If you live in Omaha or Lincoln, chances are you have at least one reliable source of news. But if you’re in a more rural area of the state — say, Bartlett in the middle of the state, or Harrisburg in the Panhandle — access to trusted media drops precipitously.
“There’s nine counties in Nebraska that have no local news organizations,” said Jessica Fargen Walsh, a journalism professor at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. “There’s 43,000 Nebraskans who live somewhere where there is no local journalist at all.”
It’s a symptom of a national problem: Legacy newspapers, once the backbone of American cities and towns, are on the decline. Public radio stations are facing federal funding cuts. And local TV stations are reckoning with shrinking viewership.
The discussion around the future of media came Wednesday during the third annual Flatwater Free Press Festival. The event, hosted at Creighton University, featured a series of discussions with experts, policymakers and journalists about the future of the state and nation.
The journalism industry has in the last several decades weathered a rapidly changing landscape, heralded by the advent of the internet, which threw traditional media funding structures into disarray. Print advertisements, long a reliable source of income, dried up. And newspapers, once the gatekeepers of essential information, came up against fresh competition for readers’ attention.
“I have some anger, because I feel like I’ve been around journalism for more than 30 years, and I feel like the legacy commercial media, which still has the largest sort of collective footprint, was not in a mindset to think in an innovative fashion,” said Holly Edgell, managing editor at the Midwest Newsroom, a collaborative made up of NPR member stations.
As money got tighter, newsrooms shrank. News deserts have proliferated — including in the Cornhusker state. Research led by Walsh shows 55 Nebraska counties have two or fewer full-time journalists.
Jeff Cohen, senior adviser over the journalism portfolio at Arnold Ventures, said it is in many ways a bleak time for journalism. He referenced recent layoffs at the Omaha World-Herald and the Atlanta Journal Constitution’s decision to end its print publication.
“On the commercial side, you just have continuing death by a thousand cuts,” Cohen said.
But as the financial struggles of legacy outlets intensified, new newsroom structures rose up, including independent publications, co-ops and nonprofits. Stand-alone digital news sites are on the rise, even as traditional newsrooms close.
Matt Wynn, executive director of the Nebraska Journalism Trust, recalled his experience working at a national legacy news publication and feeling as though only his mom had read his stories. That, he said, was how bad the audience numbers were. Since the inception of the Flatwater Free Press, Wynn said, that experience has been flipped on its head.
“We do a story, and it dwarfs the numbers that I was doing at any of those other places,” he said. “We had built from scratch with our true north compass a thing we wanted to build, and it’s working. That’s success. That feels good.”
Edgell pointed to the acquisition of The Reader by Nebraska Public Media when it seemed that the publication might go under. That allowed for the preservation of The Reader’s archives, and made sure a full-time reporter could continue to serve the community meaningfully.
“That is taking something that people loved and relied on, bringing it back, not focusing on breaking news, on fires, but on systemic issues, systemic problems,” she said.
Nonprofit news, Wynn said, frees journalism from the whims of advertisers, who in the heyday of print media could pull their ads because they didn’t like a headline.
“It’s finally about the journalism,” he said. “It is not about capturing some audience.”
The rise in nonprofit newsrooms is encouraging, but Cohen readily admitted that many of those newsrooms are at the moment too reliant on big donors, such as Arnold Ventures, to maintain and grow their work.
But as funding goes toward other key issues such as criminal justice reform and health care, Cohen said, it’s important that philanthropy remains willing to step up and invest in journalism.
“Almost all of them have 50% of their revenue from institutional philanthropy,” he said. “Then it’s members, large donors, and then some earned revenue, events like this, some subscription newsletters. But … this is all somewhat of a nascent, less-than-10-year-old industry, and it’s finding its way. So my pitch to the funders, to my funders, is that we have to be in there.”
One bright spot in today’s media landscape, Walsh said, is the increasing collaboration between news outlets.
Edgell pointed toward content exchanges, which allow news organizations to republish each other’s work, and cross-newsroom reporting, where reporters from different outlets collaborate on larger stories. The Midwest Newsroom has collaborated with national outlets like the Marshall Project, and had its stories republished by legacy newspapers like the Kansas City Star.
“I say collaboration is a superpower, and it’s kind of my catchphrase now,” Edgell said. “There’s a force that we have when we do things together that we cannot do by ourselves. I think that we overlook opportunities, through collaboration, to be in more than one place at the same time.”
Wynn said that spirit of collaboration is part of the reason the Nebraska Journalism Trust exists. Both the Flatwater Free Press and Silicon Prairie News operate under the NJT umbrella and collaborate with other news organizations across the state and the nation.
“This has to be an ecosystem problem,” Wynn said. “We cannot be so myopic as to think that we can solve it with any one publication.”
1 Comment
Newspapers never adjusted to the digital age. They should have moved to digital subscriptions and micro ads early on but they never could adjust #END#