It's the Community, Stupid

For the last few months, I've been blocked when it comes to this newsletter. One reason for that is, frankly, this exercise feels like talking at people rather than engaging in a conversation. I recently wrote both a reported feature and a commentary piece for a magazine and found that doing the former was like breathing and the latter was like an all-mouth root canal. It was an instructive experience that helped clarify why my notes are full of false-start newsletter entries and the actual space hasn't been updated, fundamentally, since May.

A few days after the election, the additional layer is that this all feels superficial. Who cares about editing when the very idea of a free press is in peril? And yet, spending the last few days watching and reading how the media, specifically, has responded to the results got me good and angry. I said at the outset that I didn't want Retronym to be a media criticism space; that there are more than enough of those. I still believe that. But in this case, I'm making an exception because most of those media critics are missing the point — and giving the industry a wholly unearned pass.

Nearly every story I've seen or heard that has approached the issue of the election results, essentially, by asking the same questions: How could journalists have missed the signs pointing toward a runaway Trump victory? Did they do enough to report on the issues and the candidates' positions? Why do more people care about what the likes of Joe Rogan have to say rather than legacy media? Is there a coastal elite problem? Is there a diversity-in-the-newsroom problem? Where do we go from here?

Every question is backward looking. And every question is asked from a position of authority figures wondering why their children got out of line. But more than a paternalistic elitism problem, the subtext of the hand-wringing that has — from what I've seen — gone unacknowledged is the failure of media to adjust to a failed business model over, at least, the last eight years and what that has meant for the state of local journalism in this country.

There are more than 200 counties in the U.S. considered news deserts, "meaning that more than half of all U.S. counties now have limited access to reliable local news and information," according to researchers at Northwestern's Medill School of Journalism. Those researchers also found that, since 2005, more than 2,900 papers have closed, leaving only about 6,000 left operating in the country. "Of the 3,143 counties in the U.S., more than half, or 1,766, have either no local news source or only one remaining outlet, typically a weekly newspaper."

That, as much as anything else happening today, is a crisis of democracy. And it's one that precedes the ascension of Trump. Yet it barely registers. Sure, people like to bemoan the reality. But talk rarely goes into solutions, preferring rather to wallow in the inevitability of this continuing until there are no papers left.

Small, non-profit newsrooms have begun to pop up around the country, but they can't begin to address alone the gaping chasm left by the evisceration of newsrooms staffed by hundreds of local journalists, people who live in and report on the community, hold local politicians accountable, and who, most relevant to this discussion, can best articulate what a candidate's position on an issue means for the people who live there.

I support local outlets The City and Hell Gate because what they do is incredibly important. But when I had a conversation with a total stranger a few days before the election and mentioned The City, she gave me a blank stare. Without some physical, in-real-life presence — like a newspaper — a lot of people are going to miss the vital work publications like these do.

And, unfortunately, sites like these in cities like New York, are the exception. The rule is that most people get their news, if they get it at all, from organizations that are laser focused on the national. What matters in Washington and New York is more important to legacy media in a lot of places because those stories drive clicks, which drives traffic, which drives ad revenue. They'd rather aggregate what's trending to pull in some faceless global traffic than publish original work relevant to their community. When confronted by a scare headline about migrant gangs decapitating people in Long Island (making this up, but it sounds real enough) or one about the local school board president embezzling money, that first one will get people clicking.

This is how it has been for years. Publications aim for bigness, for Google search dominance, for high-volume virality. And what they lose and lose and lose until they just don't care anymore is their identity.

Who is your audience? Who is your reader? Who is your customer? If you're answer is, "Who cares?" then you're the problem. And, today, more outlets than not would respond that way.

The kerfuffle over the Washington Post's non-endorsement bears this out. Does anyone really care that WaPo didn't officially endorse Kamala Harris? I know the actual issue is that owner Jeff Bezos intervened and the optics are that he did it to protect Blue Origin's ability to contract with the federal government. But the value of an endorsement and an owner's greed are two different things. Bezos was right when he said no one's mind would be changed by his paper endorsing a candidate. Where he was wrong, though, was saying that endorsements generally don't matter. They matter a lot — to local communities. No one cares what the New York Times or Wall Street Journal or WaPo or the LA Times or any of these nationally-focused papers say about a national race. But people in cities and towns do care about what their papers say about politicians running for offices that impact their day-to-day lives: mayor, councilperson, Congressperson, and so on.

The WaPo story gave cover to 2024's real endorsement scandal, which was the New York Times saying it would stop making local endorsements. That is journalism malpractice. And it has been completely forgotten in the miasma of rage around Bezos' blunder. But if you step back, it makes a perverse sense. The Times has backed away from New York long ago, and it's truly the one national paper in the United States. So, The City and Hell Gate and others move to fill the void, for whatever good that does. I hope it's a lot, but they do not have the same level of brand recognition.

All manner of local media have abandoned their communities to chase a failed business model. Rather than investing in the local, they were convinced to pivot to national and got destroyed and swallowed up by the same Silicon Valley-backed vulture capitalists that set them on that destructive path. So when we do the postmortem after another Trump win, a top area of introspection should be this exact topic. Issues, impacts, stakes — a macro, national view doesn't matter to a family struggling to make rent, where the parents' jobs are insecure, where the kids' schools are underfunded, where their neighbors are at risk for deportation.

There is plenty of criticism to be had about horse race coverage and how that doesn't serve the common good, about "sanewashing" Trump, about an idiotic commitment to a tradition of objectivity that never existed. And in the first few days, post-election, those are the only things people want to talk about, as if those problems need fixing first. If 2016 is any indication, that's where the focus will remain. It's completely myopic.

The only questions these places should be asking themselves are: How did we allow ourselves to abandon local communities? And how do we rebuild those relationships, those publications, that trust?

For whatever it's worth, to me, it begins with accepting that you're not going to be the next New York Times. There is only market space for one of those, and that slot is taken. But there is a good living to be made by being a local publication. And by embracing the potential opportunities for new business models. If you think you're going to make all your money in 2025 on Google search and ad buys and aggregated content, you're delusional. But you can get creative with ads, memberships, subscriptions, sponsorships, and on and on and do something worthwhile, that benefits the community, that delivers on journalism's mission, that employs journalists, that generally adds something vital and unique to the civic commons.

I think about these things a lot, and when I do I often find myself back to what I wrote at the top. What business do I have to go on about this stuff? Who am I? But it struck me today how self-defeating that mindset is, and how it has allowed this implosion to perpetuate. I bought the lie, pummeled into me by mediocre, lazy executives and middle managers, that because I'm not a name brand byline or leader at a name brand publication, then I should shut up and leave the future to the grown ups.

Absolute, utter nonsense. Not only because those are the same people with the same lack of vision and foresight who keep getting us into deeper and deeper holes, but because it's people like me who are precisely who you want to listen to right now.

In an interview I did once with underground filmmaking legend Jonas Mekas, he described himself as a ditch digger of culture, doing the hard work to prep the ground for new ideas and ways of creating to take root. I always liked that framing. And I'm going to steal it. For the last two decades, I've been a media ditch digger, doing the work to move whatever publication I worked on forward. I rarely got promoted, my ideas were usually waved away, I was never really respected. But over and over and over again, short-sighted self preservationists dismissed what I could see coming over the horizon as the mirages of a naive dummy. And then they (mostly) came true. And all I did to imagine them was listen to what people were saying, looking for the areas of opportunity, reaching beyond my narrow world for developments elsewhere that would manifest in journalism.

And here we are again. Everyone is hellbent on framing the failure of media as one kind of problem — because that's all their elitism can allow them to see — when the real challenges are elsewhere. Ivy League J-school grads want the big show. Great, God bless. But journalism, once upon a time, was a local, blue collar profession. You want to make changes to media? Returning to those roots is a good starting point.

But what do I know? I'm just a poor blue collar ditch digger.

**

This is long, but I wanted to conclude with one last thing...

I want this newsletter to participate in the work ahead somehow. I'm not just a scold; I truly care about the health and viability of this industry — as an American and as someone who sees this as a vocation. (A newsletter for another day.) So I'm going to make this space as solutions-oriented as I can. What I don't want this to be is backwards-looking and wallowing. I want to look to the future. I became a solutions journalism acolyte while working on The Elective, and I'm going to lean into it here.

That said, the whole editing focus will likely take a backseat for a while. Instead, I'm going to dig in on what I thought would be a sidebar, which is making sense of the changing perception of journalism in America through how journalists and the industry are portrayed in movies. Not a traditional solutions angle, I know, but like a lot of people I'm actively rethinking a lot. Thanks for sticking with it.