After a long career in daily news, I left the paper about two years ago. This year, I volunteered to produce local news for our community radio station (low-power FM) in North Texas. A friend and former co-worker started volunteering for a Seattle area station that's a little further along in building its local newsroom. I think this nationwide network of community stations is full of untapped potential that could go much farther, with just a bit of support. https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/09/19/number-of-u-s-low-power-fm-radio-stations-has-nearly-doubled-since-2014.
The Institute for Nonprofit News has about 350 members and all of them, or almost all of them, are based in major cities, although some are covering entire regions or the entire country. One can argue that metro areas have news deserts, but that's not new. Take metro Pittsburgh, for instance. It is in Allegheny County. Just that one county has about 150 different cities and towns, 100 or so police departments, more than 60 school districts, etc. Very few of them ever got much coverage from suburban weeklies or the metro dailies. Journalism schools have partially come to the rescue in a few places, but as I showed in the academic journal Journalism & Mass Communication Educator in 2012 (yes, 10 years ago), almost none of the rural news deserts have a college journalism department/school within a reasonable distance. A current project by University of Kansas and another one about 30 years ago by Kansas State University are exceptions. A digital-only, taxpayer-supported organization that's a kind of hybrid Report for America/AP/NPR/PBS model looks like the only solution to me, which I did not suggest 10 years ago.
As a retired editor in rural upstate New York I’ve had the exact the same concerns. My book “The Last American Newspaper” comes out later this spring and chronicles the great community journalism we did over the past two decades, but more importantly it asks the question who will do that journalism in the future. In talking to community groups over the past six months, there seems to be little appetite to pay for online news and even less of an acknowledgement that this might be a problem.
After a long career in daily news, I left the paper about two years ago. This year, I volunteered to produce local news for our community radio station (low-power FM) in North Texas. A friend and former co-worker started volunteering for a Seattle area station that's a little further along in building its local newsroom. I think this nationwide network of community stations is full of untapped potential that could go much farther, with just a bit of support. https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/09/19/number-of-u-s-low-power-fm-radio-stations-has-nearly-doubled-since-2014.
The Institute for Nonprofit News has about 350 members and all of them, or almost all of them, are based in major cities, although some are covering entire regions or the entire country. One can argue that metro areas have news deserts, but that's not new. Take metro Pittsburgh, for instance. It is in Allegheny County. Just that one county has about 150 different cities and towns, 100 or so police departments, more than 60 school districts, etc. Very few of them ever got much coverage from suburban weeklies or the metro dailies. Journalism schools have partially come to the rescue in a few places, but as I showed in the academic journal Journalism & Mass Communication Educator in 2012 (yes, 10 years ago), almost none of the rural news deserts have a college journalism department/school within a reasonable distance. A current project by University of Kansas and another one about 30 years ago by Kansas State University are exceptions. A digital-only, taxpayer-supported organization that's a kind of hybrid Report for America/AP/NPR/PBS model looks like the only solution to me, which I did not suggest 10 years ago.
As a retired editor in rural upstate New York I’ve had the exact the same concerns. My book “The Last American Newspaper” comes out later this spring and chronicles the great community journalism we did over the past two decades, but more importantly it asks the question who will do that journalism in the future. In talking to community groups over the past six months, there seems to be little appetite to pay for online news and even less of an acknowledgement that this might be a problem.