News for the Rich, White, and Blue: How Place and Power Distort American Journalism 9780231545600

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N EW S F O R T H E R I C H , W H I T E , A N D B LU E

News for the Rich, White, and Blue

How Place and Power Distort American Journalism

Nikki Usher

Columbia University Press

New York

publication supported by a grant from The Community Foundation for Greater New Haven as part of the Urban Haven Project

Columbia University Press Publishers Since 1893 New York Chichester, West Sussex cup.columbia.edu Copyright © 2021 Columbia University Press All rights reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Usher, Nikki, author. Title: News for the rich, white, and blue : how place and power distort American journalism / Nikki Usher. Description: New York : Columbia University Press, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020053469 (print) | LCCN 2020053470 (ebook) | ISBN 9780231184663 (hardback) | ISBN 9780231184670 (trade paperback) | ISBN 9780231545600 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Journalism—Political aspects—United States—History—21st century. | Online journalism—Political aspects—United States—History—21st century. | Journalism—Objectivity—United States—History—21st century. | Journalism— Economic aspects—United States—History—21st century. | Newspaper publishing— Economic aspects—United States—History—21st century. Classification: LCC PN4888.P6 U84 2021 (print) | LCC PN4888.P6 (ebook) | DDC 070.4/49320973—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020053469 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020053470

Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent and durable acid-free paper. Printed in the United States of America Cover design: Noah Arlow Cover images: Shutterstock, Dreamstime

To Brinton Henry Layser

Contents

Preface Acknowledgments

ix xiii

INTRODUCTION

Place, Power, and the Future of Journalism

1

CHAPTER ONE

Myths of Local News and Why Newspapers Matter, Anyway

15

CHAPTER TWO

News for (and by) the Rich and White

41

CHAPTER THREE

Journalism’s Big Sort: Is the News That’s Left Just News for the Left?

66

CHAPTER FOUR

The Beltway Versus the Heartland, Embodied: The Case of Washington Correspondents

101

CHAPTER FIVE

Place and the Limits of Digital Revenue: Goldilocks Newspapers and the Curse of Geography

130

CHAPTER SIX

The Counterpoint: The New York Times’ Chase for Global Readers

162

CHAPTER SEVEN

Blue News Surviving: The Big Sort in News Philanthropy

194

CONCLUSION

Place as the Way Forward

234

Appendix A: Methods Appendix B: Extended Methods from Chapter 3 Appendix C: Extended Methods from Chapter 7 Notes Selected Bibliography Index

259 265 271 281 335 341

viii C ont e n t s

Preface

When I was a cub reporter at the Philadelphia Inquirer, I was stuck out in the suburbs of southern New Jersey. Union regulations put strict boundaries on my movement: I wasn’t allowed to work from the gleaming newsroom headquarters in Philadelphia. If I did end up reporting a story in the city, I would have to be paid more. That downtown building was like a beacon, the so-called Tower of Truth, with a gleaming marble entryway and a golden dome that could be seen from most of the city. All I wanted was to work inside the building, but I think I wanted it too much. Youthful impatience and ego got the better of me, and I left a reporting career behind for graduate school and the academy. The building had functioned as my gatekeeper; the newsroom was a place of power. From inside, journalists could hold Philadelphia’s corrupt officials accountable and chronicle the joy and frustrations of a city united by rabid sports fans and divided by glaring inequalities. In 2012, when I learned that the Philadelphia Inquirer was moving out of its historic headquarters, I felt a visceral mix of sadness, pain, and shock. Though my academic career had to this point largely celebrated the forward progress of journalists adapting to new technology, this idea of newsrooms moving from their established place in a city became a symbol of the decay of the newspaper industry. Thanks to a fellowship at the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University, I began

looking at what would become a routine move to shed newspaper debt: the sale of landmark historical buildings and relocation to smaller, more digitally functional quarters. When the contract for this book was signed in 2015, the book was supposed to be about news buildings, journalism in the built environment, newspaper manufacturing, and postindustrial spaces and places of news. But in fall 2016, following the U.S. presidential election, I saw that I had been thinking far too narrowly about place. The book took a sharp turn as I became increasingly angry at the news industry as a whole: so many of its wounds were self-inflicted. Other wounds, of course, were not, from the long-term right-wing media strategy to undermine mainstream media, to changes in audience preferences, to the rise of big tech. Like many journalists, scholars, industry observers, and policy makers, I was frustrated by the blind spots of national journalists whose media bubble insulated them from the groundswell of right-wing populism in the United States. It became clear to me that place, partisanship, and inequality were increasingly intersecting when it came to how people felt about news and where journalism seemed to be on the decline. It was disturbing to me to see cut after cut to the kind of journalism that had long held people in power accountable and provided a first draft for the cultural memory about a place. The situation seemed to be the worst at newspapers, especially the type of large newspaper I had worked at in some capacity: the Boston Globe, the Dallas Morning News, the Times-Picayune, the Chicago Tribune, the LA Times, and the Philadelphia Inquirer. The consequences of losing the news would have significant consequences for a city, state, and region. What had happened to these places of power? At the same time, I understood well that these newsrooms had long histories of racism, homophobia, and elitism that had affected who could and could not be a journalist and what stories could and could not be written. When I was working as a young queer journalist, my editors would second-guess my ability to “objectively” cover any story I suggested about the LGBTQ community. With all the good that this journalism was supposed to bring to democratic life, it often fell short. National journalism seems increasingly likely to dominate what limited attention audiences have for journalism. But different places have different resources, opportunities, limitations, histories, and power x

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structures, and national journalism cannot tell these stories as well or as often as local news media. As American political power is tied to geography, this presents a serious problem for democratic life. When I moved from Washington, DC, to Champaign-Urbana, Illinois, in 2018, this question of place became personal. I live within walking distance of farmland and am now just a few miles from rural America. My new local newspaper is an all-white institution that cozies up to the local establishment and has serious problems covering race. This is an academic book because I am an academic, but it is not intended only for academic audiences. Nonacademics reading this book might find the quantitative analysis in chapters  3 and 7 challenging, while academics might want more information on the methods. I’ve provided significant context in the appendixes and notes. For a more robust theoretical discussion of this book’s core concepts, please see my “Putting ‘Place’ in the Center of Journalism Research: A Way Forward to Understand Challenges to Trust and Knowledge in News,” Journalism & Communication Monographs 21, no. 2 (2019): 84–146. As a caveat for all readers, people’s titles are consistent with what they were at the time of the research. Most of the journalists and industry insiders mentioned by name have offered their responses to my interpretations of their work or their thoughts, and you will see this reflected either in the text or in footnotes. Over the course of the writing and the production of this book, a global pandemic and two U.S. presidential elections have occurred. The pandemic has kept journalists in their homes, forcing a form of disconnected journalism where remote visits to people and places stand in for on-the-ground knowledge, and the consequences of COVID-19 for journalism’s economic fortunes are likely to be felt as long-haul challenges. Clearly, the news industry is changing rapidly. To keep up is like chasing a speeding bullet; that said, the arguments made here endure past any one particular event or headline. Nonetheless, we still have a choice: everyone reading this book has the opportunity to rethink how to make the American news media more equitable and more responsive to the needs of democratic civic life, especially at the local level.

P r eface

xi

Acknowledgments

This book would not be possible without the journalists, industry experts, and news organizations that agreed to participate in this research; thank you for sharing your time, your insights, and your world with me. The project was supported and fought for by my patient editor, Philip Leventhal. Sanghoon Kim provided invaluable research assistance with his top-notch quantitative skills. Special thanks to Henrik Örnebring for the full first-read of the manuscript. This book benefited from the rich engagement I received as a fellow at the Illinois Program for Research in Humanities and was supported by funding from the George Washington University and the University of Illinois. I am thankful for being able to present early-stage research at various gatherings, conferences, and symposia, including at Goldsmiths University, Loughborough University, Northern Illinois University, OsloMet (as a visiting fellow), Social Science Research Council, University of Illinois– Chicago, University of Illinois–Urbana Champaign, University of Michigan, University of Sydney, and University of Utah. Thanks to those who provided feedback on chapters and proposals: Larry Gross, Jesse Holcomb, Kjerstin Thorson, Stephanie Edgerly, Amanda Lotz, Tom Glaisyer, Scott Althaus, Stuart Soroka, Silvio Waisbord, Peter Loge, Antoinette Burton, Stephanie Layser, Damon Kiesow, Michelle Ferrier, Rodney Benson, Heidi Tworek, Zizi Papacharissi,

Mike Barthel, Yphtach Lelkes, Heather Bryant, Cara Finnegan, Maria Gillombardo, and Leon Dash. Thanks for support and inspiration, generally, to Jay Rosen, Jay Hamilton, Emily Bell, Josh Benton, Bob Entman, and Phil Napoli. Thank-yous are owed to those at Illinois and GW who made the book possible: Frank Sesno, Kim Gross, Maria Jackson, Stephanie Craft, and Jennifer Price. Undergraduate research assistants at both institutions were top notch: thanks to Paige Childs and Colleen Grablick (GW) and to Molly McQuaid, Dan Harty, and Tara Sohns (Illinois). Final manuscript assistance from Carl Thompson and Erin Cheslow brought me to the finish line. Two places were particularly important in maintaining sanity: the National Press Club in DC and Atkins Tennis Center in Urbana—thank you to friends and staff. Academic friends near and far provided invaluable emotional support and smart feedback. Thanks especially to Matt Carlson, Sue Robinson, Valerie Belair-Gagnon, Daniel Kreiss, Matt Hindman, Seth Lewis, Catie Bailard, Imani Cheers, C.  W. Anderson, Rasmus Kleis Nielsen, Shannon McGregor, and Avery Holton. I owe my gratitude to friends for putting up with the ups and downs of bookwriting and the academy: thanks to Susan von Thun, Eleanor Morrison, John Asalone, Chris Cianci, Drew Lehman, Helen Springut, Britt Duff, Jarrod Thomas, Katie Wilmes, Jeff McIntryre, Ieva Augstums, Mattie Olsen, Stacy Trager, Jason Trager, Kim Greenlee, Andy Greenlee, Dan Wagner, Benjy Sarlin, and Suzy Khimm. Eternal love and thanks are owed to my wife, Shelly Layser, who has begun her own brilliant academic career, and to my son, Brinton Henry Layser, who is a smiling beacon of joy.

xiv

Ack n owl e dg m e n t s

N EW S F O R T H E R I C H , W H I T E , A N D B LU E

INTRODUCTION

Place, Power, and the Future of Journalism

Lobster canapés served in porcelain spoons and set on trays adorned with flower petals, bite-size beef wellingtons, and fried smoked mozzarella were brought out on white platters by a crew of meticulously coiffed caterers.1 This small but notable gathering of Washington journalists was also treated to freely flowing scotch, white wine, and champagne, all served in the appropriate stemware. They had gathered to celebrate the dedication of the Ben Bradlee Story Conference Room in the Washington Post’s new headquarters. Bradlee, the late editor who had led the newspaper to international renown with his stewardship over Watergate and the Pentagon Papers, was certainly worthy of the honor of having what would serve as the Page One meeting room named after him. The Post had been in a downward spiral of job cuts and coverage cutbacks, but the newspaper was rescued by Jeff Bezos, whose Amazon fortune has made him the wealthiest person alive. As has been true throughout much of American history, the man who buys a newspaper also builds it or buys it a new home, and Bezos was no exception. The Post’s move to a new headquarters along Washington’s K Street power corridor—its sign reportedly visible from Georgetown, across the city—ushered in a true restart for the newspaper under its new ownership.2 Thanks to the newly liquid cash flow, the move also provided an excuse to celebrate the late Bradlee. On hand to toast to his memory and the bright new start for the Post were some boldface Washington

names. I spotted at least three people in the room who had either been played by actors in a Hollywood movie or who could claim a cameo role (if you count Bradlee, four). This included the Post editor Marty Baron, who had just been portrayed by Liev Schreiber in the Oscar-winning 2015 film Spotlight, and Bob Woodward, one of the Watergate reporters famous for his journalism and made a legend by Robert Redford in All the President’s Men.3 Sally Quinn, the one-time Washington gossip columnist and Bradlee’s widow, was there to honor her husband, and their grown son was wearing one of his father’s signature pinstriped shirts. Bradlee, as played by Tom Hanks, would soon be introduced to a new generation in the Post for his role in publishing the Pentagon Papers. If this name-dropping brings to mind one of the 1960s-era Georgetown parties that the Washington Post publisher Katharine Graham used to throw, it is intentional. This cocktail party was only one of a week’s worth of events to mark the newspaper’s move in January 2016 to new headquarters. I asked Woodward whether the lobster canapés were maybe a bit much. “We have a new owner with a lot of money, and what’s important is his commitment to serious investigative reporting,” Woodward told me. “He resolves to dig.” He absolved Bezos of the costs of the canapés, instead noting, “The lobster is just a gesture to Ben and the good life he lived.” The day after the lobster and scotch party, January 28, 2016, the Post held the grand-opening celebration for its new headquarters. This lavish event was an even more jaw-dropping display of the Post’s sense of its authority, an impressive, symbolic declaration of its path forward to become even more important, respected, and listened to by “ordinary” news consumers and elites alike. Held in the Post’s new “Post Live” event room, a crowd of “DC-famous” politicians and media moguls mingled as a jazz ensemble played in the corner, while others stood on line for the made-to-order barista stand.4 There were ample fancy breads and fruit spreads, three choices of bottled water, a guava juice option, and monogrammed Washington Post napkins. In a bold display of newspaper egotism, someone had set up flat screens featuring the up-to-the-minute audience web traffic data; newspapers are normally shy about their actual audience size, but the Washington Post had just beaten the New York Times’ monthly traffic numbers for the first time, according to some metrics.5 2

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Most of the men were wearing the classic Washington power suit— dark blue pants and jacket, powder-blue shirt, and red tie—while the women wore some variation of a skirt suit and tasteful pumps, many complementing their outfits with a strand of pearls, the standard “female” power accessory. The crowd was mostly white, though I did spot the head of Black Entertainment Television and Ernest Wilson, the first Black dean of my graduate school. The Obama administration was still in office. Secretary of State John F. Kerry gave a speech, highlighting the importance of an enduring press to the crowd of boldface names in politics and journalism. This ode to a free press was not empty words, as the opening ceremonies coincided with the release of the Washington Post journalist Jason Rezaian, newly free after 545 days as a hostage in Iran, a release Kerry had negotiated.6 The grand-opening ceremony, moderated by the Post’s publisher, Fred Ryan, also included speeches from the sitting Virginia and Maryland governors, along with DC’s mayor, each of whom honored the Post’s role in democracy. Jeff Bezos was on hand to cut the digital red ribbon to open the building, offering his own toast to the newspaper’s fresh start under his ownership. Silicon Valley was now in the room with the power-suitwearing glitterati. The week-long party that the Post threw itself was an argument for its importance, and its new building was a statement, etched in brick and mortar, that it was durable, lasting, a testament to journalists’ authority, and an invitation to acknowledge the newspaper’s institutional heft. Amid all the pomp, if you gazed across the street, you might see lines of homeless people in Franklin Square, a prime gathering place for various charity groups to distribute food. Yet the square was easy to ignore amid what was happening inside the Post, with its grand ambitions and ego and the reminder of entrenched elitism on display—a weeklong ode to power where some people are welcome and others are decidedly not. These separations, of course, have their consequences, especially for journalists, whose claim to authority and power comes in part from their ability to reliably explain to people the world they cannot experience themselves. These celebrations took place ten months before the United States would elect Donald Trump, who rode to the presidency on a wave of populist discontent and media bashing that caught many in the Washington In tr o du ction

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and New York news media world by surprise, and another thirteen months before the Post adopted the slogan “Democracy Dies in Darkness.” 7 This was also before the phrase “fake news” had become a moral panic and part of the national and international lexicon. Journalists, especially national journalists, had done little to reckon with their own reputational mess, nor had they yet recognized the gravity of the growing geographic sectionalism in a United States that was now by some accounts more partisan than at any time before the Civil War.8 In January  2016, at the Washington Post’s celebration of its relaunch under Bezos, what mattered was a display of the Post’s reclaimed power. At the time, I was having trouble reconciling the lavish celebration that the Post was throwing with what I knew were dire times facing many of the newsrooms I had visited in major cities across the United States—it seemed showy, celebratory, out of touch, elitist. If you did not know that local news media outlets in the United States were facing a fiscal crisis, you are not alone—71  percent of Americans think local news is doing well financially. Newspapers have been particularly hard hit, losing an estimated 35 billion in advertising dollars between 2006 and 2018. Newspaper employment has declined by the tens of thousands, down 47  percent from 2005, a trend that is continuing.9 Since 2004, more than 20  percent of the country’s metro and community newspapers have closed or merged.10 By some estimates, more than 1,800 communities across the United States have become “news deserts” and lack any regular access to local news.11 And for better or worse, most Americans profess little faith in the news media, with most opinion polls showing trust in journalism at its lowest levels in decades.12 This is particularly acute among Republicans, who have spent decades listening to conservative media outlets attest to the pernicious influence of what the 1964 Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater once referred to as the “eastern liberal press.”13 Also on this list of challenges facing the news media: growing structural inequalities, largely geospatially distributed; a U.S. public whose partisan politics mirrors these divides; and the looming influence of tech companies, whose platforms enable the algorithmic sorting of information and embolden bad actors eager to spread digital chaos and disinformation. At the cocktail party and ribbon cutting, I was thinking

4

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about the Post’s extravaganza as an illustration of the haves and the have-nots among journalists. However, I was not thinking about how these inequities were playing out on a much grander and far more consequential scale in American politics, and most likely, neither was anyone else at the party. P L AC E , P O W E R , A N D N E W S F O R T H E R I C H , W H I T E , A N D B LU E

The day after the 2016 election, the New York Times’ executive editor Dean Baquet apologized to his own media reporter for journalism that had failed to spot the groundswell of support that had tipped the presidential election to the Republican candidate. Baquet acknowledged, “We’ve got to do a much better job of being on the road, out in the country, talking to different kinds of people than we talk to—especially if you happen to be a New York–based news organization—and remind ourselves that New York is not the real world.”14 Journalism begins with the questions of “who, what, when, where, and why,” and journalists had screwed up the “where,” big time. If the Times had done a better job covering these places, journalists might have challenged the consensus view of a Clinton win held by political insiders of the sort found at the Post’s opening gala. Where journalists go, where they don’t go, and whom they are able to reach have consequences for democracy. This book connects the broad themes of place, power, and social inequality to what is happening to journalism in the United States today and what this means for democracy. We are in the midst of a “big sort,” a geospatial realignment where power, inequality, and even identity are increasingly tied to physical geography.15 The geospatial inequities that play out across almost every other measure of American social life are also found in the retrenchment of journalism from communities and, in particular, the disappearance of newspapers. Journalism anchors American democracy by connecting people to the places they live, providing them with critical news and information as well as a sense of cultural rootedness and belonging. As such, journalism enables an active and engaged citizenry. In practice, journalism often falls short of this ideal,

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but the ideal is a powerful and aspirational myth that enables American civic life. What is far less understood is how places shape journalism. Journalism, especially newspaper journalism, is having its own “big sort.” News organizations can no longer depend on selling audiences to advertisers in order to support their news-gathering activities. This means they will increasingly have to turn to news audiences to support their journalism, depending more than ever on digital subscription dollars or memberships. Some people in some places will not pay for journalism because of their politics or their poverty (or both), a simple market fact present even in the predigital era. But here’s the rub: news organizations, especially newspapers, need people to pay for news more than ever before, and under this financial pressure, journalists are retreating from some communities and some places more than others. This book details how journalists and news organizations are reconciling their financial survival with the larger place-based inequalities in the United States. I show how place affects how journalists think about news coverage, how place challenges the financial and business outlook for news organizations, and how the retreat of local newspapers from certain places stands to worsen preexisting divides between haves and have-nots in access to news and information. I demonstrate that current market incentives for the kind of quality journalism that powers democracy are at odds with reaching a population most vulnerable to the excesses and distortions of this market. The newspapers most likely to withstand today’s constellation of financial, social, and technological challenges are large national and international news outlets that serve elite, educated audiences who can and will pay for news—journalism for and by the rich, white, and blue (liberals). In other words, quality journalism that powers democracy will be targeted at those who see its value; those with significant cultural capital, if not actual capital; and those who still trust it (now, mostly Democrats).16 What’s more, quality journalism will necessarily be produced by journalists who have the financial comfort to weather the ups and downs of an increasingly precarious industry. The news outlets that have long provided such journalism have been white institutions, which have rarely questioned their role in perpetuating stereotypes about race

6

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and class and have long been unwelcoming to nonwhite journalists. This is a normative problem, but an optimistic gloss is that repairing journalism could empower those often marginalized by it—particularly rural Americans and people of color. My argument is a call to action: journalism’s “big sort” matters because place is the essential unit of political power in the United States. For example, look at the fight over the U.S. census: the principal reason to count people in places is to know how much representation people living in these places are entitled to in Washington.17 Similarly, fights over gerrymandering at the state and local level reflect how closely tied population, identity, and geography are to one another; carve cities or counties just so, and the result is a reliable red or blue election outcome. Journalists connect people to politics and community life: journalists cover places to help communicate to people what is happening beyond their immediate daily experiences. Certainly, journalists do not always cover places as well as we might like, and members of the public can do their own information gathering and sharing. But professional journalists do this as part of their job description; their primary occupational role is to cover the news in the places they work. When journalists retreat from places, there are simply fewer people paying close attention to and investigating what is happening in that community. The presumptive link between journalism, an informed democracy, and the geospatial distribution of U.S. political power and what places are covered, how they are covered, and who gets the news will have profound implications for U.S. democracy as a whole. But politics are not everything, just as place is not just about location or physical geography. Some scholars find strong causal links between declines in geographically specific news (local journalism) and indicators of political fragmentation and declines in public knowledge, but journalism matters to democracy on an even more fundamental cultural level. Journalism tells us where we are, and in articulating a sense of place for a public, it provides at least a common, discursive meeting ground for a deliberative hashing out of what our shared future might look like.  Journalists are communicators of culture and traditionally have been empowered as cultural authorities to communicate place.

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P L AC E A N D T H E F U T U R E O F N E W S : A N I N T E RV E N T I O N

In 1986, the scholar Daniel C. Hallin explained why the “where” in journalism was so powerful: Journalists not only tell us where a particular event took place, they also tell us where we are in a much more general and more important sense. They communicate to us images of our neighborhoods and cities, of the nation and the world around it, and even of the universe, images which for many of us may constitute most of what we know about the world beyond our immediate circle of experience.18

Journalists’ claim to “being there” and therefore to knowing more than people who are not there is an important way that journalists legitimate their cultural authority. Newspaper names often have a place name in them, as if to signal both allegiance and special knowledge of a location. Proximity is one source of authority, yet distance is another: journalists distance themselves from what they are covering, offering a “view from nowhere,” by which they claim to provide an accounting of events without taking a position, thereby rendering an “objective” version of reality.19 The ability to report on events from distant locales or places of power that ordinary people do not ever visit is often a news organization’s hallmark claim. Consider the tagline of the New York radio station 1010 WINS: “You give us twenty-two minutes, we give you the world.”20 Journalists position themselves as proximate to ongoing events, using cues like “breaking news,” “live,” “eyewitness,” and “on location.”21 Professional journalists are able to access places of power, with their credentials and the newsroom support to cover powerful people and institutions that most ordinary people will never have the chance to meet or see. Still, journalists have had a nearly impossible task of balancing the fact that their authority must be legitimated both downstream and upstream from other powerful social institutions.22 On the one hand, the more journalists can sell the power of their influence over the public, the more institutions feel compelled to listen to them and facilitate access inside them. On the other hand, the closer 8

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that journalists get to being embedded in this larger system of power and influence, the further removed they are from the communities they report to. Journalists are supposed to know about the places they cover—at least better than the people reading or watching the news—and when they don’t, their expertise and the audience’s rationale for trusting them are called into question. Over the past thirty-plus years, journalists’ relative power to communicate an understanding of places has been challenged by new technology, growing distrust in journalism, and a much-weakened news industry.23 Some Americans simply have tuned out, some for political reasons, others in response to a high-choice media environment.24 News attention, especially online, has nationalized,25 but these national outlets are often highly specific and selective about which geographic areas they care to invest in for sustained coverage. Metropolitan newspapers are retrenching, fast, and local TV stations are shedding their “local” focus as media conglomerates continue to buy new stations, growing in size but not in ownership diversity.26 Losing local news also leaves national news to pick up the slack, meaning many people in the United States do not see where they live or people like them authentically presented in the news. At the same time, a strong conservative media sphere has expanded beyond talk radio and cable to YouTube, Facebook, and beyond, offering commentary and news with minimal coverage of local issues. For many Americans, this has become the only source of trusted news and information.27 Where journalists are located and where news organizations are based have a lot to do with the decisions and the news routines that determine the news that gets produced. Specifically, place anchors news production or how journalism gets made because the particular features, resources, culture, and demography of a place provide the setting and context for news routines and shape the market for journalism. Just as place-based realignments are happening in society at large, forces inside and outside journalism have changed how news is made and who makes it, where it is made, and to whom and how news is distributed. However, as newspapers decline, they lose their ability to cover places, and the impact of the broken financial model for journalism affects some newsrooms and some members of the public more than others. There are fewer journalists covering greater expanses of geography and In tr o du ction

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more people with smartphones to cover the live broadcasting of history and share it with the world, and the average distance between journalists and audiences has grown. But distance should not only be understood as a measurement of miles from point A to point B. Conceptually, place is more than just physical and material geography. Places become meaningful to us because of the activities and interactions that we have in them. We shape the stories, histories, and cultural meaning of places, and these places, in turn, shape us. Throughout the book, I rely on a three-part framework for analyzing place that I draw from the work of the geographers David Harvey and Henri Lefebvre: place is a material location, a spot on a map; place is lived, the setting and context for social relations; and place is also symbolic, imagined, and constructed.28 Place and space are terms often conflated, but I see space as the opposite of place. Space is undifferentiated, but place is “a center of felt value,” as the geographer Yi-Fu Tuan articulates.29 Spaces become places when we inhabit them.30 Who gets to be in the “room where it happens,” as a line from the musical  Hamilton  puts it, refers to places where the powerful make decisions. It is both a material and a symbolic division: you’re either invited or you are not, reflecting what the feminist geographer Doreen Massey refers to the “power geometries of place.”31 We carry our place in society with us as we travel through physical places.32 This is why national political journalists on the campaign trail don’t suddenly become down with the folk, even after the umpteenth visit to a smalltown Iowa diner. Newsrooms and other sites of media production are places where this power is revealed and exercised; this separation of media people from nonmedia people has traditionally reified and naturalized media power.33 Journalists shape our understanding of places, but journalism is also shaped by place. When it comes to physical geography, different places have distinct demographics and market power. Places that can’t or won’t support paying for news create challenges for news organizations, and places that journalists aren’t familiar with and try to cover reveal cracks in their authority. And when it comes to place as a way to think about power and privilege, where journalists are and who they are shape the way that they see the world. Where journalists are located culturally situates them, too, and their everyday life and experiences 10

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affect what they see as important to cover. Who gets to be in a newsroom matters, as journalists’ lived experiences (or lack of them) can shape the coverage we see. Where audiences are located in terms of their relative power and privilege also influences how they understand journalism and how they are covered by the news media, whether the news coverage is for and about their communities or seems distant, out of touch, boring, depressing, or biased. Though this book is deeply concerned with the consequences of journalism’s decline for the public, I focus on how journalists and news organizations are reckoning with the place-based implications of market failure for news. I explore how place—as location, as social and cultural context, and as power—shapes what journalists do and how news organizations are strategizing for their survival. I will take you inside newsrooms, usually off-limits to ordinary people, offering insight into how racial, economic, and geographic diversity in newsrooms are worsening given the financial pressures on the news. Often, scholarship focuses on news content, analyzing the texts or images produced, or it focuses on the ways audiences consume news and information, but news production research actually shows the ins and outs of how news gets made, how journalists make decisions about what to cover, and the implicit and explicit pressures that shape how journalists do their work. G O L D I L O C K S N E W S PA P E R S

Although 97 percent of newspapers in the United States are less than 50,000 in circulation size,34 the newspapers I am most worried about— and the ones you should be, too—are the large daily newspapers named for big, populous, American cities that provide the most comprehensive one-stop “news report” available for their geographic region. I refer to these regional and metropolitan daily newspapers as Goldilocks newspapers: not big enough to claim national audiences but still big enough to serve a vital role in the larger national news ecology by being the authoritative voice of a city or region, surveilling a geographically specific part of the country. In the children’s fairytale “Goldilocks and the Three Bears,” Goldilocks is only satisfied by what is “just right”—not too hot, not too cold—and eats the baby bear’s lukewarm porridge. In the case of newspapers, those that are not too big but not too small are In tr o du ction

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getting destroyed by the perverse logic of digital-content economics. Unable to make enough money off digital advertising or digital subscriptions, these newspapers have suffered significant staff and reporting cuts and in some cases have gone bankrupt. By and large, Goldilocks newspapers are best poised to provide “journalism that matters,” along with some digital-first, largely nonprofit counterparts.35 Roughly, Goldilocks newspapers are in what Nielsen would define as a top-125 designated market area, most easily thought of as a distinct, geographic television and media market. These Goldilocks newspapers include, for example, the Miami Herald, which, while a hollowed-out remnant of what it used to be, still regularly employs the kind of talent that jumps ship to the New York Times, the Washington Post, and national digital-first upstarts like BuzzFeed. At the biggest, Goldilocks newspapers include the Chicago Tribune and the LA Times, and at the smallest, newspapers like the Vindicator in Youngstown, Ohio. Goldilocks newspapers refer to a particular size or class of news outlets, but each newspaper must wrestle with different affordances of place—or the features, resources, constraints, opportunities, and power dynamics that exist in a geographically specific location. When Goldilocks newspapers pull back from suburban and rural areas, these areas often lose regular, professional coverage of their issues. Even if a community newspaper is available, it is extremely unlikely to be able to do comprehensive, watchdog journalism or even critical coverage: it’s hard to report negatively on your friends and neighbors, much less anger the few advertisers in town.  Goldilocks newspapers, then, reflect an approach to doing “local” journalism with a level of professionalism that represents the best of what current journalism can offer. They were once formidable institutions—and still to some extent are— and serve to unite large geographic expanses by focusing on shared areas of concern. Unfortunately, to survive, these newspapers must play to an audience who will pay: audiences who are rich, white, and—given current polarization around trust in media—likely liberal. P L AC E , N E W S , A N D D E M O C R AC Y

Despite the lofty appeals of journalism ideology, newspapers as a commercial product have rarely well served the poor and the marginalized. 12

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A central tension in this book is my effort to balance the hope that journalism plays a central role in creating an informed public with an empirical reality that doesn’t necessarily bear this out. Before we can understand questions about how to save journalism or how to rebuild trust in journalism, an obsession of the news industry punditocracy, we need to think more strategically about how places limit and enable particular kinds of journalism. To show how places shape journalism and how the present market failure of journalism stands to worsen existing inequities in access to news and information, I draw on more than thirteen years of qualitative research on journalism—principally fieldwork and interview data, along with secondary data and textual analysis—and employ quantitative research to add scale to my qualitative study of journalism and place. The first chapter of the book goes into greater detail about why journalists’ ability to tell the “where” of news has changed so much, why newspapers are facing market failure, and what this means for information asymmetry. Chapters  2 and 3 tackle the “rich, white, and blue” of the book’s title, showing the race, class, and political implications of journalism’s geospatial realignment. Chapter  4 provides a more granular assessment of the role of place in journalism through the case of Washington correspondents, who are the embodiment of the so-called Beltway-Heartland divide. Chapters 5 and 6 focus on how the place-based dynamics of digital economics shape the future of newspapers at an institutional level, comparing Goldilocks newspapers to the New York Times and using its international expansion to demonstrate how size, scale, and the specificity of local markets shape the future of newspapers at an institutional level. In chapter 7, through a geospatial analysis of efforts aimed at supporting journalism via nonprofit philanthropy, I find that there are reasons to be concerned that this support mostly reaches well-connected news outlets in liberal cities. I draw attention to the risk that nonprofit support for journalism that comes from outsiders may be rendered impotent by accusations of liberal media bias. Underpinning these chapters is my normative vision of the role of news in democracy. Right now, I worry that if nothing changes, our news media will further facilitate an elite democracy, with journalism that provides information to elites about other powerful elites so they In tr o du ction

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can be held accountable, either through official sanction or the shame of scandal.36 I am not wedded to the archaic ideas that only newspaper journalism can save an informed electorate or that an informed electorate is the linchpin of American democracy. I do, however, think it is important to hold on to what the sociologist Robert N. Bellah referred to as “the American Way of Life,” a belief in our capacity for selfgovernance and the bridging of difference through consensus. This functions as a shared civic religion, part of the American collective imaginary, and is foundational to our national identity.37 At present, our news media struggles to amplify the voices that most need to be heard in a democracy: those who lack institutional power, political representation, and meaningful redress to structural discrimination. While there have always been inequities in access to information, and although journalism has consistently marginalized the “unknowns,”38 the pressures of late capitalism on the news industry and within society more generally stand to amplify these divisions to extreme proportions. The geographic asymmetry in access to news and information as well as to representation in that news coverage mirrors larger power asymmetries in American public life. There are many forms of democracy that emerge from different media systems, and we get the democracy we deserve based in part on the media system we support. The book concludes by arguing for unbundling the functions of journalism: given market conditions and place-based affordances, no news outlet can be all things to all people. In fact, place, size, and scale will determine the extent to which any one news outlet can successfully provide accountability journalism, offer local information needs, and serve as a source of community storytelling and memory. For community stakeholders, scholars, public officials, and supporters of journalism more generally, our charge is to make sure that this unbundled journalism does not end up leaving only those who are rich, white, and living in blue enclaves with quality news about government and public affairs that holds the powerful to account.

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CH APTER ONE

Myths of Local News and Why Newspapers Matter, Anyway

When the Miami Herald moved from downtown to an office building near Miami International Airport, twelve miles away, in May 2013, journalists worried what might happen if the Miami Heat basketball team were to win another championship. The old newsroom, with the printing press just below it, was less than a mile from the American Airlines Arena, which meant that it had been easy to deliver extra editions announcing the glorious wins to celebratory fans in 2006 and in 2012.1 The Heat basketball fans got their next championship a month after the newspaper had left downtown. The Miami Herald played it just right, though—there were extra editions of the following morning’s newspaper with the headline “REPEAT” in the hands of Heat fans outside the arena before the trophy ceremony had even begun.2 Despite the logistical challenges, the Miami Herald managed to properly position itself as part of the public memory of the Heat victory celebration. If there’s one occasion where even the deepest cynic would be forced to agree that newspapers can help people come together, then it’s this one—when fans gather together clutching an extra edition in their hands, evidence of a championship. In 2019, when Vanderbilt University’s baseball team won the College World Series, the Tennessean in Nashville had no such extra edition. In fact, the morning newspaper didn’t even celebrate the success. The team had won after the newspaper’s print deadline, but the game

hadn’t gone on all night; in fact, it was over by 9:15 p.m. In an effort to consolidate operations and cut costs, newspapers have made print deadlines earlier, and this meant a 6 p.m. print deadline for the Tennessean and no morning-after commemorative edition.3 Instead, Vandy fans got their front-page keeper thirty-six hours later . . . well after the immediate bliss had subsided.4 In the midst of financial decline, journalists are challenged in their ability to cover places, and newsrooms are limited in what they can do. The Tennessean wasn’t in control of its own deadlines because it was being printed remotely on the orders of Gannett, its corporate overlord, headquartered outside of Washington, DC, which makes decisions about the efficiencies of printing presses from afar.5 Miami Herald journalists managed to make the extra editions happen from their new geographic location, but what happens after the next big championship may be even harder to control. As of 2020, the Miami Herald no longer owns its own printing press, instead utilizing its rival newspaper the Sun-Sentinel’s presses, about fifty miles away.6 These championship moments have very little to do with information seeking or political knowledge, though newspapers often see a run on print copies purchased after a major election. Buying a newspaper to save and treasure is almost never the way that we think about the “value” of journalism from an economic perspective. But these moments tell us a lot about the symbolic role journalists and newspapers have as cultural authorities in communities to define and commemorate issues of importance to particular places.7 A major institution honored and legitimated your fan loyalty, imbuing it with larger cultural significance. The win mattered. The city believed. The moment is historic. Now consider what happens when there is no newspaper at all. When the Vindicator closed in 2019, just after celebrating its 150th anniversary, Youngstown, Ohio, took on the dubious distinction of being America’s first midsized city without a daily newspaper of any kind—print or digital. Youngstown has been a city in decline, with negative population growth and extreme poverty; those from the area still talk about “Black Monday,” when the steel mills first began shutting down, as if it were yesterday, instead of 1977. The newspaper was for sale for over two years and the local owners could not find a willing buyer, but not for lack of trying. The Vindicator had continued to pay fair 16

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wages to unionized journalists, managed to support investigative journalism amid financial strain, had engaged in early experiments with online news, and had retained its emphasis on covering the city’s distressed, mostly poor and Black, urban core.8 At least to those mourning its loss, the Vindicator was the textbook example of what you’d want from a local newspaper, from investment in content and fair wages to commitment to telling the community’s story. But Youngstown, a “post-traumatic city” defined by its nostalgia for an industrial past, also failed the Vindicator.9 The city shriveled and shriveled, and the newspaper’s options for major advertisers who were willing to pay newspaper print prices for ads were slim. Those better off and living in the five-county region’s outlying suburbs have another newspaper and local television stations to turn to, not to mention speedy Wi-Fi connections. For onlookers who have an unimpeachable faith in the link between local news and democracy, it was alarming that Youngstown proper, a poor, left-leaning area, was now without journalists and especially vulnerable to unchecked corruption and misinformation. The Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Will Bunch even wrote a column headlined “How the First U.S. City with No Daily Newspaper Will Help Trump.”10 From these vignettes, you get a sense of how places shape how journalists are able to cover the news and how the affordances of place—the features, resources, and contexts of a particular location—affect what journalists do and how newspapers function as businesses. Most of us who believe in the project of American democracy find it hard to think about what happens without geographically specific news because of its role in social cohesion and civic engagement. But the decline of newspaper journalism has distinct racial, economic, and partisan implications that play out across America: news for the rich, white, and blue—news for those who can pay, news from white institutions that fail in comprehensive and inclusive coverage, and news read by liberals who still trust mainstream media. To get a better handle on the messiness of what is happening to American journalism, it’s helpful to establish a few core premises: 1. Critical and comprehensive local news is a recent invention, not a core element of the history of American democracy. My t h s of L o c al Ne w s an d W hy Ne w sp ap er s Matter, Any w ay

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2. Newspaper journalism matters for powering democracy, but journalism also perpetuates inequities and the status quo. 3. Newspapers have reached a state of market failure, making quality journalism a “private good” only some can and are willing to pay for. 4. Place is a proxy for power—and the power to define “place” has been a source of journalistic authority. These key premises establish why place is such a useful way to think about the causes and consequences of journalism’s decline and buttress the theoretical and empirical arguments throughout the book. These premises also aim to mute some of the rhetoric and sweeping assumptions about the information needed for a functioning democracy. The “where” of news is changing, both within journalism, because the industry is being reshaped, and outside of journalism, as place-based realignments of people and power become increasingly important for understanding the relationship between journalists, audiences, and other social actors and institutions that legitimatize and financially support professional journalism. Most important, the changing “where” of news has significant stakes for trust in journalism and social cohesion at large. While it seems self-evident to say that where people live and work enables and constrains everyday life, both popular discourse and scholarship has ignored place, focusing instead on the power of networks and technology to transcend material geography. As the Wisconsin scholar Lewis Friedland puts it, “The reason this needs to be stated at all is because of the dominance . . . in the past decade or so of network perspectives that locate the lives of social actors in a floating ‘network space’ that somehow sits on places but is never rooted in any place.”11 In its ideal form, journalism matters to democracy because it connects people to places, giving them a sense of a shared commitment to a physical location as well as to the people in it. Journalism can do far more than just equip people to make political decisions; journalism roots us in a “sense of place,” which “conceptualizes individuals’ physical, psychological and/or social connections to particular geographic territory without necessarily locating them within these physical spaces.”12 At their best, newspapers build a sense of collective memory, social cohesion, and civic imagination. However, with minor exceptions, many stakeholders in the future-of-news debate, including academics, 18

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have false nostalgia for journalism that powers democracy; it would be more accurate to acknowledge that we are chasing ideals for news and democracy that seem increasingly out of reach—but this doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try. Let’s move to my first premise, which offers a dose of needed realism about local news in the United States. CRITICAL AND COMPREHENSIVE LOCAL NEWS IS A RECEN T INVEN TION

Scholars laud the importance of newspapers and journalism more generally for building a shared sense of community, inspiring participation in civic life, and holding powerful people and institutions to account. This faith that journalism does something good for society because it keeps democracy running is essential to the myth of American democratic liberalism, one that privileges an ideal of the informed, rational voter equipped to make good decisions for the polity. In this version of journalistic ideology, journalists are imagined as public servants who serve as watchdogs against corruption and abuse, sounding “burglar alarms” for citizens to take action when it is needed.13 Indeed, empirically, there are clear indications that journalism does make a difference for facilitating a healthy democracy—and newspapers, not television, radio, or new media, receive the lions’ share of the credit. But newspapers are less robust than we might presume in actually providing locally specific news about politics and government. Foundational to the civic religion of U.S. democracy is a belief in the importance of journalism in creating a common ground for debate, discussion, and solidarity, facilitating a healthy, critical public sphere with a public capable of rational, informed political decisions.14 Local newspapers, in particular, have been thought to play an important role in cultivating civic belonging and community, an observation Tocqueville made on his 1800s road trip across the United States. Today, when journalism advocates worry about “news deserts,” that is, places that lack access to regular local news, usually a daily newspaper, they invoke a scenario where corruption will reign, school and sewer boards go uncovered, and shared civic life will fade. This romanticizing of the local newspaper is deeply problematic and somewhat ahistorical. In fact, the word “local” is imprecise to the My t h s of L o c al Ne w s an d W hy Ne w sp ap er s Matter, Any w ay

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point of being almost meaningless. As the media policy scholar Christopher Ali points out, “local” is conceptually ambiguous—it is taken for granted that everyone knows what it means, and what’s local is, well, what’s local.15 The word “community” suffers from similar issues of ambiguity.16 Much local news of the sort that we worry about losing is probably more of an exception than the norm, for two main reasons: first, local news as we think of it today is a rather recent invention, and second, the “journalism that matters” is largely a boutique form of journalism practiced by Goldilocks newspapers of the post-Watergate era. The romantic myth of the informed American citizen where every town had its own newspaper is missing an important detail: the United States was founded and existed for close to a century without a robust tradition of local news, and most of the news in these plentiful local newspapers was reprinted from other outlets. For much of American history, local news was associated with either salacious scandal or boosterism (or both), and most newspapers were low on original news content.17 The sociologist Alfred McClung Lee credits the Philadelphia Public Ledger for inventing local news in the 1850s. Its regular coverage of courts and crime differentiated it from the shipping and trade news, editorials, and foreign dispatches that were its competitors and typical of newspapers of that era.18 The dawn of the modern era of journalism brought two types of journalism to the fore, the urban journalism found in New York, Chicago, and other large cities and the booster journalism generally associated with the development of the American West. Much of early local news in big cities that appeared in the 1870s-to-1890s era of “yellow journalism,” known for scandal, human-interest stories, crime, and illustrations, would be maligned by today’s biggest supporters of journalism.19 Local news included the salacious sort of “trial by newspaper” that James Gordon Bennett made his name for practicing or Joseph Pulitzer’s clever use of sensational tales of idle rich and the miscreant, rabble-rousing (usually immigrant) poor, which played on class prejudices to raise circulation. Journalists often became powerful politicians, and local newspapers often worked hand in hand with corrupt city bosses. After the Great Chicago Fire in 1871, the Chicago Tribune’s publisher Joseph Medill became mayor. He grew frustrated with the incompetence and 20

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rot in the city council (perhaps because they disagreed with him), and after his service, the Chicago Tribune began engaging in proto– investigative journalism more as a form of retaliation than anything else.20 The Chicago River’s sewage problems frustrated rich and poor alike; Medill didn’t want to have digestive problems or smell sewage, and thus, the journalism he supported was public-interest journalism motivated by his own self-interest. Further examples of politicianpublishers throughout American history point to the limitations of most urban newspapers to question power in any meaningful way. Warren G. Harding, the first (and only) newspaper publisher elected to the presidency, was a product of the success of the Ohio party boss system. Unsurprisingly, his presidency was filled with scandals (the most famous being the Teapot Dome Scandal). The publisher Horace Greeley ran for president; William Randolph Hearst was elected to Congress twice and ran for mayor of New York, the Senate, and the presidency. Boosterism is the other precursor to what we now think of as local news, and local news in many places across the United States still serves as a site for community promotion rather than community critique. Frontiersmen “founded” new towns and newspapers often at the same time, and many of today’s newspapers bear the mark of larger-than-life figures trying to “settle” the West.21 These settlers were also participants in Native American genocide, either directly or indirectly; to have a newspaper was to civilize and to fulfill manifest destiny. Men like Col. Alden Blethen of the Seattle Times used their power at the helm of a newspaper to create their cities. Blethen’s power as a publisher was in part responsible for the leveling of the hills that made Seattle’s downtown possible.22 The newspaper that would become the Omaha WorldHerald was one of the first permanent brick structures in the city in 1865, built above a saloon on the same intersection that a much newer building sits on today. George L. Miller, who wrote all four pages of the newspaper, quickly set about using his investment to draw settlers from the East Coast, touting the superior climate of the Nebraska territory with less-than-truthful claims: “Men die in Nebraska, it is true, but under like circumstances and everything being equal, our climate certainly does furnish greater immunity from fatal disorders than any other in the known world.”23 (Miller did later go insane.) Booster newspapers played a critical role in settling the American West, drawing new My t h s of L o c al Ne w s an d W hy Ne w sp ap er s Matter, Any w ay

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residents to a place by talking up the potential for wealth, new beginnings, and adventure. We aren’t just talking about the era of Horace Greeley’s “Go West, Young Man,” though. The Fort Worth Star-Telegram’s founder, Amos G. Carter, so doubled down on his self-branding as the prototypical American cowboy that the newspaper’s own mini-museum proudly employs photographic evidence to highlight Carter’s real friendship with the Hollywood cowboy Will Rogers.24 Many of the major newspapers that still exist today were started with boosterism as their raison d’etre. The Chandler family’s Los Angeles Times aimed to draw investment and interest in Southern California, and Newsday was founded by the newspaper heiress Alicia Patterson, with the intention of using it to promote her Long Island real estate investments to returning U.S. GIs in the 1950s.25 At the end of the twentieth century, the Omaha World-Herald’s in-house pamphlets for potential advertisers promoted both the newspaper and the city in the same fold-out brochure: “Omaha is a friendly city on the banks of the Missouri River. The quality of life is high and the cost of living is low.”26 This booster journalism was meant to build up a “place,” to make a place somewhere that people wanted to invest in and move to; critical local journalism was scant, and there was ample coverage of government efficiency and business prowess. It is probably more accurate to credit the growth of these cities to boosterism in newspapers than it is to say that newspapers kept power in check and enabled people to make good, informed choices about their local officials. My intention is not to string together ancient newspaper history (others have offered far more comprehensive reviews) but to establish that a good portion of the American democratic experiment has happened with limited critical local journalism. Even today, the division between local players in politics and business and the owners of the local newspaper is nearly indistinguishable in many communities in the United States. There is strong support to suggest that the myth of the locally informed citizen thanks to hard-hitting local reporting is a temporal corollary of the rise of modern investigative journalism in the 1960s and 1970s.27 In fact, this era of adversarial journalism was only nominally “local,” done by some of the largest and most powerful Goldilocks newspapers. This journalism also required resources: expertise; time for reporting; 22

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new, expensive computers to aid in data analysis; and legal protection. Even if they wanted to, most small local newspapers could never hope to do this journalism. On a more industry-wide level, the resurgence and professionalization of this Progressive-era spirit of adversarial journalism coincided with the growth of chain newspaper ownership, where efficiencies of scale and publicly traded, chain newspaper companies were favored instead of locally-owned family media properties. Journalists moved from newspaper to newspaper across the chain, usually from smaller to bigger outlets, and while a lack of family ownership enabled adversarial independence to blossom, journalists often lacked permanent local ties. When we think of some of the “local” heroes of this era, journalists like the Philadelphia Inquirer’s Donald L. Bartlett and James B. Steele— who earned two Pulitzer Prizes and whose reporting led to citywide changes—come to mind. But these same heroes weren’t immune to bald careerism; both moved on to Time, then Vanity Fair. I walked past their pictures and prizes as a cub reporter at the Inquirer, but if I’m being honest, my awe and admiration had nothing to do with the stories they uncovered, but with their career success. My attitude wasn’t uncommon. The post-Watergate investigative journalism that helped keep cities, states, and regions accountable also helped journalism brand itself. The Pulitzers that followed these investigations became bragging points for newspapers and journalists, and journalists, at least, could see themselves as performing an important social role that mattered: good journalism could bring the bad guys down and defend the powerless, who couldn’t fight back without journalists on their side. Journalism could send people to jail, but it could also make a journalist’s career, resulting in a relationship with the audience that could be extractive rather than complimentary.28 In sum, the presence or absence of local journalism does not guarantee that journalists are holding up truth to power. Now, many of those concerned about the decline of journalism in the United States are mourning the loss of a type of journalism that never existed in most places and only existed in its mature form for a few decades at a few news outlets. The American democratic project was well underway without the kind of local news we imagine to be necessary to support a thriving democracy. That said, the local journalism we worry about My t h s of L o c al Ne w s an d W hy Ne w sp ap er s Matter, Any w ay

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losing today does have an important democratic function, but it is more complicated than some of the research would suggest. Thus, consider the second premise: J O U R N A L I S M P E R P E T UAT E S I N E Q U I T I E S A N D T H E S TAT U S Q U O

Political scientists, communication scholars, and journalists point out the important role that newspapers play in watchdog journalism, civic engagement, and political knowledge. Yet many of the classic studies that demonstrate these connections were done before the present highchoice media environment, declines in journalism, and rise of social media, making it hard to know how to compare their findings to the present.29 Contemporary research has provided some support that newspapers matter to a healthy democracy but often fails to control for outside variables, from who uses news in the first place to how much news is consumed, and tends to overemphasize voting and partisanship as the most significant indicators of civic engagement. Some of the most widely cited studies come from economics, meaning that communication theory about how people actually consume and share media is often underexplored or oversimplified. A number of problems have plagued this research agenda: self-reported data on media consumption, the inability to disentangle causality (is it newspapers that drive civic engagement or vice versa?), and the lack of generalizability across large populations.30 The uncertainty of a strong, direct connection between journalism, invoked uncritically as a generalized ur-term that signifies bountiful information filled with civic import, and the democratic life it is said to enable means that we need to be far more critical of our tendency to view so-called news deserts as an urgent civic problem that must be solved. Let’s consider what this research actually shows about the direct effects of journalism on democracy. The scholar Esther Thorson summarized the empirical social science findings in 2005, arguing that “news uses, at least of newspaper and television local network types, is virtually always a significant component in a pattern of positive citizen responses to their civic sphere,” but this phrasing underscores that the link between journalism and citizen engagement is not necessarily 24

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causal.31 Scholars are aware that the link is more of an association than it is clear-cut evidence that news causes democracy, which keeps us busy disentangling the complexity of human behavior, media effects, and culture. Journalists and the public might see these links anecdotally: an investigation leads to a corrupt politician being exposed and thus voted out. As public-interest journalism reaches a news stage of financial implosion, it is a more compelling rallying cry to argue that journalism plays an essential role in facilitating democracy than to make the more academically nuanced argument that we see a positive, associational relationship, often with quite small effects. Perhaps I am being too harsh. There is empirical support to suggest some connections between the loss of newspaper journalism and consequences for political knowledge, even in the contemporary political environment. When both Seattle and Denver lost their second daily newspapers, there was a short-term drop in civic engagement.32 The scholars Meghan Rubado and Jay T. Jennings explored the effect of newsroom staffing cuts between 1994 to 2016 at eleven California newspapers;33 results from 246 elections in forty-six cities show that lower staffing levels were associated with lower voter turnout and less competitive elections.34 However, California arguably had shifts in partisanship that turned the population more consistently Democratic, so less competitive elections are not necessarily a sign of a problem caused by a lack of journalism but by a more uniform electorate. A similar study on the closure of the Cincinnati Post found that while the Cincinnati Enquirer supplemented the coverage in the areas that relied on the Post, fewer candidates ran for municipal office in these areas, incumbents were more likely to win reelection, and voter turnout and campaign spending fell. Three years later, however, while voter turnout remained suppressed, most other measures had returned to preclosure levels.35 The scholars acknowledge that their results, while “statistically imprecise, they demonstrate that newspapers . . . can have a substantial and measurable impact on public life,”36 but the results were imprecise, not clear-cut causal support for how news aids in the functioning of a healthy democracy. Others found that municipal borrowing rates increase when newspapers close, suggesting more concern from investors about internal corruption,37 though a city’s overall economic outlook may also be to blame. My t h s of L o c al Ne w s an d W hy Ne w sp ap er s Matter, Any w ay

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Perhaps the most robust effort to connect declines in local political journalism with declines in civic engagement is the work of Danny Hayes and Jennifer Lawless, who conducted a longitudinal study of newspaper coverage for every U.S. House district during the 2010 and 2014 midterms, which they paired with survey data of U.S. voters.38 Tracking the same individuals, they found that coverage of uncompetitive races and races covered by large-circulation outlets tends to be weaker when compared to news coverage of elections in contested districts served by smaller outlets. They suggest that the lack of coverage affects people’s ability to evaluate their members of Congress and reduces voter turnout. It also seems that areas where local congressional members are covered less tend to attract less federal funding,39 though this may be a reflection of the lack of power of these lawmakers. These studies presume that journalism provides this critical lifeblood of civic information. But most American communities haven’t had this journalism, neither historically, as I have shown, nor presently. In fact, most American communities may already be news deserts, if we look beyond the presence or absence of a news outlet and at the composition of local coverage itself. Of the 16,000 news stories the News Measures Research Project studied, only about 17 percent of them could be described as truly local, that is, about or having taken place in that community.40 Partnering with Facebook, the research team also analyzed over three hundred thousand local news stories across ten thousand communities (Facebook decided what was “local”) and categorized them by whether they met a “critical information need,” defined by the FCC as the “identifiable set of basic information needs that individuals need met to navigate everyday life, and that communities need to have met in order to thrive.”41 By and large, most stories were about sports or emergencies or were obituaries. Local political stories were not only the least common type of story in their data set, but they also generated the lowest level of Facebook engagement among audiences, leading researchers to conclude, “If we interpret engagement as an indicator of demand, then this finding is a bit discouraging.” A 2019 Pew study of over 35,000 Americans found that 47 percent of Americans say that the local news covers an area different from where they live.42 This is not to say that the watchdog function of journalism does not matter, but these data suggest that its occurrence in newspapers is the 26

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exception, not the rule. Democracy’s Detectives, James Hamilton’s book on the economics of investigative journalism, provides ample examples of how investigative journalism in regional newspapers, which can cost $200,000 to $300,000 for a major project, has a massive social benefit.43 One North Carolina journalist he profiled had conducted over three hundred investigations in thirty-six years; of those, 149 generated substantive changes, 110 produced deliberative outcomes, and forty-three generated individual impacts; in 10 percent of these investigations, an actual law was changed.44 Nonetheless, the history of local news and the data suggest that it is unlikely that dogged journalists in every town are on guard watching out for corruption and give thin causal support to the claim that journalism’s efficacy is the linchpin that keeps politicians in line.45 What’s more remarkable is that there isn’t more corruption. With all this promise of news and democracy, there is a dark side. One would be hard-pressed to find a general-interest newspaper, large or small, that does not have a legacy of racial exclusion, keeping people in place and out of places of power. General-interest newspapers have remained largely white institutions. The power of newspapers to create places helps revitalize downtowns; it also enables the mental mapping of dangerous areas in a city.46 Journalism’s trust problem when it comes to minority populations has a long history—the printed word legitimated exclusive practices and stereotyping and turned a blind eye to internal newsroom practices that made it hard for journalists from marginalized populations to succeed, which I consider more in chapter 2. Indeed, many of the most prestigious U.S. metropolitan and regional newspapers have also held editorial positions that have directly advocated against programs or policies that would provide marginalized city residents some redress—keeping people in their places, literally and figuratively. The Boston Globe advocated against integrated busing in the 1970s, effectively sanctioning de facto school segregation as the institutional voice of the city. The Chicago Tribune’s editorial board was against the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which some argue was the single most sweeping piece of legislation to redress racial inequality since the end of the Civil War;47 the newspaper’s institutional voice, reflecting a legacy of nativism and racism, was against not only upward social mobility for people of color but also basic equality. Local newspapers today are often part and parcel of the establishment power My t h s of L o c al Ne w s an d W hy Ne w sp ap er s Matter, Any w ay

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structure and have a vested interest in its continuation. As Michael Clay Carey’s research on Appalachian news suggests, journalists may duck substantive issues that would help communities address systemic issues as a protective measure in order to avoid perpetuating an overly negative community self-image.48 The power of journalism to maintain the status quo is often underemphasized in favor of its more celebrated feature, its capacity to hold the powerful accountable. But there is still something worth holding onto in this imperfection: we don’t throw the bathtub out because the bathwater is dirty.49 While the web and your mobile device might flatten the difference between different types of media—radio, TV, newspaper, digital-native— newspapers, even in their diminished form, still provide the vast majority of original news coverage, especially at the local level, setting the agenda for other local news media. Local television news is severely limited in what it can cover because of the logics of the medium, as the scholar Phyllis Kaniss argues; many public policy issues are simply “video poor” and thus don’t make for good television stories, unlike crime stories or human interest ones,50 and media conglomeration often means that stories are “local” in style rather than content, without sustained geographic focus on the specific media market.51 When newspapers are weak, local television often suffers too, and this “trickledown effect” matters, especially for those with lower socioeconomic status or lower political knowledge, who tend to rely most on television for news.52 Online-only news outlets make up a very small portion of original news-gathering efforts, and their audiences are tiny, suggesting that they are unlikely to replace the role of newspapers.53 Even journalists themselves often hold newspaper journalists up as the most authoritative and qualified in their field,54 meaning newspapers often have an outsized role in determining what stories to emphasize. Still, there are indications that even in a changing media environment, while newspapers do contribute less to political knowledge than they used to, they nonetheless are still important, especially for those with limited interest in politics.55 Recent analysis bears out the importance of newspapers as content generators. A comprehensive study of one hundred randomly sampled communities by the News Measures Research Project at the DewittWallace Center for Media and Democracy at Duke in 2019 found that 28

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local newspapers accounted for only a quarter of the total media outlets in their sample but produced 50 percent of the original news stories in their database, concluding, “essentially, local newspapers produced more of the local reporting in the communities we studied than television, radio, and online-only outlets combined.”56 Two studies conducted by Pew looked at where original news comes from in cities and found that newspapers play the most important role in creating the original content that then feeds all the other local media outlets.57 That said, by 2015, newspapers weren’t exactly overperforming; they were just better than their television counterparts at going above and beyond pressrelease and event-centered reporting; in Denver, newspapers accounted for 12  percent of this kind of news compared to 4  percent from television.58 There is nothing magical about newspapers and their connection to democracy, except that, by and large, every other local outlet has a parasitic relationship with newspapers, relying on them as a source of original reporting. “The importance of local newspapers is not some mystical capacity to convey a deep understanding of factual information. Instead, the local newspaper is important because it often is the only medium to provide adequate coverage of local politics,” as the political scientist Jefferey Mondak notes.59 Local newspapers can sometimes be terrible, but most scholars would still agree that local news is terribly important, as the Reuters Institute’s Rasmus Kleis Nielsen puts it.60 Recall that my concern rests with how the geospatial asymmetries that we see outside of journalism are manifest inside the news industry too, and the place-based fracturing in the United States has real consequences for social cohesion and trust. But I caution against the naiveté of the view that if a community loses a newspaper, corruption runs wild; newspapers have rarely served the poor and the marginalized well and have long played an important role in reinforcing the dominance of existing power structures and maintaining the status quo. The affective dimension of journalism is not as easily measurable as a variable like voter turnout; journalism is more than information and politics, as journalism plays an important role as a builder and transmitter of shared cultural values and experiences. The role journalism plays in place-making, history-shaping, and communitybuilding functions is harder to quantify because it is something people My t h s of L o c al Ne w s an d W hy Ne w sp ap er s Matter, Any w ay

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feel and experience, but it is arguably just as important, if not more so, than political knowledge. It is this aspect of journalism’s impact on democracy that really stands to suffer if journalists are less able to cover places. This is particularly consequential because newspapers have reached a state of market failure, and the news they provide is increasingly becoming a private good that only some people have access to, which brings us to our third premise. Q UA L I T Y J O U R N A L I S M I S B E C O M I N G A “ P R I VAT E G O O D ”

In response to the COVID-19 crisis, many newspapers dropped their paywalls. In a public health crisis, the more access people have to news and information about the virus and how to prevent its spread, the better. Goldilocks newspapers demonstrated their unique value to the geographically specific areas they covered, providing fine-grained detail about a city, state, and sometimes region in ways that large, national outlets could not, digging into community-specific problems and responses to the pandemic. By and large, these newspapers were the best source of local news and information, compared to local television and radio stations and their websites, and they were certainly more robust than community news outlets with infrequent publication schedules. If newspapers hadn’t dropped their paywalls, then the quality of information people would have had access to about how the pandemic was spreading through their community and how to prevent it would likely have been significantly worse. This was news too important to require people to pay.61 Most newspapers made the calculus that news about the pandemic reaching people was more important than restricting news to digital subscribers. There were record audiences for news, especially in the first few months of the pandemic. However, many newspapers were losing money, not making it. In addition to the economic losses that came from local businesses pulling back their local advertising budgets, digital advertising economics were stacked against news outlets. Digital advertising is largely automated and often referred to as “programmatic advertising”; advertisers preemptively blocked their content from appearing next to content about COVID-19. Record audiences bring 30

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more digital ad dollars, but the COVID-19 stories didn’t translate into more money for news because advertisers avoided them, as “doomscrolling” consumers of pandemic news were unlikely to be behaviorally motivated to buy a new car or splurge on a travel package.62 There are two issues raised by this COVID-19 example: first, that high-quality news and information about a community is increasingly limited to those who can pay, and second, that newspapers have entered market failure because of the massive disruption of the ad-supported model that has sustained them since the 1830s. Market failure is a technical economic term that describes what happens when supply, demand, and prices are out of alignment—and when the costs of producing a good are not met by the price people are willing to pay for it.63 I mentioned some of the dismal stats for the newspaper industry in the introduction, but it is important to highlight the extent of the resource and labor cuts: the number of newspaper newsroom employees dropped 51 percent between 2008 and 2019, from about 71,000 workers to 35,000.64 Fewer journalists means less coverage of places. The Goldilocks newspapers I am most concerned about have decimated staff, struggling to staff beats and not replacing vacated jobs. Few Washington correspondents remain, as I discuss in chapter  4. Beats that have traditionally been the purview of a team of journalists are understaffed. Consider that there is just one full-time education reporter at the Miami Herald for Miami, a metroplex of about six million people.65 The market failure affecting newspapers reflects the larger adjustment in news economics that shifts the burden of paying for for-profit commercial journalism from advertisers to audiences, which means prioritizing reaching the audiences that can and will pay. While news and information are often thought of as public goods, it is now better to think of newspaper journalism, often the most high-quality news an area has, as a private good, something not everyone can have. This has distinct consequences for access to news and information. The economics of news have always been a bit wonky. The motivations for paying for news operate on fundamentally different premises than consumer goods. In classical economic theory, scarcity, or limited supply, generally drives costs up if consumer demand remains the same (think about the demand for Teslas compared to the supply and thus how much Tesla can charge). But the market works differently for information, My t h s of L o c al Ne w s an d W hy Ne w sp ap er s Matter, Any w ay

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and many scholars consider it a “public good” because of its social, rather than commercial, value. When information is understood as a public good, it is because it is in the open, that is, ostensibly, everyone can have access. The media economist James T. Hamilton provides a clear explanation of the difference between a public and a private good in the context of news and information: an apple is a private good. You can’t eat the apple I just ate, and for me to eat an apple, I’ve got to buy it.66 However, a story about apple contamination shows how information acts as a public good: my reading about the apple contamination does not mean that others can’t also read about it. I can share news about this with a friend without him or her having to pay for this information, and in many cases, I haven’t paid for the news either (maybe I heard it on the radio, saw a text alert, etc).67 That information becomes less valuable because sharing it among others doesn’t cost anything; there is no longer a price to put on the information because that knowledge is no longer exclusive.68 In fact, journalists call this news “commodity news,” or journalism that anyone can get on any website but that lacks any kind of distinctive, original contribution.69 Sometimes information can be a private good: in the case of financial markets, government intelligence, or sports betting, information is expensive precisely because other people don’t have it. However, the value of news is ephemeral; once it’s out in the open, it’s not worth much anymore: today’s news, tomorrow’s fish wrap. However, journalism as a primarily public good is a view from the perspective of the consumer, not the industry. As the historian Michael Stamm convincingly argues, the newspaper industry is much like any other manufacturing industry: it relies on international trade, raw goods, machinery, and manual labor, and the tremendous costs of running a functioning newspaper are often forgotten in lieu of the social value of news itself.70 Newspapers as an industry and news as a public good are an economic contradiction. If journalism is still a public good, this would mean that the relative costs of gaining access to information should be low. However, in the era of metered paywalls, those who can pay are able to read the content, and those who can’t pay don’t get to read it; the transfer of information from one person to another was far more frictionless in an era before the gated web, social media that algorithmically preselects what we are 32

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interested in seeing, and paywalls. Similarly, as news organizations devote fewer resources to reporting, the differences in quality between outlets may matter more. There might be value in consuming a story on a specific news outlet because of the depth of coverage it offers; the paywalled newspaper’s version of events is likely to be far more comprehensive or detailed than another outlet that may have the same basic story. COVID-19 is again instructive: local television stations often reported daily numbers of cases, but newspapers pulled together interactive graphics to show the rise and fall of trends and illustrate county and zip-code-specific case counts. Without dropping paywalls, people might have had a grasp of basic facts about COVID-19, but facts often lack context. Even if people didn’t go to newspapers to read COVID-19 coverage, they could if they chose to, facilitating the spread of information. Increasingly, high-quality journalism that provides original news and information is more like a private good, especially as more and more newspapers turn to paywalls and as social media serves as a distribution portal for news. Market failure for newspapers raises serious concerns for public knowledge, and those who stand to lose the most are already those who have traditionally had less access to news and information, particularly as news moves online. Active information seeking requires time, effort, and money, which Anthony Downs called “information cost” in his 1957 classic An Economic Theory of Democracy.71 It is little surprise that political knowledge is often highly correlated with socioeconomic status.72 Overall, there is a significant “knowledge gap” between rich and poor not just in political information but also in areas such as health and personal finance.73 Incidental exposure to news, though, doesn’t require that same information cost, and in the era of the ungated internet, many were hopeful that online news would mitigate some of these problems with information inequality, increasing the number of those “accidentally informed.”74 In 2004, a group of scholars writing for the Russell Sage Foundation asked, “If publishers stopped printing newspapers and put all the news online, would inequality in information about politics and world affairs diminish, become greater, or stay the same?”75 The answer, now, appears to be: inequality grows. You might be thinking that you haven’t actually seen or held a print newspaper in quite a while. At Starbucks’ 8,600 U.S. locations, you used My t h s of L o c al Ne w s an d W hy Ne w sp ap er s Matter, Any w ay

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to be able to buy one of three national newspapers, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and USA Today, along with a selection of local newspapers, but the company ended the practice in the fall of 2019 (though it is now offering complimentary in-store access to a number of large newspaper brands with paywalls).76 U.S. grocers are ditching newspaper racks to make space on their shelves.77 To the contrary, some argue we are in an era of “ambient journalism,”78 with news popping up everywhere as part of our background environment: on social media feeds, smartphones, and watches and in taxis, airport gates, and elevators in corporate buildings. But this kind of incidental exposure in our everyday environment rests on a certain type of person: one who sets news alerts on their phone and who rides in elevators, taxis, and airplanes. Initially, scholars were hopeful that social media might actually amplify incidental exposure. However, the data suggest that our current digital environment facilitates greater inequality among information haves and have-nots. Online incidental exposure to news grows for people who are already politically interested and for those with a higher socioeconomic status;79 however, if no one in your feed is sharing news, you’re not going to see any. In the United Kingdom, Reuters data suggested greater social inequality in online news consumption than offline news consumption, and this inequality in news consumption was actually greater than the United Kingdom’s actual level of social inequality.80 There’s also substantial support for the claim that in a high-choice media environment people just pay less attention to news if they weren’t interested to begin with; that is, it’s not just those who are low income who tune out.81 As journalism moves behind paywalls and to apps and social media platforms, and as print newspapers are no longer sold at Starbucks or found on grocery shelves, rising information asymmetry between the rich and the poor and between the interested and uninterested stands to grow. How does all of this get back to place, then? Market failure is relevant to journalism’s erosion of its ability to make a distinct claim to cover places—to be able to tell the “where.” If news is incentivized by markets, places where people are not willing to pay for news that is costly to produce and potentially free to share are likely to have the most difficulty supporting this kind of journalism. The rise of news deserts reflects the premise that there are some places where there is just 34 My t h s of Lo c al Ne w s an d W hy Ne w sp ap er s Matter, Any w ay

no market for a geographically specific newspaper. The “where” of news is changing, making it harder for journalists to cover places. Hence, the final premise: P L AC E I S A P R OX Y F O R P O W E R I N J O U R N A L I S M

Place is not just locative, and as a multidimensional concept, place is also about power relations. Over the years I’ve spent thinking and talking about this book, there’s always this “Placeless Guy” in the audience or at the bar who uses his extremely privileged experiences of moving through the world to tell me that place doesn’t matter anymore. I want to throttle him, and although I don’t, Placeless Guy’s comments are instructive for showing how place, power, and communication are intimately connected. Placeless Guy is almost invariably a white, older man who lives in a large city. He’ll turn to me and say, “See this, what I’ve got in my hand, I can do anything with it!” Placeless Guy will then proceed to tell me that his smartphone gives him access to news from anywhere in the world on demand and the ability to contact and communicate with people across the globe at lightning speed. Placeless Guy will also usually add that he doesn’t pay attention to much local news anyway and prefers a few elite outlets. If he’s American, he’ll often start talking about how he only reads British news about U.S. politics, which he can get whenever he wants from his smartphone (ignoring that he’s already contradicted his premise that place doesn’t matter, because if it doesn’t, the origin of the news shouldn’t either). If Placeless Guy wants to go further, he will also add that every place is pretty much the same now. This is a sentiment that might be called the “placelessness of place”; after all, shopping malls, suburbs, freeways, office buildings, and revitalized industrial districts do look the same across many late-capitalist democracies.82 He’s not entirely wrong, but physical similarities among cities or even shared, intractable social issues barely prove his case. When it comes to news, digital news from anywhere is indeed accessible from most spots on the globe, though internet security regulations and digitally enabled autocracies certainly challenge this premise. Still, Placeless Guy is unfettered by the increasing friction-filled sharing of news—he can pay for news or otherwise spend time figuring out how to My t h s of L o c al Ne w s an d W hy Ne w sp ap er s Matter, Any w ay

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skirt paywalls. My general reaction is to kindly point to his smartphone and note that if place really was so unimportant, then why were Apple and most of the apps on his phone continuously collecting detailed tracking data about his location? He’ll turn in a huff, and usually, the conversation ends there. Of course, for Placeless Guy, there’s no way of telling him that his experience of moving through the world is a representation of the experiences of the global elite. Placeless Guy rarely experiences the constraints of place on his activity or options; his access to capital, privilege, and connectivity enables him to go into “places” that others do not: his place of privilege moves with him.83 Placeless Guy’s experience of the world is highly homogenous and borderless because he’s at the apex of power.84 Power and capital are facilitated by eliminating the affordances of place—by turning place into undifferentiated space. World leaders have known this intuitively. The chase to establish telegraph lines around the world to connect colonies to empires85 and the more recent fight to control broadband86 show how power over communication has facilitated power over places and the people in them. In a more academic context, the scholar Manuel Castells is probably most celebrated for making the case that internet communication technologies facilitate all the other flows of finance, trade, people, and information. To his credit, he recognizes the affective importance of places in shaping our orientation in the world, contrasting “the space of places” with the “space of flows,” or the space of the transfer of information and capital. The news media, in particular, is empowered in the space of flows, with cities serving as central distribution hubs for the packaging and repackaging of news and information to move through the network.87 To own media in this era of flows is to possess this power.88 My counterpoint to Placeless Guy and the theoretical extension of his argument is that we have not overcome place. Power is inscribed in places because people’s activities shape places. For a simple example, just because countries have vast stores of natural resources does not translate into their power at the global scale. At a more domestic, local level, the decision of where to put highways, where governments should offer incentives for neighborhood development,89 where to build schools and libraries, and so on inscribe inequities at the level of physical geography. Segregation in the United States is a classic example 36

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of intentional policies used to limit mobility, but the resulting de facto segregation can still be found in places, from their racial composition to their home ownership rates, property values, and access to banking services and grocery stores. Place is an actor in the game of perpetuating inequality and powerlessness. The inability to move through the world because of these structural and social factors literally leaves people “stuck in place,” as the sociologist Patrick Sharkey argues.90 In fact, place—and the kind of knowing about a place that news provides—is arguably more important than ever. However, as the critical “place” communicators, journalists and news organizations are now more challenged than ever. The placelessness that elites like Placeless Guy get to experience is the exact opposite of a key cause of one of journalists’ biggest problems: journalists have long used place as a way to claim authoritative knowledge, and this authority has also provided a rationale for audiences to trust them. Place is connected to journalistic epistemology and journalistic authority, or how journalists come to know and the legitimacy of their claims over this knowledge relative to others.91 But journalists often are imperfect in communicating place— and this is getting worse as fewer journalists cover more places. Who gets to order, name, make sense of, and arrange places has the ability to value, compare, and ultimately include and exclude.92 This is especially important because journalists do a lot of that naming and ordering for us, and at least traditionally, they’ve had more than their share of influence, along with other media makers, in shaping our cultural imaginaries of places, which in turn can reify power and authority and order our identities and memories.93 The communication scholar Zizi Papacharissi has adopted the Harvey/Lefebvre matrix discussed in the introduction for understanding “place” in communication research. She argues that place is “a particular location that bears significance for human agents, assembled and attained relationally, but also reflective of power structures and allowing potential for agency.”94 Thus, in this book, I apply the following framework for understanding place in news production: 1. Place is the geographic and material setting of news. This includes objects, physical structures, and location on a map—the most elemental understanding of the “where.” My t h s of L o c al Ne w s an d W hy Ne w sp ap er s Matter, Any w ay

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2. Place is lived: where action and meaning is made. This includes the ways that journalists, audiences, and institutions interact with their environments, build routines, and construct cultural meaning, as an individual and collective project. 3. Place is cultural, economic, and symbolic power. This includes situating journalism in its intersection with social institutions, resources, economic imperatives, and flows of capital. The American public seems to be fracturing along place-based divides, a sectionalism instantiated by the way location shapes opportunities, environmental resources, and attitudes toward popular customs and laws.95 Political scientists have also observed that there is a selfsorting process underway, in which people are increasingly likely to congregate with other people just like them—a social homophily that is also mirrored in physical geography. This is a cause for worry. As the political scientist Lilliana Mason puts it, “Social contacts and shared social identities are things that allow individuals to understand each other and tolerate differences of opinion. As these connections grow scarce . . . partisan battles become social and cultural battles, as well as political ones.”96 Community belonging is far more complicated in a networked, global world, with physical geography perhaps less important; nonetheless, what Lewis Friedland calls “traditional communities of place” still rely on local media, and especially newspapers, for a sense of cohesion and identity.97 Despite these place-based divisions, American political behavior has largely nationalized, as the political scientist Daniel  J. Hopkins argues in The Increasingly United States (though I disagree with his contention that the specificity of place is less important than ever).98 News consumption seems to follow these patterns: when news consumers turn to read news online, they almost always choose a national outlet rather than local news. The political communication scholar Matthew Hindman found that in most major metropolitan markets, people spend on average about nine to 14.8 minutes each month on local news. Local news received just 0.5 percent of all internet page views, while 80 percent of visits to news sites go to national news outlets; usually, local TV is the most trafficked local news site in most markets.99

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Perhaps one of the biggest concerns surrounding the messiness of our contemporary media system is the fear that audiences will develop blind spots that in turn leave them vulnerable to a host of persuasive influences, undermining their ability to make informed political decisions. When communities lose news, initial findings suggest that they are more likely to rely on partisan cues from national parties without other input.100 The decline of local newspapers is further contributing to the nationalization of American politics; absent your local newspaper, what you decide about local politics is likely to draw from what you know and think about national politics. These implications of a highchoice media environment, an increase in partisan news media, and a decline in local journalism are concerning. What may matter more than any of the divisions that exist in our digital news consumption is the ideological and social sorting that happens in real life,101 our distances between those unlike ourselves—cultural distances instantiated as spots on a map. We do not spend enough time thinking about how journalists develop blind spots and how journalists’ blind spots make it harder for them to provide coverage that serves the twin aspirations of connecting communities and facilitating the flow of information about democracy. Still, as the journalism scholars Candis Callison and Mary Lynn Young point out, the “decades of scholarship on representational harm” is “extensive and damning” because journalists “tend to reinforce structural inequities and identities in problematic, material and systematic ways” and have particularly failed to challenge gendered and racialized stereotypes, violence against women, social control, white supremacy, and settler colonialism.102 Where journalists cannot go (for example, into the home to report effectively on domestic violence) and how journalists perpetuate which people belong in which places (reinforcing tropes about class, race, gender, and so forth) ultimately set up cognitive barriers that reinforce the structural ones and limit mobility. As my adaptation of place as an analytical framework suggests, place is geographic as much as it is cultural, and the growing physical distances between journalists and audiences also mirror growing or worsening cultural divides across race and class. Journalists are losing their authoritative claim to being able to cover places, and the places of

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news are changing, too. What happens when journalists struggle to tell places? What happens when those places make it harder for journalists to do their jobs? In the following chapters, I’ll further detail how journalism is increasingly challenged by place and why the quality journalism that remains amid market failure is likely to be produced and consumed by the rich, white, and blue. In particular, the next two chapters focus on the growing geographic and sociocultural divides between journalists and audiences.

40 My t h s of L o c al Ne w s an d W hy Ne w sp ap er s Matter, Any w ay

CH APTER T WO

News for (and by) the Rich and White

The Chicago Tribune’s Tribune Tower was built as a cathedral for journalism. In 1922, Col. Robert R. McCormick held an international architecture competition with a $100,000 prize to solicit plans for the “the most beautiful and distinctive office building in the world.”1 Today, the 236 entries from twenty-three countries are still instructive for a time when classical architecture, art nouveau, and the then-futuristic art deco were battling for supremacy. McCormick chose to go classical (or neoGothic).2 The outside of the Tribune Tower, with flying buttresses and gargoyles, resembles Notre Dame and boasts 149 stones from landmarks around the world, including the Great Wall of China, the great pyramid at Giza, the Parthenon, and the Taj Mahal.3 It is meant to represent the Tribune’s domain—the world. McCormick had dubbed the Tribune the “World’s Greatest Newspaper,” a tagline that ran into the modern era on the banner of the print newspaper and still serves as the call letters for what were once Tribune-owned radio and broadcast stations. The foyer brings to mind Westminster Abbey, replete with marble floors, vaulted ceilings, stained-glass windows, and a John Ruskin quote etched into the floor, along with lines from the likes of Samuel Johnson, James Madison, Thomas Jefferson, and Daniel Webster about the importance of journalism to society carved into the cement walls.4 Dark brown wood the color of church pews adorns the wall behind the security desk, which is flanked by a map of North America with three-dimensional

topography said to be made of plaster and U.S. currency; above the map is a stunning clock with Roman numerals featuring a bas-relief of crests, small figures, and interlocking ivy. Behind the security barriers are ornate elevators, once rumored to separate the advertising and business floors from the editorial and production floors of the newspaper, so that business commitments would not interfere with editorial judgment. As the Tribune’s Pulitzer Prize–winning architecture critic Blair Kamin put it in the tour he gave me, “You are entering the cathedral of a free press, the presbytery of Midwest conservatism.”5 But in 2018, Tribune employees were forced to pack up and move from these headquarters on Chicago’s Magnificent Mile to a few floors in the Prudential Building, named for the insurance company. The newspaper’s parent company, Tronc (renamed to signal a digital future), had sold the building as a cost-cutting measure. The Tribune was facing a host of challenges common to other Goldilocks newspapers, but it also had suffered from some uniquely dysfunctional mismanagement over the past half-decade. Following the Chicago businessman Sam Zell’s purchase of the company, there was a subsequent bankruptcy, a sexualharassment scandal in the c-suite, and excessive executive compensation that funded private jets and premiere sports tickets but also resulted in cuts to newsroom jobs. In March 2018, I visited the headquarters just before the move. By Kamin’s desk were at least four completely empty cubicles; around the newsroom were other empty cubes, but in many cases, their former inhabitants had not bothered to dispose of the detritus of papers and files amassed over the course of a journalism career. The space was dark, with poor overhead lighting. Though it was a day after daylight saving had “sprung forward,” the digital clocks around the newsroom were still an hour behind. For an industry consumed with timeliness, not to mention being first to break news, the neglected clocks seemed to me a particularly noteworthy sign of the state of disrepair. Later that day, Kamin took me up to a hidden balcony, where journalists could peer out beyond the gargoyles, the sentinels over their city, empowered from thirty-four stories above, and see dot-sized people walking below. Now these journalists were being kicked out of their cathedral. Even though newspapers may be losing power, perhaps paradoxically, this institutional decline actually reifies the separation between 42

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journalists and the people they cover. Newsrooms remain places of power, even as journalists are losing their authority over places, including their own physical workplaces. Those who have access and entry into the newsroom get to mold the coverage we see; those who pay for news will increasingly determine where journalists direct their scarce resources. And as journalism jobs become increasingly precarious, newsrooms become bastions of privilege, making any meaningful gains in diversity and inclusion more difficult to maintain or advance. As newspapers enter market failure, current market logics for news stand to worsen existing inequities in what people and what places are covered. In this chapter, I show how journalism is increasingly for and by the rich and white. Drawing from scholars who underscore the importance of thinking about intergroup differences across class and politics as a function of material geography, I show how place shapes journalism, with place understood as geography and as a reflection of social relations and power. By bringing together research about diversity in journalism, as well as audience data and qualitative observations, I argue that the kind of journalism that is important for a healthy democracy is increasingly undemocratic; made for and by the rich, white, and “blue”; and reinforces many existing structural inequities. P L AC E A N D C U LT U R A L P R OX I M I T Y

My claim that journalism is becoming for and by the rich, white, and blue reflects the growing psychological, cultural, and political distance between journalists and audiences. This distance matters for journalism: the less the public thinks journalists are like them, the less likely they are to trust them. This, in part, explains the rhetorical tropes invoked by the conservative media—mainstream media is not like you and does not share your values.6 By “cultural proximity,” I mean how much people perceive themselves to be like one another—or in this case, how much journalists are like other people. Cultural proximity invokes a similar set of life experiences and shared values. This idea can also be extended to place. The political scientist Ryan Enos has developed the concept of “sociogeographic impact,” arguing that “geographic, social, and psychological distance are linked—and this affects political distance.”7 Place reflects Ne w s f o r (an d b y) the Rich an d W hite

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and refracts inequality, meaning that people who share similar social and political identities are often located in the same place, while interaction with people who are not like one another and do not share the same values can be limited, potentially worsening existing perceptions of difference.8 In political science, place has become increasingly recognized as a critical factor in political decision making. The political scientist Cara Wong notes, “Where people draw the boundaries of their community affects their attitudes about local institutions, efficacy, and tolerance, as well as obligation,” noting that the affective and locative understandings people hold are consequential for politics.9 As Wong and her colleagues argue elsewhere, understanding political decision making requires measuring “both political attitudes and the ways in which place is represented in the minds of individuals.”10 This outlook bears out in more anecdotal observations, too. Atlantic journalist James Fallows and his wife, Deborah, took the “flyover state” ding literally and got in their Cessna, flying over one hundred thousand miles around the United States. What they found mirrors the survey research on intergroup contact; the other is “less other” when the other is proximate.11 Katherine Cramer’s The Politics of Resentment chronicles how rural Wisconsinites perceive their urban counterparts; the resentment they felt was “rooted in place and class identities” and where they were located, their physical geography, defined their social identity.12 Their strong sense of distributive injustice reflected a “fundamentally different set of values which are neither understood nor respected by city dwellers.”13 This view is a function of inequality instantiated in place, with those in more prosperous places, especially those working in politics, seen as out of touch or, worse, corrupt. Inequality among places has continued to grow. In 1966, the average per capita income of greater Cedar Rapids, Iowa, was only $87 less than that of New York City and its suburbs; by 2013, per capita income in New York was 172  percent higher than the national average.14 While those “stuck in place” struggle, and as the news media becomes more unequal and less representative of large swaths of the United States, it is easy to see how distrust can fester among audiences more distant from journalists.15 In fact, according to a Pew study of 35,000 Americans, those who thought journalists were connected to their communities also saw them 44

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as 31 percent more likely to represent all sides of a story.16 In survey language about journalism, assessing journalists’ ability to represent all sides of a story is a way to measure perceived bias and audience trust. Pew’s findings suggest that audiences actually trust journalists more when they feel journalists are more connected to their communities. Bourdieu’s notion of habitus helps build into cultural proximity the notion of life experience. Habitus has generally been divorced from physical geography, but it is a powerful way of thinking about social space and social distance between other people and institutions. Habitus is a reflection of the sum total of our lived experiences, the access one has to various forms of capital (social, economic, cultural), and the way that we reproduce and legitimate social order through practice. Late in life, Bourdieu acknowledged that social space and geographic space usually went hand in hand: We can compare social space to a geographic space within which regions are divided up. But this space is constructed in such a way that the closer the agents, groups or institutions which are situated within this space, the more common properties they have; and the more distant, the fewer. Spatial distances on paper coincide with social distances[,] people who are close together in social space tending to find themselves, by choice or by necessity, close to one another in geographic space.17

Simply put, the more alike we are, the more likely we are to be in the same geographic space. In these shared geographic spaces, we further reproduce our social divisions and hierarchies. Geography itself is not deterministic. It is not just rural versus urban but how people position themselves relative to the places they are in—as part of a bigger world or one that is consumed by self-contained, self-interested questions. In 1957, the sociologist Robert Merton conducted a study of how mass media functions via interpersonal influence within a small town. He juxtaposed “locals” to “cosmopolitans”: “Locals” were parochial, fundamentally self-interested to the exclusion of the nation and society around them, while cosmopolitans were “ecumenical,” seeing themselves as connected to the problems in society at large, looking outward.18 Ne w s f o r (an d b y) the Rich an d W hite

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In focusing on how place and politics intersect, however, most of this research has paid little attention to the media. Journalists in big cities can be tremendously parochial despite living in a cosmopolitan locale if they are unable to see beyond their own perspectives and consider the perspectives of those unlike them. The parochialism stands to be problematic because journalists do not have access to the perspectives and experiences of those who do not share their outlook, experiences, or worldview. Given concerns about journalists’ blind spots, where they are culturally is also often a reflection of where they are materially located—and a lack of familiarity with places outside those they regularly traverse makes these cracks in their journalistic authority come into full view. You have probably at some point been frustrated by “parachute journalism,” the derisive term for journalists from afar (usually big national media) that swoop in to get a breaking story, often mischaracterizing and even exploiting locals (and local media). But this issue operates on a larger scale: The further apart journalists and audiences are geographically, the further apart they are likely to be culturally, too (and vice versa). When journalistic knowledge is considered a trustworthy interpretation of the world beyond our own immediate experiences, its symbolic and cultural authority is then legitimized by other social actors, but when journalists are unable to fully understand the places they are supposed to know about—and when that lack of knowledge is on display—they undermine their own cultural authority and their readers’ trust. The current pressures on journalism, both inside and outside the industry, suggest that these fissures around place will only get worse. N E W S BY T H E R I C H

“Journalism has a class problem. We know this,” argues Heather Bryant, a former fellow at Stanford and expert in technology development for journalism.19 In an essay posted on Medium, Bryant chronicled the shocked reaction that a fellow journalism conference attendee had upon learning that Bryant’s husband was a garbage collector: “That person was genuinely surprised that the spouse of a journalist had such a bluecollar job. The reaction makes me wonder how badly our industry really lacks for people with more diverse socioeconomic backgrounds.” She 46

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describes her background: “mine could see working class from where we were if we squinted hard enough.”20 Across two posts, she calls out journalism for its class myopia, maligning the lack of economic diversity among journalists, which is getting worse as the industry contracts: If that conference interaction is how a journalist responds to my husband’s job while idly chatting, how do they cover the sanitation worker that ends up in a story they are working on? If talking about someone to that person’s spouse isn’t enough to cause one to mask aversion, how do they talk about people to whom they feel even more distance from? What does this mean for our audience’s ability to trust us?

The structure of employment in contemporary journalism has serious class bias built in, and while journalism jobs were not always the provenance of the elite, 90  percent of journalists have college degrees (versus approximately 25 percent of the overall adult population);21 higher education and internships are all but required for journalists. While we should want our journalists to be highly educated and to have expertise, a student’s chance of joining their ranks is much easier if he or she goes to an elite school, can take advantage of unpaid or poorly paid internships, and participates in extracurricular student journalism. Given the highly precarious nature of journalism employment, those with a financial safety net are better able to weather the possibility of job loss or underemployment. Aspiring journalists who can afford to be “free labor”—or who can rely on parents as a backstop against the precarity of freelancing22—are coming from a place of privilege and can choose a career that is unlikely to be financially remunerative, much less stable.23 For the 14,000 journalism-school students estimated to graduate annually, there are only 88,000 journalism jobs in the United States, total. By 2028, this number is likely to contract by 10 percent.24 In an article titled “The Death of the Working-Class Reporter,” the journalist Justin Ward explains the predicament: “Where once there were many paths to success in journalism, now there is only one—and very few can afford to walk it.”25 As a result, opportunities for journalists to succeed in the profession diminish for those who do not come from wealthy backgrounds. Ne w s f o r (an d b y) the Rich an d W hite

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Journalists as a group will make about $20 an hour, and their national, median pay of $43,490 is below the U.S. average and more than $15,000 below the U.S. median household income.26 I have had talented first-generation students sit in my office and tell me about their plans to take a scholarship to law school or a consulting position because they were expected to contribute to their family’s income; they could not take a poorly paid fellowship with no guarantee for a job and no benefits. There was no margin to be put on their parents’ health insurance. Why turn down a job out of college that starts you firmly above median American income with plush benefits? Those who are most able to take—and succeed—at an unpaid or poorly paid internship are often those who don’t have to worry about paying for summer food or rent because their parents will help them. The bulk of these internship opportunities are increasingly concentrated where the majority of journalism jobs are—around major (expensive) metro areas. Students are often able to get college credit for these internships, but at some schools, including at George Washington University, my former employer, this means paying for these credits, often over the summer, in order to work for free. Students who cannot afford to pay for summer housing in these cities either abandon the internship or find themselves taking on second and third jobs on top of their internships. I have seen this scramble in action as a faculty member, but it was especially clear to me after spending two years living in the dorms as faculty-in-residence. Many of my students at George Washington University were not those who could pay the sticker price of upward of $70,000 and, as a result, were already taking on student debt and were often likely required to have a federal workstudy position. But being at GW, in the heart of Washington, DC, was advantageous because one could go to school and take a less competitive term-time internship at a national or international media company without having to worry about paying for additional housing costs. So, student interns who were on financial aid were already working one parttime job, adding on an internship, and taking on a full course load. Because financial aid doesn’t cover any extras, students often worked a third job, in some cases just to supplement the minimal meal plan their package covered and to have additional spending money. To keep their financial aid, they often had to take jobs that paid in cash or under the 48

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table to avoid reporting the income. Every so often, I’d catch one of my students working a late weekday evening behind a nearby bar, which would explain their exhaustion in my class; it was clear that the unpaid internship scramble and covering the cost for college more generally meant that the less advantaged students were sacrificing classroom success for résumé lines. Universities and other institutions do offer scholarships to provide stipends to support students over the summer, but these are likely not sufficient. In 2000, I was awarded a $3,000 stipend for a summer internship in Washington, and even with free housing thanks to a family friend, I was by no means living large. In 2018, the going rate for an internship stipend through George Washington University remained $3,000. Conde Nast, the publisher of the New Yorker and Vogue, among others, settled a lawsuit with 7,500 interns who had argued that they should have been paid minimum wage for the tasks they were doing, rather than intern wages.27 In places where the internship selection is less robust during the term, students often get much of their experience working on student publications outside of class. Again, they are generally unpaid for their labor. Some college media outlets have made provisions for work-study students to earn wages, but for news outlets independent of the university, these provisions mean funding must be raised independently so a student can effectively “turn down” an official work-study job to work at the student newspaper.28 Students who go to elite schools are also best positioned to secure top internships. Though the Ivy Leagues, some elite liberal arts colleges, and some top-tier state universities have made college education free for students below a certain parental income bracket, the chances that a student at an elite school is financially privileged remain high. In 2017, the Harvard Crimson found that the median family income for undergraduates was $168,800—more than three times the national median.29 When the New York Times’ director of fellowships and internships, Theodore Kim, tweeted his “super unscientific opinion on which schools churn out the most consistently productive candidates,” his list reflected this bias toward elite schools and state schools with the most competitive journalism programs.30 His top choices were Columbia, Northwestern, UC Berkeley, and Yale, with “Honorable mentions, Ne w s f o r (an d b y) the Rich an d W hite

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Tier 1 (no order)” going to Missouri, Harvard, USC, Florida, Duke, and Stanford. Predictably, this list did not land well on social media. The Asian American Journalists Association took a closer and more systematic look at whether interns working at the most prestigious news outlets were going to students at the same set of top schools.31 They compiled a dataset of 150 news interns from the summer of 2018 who worked at the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, NPR, Politico, and the Chicago Tribune, concluding, “65 percent of interns from those seven organizations attended a group of intensely selective universities that make up just 13 percent of US fouryear colleges.”32 Where you went to college is not a proxy for family wealth, especially given that these elite universities are increasingly able to support tuition waivers for low-income students. Still, elite universities provide an outlook, a perspective, an alumni network, and a set of opportunities that other schools simply are unable to match—it is what makes them elite. Are all interns rich? Are all students at elite schools rich? No. But realistic assessments of the data suggest that is likely to be the case, which has consequences for newsroom diversity across race and ethnicity as well. Even assuming the student internship junket proves successful, first jobs present similar challenges for those without a safety net. These jobs are often low paying and in large, expensive cities. Many are structured as “fellowships” that provide a small stipend (or a stipend that has remained unchanged for over a decade) and no benefits. Working-class journalists often struggle. In a Columbia Journalism Review piece, “When the Math Doesn’t Work,” journalists talked about “side hustles,” the one, two, or three jobs required to make ends meet on their salaries, including bartending, working in pizza places, and teaching.33 Other studies on those currently in the profession suggest that journalists who lack family wealth and find themselves woefully underpaid put off having children and starting families, run up credit-card debt, and go without meaningful access to health care.34 One might suggest that those who can’t afford to be journalists maybe ought to find another job. But we need those journalists. Meg Fair, a Pittsburgh journalist, reflected on the costs of losing working-class journalists: “If you don’t have a single person in your newsroom who comes from a bluecollar background, or knows what it’s like to wipe down tables at the end of night, they’ll never be able to empathize when they’re writing stories 50 Ne w s for (an d b y) t h e Rich an d W hit e

about things like workers’ movements, or communities displaced by gentrification.”35 To bring the conversation of cultural proximity and distributive inequity in terms of access to power back to place, we can see how place as a multidimensional concept helps orient our critique. Aspiring journalists who put themselves in the right, locative place, either an Ivy League school or in a big, media rich city, also put themselves in the right place socially and culturally to succeed. Inequity in both geographic and cultural proximity to entry-level journalism opportunities functions as a barrier to entry. And while some journalists have managed to move past these initial roadblocks, to stay in journalism without a financial safety net is often trying. To lose those who have more cultural proximity to low-income experiences in journalism further distances those in the newsroom from the experiences of the vast majority of Americans. NEWS FOR “THE RICH” (AND WHITE)

When the Pew Research Center asked the question “Who pays for news?” the answer was white, older, and college-educated Americans.36 When I use the word “rich,” I don’t mean to imply the 1 percent, but I do want to suggest a sort of differentiation based on cultural capital that is often inextricable from economic capital—those who are both willing and able to pay for news, especially local, digital news. While Pew considers each of these demographic descriptors as analytically distinct, “college educated” is often a proxy for both whiteness and wealth, though not entirely,37 and college-educated people in the United States tend to earn more (though even among the college educated, a racial income gap persists, one that is particularly acute for Black Americans).38 Newspapers are expensive and have become increasingly so. As the scholars Iris Chyi and Ori Tenenbaum find, between 2008 and 2016, industry-wide, seven-day home-delivery prices more than doubled, and weekday single-copy prices tripled, with seven-day subscription now costing an average of $510 a year.39 More than two-thirds of news consumers stuck with these subscriptions, despite being up-charged close to $300 over a six-year span. Those who can absorb the cost of print newspapers have the disposable income to do so; following basic Ne w s f o r (an d b y) the Rich an d W hite

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microeconomic theory, they are making the decision to pay for news rather than something else. When it comes to digital news subscriptions, consider that only 14  percent of Americans report paying for any kind of local news, including local public media donations and memberships; those who prefer print are also more likely to worry about the financial future of journalism and pay for a print newspaper.40 In an era of streaming content, Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime, Spotify, Google Play, and other digital subscription entertainment companies jockeying for our dollars, the question becomes just how many more digital subscriptions can be added to one’s monthly budget. (The answer? Probably just one.)41 Paying for news becomes both an economic luxury and a value statement, one that newspapers are quick to remind visitors to their site. The LA Times encourages subscription with the invocation, “Support quality news.” The Omaha World-Herald advertises, “Your subscription helps guarantee local news keeps coming.” And the New York Times’ “The Truth Is Worth It” national ad campaign suggests that those who care about the truth are willing to pay. Paying for for-profit journalism has become a symbolic act, an identity statement, and quite possibly a political act,42 one that was previously associated with those who carried a tote bag given to them as thanks for their donation to public radio or television.43 (Notably, Democrats are more likely than Republicans to support local journalism for the sake of supporting a free press.)44 While we cannot definitively say that newspaper subscribers are white and rich, these terms function as a shorthand for those likely to subscribe—people who are high earners or at least have the education and cultural capital to choose to pay for for-profit newspaper journalism. Crafting coverage to match the needs and interests of loyal readers is not new to the digital era of newspaper “disruption.” It is overly deterministic to tie choices about coverage and content only to economic pressures and incentives, but they are present and increasingly openly talked about in newsrooms.45 C O V E R AG E F O R ( A N D O F ) T H E “ R I C H ”

As the economic model for newspapers collapses, the implicit and explicit incentives that have always driven journalists to target their 52

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coverage to particular audiences in particular geographies stand to become more extreme. Who pays for news has always influenced what news gets covered, either explicitly or implicitly, from Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst’s attempt to build mass circulation around a penny press with innovations in illustrations and types of storytelling to efforts in the 1990s to build “zoned” print circulations to take advantage of advertising opportunities for lucrative suburban communities. Today’s loyal newspaper readers are those who can and will pay, especially for digital subscriptions and those who are worth enough to advertisers as a demographic group to cut individual deals with newspapers. In short, they’re “quality audiences”—the target group that a business most likes to reach. News publishers often talk about the digital subscription “funnel” that newspapers present as the process of turning readers into subscribers; the “loyalists” renew over and over. Journalists’ decisions about what to cover stand to be increasingly influenced by efforts to keep paying customers happy. Research suggests that journalists devote more coverage and attention to the powerful and wealthy. In 1979, Herbert Gans observed the preponderance of news organizations that focus on a few “knowns”— powerful individuals, wealthy business owners, etc.—versus “unknowns,” or people who only make the news for exceptional reasons, often for tragedy or unique feats.46 Phyllis Kaniss, in her 1991 book Making Local News, showed how local news outlets set the agenda and local imaginary for communities in ways that favor those with higher socioeconomic status and marginalize the poor and people of color.47 Contemporary research has shown that poor people get covered less than rich ones. A comparison of three New Jersey “news ecosystems” showed that the wealthy suburb of Morristown got twenty-three times more news stories per capita than Newark, one of the poorest cities in the state, even though Newark is New Jersey’s largest city by population and home to one of the largest newspapers in the state (the Star-Ledger).48 Another study found wealthier areas of Phoenix got more newspaper coverage than poor areas in the city.49 Analysis of news content and the “geography of poverty” suggests that there is less accountability journalism about these areas. This oversight may have significant consequences for low-income individuals, rendering them more vulnerable to fraud and deception.50 Ne w s f o r (an d b y) the Rich an d W hite

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The lack of inclusivity in journalism around issues of class is the result of business practices pursued by newspaper companies in the 1960s and 1970s that “changed the target news audiences and altered the actual news narratives about the working class in US journalism” and redefined working-class and minority audiences as “the less desirable customers.”51 Though newspapers theoretically have a global reach thanks to the web, digital newsrooms tend to restrict their coverage area to where their newspapers actually circulate, and circulation, of course, is a proxy for who is actually paying for the newspaper.52 UNC’s U.S. News Deserts project finds that, in rural areas where papers have closed or merged, the average poverty rate is nearly 4  percent higher than the average U.S. rate, and the median income and percentage of residents with bachelor degrees in counties that lack newspapers is lower than in the United States as a whole.53 In the Boston suburbs, the GateHouse chain justified closing ten weekly newspapers because they were targeted at low-income areas that “were not attractive to print advertisers.”54 More anecdotally, when I visited the headquarters of a major U.S. newspaper chain and expressed concern that some people’s computers and internet access would not support their web sites, an executive told me that it didn’t matter because those people were unlikely to be able to afford to subscribe anyway.55 Which places major news organizations cover and how they cover them are also telling. In 2015, I considered whether the New York Times’ coverage of the “super rich” was alienating readers, especially millennials.56 While people of all classes have been curious about the lifestyles of the rich and famous, which I took to task in the piece, the reality is that if any newspaper has readers that might be able to aspire to serviced apartments or empathize with the high costs of banker’s lifestyle, it’s likely readers of the few major national newspapers like the Times, the Washington Post, or the Wall Street Journal. When the New York Times covers with a serious, informed tone the question of whether departing to a second home during the COVID-19 crisis might be more challenging for setting up remote work, it’s difficult to see intended readers as anyone other than these second-home owners.57 How editors came to cover this story, and others like it, also raises the question of class disconnection.58

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Consider current market logics for journalism in the context of sociogeographic impact—that some people, by virtue of where they are located geographically and economically, are not thought of as markets that can fund the news and that, as such, there is less news about them. The situation for Goldilocks newspapers is different from major national outlets because in a geographically specific place, there are only so many wealthy people or people with the cultural capital or political ideology that might compel them to pay for news. While there have long been markets ignored by news organizations because they were not seen as having the demographics advertisers would find attractive, the problem gets worse when newspapers have to depend on audiences rather than advertisers to pay for the bulk of supporting news production. To survive, Goldilocks newspapers have to chase the subscription dollars of the wealthy, more so than ever before, which means Goldilocks newspapers have to reorient their coverage in order to make sure that their geographically specific audiences can and will pay for news. The problem of increasingly scarce resources compounds already consequential choices that news organizations must make about which places matter. While the economics of digital content are now largely outside the control of the newspapers themselves, Goldilocks newspapers’ efforts to respond to the revenue crisis leave them caught up in the larger social stratification that emerges out of rising income inequality. N E W S BY W H I T E P E O P L E

The embarrassing whiteness of legacy news outlets was on full display in the summer of 2020 as the United States reckoned with the death of George Floyd and the significance of Black Lives Matter. Within a few days, a number of egregious examples of institutional racism in newsrooms became part of the larger public discourse around racial inequity, with the imbalance between white newsroom leaders and a (slightly) more diverse staff becoming particularly clear. The Philadelphia Inquirer published a tone-deaf headline on an architect’s column, “Buildings Matter, Too,” which led dozens of journalists to walk out of the newsroom in protest and culminated in the resignation of the Inky’s editor-in-chief.59

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The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette management reprimanded Alexis Johnson, a Black reporter, for a tweet it deemed racist and barred her from covering further Black Lives Matter protests, a move that was widely disputed.60 Top national newsrooms were not exempt from being called out for their racism. The Times’ opinion section published an op-ed by Senator Tom Cotton calling for federal troops to put down protests in cities. External expressions of dissent at the Times are usually nonexistent, but staff spoke out on Twitter, saying the op-ed endangered “Black @nytimes staffers and all Black people.”61 This outcry across the news industry was perhaps the most direct moment that legacy newsrooms have had in decades, when an open discussion of racism in the newsroom broke through not just to journalists but to a wider, national audience. Journalists demanded action from news organizations. The LA Times Guild’s Latino Caucus wrote a letter demanding the newspaper’s leadership apologize for its history of creating mass anti-Latino hysteria and that it address an embarrassing diversity deficit. In Los Angeles, approximately one of every two residents is Latino, but Latinos only constitute 13 percent of the newsroom’s employees.62 The Associated Press Stylebook, the fountainhead for language and style in newsrooms across the United States, suggested journalists capitalize the “B” in Black, recognizing “an essential and shared sense of history, identity and community among people who identify as Black.”63 (In 2019, the AP Stylebook also advised journalists to avoid “racially charged, racially motivated or racially tinged euphemisms which convey little meaning” and use the word “racism” or “racist” instead.)64 The “problem” of newsroom diversity was first addressed as a public policy concern in 1968, when the Kerner Commission blamed U.S. urban unrest on the mainstream media, noting, “Along with the country as a whole, the press has too long basked in a white world, looking out of it, at all, with white men’s eyes and a white perspective. That is no longer good enough.”65 While it’s a bit of a stretch to blame a lack of media diversity for the swath of issues that inspired urban, largely Black, unrest in the United States, it is fair to say that those with the power to cover the news set in place the images and the cognitive shortcuts and stereotypes that we use as heuristics for making sense of the world. Though it overlooked ethnic media, the Kerner Commission did recognize that journalists of color were not welcome in “mainstream” 56

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media institutions. As an instructive example, in 1972, my colleague at the University of Illinois, Pulitzer-winner Leon Dash, was one of seven Washington Post Black reporters to file a complaint with the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission while simultaneously working there in order to point out workplace discrimination in hiring and employment.66 In 1978, the American Society of Newspaper Editors’ put forth a series of recommendations. The first was that “the commitment to recruit, train and hire minorities needs urgently to be rekindled. This is simply the right thing to do. It is also in the newspaper industry’s economic self-interest.”67 Diversity was not only morally just but motivated by the desire to make more money, by increasing readership among minorities. The other recommendations included a call for an annual diversity survey of employment, promotion of more journalists of color in management, a specific call out to small newspapers to work to improve their staff ratios, and most importantly, the goal of minority employment by the year 2000 at parity with the national population.68 In 2000, it became fairly clear that the news industry was not going to meet these goals, and ASNE extended its timeline to 2025. Historically, the survey has been opt-in, relying on a sample from organizations that volunteered to participate, and as a result, it is an imperfect overview of the state of diversity in journalism.69 But in 2018, the fortieth anniversary year of the survey, the participation rate reached a “historic low”—the response rate of 17  percent reflected 293 newsrooms, out of 1,700 queried for data. ASNE scolded newsrooms about the importance of transparency, noting that “participation in the survey is crucial to building more diverse and inclusive journalism communities” and that releasing the numbers was a way to signal a “commitment to equality and representation in journalism.”70 How far were these newsrooms from parity to date? The journalists Matt Daniels and Amber Thomas of the digital site the Pudding conducted a secondary analysis of the 2017 ASNE survey. They found that, on average, American newsrooms are still more white than the city, county, or state that they serve and that the largest newsroom staffs are the furthest from racial parity: “For instance, the white populations in Chicago, Detroit, Houston, Dallas, and Philadelphia are all less than 40 percent of each city’s total population. But, in the newsrooms that cater to those cities, white journalists exceed 74  percent of the total Ne w s f o r (an d b y) the Rich an d W hite

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team.”71 The database of newspaper demographics compared to census population that Daniels and Thomas put together is an invaluable but damning resource.72 Other estimates suggest that the number of fulltime minority journalists working for the U.S. news media as a whole has decreased slightly to 8.5 percent since 2003 and remains “well below the overall percentage of minorities in the US population,” according to the 2013 American Journalist in the Digital Age report.73 As local news media are increasingly challenged economically, adjusting these diversity problems has become more difficult. Between 2001 and 2017, about 45  percent of newsrooms became more racially diverse;74 however, they have struggled to hold on to these gains. Just over half have maintained their 2001 levels of diversity, and some have even become less diverse.75 As the Local News Initiative at Northwestern explains, “Simply put, when newsrooms don’t hire, they don’t hire minority journalists.” It notes that overall declines in newsroom staffing are “making it more difficult for news organizations to address their longstanding lack of diversity.”76 At the time of the 1965 Watts uprisings, there was not a single Black journalist officially on the LA Times’ staff. In recent memory, the paper did not have a single leading editor who is Hispanic or Black in its top leadership, though this representation has been better in the past.77 Internship programs that have sought to bridge these gaps and expand the number of journalists from underrepresented minorities have also suffered as newspapers decline. In 1984, the LA Times began the Minority Editorial Training Program, or “Metpro,” a two-year program of intensive mentoring that ended with an additional year of a guaranteed full-time job.78 Metpros were also provided with housing. Between 1984 and 2001, the program had the effect of more than doubling diversity in the newsroom (to 11.6 percent), but a 2018 report from the LA Times union guild pointed out that Metpros were increasingly being recruited from Ivy League universities, that much of the training had diminished, that compensation had not kept up with the cost of living in Los Angeles, and that trainees reported feeling like second-class citizens. The guild’s conclusion was fairly devastating: “The program has regressed from one that invests in young journalists to one used to exploit members of under-represented communities.”79 Though this report shows only one example of such efforts targeted at improving 58

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diversity in newsrooms, it is illustrative. To improve diversity requires investing in people, paying them fairly, and training and treating them well. One problem that continues to plague newsrooms is that people of color feel unwelcome. A close-up study of Pittsburgh news media revealed that these newsrooms were often isolating and discouraging for people of color, with their efforts and suggestions about how to improve coverage of these communities generally ignored.80 Moreover, many of these journalists felt that they could not openly express concerns about diversity in the newsroom or in coverage. Sick of this environment and of living in a city that was generally not hospitable to Black Americans, some Black journalists simply left the city and its newsrooms rather than deal with everyday racism. “The modern-day doubleconsciousness of having to thrive as a person of color inside and outside of the newsroom, is arguably the most underestimated challenge facing efforts related to improve newsroom diversity,” writes Letrell Deshan Crittenden, the author of the report. Minority ownership has been shown to make a difference in news coverage and gathering spaces for local minority communities,81 but as the current precarity of news media grows and federal policy favors consolidation over media diversity, trends are discouraging.82 At least some newsrooms that can hire and expand are able to improve their representation. The New York Times is a very different place today than it was ten years ago. Yes, the newspaper has its first Black executive editor, but the newsroom also looks different—it is likely less white than it has ever been. The Times’ 2018 “Diversity and Inclusion” report breaks out their staff diversity statistics, and while the newspaper points out that numbers are generally improving, the report notes leadership has not grown more diverse and that low staff turnover means incremental improvements in representation.83 In addition, the mere presence of diverse journalists does not equate to those journalists feeling like they belong and have gravitas as equal stakeholders. The Times’ report acknowledges that “measuring progress on diversity is straightforward because we can easily track it. Tracking inclusion is harder, since at its core, inclusion is a feeling of belonging and acceptance, a sense that employees feel heard, supported and valued.” Ne w s f o r (an d b y) the Rich an d W hite

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In the wake of the 2016 election, then–public editor Liz Spayd called attention to what she referred to as the “newsroom’s blinding whiteness.”84 When it came to political reporting, the Times’ staff of twenty campaign reporters included two Black people and no Latinx or Asians, and at the time, all of the newspapers’ six White House correspondents were white. Tanzina Vega, the Times’ first race and ethnicity beat reporter, called her former employer to task in a piece for CNN Money: “At a time when so many people are questioning the validity of their media coverage, having people with a range of perspectives and backgrounds reporting the news is critical.”85 She offered the reminder that having diverse perspectives is just good journalism. “Diversity is not a trend, it’s an imperative to make sure your coverage is better, more nuanced and more accurate.”86 But it only works if these diverse voices are not tokenized or marginalized (or both). Consider that while local television newsrooms often have nonwhite anchors and thus appear more diverse, this only gives the appearance of “nonwhite news”; in practice, white managers are setting the tone of what stories to cover and how they are covered, much to the frustration of nonwhite journalists who are the face of stations.87 Newsrooms are white places of power, which affects the way journalists approach their work and the coverage we ultimately see. Newsrooms play a role in keeping people of color in place by legitimizing state-sanctioned violence through deep and enduring normative orientations toward law and order.88 The systematic stereotyping that continues to marginalize people of color cannot be changed just by improving representation of diverse communities; rather, newsrooms also need to empower these diverse voices. Indeed, as the University of Southern California scholar Allissa V. Richardson points out, the rise of mobile media and the livestreaming of civil rights abuses are in part responses to institutional news media that has not made space for legitimating the voices and experiences of Black people.89 White-majority newsrooms lose out from being able to cover their cities, states, and regions, and journalists stand to miss important stories that they may not even know to ask about. In fact, for me to document these white places of power and privilege also requires recognizing my own limitations to do so; as a white person, I cannot ever be wholly conscious of the extent to which my racial privilege informs my experience 60

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and understanding of these problems in journalism, nor can I speak for people of color. Newsrooms and news consumers alike need to listen to what these journalists have to say about their experiences of exclusion. After forty years of trying, American newspapers have not even reached parity with the population that they serve. NEWS FOR WHITE PEOPLE

Is it too much to say that news is written by white people for white people? Demographically, in many places, that is indeed likely the case. It may also be true conceptually. For example, can the Detroit Free Press, which is 16 percent Black, adequately claim to cover race comprehensively when it serves a city that is 80 percent Black?90 Detroit is not the only city with a newspaper that has these skewed representational statistics, raising the more alarming question of whether newspaper journalism at Goldilocks-sized outlets is written for white people. The audiences, by percentage, might not numerically suggest that people of color aren’t reading the local newspaper (or consuming local media more generally), but it is important to think about the coverage implications for news written primarily from a white gaze but presumed to constitute “general-interest news.” Can news produced by majority-white journalists actually claim to authentically have the authority to communicate “where” in ways that would reflect the experiences of people of color in these places? Most people have never met a journalist, but those who have are more likely to be white. According to Pew, 23 percent of white people have met a journalist (and that journalist was also likely to be white), compared to 19 percent of people of color and 14 percent of Hispanic peoples, according to a survey of 35,000 U.S. adults.91 Consider Callison and Young, who argue for the importance of recognizing the “decades of representational harm” caused by journalists’ portrayals of those with less power, particularly people of color. Now, do not for a second presume that the journalists studied here are sitting in Page One news meetings deliberately thinking about upholding white supremacy. Nor are they crafting stories with an explicitly racialized intention like “this will appeal to the white people that live up in the suburbs,” though they indeed are targeting coverage to them. Regardless, there are issues that Ne w s f o r (an d b y) the Rich an d W hite

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white people will simply not spot because of the privilege that being white affords, and the implicit and explicit pressures on what becomes news likely does not incentivize white journalists to overcome these blind spots. Research suggests that diverse newsrooms alone do not result in changes to news coverage, although media outlets that have diverse staff in areas with high proportions of minorities do at least cover these issues more frequently.92 Researchers took a close look at the Dallas Morning News’ coverage of race, as well as internal newsroom efforts to improve diversity, working in collaboration with top newsroom leadership. The content in the newspaper was nothing short of alarming when it came to race. The scholars wrote, “Content on both platforms did not match the diversity of the surrounding community, which is 40 percent Latinx. People of color and women are symbolically annihilated through the coverage, which results in stereotypical framing of these groups.”93 While lauding the efforts top leadership at the newspaper made to recruit diverse journalists, the scholars also point out that systemic change to improve diversity at the newspaper will be difficult without people of color in top leadership roles; as of 2018, all of the management was white. This sadly reflects a 1979 observation made by Robert  C. Maynard, the publisher of the Oakland Tribune and the first African American to own a major metropolitan newspaper, that newsroom management was “purer white than Ivory Snow,” with the disproportionate exclusion of people of color from newsrooms being one of the biggest reasons for the continued misrepresentations and stereotyping of race by the news media.94 That said, the lift that is required to change coverage requires power in the newsroom and significant emotional labor. My observational fieldwork suggests that the representation problem inside newsrooms is consequential. When I was visiting the Omaha World-Herald in June  2016, the Black Lives Matter movement had reached a critical public resonance. The week I was in the newsroom, five Dallas police officers had been shot, and local BLM activists had planned to hold a solidarity rally. But after two weeks in Omaha, I had only seen two people of color in the newsroom—at least in plain view. One was a junior news assistant and the other a sports journalist.95 The entire masthead was white, and so was almost the entire newsroom. 62

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The Omaha newsroom’s aspiration was to cover the rally with compassion and fairness, but no one in the newsroom was empowered or even able to point out what their coverage might be missing. The media scholar Sue Robinson has powerfully chronicled the ways that, even in progressive communities, Black voices are systematically marginalized by institutional media. Those covering the news for mainstream outlets were not aware of how they relied upon a tiny slice of Black leaders to represent “Black voices” in their work.96 Robinson notes that Black people in these cities simply do not think that the local newspaper has ever had their interests at heart. Rather, Robinson documents the existence of a powerful, alternative media system for information sharing, enabled in part by social media platforms but made necessary because of the blindness of institutional media’s white privilege. While this alternative coverage can enhance news and information for populations marginalized by mainstream journalism, these mainstream journalists still have more power as cultural authorities to tell the stories of these places to bigger audiences and to powerful stakeholders. Their blind spots and failings to produce an inclusive news report can distort policy making, as Robinson shows with the case of education reform. During my brief visit to the Chicago Tribune, while there were some Black and Latinx journalists sprinkled throughout the newsroom, every major editor in the Page One meeting I observed was white. Chicago was in the midst of an epidemic of gun violence. In one weekend, fiftytwo people were shot on the South Side of Chicago, a predominantly Black part of the city. One might wonder: had those fifty-two people been white, would they have been memorialized in fifty-two individual survivor profiles or obituaries, rather than relegated to another breaking-news crime story?97 Some places simply get more compassionate, consistent, humanizing coverage, while others, home to people of color, remain “unknowns,” places of statistics rather than of lives that matter. Even efforts to change this pattern outside of traditional newsrooms face uphill battles. There are other indications that newsrooms feel few commercial incentives to support news projects that are primarily targeted at chronicling the lives of people who might never have the disposable income to subscribe. In big cities, the breakdown often happens Ne w s f o r (an d b y) the Rich an d W hite

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around color lines. In 2012, the DC-based wife-and-husband team of Laura and Chris Amico started Homicide Watch, a digital-only outlet whose mission was to “Mark every death. Remember every victim. Follow every case.” The technically sophisticated site offered interactive maps, document viewers for court records, and a robust commenting platform. The rationale for the site was rooted in inequity, the observation that some lives are simply treated as less important news stories than others. The Washingtonian described Amico’s origin story for the site: Laura Amico arrived in DC five years ago and saw two cities: “One where more than one hundred people were murdered every year, most without a shred of news coverage, and another where homicide was rare but reported on as if life actually mattered.”98 But in 2014, five years after starting the DC site, the duo needed to move on and tried to sell their site to another major outlet. When the site announced it was closing, major DC figures, including the chief of police, lauded it for its comprehensive murder coverage.99 A DC photographer maligned the coverage given by most of the local media to a single murder at a Lululemon shop in a fancy suburb compared with the other four hundred murders that Homicide Watch had chronicled, stating, “There are thousands of other victims whom people are remembering to no public acclaim and to no public help.”100 When the Amicos found no buyers, Laura Amico told the Washingtonian, “It’s an indictment of local media.”101 Some places are simply worth covering more because the people in them have more money or claim the same racial identity as those making decisions in the newsroom. Other places, those disempowered, not seen to be sources of newsroom income or of power and influence, are shortcutted by mainstream news media. N E XT: N E W S F O R ( A N D BY ) “ B LU E ” L I B E R A L S ?

Cultural proximity affects the way news is produced and the news that citizens read and use to learn about the world. If journalists are supposed to speak truth to power without really understanding the place of those who are disempowered, their mission is hampered from the outset. These issues about race and class are only a few of the important factors that create distance. I’ve not addressed other aspects that similarly produce blind spots, from gender disparities to ableism to limited 64

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political perspectives to the tendency of journalists to engage in groupthink and consensus, even when working for different outlets.102 Nonetheless, this chapter connects how place—not just the material geography but place as a setting for social relations—influences the ways that journalists cover the news and that news organizations prioritize what is important around issues of race and class. Journalists aren’t and shouldn’t claim to be omniscient, but it is critically important to see how the “place” of the American journalist, as an elite, generally white, person, and the “place” of their audiences, those who will pay for news, explicitly and implicitly affect who has access to news and information. Journalists still have tremendous power to shape places, but journalists operate in places of power that have long kept out marginalized people. And efforts to improve this lack of inclusivity have largely stalled. Perhaps what is most disappointing is that revenue models for journalism make these divides more severe; there is no commercial reason to more accurately and empathetically cover those who will never pay to read what is written about them. The economics of news keep “in place” underrepresented people, whose stories continue to be told in ways that perpetuate legacies of disempowerment and stereotyping. The moral claim for doing better is tied up in the myths of a functioning American democracy, which I will explore in light of what the displacement of journalists away from places might mean for politics.

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CH APTER THREE

Journalism’s Big Sort Is the News That’s Left Just News for the Left? Trump thrives in areas that lack traditional news outlets. Relentless use of social media and partisan outlets helped him swamp Clinton and exceed Romney’s performance in places lacking trusted local news media. —P OLITICO

Fly-over country: Trump’s unexpected victory four years ago led to questions about whether media organisations, in their coastal bubbles, had failed to hear the frustration of voters in the heartlands. — T H E GU A R D I A N

The media bubble is the ultimate symbol of what’s wrong with this country. . . . It’s just a circle of people talking to themselves who have no f—ing idea what’s going on. — S T E V E B A N N O N, F O R M E R T RU M P S T R AT E G I S T A N D E D I TO R O F B R E I T B A RT N EW S

If you consider the public discourse and pop social science around the 2016 election of Donald Trump to the presidency, especially with 2020 hindsight, you will find that the national news media has engaged in a serious mea culpa about failing to understand the swell of populism. They have blamed themselves (or been blamed) for a narrow perspective resulting from groupthink and a lack of geographic and cultural diversity, and the largest news outlets are rethinking and restaffing how they plan to cover the United States outside the big coastal cities. You will also continue to see that rurality, poverty, and the lack of local news

media are often conflated, often causally, as reasons why voters turned to Trump and embraced right-wing populism more generally, despite growing evidence that Trump voters were generally of above-average income and were not making their choices based on economic hardship.1 To summarize the argument that social scientists have hesitated to make but journalists and pundits are more likely to suggest, often implicitly rather than explicitly: voters who have lost access to local media are poor, misinformed, and vote Republican, which constitutes a vote “against their own interests.” Local news media outlets are in decline, with newspapers emptying out in the middle of the country. In short: news deserts equal fertile and growing Republican votes, while national news media concentrates in big, blue (“liberal”) cities. This is journalism’s “big sort,” part of the United States’ more general geospatial realignment along wealth, class, and ideological lines. This chapter details how journalism’s “big sort” is more complicated than the oversaturation of journalists and news organizations in these “media clusters” or “media capitals,” a long and enduring trend.2 That said, it is increasingly clear that the newspapers that will emerge as survivors are the large, well-resourced ones located in the biggest U.S. cities (New York, Washington) that have a large and elite national audience. In fact, political uncertainty may be good for their survival; the boost in subscriptions following the election of 2016 was called a “Trump bump.”3 Newspapers without these elite national audiences, like the Goldilocks newspapers in large American cities, will face accelerating and potentially fatal financial challenges. The problems of national news media parachuting into places they have little familiarity with are far from new. However, the state of market failure of local newspapers amid the groundswell of populism and deepening distrust in journalism—far more so for Republicans than Democrats4— adds more urgency to these concerns. We need to think carefully about the impact of the growing distance between journalists and their audiences: journalists in one place, audiences in another. In 2019, Pew found that 22 percent of all U.S. newsroom employees—newspaper, radio, television, digital—lived in New York, Washington, or Los Angeles, while only 13  percent of the total U.S. workforce lived in these cities.5 My concern is  not about the partisanship of individual journalists living in liberal Jour n ali sm’s Big S or t

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bubbles but about the consequences of journalism’s “big sort”: my worstcase scenario is that the future of quality, original reporting in journalism ends up being written by journalists living in big blue bubbles and only listened to and paid for by those who vote blue. This distance between journalists and audiences needs to be thought about as a problem of place: Where journalists are located, where they work, whom they speak to each day—their place—affects what they know, what they value, and what they come to see as important. Journalistic authority and legitimacy, then, comes out of a “prolonged and continual presence in that place . . . specialised knowledge and experience of what makes a place and the people within it ‘tick.’ ”6 In the previous chapter, we considered questions of cultural proximity and sociogeographic impact, whereby journalism has become a profession of the wealthy and stubbornly remains a white profession, at least among large general-interest news outlets. These social divisions are also reflected in the physical places people live, work, and travel. When journalists are out of place, they do not know what they are missing because they are not there, physically, culturally, or cognitively. This undermines their power as trusted authorities, and their blind spots become glaringly clear. If journalists are increasingly concentrated in large, liberal, urban enclaves where, their own politics aside, the only people they talk to are liberals, the news media stands to become even more nearsighted at the national level.7 This chapter explores this question of growing distances between journalists and audiences. First, I look at the affective dimension of place—what it means for newspaper journalists, local news, and journalists generally to materially as well as symbolically disappear from places. Then the chapter turns to a quantitative analysis of journalism’s supposed retrenchment, exploring whether the national media, at least by body count, really does work in a bubble. There isn’t as much support for this premise as we might fear, and there is reason to be optimistic about what seems at first to be some fairly dismal findings. In the final section of the chapter, I consider place as a setting and context for how social relations unfold and power is distributed and provide a brief overview of how large national news outlets are covering “flyover country” in an era of news deserts.

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M AT E R I A L R E T R E N C H M E N T, S Y M B O L I C D E C L I N E S

The evidence of journalists retreating from places has both affective and symbolic dimensions. Journalists are quite literally leaving places behind as they move from historic downtown buildings to smaller spaces, prompting the perception that journalists are also disappearing. While this sense of loss is hard to measure through quantitative analysis, journalists worry about how their physical displacement from communities affects their own coverage and can worsen the distances between journalists and audiences.8 News organizations are leaving behind their headquarters, disappearing from city skylines and often retreating to cheaper real estate on the outskirts of town. Newspaper buildings are large, architectural statements in brick and mortar, indicators of the permanence of the institution. Located downtown, journalists were proximate to other places of power—the courts, city hall, and law enforcement; in many cities, “the paper was often physically at the center of town and always at the center of its life.”9 The construction of a news outlet’s building was often a historic event that coincided with important developments in the growth of its home city. Design and material choices—whether Daily Planet–style modern steel of the New York Daily News or Chicago Tribune–style stone and marble—were intended to convey a newspaper’s sensibility and power.10 The Chicago Tribune building, designed as a Gothic cathedral, is exemplary.11 Often these buildings had massive signs, as if to announce their presence on the city skyline, and still today some even use their buildings to broadcast tickers of breaking news. I found these newsroom moves so significant that I conducted a yearlong project in 2013 for Columbia University’s Tow Center for Digital Journalism, tracking Goldilocks-sized newspapers that moved their newsrooms.12 At the time, I had tracked thirty-five such moves, but as the number of moves continued to mount, I stopped counting; selling valuable real estate became a common strategy for cutting financial losses. The case of the Miami Herald is particularly instructive: journalists moved out of downtown, the building was demolished, and journalists felt that their news routines and therefore their ability to cover the city had been profoundly affected.

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“Being there” had symbolic consequences: 1 Herald Plaza was in the center of downtown. When the Miami Herald building was completed in 1963, it anchored a downtown revival. When it was first opened, the building was one of the largest in Florida and had a view so expansive that its owners, John S. and James L. Knight, decided not to have a rooftop lunchroom deck for fear that employees would not return to work. It was also built with large dreams in mind: to serve a projected circulation of 1 million and remain up to date through 1980.13 Movies such as the Mean Season and Absence of Malice were filmed there during the glory days of the 1980s. The building itself was seen as a site where news happened; in one legendary case, a corrupt politician came into the building and shot himself. Another viral breaking-news situation was captured by the old Herald’s security cameras in 2012: a man high on bath salts eating another man’s face, now known as the “Miami zombie.” But in 2011, McClatchy had sold the property to a Malaysian casino operator for $236 million, with the downtown location an important source of the lot’s value.14 The city of Miami did not grant the midcentury modern building a historical landmark designation, so it fell victim to the wrecking ball. Whether and how much the public noticed its loss is unclear; shortly after the newsroom’s move, the television show Burn Notice filmed an episode involving the Miami Herald building burning down, and footage of the wrecking ball was broadcast on all of the local TV networks.15 The journalists I spoke with believed the old building underscored the power of the Miami Herald as a significant voice and that, without this building, the city would no longer consider the newspaper important. A reporter pointed out that in Miami, having a branded building was part of the culture of the city: “In this town, image is everything.” Another editor explained, “It’s bad for the psyche for there to be no building to exist for people to see every day. . . . We are fighting for our brand share particularly [with] a generation who thinks we are nothing but dead trees. To not have that downtown marquee to look at every day is not good for us.”16 The newsroom had been visible, accessible to the public, and part of downtown. Now, twelve miles away from downtown and near the airport, the new newsroom was located across from a cow pasture in a strange zoning area that combined agriculture and industry. Its new home was on the grounds of the former U.S. Southern Command, and there were plenty of leftover military touches: concrete bunkers and 70

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barbed wire. The new location was almost completely inaccessible by public transport and was certainly out of view of the workers and entertainment seekers flooding downtown Miami each day. The geographic displacement, the material instantiation of place, changed how journalists were covering the news. Being close to downtown in a city known for horrific traffic meant easy access to lawmakers and high-profile sources, and journalists told me they were now less likely to run downtown for a surprise press conference and that it was harder to obtain paper court documents in a deadline situation. The move was not all bad, though, and from the perspective of place as the setting for social relations, journalists were now in the best possible type of bunker from which to cover the hurricanes that plague the region. Journalists were closer to other journalists, too, suggesting a clustering effect; the main Univision office, for example, was within walking distance. The new newsroom prompted an organizational restart that prioritized digitalfirst news production. The editors had intentionally designed a central news hub to place breaking-news reporters, homepage and social-media producers, and the online editor in close, physical proximity. But it was hard to escape the feeling that this new newsroom was just as empty as the other one, as vacant chairs and desks stacked up after each new round of layoffs or cutbacks. As a coda to this move, in the wake of COVID-19 and its tumultuous effect on digital advertising revenue, the Miami Herald’s parent company, McClatchy, went bankrupt. As the newsroom went remote to maintain social distancing, the new building was deemed too expensive: the Miami Herald became a newspaper without a newsroom.17 Certainly, not all of these newsroom moves were so extreme, and in many cases, moving to a new place also functioned as a symbolic reboot to the city as a whole. The Boston Globe newsroom moved downtown for the first time in modern memory, closer to the city, and other newsrooms that had been out in the suburbs, like the San Jose Mercury News, also moved downtown. The Philadelphia Inquirer left its Tower of Truth but moved to new offices arguably more proximate to City Hall. The presence or absence of a newspaper is an important material and symbolic marker from which to measure distance and decline. In Cleveland, for instance, the Plain Dealer newspaper relocated from a building that could house one thousand journalists to office space in a Jour n ali sm’s Big S or t

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transit center above a Hard Rock Café, prompting one journalist to decry, “This is not a newsroom.”18 There were other institutional declines in Cleveland, too. In 2000, the Plain-Dealer had 340 unionized journalists. After a cut in 2019, that number went down to thirty-three; these unionized journalists were then cut further by another eighteen in 2020, leaving roughly seventy-seven journalists, total, at the newspaper.19 The city of Cleveland has about 400,000 people; that’s one journalist for roughly 5,200 people. For perspective, the city employs one police officer for every three hundred people.20 These material retrenchments have happened as journalists have disappeared from their posts outside the newsroom, too. In most places that are regular sites and sources of news, news outlets often have a bureau to work in, a designated room, often shared by a number of competing news outlets. The rationale for bureaus has long been to place journalists in close proximity to newsmakers or to newsworthy events. Bureaus in state legislatures were once busy places for journalists from competing statewide outlets, but the overall reductions in staffing have meant there are now state houses with legislators whose activities not routinely monitored by general-interest news media. These spaces still exist as designated areas for journalists, but they are far emptier, mostly filled with old equipment, or have been repopulated by niche, for-pay outlets that serve specialist audiences.21 Similarly, police beat reporters would work from a bureau in the police headquarters, the same practice followed by reporters at the courthouse and City Hall. When the Los Angeles Times relocated from downtown to El Segundo, twenty miles away and, optimistically, a fortyfive-minute commute, it also lost its proximity to every major municipal office and most of the federal buildings.22 The move also distanced the Los Angeles Times from the formerly adjacent Skid Row, a locus of impoverished residents who offered journalists a daily reminder of the hardships faced by the city’s most destitute residents.23 Nonetheless, given the traffic in LA, even in an era where technology facilitates all sorts of telecommuting, the Los Angeles Times still understood that some presence downtown was a physical necessity for covering the city. Being emplaced in these pockets of power matters for the practical realities of news production. If something truly significant happens downtown, the Los Angeles Times staff can no longer just rush 72

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across the street to cover it. The newspaper had once been known for its “swarm,” or its ability to throw dozens of journalists at a breaking-news event.24 This swarm would now be a bumper-to-bumper caravan. To alleviate some of these concerns, the newspaper kept its City Hall bureau and looked for downtown office space. There have been other ways that newspapers have built loyalty and integrated into communities. For example, newspapers used youth newspaper carriers to create goodwill.25 Young people got a taste of independence by delivering newspapers—and subscribers would find it difficult to cancel their subscriptions if they had to tell the youthful carrier in person that they would no longer be paying for the newspaper. The presence of local news media companies as sponsors of local charity and educational efforts was arguably more pronounced than now, with their names placed prominently as boosters for everything from county fairs to baseball stadiums. New distribution methods (as well as child labor laws) and declining profits may well have limited this kind of connection between branding, place, and community. Even the circulation of a print paper mattered as a symbol of a newspaper’s geographic power. In the Midwest, newspapers helped unite far-flung and rural regions around a shared state source of information. In the early days of the Des Moines Register, the Cowles family lobbied to fund road construction that would connect Iowa’s ninetynine counties so the paper could expand its reach and claim to be truly statewide.26 This isn’t ancient newspaper history, though; until 2009, the Omaha World-Herald circulated in print each day to every county in the state, an effort that had always been a money loser, but it was seen as important symbolically to show its state pride and commitment to all Nebraskans, not just Omaha residents. After circulation cutbacks, political reporters told me that they spoke with rural western Nebraskans who felt that the newspaper had “abandoned them” by ending daily print circulation. Based on this reception, journalists worried that the newspaper would be seen as overly “Omaha-centric” and that its reporting would be disregarded by those in more rural communities.27 These cutbacks also extend the distance between journalists and audiences in urban places. The disparity between those who have access to broadband and those who do not has become a growing problem as newspapers have cut daily print editions. In 2008, the Detroit Free Press Jour n ali sm’s Big S or t

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and the Detroit News moved from seven-day-a-week delivery to just three days a week, the first major city newspaper to do so, in a trend that was then replicated by many other Goldilocks newspapers. By going three days a week, the newspapers could eliminate the costs of paper, ink, and fuel required to deliver newspapers, not to mention the delivery vehicles that covered over 300,000 miles each night. CNN reported on the story, noting that at the time, only 63 percent of Detroit Free Press and Detroit News subscribers had access to the internet. News executive David Hunke commented that for those without internet access at home, “this isn’t necessarily gonna be the best news for them.”28 Executives pointed out that single newsstand copies would still be available each day, but for news consumers, this would mean a new daily routine at the more expensive newsstand price. Broadband penetration often tracks income; these cutbacks show the unintended impact of market failure on lower-income readers who want to consume news and information but who may lack the digital access to do so. Some scholars argue that when local newspapers were more vibrant, journalists and newspapers were more visibly emplaced in communities; ordinary people’s direct experiences with journalists thus helped bolster trust in journalism as a whole. As the journalism scholars Ed Madison and Ben DeJarnette argue, “During the height of family newspaper ownership, in the early 20th century, newspaper owners . . . were likely to bump into readers at the grocery store or serve alongside them on the boards of local civic organizations.”29 This is a theme that was picked up by some of the more than three hundred newspapers that all published editorials on the same day to rebuke the Trump administration’s assignation that the press was the “enemy of the people,”30 with many of the smaller newspapers pointing out their community links and shared interests. Local television, however, despite often not being geographically local, still receives high marks for trust because anchors show up at big community events; their faces facilitate a kind of parasocial relationship and familiarity,31 even if people don’t actually know the anchors. Newspapers don’t have this visibility. Indeed, more recently, especially at the Goldilocks newspapers, journalists often lack special knowledge over places and long-standing ties to any one community. The folksy narrative of friendship and connection is generally false nostalgia. For career success, both newspaper 74

Jour n ali sm’s Big S o r t

and television journalists have chased bigger and bigger audiences; they are carpetbaggers, moving from smaller markets to bigger ones with more presumptive prestige. Some of the best journalists at any one local outlet have no connection to the place they cover; it’s a stopping spot along the way to promotion. While this path toward promotion has been destabilized as newspapers have declined, for most large regional, state, and metropolitan newspapers the connections between journalists and audiences, while far from perfect, is growing more challenging. If journalists and audiences are indeed growing more distant, as this geospatial sorting plays out, the gulf between who reports on America, where they report from, and who is listening may become even more pronounced. M A P P I N G J O U R N A L I S M’S R E T R E N C H M E N T

By the numbers, between 2008 and 2018, the number of newspaper newsroom employees dropped by 47 percent, from about 71,000 workers to 38,000.32 To get a better sense of the retrenchment of journalism and how the “big sort” of journalism is playing out, I wanted to see a historical trajectory of these changes. I looked at the newspaper employment levels of journalists in a geographic area, a “body count” that serves as a proxy for the strength of the news industry in a specific, material location.33 Newspaper employment is a useful indicator because newspapers provide the bulk of original coverage in an area, the “raw material” that other news outlets will then use for their own story selection and reporting. As a result, declines in newspaper employment (and news coverage) reverberate through a community’s news ecosystem. Further, newspaper employment also is a fairly coherent category of labor employment captured by the U.S. government that reflects news-gathering capacities (as opposed to television broadcasting or internet publishing). However, I also wanted to go beyond the actual location and employment measures of gain and loss to say something more meaningful about the types of communities that were losing journalists. Similarly, I was curious about how these changes might also be distributed along partisan lines. To assess my larger concerns about this “big sort” in journalism, I explored the following questions: Jour n ali sm’s Big S or t

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1. Are journalists increasingly concentrating in big cities? 2. How are different types of American communities affected by the collapse of local journalism? 3. What evidence is there of an association between declining newspaper employment and increased partisanship? Along with Sanghoon Kim, a PhD candidate in political science at the University of Illinois, I set out to answer these questions. So much of the popular discourse around the loss of news suggests that losing local journalism results in limited access to information, leaving voters in the lurch when it comes to quality news and information. Many journalists and commentators suggested this was particularly problematic for those rural areas where poorly informed voters would now be voting Republican, presumably against their own interests. On the flipside, journalists and media critics alike worried that the cutbacks to local news meant that journalists were concentrating in big, blue cities, worsening existing disparities to news and information and revealing dangerous blind spots. I wanted to know whether their intuitions, which I shared, were right. As is often the case with social science analyses, my findings revealed that journalism’s big sort was far more nuanced than just a simple evaporation of journalism from poor, rural, red places. Some highlights from our research caught me by surprise, assuaging my own worst fears of a news media composed of journalists living in big, blue cities and listened to only by liberals in these places. First, judging by the 2007 and 2018 data, most places simply don’t have local newspaper employment and, arguably, haven’t really had local news for more than a decade, at least from geographically specific newspapers dedicated to covering these places. Second, by absolute numbers, the concentration of newspaper employment in big cities has barely budged in this time frame: big cities have gone from having 61 to 63 percent of all newspaper employment over the eleven-year span we explored. Third, there are also signs that relative to the number of newspaper employees as a whole, big, blue cities may be faring worse than deep red counties. In addition, the missing data also tells a story: 95 percent of the counties that did not have newspaper employment data recorded for any of the years under study became more Republican. 76

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All in all, the data suggest that news deserts can be found in all types of communities, rural and urban, Republican and Democratic strongholds alike. The dramatic declines in the news industry over this time are notable. However, the parochialism that limits big-city journalists’ understanding of nonurban America is a far more enduring and consistent concern that extends beyond any one election cycle and any new data about journalism job losses. Thus, let’s take a closer look at what these research questions tell us about journalism’s “big sort.” To conduct the analysis, I combined three different datasets to get a better sense of these changes: the annual averages from the Bureau of Labor Statistics Quarterly Census of Employment and Wage datasets, which allowed us to track changes in newspaper employment; the MIT’s Election Data and Science Lab’s County Presidential Election Returns 2000–2016, which allowed us to assess partisanship; and the American Community Project dataset (for more details, see appendix B). First, a few notes about the data. As our goal was to understand change over time, we set three temporal reference points: 2007, before the Great Recession; 2012, when Obama won his second term; and 2018, the last year for which there is data from the BLS datasets. As I also wanted to move beyond “blue” and “red” characterizations, I wanted to know something about the types of communities that were losing the news. Places have their own distinct geographic affordances, from their material geography to their demography to the specific historical and civic memories associated with that place. Thus, doing analysis at scale without any richer description of a community than its partisanship or maybe some rough “rural versus urban” divide seemed lacking to me. Enter the American Communities Project (ACP), which seeks to provide analytical parsimony across the vast expanse of U.S. communities. Using a set of thirty-six different indicators ranging from population density to numbers of military servicemembers in a county, the ACP data designate fifteen “community types” that share cultural proximity even if they are not geographically proximate. Each of the United States’ 3,143 counties, parishes, and metropolitan statistical areas are assigned one of these fifteen types, which are described further in table  3.1.34 The ACP categorization into community types gives us in broad strokes a sense of what a place’s “political regionalism” is like at a more descriptive level: the characteristics of the people who Jour n ali sm’s Big S or t

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TABLE 3.1 Description and definition of each community type Community Type

Definition

Exurbs

These 222 counties generally lie on the fringe of major metro areas, in the space between suburban and rural America. The Exurbs are populous, with 34 million people, and relatively wealthy, with a median household income of about $65,500.

Graying America

Fairly rural and scattered around the country, these 364 counties are full of retirees and those nearing retirement age. Almost a quarter of everyone in these counties is 62 years of age or older and only 19 percent of the population is under 18, making this one of the oldest types in the ACP.

African American South

Counties in the African American South stretch in a belt that runs from Virginia down through Texas. These 370 counties hold large African American populations—the median is 37 percent.

Evangelical Hubs

The 372 counties in this type have the highest number of religious adherents tied to evangelical churches like the Southern Baptist Convention. They are also one of the most politically conservative types in the ACP.

Working-Class Country

Working Class Country counties are heavily clustered in specific rural communities in the eastern half of the United States, including Appalachia, the Ozarks, and the upper Midwest. Home to 8.5 million people, Working Class Country is blue-collar America with a rural overlay. These counties generally don’t rely on agriculture but rather exist as small service economies with some small manufacturing.

Military Posts

Marked by the presence of troops and bases, these 89 counties are located largely in rural locales. These communities have a distinct demographic look and feel. Their military ties make them relatively young; only 13 percent of the population is 62 years of age or older. And they feature a larger African American population than average, 16 percent.

Community Type

Definition

Urban Suburbs

These 106 counties hold the wealthy, diverse suburbs of most major cities, and they have come to take on many of those big-city characteristics. They are densely populated—the average Urban Suburb has roughly 500,000 people living in it—and diverse.

Hispanic Centers

These 161 counties are not necessarily majority Hispanic, but they are places where self-identified Hispanics make up a large part of the population, 56 percent on average. These counties are heavily rural and based primarily in the Southwest, though there are some large urban areas in Texas and Florida that also fall within the group.

Native American Lands

Dotted primarily across the West, these 43 counties are marked by large Native American populations; more than half the people who live in these counties overall are indigenous Americans.

Rural Middle America

A large collection of counties, some 599, that runs across the northern half of the country, starting in Maine through the Great Lakes and across to Montana and Washington State. They are also spread into less urban locales; 62 percent of the population lives in places the U.S. Census labels as rural. Though they tend to be made up of small towns, these places do not generally rely heavily on agriculture.

College Towns

Filled with college students, about 8 percent of the population sits between the ages of 18 and 21. Incomes tend to lag the national average here because of the large student populations. They are also less diverse than the nation as a whole, about 82 percent white, 4 percent African American, and 5 percent Hispanic.

LDS Enclaves

Based around Utah and the Mountain West, these 41 counties are the centers of the nation’s Mormon population. Even though many of these counties are rural, the large Mormon population results in a younger average age than other places. (continued)

TABLE 3.1 (CONTINUED) Community Type

Definition

Aging Farmlands

These counties are the oldest on average in the American Communities Project (ACP), with more than 24 percent over age 65, and the least diverse racial and ethnically. There are 161 counties in this group set on the Great Plains, with only about 3,500 people per county on average.

Big Cities

The Big Cities are the most populous county type in the ACP and also the most Democratic. Diversity is the key word for this population: 48 percent are white, 15 percent are Hispanic, 16 percent are African American, and 6 percent are Asian. The median household income is about $58,700 here, often with large pockets of poverty as well as pockets of wealth.

Middle Suburbs

The Middle Suburbs have been slower to urbanize than the semiurban places around them. At 85 percent white, they are less diverse than the Urban Suburbs and the Exurbs. These 77 counties are located around the major cities of the Northeast and the Midwest.

Source: American Communities Project (http://www.americancommunities.org).

live in these counties, the locational characteristics that shape opportunities, the attitudes and customs common to that particular place, and the environmental resources there.35 The quantitative data explored here give us a sense of scale about the problems as a whole, but these findings need to be interpreted in light of the affective and symbolic dimensions of journalism’s retrenchment. A R E J O U R N A L I S T S C O N C E N T R AT I N G ( F U RT H E R ) IN BIG CITIES?

There are two ways to answer this question: through aggregate/absolute numbers and as proportions relative to overall employment of U.S. newspaper journalists. In aggregate, while journalists are more concentrated in big cities, during the most extreme point of the newspaper crisis, 80

Jour n ali sm’s Big S o r t

this overall concentration barely changed. In 2007, 61 percent of journalists worked in a metro area classified as a “Big City” in our ACP data, while in 2018, this number budged to 63 percent. There are more people in cities, so it’s only logical that there would also be more journalists in them; this is not a pathological flaw in the news media but a reasonable outgrowth of the effects of population density.36 Cities overall have gained population relative to nonurban areas, so even in an era of journalism’s decline, more journalists working in areas where more people live is not necessarily normatively problematic. Further, media capitals and media clusters have market efficiencies that are important for reducing the costs of news production, especially when offset against financial considerations that deserve far more scrutiny, such as favorable tax incentives or labor and employment regulations. In short, the oversaturation of media in big cities is not a new phenomenon inspired by the current crisis in journalism, and this concentration itself does not alone support claims that journalists are out-of-touch with many non-urban Americans. Who lost the most newspaper employees? Cook County (Chicago) and Los Angeles County (the city of Los Angeles and its environs). These are home to some of the biggest Goldilocks newspapers, the Chicago Tribune and the Los Angeles Times, both not big enough and too geographically specific to win the digital revenue profit game. Who gained the most? Surprisingly, the top ten places that gained newspaper employees between 2007 and 2018 by absolute numbers don’t include New York City or Washington, DC (see table 3.2). The top three are not big East Coast cities but are instead DeKalb County, Georgia, in the Atlanta metro region; Pinellas County, Florida, in the Tampa–St. Petersburg– Clearwater metro area; and Jefferson County, Kentucky, whose county seat is Louisville. Anecdotal evidence suggests that these changes are not “real” gains in newspaper employment but likely reflect geographic relocations and consolidations of newspaper companies (for example, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution relocated from Atlanta/Fulton to DeKalb in 2010; in Pinellas County, the Tampa Tribune was bought by the Tampa Bay Times in 2016; and Louisville, a Gannett publishing hub, likely benefited from operational consolidations there). But these absolute values don’t tell the whole story about trends in news employment. Instead, shifts in newspaper employment Jour n ali sm’s Big S or t

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TABLE 3.2 Winners and losers in newspaper employment (Absolute values) Ten counties that gained the most newspaper employees (2007–2018)

Increase in absolute numbers

Ten counties that lost the most newspaper employees (2007–2018)

Decrease in absolute numbers

DeKalb County, GA

+691

Cook County, IL

−3,819

Pinellas County, FL

+684

Los Angeles County, CA

−2,657

Jefferson County, KT

+466

Maricopa County, AZ

−2,468

Sarasota County, FL

+407

Wayne County, MI

−2,131

Queens County, NY

+328

New York County, NY

−2,073

Duval County, FL

+303

San Diego County, CA

−1,786

Orleans Parish, LO

+285

Middlesex County, NJ

−1,720

Lee County, FL

+264

Denver County, CO

−1,709

Richland County, SC

+264

Orange County, CA

−1,706

Cumberland County, PA

+220

Suffolk County, MA

−1,615

concentration also need to be considered proportionally, or as changes relative to the total number of employees in the newspaper industry. For example, the same 10 percent increase in employment can represent different realities depending on the population size of the county and the preexisting strength of the news industry in that location. An increase of 350 employees in one of ACP’s “Big Cities” means only a two-employee increase in the exurbs. In other words, we can only tell if New York City (seen in these tables as New York County, i.e., Manhattan, and Queens County, i.e., Queens) gained more newspaper employees in any meaningful sense if we compare how many more employees it gained relative to the industry as a whole between 2007, 2012, and 2018 (see table 3.3, also appendix B). From a proportional perspective, the geospatial redistribution of newspaper media concentration is relatively insignificant, too. In 2007, the 82

Jour n ali sm’s Big S o r t

3.67

1.68

0.37

0.04

0

0

2.44

0

0.53

0

District of Columbia

Queens County, NY

DeKalb County, GA

Pinellas County, FL

Jefferson County, KT

Los Angeles County, CA

Sarasota County, FL

Lancaster County, PA

Duval County, FL

% in 2007

New York County

Ten counties that gained the most newspaper employees (2007–2018)

0.35

0.90

0.48

2.94

0.54

0.80

0.90

1.31

2.74

6.70

% in 2018 Fairfield County, CT Montgomery County, PA Bergen County, NJ Tarrant County, TX Palm Beach County, FL Wayne County, MI Douglas County, NE San Diego County, CA Bucks County, PA Denver County, CO

+3.02 +1.1 +0.93 +0.86 +0.7 +0.54 +0.51 +0.48 +0.37 +0.35

Change

Ten counties that lost the most newspaper employees (2007–2018)

TABLE 3.3 Descriptive statistics of newspaper employment concentration by proportion

1.11

0.65

1.10

0.48

1.34

0.85

0.81

0.68

0.80

0.69

% in 2007

0.75

0.29

0.63

0

0.84

0.35

0.27

0.13

0.12

0

% in 2018

−0.35

−0.36

−0.46

−0.48

−0.50

−0.50

−0.54

−0.55

−0.67

−0.69

Change

county with the lowest proportion of newspaper workers had 0.04 percent of the total newspaper employment, and the county with the highest proportion had 3.6 percent of the total employment. In 2018, the lowest proportion did not change, but we see a sign of newspaper concentration with the highest employing county, New York County (Manhattan), now hosting around 6.6 percent of the entire industry’s jobs. The data simply do not bear out that there has been a massive redistribution of newspaper journalists around coastal centers at the expense of elsewhere. A 4 percent change in the number of newspaper employees located in New York (Manhattan and Queens), DC, or just outside Atlanta is unlikely to produce any kind of massive discursive shift around urbanity or rurality; as a proportion of all the newspaper employees in the United States, this is a small shift. Similarly, the lowest proportion of journalists didn’t change either, suggesting that areas that have had only a few journalists still have that same paucity. Nonetheless, the changes might be a big deal to the journalists living and working in big cities—given the socialization patterns of journalists, even a 4 percent increase in the number of their peers might be significant. This is why it is important to supplement the quantitative data with additional qualitative insight. In the next chapter, I consider how the oversaturation of journalists in a place affects news production, using the case of Washington correspondents, whose task it is to juggle the demands of distant geography, reporting on Washington for a newspaper and readers located far outside the capital. Looking at where newspaper jobs are most concentrated and where the biggest losses are gives us some sense of the “big sort” of journalism employment and helps point out the outliers. But this analysis doesn’t tell us much about what is happening to various types of communities in the United States when it comes to losing the news. The ACP data provides additional descriptive detail to augment this analysis. HOW ARE DIFFEREN T TYPES OF AMERICAN C O M M U N I T I E S A F F E C T E D BY T H E L O S S O F LOCAL JOURNALISM?

What I find is that employment declines do not discriminate by community type. (See table 3.1 for community descriptions and table 3.4 for results.) 84 Jour n ali sm’s Big S o r t

TABLE 3.4 Average employment level in newspaper industry over time by community types ACP Type

2007

2012

2018

% change

Exurbs

57.23

36.96

17.17

−70.00***

Graying America

17.29

11.05

12.55

−27.4

African American South

9.81

9.15

6.62

−32.49

Evangelical Hubs

3.92

3.2

1.04

−73.48***

Working-Class Country

3.11

2.07

1.63

−47.49

Military Posts

38.19

19.65

16.96

−55.6

Urban Suburbs

635.07

379.99

237.59

−62.59***

30.47

20.98

13.81

−54.68**

Hispanic Centers Native American Lands

0.29

0

0

Rural Middle America

12.74

8

4.87

−61.75***

College Towns

85.99

52.56

41.41

−51.84***

LDS Enclaves

52.8

32.53

22.55

−57.29

0.16

0.31

0.2

24.9

1691.48

1129.04

119.29

65.05

Aging Farmlands Big Cities Middle Suburbs

−100

721.27

−57.36***

43.6

−63.45***

Note: Statistical significance for % change values from two-sample t-test for difference of means (*p < 0.1; **p < 0.05; ***p < 0.01).

Rural America is losing news, but so are big cities and suburbs, among other types of communities. The story of declines in newsroom employment in the United States is not a story of rural news deserts at the expense of gains in big cities but a story of growing deficits in journalism across almost all types of American communities. However, there are some areas that have simply been in a state of semipermanent underinvestment in journalism. For at least a decade, most counties in our dataset (2,051, or Jour n ali sm’s Big S or t

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78 percent) have not had much newspaper employment by BLS standards; these are historical news deserts, suggesting that most of the United States has likely been without regular access to local news and information for at least the past eleven years, if not more (see appendix B for more details). From 2007 to 2018, the areas that have seen significant loss—measured by the change in the average newspaper employment level by county type— include, in order of most significant to least: Evangelical Hubs, Exurbs, Middle Suburbs, Urban Suburbs, Rural Middle America, Big Cities, Hispanic Centers, and College Towns. The average percent change ranges from −73.48% in Evangelical Hubs to a −51.84% change in College Towns. County types without statistically significant changes are also important because they challenge some of the conventional assumptions about who has lost access to information. There are some places that simply have had very little local news for more than a decade, suggesting these are not new news deserts but old ones. What places are these? Graying America, the rural, depopulating places in the United States, where audiences are already declining. Working-Class Country, which has likely had less access to local news, given the political economy of the news industry. The people living here do not fit the profile of subscriber demographics that power advertising because they are geographically dispersed and often poor. These areas, which journalists so liked to blame for the Trump vote, are not significantly worse off in their access to local news in 2018 than they were in 2007. Military Posts have lost newsroom employment, but not significantly so, and it is arguable that the local information environment for a highly transient community may be less important than national-level insight into defense industry–specific concerns. The African American South and Native American Lands: on average, counties in the African American South went from having ten newspaper employees to 6.6, while the Native American Lands data are so minimal that they barely register in the BLS employment report. These counties have likely been systematically underinvested in by news organizations and corporations. The takeaway is that some places just have weaker traditional information infrastructures as a whole. Declines in journalism have hit these places, but there was not much journalism to begin with. The popular 86

Jour n ali sm’s Big S o r t

conversation that invokes correlations between diminished information and respective declines or changes in civic engagement, political knowledge, or partisanship/polarization is much more difficult to support when there was never much professional journalism at all in many American communities. Regardless, when we look at the places where there is a statistically significant decline in employment, the findings are jaw dropping. The period between 2007 and 2018 generally reflects employment levels after digital obsolescence had already cut many jobs; consider the implications of some communities losing 50 percent or more of their community’s journalists in ten years’ time. Given that the American political system is determined by geography, some counties and some types of communities seem to matter more in driving election outcomes. We know counties overall have lost news, generally speaking, but how much this matters for election outcomes requires a bit more digging and circumspection. Thus, my next questions sought to explore the intersection of patterns in partisanship, news loss, and type of county in order to assess geospatial trends. W H AT E V I D E N C E I S T H E R E O F A N A S S O C I AT I O N B E T W E E N D E C L I N I N G N E W S PA P E R E M P L O Y M E N T A N D I N C R E A S E D PA RT I S A N S H I P ?

Do Certain Types of Communities Show More Vulnerabilities to Asymmetric Polarization When They Lose the News? Of the 2,051 counties that did not have measurable newspaper employment in any of the years under study, 95 percent of them turned more Republican across two elections, and these are categorized mainly as Rural America or Working-Class Country. Places without newspapers got more Republican, but these were already strongholds for the Republican Party (see figure 3.1). But it is important not to equate “rural” with “Republican” and to avoid getting into the causal traps common to national political journalism narratives. Recall in chapter  1 the discussion about the small but significant findings that suggested that losing newspaper journalism affects voter turnout, corruption, election competitiveness, and decreases split-ticket Jour n ali sm’s Big S or t

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Figure 3.1 Newspaper employment in 2007. Note: The figure shows the number of newspaper employees for each county in 2007. Counties with a larger number of employees are in darker gray.

voting. These studies reflect the underlying premise that without local news, the public cannot make informed decisions. Putting aside the extensive critique I offered in that chapter about the limitations of this research, if we presume that if places lose local news and as a result people either vote less or become more partisan, then the political orientation of the types of places losing the news matters a great deal. This loss of news might be particularly problematic in communities that have enough undecided voters to swing elections—certainly not a given in many, many, locations. In other cases, partisan selective-exposure, or the tendency of partisans to choose media that aligns with their beliefs, can in turn augment political activity.37 The risks of losing the news in Republican places may also be more consequential for asymmetric polarization and rising distrust in the news media, especially given how much more Republicans distrust journalists than Democrats—among the most highly politically aware, there’s a seventy-five-point spread.38 The polling data suggest that Republicans are likely to turn away from mainstream national news outlets and are less likely to support 88

Jour n ali sm’s Big S o r t

Figure 3.2 Newspaper employment in 2018. Note: The figure shows the number of newspaper employees for each county in 2018. Counties with a larger number of employees are in darker gray.

local news, meaning that quality news and information will increasingly be news for the blue, that is, paid for and supported by Democrats. A Gallup-Knight poll39 that examined Americans’ perceptions of the financial value and future of journalism illustrates these trends: Democrats (37%) are more likely pay to access news than Republicans (25%), Democrats (30%) are more likely to have donated to a news organization than Republicans (8%), and Republicans (38%) perceive a wider gap between their own ideology and their local news media compared to Democrats (14%). Gallup-Knight also found that pride in local news depends on the perceived alignment with personal political views; more Democrats (70%) than Republicans (55%) say that they see local news as a form of civic pride. Polling is helpful, but the high stakes of losing local news and the consequences for political engagement happen in the context of different types of communities. To better understand the associations between partisanship, geography, and newsroom employment, I conducted two separate analyses, one that explored counties relative Jour n ali sm’s Big S or t

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to changes in their partisanship and population and one that looked at the counties more descriptively, using their ACP data type (see appendix B).

Counties, Partisanship, and Change Contrary to prevailing expectations, Republican places don’t disproportionately suffer employment losses. In fact, counties that shifted more Republican actually gained more newspaper employment relative to the total population, while counties that shifted more Democratic lost more journalists in proportion to their population. When we consider county types, only Exurbs show a statistically significant association between news employment and shifts in partisanship—but not in the direction we might expect: exurbs gain journalists relative to their population and also have shifted more Republican. Republican counties are not losing news employment and also becoming more Republican. Democratic-majority places also lost many journalists and also became more Democratic (in particular, urban counties lost more journalists in absolute numbers but also became even bluer). Figure 3.3 shows the relationship between the two variables: those counties that lost more news employment also turned more Democratic, while those who voted more for the Republican Party gained more newspaper employment. I ran regression analyses to consider the relationship between changes in newspaper employment and partisanship. I operationalized this into two variables: I looked at county-level Republican vote share changes and newspaper employment population per 10,000 residents (see table  3.5). This enables us to compare relative news employment across different communities and diagnose how shifts in news employment are associated with shifts in partisanship. The regression table shows that the partisanship change variable returns a positive and statistically significant coefficient (model 1). Model 2 uses unemployment change in each county to account for variations in economic performance that might impact the local economy and thus impact newspaper employment. Model 3 includes community-fixed effects to account for potential changes in each community (for example, potential confounding variables; see appendix B). 90

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Figure 3.3 Distribution of newspaper employment change by partisanship. Note: The figure shows the distributions of newspaper employment change measured by its concentration level.

Note that these findings do not suggest that Republican counties somehow got more journalism but that the increased proportion of concentration of journalism in red counties may reflect the concentrated decreases in blue counties. Relative to the declines in Democratic counties (which have more journalists concentrated in them to begin with), Republican counties are proportionately experiencing fewer losses in journalists than their Democratic counterparts, relative to total population. Most of the places that got bluer and lost the most journalists were big cities, while most of the places that were Republican and either lost or never had newsroom employment got more Republican. However, a closer look at which community types fare better and worse, especially insofar as in-community partisan variance, further complicates the narrative of the informed voter and news availability. I also examined whether there were any community types that showed a statistically significant association between newspaper employment changes and partisanship changes. I ran regressions of Jour n ali sm’s Big S or t

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TABLE 3.5 Regression of Republican vote share change on employment change Dependent variable: Republican vote share (1)

(2)

(3)

0.121*** (0.020)

0.124*** (0.020)

0.026** (0.013)

−0.206*** (0.023)

−0.075*** (0.017)

0.021 (0.026)

0.010 (0.029)

−0.634*** (0.019)

N

N

Y

Observations

2,625

2,625

2,624

R2

0.016

0.057

0.499

Adjusted R

0.016

0.056

0.496

Residual standard error

0.945

0.925

0.676

42.772***

79.153***

162.554***

Employment change

Unemployment

Constant

Community fixed effects

F statistic

Note: Results from OLS regression models. All variables are standardized. Robust standard errors are in parentheses. (*p < 0.1; **p < 0.05; ***p < 0.01)

partisanship changes on newspaper employment changes at the county level for each community type. The Exurbs are the only community type to show a statistically significant relationship between newspaper employment and partisanship change. In the Exurbs, increases in newspaper employment relative to their population are associated with an increase in Republican vote share (see table 3.6). In the rest of the communities, we could not find significant relationships between the two variables. Why only the Exurbs, especially given that the Exurbs have also lost significant numbers of journalists (there were about 70  percent fewer journalists in these counties in 2018 than there were in 2007)? Recall that these data should be understood as relative gains and losses in the context of 92

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TABLE 3.6 Newspaper employment and partisanship changes in different community types Dependent variable: Republican vote share change Employment change

Unemployment change

Constant

Observations

−0.064*** (0.047)

194

Exurbs

0.132* (0.07)

−0.121* (0.07)

Graying America

0.039 (0.032)

−0.290*** (0.032)

African American South

−0.021 (0.049)

−0.045* (0.023)

−0.447*** (0.028)

287

Evangelical Hubs

−0.094 (0.070)

−0.104** (0.040)

0.251*** (0.037)

314

WorkingClass Country

−0.024 (0.078)

0.120*** (0.035)

0.975*** (0.047)

281

Military Posts

−0.022 (0.052)

−0.285*** (0.088)

−0.519*** (0.066)

67

Urban Suburbs

−0.078 (0.051)

−0.089 (0.097)

−1.228*** (0.069)

103

−0.666*** (0.076)

108

0.058 (0.04)

Hispanic Centers

0.113 (0.069)

−0.178*** (0.063)

Native American Lands

−0.473 (0.587)

−0.619*** (0.176)

0.252 (0.253)

295

25

Rural Middle America

0.021 (0.026)

−0.044 (0.048)

0.580*** (0.037)

533

College Towns

0.037 (0.044)

−0.103 (0.078)

−0.677*** (0.055)

146

LDS Enclaves

0.020 (0.101)

0.597* (0.291)

−2.382*** (0.329)

30

Aging Farmlands

0.088 (0.439)

−0.170 (0.135)

0.642*** (0.140)

120

Big Cities

0.022 (0.053)

−0.015 (0.101)

−1.321*** (0.084)

46

Middle Suburbs

−0.020 (0.050)

−0.088 (0.084)

0.026 (0.071)

75

Note: Standard errors in parenthesis. (*p < 0.1; **p < 0.05; ***p < 0.01)

overall declines. The exurbs are seeing significant population growth, and we may see more gains as the full effect of the migration patterns caused by COVID-19 emerge.40 It may be that Republican-leaning Exurbs are growing enough to merit additional news investment or reallocation of existing resources, relative to overall losses in the newspaper industry. These findings suggest that the data about declines in the number of news employment jobs, partisanship, and the types of communities losing the news tell a more complicated story than might be presumed by the epigraphs to this chapter. National news media bears a far greater chance of surviving this economic disruption than local, geographically specific news media, especially when it comes to newspapers. Regardless of whether the nationalization of news consumption is a supply or a demand effect, in a high-choice environment, there is increasing evidence that those most partisan and most interested in politics are likely to pay the most attention to partisan news media. In broad strokes, we are seeing a “big sort” of national journalism’s influence, even if journalism’s employment patterns don’t necessarily bear this out, with newspaper employment a proxy for journalism jobs more generally. This is particularly concerning on the right, which has deep polarization around media distrust. How news outlets plan to rethink their strategies of covering places that they have less familiarity with matters in the take-up and reception of the content. If covering places authoritatively requires a sense of that place, national news outlets with employment concentrated in big cities still have an uphill battle. E N D I N G T H E “ T RU M P S A FA R I ”? N AT I O N A L N E W S I N N E W P L AC E S

Since the 2016 election, journalists in New York and Washington have tried to better understand why they missed the rising tide of nationalism and populism. These are supposedly the best journalists in the country, with the most significant resources behind them, but the election exposed the cracks in their own veneer of supremacy as authorities. These problems did not end after the election, either, with the “Trump Safari” genre emerging as an effort by national journalists living in DC or New York and working for national outlets trying to explain who, 94

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how, and why people voted for Trump.41 Among the worst examples of this Trump Safari journalism was Politico’s effort in 2017 to profile Trump voters in Johnstown, PA, to see if the president’s first year of mishaps had changed their voting preferences. The story detailed a part of Pennsylvania emblematic of the decaying Rust Belt region of the United States—a heroin and opioid epidemic was in full swing, miners were portrayed as delusional for thinking that someone could bring back mining and manufacturing, and misinformed voters were told at church that President Obama was the Antichrist.42 Moreover, these Trump voters were also both subtly and directly portrayed as racist, with the journalist Michael Kruse noting: “Trump is simply and unceasingly angry on their behalf, battling the people who vex them the worst—‘obstructionist’ Democrats, uncooperative establishment Republicans, the media, Black Lives Matter protesters and NFL Players (boy oh boy do they hate kneeling NFL players). . . . And they love him for this.” Here was a journalist from Washington, DC, telling this story of hate, despair, and delusion in Rust Belt, heartland America. Kruse was working for one of the most Washington insider of publications— Politico is devoted to politics and covers little else. He had come from Washington, a center of power, wealth, world-class museums, and top restaurants, and by virtue of working at Politico, he had a megaphone behind him to push the story across the web as well as an audience of Washington insiders. However, Johnstown cannot be so easily characterized as a postindustrial, conservative wasteland; it is instead reasonably cosmopolitan and marginally progressive. The Pittsburgh City Paper’s Ryan Deto reflected on the misrepresentation of Johnstown, offering a direct rejoinder to the story: “Politico published a story many in the Pittsburgh region have seen too many times . . . like many dispatches from the Rust Belt by national publications, the story painted Johnstown as a no-hope town, overrun by drugs and blight, and still in love with Trump.”43 But there was a big problem with the story. You wouldn’t know this from reading it, but Hillary Clinton actually won by a sliver—1 percent—in Johnstown. Indeed, Johnstown would have many amenities that would appeal to the sensibilities of a big-city dweller. Deto went on to chronicle the progressives in Johnstown, who formed a local chapter of the Indivisibles, a group against racism. He noted that Johnstown is also Jour n ali sm’s Big S or t

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home to a local symphony, a vibrant artists’ community, and hosts a national triple-A baseball tournament each year. In other words, despite the empirical results from the “body count” effort to assess journalism’s “big sort” in the previous section, there is still reason to worry. The loudest voices in American public discourse belong to those journalists with perspectives shaped by minimal day-today exposure to those who don’t live in big cities like them—but likely soon, there will be no Pittsburgh City Paper to offer an alternative take on what national news media got wrong. Barry Goldwater’s maligned “eastern liberal press” is becoming the only general-interest news media option available to many. Goldwater, originally from Arizona, would find that present-day Arizona’s news consumers pay little attention to anything other than the national news media he taunted. Arizona, home to many ACP-designated Hispanic Centers, has lost significant numbers of journalists, and local digital news traffic to news outlets is tiny.44 Journalism’s losses are reflected in larger realignments of power and capital. For much of contemporary journalism, national journalists have had more power to tell stories about a place to larger, geographically dispersed audiences. Increasingly, national news media outlets are seeing themselves as the last boots on the ground for many communities that once had more robust news provision from their own, geographically specific outlets. During a live interview on CSPAN conducted at the National Press Club in Washington, DC, the New York Times’ executive editor Dean Baquet noted, “The greatest crisis in American journalism is the death of local news.”45 He was joined by the Washington Post’s editor Marty Baron, who added: There are school boards going uncovered. County commissions going uncovered. City Councils going uncovered. A lot of things going uncovered, forget about the other powerful institutions and powerful individuals in town that should be covered . . . overall it leads to a lack of accountability and I think degradation of basic civil society at the local, regional, and state level . . . and I think that is hugely concerning. Who is going to step in to do the work?

After 2016, Baron and the Post launched “Team America” to bolster national journalism, but according to the American Prospect article “How 96

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Not to Cover America,”46 by 2018, the Post had made little progress. Two years after the election, the newspaper had twenty-five journalists in eighteen bureaus across the world but had yet to assign a permanent correspondent to the Midwest.47 Other news organizations have also promised to double down on bolstering local news coverage. ProPublica has launched a local reporting network, providing philanthropic and structural support to local journalists. Asking, “What issues do people care about most in places we don’t hear from often enough?” HuffPost launched “Listen to America,” a road trip that resulted in over 1,700 interviews on the first incarnation, following up with a five-state road trip in 2018 before the midterms. But this was no trip through small-town America: featured stops included Sacramento, Reno, Boise, Boulder, and Phoenix.48 National news organizations are making serious efforts to broaden their scope, perhaps trying to account for 2016’s flub while taking up the mantle of suffering local news. NBC News went on a hiring spree for national journalists, calling for “Deep familiarity with a major U.S. city where NBC News Digital does not have a bureau (not New York, Washington, D.C., or California), and a willingness to live there. The job will not be based in any of our existing bureaus.”49 The New York Times began an effort called “Times in Person” to have journalists return to sites of reporting projects, trying to mitigate some of the extractive issues caused by parachute journalism.50 Before the 2020 election, Marc Lacey, the New York Times’ national editor, announced over Twitter, “We have a bounty of fabulous new jobs on the @nytimes national staff, all aimed at deepening our coverage of the country. All of them will be based outside of NY and DC.”51 Despite these efforts, national news media still fall into the same mistaken tropes about “flyover states.” The New York Times journalist Sydney Ember moved to Iowa three months ahead of the 2020 presidential primary caucuses. Her piece for the newspaper’s reader center, “I Wanted to Understand Iowa. So I Moved There,” begins with the dateline of Des Moines and the short sentence, “I was in a tree,” with an anecdotal lead about her bow-hunting experiences with the Iowa state auditor.52 This kind of corrective, without caution, may well backfire. As the reformed right-wing provocateur Charlie Sykes puts it, “Every time you talk about them in this way, you deepen this red, blue divide, this thing. You need to not treat them as these . . . deplorable troglodytes.”53 Jour n ali sm’s Big S or t

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As a colleague of mine remarked, somewhat disparagingly, it’s tempting to see these efforts by national news media merely as a corrective to help elite, liberal-leaning national audiences feel less guilty about their lack of knowledge of “heartland” America. There are indeed indications that “being there” makes a difference in covering a place. While both scholars and journalists have considered the implications of place in the context of foreign correspondents, and to a lesser extent in Washington, more specific thinking about what it means to be in a particular place and covering America has received less attention. Molly Hennessy-Fiske, a LA Times journalist, convinced the newspaper to let her and her photographer colleague Robert Gauthier rent a home on the U.S.-Mexico border in a small town, Roma, better known for journalist “ride-alongs” with Border Patrol agents than anything else. They developed sources and an understanding of the border that became almost instinctive, using the cues from birds and barking dogs at night to alert them to the activity of the Border Patrol.54 The New York Times took a similar approach, with its deputy national editor Kim Murphy explaining the rationale: “Our view was not to really focus on any one place, but to have eyes and ears on the border 24/7, so that we can start seeing the stories that you only get when you live, work, eat and breathe in a place.”55 Being there may not necessarily improve empathy within the coverage, though. Earlier research suggests that news outlets closer to the border offer more coverage on Latinx immigration but that it is also often framed negatively.56 But it’s possible these deliberate efforts, rather than just happenstance proximity to the border, will make a difference in coverage thanks to improved sourcing and better trust. Still, it’s hard to know if the effort to play catch-up by national news outlets will make a difference in coverage that goes missing and whether the audiences who are losing coverage will actually turn to national media as a supplement. After Politico has burned a community once, for example, what motivates Johnstown residents to turn to another Washington or New York publication for future insights, either about Johnstown or the rest of the country? My concern remains that these journalists from large, national news organizations in big, liberal cities have limited knowledge about places outside them and face blind spots in their own ability to spot 98

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stories that matter. Their missteps stand to confirm the worst suspicions that people outside the big media centers already have about journalists, quite possibly breeding more disaffection, distrust, and disconnection. Pew’s findings suggest that nearly 85 percent of people think it is important for journalists to understand the history of the community, and 81 percent of people also say it is important for journalists to be personally engaged in the community, but there is an urban-rural distinction between how well people feel journalists do this, with rural Americans feeling that they receive far less local news about where they live.57 The nationalization of the news media means that the news stories that come from these types of national news outlets, especially national newspapers, are likely to be the most comprehensive, original news reporting available, and increasingly so—and when local news suffers, expect national news to try to replace it, for both moral and commercial reasons. National news outlets, though, especially the kind of “quality journalism” that feeds democracy, don’t get great trust ratings among Republicans, who instead turn to just a handful of partisan sources, while Democrats turn to far more sources, both those that are explicitly liberal and mainstream news outlets.58 If Republicans turn instead to national news outlets like Hannity Radio, Fox News, and Rush Limbaugh (the Wall Street Journal is only slightly more trusted than distrusted), which do not have the same investments in trying to report local stories, what replaces local news for these news consumers is likely partisan news or religious news that pushes an evangelical political agenda. For better or worse, people are more likely to pay attention to news and information from sources they trust the most.59 There are indications that the future of local news may well be digital-first local news sites that masquerade as nonpartisan but actually push right-wing partisan talking points. In the Midwest, Locality Labs set up dozens of “fake” local news sites that obscured their funding sources and left out inconvenient information that might tip off a Republican tilt.60 And as local news outlets dry up and television markets continue toward consolidation, there is a good chance that any new Sinclair-owned local television stations will cut back on original local news and push a similarly obscured partisan agenda. In fact, the entry of a Sinclair station appears to shift communities more Republican.61 Jour n ali sm’s Big S or t

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(This partisan investment in journalism, as I will propose in the conclusion, may not be as bad for democracy as some might think.) Regardless, the quality news that feeds democracy that is left after all the financial upheaval in the news industry is likely to be literally for those on the left. Most of the right is unlikely to trust national news outlets, especially those coming into new geographic areas with promises to tell authentic local stories that end up ringing flat. There are many reasons to be concerned that the impact of national journalists covering the news without local knowledge will be problematic for existing frayed relationships. Some journalists are already struggling with this balance of trying to claim local knowledge while nonetheless being far removed geographically, culturally, and cognitively from the news. This returns us to the fundamental premise of this book, which is that place matters to journalism and that the places of news are changing, meaning that how journalists work, what they cover, and what kind of authority over these places they can claim is changing, too. I turn in the next chapter to consider the dilemma of place for Washington correspondents, often called “regional journalists,” who cover Washington for a “hometown paper” that they rarely get to visit and that may not even be their “hometown.”

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CH APTER FOUR

The Beltway Versus the Heartland, Embodied The Case of Washington Correspondents

Every Tuesday when Congress is in session, senators head to the Capitol Building for what are called “policy lunches”—one for the Democrats, one for the Republicans. The roughly two-hour closed-door lunches require the attendance of the senators, unless they wish to face the wrath of party leaders, who use this face time to plot strategy. What this means for journalists is that Tuesday is prime stakeout time: if you want to nab a senator for a comment about, well, anything, Tuesday is the best day to try because there is one place you can be almost guaranteed to find them. From about 11 a.m. to about 12:30 p.m., dozens of congressional reporters will stand outside the “subway” that connects the various buildings on Capitol Hill via underground tunnels to wait for senators to step off the small train car and head into the U.S. Capitol Building.1 The scene between journalists and the senators trying to avoid them is almost humorous to observe: a senator steps off the subway, and an ambush follows. A frenetic chase ensues, the senator on the escalator, the press running up the adjacent stairway or just behind the senator, with the senator aiming to get from the subway to the senator-only elevator as quickly as possible so as to avoid answering journalists’ questions. (The senator-only elevator, which a journalist can be invited to ride, offers a prime opportunity for an exclusive story.) If the senator wants to dally, journalists will get a chance to have a few questions answered. Most of the time, the senator ducks them.

These chases and stakeouts occur every day in different locales throughout the Capitol, sometimes planned, sometimes unplanned— but Tuesday’s stakeout is the big show. Most journalists are hoping for a lawmaker to offer a quote on the big news story of the day, but if the question is asked and answered in the presence of other reporters, anyone can use the material. At first glance, this is a quintessential example of “pack journalism,” a “practice whereby large groups of reporters cluster around a news site, engage in copycat reporting by using and sharing news information, and lazily refrain from confirming the data through independent sources.”2 This helps explain why so many Washington stories can sound the same, regardless of what source you read them in.3 These journalists seem interchangeable, chasing after the story of the day, desperate for a quote. Washington journalism has long been maligned as detached from the needs and concerns of ordinary Americans. Given the nationalization of contemporary political journalism and the hollowing out of journalists in almost every type of community in the United States, Washington journalists are even more of an anomaly. Journalists are overrepresented at ten times the density of elsewhere in the country and are paid more than journalists anywhere else in the United States.4 At first glance, it would seem that Washington journalism bucks the trend—no sign of a crisis in journalism here. “It seems to be the case there are more people covering Capitol Hill than ever,” observed Chuck Raasch, a long-time Washington correspondent for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.5 However, Raash and his fellow Washington correspondents are a dying breed. Traditionally, Washington correspondents work for a news outlet (usually a newspaper) based outside of Washington, with the charge of covering anything of interest to the news outlet’s readers “back home.” This includes reporting on congressional delegations, federal agencies, the Supreme Court, and the White House, with a geographically specific interest in mind. “The Washington correspondent has got to write news for the milkman in Omaha,” quipped Richard Probot, who was AP bureau chief in the 1950s,6 and while there are fewer milkmen in Omaha today, the sentiment remains the same. These journalists, most of whom work for Goldilocks newspapers, have increasingly been considered an unnecessary cost for a news organization. Given the plethora of national political news coverage, why 102

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should a newspaper have a staff of reporters in Washington, much less its own Washington correspondent? In the print era, these correspondents were the sole link between what went on in Washington and their newspapers back home. Today, to know what is going on in Washington, a Houston resident could just as easily turn to CNN or the New York Times as they could the Houston Chronicle. In a time of financial difficulties, many newspapers have chosen to cut this reporting position; from 1997 to 2017, the number of regional reporters in Washington dropped from 220 to approximately seventyfive.7 In fact, in 2015, only twenty-nine states had anyone from a news organization paying full-time attention to the state’s congressional delegation and any other state-related issues. As of 2018, this number crept up to thirty-five states, bolstered in part by nonprofit newsrooms.8 Even still, these jobs are tremendously precarious. In fact, the majority of journalists quoted in this chapter have since had their jobs eliminated or have left for other, more stable positions. This chapter uses the case of Washington correspondents to show how place shapes the norms, routines, and practices of journalists. The Washington correspondent is the personification of where the Beltway and the Heartland meet. Washington journalists must live and work in the DC metropolitan area, ensconced in the “coastal elite” world, while keeping in mind the needs and interests of the people back home who read their coverage. Through a discussion of how Washington correspondents do their work, I augment chapter  3’s aggregate analysis to consider how the decline of newspaper journalism results in diminished place-based knowledge, with distinct implications for democracy. Drawing on fieldwork conducted in the Capitol Building and the National Press Club, interviews with eighteen Washington correspondents, and a systematic analysis of the backgrounds and experiences of these journalists, this chapter interrogates the importance of place as a physical location, as setting for social relations, and as a source of power.9 Regardless of the quality of coverage they produce, I find that Washington correspondents play an important role simply by “being there” in Washington. They help keep lawmakers accountable, as they ask state- and region-specific questions that other national journalists are not pursuing. However, these journalists also are elites, even if they protest this, and most are white. As a result, these journalists struggle T h e B e l t w ay Ve r su s t h e He ar tl an d , Emb o die d

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with balancing their own place of power and privilege while negotiating Washington’s own insular and self-absorbed culture, the minutiae of which holds little interest for those outside the so-called Beltway. WA S H I N G TO N J O U R N A L I S M A N D T H E B E LT WAY B U B B L E

Many cities have beltways, which are circular highways that encompass a city. They connect various neighborhoods and serve as a way for drivers to avoid entering the city at all. Washington’s Beltway, called 495, is more than a geographic descriptor. It is a location, but it is also a cultural orientation and status system that reflects Washington as a deeply hierarchical industry town consumed by politics. “Washington feels like a conspiracy we’re all in together, and nobody else in America quite understands it, even though they pay for it,” describes one tell-all Washington insider book.10 When journalists talk about “Washington” or the “White House” or the “Beltway,” they are invoking the very place as an active actor.11 A restaurant is not just a site for a politico power lunch but a place where news scoops are intentionally shared; BLT Steak, located just below the New York Times’ Washington bureau, has been a site of multiple scoops for Times journalists during the Trump administration, based on conversations they have “accidentally” overheard. The distinct culture of Washington builds into daily life an obsession with national politics. It is not uncommon to be asked by a cashier for one’s opinion on the scandal of the day, and visitors to Washington often comment with surprise that their car share or taxi driver is listening to NPR or gavel-to-gavel CSPAN on the radio. CNN is on constantly and everywhere: in elevators, bars, doctors’ offices, and coffee shops. The main George Washington University student-run “meme” Facebook page12 chronicles the “DC famous” that walk through the Foggy Bottom university area, grocery shopping or grabbing lunch, much like People magazine’s “Stars, They’re Just Like Us” section. The concentration of journalists and professional political insiders can be deeply problematic for journalism, leading to groupthink, blind spots, and sourcing practices that result in developing cozy relationships with politicians.13 Journalists in Washington spend their days in a place 104

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proximate to some of the most powerful and richest people in the world, and they are incentivized for work and social reasons to become a part of this social world,14 which is wealthy, largely white, and, indeed, can be fairly described as home to the power elite. However, Washington also belies the idea of journalists’ presumptive cultural saturation within a single-minded, liberal political culture. Despite producing the highest density of Democratic votes during the 2016 presidential election, the Washington area is also home to a significant concentration of Republican political elites, many of whom mix and mingle with journalists in these social settings, from parties to parent-teacher associations.15 Problems with insularity are nothing new to DC journalism; Leo Rosten’s 1937 study of Washington correspondents found FDR-era Washington journalists enmeshed in a bubble quite similar to today’s.16 Indeed, history testifies to some of the consequences of this insularity— Vietnam, Iraq, the insistence that Hillary Clinton would win in a landslide electoral victory in 2016.17 While political journalists see themselves as able to negotiate their role as “outsiders,” the nature of the political media bubble and its proximity to power casts doubt on this perspective.18 As social media, especially Twitter, has become increasingly important to journalism, the offline bubble extends to an online bubble and in some cases is worse online, perpetuating existing power dynamics and leaving journalists vulnerable to groupthink.19 Which journalists are given access to these corridors of power is determined by elaborate credentialing systems, self-policed by journalists as well as by various press offices across the various branches of the U.S. federal government. Journalists seeking daily credentials to cover Congress (a “hard pass”), for example, must apply to the Standing Committee of Correspondents, a group of five journalists elected by their peers. This hard pass entitles a journalist to permanent access to the Capitol Building and entry into special spaces only journalists can go, like the Senate and House media galleries, and it is often the gateway for all other press credentials in Washington. The Standing Committee of Correspondents enforces strict rules about who is eligible, including a residency requirement: journalists must live in the DC area.20 This residency requirement creates a sociogeographic distance between journalists and audiences back home and limits journalists’ in-person, day-to-day social world by physical geography. T h e B e l t w ay Ve r su s t h e He ar tl an d , Emb o die d

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In late 2015, the Pew Center for Research on Journalism published a census on Washington journalism.21 Even with significant cutbacks in journalism, the overall size of the Washington press corps was roughly the same as it had been twenty years ago. However, the composition of the press corps had changed: Washington correspondents had been replaced by wire-service reporters, digital and niche news outlets covering Washington, and specialty press focused on Congress, like CQ, Roll Call, and the Hill. Some might see the declining numbers of Washington correspondents as a threat to the functioning of American democracy; research suggests that regular coverage by local media of state and national lawmakers can mitigate the effects of voters relying on blatant partisanship to guide their decisions.22 However, those more cynical would dismiss these journalists as obsolete, a holdover from an era of print newspapers. Judged on the basis of their coverage, these journalists may not be writing for the milkman back home. The Pew study took a deep dive into Washington correspondents’ stories, finding that their coverage was essentially more run-of-the mill Washington journalism. Drawing on a content analysis of eight newspapers around the country, four with DC correspondents and four without, the center’s research found that regional journalists “stay focused on Congress, but often not in a way that connects the news back to citizens.”23 The report also suggested that only 34  percent of stories framed the impact around citizens (according to Pew’s definition); moreover, journalists covered Congress half the time, with federal agencies receiving attention only 20 percent of the time.24 Research in political science and communication backs up Pew’s findings, showing that political journalists tend to focus on episodic rather than thematic issues, frame politics as a contest, and focus on those in power, reifying establishment values.25 If these Washington correspondents were just doing Beltwayinsider journalism that didn’t connect to ordinary citizens, then these journalists weren’t doing what they were tasked with, and maybe news organizations could cut their jobs without the public losing out. In fact, I made this point in the Columbia Journalism Review, in a story headlined “Are DC Bureaus Worth Saving?” and I came to the conclusion that these bureaus probably weren’t.26 I have since firmly recanted this position. Even if Pew’s assessment is dead-on about the overly Beltwayinsider focus of Washington correspondents, these journalists occupy a 106

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specific role in the political news ecosystem that is not easily replaced by someone working for a national news outlet. The Washington correspondents I spoke with did not see themselves as merely replicating the coverage done by wire services or national news outlets. A Washington correspondent from a major Chicago newspaper offered a summary of what she saw as her job description: “In Washington, regional reporting means looking at every event, every development, every day, through the lens of searching for a local angle. It does not mean just getting a reaction on national events but developing, digging, and analyzing everything to make sure you leave nothing of local interest on the table.”27 Washington correspondents believed they had a distinct mission to avoid these “inside-the-Beltway stories,” which they defined as stories narrowly focused on “process,” the progress of legislation through Congress, or “palace intrigue,” stories about the vicissitudes and backroom deals of the various personalities in Washington, especially in the White House. In fact, Washington correspondents see themselves as the unelected representatives for readers back home. EYES AND EARS

“I consider myself the eyes and ears for Utah in the Capitol,” Thomas Burr, the Washington bureau chief for the Salt Lake Tribune, explained to me.28 The Salt Lake Tribune is the only newspaper from Utah with a permanent Washington correspondent. The four-person Utah congressional delegation is small compared to other states, but Burr is the only person who is paid by a general-interest media outlet to pay attention to anything Utah-related in Washington. Burr’s years of experience had given him regular access to Senator Orrin Hatch, who was still in office at the time of our interview and is the longest-serving Republican senator in U.S. history.29 Questions from these Washington correspondents are the only questions that lawmakers will get that are specifically about how policies actually affect the people who elect them. Bart Sullivan, a Gannett journalist who covered Washington for a list of newspapers that spanned from Florida to Iowa to California, noted, “I’m the only one here from their markets. The TV stations and the radio stations in their T h e B e l t w ay Ve r su s t h e He ar tl an d , Emb o die d

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markets don’t have anyone in Washington who can go and find people.”30 Sullivan was laid off a week after I interviewed him. Without being in Washington, it would be nearly impossible for these journalists to do their jobs. “Covering Washington from Salt Lake City is like covering the Salt Lake City Council from Washington,” Burr said, and to drive the point home about the importance of being physically present in Washington, he arranged for me to get a temporary press pass to follow around the congressional press corps. Journalists chasing after lawmakers on Capitol Hill may result in the much-maligned pack journalism I described at the beginning of the chapter, but it is also a necessity. In a world of social media, nationalized politics, press secretaries, and prepared messages, it has become easy for a politician to avoid having to answer tough questions. “Being there” on the Hill gives journalists their best chance to have a moment of unscripted, unplanned conversation, which is extremely rare in a highly filtered, professionalized, and polarized era of political communication. Being in Washington full time also gives correspondents regular access to power players in other contexts, through invitations to various roundtables and gatherings as well as the chance to have an off-the-record coffee with a source. To be in the right place at the right time is to have access to power. “If you are at the Capitol and if someone is ducking you, you can be there and buttonhole them. . . . I go to the Hart Building [a Senate building on the Hill] and run into staffers, and they tell me things they wouldn’t tell me on the phone from New Mexico,” Coleman, the Washington correspondent for the Albuquerque Journal, explained.31 There are other intangibles that can help a journalist understand a lawmaker’s motivations that can only come from being face to face. Raasch, the Post-Dispatch journalist, explained, “Sometimes you get nuance you don’t get on the phone. . . . When I am asking an adversarial question, it is important to know their reaction. Are they smiling, scowling? You get the context of how they are responding to you.”32 During my fieldwork, I found “being there” really does facilitate these interactions between lawmakers and the press. Within my first few hours in the Capitol Building, I found myself standing alone next to Senator Amy Klobuchar. We had a pleasant five-minute conversation about this research, with no one else listening and no staffers trailing her; had I been a journalist, I could have used this time to probe her for an exclusive story. 108

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Even though news consumption has nationalized and politics is increasingly viewed from a national lens, there are lawmakers who do make time specifically for Washington correspondents. “Sen. Lindsey Graham will often say something to the effect of ‘excuse me,’ I’m talking to my local press,” South Carolina’s McClatchy correspondent Emma Dumain explained.33 While their newspapers are on the decline, Washington correspondents are still able to ask questions other journalists likely won’t care or know to ask. As Alex Daugherty, a Miami Herald correspondent, put it: “In a scrum, if I have a question to ask, I ask it. I don’t apologize if I’m going to ask something about the Everglades in the new tax bill. No one else is writing a story about the Everglades, and other reporters can deal with it. . . . [Florida’s senators] Rubio or Nelson understand that’s my job.” Lawmakers can avoid dealing directly with the public but have a harder time ignoring journalists who are standing right in front of them. For example, during debates about reform to the Affordable Care Act, some lawmakers held town halls to answer the public’s questions. Others refused. To get around Ohio lawmakers dodging the public, the Columbus Dispatch and other Ohio newspapers set up a reader Q&A forum. Jessica Wehrman, one of the two Washington correspondents for the Columbus Dispatch and the Dayton Daily News,34 then asked lawmakers in Washington the questions from readers. “It’s not apples to apples, but it’s something,” she explained. These aren’t perfect relationships, to say the least. The allure of national news offers politicians a chance to burnish their own reputations for a larger audience, and that can make the job of Washington correspondents harder. “I hate it when my guys give national reporters some insight they don’t give me. . . . We write for the people who elect them,” Wehrman said. Local lawmakers might be in the national news, but the questions being asked might have nothing to do with how their actions affect the people that elected them. Kevin Diaz, a correspondent for the Houston Chronicle, explained, “If we weren’t here, no one would be covering Texas [for Texas], no one would know what [Texas’s senator] Ted Cruz’s latest utterance was unless it was on Fox News.”35 Other journalists have learned that there’s nary a chance that the elected officials they cover will stop and speak to them—much less anyone else—but this deep knowledge allows them to source in different T h e B e l t w ay Ve r su s t h e He ar tl an d , Emb o die d

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ways. For example, Kirsten Gillibrand, the New York senator, rarely stops to take questions from the press, making every stakeout a tradeoff between doing other reporting and the possibility of a brief, likely generic comment. “A young smart person with a laptop and a cell phone can wait for Gillibrand to walk out of a meeting, but it’s not productive,” Dan Freedman, a Hearst correspondent for a number of its New York and Connecticut newspapers, told me.36 He explained that after thirty years in Washington, he can rely on other sources to return his phone calls.37 But being in Washington gives him a choice that he wouldn’t have if he were based in New York. If Freedman needs to catch Chuck Schumer (or the president) at the White House, he has the option to try to do so. Being in Washington enables journalists to do their jobs; they are physically proximate to power, enabling the kind of social relations that allows for engagement with other journalists and lawmakers. F I R S T- L E V E L S U RV E I L L A N C E

Washington correspondents play an important role in the larger national news ecosystem. Through regular coverage of their elected lawmakers, they provide the starting point for the follow-up by other, larger, national news outlets and, in some cases, law enforcement. Consider the role Jerry Zremski, the Buffalo News Washington correspondent for more than thirty years, played in the eventual indictment of a New York congressman, Chris Collins (R, NY-27) for insider trading. Zremski’s responsibilities include covering the New York delegation, though he focuses mainly on the three representatives from his area and New York’s two senators. In 2017, he caught wind of something strange about Collins’s investments in a shadowy Australian biotech firm and wasn’t quite sure what to make of it. Zremski saw a press release that this company, Innate Immunotherapeutics, had received FDA clearance to begin trials in the United States for its new multiple sclerosis drug. Zremski initially dismissed the development as “inside baseball” but was frustrated that Collins had lied to him about Innate (as he had about a few other developments),38 so he wrote a short news article titled “Collins Said Drug Company Had No Business Before Feds—but It Does.”39 A week later, Zremski saw that Innate’s drug trials in Australia had been a wash, resulting in the massive crash of its stock price on the 110

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Australian stock exchange. Zremski’s next story, “Collins Loses Millions as Stock Collapses—but Others May Have Gotten Out Early,” suggested the possibility of insider trading.40 Zremski’s reporting was markedly prescient, as the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission arrested Collins shortly after. Zremski reflected on his coverage in a blog post after the arrest: “No other reporter in America or Australia wrote about a possible ‘pump and dump’ scheme, and that made me worry that I had gotten too far ahead of the story, that I had been unfair to Collins and unfair to Innate.”41 But his instincts were on point. While Zremski can’t be sure that his coverage led to the SEC’s actions, he knows that the New York Times certainly relied on his initial reporting for their follow-ups.42 Zremski told me he wasn’t annoyed by the Times’ ability to draw national attention to the scandal and that the newspaper had done a “really good job for the New York Times audience.” But he did note that “there wasn’t one piece of news in it that we hadn’t reported. And, we had reported it weeks ago.”43 The Times didn’t have the deep knowledge of Buffalo and Washington that Zremski did and simply hadn’t been paying as much attention to what began as a local story but then became a national event. Recall, too, that seemingly local news can have drastic, national consequences: Watergate began as a crime story about a burglary. Zremski’s careful eye on the New York delegation broke the corruption story open. It’s hard to conclude definitively whether corruption among lawmakers in Washington would increase without Washington correspondents, but Zremski offered this take: “You have to wonder . . . what happens when members of Congress don’t have a reporter covering them closely?. . . It comes down to . . . a reporter paying enough attention to a member of Congress to see when that member of Congress is doing something questionable.” A correspondent can provide this critical, close surveillance. The confirmation hearings of Judge Brett Kavanaugh for the Supreme Court provide another example of the importance of having a Washington correspondent physically present from a state or region. Two senators were considered up for grabs, both moderate Republican women in fairly politically independent states, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Susan Collins of Maine. During the confirmation hearings, though, the only journalist covering Alaska for an Alaskan newspaper, T h e B e l t w ay Ve r su s t h e He ar tl an d , Emb o die d

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Erica Martinson of the Anchorage Daily News, got laid off. She tweeted, “Yesterday I had a quintessential journalism experience: I was laid off. There is no longer a Washington Bureau for the Anchorage Daily News. It was me. Now it’s not.”44 This could not have come at a worse time; in the midst of hearings that stood to change the direction of the Supreme Court, the journalist who arguably knew most about Murkowski and cared most about asking questions on behalf of Alaskan voters was gone. National journalists have no reason to care about what voters in the far-off state of Alaska might need to know, nor would they have any real reason to communicate the concerns of Alaskan voters to the senator. But until she was laid off, Martinson was there, in Washington, staring Murkowski in the face, the physical embodiment of political pressure from Alaska that could serve to influence Murkowski’s actions. To make it worse, there was not a single journalist dispatched from a Maine newspaper to cover Sen. Collins. Although the senators’ two votes could change the entire direction of the Supreme Court, there was not a single journalist from either of their home states covering their activities in Washington. Ultimately, Collins voted to confirm Kavanaugh, while Murkowski punted on a direct “no” vote thanks to Senate procedural rules.45 Are these reporting efforts inside baseball, despite journalists’ seeing themselves as the voice of voters from their state? Perhaps, but this journalism can still have an impact. Journalists acknowledged that the people reading about politics back home likely don’t represent most of their readers as a whole. Michael Coleman, the Washington correspondent for New Mexico’s Albuquerque Journal, laughed about this. The people he saw every day were reading what he wrote, even if they were a small, elite group of New Mexicans in Washington. “It’s maximum accountability,” he said.46 With reduced newsroom budgets making it difficult to travel back and forth and in some cases no actual hometown connection to the state or region whose interests they are in Washington to cover, these journalists struggle with both the geographic and cultural distance from their audiences. Some journalists are lucky, as they do have these hometown connections. Jessica Wehrman, a correspondent for the Columbus Dispatch and the Dayton Daily News, said she

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didn’t find it particularly hard to stay connected to the issues back home because she had such strong ties to the area. “A lot of my readers are friends from high school. . . . I am in touch with a lot of those folks.” It was not uncommon for me to hear that these journalists paid out of their own pockets to fly back to their “home” states or spent their vacation time speaking to people in the states they cover. Still others try to meet with visitors to DC from their home state; Coleman gave me the example of covering the New Mexican angle of a #marchforourlives antigun protest in DC through a story that focused on New Mexican youth that had traveled to the capital. Ironically, however, many of those journalists who are dispatched by faraway news outlets to cover Washington have limited personal knowledge and experience with the places their readers are from. As a result, journalists rely on a variety of strategies to get to know the important issues and policy makers in their states. Kevin Diaz, a Houston Chronicle correspondent, scans YouTube videos of local political events back in Texas to see some of the dynamics on the ground.47 Alex Daugherty, a young correspondent covering Miami, has a daily check-in each morning with his editor, who is based in Miami and gives Daugherty updates and coverage questions from Florida. Others count on specific issue expertise to give them a grounding in local issues. If you’ve never been to Albany for reporting purposes but you cover Albany and upstate New York for Hearst newspapers, and if you’ve only been to Connecticut a handful of times, with your last trip three years ago, but you cover Connecticut, as Dan Freedman does, you’ve got to have some way to figure out what matters or some kind of expertise that compensates for your lack of local knowledge. Freedman is an experienced journalist with award-winning expertise in transportation and guns, two issues that Albany and Connecticut residents see as central concerns. “They’ve generally been happy with me, and if there’s a problem, they can course correct,” he said, referring to his editors. “I wish I could get up there more [to New York and Connecticut],” he told me. These Washington journalists contend with a strange duality—on the one hand, being in Washington gives them important access to lawmakers; “being there” is a source of authority thanks to their proximity to power. But “being there” is also a challenge

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that undermines their ability to keep a perspective on what is important outside of Washington. R E C KO N I N G W I T H C OA S TA L E L I T I S M

How these journalists negotiate being in Washington while trying to avoid being taken up by Washington is critical to how they think about their jobs—and to how they do them. Sociologists have underscored how we try to distinguish between a collective identity and our individual approach to the world, particularly when it comes with being associated with something that may be collectively maligned. For example, low-income people who see themselves as “virtuous” will try to make the argument, often to the diminishment of other impoverished people, that they are indeed not like all other poor people, even making political choices based on this differentiation.48 For Washington correspondents, many of whom have a similar set of qualifications and elite schooling, Erving Goffman’s concept of “role-distance” helps them reconcile the disconnection that many feel to the places they cover and the trappings of Washington power circles.49 By clearly defining what they are “not like” (other elites), journalists can retain the sense that they are just like everyone else; however, being able to identify, name, and know what the experiences of elites are in great detail also suggests a proximity to these experiences. “I have been in Washington twelve years, but I haven’t gone Washington,” the Salt Lake Tribune correspondent Thomas Burr says, adding, “I have been to Georgetown cocktail parties, I own black tie and white tie, but I also can milk a cow and change my own oil if I need to.”50 Burr was insistent that he remained connected to the two-thousandperson small town in rural Utah where he grew up and noted that when someone from Utah emailed or called to accuse him of not understanding the issues back home, he was able to refer to these rural roots and connections. We were talking at the National Press Club, and he explained reckoning with the dissonance of being close to power but trying to remain grounded: “Its our life to cover politics. I can see the White House when I look out the window [of the Press Club], but I think the point is I try to keep one foot in the state.”

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Dorey Scheimer, the only regional journalist television correspondent I spoke with, wrestled with the strangeness of being in Washington and retaining some sort of outsider perspective. “Everyone is from somewhere, right?”51 She talked about how most of the journalists in the Cox Washington bureau, especially TV journalists, had come from smaller markets to Washington and were more in touch with people outside the Beltway than doubters might expect. Scheimer, a 2012 graduate of Penn State, most recently had been working in central Pennsylvania, where “there was an institutional resentment to DC. . . . I was covering this town that was dying a slow, sad death. There was no coal, no manufacturing, and I knew that world better than DC.” Having the connection to rural Pennsylvania made it hard to watch some of the national coverage of the area. “I felt this weird two-dimensional thing,” she explained, describing how the same people “screaming at Trump rallies would clap for me when I ran by their houses on a run.” She contrasted this to the DC universe: she told me about how she had the night off for one of the Democratic primary debates in 2016 and recalled how she could see through the windows of every home that she walked past that night that the TV was tuned to the debate. Another journalist, Jack Torry, Werhman’s colleague, saw his experience and knowledge as a benefit, distancing himself from the “other” Washington journalists, a classic “role-distance” move. “I haven’t lived in the Midwest since 1988, so I guess you could say that’s me” (responding to my question about whether he could be called a “coastal elite”), adding, “but I like to think that’s because I am a student of public policy. . . . I’m not a coastal elite in the sense that other journalists at the Post, NBC, ABC are. . . . I have no television show that is influencing the public opinion of Americans.”52 He joked that he was happy if people just read his newspaper. Other journalists made similar efforts to distance themselves from national political journalists, pointing to previous experience that these journalists lacked. Dan Freedman, Hearst’s correspondent for Albany and Connecticut, grew up in New York City on the Upper West Side and went to Dalton, an elite private school in Manhattan. He has an MS from Columbia’s School of Journalism. Freedman has been in Washington since 1987. That said, his long career includes stints in Camden, New

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Jersey, an area known for its high crime; a few years in San Antonio; and covering political violence and civil war in Central America. He positioned his breadth of experience outside DC against his son-inlaw’s, also a journalist, who started his career in New York City and then moved to Washington. “He’s done great, since he knows politics, but he’s never had to go knock on someone’s door and say, ‘I’m really sorry to hear that your child was run over by a truck, can you talk to me?’ ”53 Considering the pecking order in Washington, it’s fair to say many of these regional journalists have experience outside Washington and think of themselves as being able to marshal this experience to stay grounded; nonetheless, to be a journalist in Washington is to occupy a place of power, and to become a journalist in Washington often requires the kind of elite education and access to privilege that past and presentday media critics would point to,54 raising concerns about insularity and blind spots. These are not new problems.55 Indeed, in 1971, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, not yet a senator, lamented the decline of the working-class journalist in Commentary: “Journalism has become, if not an elite profession, a profession attractive to elites. This is noticeably so in Washington.”56 But as Stephen Hess, a Brookings fellow and scholar of the Washington news media, pointed out in response, even during the Great Depression, more than 80  percent of journalists had a college degree (as Rosten had found). Rather, as Hess put it: Being described as an elite disturbs many reporters. But, of course, they are. And those who eventually join their ranks—regardless of race, religion, gender, or previous economic condition—also will be part of this elite. They are workers in words and symbols. They must be trained in the skills necessary for the occupation, meaning that they will be increasingly well schooled. They will be increasingly well compensated. They will be increasingly fraternal with those of comparable standing.57

Whether this elite background matters, though, and how it has or has not changed, is one point of consideration. Other Washington institutions— like Congress—mirror this elite educational representation.58 116

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Figure 4.1 Number of journalists by type of school. Note: Ivy League, SLAAC (small liberal arts college); state school; top journalism school; elite private school; Washington, DC, school; other

I looked at the education background of the seventy-five regional journalists that were still employed in March 2017, drawing from a list of credentialed journalists listed in the “press” section of the 2016 Congressional Directory (see figure  4.1). Indeed, more than 70  percent of these journalists had gone to an elite private school or went to school in Washington, DC, which proffers similar kinds of access and advantages in terms of national politics. I also considered how long, on average, these journalists had been in Washington; my sample included three DC natives, with an average time spent among the others of just over thirteen years. Through interviews with Washington correspondents, it was clear that most of the veteran journalists had worked their way up through the ranks of a single newspaper until reaching the status of Washington correspondent. But even among these veteran journalists, many were no longer working for their “hometown” newspapers, covering new states as experienced journalists. Jonathan Salant, a long-time Washington journalist, first came to Washington in 1987 as a correspondent for the Syracuse Herald-Journal, T h e B e l t w ay Ve r su s t h e He ar tl an d , Emb o die d

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a newspaper that no longer exists. He has since worked for national, trade, wire, and newspaper outlets, and when we spoke, he was a correspondent for New Jersey’s Advance media, fresh off a scoop about Arizona’s senator Jeff Flake. “I’ve been here for so long, I know everybody. I’m valued for these connections.”59 For many but not all of the younger journalists, a first job covering Congress for a national outlet was often the training ground for working as a Washington correspondent. Though younger journalists may be less schooled in political history than their more experienced counterparts, senior journalists were quick to credit them. “An awful lot of these people coming out of Ivy League places are so talented and so capable, and most of the time they can hit the ground running,” said Bart Sullivan, a journalist for Gannett. But there was no one career path to becoming a Washington correspondent. Old-timers who had been in Washington had been there for decades, while newcomers had likely not done any journalism outside of Washington. Based on my data, the time (or lack of time) someone had spent in Washington did little to augment some sort of claim to authentic knowledge about audiences. Nor did overall experience serve as an antidote to “becoming Washington.” Nonetheless, many of these journalists were reflective about their privilege. “If you were to look at me as a label or a résumé, you could fairly characterize me as a coastal elite. . . . I have a graduate degree and write for a living,” Alex Daugherty, the Miami Herald correspondent, said. He pointed out that both sides of the aisle were likely to tar reporters with these accusations of out-of-touch elitism when it was convenient. Daugherty had not been able to afford an unpaid internship in college, but he secured the financial support to go to Columbia Journalism School, giving him the ability to focus on honing his investigative skills. He acknowledged that Washington reporters were different from many of their readers, and he was doubly conscious of working for the Miami Herald and not speaking Spanish, which he viewed as a significant limitation. “The people who are shaping what we read every day are from a certain cultural background, they are less diverse than the country as a whole, they are more male, and . . . I know why that label [of coastal elite] applies to me.”60 There was another critical blind spot that emerged, though it is one endemic to more aspects of journalism, not just this beat: every single 118

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journalist I spoke to for this research was white. White journalists constitute the overwhelming majority of Washington correspondents.61 The Beltway journalists on stakeouts looking to speak to lawmakers were a sea of white faces. When Black White House correspondents reflected on their paltry representation in a forum at George Washington University, they could count on two hands, by name, the number of Black journalists credentialed to cover that beat.62 This is simply not acceptable and is another reminder of the whiteness of the most esteemed newsrooms that cover the corridors of power. It is perhaps both lazy and unfair to journalists to categorize them in broad strokes as out-of-touch, mostly white elites, but being in Washington does challenge their ability to connect with the readers they purport to serve. They are surrounded by an all-encompassing obsession with politics, and they do not have many opportunities to do their own on-the-ground “back home” sourcing and reporting. Nonetheless, “being there” in Washington means that lawmakers and their staff are accountable in a more immediate, material way: they have a hard time dodging journalists who can stand in the hallway asking them questions. A TA L E O F T W O C A R O L I N A S

A closer look at two Washington correspondents shows how journalists’ understanding of place informs their work. Washington, as a place, and as they experience it, is a reflection of their social relations, social networks, experiences, and understandings.63 Their connections and associations with the Beltway as a physical and imagined place informs their approach to reporting, while their “place,” in terms of their relative privilege, provides advantages and disadvantages in their ability to claim knowledge of readers “back home.” At least superficially and by company mandate, Emma Dumain and Anna Douglas have much in common. Both are women under thirtyfive,64 arguably on the edge of mid-career, and at the time of my research, both were McClatchy regional journalists covering the South; Dumain was McClatchy’s South Carolina correspondent, and Douglas was North Carolina’s Raleigh News and Observer correspondent. They represent the new guard of Washington correspondents who have come up during a time in journalism when jobs like the ones they have are T h e B e l t w ay Ve r su s t h e He ar tl an d , Emb o die d

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becoming more and more difficult to come by. Dumain and Douglas express how they see their roles as Washington correspondents in similar ways: they are generally charged with covering the congressional delegation of their states and monitoring federal agencies and Washington activities that matter to particular state issues. However, they couldn’t be more different in terms of their backgrounds and how they understand Washington as a “place” to inform their reporting routines. I met Douglas at a hipster bar in Shaw, a gentrifying neighborhood in DC.65 She was already on her way out of town, just a few days away from moving back to the South to a new job for McClatchy in Charlotte. Dumain, on the other hand, eight months pregnant, was in the thick of trying to soak in every last bit of work that she could before going on maternity leave. We met for coffee (for her, tea) at a quiet nook of a café on Capitol Hill, a few blocks from the Capitol Building.66 To look at the two of them side by side showcases why Washington correspondents are such a useful case study for understanding how place intersects with practice—but it also prompts us to caution against overgeneralizing and stereotyping. Dumain had always wanted to be a political journalist, and while she has never been called a coastal elitist, her profile could certainly invite the critique. She acknowledges, in her words, the odd position of being a “Yankee Jew covering the South.” Political journalism is not just a job but an avocation: “I totally love the palace intrigue. A reporter friend of mine who covers the House Democrats and I drive our significant others crazy. We’ll get together at a party, and we’ll talk about who is going to replace Nancy Pelosi [the House majority leader] for an hour, and I’ll get all giddy.” Yet she also recognizes that her obsessive fascination with politics is likely far different from what anyone in South Carolina is likely to spend much time thinking about. “If Pelosi leaves, that’s the kind of story people are going to care about nationally. No one from South Carolina is going to pick [the newspaper] up and . . . care about the granular level of the rank and file.” Dumain grew up in New York City, went to a small private high school in Manhattan, and headed to Oberlin College in Ohio, a rigorous small liberal-arts school with a reputation for liberal activism. There was no journalism program, so Dumain majored in English and worked 120 T h e B e l t w ay Ve r su s t h e He ar t l an d , Emb o die d

on the college newspaper. She acknowledged, “Yes, I got the benefit from the unpaid internship track.” Her first permanent job was as an editorial assistant at Congressional Quarterly. From this spot at CQ, she took the path that future Washington correspondents will be more likely to travel: moving up in the profession by working in Washington rather than at smaller outlets outside Washington. At CQ, Dumain gained intimate knowledge of the inner workings of Congress: she covered votes and learned about how legislation moved through Congress. Dumain’s other formative stints included work at Roll Call, where she began covering Congress on the “campus beat,” which required her to write about Congress as one might a small town, reporting on the people both in and out of the spotlight, from the police security to how Congress runs its own budgets and governs itself to how congressional oversight over DC worked. Certainly, there is experience that comes from knocking on doors after a tragedy, but the arcane knowledge required to understand Congress requires its own expertise and experience, which are hard to acquire in any other setting. Dumain’s first regional reporting job was covering South Carolina for the Post and Courier, which had newly established its DC beat after a traumatic year that included debates over the Confederate flag flying over the South Carolina state capitol building and the racially motivated shooting of nine parishioners in a Charleston church. Showing the fragility of the Washington correspondent and the fickle nature of politics, when Dumain took a job with McClatchy, the Post and Courier did not replace her. At the time of our interview, Dumain told me she was living her best life. “I love living in DC. I am going to raise a family in DC. Covering Congress is my literal dream job. I could grow old covering Congress.” Dumain is the embodiment of the kind of journalist for whom the Beltway bubble and the players involved are a source of endless fascination. That said, Dumain has also been driven by a long-standing desire to communicate these complicated goings-on in Congress to ordinary people, which she noted was one of the appeals of the Washington correspondent job. Commenting in retrospect after leaving this position, Dumain noted, “I wanted to be a translator to real people about how this crazy place works and operates, and that was the perspective I always T h e B e l t w ay Ve r su s t h e He ar tl an d , Emb o die d

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tried to bring to my regional reporting.”67 Who she is, where she comes from, and how she approaches Washington reflect this interplay between place and power; her experience, interest, and comfort covering politics give her access to a level of knowledge and sourcing advantageous for her work, but this experience is also a reminder to her of how abstract and complicated Congress is to ordinary people. Dumain’s advantages and challenges are far different than Douglas’s, her former counterpart in regional Carolina coverage for McClatchy, and their backstories and approach to Washington couldn’t be more different, either. Douglas covered Washington for the Raleigh News and Observer as an outsider, someone who decidedly did not feel that she “belonged” in Washington and wasn’t planning to stay.68 Douglas is from South Carolina, but from an area closer to Charlotte, North Carolina, than any of South Carolina’s major cities. Douglas, unlike Dumain, could use her Southern accent to her advantage. As Douglas put it, “A Southern accent covering a Southern state, it’s automatic credibility.” Douglas, a native of Spartanburg, South Carolina, got her start working on her student newspaper at Winthrop University, a small public university in Rock Hill. As a student journalist, she distinguished herself through her investigative reporting, which eventually resulted in the resignation of the college president. After graduation, Douglas spent three and a half years working at the Herald, a McClatchy-owned under40,000-circulation newspaper in Rock Hill. Douglas is an extremely talented journalist, as her work even as a student journalist indicates, and after winning a South Carolina press award for another investigation, she acknowledged she was up for another challenge. “I was a big fish in a small pond, and it was time to take a leap. . . . McClatchy rolled out a couple of options, and the DC one was the scariest, so I took it.” A few years in Washington would be a rite of passage in her upward trajectory in local journalism, she figured, a résumé line appropriate for someone hoping to become the executive editor of a newspaper. “The way I figured it, people work all of their careers to get here, or they get here and stay here forever, but I never wanted to be a Washington reporter.” To some degree, Douglas’s expectations of what Washington journalism would be like mirrored some of her audience’s back home. “National reporters are truly caring reporters; they’re not the scum of the earth,” 122

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she joked. On the other hand, she noted that the stereotypes are “rooted in some kind of truth,” and without wanting to specify, she added, “the things that happen in this town as a member of the media, you can’t help but sigh or roll your eyes.” She recognizes her path to Washington had been unusual given the intensity of the competition for these types of journalism jobs. “A person who ends up in DC has been meaning to come here; it’s not an easy position to get.” She noted that the typical pathway is usually a “killer internship in Washington or New York,” often with a master’s degree in hand. Note that Douglas sees herself as a Washington outsider because she lacks these elite credentials, but in the anti–coastal elite, anti– “liberal media” tenor of then-Republican-controlled Washington, her outsider status was a different source of power. Not being “of Washington” enabled her to recognize stories that would resonate with those outside of it. If Dumain is an insider in Washington, Douglas is an outsider, but both pathways provide different ways of performing one’s role in Washington. For each journalist, “where they come from” relative to power, ideology, and the way that social relations unfold in Washington becomes part of how they approach their work of covering Washington for their readers back home. Journalists carry their “place” with them, and it informs how they proceed through the “place” of Washington. Dumain’s first job with the Post and Courier gave her a chance to learn about South Carolina. She went to Charleston to get to know the city and relied on her South Carolina editors to help educate her about the key issues related to the state. So when it came time to turn to McClatchy’s assignment, she had already become familiar with the state and its delegation, noting, “I went in as an expert rather than hiring me off the street.” Still, she didn’t have a Southern accent and had an East Coast background, and she continued to worry that delegation members and readers might question her lack of knowledge of the state or, worse, her presumptive liberal bias. But Dumain has found one way to moderate the suspicion, and this too draws on her personal background: her husband is from South Carolina. “I find that gives me credibility to say that I’ve married into a South Carolina family.” This isn’t just some empty effort to gain an “in” with the delegation, however. As Dumain noted, “I have family there I T h e B e l t w ay Ve r su s t h e He ar tl an d , Emb o die d

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love and care about, and its future matters to me very deeply.”69 Her husband happens to be from Clemson, one of the most conservative areas of the state; her personal sense of “back home,” then, comes from these family connections. “Go Tigers!” she joked, adding, “I wouldn’t know that if I wasn’t married to him. I didn’t know what Clemson was until we started dating . . . [this] warms people to me in a way that I don’t think [it] would have [if] I didn’t have that connection.”70 In Washington reporting, especially as a regional journalist, talent may help, but reporting is still personal; these personal relationships are forged by associations with places. Sometimes these places are a Washington hallway, but in other cases, being able to distance oneself with an authentic claim to being “outside” the palace intrigue is a great advantage. Despite this need to establish “outside cred,” Dumain’s bread-andbutter source of scoops comes from spending a significant chunk of time actually in the Capitol Building. While joining the giant scrums of journalists pouncing upon any elected politician has never been the best way for her to break a big story, Dumain knows how to use place to her reporting advantage—she uses her intimate knowledge of the physical layout of the Capitol Building to get her scoops and her face time with the South Carolina delegation. She reflected: “[These] are the tricks you learn as a congressional correspondent. . . . I knew them as a congressional reporter for Roll Call and CQ. I know which way they walk. I know which way all nine members of the congressional delegation walk to go to a vote. I know which offices and which elevators they take.” Unlike Dumain, the national journalists don’t need Senator Lindsey Graham to say anything specific about South Carolina, but Dumain does. For a while, her approach to finding Graham in the hallways was so reliable that Dumain used to do a tweet series she called “Tuesdays with Lindsey.” For Dumain, “being there” in the right places is part of her reportorial insight. Douglas doesn’t have this kind of deep knowledge of Congress, but because she never intended to be in DC for the long term, her general sense of suspicion of the machinery of the Hill also works to her advantage. She spoke to me about her surprise at the numbers of communication directors and press secretaries, both on the right and left, who seemed like they felt entitled to “attempt to negotiate what a story is 124

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going to say and how you are going to say [it].” As scholars and media critics alike will point out, national journalists in DC are guilty of this “tango” with their sources.71 However, Douglas also observed that too much time in Washington had led other reporters to have an undergirding cynicism that people in power have few genuine intentions. And this cynicism, as much as the socializing and the hobnobbing with power that leads to scoops, could also lead to tunnel blindness. She argued, “Reporters and editors who have been in DC for more than a handful of years have become so skeptical to these games that people play with us to the point that even when someone is being a truth teller, there’s so much skepticism . . . and I think sometimes we miss good, new opportunities.” In short, in positioning herself as an outsider and intending to remain one, she saw herself as able to think more broadly about the possibility that perhaps, indeed, not every story about Washington could be boiled down to someone jockeying for power. Perhaps more important, Douglas was deeply concerned about the fraught relationship between mainstream media and her audience. Unlike many in Washington (including some Republican political strategists), Douglas wasn’t quick to dismiss a Trump voter as uninformed or hateful. She told me, “Look, my dad voted for Trump, he’s a good guy, and he’s well-informed,” noting that to write off the concerns of these voters would be misguided. In fact, she viewed her greatest strength as a journalist in Washington as being able to understand and respect what she called the “Southern point of view.” Douglas explained, “In the South, Southern identity for a lot of people is very closely and intimately tied to their political identity, and so when they call a political reporter and all they see is Washington bullying, it might be on some level reassuring to hear a Southern accent.” Beyond that, she could genuinely relate to a congressperson when he or she mentioned the “good people of the Eleventh District” because she was from a similar place. While she acknowledged that someone not from the South could be a strong Washington correspondent (point in case: her colleague Dumain’s coverage of South Carolina), Douglas felt McClatchy had tried to “prioritize someone who could understand the culture and appreciate it.” She explained how her “hometown” insights guided her coverage. At the time of our interview, North Carolina had passed what was T h e B e l t w ay Ve r su s t h e He ar tl an d , Emb o die d

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known as “HB2,” or the “transgender bathroom bill,” a law that required people to use the bathrooms that reflected their biological sex rather than one that matched their gender identity. Douglas explained her approach to the story: One of the things that I think distinguished what I did during those first few weeks of the law passing was something that I don’t think anyone else in the state and no one nationally was going to care to do. [Liberals were] freaking out and saying HB2 would cause the state to be stripped of education funding [which national media treated as fact]. I asked, is this true?—and found that in other cases of Title IX violations . . . no one had ever had federal dollars stripped.

Her point was that she had the perspective, thanks to her background and upbringing, to do this story in a way someone else who didn’t share this outlook might not. She explained that as a Southerner who went to a public school, she knew that people back home would worry about possible cuts to education. And while she said that she could have just written another “liberal freakout” story, she thought that it was important to “give people a nugget of information” they wouldn’t be getting from other news outlets. “If you were a national journalist or a CNN reporter trying to cover transgender bathroom bills, you’d probably be looking for other angles than specifically North Carolina’s education budget,” she explained. Yet being located in Washington also broadened her perspective and ability to cover the transgender bathroom debate. If her first story perhaps seemed overly sympathetic to proponents of the bill, her next story reflected how the place of Washington—the physical locale where she was living and working—intersected with the practice of her work. Douglas realized that DC had been an early adopter of pro-transgender bathroom laws that designated that people indeed had the right to use the bathroom of their gender identity. She thought of a way to report on HB2 that avoided the political rhetoric and, instead, went on what people in the newsroom jokingly referred to as a “bathroom tour.”72 Douglas took readers on a step-by-step history of how the law had been adopted in DC and what the law’s implementation actually looked 126

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like, visiting a handful of local DC restaurants to talk with owners about their bathroom stalls. She pointed out to readers that Washington, which hosts an average of 20 million tourists a year, had a transgenderinclusive bathroom law that did not have any recorded safety concerns for cisgender bathroom users.73 Douglas quoted an economic development leader in the city who said, “You’ve probably been using the restroom with transgender people off and on for decades, and nobody’s ever known.”74 Douglas then reached out to a number of tourists from North Carolina to ask them if they had known that the same bathroom laws they were debating were already in place in Washington. None had, and in fact, Douglas quoted one tourist saying, “I’m kind of embarrassed that I didn’t even notice [a difference].” Each of these stories on the transgender bathroom debate reflected a different way she used place to inform her journalism; in the first story, she thought to consider the implications for North Carolina outside of the civil rights rhetoric, and in the second, she used being in Washington, a large liberal city, to help illustrate to those back home that perhaps this bathroom bill was not as big an issue as they thought. Dumain and Douglas, then, each try to negotiate this insideroutsider status as a way to inform their reporting. For each, place provides a different sort of opportunity for their reporting, and place, too, challenges them. These journalists show that place itself is agential in shaping how journalists work but that place is more than just a geographic location. One’s place is also one’s personal history and current context, and the power or lack of power that comes from these preexisting experiences enables and constrains the practices of journalism. WA S H I N G TO N C O R R E S P O N D E N T S A N D T H E I R P L AC E O F P O W E R

Craig Gilbert, a long-time Washington correspondent for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, spoke to me a few weeks after the 2016 presidential election; Wisconsin had been one of the states where the polling had been far off the actual results, with first-time voters turning out in rural areas to support Donald Trump, the Republican candidate. Gilbert does have the elite credentials, and he is a Yale graduate from the Northeast, but for most of his adult life, he’s worked for the Milwaukee Journal T h e B e l t w ay Ve r su s t h e He ar tl an d , Emb o die d

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Sentinel and has covered every presidential campaign since 1988, with deep knowledge of Wisconsin. He prides himself on rigorous data analysis to guide his journalism, but despite his best knowledge of the state, he simply didn’t anticipate the upset. He blamed it on both physical distance and the deepening of geospatial political divides. But he also phrased this as a reporting challenge, too: “Someone from Washington is going to miss what’s going on in Wisconsin. . . . One of the challenges arguably for journalists not just in Washington but at any metro newspaper around the country: if the two parties realign along class and . . . urban or rural lines, [that] creates more physical distance between us and the base.” In other words, physical distance was ideological distance, too, reflecting this larger conceptual assessment that place is agential in shaping values, norms, and social connections. In this case, class and urbanity separate these journalists, physically, from the people they are covering. But by and large, I found that these journalists know that this is a problem and do their best to figure out a way around the limitations of being able to be in two places at once, or even getting back to the place they cover. Through speaking with and watching Washington journalists work, we gain insight into how being in a place informs their work, as well as how place reflects larger power differentials. We also see some of the book’s larger tensions woven through this chapter: being in Washington means being proximate to power, and these journalists, even beleaguered Washington correspondents, have the power to talk to lawmakers and demand answers. Physical presence, especially for journalists who do reporting on Capitol Hill, is needed for the informal, often unplanned encounters with powerful Washington insiders. However, although being in Washington is essential to doing the job, it also presents a liability; living in an “industry town” where politics is front and center has a warping effect that prompts one to think that everyone outside of Washington is paying as much attention to the day’s events as those inside the Beltway, and this is was as true in the 1930s as it is today. But there is an important contemporary difference: historically, the Goldilocks newspapers that are contracting right now had the dominion over place that also extended to having a “place” in Washington. The coverage may be “inside baseball,” but in 1937, with a

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much smaller press corps and fewer mature communication technologies, there was approximately one reporter for every lawmaker. Today, there are approximately seventy-five journalists whose specific role includes paying attention to all the affairs of the federal government associated with a geographically specific region. There are fifteen states that do not have a single journalist covering their concerns in Washington. This presents a profound problem for democracy. The federal government and the apparatus of Washington has expanded greatly, and there are far fewer journalists focused on how the cities, states, and regions outside Washington, DC, will be affected by what goes on within it. This is a consequence of the geospatial retrenchment of journalism. Washington correspondents serve a critical and likely irreplaceable role within the larger national political news ecology—especially for spotting stories and scandals that filter up from their reporting. Regardless of how well they actually differentiate their coverage from national political journalism, these Washington journalists are the physical embodiment of the connection between the Beltway and back home, whether the heartland or a large population center like Chicago. They are professionally mandated to care about a geographically defined audience, and this focus on a region, a state, or a city is a geographic, locative mandate to focus their coverage. Goldilocks newspapers are particularly constrained by the current market failure of journalism, and the Washington correspondent job is an expensive one to staff. This specificity of a geographic market that once demanded (and could support) the full attention of a Washington correspondent is also a weakness when it comes to contemporary digital-content economics. The following chapter turns to the placebased affordances of geographic markets to explain how digital economic considerations are hollowing out Goldilocks newspapers and leaving quality news for the rich, white, and blue.

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CH APTER FIVE

Place and the Limits of Digital Revenue Goldilocks Newspapers and the Curse of Geography

There was no way the Miami Herald was going to be scooped on the death of Fidel Castro, Cuba’s dictator. Certainly, like many regional and metro newspapers, the Miami Herald had faced significant cutbacks. But this was a matter of pride. The Miami Herald saw itself as owning Cuba coverage like no other U.S. newspaper or television network could. Miami is home to the largest Cuban-American population in the United States, and it was an intolerable thought to journalists at the Miami Herald that they would not be the first to break the news with the full panache of all the newspaper had to offer. For almost twenty years, the newspaper had a “Cuba plan,” and every reporter and editor knew his or her specific assignment.1 While the newspaper changed over the years from a hard copy to a Google document and from a print plan to one that emphasized 24/7 breaking news and social media, the Herald was prepared for Castro’s death: There was an obituary that was routinely edited, a web template set to go, and pictures already selected. Other news outlets also have prewritten obituaries, standard for (in)famous figures, especially ailing ones. They did not, however, have a permanent whiteboard installed in the center of the newsroom with the Castro obit story’s ID code on it so it could be called up as quickly as possible from the content management system to publish as soon as the death was confirmed.2

Just before 1 a.m. on November  26, 2016, the Miami Herald was finally ready to go live with the news.3 Muscle memory from years of covering major hurricanes and big breaking news kicked into high gear, and the newly created continuous news desk was in action.4 Top editors considered this a well-earned journalistic victory. Aminda Marqués Gonzalez, the paper’s executive editor, wrote a wrap-up column talking about the newspaper’s decades of preparation: “All those years of planning paid off,” she recalled. “We quickly had a rich array of deeply reported stories and analysis posted on our website. We dispatched reporters, photographers and videographers to the streets of Miami where people were beginning to gather. We went live on Facebook.”5 The newspaper went on to receive attention from the public and other news outlets alike for its richly detailed breaking news coverage, the historical depth and context of the reporting, and the eloquence of the obituary.6 But although the newspaper received web traffic from around the world in the wake of Castro’s death, little of it “counted” as traffic that would translate into digital ad dollars. Because of the perverse, upsidedown logic of digital economics for journalism, the Miami Herald couldn’t financially benefit from this massive burst of attention, which was considered “drive-by traffic.” The new readers might come for one or two stories about Castro and then never return. Only people in the local market—Miami and environs—mattered in terms of monetizing digital advertising dollars. This scenario plays out time and time again for Goldilocks newspapers, those metropolitan and regional newspapers that are not quite local and not quite national. Goldilocks newspapers are the reputable, original content providers for not just a metropolis but also often a region and a state. Even given their imperfections, such newspapers are not outlets we want to lose, and their journalism, while locally significant, often draws national attention as well. Their size, however, has squeezed them particularly hard in an era when making money from digital dollars is the key to future financial sustainability. But digital advertising is an unreliable, deeply problematic source of revenue for news publishers of all stripes, not just newspapers. The way forward for commercial newspapers almost entirely depends on audiences paying directly for the costs of news production. Non-national newspapers are Pl ace and the Limi t s of D ig it al Re venue

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particularly challenged; they cannot escape the hard, material truth that local audiences are finite. There are only so many eyeballs in one place and a limit to how much money can be tapped from a geographically specific market. This chapter uses place as a conceptual tool to understand how physical geography—where a newspaper is located—intersects with its digital monetization destiny. Moreover, the collapse of quality local journalism in the United States is tied to the affordances of place—what features, resources, and advantages a place has and how people are able to take advantage of them. As you saw in the previous chapter, the case of Washington correspondents, most of them working for Goldilocks newspapers, reflects the way that place structures how work gets done and the implicit and explicit ways that journalists decide what is news. In this chapter, I move to a more macro scale to look across the newspaper industry, in which the vagaries of individual cities and markets create different contexts for the survival of newspaper journalism. To do so, I turn to key industry voices, fieldwork, and popular and trade press coverage of the economic unraveling of newspapers. I provide a brief, alternative history of how local newspapers lost their local advertising monopoly, placing some blame back on newspapers rather than on tech companies, while detailing how Google and Facebook have seized the local digital ad market. I then discuss how the success of “reader revenue,” or getting digital subscriptions to cover costs, depends on the vagaries of geographically specific markets, including the presence of a benevolent benefactor, and turn to Boston and Dallas as examples to show why the specificities of particular places matters to the future of news. Goldilocks newspapers face a shared financial dilemma because of their size. They aren’t big enough to have regular national audiences, but they aren’t so small or specialized as to have niche audiences. However, we should not confuse the discussion of these sweeping digital revenue challenges with an erasure of the specificity of places themselves: Shared challenges do not displace the significance of locale. If that were the case, it would be far easier to find a solution to “save” the news. But there is no single solution because every local market is different. The specific geographic affordances of places require nimble approaches and strategies that are not necessarily scalable or able to be copied by others. At the 132

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local level, the pressure to raise digital revenue has particularly problematic consequences; for news publishers to remain solvent, they must prioritize those who will pay for news—audiences who are rich, white, and blue—worsening inequities in access to news and information. THE TICKING TIME BOMB OF LOCAL AD DOLLARS

“The only reason we’re surviving is the naiveté of local advertisers,” an ad exec at a regional newspaper confided to me in the quiet of his office. This quote has been haunting me since 2013. Newspapers were hanging on simply because local businesses did not yet know better than to advertise with them, the clock slowly running out on how long this would last. The problem only intensifies during economic down times, such as in the wake of a global pandemic, when struggling local retail establishments have far smaller budgets for advertising. It is only a matter of time before even the most naive mom-and-pop shop figures out that digital ads in a newspaper are both overpriced and less effective, and newspaper ad sales have already dropped $40 billion dollars in a ten-year span.7 By 2019, the digital advertising total expenditures in the United States reached $129 billion, more than half of all dollars spent on advertising, but digital advertising in newspapers only claimed 2.1 percent of this pot. Projections suggest that by 2023, newspapers will account for only 1 percent of dollars spent on digital ads.8 Almost 70  percent of digital ad spending goes to Google, Facebook, or Amazon.9 Digital advertising is a vibrant industry, just not for news publishers. The idea of the local ad buy sold by a local advertising salesperson at a newspaper is increasingly archaic. In the era of Google and Facebook, why would any knowledgeable local advertiser even bother with an adsales middleman at a local newspaper? In fact, in a remarkably self-destructive and short-term survival tactic, newspaper ad execs have begun serving as digital ad consultants for mom-and-pop shops, sometimes creating ads for them on Facebook or Google rather than in the newspaper where they work. Worse yet, some of these ad execs are teaching mom-and-pops how to use the Facebook and Google ad platforms for themselves. “They go into the local flower shop as the local newspaper and help the flower shop do Google ads. . . . Pl ace and the Limi t s of D ig it al Re venue

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For now, it’s new revenue as a growing marketing service and helps pay for the newsroom, but it is not a long-term business plan,” explained Jason Kint, CEO of DigitalContentNext, a trade association for digital content companies.10 Local newspaper advertising is living on borrowed time. But it wasn’t always this way, and for much of the recent postwar history of print newspapers, dominance over local advertising in a geographically specific market was the root of their financial success. Newspapers are dual-product markets, meaning that they sell content to audiences and these audiences are then sold to advertisers. Newspapers offer a bundle of content across wide-ranging subjects intended to reach different audiences, and before the web, readers couldn’t just buy one article or only read the sports section; they had to buy the whole thing. As Ben Thompson, a tech and media strategist, elucidates, “Printed newspapers were the primary means of delivering content to consumers in a given geographic region, so newspapers integrated backwards into content creation (i.e., supplier) and earned outsized profits through the delivery of advertising.”11 In short, newspapers could control both supply and distribution, with advertisers rather than audiences paying the full cost of news. Advertisers, wanting to reach as many consumers as possible as efficiently as possible, tended to devote their advertising budgets to the newspaper with the biggest circulation, causing competitors to lose revenue and eventually pushing them out of business.12 Readers, too, wanted newspapers with the most pages and the most ads. The sociologist Paul Starr calls this pattern “a law of the newspaper jungle: the survival of the fattest.”13 In postwar society, however, costs of newsprint, labor disruptions, shifting media preferences, population shifts to the suburbs, and larger social changes meant that many newspapers simply could not keep up with rising operational costs, leading to waves of consolidations, mergers, and newspaper closures.14 By the 1980s, most regions had only one newspaper that was reaping the benefits of this attentive local market.15 This meant a single newspaper had a local advertising monopoly. A newspaper’s wide but defined reach was especially meaningful for local advertisers. As the media economist Robert Picard puts it, “Newspapers are inherently local products, normally fixed to contiguous geographic areas by local retail 134

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advertising and local news demands.”16 Television cut into this dominance, but many businesses that could not afford commercials could afford to take out an ad in the newspaper. “You could go to one place, serve the ads, and because you had a targeted locale, you could see the impact, versus more general national publications, which were great for awareness but couldn’t tell you about an increase in sales,” explains Tony Haile, the founder of Chartbeat, the first web analytics measurement software for publishers. To capture television dollars, many newspaper publishers also bought television stations. Classified ads worked well, too. Newspapers were simply the best places for ordinary people to reach the widest possible audiences for everything from posting job openings to selling puppies. The owners of these big-city newspaper monopolies (first families, later chains) made oodles of money. Monopoly newspapers benefited from a bloated, inefficient local advertising market.17 Newsprint costs were roughly the same for newspapers of all sizes, thanks to very favorable tariff legislation. What were then called “general advertisers” and are today’s “brand advertisers” or “national advertisers” were generally charged more than local retail advertisers and classified ads. Most newspapers gave advertising agencies a standard 15 percent commission for sales, a differential pricing structure that remains alive today.18 In addition, ad costs were driven up because ads arrived from agencies ready to be printed, so union printers demanded that this loss of hourly labor be compensated. (The extra compensation was called “bogus.”) These boom times for newspapers in the United States should be thought of as a historical aberration that lasted at most about forty to eighty years, even though print newspaper readership continued to slowly decline. For most of U.S. history, newspapers have been money losers.19 Their inefficient local ad monopoly was ripe for disruption. S O W H AT H A P P E N E D ?

As audiences shifted online, the newspaper industry made an egocentric assumption that it would continue to hold the monopoly on audience attention. Newspaper publishers failed to anticipate what would happen when audiences could choose among national and local news competitors from rival markets, not to mention the internet’s vast Pl ace and the Limi t s of D ig it al Re venue

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choices for entertainment and social connections. Executives and strategists also misunderstood the profit incentives of digital advertising. Then, Google and Facebook built a better mousetrap: they disrupted the distribution model for news, took over the creation and the pricing of the advertising market, and colonized audience attention. But the more fundamental mistake was that the newspaper industry failed to understand the basic economic principle of supply and demand. More supply means that prices fall. When there is more supply and less demand, prices fall further. Newspapers imagined themselves as having access to infinite attention and infinite web space. The economics of digital CPMs, or cost per mille (thousand), a metric derived from a hodgepodge of television and magazine publishing metrics and early understandings of how e-commerce worked, privileged scale, or reach, across the widest possible audience. Newspapers made a play to chase scale in the hopes that they could maximize profit from huge audiences coming to their sites. As the news entrepreneur Jim Brady put it, “The theory was that the CPMs would never change, so if we doubled our traffic, we’d double our revenue, but when we doubled our traffic, the CPMs halved, and there was a lot more traffic required to keep the same thing going. We were pedaling faster and faster as the bike came apart.”20 For advertisers, on the other hand, digital advertising offered a key advantage: advertising efficacy could be measured far more precisely—or at least that was the promise. Aside from circulation data and basic audience demographics, it was hard to know how many people were actually looking at print ads, and for how long. Still, print ads were widely believed to be more engaging than digital ads. “It was measurable against unmeasurable, and that is why the digital-side numbers look so small. It’s terrible to put a number against a perception,” Brady explained. As a result, print newspaper ads remained more expensive than digital ads, which newspapers further devalued by throwing them in for “free” in advertising deals. But print circulation was eroding, meaning that the prices newspapers could charge for these ads were dropping as that fat newspaper slowly became skinnier. Misunderstanding digital economics, news publishers fell into what Bharat Anand of the Harvard Business School calls “the content trap”: in theory, the more content that could be produced, the more opportunities there would be to reach audiences, and, as a result, the more ad 136

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dollars that could be generated.21 In many cases, newspapers undermined their own news products with cheap plays for traffic like slideshows of party pictures or layouts that required audiences to click through multiple web pages. “It all got back to trying to monetize every last pixel for any revenue that could be paid to a newsroom,” Kint explained. Not only did CPMs drop substantially, but other troubles were on the horizon. Following the 2008 recession, many newspapers were hit hard by a perfect storm of rising costs, decreased print ad revenue, decreases in print subscribers, and the realization that digital ad dollars could not make up for the money lost from print advertising. Newspaper economics were a mess before Google and Facebook took their local ad business, though at this point, Craigslist shouldered much of the blame. As a result, newspapers began hunting for other models to raise money from readers.22 The era of the newspaper “paywall,” now more appropriately called a “digital subscription,” might well be officially marked in 2011 with the launch of the New York Times’ paywall, though the Dallas Morning News, which launched its paywall the same year, is also considered a “paywall pioneer.”23 The New York Times’ coverage of its paywall explained the rationale: “For years, newspaper companies have been offering Web access free in hope that the online advertising market will cover their costs. But while online advertising has grown, it has not increased quickly enough to make up for the decline in traditional print advertising. Many publications have been looking at ways to make online consumers pay as they do for print.”24 Because it was the Times, all eyes would be on its success or failure, as the company acknowledged. But therein lies the mistake: the Times is a case of one. While it is exemplary of trends and possibilities, the Times, along with its successful digital subscription model, does not offer much generalizable knowledge (as I discuss in the following chapter). Missteps were made from the outset. The entire digital subscription model was premised on a flawed understanding of digital advertising economics, whereby audiences on newspaper sites were extremely desirable, highly concentrated, and could still be bought and sold to advertisers like they once were in print. Newspapers were willing to sacrifice page views if need be. The thinking was that digital subscription revenue from fewer, loyal news consumers would drive up digital ad prices because this group Pl ace and the Limi t s of D ig it al Re venue

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was the most valuable local advertising audience. The second big mistake was that newspapers presumed that their geographically specific attention monopoly over these highly desirable audiences would continue, even in a rapidly transforming digital environment. The third big mistake was bundling a “free” digital subscription with a print subscription, undercutting the value of the digital subscription by offering it as an addon rather than as having its own merit. As a result, paywalls may have hurt more than they helped. Arguably, the majority of outlets waited too long to implement paywalls: in 2017, only about 52  percent of U.S. newspaper sites and weeklies had paywalls, but by 2019, 69 percent of them had a paywall.25 In many markets, after a paywall was introduced, traffic plummeted, never to return to previous levels.26 The choice to implement a paywall also resulted in lower traffic growth over time. The lower traffic, of course, made advertising rates on the site go down, compounding the other issues that chipped away at the digital advertising revenue model as a whole. To make up for all the lost advertising dollars, sites got overloaded by trying to turn every pixel into a dollar, and all the ad tech compromised load time. The news sites were ugly, and worse, slow.27 According to what are now decades of internet user behavior research, delayed load time frustrates web users more than almost anything else.28 In fact, there is some research that suggests that people who are able to pay for the superior print product do so rather than paying for a terrible newspaper site.29 Given the current performance of digital subscriptions, it’s unclear if most Goldilocks newspapers will ever be able to cover their costs from reader revenue. My news industry confidants often contest this critique, pointing out that relying on a paywall as a primary source of revenue requires years of sustained effort and time, maybe even five or more years to see results, given the massive change in organizational behavior and business strategy required. Nonetheless, newspapers had misunderstood scale—it wasn’t undifferentiated audiences that advertisers craved. In the print era, newspaper consumers were a reliable proxy for a local audience. In a digital advertising regime, these audiences could now be targeted not just by location but by precise demographics, psychographics, and behaviors across all of the websites they visited, not just a news site. Only a few

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large news publishers that could consistently draw massive national and international audiences could make a play for ad buys based on audience scale and demographics. Even then, the entire digital advertising infrastructure was, and is, stacked against them, with big tech, especially Google and Facebook, reaping the benefits. W H Y A R E LO C A L AU D I E N C E S S O I M P O RTA N T ?

Before I explain how tech companies built a better way to advertise and their larger role in this disruption, I want to address a question I’ve had trouble understanding. Why is it that geographically proximate audiences are so favored when it comes to the monetization of digital revenue for the vast majority of news publishers? In the opening anecdote, I relayed how the Miami Herald had record audience attention and professional recognition for its coverage of Castro’s death, but as much of this audience came from outside Miami or Florida, their views did not translate into meaningful digital ad revenue. In an era when a single news article can go viral and where you are in the world doesn’t limit what and where you can access and read, why does it matter whether audiences are physically close to a news organization? This is how it has been explained to me: Physical geography creates real, material limits on how much digital revenue can be raised from readers.30 There are only so many people in one geographic market; local attention simply cannot continue to scale beyond the size of the market itself. National brand advertising has changed too; when national brands do choose to advertise on newspaper sites, they are only likely to do so on the biggest news outlets, those with national and international audiences. Without national brands, Goldilocks newspapers are more dependent on local advertising. Even if a story gets millions of views and goes viral, the traffic that “counts” for the CPMs measured by local companies are only local digital visitors whose specific geography can be pinpointed by their IP addresses. Unlike large, national news outlets that regularly command large audiences, the spike in traffic from a local news outlet is unpredictable. With such “drive-by traffic,” even if a story goes viral, there’s little recouping the value of these geographically

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dispersed audiences in any meaningful way because there is “no internal information on them,” explained Aram Zucker-Scharff, the Washington Post’s ad engineering director, a well-regarded expert in the news and advertising technology sector. Undifferentiated scale does nothing for a local pizza shop that is advertising on a local news site; there’s almost zero likelihood that someone in Atlanta reading about Castro’s death will click on a link for 20 percent off at a Miami pizza place. When publishers attract massive audiences, they are punished for their success. Journalists at the Fort Worth Star-Telegram told me how Matt Drudge, the right-wing blogger, had published a link to a throwaway story in the newspaper about a texting dispute in a movie theater.31 The referrals from Drudge resulted in the single largest traffic numbers the newspaper had seen to date, about 6 million page views. Almost all were from outside the Fort Worth area and thus virtually meaningless for the newspaper. As Kint explained, “Once you have national traffic to a story, you just lost all of what you could uniquely package about that audience.” Local news organizations cannot capitalize on this national or international audience attention because it is not coming from valued local audiences. Local audiences are the only audiences that matter because these are the only audiences that will really make a difference in a local company’s bottom line—and the purpose of advertising, of course, is to do just that. Geography presents another challenge for newspapers: There is a limit to how many readers in one area can be converted to digital paying subscribers. Just as not everyone in a metro area subscribed to the print newspaper, not everyone will subscribe to the digital version either. The likelihood of an outsider paying for a digital subscription to the Miami Herald, absent local ties or a Miami Heat obsession, remains small, too (although McClatchy, the parent company of the Miami Herald, does offer a sports-specific subscription).32 These trends reflect the logic of what is called a total addressable market (TAM), or the most amount of revenue a business can expect to make within a specific market.33 The size of the TAM depends on the vagaries of a particular market, as does the ceiling for what people are willing to pay for a digital subscription. Simple proportions suggest that, no matter what, the Times is starting at a natural advantage as a national (and international) newspaper because there is a bigger TAM. As a newspaper becomes more highly 140

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differentiated to attract a local market, it limits its potential scale and its potential digital revenue growth, too. A B E T T E R M O U S E T R A P : G O O G L E , FAC E B O O K , A N D P R O G R A M M AT I C A D S

To be clear, it is not that local advertising is no longer profitable. Rather, newspapers lost control of the local advertising market. The problem was not that local advertising stopped working; it’s that someone—Google, Facebook, Craigslist—did it better. In fact, being able to target local customers is among the most profitable forms of advertising. “The truth is that Facebook, Google, and Amazon make most of their money off small advertisers. They have become the go-to place for any localized advertising, small scale and regional,” explained Gavin Dunaway, the editorial director of AdMonsters, an advertising industry trade site.34 While many familiar with the news industry profess to understand this story of disruption, the complexity of digital ad revenue is often poorly understood, making it harder to understand the challenges facing geographically specific news markets. The tech companies disrupted and aggregated multiple functions that newspapers used to provide, bearing none of the costs of content production. First, Craigslist disrupted small-scale person-to-person advertising; it has widely and unfairly shouldered the blame for undercutting this form of advertising revenue from local and national newspapers.35 Then, Google and Facebook gave a three-punch knockout to newspaper profits. They disrupted the distribution model for news, took over the creation and the pricing of the advertising market, and colonized audience attention. Advertisers want to reach as much of an audience as possible (often a highly defined target audience) for as cheaply as possible. By rendering, targeting, and delivering ads on platforms they control, these tech companies made advertising more efficient and less expensive for companies. Google and Facebook dominate the digital advertising industry’s underlying infrastructure for delivering ads to consumers. The word “platform” is often used to describe companies that host content they do not create but nonetheless profit from on their sites. These platforms have far more accurate data on users than a newspaper could ever have: Pl ace and the Limi t s of D ig it al Re venue

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exact knowledge about what users are interested in; what they have Googled, watched on YouTube, or shared on Facebook and Instagram; what they have recently purchased; their precise location; and beyond. This data means that local advertisers can get far more scale and accuracy to reach potential customers. Google can promise ads that, rather than appearing just on a news site, can reach a potential customer across virtually the entire inventory of websites a person might visit. The vast majority of digital advertising is facilitated through a largely automated process, often referred to as “programmatic advertising,” with supply, pricing, and delivery conducted via what are called “advertising exchanges.” Ads are bought and sold, in real time, with pricing determined by a complicated host of factors. On the open web, Google controls both the supply side and the demand side of this exchange, in addition to hosting the dominant tech platform through which these ads are delivered to audiences.36 By my count, there are at least seven steps on the “digital advertising intermediation chain” (also known as the ad tech stack) from the advertiser to the publisher to the consumer.37 Every single aspect of the direct advertising process runs through third-party software that takes a cut of the ad dollars delivered to a newspaper, from the digital advertising agencies that work with companies to the ad tech companies that deliver the ad to a website to the software that then tracks an ad’s performance. Google averages a 40  percent “take” from the ad; at best, a news publisher might get $0.60 on the dollar.38 In short, much of the advertising that news consumers see is automated via third-party software, unless there is a specific deal brokered by a newspaper’s advertising salesperson with a business. These deals are often still delivered to news consumers via these third-party-owned programmatic pipes. The entire process is rife for fraud and abuse because there’s little incentive for these exchanges to monitor fraudulent websites or juicedup measurements of digital audience size. In other words, there’s little accountability for where any of these ads end up on the web.39 News sites rarely have control over the advertising technology that tracks and delivers these digital ads, which is also responsible for the clunky, slowloading user experience. The Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal (and News Corp), and the New York Times can pay for tech talent like Zucker-Scharff, who can customize ad tech software. Other newspapers 142

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are unlikely to be able to afford or to retain staff with these skills, though the Washington Post has begun selling its own alternative ad tech stack, which it calls Zeus, to other publishers.40 But here’s the rub: these CPMs are already worth virtually nothing. While it’s hard to generalize what ads cost given that they are highly dynamic, with pricing changing in real time on the programmatic exchanges, there have been some attempts to match the cost of a journalist’s labor with the number of ads that need to be sold. In a particularly jarring infographic in the appropriately named web magazine Traffic, one learns that to pay the average salary for a staff writer in the United States (roughly $69,000 by Traffic’s estimates), it would take 89.8 million banner ads at $0.77 per CPM.41 During the most extreme days of the COVID-19 pandemic, many Goldilocks newspapers saw record traffic. It was a good opportunity to reclaim a monopoly over audience attention in a specific geographic region; these newspapers could provide locally relevant coverage that national news outlets were unlikely to provide in the same depth. Many Goldilocks newspapers dropped their paywalls for COVID-19 coverage, seeing the information as providing a public service that should be accessible to people regardless of their ability to pay, a reminder that paywalled news has increasingly become a private good (as discussed in chapter 1). Nonetheless, Goldilocks ad sales plummeted; advertisers blacklisted their ads from appearing next to words associated with the pandemic.42 The pandemic pushed many newspapers to the brink of closure. Estimates suggest over 36,000 news workers lost their jobs, faced salary cuts, or were furloughed.43 Facebook even threw $100 million toward supporting local journalism.44 This financial shock was not just caused by local companies hurting and cutting ad budgets but also by a failure of programmatic advertising. Facebook undercuts local newspapers through direct-response advertising that lives within its own walled garden, combining its rich data about you and its command over your attention on its platforms for precisely targeted ad delivery. Creating Facebook ads is incredibly simple, too, and based on user data and a few selection categories, Facebook offers the advertiser a “lookalike audience” matched to their existing audience data; Facebook says it “identif[ies]the common qualities of the Pl ace and the Limi t s of D ig it al Re venue

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people in it (for example, demographic information or interests). Then, we deliver your ad to an audience of people who are similar to (or ‘look like’) them.”45 Facebook’s tremendous targeting power has received close scrutiny in the political realm. Targeting specific communities to spread misinformation has been a tactic taken by both legitimate political campaigns and bad actors, like Cambridge Analytica and the Russian Internet Research Agency.46 But mom-and-pop shops can be similarly empowered to target potential customers without requiring a newspaper ad salesperson. Some exceptions reveal how important individual characteristics of particular places can be in the game of digital survival. The Chicago Tribune still has an architecture critic and a theater critic, a seemingly indulgent editorial investment in these times; however, Chicago is known for both its architecture and theater. Its theater scene is the most vibrant outside New York (and to some, more daring and experimental). “The Tribune has a symbiotic relationship with Chicago theater; without the Tribune, it wouldn’t exist,” the paper’s chief theater critic, Chris Jones, told me proudly.47 Jones pointed out that the theater listings and theater ads are some of the most significant ad revenue that still exists for the paper in print. While Facebook and Google could be used to target Chicago theatergoers, there is a specificity about the particular audience that reads Jones and other Chicago theater coverage online that the Tribune says offers a better chance of hitting exactly the right audience. “Local theater companies know that they can try to target by geography or interest, but if they come to us, they know that if someone is reading Chris Jones on a new opening, they have an even higher propensity [of reaching the right people],” said Kurt Gessler, director of Tribune Publishing’s editorial operations.48 “How many topic areas are like that? Too few,” he acknowledged. And local features of particular places don’t always predict digital ad revenue successes. While Chicago has many golf courses, “It was clear right away that people were not interested in the Chicago Tribune’s coverage of golf,” Gessler added. “We couldn’t offer anything unique enough.”49 Nonetheless, if it isn’t already clear to you, digital ad dollars are a hopeless way for all but a few newspapers to make any reliable revenue. For the first time in newspaper history since perhaps the early days of the party press in the United States, readers will increasingly be 144

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expected to pay the full cost of news production, which disadvantages all but the largest news outlets. H O W P L AT F O R M S C O N T R O L S C A L E ( A N D U N D E R M I N E THE LOCAL)

From the beginning of my research into the evolution of digital news, I’ve watched newspapers try to game big tech’s distribution and curation power. In 2009, I visited the Christian Science Monitor at three different points in the year to track the evolution of what was at the time a radical move: the newspaper had stopped distributing a print edition. Though the newspaper is nonprofit, it couldn’t be a money loser, and the CSM, well known for its international coverage, now needed to do everything in its power to bring people to its website.50 The premise was that Google News had considerable power to drive traffic to publishers. It was during the “content-trap era,” when traffic at scale was thought to drive profit. I watched how the newsroom became increasingly obsessed with search engine optimization (SEO). Editors scrutinized every headline, hoping that by using key terms that readers might use to search for news, the articles would be more likely to surface via Google News or Google Search, thus driving more web traffic. For other news organizations I visited at the time, this SEO strategy was outwardly discussed as the primary strategy when creating news content.51 By 2013 and 2014, the obsession with SEO and the belief that a news publisher could control its destiny had shifted to a sense of resignation in face of the all-powerful Google, particularly among local news publishers. Many felt that Google’s algorithm was biased to favor large national and international outlets, even in the case of breaking news stories that would receive the best, most comprehensive coverage from more local news outlets. Journalists at the Fort Worth Star-Telegram had a front-row seat to the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition, which has a prestigious international reputation.52 Each year, there was a week of coverage before and during the stages of the event. Because a reporter was on site to hear the eventual winner, the StarTelegram was generally the first to report it. Yet, year after year, the Star-Telegram journalists complained that, despite filing the story first and breaking the news, the New York Times or the AP would still be the Pl ace and the Limi t s of D ig it al Re venue

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top-featured news outlet on Google News, often with no link to the Star-Telegram at all. The aggregation that accompanied the story was often detailed enough to deter readers from clicking through to coverage. The Times or AP article snippets provided the key facts about the competition, thereby discouraging further exploration of more in-depth coverage from the local outlet best placed to cover the story. If local knowledge didn’t count and timing didn’t seem to matter, what did Google News care about anyway? Journalists were stymied.53 In 2015, I asked Richard Gingras, the head of Google News, why its algorithm was such a black box, given the company’s professed commitment to transparency. Gingras replied that Google News was sufficiently transparent because users could see search results.54 Publishers were wrong to presume these traffic surges could help enhance digital ad dollars, but they were not wrong to point out the power that platforms had in the curation and distribution of their content. We are now in what Columbia’s Tow Center for Digital Journalism calls the era of the “platform press,” when news publishers must rely on the vagaries of platform companies like Facebook, Google, Snapchat, YouTube, Twitter, and others to reach news consumers.55 There are two key issues that all digital publishers have to reckon with: creating content for platforms and dealing with the vagaries of how each platform’s algorithms then surface this content. The “platform press” disadvantages all but the largest news organizations. The vast majority of people see news content in the form of single stories delivered to them via myriad social media and digital platforms, what news industry insiders refer to as “distributed content.” The number of direct visits to news publishers’ websites and apps is not increasing and at best has remained stable. The mantra from news publishers is now to “reach news consumers where they are,” that is, to take advantage of every platform’s potential to bring someone to their content. Until recently, both Google News’ and Facebook’s algorithms have generally favored surfacing national news brands over local news brands. Facebook has deemphasized direct posts by news organizations entirely, favoring posts that users share with one another. Without Google on the side of content discovery, traffic drops. “Google’s search algorithm is effectively so biased against local news 146

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sources that it inflicts an unfair financial penalty on local journalism,” wrote Damon Kiesow, the former director of product at McClatchy, in the aftermath of 2018’s hurricane season, when Google results effectively ignored geographically proximate local news outlets.56 Gessler added that Google News “is a very closed system in which we have little control. It’s really stacked in favor of the largest sites these days.”57 Recent research suggests that Google News’ geographic bias is more complicated and depends on the search terms entered, though the landing page of the Google News portal offers little local news exposure.58 Google has not acknowledged that it favors larger outlets or offered much insight at all into its page rankings, but a news site’s overall site traffic, Google’s assessment of a news organization’s reputation, the number of links in a story, and its length likely all contribute. If overall traffic to a site is an important rationale for rank, big sites with already large traffic have an advantage in search. When I visited the Chicago Tribune in March 2018, I sat through their 10 a.m. Page One meeting.59 In it, the editorial team was trying to plan for the day’s stories, hoping to set digital deadlines timed with possible surges in audience demand. The team also aimed to see if there was any actionable data from the web analytics reports and social media data. At the time, Gessler pointed out a story that was doing well by his estimation (I missed the story itself), to which he added, shrugging, “I would not have thought this would have been a Google News story.” The specifics of the story aside, while trends in what Google News chooses to feature are certainly anecdotally supported, there’s still considerable ambiguity and surprise on any given day as to what and why a particular story might be surfaced by its algorithm, even to its most studious observers. To close out the presentation to the editors, Gessler pulled up the Facebook stats and shrugged his shoulders. “There’s not a lot of truth in here,” to which another editor replied with gallows humor: “No, there’s not a lot of truth in Facebook,” prompting the room of editors to chuckle.60 There is also an interpersonal aspect to distributed content. While the most powerful news publishers in the world can pick up the phone to pitch their stories to be featured on Apple News or give a heads up to Facebook, non-national brands who lack these connections cannot take advantage of similar potential partnerships.61 Further, at local Pl ace and the Limi t s of D ig it al Re venue

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newspapers, there are fewer people to create posts for social media platforms and fewer stories to choose from to post in the first place. Even comparing Goldilocks newspapers to national brands, it’s clear these newspapers simply cannot post as much or on the same variety of platforms. The Tow Center found that, while the New York Times posted on ten platforms a week, the Chicago Tribune only published on six or seven; 17  percent of the Times’ social media posts were on platforms other than Apple News, Twitter, and Facebook, compared to 1 percent of posts for the Tribune, the LA Times, and the New York Daily News.62 These factors add up, favoring large news outlets at the expense of smaller ones and, more often than not, leaving news organizations and journalists frustrated and feeling helpless. T H E VAG A R I E S O F G E O G R A P H I C A L LY SPECIFIC M ARKETS

Thus far, I’ve described issues that face a class of newspapers—the Goldilocks group. As I’ve argued, these are the reputable, original content providers for not just a metropolis but also often a region and a state. Despite their similarities, however, there is no single solution because every local market is different. In the pre-web era, media economists wrote about how media markets were defined by the particular economic geography of their specific markets. The media economist Robert Picard noted that the relative success of a newspaper depended on the particularities of that market’s retail sector, the newspaper’s reach, and its relative competition.63 This geographic specificity was reflected in the variance in print newspaper ad pricing, subscription costs, and single-copy prices. These would be set based on “some combination of circulation figures, the current strength of the local market economy, perceived competition for advertising dollars, intuition as to what the market will bear, and chance,”64 leading the media scholar Mary Alice Shaver to conclude, “pricing may appear to be both individual by market and largely arbitrary.”65 Consider the variety of characteristics that make an individual newspaper’s digital prospects distinct even among shared industry challenges. There are basic demographics. Is the city and region rich, poor, growing, in population decline, multilingual, highly educated, transient, 148

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Democratic, or Republican? Does a city have high broadband penetration? There are also foggier, harder-to-measure cultural factors. Is the city suffering from crime, mismanagement, or debt? Does the city see itself as a collection of unique neighborhoods that require specific attention, or do people prioritize a sense of region-, state-, or citywide identity? Perhaps a place is particularly corrupt and a newspaper has taken on a unique civic role that people don’t want to lose. The newspaper’s content might make a difference. If a newspaper is known for its professional sports coverage and local sports teams have a national audience, there may be less room to grow in terms of in-market audiences. How does the newspaper dedicate its resources—to statewide coverage, metropolitan coverage, or the suburbs? Where has it cut back the most? Is the newspaper visible in the community, in classrooms, and beyond? Does the newspaper think of its audience as active participants in the news production process? Is it a transparent organization that shares its reporting techniques? Has it been priced well? Is there a good user experience for digital consumers? Are there diversified digital products available, from email listservs to apps, and is there actual audience interest in them? That said, the best content in the world is not going to change the core predicament of journalism’s root problem—its financial model.66 The list of questions can go on and on. By raising some of them, I aim to highlight that places have their own histories, sociocultural contexts, and media markets. Shared problems do not create generalizable, one-size-fits-all solutions. The particular and peculiar mix of factors means that the specificity of place cannot be ignored. P L AC E M AT T E R S : W H O I S Y O U R L O C A L W E A LT H Y S AV I O R ?

To keep newspapers afloat, the au courant corporate business strategy deemphasizes newspapers’ relationship to geographically specific locations. This shift stands to further undermine any unique value that news consumers might get from their newspaper. Manufacturing a print newspaper has typically been hard to scale, with printing presses, trucking, and so forth needed nearby.67 Today, new technology can facilitate the process a bit better, and newspaper companies are developing Pl ace and the Limi t s of D ig it al Re venue

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economies of scale, consolidating newspaper properties by buying more newspapers, then consolidating as much of the labor and production processes as possible. As a result, journalism becomes increasingly delocalized: jobs get cut, leaving local communities with fewer journalists to do geographically specific coverage (as discussed in chapter 3). The buying and selling of newspapers has gotten so heated that the news industry observer Ken Doctor referred to the industry as the “Consolidation Games,” predicting that the five biggest newspaper companies would eventually merge into just two companies that would own one-third of the daily press in the United States.68 We saw hints of problems with this strategy in earlier chapters, such as what happens when newspapers are printed at remote printing presses to cut down on costs. Inflexible deadlines lead to goofs, like the Tennessean’s missed opportunity for a timely commemorative front page to celebrate Vanderbilt’s baseball College World Series win. In other cases, newspapers are edited and laid out remotely, with copy editors, page designers, and sometimes even homepage producers located far away from the city bearing a newspaper’s name. This remote editing and pagination can lead to embarrassing mistakes a local copy editor would presumably be less likely to make, such as misspelled street names or editing out local nicknames for various locations. To avoid some of these issues, McClatchy centralized much of its web production and print design but left copy editing to local newsrooms. Kerry Beam, senior director of news publishing, explained that the consolidation is not all bad news: “We have a template that newsrooms use called our daily print plan. The newsrooms can determine what they want on section fronts or the local front and the sports front.”69 She acknowledges that readers will complain on Twitter and Facebook about mistakes but points out that “people make mistakes,” noting that twenty years ago, the Charlotte Observer had twenty-five designers and still made mistakes.70 With these efficiencies and new technologies that facilitate quicker design, McClatchy now averages 2.4 staffers in the publishing center per newspaper. Nonetheless, even the once-successful McClatchy has declared bankruptcy. Newspapers are an aging industry that many investors would call “distressed.” Many have filed for bankruptcy, with more likely to follow.71 Their status also leaves them vulnerable to consolidation. 150 Pl ace and the Limi t s of D ig i t al Re venue

Some of the biggest new shareholders are hedge funds. One hedge fund, Alden Global Capital, has become so notorious for buying newspapers and then stripping away core resources that some refer to its practices as “vulture capital.” In fact, the pending threat of Alden Capital becoming the dominant shareholder of Tribune Publishing prompted the Chicago Tribune investigative journalists David Jackson and Gary Marx to pen an op-ed in the New York Times calling for “a civic-minded local owner or group of owners” to rescue the newspaper from Alden.72 However, the last local owner, Sam Zell, drove the company into bankruptcy in 2010, less than a year after he bought it.73 The call for a return to a newspaper owned by a benevolent benefactor is exactly the type of anachronism that reveals just how much place matters. The presumption is that before newspapers were mostly owned by big corporate chains and publicly traded, local family owners invested in journalism because they cared about their communities and put civic interests before (or at least on par with) profit. If these newspapers could be relocalized and owned by a local benevolent benefactor, the hope is that a charitable do-gooder with strong civic sensibilities might have a better tolerance for financial losses. From this view, investing in a newspaper is like investing in the local opera or other civic institutions; people who have ties to the community and a lot of money will see the importance of quality journalism in a city. This wide-eyed localism that favors a local owner obscures the complicated history that many local newspaper owners have had with their communities. Any new benefactor will also likely face conflicts of interest. Not every city will have the same kind of wealth, nor will the crown philanthropist in town always be predisposed to support journalism. For instance, the Seattle Times is still majority owned by the Blethens, the family that has owned it since 1896. It exemplifies the kind of ethos a local owner is supposed to provide a newspaper, putting good journalism first rather than profit. But it is an anomaly and one that has been the result of careful and intentional family dicta. The Blethen family rotates the next generation of newspaper leaders across the various branches in the company with the hope they will gain an appreciation for how a newspaper works.74 Despite the hard times facing newspapers, the Seattle Times, which has faced cutbacks, has also continued to produce award-winning journalism, winning four Pulitzers between 2010 Pl ace and the Limi t s of D ig it al Re venue

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and 2020. Seattle, a large, liberal city with tremendous wealth and a strong civic culture of collective organizing, may make publisher Frank Blethen’s job a little easier. Blethen is newspaper wealthy, not pharmaceutical, real estate, or startup wealthy, and his background is likely a significant distinction when it comes to a tolerance for loss and a commitment to civic information. Nonetheless, Blethen spearheaded the Save the Community Newspaper Act through Congress, making it easier for him to defer employee pension contributions; good for Blethen, but not so good for employees.75 On the other side of the coin, in 2015, local leaders in Los Angeles hoped a new owner for the LA Times would restore quality news coverage. The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors passed a resolution calling for the LA Times to be returned to local ownership, and fifty local civic leaders signed a letter to the Tribune Company expressing the same sentiment.76 One potential investor was Eli Broad, who had tried to buy the newspaper three times from Tribune. Broad has invested heavily in art and philanthropy. He was not only a “walking conflict of interest,”77 as one LA Times journalist put it, but was also critiqued for “his instinct for getting the greatest return on his philanthropic dollars—not only in personal aggrandizement but in the freedom to do as he pleases in public institutions.”78 A benevolent owner alone, however, cannot fix a market that, for other reasons, will not support journalism via digital subscriptions. The LA Times was bought in 2019, but not by Broad. Its new owner, the biotech billionaire Patrick Soon-Shiong, has reinvested in a battered LA Times newsroom, which a decade ago saw itself as a legitimate competitor to the big East Coast newspapers.79 But these investments have not paid off; a year after Soon-Shiong’s purchase, in 2019, the LA Times had hoped to double its subscriptions from 150,000 to 300,000 but instead was only able to boost new subscriptions by 13,000. Los Angeles has many, many wealthy people and is another deep-blue pocket that might feel inclined to support local journalism. The newspaper has recommitted to quality journalism, including a hiring spree that raided talent from the Times and the Post. But it isn’t enough. While the number of digital subscriptions to the Boston Globe is just below that of the LA Times, the Boston area is one-third the size of the LA metro area, meaning that a far larger proportion of Boston residents are purchasing 152

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digital subscriptions to their hometown paper than Angelinos are to theirs.80 Why is the LA Times not reaping success from these investments? What is it about the LA market? Perhaps the New York Times’ growth in California has satisfied the need for that “first-read” quality newspaper. Perhaps there is something about transience in Los Angeles that leaves some readers feeling less rooted to LA institutions. Or perhaps Los Angeles’s majority-minority population simply does not see a reason to support a news organization with a long history of establishment “white” views that has not reached anywhere near racial parity in its staffing with the population it covers. The fate of the LA Times depends in part on Soon-Shiong’s patience and benevolence. These big, wealthy, liberal cities may have many potential saviors with deep pockets that might stave off decline. Other places may have fewer, and saviors are unlikely to help much given the difficulty of local economic geography. Consider Youngstown, Ohio, and the plight of the Vindicator. In a Monday newspaper before it closed, the Vindicator had eight column inches of print advertising—roughly the length of a newspaper’s crime blotter. In part, the limited advertising is because Youngstown is so economically depressed that local stores do not have budgets to advertise. Youngstown’s local saviors could have been the family that owns the San Francisco 49ers, the DeBartolos, who have made philanthropic contributions to Youngstown State.81 However, the family patriarch Eddie DeBartolo Jr. was pardoned by Trump for a felony bribery case, and the family has many rumored mafia ties, suggesting a possible newspaper owner–local philanthropy– civic information mismatch, to say the least. Other possible benefactors are rumored to have similar underworld ties.82 (The Vindicator has relaunched under new, quasi-local ownership with minimal local coverage.) Some employees at the Erie Times-News have quietly hoped to be purchased by local billionaire Tom Hagan, the fifth-richest man in Pennsylvania and 1,098th  richest man in the world.83 Thus far, Hagan has been a benevolent philanthropist whose dollars have helped restore vitality to the Rust Belt city, but he shows no signs of interest in the newspaper. And Warren Buffett, a well-reputed newspaper lover, has pulled out his investments in newspapers, even selling his beloved hometown paper, the Omaha World-Herald.84 Not Pl ace and the Limi t s of D ig it al Re venue

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every city will have the same kind of wealth, nor will the top philanthropist in town be predisposed to support journalism. T H E C U R I O U S C A S E O F T H E B O ST O N G LO B E

Across the landscape of the U.S. news industry, there are a handful of bright spots, with signs that the right mix of variables, from audience demographics to ownership, means that market failure might be avoided in that particular city. The case of the Boston Globe is particularly noteworthy because it shows how important the specificity of place is to the future of journalism. In late 2018, the Boston Globe moved into the black, with its owner John Henry disclosing, “I don’t know how long it has been . . . since the Globe had a profitable year but we will this year and probably next as well.”85 Then, in 2019, the newspaper became the first “local” newspaper for which “digital subscribers surpassed that of its weekday print subscribers for the first time—likely the only traditional, regional daily in the U.S. to have done so,” as the Boston Business Journal reported.86 Though the newspaper is likely struggling in the wake of the pandemic, as the Northeastern journalism professor and long-time New Englander Dan Kennedy explained to me: I have often wondered whether the Globe’s strategy could be replicated elsewhere. Boston is still a good newspaper town, and a good news town. We have two major public broadcasting outlets doing news, WBUR and WGBH . . . a terrific nonprofit called CommonWealth magazine, a few top-notch neighborhood newspapers, and even local TV news that is not terrible, or at least not as terrible as it is elsewhere. Could any other city of Boston’s size support that? I don’t know.87

As a place, Boston and the wider New England region have a geographic, cultural, and symbolic context that give its newspaper of record a fighting chance at survival. There is a large cultural history that may factor into this success. The area is wealthy, highly educated, and civically engaged; a “deep blue” liberal stronghold; and committed to the pursuit of learning. Tocqueville was impressed by the New England town hall meeting as a 154

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model of direct democracy, facilitated in part through newspapers, and today’s presidential primary campaign in New Hampshire reflects this legacy. Colin Woodard, a Maine journalist whose pop history argues that the United States can be broken up into eleven nations, refers to New England as part of “Yankeedom,” distinct from other areas of the country for its respect for education and commitment to the common good.88 Add to these factors that the Boston area is also home to some of the most august universities in the United States: Harvard University and MIT, not to mention large top-ranked schools like Boston College and Boston University, alongside dozens of elite liberal arts schools like Wellesley and Emerson (known for its journalism program). Northeastern University’s “co-op” system of internships has long partnered with the Globe to supply a regular fleet of interns.89 According to some basic demographic data, almost 50 percent of Boston metro residents have a college degree,90 and the area is one of the top ten wealthiest cities in the United States (though of course that wealth is not evenly distributed).91 All these factors make the area fairly advantageous for predicting possible digital subscribers. The argument to get a socially conscious, financially comfortable Harvard graduate in Boston to support his or her local newspaper with a digital subscription is not as likely to be as heavy a lift as it might be elsewhere. I speak anecdotally, having ties to both the Boston Globe and Harvard, and the conversation among my classmates about local news subscriptions reflects this responsibility. The Boston Globe has other structural advantages. First, the Globe has had a “two-site” digital strategy since 2011.92 Boston.com is free and intended for a “more casual audience,” while bostonglobe.com has a “hard paywall” for the “most committed, regular web readers.”93 The newspaper also has a lot of readers who are used to paying a lot of money for news. In 2018, the Boston Globe was the most expensive daily print newspaper subscription in the United States, charging $1,350. It also has what Joshua Benton of Nieman Lab characterized as a “super expensive digital subscription” of $360 annually. For perspective, an entire year’s subscription to the print version of the Detroit Free Press is $288,94 and the New York Times’ annual digital subscription is $260.95 The digital ads, too, can command good rates thanks to a local “desirable” market of high-net-worth people.96 Finally, the Globe has invested in Pl ace and the Limi t s of D ig it al Re venue

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technology developed by the Washington Post that delivers a solid user experience, and while it is not as smooth as the Post’s, Kennedy describes it as “good enough.” Like many metro newspapers, the Globe has massive traffic coming from sports teams. But it has differentiated its content and, to put it gently, still has the kind of content that smart people expect to see in their local newspaper—perhaps an exception to the rule that content won’t fix journalism’s problems.97 In fact, when the milestone of more digital than print subscribers was reached, the newspaper’s director of consumer revenue, Tom Brown, credited not just the mix of financial enticements but also “the coverage and highly converting content,” which included a spotlight investigative series on an NFL player charged with murder, as “a major driver of the surge.” Add in one more essential factor—ownership. Although the model of the benevolent newspaper baron is a throwback to an earlier era of American history, John Henry, the Boston Globe’s owner and “new media baron”98 is the 319th wealthiest billionaire in the world.99 Henry also owns the Boston Red Sox, the Liverpool Football Club, and NESN (New England Sports Network), which ESPN has described as “a cash cow that’s the envy of baseball.”100 Although life at the Boston Globe has been rocky, and while ownership under Henry sometimes results in some prickly situations when the newspaper is covering his investments, arguably it has been less rocky thanks to an owner whose financial success does not hinge on the newspaper.101 Observers note that his wife, Linda Henry, loves the Globe, providing another layer of comfort. As Kennedy points out, the paid-only digital circulation numbers do seem to be bolstered by massive discounts, but in his view, “What’s good about that is that Henry wants to hang on to those readers, and he can’t do it unless he maintains the product.”102 Given this mix of factors, the Boston Globe may or may not be able to sustain its digital success, but its case speaks to how industry-wide challenges meet the geographic realities of particular areas. Boston has a specific cultural legacy, a benevolent owner who may grow frustrated with losses but has provided stability to the newspaper, and a highly educated and wealthy audience accustomed to paying some of the most expensive rates for its newspaper. This audience may be particularly responsive to editorial investments in quality content, which lie firmly 156

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in the hands of the newspaper, rather than third-party business partners. Boston is an outlier, but there are other cities, such as Seattle, Philadelphia, and Minneapolis, where dedicated community stakeholders are working, and are close to succeeding, in making their newspapers marginally solvent. All of these have benefited from local ownership and investment. In other words, place matters. Geographically specific factors like regional wealth; the presence or absence of a benevolent, wealthy, would-be newspaper owner; partisanship; commitment to civic engagement and local information; among other factors, affect a newspaper’s sustainability. W H AT ’S T H E M AT T E R W I T H DA L L A S ?

The Dallas Morning News, another early innovator in the paywall model for journalism, is also struggling with digital subscriptions, though it shares many of the same characteristics that are arguably contributing to Boston’s success. The Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex has been ranked among the top ten globally for high-net-worth individuals having between $1 million and $30 million103 and has been fairly regularly tagged as the “city of millionaires.” Plus, while a fast-growing city, it is not particularly transient.104 The newspaper is in a “blue” city surrounded by “red” outlying counties, but the newspaper’s editorial page has a long history of pro-business conservatism, only breaking with its tradition of endorsing Republican presidential candidates since World War II to “recommend” Hillary Clinton in 2016.105 The newspaper chain that owns it, A. H. Belo, began as a Texas newspaper company in 1842, and while it is publicly traded on the NYSE, it is still family run, thanks to its dual stock structure.106 Generally speaking, people in Dallas have favorable opinions about the area news media’s connection to the community; more than 80 percent say local media covers the community well and provides the information they need, and more than 60 percent say that journalists are connected to the community.107 The newspaper has retained a Washington bureau, can claim nine Pulitzers, and had three Pulitzer finalist nods between 2015 and 2020.108 The Dallas Cowboys are all but an institution in Texas (and America’s team), and the Dallas Morning News’ editor Mike Wilson noted, “The Cowboys and Mavericks traffic is just massive for us.”109 Pl ace and the Limi t s of D ig it al Re venue

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The newspaper has also directly sought advice from outsiders about how to grow, from participating in the Facebook local subscription accelerator to bringing in the American Press Institute as a strategy consultant to optimize digital audiences.110 When Wilson took the top job in 2015, he was the first editor in thirty-five years to come into the top job from outside the paper.111 So, what is it about the Dallas Morning News—by all accounts doing everything in its power to monetize online at least from an editorial and business standpoint—that makes this such an uphill battle? The 2017 numbers give a sense of the mismatch: The newspaper has roughly 24,000 digital subscriptions and a paid print circulation of  98,000 on weekdays and 160,000 on Sundays.112 In 2018, quarterly earnings showed that the digital subscriptions amounted to 2 percent of revenue, accounting for just over a million dollars.113 If one size fits all Goldilocks papers, then surely the Dallas Morning News would be positioned well. Yet, as Pew numbers reveal, only 11  percent of those surveyed in the market turn to local newspapers often as their top local news provider, while 41 percent turn to television. The shared challenges meet differentiated local responses with different predictors of continued success and particular challenges because the where of news—where journalists are and where the newspaper is located—matters. But in a desperate quest for survival, newspapers are increasingly challenged in their ability to cover places well and remain financially afloat. The journalism that used to define a region is not just decimated in terms of its content but is also almost entirely dependent on raising revenue from the people willing to pay for journalism— reinscribing existing inequities in access to news and information. With all of these efforts, it is unclear what the Dallas Morning News would have to do differently, as its approach to raising reader revenue follows the best textbook advice that journalism and business consultants can offer. PAY I N G C U S TO M E R S : T H E R I C H , W H I T E , A N D B LU E

The question of what gets people to pay for news has perplexed many of the brightest minds in journalism and adjacent fields. As in the past, newspapers and legacy media outlets have wanted subscribers with the 158

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right set of demographics and the disposable income to resell this audience to advertisers. Now, newspapers are almost entirely dependent on these audiences for their revenue. To get paying subscribers, what are newsrooms optimizing for? The current pressures on news production and business strategy, in part rooted in geography, result in a series of implicit and explicit decisions that shapes the news we ultimately see. Though my focus is not on the behavior of audiences but rather what is happening inside newsrooms, these claims about who will be left both picking up the costs and consuming quality news are not generalizations; they are important inequities to reckon with and to try to avoid. Many of the solutions prioritize a particular type of news consumer that is likely either to be high net worth or to have high social capital. Which audiences are favored, given structural legacies around race? As chapter 2 shows, efforts at diversifying newsrooms stop when hiring stops. For old, legacy institutions like Goldilocks newspapers, which are already white institutions, we should be alarmed about the likely uniformity of loyalist audience members and what it means to singularly pursue likely subscribers at the expense of nontraditional readers. As one news executive at a large Midwestern newspaper put it, “We don’t write for white subscribers, but it ends up being white people who read us.”114 Mike Wilson, of the Dallas Morning News, explains, “The pursuit of digital subscriptions has honed our focus on what we are covering.”115 He then quipped about probably doing more coverage than he’d like in Plano, a wealthy suburb where the 1980s show Dallas was set; Plano might as well be code for “wealthy,” and, given the context, “white,” too.116 Wilson agrees that it is fair to “criticize us and other news organizations for having focused on our traditional, mostly white, audiences at the expense of other audiences. . . . We recognize that we’ve historically underserved communities of color.”117 Since our initial interview in 2019, Wilson pointed out the newspaper has tried to address this concern, investing additional reporting resources into covering more diverse communities. News organizations are trying all sorts of packages to woo “engaged” readers and build loyalty, from happy hours to meetups to scavenger hunts, and the targeted readers are all those who have the time and interest to be engaged with a news site, a flag for a particular class and level of Pl ace and the Limi t s of D ig it al Re venue

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cultural capital. Consider the Dallas Morning News’s efforts. It has created a subscriber loyalty program, “Plugged In,” with biweekly newsletters that include perks like ticket giveaways, a subscriber-only Facebook group, and special events. One event included a chance to meet with the Cowboys legend Emmitt Smith.118 These efforts are modeled on some of public media’s strategies for building audiences; time is money, and the question becomes just whom these add-on bonus events are for, who gets to enjoy them, and whether they end up costing more time and effort than they are worth. Research suggests a pro-social ethos among members of news sites, who told researchers at Columbia University’s Tow Center for Digital Journalism that “they are committed to news being a public resource, not an exclusive preserve with a gate around it.”119 In many cases, donating so others can get news for free is a point of pride, suggesting the allure of donations to public media rather than a commercial enterprise that will keep its paywall up.120 Will there be a red/blue divide among possible subscribers? The Membership Puzzle Project, which focuses on the digital revenue problem, concluded, “It seems increasingly likely that readers who value a public service press are going to have to sustain it themselves—by contributing money, sharing knowledge, and spreading the word.”121 Their word for this type of person is “member,” which connotes a public media model. No citation is needed to suggest the long-standing antipathy Republican lawmakers have for public media; language that presents commercial media as member driven might motivate the left but not the right. The Guardian, run by a nonprofit trust, has used this language to encourage readers to support its journalism, and it is now, after many years, showing signs of success.122 It is also a left-leaning news outlet based in the United Kingdom, another exception rather than a rule. Does buying a local newspaper subscription now need to be viewed as a charitable act, albeit one linked to commercial institutions? If so, that may well have differential impacts depending on where a newspaper is located. (Nonprofit revenue streams for news are explored in chapter 7.) The fate of the Salt Lake Tribune, now a nonprofit, provides hope for those bullish about nonprofit newspaper ownership, although again, place matters: donations are just that, donations, gathered from a largely Mormon, right-leaning population used to tithing 10  percent. The Philadelphia Inquirer is now owned by the nonprofit Lenfest 160

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Institute for Journalism, thanks to deceased local scion and owner Gerry Lenfest, relieving some pressure on the struggling newspaper. But regulatory problems may ensue if local newspapers continue to pursue this strategy. The IRS “often doesn’t look kindly on a nonprofit that seems to only support one specific business,” and nonprofit ownership “does not give the organization carte blanche to fund a money-losing, for-profit operation,” as Nieman Lab’s Christine Schmidt explained.123 This chapter has raised red flags about the perverse market incentives around digital content and their impact on newspapers, with particular attention to the Goldilocks-sized newspapers that are too big to claim niche, localized audiences but too small to claim regular national and international readers. These dynamics affect news publishers of all types, including digital-first outlets, but newspapers have had the most to lose and still have bulky operating costs, so they are uniquely adversely affected. The effect on newspapers stands to further prioritize some audiences over others, with news increasingly a gated, private good. While these newspapers share common problems given their similar size, the particularities of their geography and the specificities of their local market have contextual variables that are unique to each place. No one-size-fits-all approach has managed to solve the problems of newspapers and the financing for news publishing, and these are especially likely to fail if inspired by one-off cases like the Boston Globe or large national and international outlets like the New York Times and the Guardian. In fact, as the next chapter shows through the case of the New York Times’ successful digital revenue strategy, to succeed, a news outlet must be able to transcend the limits of physical geography, as the Times attempts to do by running a 24/7, global news production process aimed at reaching a global, interconnected class of elites.

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CH APTER SIX

The Counterpoint The New York Times’ Chase for Global Readers

“The rise of the Times as a global news organization in some ways mirrors a rise in inequality, where there is a global class of connected citizens who rely on a handful of preferred, largely English, sources of news and information,” pointed out Lydia Polgreen, then editor in chief of HuffPost and the former editorial director of NYT Global.1 The New York Times is staking its survival on its exceptionalism as a generalinterest newspaper targeted at an elite, educated audience of paying readers who are interested in understanding global flows of political power, culture, and capital, readers who benefit from the prevailing political order and economy. The Times aims to conquer place by scale, redefining the potential reach of its paying audience beyond local, state, and even national borders. The case of the Times, then, is a counterpoint to the economic constraints faced by Goldilocks newspapers. It is also an exceptional case rather than a generalizable one,2 and given its particular set of resources and advantages, it is positioned to have at least a fighting chance to survive the market failure of newspaper journalism. The New York Times’ answer to the perverse logics of digital content economics is to build a subscription base beyond its U.S. market. If it reaches its goal of 10 million digital subscriptions by 2025, it will be able to forgo dependency on digital advertising.3 Thanks to McKinsey, the global consulting firm, the Times recognized early that growth in new

U.S. subscriptions would have a ceiling, although it continues to gain new U.S. subscribers, according to its quarterly earnings.4 The Times expansion plan, then, rests on the presumption that its journalism will be attractive to not just a U.S. elite but a global elite, as well as the “creative class,” or knowledge workers who recognize the value of paying for a digital subscription to the Times.5 Practically speaking, the Times has made a full-fledged international investment in editorial content and implemented a business strategy that seeks to convert the 27 percent or so of Times readers who live abroad—approximately 38 to 40 million readers a month but only 15 percent of the digital subscription base— into new digital subscribers.6 To win over these audiences, the Times has facilitated a “placeless” model of news production, in which physical geography is less important than the production of a 24/7, on-demand news report that is relevant to a certain class of people regardless of where they live. The Times is an exemplary case of digital capitalism in action, what the critical media scholar Daniel Schiller articulated as a move from “mass” to “class” marketing, as well as “from national to transnational.”7 Those inside the newspaper are well aware that, to reach the elite, this approach will leave some, if not many, people without access to quality news and information. At a private dinner hosted by the Times at the Savoy Hotel in London in 2016, another newspaper editor-in-chief, Alan Rusbriger of the Guardian, recalled hearing the Times’ executive editor, Dean Baquet, malign the fate of a depleted American news ecosystem, a “new reality in which 98% of Americans were now excluded from the New York Times’ journalism and might well have to do with substandard information.”8 But the Times is a business, and its expansion strategy reflects how market-driven concerns incentivize newspapers to appeal to elite news consumers, particularly English-speaking ones, if not also the “white” and “blue.” Place, as a conceptual lens, helps us see the tensions inherent in the Times’ global ambitions, from the conditions of material geography and the networks of people in and across places to the symbolic power of the Times as an institution in (and from) a place. For this chapter, I spoke with eighteen current and former leaders at the Times, including five journalists I first studied in 2010. I also visited the Times in New York and in London in 2019. I found that place intersects with all the best-laid T he C oun ter p oin t

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plans to pursue a global “class” market: language and cultural barriers are still present; even the Times’ ample resources limit the extent of coverage; cross-national cultural, regulatory, and political differences present challenges; and platform companies present similar headaches at the global scale as they do in U.S. markets. Still, to survive, the Times must find a way to avoid the limitations of the digital content economics that other U.S. newspapers face. T H E A M B I T I O N O F P L AC E L E S S N E S S

In 2010, before the newspaper’s digital expansion plans were fully baked, Gerry Mullany, the then–night editor of the Times, told me, “The New York Times never sleeps.”9 The newspaper was not yet fully in 24/7 operation mode, but as of 2020, almost a decade after its paywall was first introduced, it is accurate to say that the Times’ business strategy may as well be boasting of an empire on which the sun never sets. The Times has tried to escape the limitations of place, understood not just as its material geography but also as an outlook, and is moving away from a New York–based view of the world—one that, despite its urbanity, can be quite provincial. Place, as I have argued in previous chapters, needs to be understood as a multifaceted concept that brings together physical geography; our setting and context for social relations; and larger flows of power, symbols, and imaginaries. To claim “placelessness” is to claim the power to traverse through places as an elite who can ignore various material realities that might limit action.10 At the firm level, at which the Times operates, to ignore or to diminish the importance of place is to establish control over the flows of knowledge and capital.11 To do so, the Times has refashioned its entire production process, integrating preexisting outposts in Europe and Asia into a 24/7 digital news operation that allows it to “cheat time” by escaping the realities of time zones.12 This approach goes hand in hand with a distinctive market proposition that comes from news produced by companies headquartered in the United States, where the national myth of free speech and freedom of expression has long propelled an imperialist exportation of these values. Stephen Dunbar-Johnson, president, International of the New York Times Company, described his vision for how the Times would be regarded by international readers: “I want people to think about the 164

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Times as representing the best traditions of American journalism, as journalism with an American accent: highly credible, well researched, thorough, and appeal[ing] to discerning international readers eager for that independent perspective.”13 For all its efforts to escape place, though, the Times must still confront it. As much as it aspires to reach a “class” market of global elites, the Times must still reconcile the “globallocal” nexus of “distinctive identities and interests of local and regional communities.”14 When viewed in light of the desperation experienced by Goldilocks newspapers, the Times’ plans sound bold, daring, and innovative. But the Times pales in comparison to the giant media conglomerates that are typically thought of as global media companies. Unlike News Corp, it does not have divisions and differentiated businesses located across the globe.15 There is no sustained effort at movie production in Hollywood, or a satellite news channel in multiple markets, or newspaper publishing and investments in startups across the globe. For the most part, there’s just the Times’ journalism. It is a big deal for the Times to have produced a few shows in partnership with Netflix and Hulu16 and to be able to claim a podcast ranked in the top ten by popularity in the United States (the Daily).17 While it has diversified its business to include venture investment into digital startups and an advertising brand studio and has re-upped various experiments with e-commerce from wine clubs to product tie-ins, the Times cannot claim the international infrastructure of a major, international media corporation; it is not a “global media firm.” Even a comparison of the Times with news outlets like CNN and the noncommercial BBC is almost laughable.18 Both CNN and the BBC have had the legacy infrastructure to report and to distribute broadcast content around the world for decades. They have both arguably been able to trade on a successful deterritorializing of news, in part because 24/7 global satellite delivery has created what the global media scholar Ingrid Volkmer calls a “world-wide homogeneously time-zoned bios politiken” that has had significant implications for real-time global politics.19 In this vein, Ted Turner is long ago rumored to have banned the word “foreign” from broadcasts, such that a “viewer should [n]ever feel ‘othered’ by finding that his or her part of the world was covered by a ‘foreign correspondent.’ ”20 The Times did make a similar call to rename T he C oun ter p oin t

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its foreign desk the “international desk” in 2013, according to Times insiders.21 In comparison to other peer news outlets that have abandoned international growth strategies, such as the Wall Street Journal and the Economist, the Times has continued to expand, raising questions whether its plan may be outmoded because of the high costs of global expansion and the risks of moving into new markets. Further, the Times is also challenged by the Guardian, which has expanded beyond the United Kingdom to build robust operations in Australia and, to a lesser extent, the United States, offering its content without a paywall. How, then, can the Times hope to compete? With a presumably saturated global news market and an increasingly uncertain market for journalism, the risks of missteps are huge. Perhaps the Times’ hopes can be explained by its hubris. “Part of it is the arrogance of the New York Times: It is the best coverage you are going to get anywhere, so if we pick our spots and we cover big issues that really matter, we will get readers that want to pay for us,” argued Larry Ingrassia, former deputy managing editor, who helped oversee the Times’ global expansion.22 He pointed out that although the Times was not going to be able to provide blanket coverage day to day for all major news events, it was reasonably confident that it could “nonetheless win lots of subscribers by providing the best coverage of the biggest stories and biggest issues.” Add to this confidence some previous big bets that have paid off and rightful claims to preexisting strengths, and international expansion starts to seem like a reasonable option for a newspaper that understands the limitations of digital advertising and digital subscription models. T H E T I M E S ’ E XC E P T I O N A L I S M

There’s a broader question about how material geography has intersected with the Times’ success beyond New York. Events of consequence happen in New York, and urban and suburban dwellers among the New Yorker elite are powerful beyond their immediate geographic reach. In other words, New York City is a media capital and a financial capital. Since Adolph Ochs bought the Times in 1896, the newspaper has faced the challenge of being in a place like New York while looking outward to a more refined class of readers and promising appeal beyond the tabloid sensationalism of its day. The long-term effects of such an approach are 166

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hard to quantify. Fast forward to 1978, before the Times became a national newspaper, when it made a play to win New York’s bedroom suburbs. Editor Seymour Topping, who lived in a mansion in Scarsdale, explained that “suburbanites wished to retain their link to New York City in cultural terms . . . to know what was going on in the Big Town with theaters, museums, and restaurants.”23 That was how my parents read the Times, and it provided a sense of cosmopolitanism amid the banality of the suburbs, a strategy that enabled readers to feel like members of two communities at once. The suburbs were validated by the big-city newspaper and “the greater metropolis” itself.24 As a result, the Times has not been like every other newspaper for most of its existence: it was always a newspaper aware of its potential to sell its readers on a promise of urbane sophistication. In 1992, when Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr. took over the newspaper from his father, one of his first tasks was to pursue a national expansion. “It took some heavy lifting honestly, because it wasn’t clear that the business model would work,” he told the Times in a story about turning over the realm to his son, A. G. Sulzberger.25 Consider the infrastructure required to move from producing newspapers in the Northeast to printing daily newspapers all over the country and delivering them to far-flung subscribers. Though the expansion began at a time when the web was just becoming popular, the Times won—handedly in most markets—by shifting print subscribers from the local newspaper to its own product.26 In 2016, the Times could still claim print subscribers in all fifty states (although Montana and the Dakotas together accounted for only 120 subscriptions).27 In the early digital era, the Times had successfully shifted attention away from local news to national news among print subscribers. It certainly could not be called a Goldilocks newspaper. These bets on a national audience provided a bedrock foundation for an audience of digital subscribers in the years to come. Notably, as international and national growth took off, the Times retrenched from its more pedestrian New York metropolitan coverage. As it became increasingly clear that digital disruption was going to unsettle the newspaper industry, the Times made some additional choices that set it apart from other news organizations. By 2007, the Times had already attempted a paywall, called TimesSelect, which promised access to archives and op-ed columns and some online content for T he C oun ter p oin t

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$7.95 per month/$49.95 per year. The product failed after a two-year trial, but 2007 was still in the era before Facebook and Google had come to dominate the advertising market. The New York blog Gothamist quoted then–NYTimes.com senior VP and general manager Vivian Schiller: “What wasn’t anticipated was the explosion in how much of our traffic would be generated by Google, by Yahoo and some others.” She noted that “the Times now expects a bump in traffic with demise of TimesSelect.”28 These observations have become conventional for newspapers that have introduced paywalls; once a paywall is introduced, traffic declines—and unfortunately, for most newspapers, it never recovers. It was a lesson the Times learned early, and they did recover. In the midst of the Great Recession, the Times took a bet on turning to the Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim, who gave the company a $250 million loan and later became its largest single stockholder, essentially bailing out the Times.29 As a result of the newspaper’s international appeal to a global elite, the Times had an option that would be difficult for nearly every other newspaper or newspaper chain in the United States to consider.30 The Times’ second attempt at a paywall, in 2011, still came earlier than that of most other newspapers. The Times hedged its bets on digital subscriptions, introducing what was then called a “metered” paywall. Access to the homepage remained free, but after twenty articles, a reader was blocked from reading other articles unless they subscribed. Four years later, the Times reached the million-digital-subscriber benchmark, leading the industry expert Ken Doctor to conclude that “readers reward global elite journalism.”31 The Times had surpassed McKinsey’s estimation of its growth cap, with roughly the same number of paying digital subscribers as it had print subscribers in 1995.32 The question would be how to keep this number growing, especially as overall revenue growth wasn’t budging. The Times had put itself through rigorous self-studies to figure out its digital plans. One, in 2014, dubbed “The Innovation Report,” was supposed to remain an internal document but was subsequently leaked by BuzzFeed.33 A major suggestion was to hire new kinds of expertise, from technology talent to digital marketing experts to data scientists, and it was a strategy the Times aggressively pursued. But such an option was only available to the Times and a few other news outlets. The cachet of a Google executive or top data scientist at Apple taking a salary cut to 168

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work at the Times was compelling and could be pitched as a principled decision.34 The Omaha World-Herald simply does not inspire the same sort of self-sacrifice. The Times’ “free” article count has now become a dynamic paywall, with “digital subscription offers to different subsets of their audience, depending on their interests, online behavior, and price sensitivity.”35 The ability to establish this kind of paywall speaks to the tech talent and data scientists the Times has retained. With large concentrations of tech companies in New York, the job swapping was facilitated in part by proximity and geography—a cultural class, knowledgeworker version of economies of scale. Three years later, a second report, “Journalism That Stands Apart,” by the Times “2020 Group” articulated what would be the guiding vision for the newspaper going forward: We are, in the simplest terms, a subscription-first business. Our focus on subscribers sets us apart in crucial ways from many other media organizations. We are not trying to maximize clicks and sell low-margin advertising against them. We are not trying to win a pageviews arms race. We believe that the sounder business strategy for The Times is to provide journalism so strong that several million people around the world are willing to pay for it.36

What both of these reports suggest is that there was an international audience that was already coming to the Times, but only a limited number of these international visitors were subscribers. As former associate managing editor for audience Jodi Rudoren explained, “We saw this as one of our huge potential growth opportunities. My sense is that we were surprised to learn how big our international audience was, and wow, it was so big, and we were not trying that hard to cultivate one. So, what [would it look like] if we leaned into it?”37 The Times had held onto an international investment, which comprised the legacies of global partnerships with the International HeraldTribune, with newsrooms in Paris and Hong Kong that had yet to be optimized for global growth. The IHT had a storied past. Its origins stem from the Gilded Age, when in 1887 James Gordon Bennett Jr. created the Paris Herald as a European edition of the New York Herald, an expatriate newspaper for those Americans on “the Continent,” like T he C oun ter p oin t

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those doing the “Grand Tour” of Europe. The newspaper would be memorialized in expat novels such as Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises and the more contemporary The Imperfectionists. It would take on an era of glam in the 1960s thanks to Breathless, Jean-Luc Godard’s first feature-length film, with the Hollywood star Jean Seberg wearing an alluringly fitted white “New York Herald Tribune” T-shirt and selling papers on the streets of Paris.38 (A version of this shirt is now for sale in the Times’ online store.)39 The newspaper went through various names, such as the Paris Herald and the New York Herald Tribune before becoming in 1967 the International Herald Tribune. At the time, the newspaper was co-owned by the New York Times and the Washington Post, an arrangement that lasted until 2002. Because of the IHT, Sulzberger Jr. noted in 2007, “In print and on the web, we are an international paper.”40 The elder Sulzberger would set the global growth strategy in motion, killing the IHT brand, but now it is up to the leadership of A. G. Sulzberger to see whether the newspaper’s strategy of going global will produce another rehabilitation of the Times’ profit potential and, perhaps, even set up the brand’s further dominance. With a digital subscriber growth strategy in mind, in 2016 the Times put $50 million toward its global digital expansion, investing in editorial content and new bureaus around the world.41 By 2019, the Times could claim to be read in digital form “in every country on earth.”42 In addition to the IHT properties, the Times has invested in international coverage even during recent economic down times and has kept bureaus in formerly hot conflict zones, like Baghdad, far after most news organizations have departed. In 2018, the Times could boast datelines from over 160 countries, two hundred journalists based out of the United States in thirty-one bureaus, and translations of its stories into eleven different languages.43 In 2019, the newspaper grew to approximately 1,700 newsroom employees, the largest staff ever. For comparison, between 2008 and 2019, newsroom employment in the United States as a whole, across all formats, dropped 23 percent, while newspaper employment dropped 51 percent.44 Escaping the faulty logic of the “content trap,” the Times was the exception to the rule that newspapers couldn’t write themselves out of market failure; instead, the Times’ faith in its superior journalism was the foundation upon which every other aspect of its survival plan rested. 170

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This sense of self-confidence exudes from the newspaper’s various internal policy developments, which have inspired great debate among devotees of Times style. Research revealed that most readers did not understand datelines, which establish before the beginning of a story in bold caps where the reporting took place (e.g., HONG KONG—followed by a lead). So, in 2017, the Times announced a change to make them clearer, noting, “Datelines are the pride of The New York Times. In their breadth, profusion and sheer variety, they convey to readers that Times journalists are deployed globally, in places you wouldn’t necessarily want to be—or could only dream of being.”45 Indeed, the Times’ appeal to readers was to bring them to places only the Times could take them. The dateline policy is emblematic of the newspaper’s claim to authority through its command of place, as well as its presumption of the aspirational (if not actual) cosmopolitanism of its readers. The way that the Times took advantage of its preexisting resources to set in motion a global news report that defied time zones is a remarkable feat of organizational innovation. Still, it was far from a bloodless revolution; the Times had to bid adieu to the International Herald Tribune and its particular claim to place-based expertise in order to build its 24/7 operation and the New York Times International brand.46 In 2013, the Times, unlike most global firms, still had only three newsrooms, fewer than 1,500 employees, and essentially one core consumer-facing product. As a result, the Times could take an authoritarian approach to refashioning its international outposts to conform to the rest of the organizational mandate—and it worked.47 Some strong management and a forced imposition of “Timesian” values to reboot these international investments have indeed created a fairly seamless global news production process. Place is not just locale, though, and the social and cultural geography of Times staff—from where Times journalists are from to their outlook on the world—challenges a newspaper that at once has become more American but also more conscious of its need for global appeal. THE END OF THE IHT AND THE GLOBAL G R O W T H S T R AT E G Y

In 2010, the International Herald Tribune’s Paris newsroom, tucked in a suburban office building, seemed trapped in an era of newspaper T he C oun ter p oin t

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journalism that I associated more with expat novels than digital-first news production. I had managed to convince Times editors that observing the Paris and Hong Kong offices would help me understand the 24/7 digital/print news flow. An International Herald Tribune editor dispatched to New York lent me her place in the Marais for a week in March, just as spring was blooming. As I recall, my first interview with an IHT journalist took place in a Parisian café over a leisurely lunch of what was, at the time, the best salad niçoise I had ever tried, fresh bread, and a healthy pour of red wine. After I stayed to the end of print paper’s production close on a Friday night, the night production editor and I went out for duck confit. Hong Kong had a slightly different feel when I visited later that summer. The sensory memory I have most from my time inside the office is the smell of delicious takeout eaten at desks. The office was in a sleek skyscraper; the newsroom had been opened in 2005. Editors complained of being more than a day behind New York’s print paper and having minimal options for photographs because there was not much of a reporting staff in Hong Kong, much less a photo desk, and using tired images of Global South tragedies because of a lack of content felt like a surrender. There was also a sense of danger and colonialist adventure. China could threaten Hong Kong or the Times’ outfit at any time (and has done so). The Foreign Correspondents’ Club was a fancy outpost of “home,” with branded wine glasses. It was also one of the few places reputed to have a decent burger. Add to this environment the saturation of wealthy, Western, mostly male bankers speaking English in expat bars and the sense of Hong Kong as a financial capital and the last outpost of China, and to me it felt that the guests were still running the show, the end of British possession merely a territorial formality. These are memories that now, as a more seasoned scholar, I would record in my field notes, but I did not at the time, so if these recollections are a bit overdrawn, you can blame the rose-colored memories of a graduate student doing research in Paris and Hong Kong. They are especially wistful memories given China’s antidemocratic crackdown on Hong Kong, which led the Times to relocate some of its Hong Kong office to Seoul in July 2020.48 Nonetheless, Hong Kong offered the Times an important advantage: it was thirteen hours ahead and, as a result, could begin stories long before the New York day. 172

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The news production side of the global expansion was emotionally difficult but at least strategically clear: turn the international outposts into newsrooms that were empowered to be autonomous, equal partners in the organization and do it in a way that pushes the 24/7 digital-first agenda of the organization as a whole. Turning the IHT into the New York Times International meant challenging a proudly held expat continentalism, especially in Paris, and quashing an articulation of a sense of place that reflected the “experiences and aspirations” of the global citizen who still wanted something American, but not that American.49 As former IHT editor Anne Bagamery put it, “The product filled a gap for readers abroad that people still feel. It was an American-style paper with American voice but not an American vision.”50 The newspaper had its own style guide, which had rules for when to convert to EU currency and what Americanisms to avoid, among other features designed to imbue its content with a continental tone. It ran on a different content management system than the Times, and it had a different editorial sensibility, one I had observed during news meetings.51 For example, the IHT ran columns about Formula One and cricket and covered Baselworld, an annual watch show in Switzerland. Coverage from IHT correspondents tended to focus on issues relevant to European audiences but less so to American ones, which at the time included environmental regulatory debates. In Hong Kong, the Times’ ebullience around the latest personal tech product was toned down in copy, as Asia was far ahead of the States in terms of consumer electronics, while in Paris, tech coverage came with a heavier-handed warning about privacy and regulatory implications.52 It was a newspaper for the 1 percent, for whom place was more of an imaginary tied to one’s self-identity as an American expat or as an English-speaking elite who saw themselves consuming the best generalinterest American news brand, adjusted with an IHT-editorial twist that reflected expat sensibilities. Until 2012, when the Times started refashioning the IHT with new leadership from New York, the paper had been operating as what one Times editor referred to as a “semi-autonomous duchy.”53 The IHT-Paris newsroom was often derided as “a way for expats to live in Paris and be journalists,” and IHT staffers often felt like they were “members of the JV squad.”54 Those who were slated to move up to varsity were often seconded to New York to skill up their digital chops, refine their news T he C oun ter p oin t

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judgment, and absorb the faster pace of the Times. As Dunbar-Johnson, president, International of the New York Times Company and a former IHT publisher, put it, the IHT was “an analog product in a digital world.”55 Still, the Times-owned International Herald Tribune gave it core capacities that set it up well for digital 24/7 coverage, even if it was not yet optimized. The newsrooms in Paris and Hong Kong meant that the newspaper could take advantage of coverage in Europe and Asia. In fact, in 2010, the business desk in New York was already working to incorporate IHT coverage into its 24/7 digital operations, prompted by the global financial crisis, and these editors would go on to take a lead in bringing the IHT up to speed. Duplicative and inefficient processes were eliminated: back then, there were two separate websites and three print editions, and the IHT would often re-edit Times copy after it had already been edited in New York.56 As one former editor put it, “There was a sense the product was treated as a step child and as a result not as good as it could be.”57 The Times began sending editors from New York to run coverage in Paris and Hong Kong more directly, bringing it in line with the Times’ expectations and technical standards. The transition was not a smooth one. The IHT resented being forced to run stories about New York baseball in its Paris edition, seeing New York’s input as a parochial intrusion into its cosmopolitan aesthetic.58 The cost of running a newsroom in Paris was increasingly prohibitive, but so were layoffs, which would require concessions to employees that in some cases could be up to three years’ worth of pay. The IHT was retired as a brand in 2013 and became the International New York Times, and iht.com was redirected to inyt.com or global.nyt.com. The Times set up an office in London in late 2014 to focus on digital operations (“the first digital-first newsroom,” according to some editors) and began shifting its print production from Paris to Hong Kong. It was increasingly clear, including to outside observers, that the Paris office would close: “There is no question of the Paris office itself—home for so long to the iconic International Herald Tribune—being closed. It is simply believed that London is a more appropriate place from which to cover the European continent,” wrote the Guardian media columnist Roy Greenslade at the time.59 The International New York Times was short-lived. In 2016, the Times shifted the name of the international print edition to “The New York 174

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Times,” with “International Edition” written just below the banner and redirected the old websites to the main nytimes.com. The decision prompted derision among critics, especially on Twitter, with some critiquing why the Times would presume anyone besides Americans would want the New York Times and others noting the provincialism of the coverage. They pointed to the real estate given to the New York mayoral election on the Times’ homepage, not to mention the fact that the New York Times’ name clearly places its locus of origin in New York, rather than internationally.60 Polgreen pointed out to the Twitter critics that the Times had a remarkable resonance as a brand around the world and issued a reminder that the Times didn’t have to appeal to everyone: “Luckily we are a subscription business and not seeking scale for its own sake.”61 C H E AT I N G T I M E : T H E 2 4 / 7 D I G I TA L - F I R S T G L O B A L O P E R AT I O N

By closing the IHT, the Times had removed what had ironically been a strong sense of place from its international branding (albeit a placeless sense of place metaphorically akin to a vague continental accent). But the 24/7 global operation would present even more of a contradiction for a newspaper that was at once claiming expertise in knowing places readers could not and assembling its global news report in a way that aimed to avoid the material limitations of places. Having newsrooms in three of the major hubs of the world (New York, London, and Hong Kong) allows the Times to exert control over a very real limitation— time zones. In fact, the Times uses its operations to “cheat time” by positioning staff a full time zone ahead of an intended geographic audience. Much like the friend who always seems to get twice as much done because she needs little sleep, the Times functions with a similar advantage, though without the sleep deprivation. There is always someone awake to jump on breaking news coverage, even if that person is not living or working remotely close to where the news event is unfolding. These tactics enable the Times to establish a competitive advantage among rival news outlets and, in theory, develop a better ranking for search and social indexing. Back in 2010, when the International Herald Tribune still existed as a brand and as a print newspaper product, there were some processes in T he C oun ter p oin t

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place to facilitate a global news report, but it certainly was far from time-zone agnostic or digital first. Most of these processes were still directed from New York, with Gerry Mullany, now the international news editor in Asia, working overnight in New York with a small online production staff, along with minimal support in Asia and Europe. The print paper in New York was the most important product the company produced each day. The IHT couldn’t run a story in its print edition unless the Times had run it or was planning to that same day, but the Times would not make a final decision about Page One until the New York afternoon, when the Paris print deadline was fast encroaching. Time zones, in fact, could make a journalists’ life particularly awful. During the Asia day, and even into the European morning, a good part of the world and any American accessing the Times during the New York overnight shift was looking at a product put together by a skeletal shift of digital producers, most working in New York. One of those night web producers was Lillie Dremeaux, whom I met in 2010 during my research at the Times; ten years later, she had hopped up the Times’ hierarchy and was now the deputy digital editor for Europe, working out of the London newsroom. I had profiled Dremeaux in my first book, noting how she took most of her cues from print editors about how to evaluate stories for prominence on the homepage and had to juggle with the fact that, after a certain point in the day, there simply was no more fresh coverage coming from the New York office. Back then, I had observed that the New York newsroom “shuts down for paper deadlines in the evening, so the amount of brand-new news that can be placed on the Web site slows to a trickle.”62 Reporters certainly didn’t sleep on big stories, especially if they were writing in Asia for the New York print edition. For example, the Times reporter Keith Bradsher consulted with the IHT and NYT Shanghai bureau chief for direction on stories. In 2010, Bradsher described the process of working on a breaking story of a rare protest march of Chinese workers striking at a Honda plant in Zhongshan, China: I finally went to sleep at 3:40 a.m., then got up at 6 a.m. to go through New York’s edited version and have breakfast. The web had posted my full story with the 8 a.m. protest march at about 4:45 a.m. That was too late for other reporters in Hong Kong to 176

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make it to Zhongshan in time for the march. I went back out to the strike around 7 a.m. [and] called in to New York with updates from the protest march and brief confrontation with riot police. I was the only reporter at the march who was on deadline.63

My takeaway was that “there is a real human cost to this 24/7 production,” and I argued “the worker is expected to be divorced from time and location in order to respond to the demand for global information.”64 Yet these observations seem dated based on what Times staffers were explaining about the digital pace of the three different newsrooms ten years later. “We publish things online when they are ready. It will show up in print where you are whenever it’s feasible to get it in there,” explained Patrick LaForge, the senior editor charged with supervising breaking news. He added, “It’s a remarkable transformation for anyone trained in the era of print deadlines to wrap their head around.”65 The paper’s current New York–based operations are coupled with those of newsrooms in Hong Kong and London, with journalists awake to cover the news regardless of when—or where—the news happens. As Dick Stevenson, former Europe editor and editor of the International Herald Tribune/International New York Times, put it, “The ability to operate in the time zone at digital speed is really the primary advantage—you are working in that news cycle—you are not waking someone up . . . and the infrastructure is there to deal with whatever happens when it happens.”66 In fact, it is now somewhat of an obsession for Michael Slackman, assistant managing editor for International. “I can’t have a lag,” he explained when we met in New York, and he told me how he had just pinged someone in Hong Kong to come into work an hour earlier in order to cover the shift of a New York–based journalist.67 Slackman offered a few examples of how the Times is able to jump on breaking news, agnostic to the time zone where the news event is actually happening. In 2015, the Paris terrorist attack happened at night, after the London office had closed, but it was 4:30 in the afternoon in New York: We ran the story out of here, we had reporters up there slamming up stories, refining stories, getting them into print, and then we handed it off to Hong Kong, and Hong Kong was able to get the T he C oun ter p oin t

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names of the victims inside the Bataclan [the concert hall], and Hong Kong was working on the story as we got past the immediate crisis. The middle of the [Hong Kong day], the London staff took over to cover the investigation and manhunt.

So an event happened in Paris but was coordinated in New York and Hong Kong before the story was handed off to editors who were actually in the part of the world where the event occurred. In 2017, when a gunman took aim at concertgoers in Las Vegas, killing fifty-eight people and wounding five hundred more, New York’s newsroom was mostly dark. “Our rewrite guy in Hong Kong wrote the first stories,” Slackman explained. That “rewrite guy,” shorthand for Gerry Mullany, Asia news editor (who does more than rewrite), added more context. “News from the U.S. kind of ends up breaking at night,” he said.68 He told me how Hong Kong staff had begun reporting by phone and on social media immediately after the shooting until New York could take over the story. When I spoke with Mullany in 2019, Hong Kong was in the midst of major protests against the Chinese government. The Times’ presence in Hong Kong, along with the real-time editing, meant that the latest news from the evening’s protests in Hong Kong were ready for Mullany’s eyes in the U.S. morning. New York Today, a New York–specific newsletter intended for the New York morning, is handled out of Hong Kong. Mullany quipped that the Washington Post was “onto” the Asia advantage and had just begun to dispatch a small editing staff to Asia. When I visited the Times’ London newsroom in 2019, the Israeli elections were underway. Europe editor Jim Yardley used these election results as an example of a story that had heightened interest in the United States, which the Times would have the advantage of reporting by the time most of the country had woken up. “London is so central,” Yardley explained.69 With a more robust presence in London, Yardley argued that the Times has a better command over the world because more journalists are awake and available to cover more parts of the world when those populations are awake. “GMT gives us half the Asia day, half the American day, all day in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa.” Dremeaux, the former night homepage producer, had looked at what I wrote about her before we met in the London newsroom and 178

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offered some insights about how much had changed. “Overnight, it was usually just me and one news assistant doing the job,”70 adding, “there weren’t enough planning or resources by the newsroom as a whole for the Times to have a strong home page in the morning. All the good stories would publish on print deadlines at night, go onto the home page, and sit there until the next day.”71 Now, Dremeaux is effectively “cheating time”: “It’s a real advantage to be up and awake. I can get a really good handle on the Times’ planning, I can find out what is happening in the world, what our competitors are up to before anyone in New York is up. . . . That is what we should be doing here, covering international news in real time . . . and we can even get ahead of stuff we know is coming later.” Dremeaux gave a sampling of some of the tasks have been done from the London office by a wide-awake staff rather than a tired New York one. At one point, the London office edited the New York Times’ morning briefing, which greets those on the East Coast at 7 a.m. In London, staff members can scan social and search trends to anticipate questions news consumers might have that would be worth a Times story. The Daily, the Times’ daily news podcast, is produced out of New York, but Dremeaux noted, motioning to the poster advertising the Daily on the wall just outside the meeting room we were chatting in, “The Daily is not handled out of here, but the article page for it is. . . . We do a bunch of production tasks to put it up,” which also includes mixing the audio for the podcast. Nonetheless, while the specific location for news production matters less, place matters to coverage. Times journalists now see this expansion as a further push to avoid a New York–centric gaze on the world. The Times claims its expertise from materially being in a place, being able to cover and to coordinate that coverage with more locally situated knowledge. Stevenson recalled the experience of living through a bout of terrorist activity in Paris and the United Kingdom in 2015 as instructive about why moving editors closer to coverage was essential: “You experience it if you are part of the European culture in a more visceral way than you would if you were three thousand miles away in New York. . . . There were elements of the terror attacks in Paris that really came home to us. . . . We had armed guards [because] the office in Paris had to be protected.”72 One journalist I spoke to did not want to talk about his time in the London office because of the trauma he associated T he C oun ter p oin t

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with the period; he recalled how he’d hear about a stabbing on the tube and immediately wonder whether it was terrorism. Tim Race, the former Europe business editor, described how he thought that being closer to ongoing events had been critical for investing early in coverage for issues that became even more significant at a global scale: “You could see the migrant crisis unfolding, and I think we got on that early.”73 He added that directing coverage of the Eurozone crisis from Europe had distinct advantages for being “out in front of the story,” enabling him to find angles that would interest New York and other American readers in what would otherwise be dismissed as a parochial story. And there are more pedestrian reasons, too. Stevenson also pointed out the importance of being able to step on a plane or even a train and see a reporter in person within a few hours, something that would have been prohibitive if he were to direct European coverage from New York. This coordinated global report is ultimately the guts of what makes anything else in the Times’ international expansion possible. But the fact that the Times has a global audience and that it has re-upped its international efforts does not mean that it is immediately clear how they capitalize on this interest and turn their international readership into digital subscribers. S T R AT E G Y, D I F F E R E N T I AT I O N, A N D M A R K E T I N G TO T H E W O R L D

The Times has pegged its hopes for international expansion on the instinct that the world has become more connected, readers have become more interested in global affairs, and, especially with Trump in office, international readers have become more interested in the United States. But a number of questions emerge. While the Times has invested $50 million in building up its international coverage, will this move deliver an international subscriber base? Should the Times be thinking about country-specific marketing segmentation? Are there linguistic considerations? What kinds of investments need to be made in terms of editorial content? How should subscriptions be marketed to international audiences? The Times has had a number of fits and starts in its  general approach. A closer look at some of its pivots reveals the

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difficulty of reconciling a “type” of Times subscriber, the global citizen, with the realities of geographically specific markets and the resource constraints of the Times itself. On one level, there is a psychographic marketing portrait of a Times subscriber that transcends geography, a classification based on their attitudes, preferences, and demographics that exists irrespectively of their location. Stevenson explained what market research had revealed: “The kind of reader that subscribes to the NYT in any of its forms was a type that was present in almost any country and culture to greater or lesser degrees.”74 He also noted that international readers “have a kind of well-educated global outlook on life[;] they’re relatively high up in income but not stratospheric.” These readers could be described as omnivorous in their interests, perhaps turning to the Times for cultural coverage just as often as they might for political coverage, with a high degree of fluency in English or interest in improving it and likely some sort of enduring link to the United States in either their personal or professional lives. Polgreen put it bluntly: “There are a lot of similarities between a wealthy well-educated person in Singapore and a wealthy, well-educated person living in New York.”75 On another level, physical geography is very much at the core of the difficulty of figuring out how to market appropriately to the world. As Hannah Yang, head of subscription growth, explained, “Internationally, overall, the conversion rate is something that is harder to impact. There is no one blunt instrument to apply to all the countries. . . . There are a gazillion differences between different countries, and I don’t think about [the audience] as one segment.”76 For example, there are different cultural sensitivities for electronic payments. In the United States, recurring electronic payments are an afterthought, but in some markets, everything is paid for via a prepaid card, so recurring charges don’t work. In other cases, figuring out the price point that works can be a matter of rhetorical juggling. In the United Kingdom, setting an introductory offer at a pound a week makes sense, even if the pound is slightly more than the $0.99 a week for the U.S. version of the offer. Other questions included how to make the “ask.” For example, were there some markets that were more responsive to text offers than others? Whether to make the ask in English or in the language of the reader was another

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open question. “We’re testing things that we might not test here. . . . Internationally, user behavior is more diverse,” Yang explained. T R A N S L AT I O N A N D C O U N T RY- S P E C I F I C E F F O RT S

The sentiment that “We don’t draw borders at all where our journalism can or should be,” as Rudoren, the former audience editor, put it, is a lovely one, but it smacks up against the realities of implementation.77 One of the big questions for the Times has been whether to move into country-specific markets that are already English speaking or create content, some translated, some original, for non-English-speaking audiences. The choices about which markets to expand into and what to translate are instructive for understanding the evolution of the strategy as a whole. To some, translation made sense as a business strategy: “There was an audience interested in international news and would be interested in the New York Times, but they were not yet comfortable in English,” Ingrassia, the former deputy managing editor, explained.78 The Chinese edition of the Times, begun in 2012, predates the more recent and intentional international push for digital subscriptions. As Dunbar-Johnson explained, the Times entered the Chinese market “a bit naively, with the best hopes in mind.”79 Given how China had stayed out of the Times’ Hong Kong operations and that the Times was able to secure luxury advertising commitments from Cartier and Salvatore Ferragamo, it didn’t seem unreasonable to expect that the Times might be able to enter the Chinese market successfully.80 But in 2013, the Times’ David Barboza began extensive reporting on corruption in the Chinese government, eventually winning a Pulitzer for his efforts. The Chinese government promptly placed the Times’ site beyond the reach of those inside the Great Firewall. The Times has kept this site going, and it now features original stories written in Chinese by Times staff for Chinese audiences, as well as translated content. To some extent, the continued existence of the site has little to do with international subscribers and is instead considered as the Times’ statement against autocracy, a noble sentiment that also plays well in marketing campaigns. Tom Redburn, former managing editor of the IHT, explained, “China might be a special case. . . . I think it’s because of the censorship. . . . There’s a sense that it provides a service to the 182

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Chinese and the Chinese diasporic community by providing New York Times coverage that they would otherwise not be able to read in English and might otherwise have a harder time getting the New York Times perspective because of the various ways they are blocked [from it].”81 In addition to Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Southeast Asia, among other places, the Times also presumes that a fair number of mainland Chinese citizens are seeing this coverage by tunneling into the site via VPNs. Yardley, a former Beijing bureau chief, praised the Times’ commitment to sticking with the “China story” for decades, even in the face of political pressure. More cynically, as Redburn acknowledged, “China just matters more for audience development.” Yet other efforts have been tabled. The Times expanded briefly into Brazil in 2013, thinking that potential readers promised a lucrative advertising market for luxury brands. The paper translated stories into Portuguese and tried to build a reader base but concluded that there was not a large enough subscription base to keep the effort going. NYT en Español, launched in 2016, reflected a different way of bringing in new Times readers. Lydia Polgreen explained her thinking at the time: The idea was from my perspective . . . that in order to really start to penetrate into the lives [of those for] whom Spanish is a primary language, we needed to have a presence in that language, in people’s information ecosystem, with [NYT stories] that were going to organically show up where they were getting information. It’s much harder to do that in English if that’s not the primary way you are interacting in your information life.82

Essentially, even if you speak English well enough to read the Times, and if everyone else around you is speaking Spanish, Spanish-language content will be what other people are sharing and talking about online. Translating content into Spanish and providing original articles in Spanish would be a way to get into these personal spaces and exchanges in a way that the English-language Times would not. Polgreen added that the idea was not simply to translate every Times article (still an expensive process) but instead to offer a compelling selection of particularly relevant articles, using translation to “serve as a kind of camel’s nose under the tent” for a “broader bilingual T he C oun ter p oin t

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Spanish-speaking world.” Run from a bureau in Mexico City, over roughly three years NYT en Español produced over nine hundred opinion articles, one hundred additional original articles, and about forty to fifty translations a week, according to the former NYT en Español editor Paulina Chavira.83 Yet in September 2019, Chavira announced the closure of NYT en Español on Twitter, writing that although for the Times it was a business decision, for the members of her staff “fue un proyecto al que le pusimos todo el corazón,” a project we put all our heart into. Despite this decision, the official statement from the Times called NYT en Español a success by measures of page views, unique visitors, and the geographical reach of the site, also crediting NYT en Español with raising the profile of the Times in the Latin American world.84 So why close NYT en Español? The Times wasn’t losing money on it, but it wasn’t gaining subscribers in the way envisioned for investments abroad. Dunbar-Johnson explained the decision: “There’s not a panLatin market for advertising. . . . We did not have enough scale in any one market to appeal to domestic budgets and concluded that it would be better to invest our resources in growing digital subscriptions globally.”85 In retrospect, the problem is obvious. Latin America might be one market, but it is a differentiated one. A shared language alone does not solve the contingencies of the market specificities. Competitors like Spain’s El País and El Mundo had faltered in their expansions into Latin America for similar reasons. Still, the translation experiments have given the Times another strategy to expand its reach, even if it is not through standalone sites. At the article level, translated stories can show off the heft of Times coverage to international audiences. As Michael Slackman, the international editor, explained, “I like the idea, particularly when we do stories that are critical or critically assess operations of other governments. . . . I don’t want to feel like we’re hiding behind English. I want the local audience to see what we are saying for impact.”86 For example, Motoko Rich, the Tokyo bureau chief, provided extensive coverage of the Japanese emperor Akihito’s abdication, and most of her stories were translated into Japanese. “The audiences for these translations are different from English[-speaking] audiences; maybe [the stories aren’t] a domestic hit, but we may get international readers we wouldn’t have gotten otherwise,” Slackman explained. As the Times was building its London 184 T h e C oun t e r p o in t

newsroom, it also expanded the New York Times International’s opinion pages. Sasha Polakow-Suransky, then–opinion editor for New York Times International, worked to bring on writers known locally but not by a global audience. Some were uncomfortable writing in English, despite their expertise and authority, so editors began a process of translating in the reverse direction, from a contributor’s original language to English. “The thinking was not only would this provide a better perspective, but it could also help [the Times] make money,” PolakowSuransky explained. “German readers or Korean readers might take the paper more seriously if they found voices they knew and like in the New York Times. . . . Whether they agree or disagree, people are pleased to see a local columnist make it big like that.”87 Multiple people I spoke with at the Times highlighted that the newspaper is often able to ask its own staff to do these translations. They pointed to this translation capacity as evidence that the Times was a global organization composed of staff that were not just American. Still, news about American politics brings in the most web traffic from abroad. Given the substantial investment in international content and translation and the Times’ own sense of its desirability among the global elite and creative class, it will be a difficult moment if the Times finds that what international readers really want from the newspaper is its coverage of the United States. Ultimately, without the advertising and the potential for “significant” conversions to paid subscribers in nonEnglish markets, the Times has gone back to basics with its international expansion plans. The Times’ sweet spot is that imagined audience of “English-speaking intelligentsia,” as Ingrassia put it.88 So, the Times has transitioned to pursuing what Dunbar-Johnson describes as the “the lowest and fattest apples on the tree,” or the 32 percent of the international audience that comes from one of three countries outside the United States: the United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia.89 T H E AU S T R A L I A E X PA N S I O N

A closer look at the Times’ Australia expansion reflects the difficulty of gauging a new market, even one that seems ripe for disruption and similar enough to an existing base. Australia has a population of about 25 million, so if the Times was worried about maxing out with the T he C oun ter p oin t

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330 million Americans, one would have reason to think that Australia’s ROI wouldn’t be an obvious stop for a targeted international expansion. “Australia surprised me. Yes, it’s an English-speaking country, but there aren’t that many people who live there,” Ingrassia confided.90 Again, a shared language is a deceptive proxy for a shared culture, and the Times has made a few mistakes, prompting some global embarrassments. There are more technical questions about how to allocate resources to secure new potential subscribers: what and how much to cover locally, how to regard the competition, and how to reach local audiences with something unique from the Times, while also keeping this work relevant globally. Australia has a fairly saturated media environment; it can claim to be the origin of the Rupert Murdoch–controlled News Corp, and while locally owned newspapers are imploding, the market is still fairly robust. The political media saturation of the “Canberra bubble” shares many similarities with the “Beltway bubble.” The Guardian Australia, a digital-only and free export from Britain, has been entrenched in the Australian market since 2013, whereas the Times only started its operations in 2017. Australia, a member of the British Commonwealth and keen of its British history, was a better bet for the Guardian’s expansion than the United States was. Would the same be true for the reverse, with the United States entering a market so tied to the United Kingdom? According to Times staff, this head-to-head local competition was beside the point. The investment, while not insubstantial, began modestly, with only five journalists. The more important question was how to manage limited resources. Rudoren explained it this way: “There’s never going to be enough about Australia for that to be the reason for them to come to us. But we can bring them into the orbit with this coverage to show them other things they might need or value.”91 Others argued that Australia is a more compelling case for international expansion than might be presumed. As Australia bureau chief Damien Cave argued, “If the New York Times is going to be a global news organization, we need to be everywhere. Australia is in a part of the world that is increasingly important and interesting. . . . There have already been a large number of digital journalism subscribers, and when it comes to the most fertile markets, Australia is at the top of the list.”92 Polgreen talked me through the decision to make a play for Australia. 186

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Both qualitative and quantitative research led her to think that “it’s a place that really rewards things that come to it versus the other way around.”93 She pointed out that a Times panel celebrating International Women’s Day had been able to sell out the Sydney Opera House.94 Still, the Times didn’t enter the market without incident. When Cave was doing his initial hiring, one job ad featured a graphic of a journalist climbing out of a kangaroo pouch. Rancor on Twitter ensued, as critics argued that the Times had misjudged and played on an old stereotype of Australia as the land of Crocodile Dundee. Seeking both to experiment and to avoid future cultural missteps, the Australia bureau became the Times’ first “engagement-first” bureau, intentionally focusing on audience feedback. In an unusual move for the paper, the New York Times Australia Facebook page allows the public to start posts on the page (although this is moderated by Times staff, and policies do change).95 Along with a weekly newsletter, the Australia Letter, Cave has been able to open his inbox to conversations about issues specific to Australian discourse, such as the importance of adjusting capitalization practices for “Indigenous” and “Aboriginal” peoples.96 The fact that U.S. style guides don’t typically adjust these words, not to mention the Dundee sensitivities, is a reminder that transnational news is still absorbed in local contexts. The Times’ journalism is only good for exporting abroad if it demonstrates the same cultural authority over place to its new audiences. The calibration of what constitutes as both useful for Australians and also relevant to a New York Times global audience has been complicated. Going global might work as a general dictum, but the finer points of its execution require paying attention to specificity. Rudoren recounted how, at first, Cave would do one version of a story for Australians and then rewrite it for a global audience, which was unsustainable. There were also questions about what to emphasize on the website. Mullany explained the conundrum: Most of the Times’ audience is still domestic, but it wasn’t clear if the Times should skew the homepage some toward the Australian/Asian morning, when most Times readers in the United States are asleep, or whether the Times should simply put the best stories up, ones that probably appeal to an American audience but may capture the Australian audience as well. Mullany tries to cut it both ways. “We are both trying to capture American readers and appeal to readers out T he C oun ter p oin t

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here.” He added, “We’re covering Australia very smartly, and when a big story breaks, that often results in an uptick in subscribers.”97 In December 2019, when I was in Australia amid the most intense wildfires the country had ever experienced, I spoke with Cave again. The Times had quietly reshuffled much of the designated Australia staff to other areas of the company (including some promotions). Cave insisted that the bureau was self-sustaining and reiterated that what happened in Australia mattered to the rest of the world, especially when it came to the environment. The fires got worse in January and February  2020. For anyone questioning the importance of the Australia investment in New York, the global attention to Times’ coverage of the fires made it clear that its efforts were paying off. With Cave’s preexisting knowledge of the country, quality sourcing, and the combination of resources across the Times, from science journalists to data journalists, the newspaper’s business strategy to let its coverage make the case for its digital subscriptions was on full display. Still, readers who didn’t know about the Times’ Australia bureau may not have expected to see the Times’ coverage from Australia; the ability to draw new readers, especially from outside the United States, nonetheless remains far more dependent than the newspaper would like on Google, Facebook, and other big tech platforms. P L AT F O R M H E A DAC H E S A N D R E G U L ATO RY C H A L L E N G E S

While I’ve suggested the Times is one of the few exceptions to the existential threat of digital-content economics for newspapers, it nonetheless still faces these headaches as it expands internationally. If growth is predicated on growing audiences outside the United States, the Times’ ability to attract national brand ads for its national audience is only a Band-Aid for the much bigger challenge of dealing with technology companies and global regulatory frameworks it is largely unable to control. Discoverability is key for expanding the Times’ current reach. For better or worse, many new readers will find the Times via online platforms, and one of the most difficult choices the paper has to make over and over again is just how to deal with the likes of Google, Apple, and Facebook. “We have wrestled a lot with how we use the platforms, 188

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whether we should use the platforms, and how we should nuance our approach with them based on geography,” explained Rebecca GrossmanCohen, VP for platform strategy and partnerships.98 For example, in the late summer of 2019, the Times was cautiously approaching Apple News but had not offered the entire library of its articles to the platform. One of Grossman-Cohen’s frustrations was that while Apple News had the technical capacity to create geo-targeted user experiences for Times readers, it was unwilling to do so. “It’s not a priority for them,” she noted. “If we could create a different experience for someone in another country . . . we would be more open to putting more free content out there because it would be helpful with discovery and brand awareness.” National boundaries do exist on the web, despite what internet utopians might like to say, and they have consequences for how the Times must strategize around its content distribution and build audience reach. In the United States, the Times is well ranked by Google as an expert source and generally is able to perform well via search; however, that is not the case for users relying on Google in other geographies. “Google has to consider you an expert,” Grossman-Cohen explained, and Google tends to favor in-country domains and geographically specific news outlets in its search algorithm. The Times could either create a whole bunch of different country-specific domains, or it could “win” Google’s designation as an international leader and thus hope to capture transnational search traffic. Yardley describes this issue as “one of the most important puzzles” facing the Times. He gave the example, “What do we do if we have this really great enterprise story from France, but it’s not something that has a natural audience searching for it [in France], but we want people to see it? How do we get that in front of their eyes?”99 This quest for discoverability has also motivated some of the editorial content creation tactics. Mullany explained that “if we get a story up first in this part of the world, we will capture the most traffic,” even with established English-language behemoths like the BBC.100 Mullany gave the example of how Times coverage of a big breaking story in Australia and New Zealand could start the digital subscription funnel for curious readers who turned to Google for information beyond their usual go-to sources: “If we’re doing well in search for those readers, they will get in the habit of turning to the New York Times.” The Times did not talk much about Facebook in this context, but those involved in these T he C oun ter p oin t

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platform strategy decisions have to figure out how much time they want to spend on Facebook cultivating the New York Times’ Australian page, for example, or how to make sure a story about the Philippines, where Facebook is a dominant platform, ends up reaching these readers. There is now an editor and a team who have the specific task of curating content for sharing across platforms. Depending on the story, the possible target audience, and the preferred platform for that particular audience, the tactics might change. As Grossman-Cohen put it, “We can’t just advertise the Times broadly in digital networks in South Asia and think it’s going to have the same impact.”101 Given these challenges, the Times is just as vulnerable and dependent on platforms as any other news outlet publishing digital content. Here’s the advantage that the Times has, though: It is lucky enough to be able to be an esteemed publisher that Facebook, Twitter, and others want to have on their platforms, even if the relationship can be rocky. The Tow Center’s Platform Press report describes how news publishers like the Times can call up or email Apple News and pitch them a major story, a situation unlike the distant-victim position many Goldilocks newspapers and smaller outlets find themselves in.102 The Times is likely to get offered first chances at trying new products or marketing techniques, and even if it chooses not to participate, the company still enjoys advance notice that other, smaller newspapers and news outlets do not. Still, national borders present problems for the Times that newspapers without global ambitions can ignore. Many smaller U.S. newspapers are not available online in Europe because of GDPR internet regulations, which news organizations consider too complicated and expensive to invest in for the return of a minuscule international audience. If the Times wants to be viable outside the United States, though, it has to conform to such regulations. The Times is in a far better position to navigate these regulatory changes thanks to its technical staff, but GDPR affects international revenue in other ways. Because of the regulations, the Times has stopped running programmatic advertising in the European Union. In the United States, it is legal to auto-enroll people in email newsletters, which the Times has found to be a highly effective way of converting a reader into a paying subscriber. In Europe, however, companies can’t automatically opt-in users for marketing messages. “For countries where GDPR is the law of the land, it’s just a devastating blow to not 190

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to be able to have that acquisition email,” said Paul Young, growth manager at the Times.103 A positive gloss is that the pivot away from these tactics gives the Times an advantage in the United States, which has yet to enact these stricter privacy laws. “These regulations will trickle into the U.S. at some point,” Yang, head of subscription growth, explained.104 Other issues, from different regimes of press freedom to the increasing tendency of authoritarian governments to nationalize the internet (and thus either block or otherwise diminish web traffic to the Times) will make growth more challenging. Still, the Times brand is positioned like no other U.S. newspaper brand (and perhaps like no other world paper, either) to grow its international subscription base, and while the general strategy is clear, the devil is in the details. T H E T I M E S’ E XC E P T I O N A L I S M , R E V I S E D

This chapter sets up the premise that the Times is the exception to the constraints around raising digital revenue for almost every newspaper in the United States. The Times’ large national audience insulates it from some of the particularly problematic issues raised by digital advertising, but to survive, it must still raise more reader revenue. I’ve argued that the Times has capitalized on preexisting advantages, from a history of big bets paying off to latent investments like the IHT that have been strategically refocused to pursue an international growth strategy. The Times has figured out a way to position people around the world to “cheat time” and facilitate breaking news. Nonetheless, the Times still faces the same set of challenges that all news publishers face—how to grow digital subscribers to get readers to absorb the costs of producing news—just in a different context. The Times, for now, appears on firmer footing than most, but that footing is still precarious. The paper remains afloat, but revenue growth is modest at best, while costs continue to rise, and the Times, like most news publishers, still relies on platforms for external traffic referrals. Times subscribers may be among the most place agnostic of news subscribers, but place still matters. The Times is still the New York Times, but the newspaper has varied its approach to investing journalism resources in covering New York, just as the other major New York City daily newspapers are cutting back coverage, suffering from the T he C oun ter p oin t

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ravages of unsustainable digital revenue, like Goldilocks newspapers elsewhere.105 This has prompted some experts to wonder whether New York City itself is in danger of becoming a local news desert (the answer is no, although it is more comparable to a savannah, with dry spots in poorer and more diverse neighborhoods).106 In 2017, the Times announced it was cutting back on “incremental coverage” of New York City as it pursued a global growth strategy and had also decided to shelve regional arts and culture coverage. Comparisons of news coverage actually about New York from the early 2000s to 2017 show roughly one-half to two-thirds fewer New York–specific cities mentioned, and staff counts suggest that the metro desk had shrunk by half over that timeframe.107 The 2017 decision prompted then-ombudsman Liz Spayd to note, “Why should a newsroom that just announced lofty international ambitions spend resources covering news of no interest to readers in Beijing and London?” The Times has toggled back and forth with its commitment to New York City, even going so far as to take its commitment to covering New York City to storefronts, one in each borough, showcasing Times local reporting. Its 2019 “Truth Is Local” campaign seemed to speak back to concerns from New York readers that the Times had abandoned New York to chase global subscribers. In the newspaper’s own coverage of the ad campaign, the Times’ metro editor Clifford Levy said, “Journalists for the New York Times visited more than 160 countries last year, but even as our ambitions and audience have expanded, we remain deeply committed to our home base.”108 Ironically, in aiming to reach a global audience, the Times’ commitment to its hometown remains uncertain. However, even in a media capital like New York, the problems with a finite number of geographically specific, would-be Times subscribers remains—and the Times will need to decide how much of that Goldilocks dilemma it will need to take on to assuage its hometown readers. Regardless of what the Times’ approach may be, it still shares an important, enduring similarity with Goldilocks newspapers: the need to strategize around content production that will appeal to audiences who will pay. The Times, more openly than most other newspapers, is actively seeking those global elites for its subscription base. The future of quality news and information is news for the rich, as the Times’ executive editor, Dean Baquet, has acknowledged. Frictionless sharing is a myth in 192 T h e C ount e r p o in t

the era of paywalls, though a paying subscriber with a VPN anywhere in the world should be able to get the Times. Nonetheless, the affordances of place still shape how even the most well-traveled, cosmopolitan elites have access to news and information, from the language of a story to political regimes that shape internet governance to big tech’s geographically specific tweaks to algorithmic content discoverability. The growing divide between the haves and have-nots of news is implicated not just in the United States but among a global class of digital elites, too. The Times is the extreme example of how a news publisher adjusts news production strategy, decisions about content, and business strategy to focus on appealing to connected elites with high cultural capital. The dire warning is that no commercial news media, and especially no commercial newspaper, is safe from financial collapse. But when nonprofit alternatives are imagined, the patterns of news for the rich, white, and blue are perhaps even more pronounced, with efforts to rescue journalism in the name of saving democracy actually threatening to reinscribe or even worsen geospatial inequities.

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C H A P T E R S EV E N

Blue News Surviving The Big Sort in News Philanthropy

The future looks grim for newspapers. Given the market ceiling on digital subscribers, diminishing returns on digital advertising, and technological infrastructure barriers that benefit the platform companies— namely, Google and Facebook—any newspaper that isn’t a national or international newspaper is simply unlikely to survive. For better or worse, the commercial viability for journalism that newspapers provide is not supported by the market. Philanthropic support for journalism is one possible solution to this market failure. In the wake of the Great Recession, which exacerbated existing challenges for ad-supported news, large institutional donors substantially increased their support for journalism.1 Philanthropy targeted toward journalism is growing—in 2009, U.S.-based funders donated over $888 million to media writ large, but by 2015, the total grew to $1.8 billion. Media Impact Funders, an organization that tracks media philanthropy, noted at the time, “The field of media and philanthropy is growing rapidly, and far larger than anyone expected.”2 It kept growing, adding corporate backing to the mix: Between 2018 and 2019, Facebook, Google, and the Knight Foundation each pledged $300 million to support local journalism.3 The global pandemic will likely exacerbate journalism’s growing dependence on philanthropy, and Google and Facebook have pledged additional support for the field.4

However, the entirety of the news industry can’t be recreated and funded outside market pressures. While there is a lot of money flowing to fund journalism, there is not enough money to support the industry at its current level. For perspective, consider that the New York Times’ operating costs were roughly $1.6 billion in 2018,5 and while it is a huge newspaper, it is just one newspaper. Repairing the crisis in journalism also begets new concerns. As I’ve argued throughout this book, the market failure of journalism has causes and consequences that stem from larger place-based inequities. Place implicates material geography and our cultural and social contexts, while reflecting and refracting inequality and power. 6 Geographic distributions of nonprofit provisions for news matter because support for journalism is linked to the health and well-being of democratic culture (at least in its ideal form). As political power in American politics is tied to geography—physical location—the connection between support for journalism and geography matters. If places where journalism is on the decline are not getting the support they need, then funders might need to rethink their priorities. My main concern is that the quality journalism that remains will be targeted to and consumed by the rich, white, and blue. Thus, it is important to consider whether place-based inequities are being baked into news philanthropy. Where nonprofits are located may well reflect other types of unequally distributed factors, such as skills, social capital, and the ideological orientations of those who might be more inclined to start and sustain nonprofit initiatives for journalism. Will these efforts to support journalism end up replicating already existing geographic disparities when it comes to news provision? Will news consumers impute a liberal bias to these philanthropic efforts, especially if the funding is coming from big-city outsiders? These are not fun questions to have to ask about well-intentioned efforts for supporting journalism; however, those getting the cash are unlikely to do so themselves. As Shakespeare put it in King Lear, “How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is to have a thankless child!”7 The partisan dimensions of these philanthropic efforts to support journalism are particularly concerning. Associations between nonprofit news philanthropy and liberal politics are largely implicit, though in

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some cases they can be demonstrated as statistically significant, as this chapter will detail. These implicit connections between funding the news and funding liberal news stand to compromise the efficacy of using nonmarket alternatives to support quality journalism. Journalists who see themselves as “holding the ring” of mainstream, nonpartisan American journalism often fail to fully appreciate the extent to which liberal and conservative Americans believe their efforts to have a liberal bias. The foundations that fund the journalism discussed here, from the Knight Center to the Ethics and Excellence in Journalism Foundation to the Democracy Fund, would and do self-describe as nonpartisan or bipartisan in aim or reach. When outsiders from big coastal cities swoop in to fund journalism efforts, especially investigative journalism efforts, there are clear benefits to shoring up good journalism. But there is also a risk that these philanthropic efforts backfire because of perceptions of liberal meddling, compromising the efficacy of both the funding and the journalism. This chapter addresses these questions and concerns. First, I provide an overview of the issues related to news philanthropy. Then, I build on two other analyses that examine nonprofit philanthropy in journalism and state-level news deficits and conduct a secondary data analysis to take a closer look at the geospatial distribution of funding for investigative journalism. I explore whether support for journalism is going to the places that actually need it and consider whether factors such as cultural or partisan homophily among the donor class and grantees correlate with giving. For some readers, the quantitative data may be more difficult to follow; the last third of the chapter features the case studies of Mississippi Today and 100 Days in Appalachia, which provide a more descriptive explanation of the issues raised by news philanthropy. (More detail about the methods is in endnotes and appendix C.) JOURNALISM AND PHIL AN THROPY

Philanthropic interventions don’t aim to prop up failing newspapers. News philanthropy supports a much broader range of news outlets and genres of journalism besides newspapers. These funders profess to fill the need for quality, independent journalism, with professional standards of news gathering not supported by the market; ostensibly, this is 196

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the sort of journalism newspapers once regularly provided. That said, funders have different priorities about what this quality journalism includes and entails, so it is important to consider what types of journalism are being funded, by whom, and where the cash ends up. In the case of philanthropy more generally, wealthy donors and foundations tend to give to people and organizations they already know.8 As such, the entrenched issues that come with privilege, from paternalism to pet causes that reveal particular partisan interests, may play into patterns of giving for journalism, too. Even the most wellintentioned philanthropies possess a tremendous and largely unchecked power to decide what types of journalism to support. Nonprofit journalism is not a new business model—think NPR, PBS, Mother Jones, and Consumer Reports, for example. However, these predecessors of the current wave of philanthropic support for journalism suggest that concerns about partisanship and elitism may be well founded. Our existing public broadcasting system, which is only marginally publicly funded from federal and state funds, relies on corporations and individual donors.9 But this philanthropic support doesn’t absolve public media of the same problems that plague journalism more generally. Public media’s record of racial inclusion is not better than that of commercial news; public radio has been critiqued more generally for prioritizing a standardized, white, Anglo voice, accent, and tone and has regularly been critiqued by journalists of color for being extraordinarily white.10 While audience makeup should not be conflated with the actual news content, NPR’s demographics reveal that its audiences are whiter than the general population. They are also better educated, 2.9 times more likely to participate in environmental causes than members of the general public, and 1.6 times more likely to work in the c-suite.11 Public media is ostensibly for everyone, with stations that reach into the most rural of U.S. communities, but audience data for NPR suggest it is consumed and supported by the rich, white, and blue.12 More general problems with philanthropy seem to be repeating themselves in news beyond the public media sector. As Rodney Benson showed in his analysis of fifteen nonprofit news outlets, financial and business elites dominate among the funder class.13 He further warned that philanthropic support stands to replicate the interests of donors and may well end up creating news for small, elite, niche audiences.14 And Blu e Ne w s Sur v iv ing

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when outsiders are invited into these national philanthropic circles, it can be disconcerting. As one of my interviewees, a new grant recipient from a digital-first regional startup, told me: “You go to an event in DC [a big urban area] and everyone is brainstorming whiteboards and post-itnotes . . . and I am like, we are like fucking dying, this isn’t an exercise where we are. . . . I get to experience the disparities and the reality on the ground and the DC- (or somewhere else-) based frame, and there is a gap there.”15 Not only is there a sense of fragility or of not belonging, but there is also a concern that the abstract ideals and processes of funders can be very out of touch with the immediate problems.16 Initially, there was some trepidation about the new wellspring of nonprofit journalism outlets, particularly regarding their long-term financial sustainability. In fact, in 2009 I published with Michelle Layser, a legal scholar, a law review article arguing that nonprofit status wasn’t some sort of cure-all for the news industry.17 There has been a flourishing of academic scholarship and applied research to assess the sustainability of these efforts, some of it sponsored by the funders themselves, such as the Knight Foundation.18 It is still a slog to fund a nonprofit news organization, although the funding streams and the “asks” are different from commercial media. Though most new nonprofit outlets are digitalnative organizations and thus not as vulnerable to the high industrial production costs associated with legacy media, the scholar Magda Konieczna found that they still rely on a handful of donors who have offered significant endowments.19 More recent research questions the reach of nonprofits that have been established in response to cutbacks in journalism. While these digital-native nonprofit news outlets may be doing important journalism with social value, web statistics on news consumption suggest that there is little sign of widespread public consumption of their work unless these outlets partner with larger news publishers with wider audience reach. This is especially the case for those focused on local or statewide news (for example, the Voice of San Diego, Michigan’s Bridge Magazine, Wisconsin Watch, and so forth).20 Similarly, the quantity of journalism they produce is a fraction of the volume of what newspapers and other local news outlets offer.21 Simply put, there isn’t enough news produced by nonprofits, and there isn’t a mass audience for it, at least not yet. 198 Blue Ne w s Sur v iv ing

Still, some of the new nonprofits have become formidable journalism institutions in a short time. For example, ProPublica and Insideclimate News, an environmentally focused digital-first nonprofit, have both won Pulitzers. Nonprofits are increasingly collaborating with larger, established commercial news outlets, and, in fact, ProPublica’s first Pulitzer win was shared with the New York Times. Report for America, modeled on the Teach for America program, supports local news with fellowships for journalists to work at existing news outlets that have suffered major cuts.22 Aside from supporting news gathering, news philanthropy has also been targeted toward efforts to rebuild trust in the news media or toward tech or product innovations that might reduce the costs of news production. There is now trickle-down news philanthropy, with larger organizations supporting smaller ones. The American Journalism Project is evaluating for-profit and nonprofit news organizations and, through “venture philanthropy,” aims to bolster local journalism while also incentivizing digital innovation and improvements in diversity and inclusion. The nonprofit investigative news outlet ProPublica’s Local News Reporting Network partners with local journalists to support more localized investigative journalism.23 There are, however, questions of control and intention. Funders get to set the priorities for the money they spend, and this cash is not evenly distributed to all comers. Philanthropic dollars are not just gifts. In our personal lives, we might think of the donations we make to support a cause as unrestricted. In most, if not all, cases, however, philanthropic foundation dollars come with strings attached—specific mandates for how the cash is spent and what outcomes are expected, though these may also have to do with making sure the money actually goes to funding journalism. In fact, as the journalism scholars Patrick Ferruci and Jacob  L. Nelson found after interviewing both journalists working at nonprofits and nonprofit foundation funders, pressure from funders feels a lot like the pressure that advertisers have traditionally tried to impose on news outlets.24 They do point out one significant difference: while journalists shrugged away advertiser pressure as best they could, hoping to avoid compromising their coverage intentions, grant-making organizations sometimes directly work with journalists and influence editorial content. That said, foundations are at least focused on Blu e Ne w s Sur v iv ing

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supporting quality journalism, even if about pet topics and their preferred takes, while advertisers have an interest in journalism that supports their business. The kind of journalism that ends up getting supported can reflect the needs and interests of funders and not necessarily the needs and interests of local communities. Harry Backlund, the founder of Chicago’s City Bureau, a community news startup, posed the question, “Is your journalism a luxury or a necessity?” and crafted a modified Maslow’s hierarchy of needs for news, a riff on the levels from survival to selfactualization.25 Backlund’s argument was that there were underserved communities that lacked the basic information they needed to make choices about transportation, health, and education and that funding these needs was far more important and immediate than funding accountability journalism. He is right to critique patterns of giving. As the health policy advocate John H. Hanson put it, “Modern elite charity is class-centered and exclusionary, employing charitable exchange ritual, like the primitive potlatch, for structured loss and exchange, both affirming and concealing status and power, obfuscating yet illuminating privilege.”26 Indeed, a study by Democracy Fund pointed to a growing gap when it came to philanthropic dollars aimed at increasing diversity, equity, and inclusion. The report noted that “tight budgets alone cannot explain the persistent gap in employment opportunities between minorities and their white counterparts seeking jobs in journalism.”27 Unlike corporate support for journalism, nonprofit funding does have a veneer of transparency thanks to required filings by donors and by recipients, giving anyone who wants to dig deep into a nonprofit news organization’s funding the ability to do so. This makes nonprofit journalism’s financial data ripe for assessing these concerns. T R AC K I N G T H E N O N P R O F I T J O U R N A L I S M I N T E RV E N T I O N

When it comes to tracing the specifics of flows of nonprofit dollars, a 2018 report for Harvard’s Shorenstein Center provides an important starting point.28 The report traces the distribution of $1.8 billion in philanthropic support of 32,422 journalism and media-related grants distributed from 2010 to 2015. The team, led by the professors Matthew 200

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Nesbit and John Wihbey, relied on the Media Impact Funders’ database for this analysis. Media Impact Funders is a member-supported philanthropic organization that connects data on media funding and is affiliated with the larger Foundation Center, which helps set standards for categorizing, tracking, and analyzing philanthropic contributions across the globe. There are a few caveats about these data: As the Shorenstein Center report noted, grants are categorized by self-report and/ or review by the Foundation Council staff.29 This reporting structure means that the data are only as good as the data the nonprofits have reported. Inequities are already baked into the analysis, too, as places with fewer nonprofits may attract less funding at the outset. Nonetheless, the Harvard team’s findings are instructive for pointing out how funding distributions may reinforce already robust media ecologies or support already well-connected institutions. The report suggests that there are indeed reasons to be worried about elites supporting elites; the nonprofit outlets most likely to be funded are those most likely to be consumed by those already reading outlets like the New York Times and the Washington Post. More than 44 percent of the $1.8 billion of journalism philanthropy went to operating costs and news reporting initiatives for public radio and television stations, which are legacy nonprofit news outlets. These outlets, as noted, are for everyone but are primarily consumed by elites, and while it may make sense to support existing and established news organizations, the funding patterns reflect preferences for “knowns.” Indeed, $657 million, or 83  percent of foundation funding to public media, went to organizations based in ten states. While these public media outlets produce news distributed beyond their locales, the majority of public media outlets in most states aren’t getting this funding to support news gathering. Investigative journalism received about 12  percent of the funds ($216 million); however, less than 1 percent of all dollars for state or local media went to covering news focused on low-income or homeless individuals. Allocating scarce resources involves hard choices. While Backlund argued for focusing on the news that would serve the immediate needs of a community, it is clear that news that serves the poor isn’t getting subsidized by philanthropic efforts, just as it is overlooked by for-profit news outlets. The Democracy Fund’s report on diversity, Blu e Ne w s Sur v iv ing

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equity, and inclusion for funding in journalism raised a similar concern, noting, “When it comes to funding that serves racial and ethnic groups, relatively few dollars go towards financial sustainability compared to programming and project-specific funding.”30 Philanthropic funding for journalism is vulnerable to the same kinds of blind spots found throughout the news industry. As the sociologists Stephen Ostertag and Gaye Tuchman suggest, foundation funding for journalism, even for new enterprises, “instills the logics of legacy news at the very roots of the groups they fund,” making it harder to challenge conventional standards of newsworthiness or story selection.31 Benson worries that these niche funder interests and the elite funders supporting journalism will lead to more journalism for the wealthy and informed, and the findings suggest reason to be concerned.32 The Harvard team also pointed to the concentration of funding “within a few national news profits, the disproportionate focus on the environment and health as subjects, and deep geographic disparities that favors the East and West Coasts.”33 Eight of ten foundation dollars flowed to just twenty-five news nonprofits, and while four investigative journalism outlets topped the list, none focus on state or local issues, even though state and local journalism, particularly investigative journalism, appears to be most under threat.34 Donations to higher education reflect similar geographic disparities, as the scholars note: “Just five universities accounted for half of all foundation funding, and 16 of the top 25 grant-receiving campuses were based in either California or in Chicago, New York, Philadelphia, and Washington.” State and locally focused nonprofits lose out, garnering only 4.5 percent of that $1.8 billion (or $80.1 million). Across the state/local news funding for all types of nonprofit journalism, 41 percent of this funding supported public affairs journalism, with most of that $33.1 million going to just ten nonprofits: Texas Tribune ($6.1M), San Francisco Bay Citizen ($4.3M), MinnPost ($3.1M), Voice of San Diego ($3.1M),  CT Mirror ($2.5M), NJ Spotlight ($2.4M), New Orleans Lens ($1.9M), Seattle’s Crosscut Media ($1.5M), Twin Cities Daily ($910K), and Oakland Local ($831K). The Harvard study points to crucial problems without laying out the stakes. There are clear signs of “pack philanthropy,” with donors clustering around a few favorites. The study raises concerns that a few 202 Blue Ne w s Sur v iv ing

coastal states and big cities with nonprofit media darlings seem to be reaping all the benefits of philanthropic investments in journalism, but these are coded references to liberal strongholds, and the study dodges directly implicating partisanship in giving preferences. These geographic disparities point to the potential for haves and have-nots, meaning that it is possible that news philanthropy is perpetuating geospatial inequities. The analysis helps us understand who is getting the money and where they are located, but there is no assessment as to whether the philanthropy is actually reaching places that suffer from news deficits. Tackling head-on what these patterns might reveal about the presumptions of donors and the ability of dollars to assist with supporting decaying state and local news ecosystems merits additional attention.35 A S S E S S I N G T H E B I G S O RT I N N E W S P H I L A N T H R O P Y

Is the “big sort” I worried about with the realignment of newspaper employment in chapter  3 found in philanthropic dollars, too? My research shows that newspaper employment has long been concentrated in big cities, while underserved areas have often had long legacies of being neglected by journalism, legacies that predate the current newspaper crisis. Partisanship seems to have some association with these declines, but partisanship increased even without substantial changes in news provision. That said, given the distrust in journalism, especially among Republicans, and the nationalization of the news audience away from local news media and toward national news publishers and cable television news, there is nonetheless reason to be concerned. Thus, in the case of philanthropy, it is also important to explore whether there is a similar big sort occurring. Along with Sanghoon Kim, I took a closer look at funding patterns for nonprofit support for investigative journalism. Why just investigative journalism? We have two primary reasons. First, investigative journalism is socially important. Second, more practically, the dataset’s coding for investigative journalism is clearly defined, while some of the other categories are not. Newspapers have led the way in our relatively new, post-1960s legacy of accountability journalism, but financial stresses to the newspaper industry have limited the resources newsrooms have been willing to spend on investigative journalism. Watchdog journalism is among the Blu e Ne w s Sur v iv ing

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least likely forms of journalism to be incentivized by the market,36 but as the media economist James Hamilton finds in Democracy’s Detectives, investigative journalism has a dollar-per-dollar social value that may be more socially significant than any other form of journalism.37 The journalism scholars James Ettema and Theodore Glasser dubbed investigative journalists “custodians of conscience” for the important role they play in serving as a moral compass directing our attention to evil, corruption, and injustice.38 As a result, investigative journalism can directly change the political composition of leaders in a municipality or state. Inequities in funding for investigative journalism mean that some places simply have fewer journalists holding the powerful accountable than others. To look at whether news philanthropy was replicating or reinscribing inequities in news and information, I explored three key questions using the investigative journalism data. 1. First, and quite plainly, is all of this money going where it is needed? Philanthropic support for journalism is intended to address some sort of perceived deficit. The Harvard study hints at the geographic asymmetry, but it does nothing to assess grant provision in the context of news deficits. If this money is going to support places that may have lost news but are still decently provisioned for journalism overall, then there’s a question whether this money is being well spent. My findings suggest little relationship between news deficits and philanthropic support, though there are some indications that support for journalism is going to places that are better provisioned for news than others. 2. Thus, a second important issue emerges: Does this money for investigative journalism demonstrate partisan patterns? Knowingly or not, donors have the power to support what may amount to actual political change, and if this is unevenly distributed across partisan divides, some places may have better access to good governance than others. Funding for journalism can and does embrace values of liberalism, whereby news and information support informed decision making and the functioning of democratic institutions. But whether this funding is also liberal— informed and supported by a political ideology and orientation—is important. Blue dollars may well mean blue priorities, which may be why we see issues and causes so dear to liberals, such as climate change, health care, public media, and criminal justice, emerge as particularly 204

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well supported by nonprofit dollars. Thus, tracking the partisanship distribution of funding isn’t just an effort to respond to a rhetorical trope about media bias. For better or worse, we do find partisan patterns in the funding distribution; blue states get more funding than red ones. Research on philanthropic giving for journalism raises concerns about how existing networks of knowns—donors and recipients—might affect giving patterns. Their work showed that funders tend to coalesce around a few favored projects. 3. Thus, a final question emerges: What do patterns for funding investigative journalism reveal about donors’ preferences? Certainly, throwing the accusation of elitism around is not to be taken lightly; however, exploring patterns of cultural homophily—whether donors and recipients are more alike than different—can provide some empirical heft to the finger pointing. We find that big-city philanthropists give to big-city grantees and college towns, supporting previous research that suggests a few big-name nonprofit news outlets in a few big cities and college towns get most of the windfall from philanthropy. The highlights of my findings suggest that my questions and concerns about elitism and partisan patterns in the funding were well founded. First, places that need support for journalism aren’t necessarily getting it. Second, places that get support for investigative journalism tend to be left leaning. Third, there is some evidence of cultural homophily, as largely urban donors give to places that are more like them than not. DETERMINING THE “NEED” FOR NEWS

Assigning what counts as “need for news” or a “news deficit” reflects my own privilege as a researcher. Baked into this declaration of “need” is the presumption that the corrective to information scarcity is the provision of more information, but it is the elites, including academics, who often define for a community what constitutes information scarcity and what then constitutes its repair.39 When it comes to journalism, scholars often argue that there is a lack of a certain type of journalism that they understand to be socially valuable and critical to the information needs of a community, which often draws on conventional understandings of media outlets rather than unconventional and interpersonal Blu e Ne w s Sur v iv ing

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forms of news and information, from church newsletters to physical bulletin boards to Next Door to neighborhood emails to sitting on stoops. Scholars have identified areas of geographic “need” for local journalism at scale through analyses of news content, news outlets, and numbers of journalists. The “health” of local news is measured by the presence or absence of these factors in various geographic breakouts, such as state, county, or designated market area (a shorthand way of designating the population reach of a particular commercial media market). These areas provide a starting point for understanding the problem facing journalism as one of place-based scarcity, though the scale is imperfect and often fails to capture the nuances of existing information practices in a community.40 In addition, the reasons for information scarcity are often masked by the diagnosis of scarcity. For instance, there may have been little support for a local newspaper because of its coverage priorities, its support of institutional racism, or perhaps because it was priced too high. In the conclusion to this book, I develop the case for a more holistic assessment of a place’s ability to withstand the loss of traditional news outlets, which I dub “news resilience.” With these caveats in mind, if we want to understand whether efforts to address deficits in journalism are actually going to where there are problems with news provision, we do need some brute-force way to assess need.41 To avoid having to recreate an entire assessment of shortages in journalism at the state level, we turned to a secondary analysis of data collected by the News Measures Research Project, a team of researchers led by Philip Napoli at Duke University.42 The Duke researchers suggest that looking at the local media infrastructure as a measure of “the entirety of the media outlets . . . and their associated personnel—that are focused, at least to some extent, on providing local news and reporting” as a proxy for assessing how well served an area is by what is conventionally understood to be professional journalism.43 To do so, they conducted a census of news outlets and news workers at the state level, which takes into account print, broadcast, radio, magazines, and online news outlets focused on news and current affairs. They then estimated the state’s news deficit by calculating what they call the “percent deviation from expected news infrastructure.”44 206

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I measure “need” for news using the number of expected news outlets and news workers per capita measured against what we might otherwise expect for this population given its size, geography, population density, the number of municipalities, and demographic data, such as household income and percentage of African American and Hispanic residents (see appendix C for more details). Notably, the News Measures Research Project finds that “at the state level, the local journalism infrastructure is overwhelmingly, and almost exclusively, a function of population size,” despite other variables like poverty and race that seemed to suggest news deficits at the municipal level.45 For example, for the “percent deviation from news workers” variable, a value of 42.92 for Montana means that the state has 42.92 percent more media employees than what it is predicted to have based on the population and its associated demographics. In contrast, consider that Utah scores a value of −37.55, showing the deficit of news workers in the state.46 It is important to note that this analysis does not attempt to

Figure 7.1 States ranked by percentage deviation from predicted news outlets per 100,000 residents (based on population). Blu e Ne w s Sur v iv ing

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Figure  7.2 States ranked by percentage deviation from predicted news workers per 100,000 residents (based on population).

index for news quality; it is simply a crude metric of how well served audiences are by journalists and news organizations that, at least ostensibly, work in the service of these populations. Nonetheless, this is an instrument to measure one state’s news media infrastructure against another’s. After establishing the variable for need, I began an initial geospatial exploration of their data and began looking for trends by visualizing the geographic distribution of grant dollars. The News Measures Research Project’s figures showing news deficits are replicated in figures 7.1 and 7.2, arranged in rank order. QUESTION 1: D O THE FUNDS FLOW WHERE THEY ARE NEEDED?

To answer this question, I began with a descriptive visualization of the data in order to better understand the geospatial trends. I then conducted a regression analysis to determine whether there was a significant relationship 208

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between either of the news deficit variables and grant funding per 100,000. Overall, I find that there is little relationship between whether a state has a news deficit and whether that state gets funding. This relationship changes somewhat when the states that get no funding for investigative journalism or have missing data are dropped from the analysis: In the states in our dataset that get philanthropic funding for investigative journalism, states that are already better provisioned for news get more funding. This suggests that philanthropic support for investigative journalism isn’t being strategically allotted, which is a problem for funders who are at least ostensibly trying to use philanthropy to bolster journalism.

News Infrastructure by State, Visualized In figure  7.3, you can see that the visualization of the News Measures Research Project’s data shows the coastal Northeast and the Mountain

Figure 7.3 News provision by geography, visualized. Blu e Ne w s Sur v iv ing

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West index the worst for news provision variables (news workers per 100,000 residents and news outlets per 100,000 residents). In the Northeast, these findings might be explained by the fact that states are small but highly populous and proximate to large urban centers, which we know also to correlate with limited access to geographically specific (“local”) news. The South is slightly worse than would be expected, and the Midwest seems to be faring somewhat well. In short, there are no trends that immediately pop out to suggest geographic trends relating to news deficits.47 When it comes to grant values, however, we do see trends that reflect disproportionate geospatial investment in investigative journalism. Recall that the Harvard team did not take population into account when posting the possible geographic disparity for news philanthropy. Simply observing that California gets more funding for news philanthropy doesn’t, in the end, tell us much about whether that makes sense given the population compared to that of other states; however, it is possible to standardize the grant dollar distribution against population, which we have done by dividing the total grant funding per 100,000 residents based on the 2017 U.S. Census data. In figure 7.4, you can see that the coastal states/areas of DC, New York, California, Massachusetts, and Virginia rank among the top recipients (as does New Mexico), while the Dakotas, West Virginia, Arkansas, Kansas, and Mississippi receive no financial support for investigative journalism, according to the database.48 Standardizing the grant dollars distribution shows that it is not the size of a state’s population driving the mismatch, but it is evidence of pack philanthropy at work. New York and DC are getting more funding for investigative journalism likely because they are media capitals, not because they have more people living there. In addition, two of the largest national nonprofits for investigative journalism operate in each city, ProPublica (New York City) and the Center for Public Integrity (DC). To get a better sense of the somewhat scattered geographic distribution of these states, we can also split them up into quadrants, setting the “deviations from predicted values” for news infrastructure (in this case, for news workers) against funding provision.49 To assess grant provision, we calculated the mean grant dollars for all the states and classified states as “High” if the funding they received is higher than the average 210

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Figure 7.4 Total investigative journalism grant funding per 100,000 residents.

amount and “Low” if not. For news workers, we put the states with a positive value for the percent deviation into the “High” category and those with a negative sign into “Low,” as seen in table 7.1. Table 7.1 displays a low-low condition, that is, states that have lower than expected news provision and grant support; a low-high condition, where there are states that have lower than expected news provision but higher than average grant provision; a high-low condition, where there is higher news provision relative to grant funding; and a high-high condition, where there is a positive relationship between expected news provision and funding amounts. The low-low condition shows eight Southern states, while the high-high condition seems to have a majority of states that lean blue. If you were to look at New York and California as a function of news infrastructure relative to population, you might conclude that these states were actually underprovisioned for journalism, but perhaps the economies of scale that result from having a large news industry to begin with might indicate that it isn’t as big a problem as one Blu e Ne w s Sur v iv ing

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TABLE 7.1 Classification of states by grant provision and predicted number of news workers Grant provision (per 100k residents)

News workers (per 100k residents)

Low

High

Low

Alaska, Alabama, Arkansas, Delaware, Georgia, Hawaii, Idaho, Kentucky, Michigan, Mississippi, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Jersey, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Utah (17 states)

Arizona, Colorado, Connecticut, Louisiana, Maryland, New Mexico, Virginia (7 states)

High

Indiana, Kansas, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, Ohio, Oregon, South Dakota, West Virginia (9 states)

California, Florida, Illinois, Iowa, Maine, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Missouri, New York, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Texas, Vermont, Washington, Wisconsin, Wyoming (17 states)

might think. When the variables are transformed into percent deviation from expected news provision, we find that in fact, looking at the descriptive data, New York and California end up being heavily overprovisioned for news and grants. Here’s the takeaway: Some places that have lots of news workers or news outlets actually get more grants than states that face news deficits.50 While this raw data can illustrate the face values of news variables and facilitate comparison of those values across states, it falls short of representing whether a certain value is sufficient for each state’s news infrastructure, considering other demographic or news-related variables.51 Thus, I ran some regression analyses to determine whether 212

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there was any significant relationship between the provision for grants and the relative news need. WITHOU T RHYME OR REASON: GR AN T PROVISION AND FUNDING FOR JOURNALISM

We found that there is no statistical significance for the data that show that news deficits and grant provision are related. In other words, whether places need support for journalism doesn’t seem to be related to whether they actually get grant funding. If we remove from the data the states that do not get any funding for journalism, a statistically significant relationship does emerge among the states that do get funding for investigative journalism, but it reveals a positive relationship: states that already have relatively strong news provision also capture more grant dollars to support journalism. To me, this relationship is a stunning indictment of the philanthropic mission for journalism. How is it possible to offer support to journalism from philanthropy but not target it to the places that could use it most? Figure  7.5 illustrates the correlation between news infrastructure variables, transformed into predicted percent deviation, and the values of grants. The upper panel illustrates results for news workers; the lower panel illustrates the news outlets variable. The two panels do suggest a weak relationship between two main variables (as the value of news workers or outlets increases, so does the amount of grants provided to each state) but not enough of one to be significant. The lack of significance prompted some further digging. Perhaps there was some confounding variable that might explain the fact that need and funding provision appear to be unrelated. To be sure that various demographics or features of each state weren’t somehow affecting our results, clouding the significant relationship between news need and grant provision, we ran a multivariate regression with a number of control variables. For example, does population density or urbanity make a difference? What about poverty rates? Maybe it’s just that places with big cities get more money for investigative journalism because their populations are so dense or large, offsetting the grant amounts. Poverty might be an explanation, as poor states could either overindex or underindex for investigative journalism funding, with a greater perceived need to Blu e Ne w s Sur v iv ing

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Figure 7.5a Grant amount per percent deviation of news workers.

Figure  7.5b Grant amount per percent deviation of news outlets and grant amount per predicted percent deviation of news workers/news outlets.

correct structural inequalities. In poorer states, journalists might not have the networks, skills, or cultural capital to know how to apply for funding. Or perhaps corruption might explain the distribution. Using a measure derived from state indictments for public corruption, if I controlled for funding decisions made to help prop up investigative journalism in

TABLE 7.2 Multivariate regression analysis on the relationship between grant amounts and news variables with different model specification Dependent variable: Grant amount per 100k residents (log) (1) News workers (% dev)

(2)

0.016 (0.019)

News outlets (% dev)

(3)

(4)

0.042*** (0.012)

0.013 (0.010)

0.018*** (0.006)

Urban

0.006 (0.027)

−0.013 (0.028)

Poverty

−0.119 (0.121)

−0.161 (0.128)

Partisanship

0.546** (0.238)

0.543** (0.248)

0.0004 (0.0004)

0.0001 (0.0004)

0.434 (0.406)

0.480 (0.424)

Distance Corruption Constant

7.747*** (0.525)

7.681*** (0.524)

7.420*** (2.599)

9.570*** (2.664)

50

50

42

42

0.015

0.034

0.358

0.303

−0.006

0.014

0.248

0.183

Residual standard error

3.714

3.678

2.105

2.194

F statistic

0.730

1.678

3.250**

2.533**

Observations R2 Adjusted R2

Note: p < 0.1; **p < 0.05; ***p < 0.01.

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particularly corrupt states, I’d see that there was some relationship between grant provision and need. (For explanation of these variables, please see appendix C.) The multivariate regression analyses can be seen in table 7.2. We dropped from fifty states to forty-two states in Models 3 and 4, leaving out the states that got no funding for investigative journalism and those with missing data, which makes sense given that we are trying to understand what factors might cause a state to get funding for investigative journalism. Dropping these cases reveals a statistically significant relationship between news provision and grant provision. In these models, neither urbanity, poverty, distance from funders, nor corruption seem to have strong associations with the amount of grant provision, suggesting that philanthropists aren’t directing the funds to these states out of concern about state corruption or because of the state’s poverty level. And the measures of urbanity suggest that population density alone isn’t what is driving the lack of significance; states with big urban areas are not getting more money because they have bigger, denser populations. A state like California, then, with its huge urban areas and its vast rural areas doesn’t command the funding simply because of population density, and a state like Illinois doesn’t command funding because of its notorious issues with corruption. However, one important confounding variable does show significance: partisanship. The regression, then, points to the importance of considering partisanship directly. Q U E S T I O N 2: A R E T H E R E PA RT I S A N PAT T E R N S I N F U N D I N G F O R I N V E S T I G AT I V E J O U R N A L I S M ?

We find strong support that partisanship does seem to be a statistically significant factor in the relationship between news provision and grant funding for journalism. In short, partisanship can explain the amount of grant funding for investigative journalism: The more Democratic a state is, the more funding it receives for investigative journalism.52 This association, however, does not imply a causal connection—we can’t be sure that a state receives more investigative journalism because it is more Democratic, just that “blue” states are more likely to receive funding (see the regression shown in table 7.2). We find this pattern even after including news infrastructure variables in Models 3 and 4, meaning that the 216

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partisan effect is present regardless of (or even “after accounting for”) the health of a state’s news infrastructure (see appendix C). While most Democratic states ranked high in funding amounts, followed by competitive states, Republican states did not enjoy the inflow of funding for investigative journalism. First, solid Democratic states received more funding in general than their Republican counterparts. Democratic states are ranked higher in terms of grant amounts, and this pattern is present regardless of the value of news infrastructure. (See appendix C for an analysis of how the partisanship values were assigned.) Figure 7.5 shows these partisan alignments as a function of the news infrastructure variables. We also find that Republican-tilting states don’t necessarily have a weaker news infrastructure (providing additional support to findings in chapter 3).53 For example, the Dakotas and a number of the Mountain West states have more news than would be expected. Rather, it is in the South that we see the greatest disparities, particularly among a few key states. For example, while Maryland ranked last in terms of the number of news workers (−69.44), it received almost the equivalent funding amount as Minnesota, which has the ninth-largest number of news workers (34.16). Second, competitive states generally follow a positive pattern in both variables, with a high news infrastructure value leading to more funding. Lastly, while many Republican states also followed a positive pattern, showing better-than-expected news provision, five of six states without funding for investigative journalism were Republican: Missouri, Arkansas, Kansas, North Dakota, and South Dakota. West Virginia, the sixth state without funding in this category, is a competitive state. As a reminder, West Virginia has a fairly healthy news ecosystem, as suggested by our findings and as confirmed by key informants working in the state on news innovation.54 There are some troubling implications and unanswered questions that may result from these partisan findings. Are news outlets in blue states more likely to get funding for investigative journalism because the left-leaning people in these states have higher trust in news media and, as a result, raise hell when politicians are corrupt? Or are blue states somehow overprovisioned in grant funding because that’s where donor preferences are, that is, because funders give to those like themselves, and funders, perhaps, have left-leaning values? Blu e Ne w s Sur v iv ing

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It is true that partisanship is a powerful accusation for those mediabias warriors, especially on the right, and any hint of a partisan taint stands to blunt the impact of investigative journalism. Nonprofit and philanthropic support seems to be one of the most viable, though problematic, answers to the funding crisis. If repair for journalism comes from funders who also fund news outlets viewed as “left wing,” or, worse, if the funders themselves are viewed as left wing, there is a chance that this strong media distrust will also be attached to any intervention from outsiders. Notably, five out of the six states that did not get any funding for investigative journalism were Republican. Perhaps the funding is better targeted to Democratic states because Democrats have higher media trust than Republicans.55 So, if the investigative journalism in Democratic states shows corruption, perhaps these findings are somehow more actionable. However, our analysis shows that there is no connection between state levels of public corruption and grant provision, suggesting that donors aren’t targeting their funding for investigative journalism based on where corrupt public officials need to be brought to account. We don’t know from this data anything about the partisanship of the journalists themselves, who are ostensibly the ones applying for grant funding. Though this analysis is speculative, it may be that journalists in red states seek less funding for investigative journalism because they worry about perception, for example, that the Republican power structure will impute a preexisting liberal bias to outside funders and find one more reason to discredit the journalism produced. Nonetheless, the findings suggest a reason to further explore whether donors are more comfortable giving to people and places like themselves and, as a result, give more to blue places. To bolster this analysis, question 3 considers the precise geographic location of funder and grant recipients with respect to partisanship and countywide characteristics, providing additional support for our partisan analysis of journalism giving patterns at the state level. Q U E S T I O N 3: I S T H E R E E V I D E N C E O F E L I T I S M O R PAC K P H I L A N T H R O P Y ?

Overall, yes. When philanthropy steps in to subsidize journalism in the case of market failure, what this really means is that powerful rich 218

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people—either in the form of rich institutional funders or family foundations or individuals—are using their dollars for a pro-social cause, a provision of journalism that would otherwise presumably not be supported by the market. Those with the money to give away are making important decisions about what types of journalism we will actually end up seeing. One important concern emerging from previous research is that elites are giving to other elites to support the kind of journalism already read by well-educated rich people. Another concern is that donors tend to engage in pack philanthropy—investing in the same nonprofits as other nonprofits. Support for investigative journalism may be an excellent case through which to explore this issue: big investigative projects may stand to have far fewer readers, but perhaps they are read by elite stakeholders about others like themselves and thus might have a far greater potential public impact. Consider a for-profit example of top-notch investigative journalism with these trickle-down effects as an illustration of this point: the New York Times’ 14,000-word exposition on President Trump’s taxes—read by few, understood likely by fewer, but significant to a far wider audience.56 There are theoretical and empirical reasons that support how geospatial distributions of capital do, in fact, reflect networks of elite status and power. The connection between physical geographic proximity and investment has been observed in other fields, most notably Silicon Valley’s “twenty-minute rule,” whereby VC investors are more likely to invest in startups within a twenty-minute drive of their offices.57 Second, the “whom you know” dimension of elites giving to elites may be related to cultural proximity—if not in exact location, then other locations that resemble one another. Physical proximity may be less important than shared social contexts and culture.58 Perhaps funders are just giving to recipients that are most like themselves in places that resemble the ones they inhabit, which might reflect another dimension of placebased inequity when it comes to the flow of nonprofit dollars to grant recipients. I look at two possible indicators to assess whether there was a placebased dimension to this pack philanthropy. First, I consider whether the geographic distance between funders and recipients is a factor in who gets money (for example, their respective actual physical addresses). Second, I use geography as an indicator of cultural proximity between Blu e Ne w s Sur v iv ing

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funders and recipients. Using the American Communities Project’s fifteen types of communities, it is easier to compare geographically distant but culturally proximate regions of the United States.59 The community types employ standard cluster analysis using thirty-six different indicators to categorize counties (labels include “College Town,” “Mormon Enclave,” “Big City,” and so forth). Thus, we answered our question about likes giving to likes by assessing the types of funder-recipient dyads. The twenty-minute rule does not appear to apply to news philanthropy, at least not for investigative journalism, but elites do give to other elites if we think about geography as a proxy for cultural proximity (see appendix C). Funders from big cities, by and large, prefer to give funding to grant recipients in other (liberal) big cities. Figure 7.6 summarizes the distribution of these funder-recipient dyads. The most common type of funder-recipient community dyad is the Big City to Big City dyad, where both institutions are located in large cities. Of the forty-two dyads included in this analysis, fourteen of them

Figure 7.6 Dyad distribution of funder-recipient. 220

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are classified into this category, with Oklahoma City being the largest funder location, followed by New York and Chicago. The next set of most commonly occurring dyad parings suggests that communities that are likely also to have high cultural capital benefit: philanthropies in big cities are more likely to give to urban suburbs and big college towns than anywhere else. Intriguingly, the most frequent top funder for investigative journalism across all 50 states is the Ethics and Excellence in Journalism Foundation, located in Oklahoma City. Though it is not a “coastal elite” city, at least by conventional terms, it does cluster for the American Communities Project as a “Big City.” The foundation’s endowment comes from the Gaylord family, which owned the Oklahoman newspaper. The foundation’s portfolio is far more specific than some of the larger news philanthropy funders, which may explain why it has a leading role in funding investigative journalism, supporting organizations like the Wisconsin Center for Investigative Reporting, the Midwest Center for Investigative Reporting, Honolulu Civil Beat, Oklahoma Watch, and others. The second-biggest funder for journalism overall, the Knight Foundation, is located in Miami and often provides large grants to other umbrella organizations elsewhere who then redistribute funds, meaning that Knight’s geographic spread is more diverse than might be initially seen in the data. Certainly, the fact that a big-city foundation gives to another bigcity grant recipient does not alone establish that the funding is necessarily going from one set of elites to another or from liberal foundations to liberal nonprofits. We looked at one type of journalism and the biggest project funded, which can only take us so far; however, it is nonetheless suggestive that foundations give to grantors whose cultural context and setting for journalistic work is familiar. Funding for investigative journalism likely goes to journalists who have the skills to do it, and these journalists are often among the best-paid employees in newspapers (and thus offer an immediate reduction to payroll expenses if their jobs are cut). In this sense, the funding is well targeted, supporting elite journalists in other big cities with the chops to do this kind of difficult journalism. The connections between and among elites that grease the wheel of news philanthropy, the path from the power of donors to the presumed Blu e Ne w s Sur v iv ing

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need for news to recipients, and the dynamics of partisanship that emerge require close attention, as do normative underpinnings about how to “save journalism.” If the goodwill behind supporting journalism ignores local contingencies and specificities, focuses on deficit rather than potential, and reinscribes the same patterns of geospatially distributed inequality, a backfire effect against the journalism presumably supported by wealthy coastal elites is liable to further erode trust in local media. Thus, I explored how two digital-native nonprofit news outlets who have received considerable attention for their efforts in both the news industry literature and in national media have positioned themselves as part of the process of repair for the decline in local journalism: Mississippi Today and 100 Days in Appalachia. INSIDE/OU TSIDE PRESSURE FOR NONPROFIT NEWS OU TLETS

I identified two states that did not get any funding for investigative journalism during the timeframe of my analysis: Mississippi, which has a struggling news ecosystem, and West Virginia, which has a fairly healthy journalism infrastructure. I took a closer look at two nonprofit efforts in these states, Mississippi Today and 100 Days in Appalachia, a news startup based out of West Virginia University. Neither of these outlets self-defines as investigative journalism outlets, and as such, they do not appear in the quantitative data I analyzed.60 Nonetheless, these new, digital-first outlets both aim to change journalism in their states, and in the case of 100 Days, the region. But as new nonprofit startups in states that are highly polarized, this mission is vulnerable to backlash and accusations of liberal media bias from the right. These abbreviated case studies of each outlet are telling because they show the tensions of negotiating how to have an authentic and important voice for the state or region while doing the types of stories that have long been either avoided or ignored by more traditional outlets or are simply no longer covered. For each of these outlets, challenging the conventional narrative is part of their DNA, but if they go too far, their work risks being dismissed by the powerful. Negotiating funding has posed a challenge for each outlet, with Mississippi Today in a far different (and more comfortable) situation than 100 Days in Appalachia. 222

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Just as I was beginning to research Mississippi Today, it made national news. A small scandal erupted when a gubernatorial candidate declined to have a campaign reporter from Mississippi Today follow him on the trail because she is female. (It was against his religious conscience, he explained.)61 A second gubernatorial candidate followed days after with the same complaint.62 Protesting this claim as unreasonable because it is sexist put Mississippi Today squarely under a nowtired attack from stakeholders trying to explain away the news outlet’s reporting by dismissing it as “liberal media.” Mississippi Today aims to support state and local news in the Blackest state in America. The news outlet has gotten itself in trouble by brushing up against one of the most conservative, whitest, and arguably most racist power structures in the United States. In a place where retaining a Confederate flag on the state flag was until 2020 a reasonable political position for garnering votes, Mississippi Today’s key areas of coverage include race, inequality, and poverty. The site has not been shy about tackling issues of criminal justice reform or police brutality, either. As its editor, Ryan L. Nave, a Black man, explained to the audience at the 2019 International Symposium for Online Journalism: “We shouldn’t have to brag about diversity. We hired people who look like people who live in our state. You cannot cover the state with the largest [percentage] African American population in the U.S. . . . with a newsroom full of white folks. . . . Or a newsroom management structure full of all white men.”63 Black journalists, along with white journalists working at Mississippi Today, are challenging that white power structure. Nave told me, “We [journalists] spent a lot of time ignoring communities in the state; we weren’t writing about race in a serious or thoughtful or responsible way a lot of the time. We are the Blackest state in America. We should be writing about race.”64 Nave would rather ignore the naysayers, saying it was more important to him to focus on “these communities that weren’t engaged before and cultivating those relationships versus convincing an old white dude I’m not a secret member of BLM [Black Lives Matter]. That’s not a productive use of my time.”65 Mississippi has also been ranked among the most corrupt states in the country, and in 2014, it had the highest thirty-year ratio among all other states for the number of public workers censured for misuse of Blu e Ne w s Sur v iv ing

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public funds.66 Mississippi only has a single newspaper correspondent in Washington regularly charged with covering the state’s delegation. And, as is common for Mississippi across so many different rankings of social welfare, the state also ranks at the bottom of nonprofit philanthropy for investigative journalism. As Nave explained, one function of Mississippi Today is to ask, “Why are we first in everything bad and last in everything good?” The answers cannot make politicians look good.67 Yet even political stakeholders recognize that Mississippi Today is sorely needed in the state, especially given the decimation of the sole statewide newspaper, the Clarion-Ledger.68 As one staffer for a Mississippi senator told me, “We don’t always like what it has to say, but at least it is there doing something. Otherwise we would have zero coverage of some of this stuff.”69 Agencies and issues that haven’t been covered in decades are getting renewed attention, including the state’s infrastructure and the Department of Corrections, which has a $300 million budget. (Mississippi also has the nation’s third-highest rate of incarceration.)70 One of the difficulties that Mississippi Today faces is the tension between covering these political ills and covering people who haven’t been covered before. Nave likes to think he can do both: “We get down to Southwest Mississippi, and they have media, but they are not producing the kind of stories that we think these communities deserve. . . . So we are intentional about places we go and kinds of issues we cover and what are the really hard questions and tough issues we know wouldn’t be covered . . . if Mississippi Today didn’t exist.”71 So, Mississippi Today might not cover the Jackson city council (Jackson is the state capital), but Nave has sent a reporter to a public utilities commission in rural Clarksdale in the Delta. Based on these decisions, he’s able to tell that the coverage is both about and for the area, as “it gets great traffic because no one else is covering [these areas] and a lot of it [the web traffic] is coming from Clarksdale.”72 But Mississippi Today is fighting another uphill battle, and ironically, it is not a question of limited financial resources. The newspaper is in a healthy financial situation. Its money and its origins trace back, in part, to a rich New York City media bigwig, none other than the former NBC News and MSNBC chairman Andrew Lack. The other cofounder 224

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and main supporter is the tech entrepreneur Jim Barksdale, the former CEO of Netscape. Lack, like Nave, did not grow up in Mississippi, but both of these journalists have local ties—Lack has family in the state, and Nave edited Jackson’s alt-weekly for four years. Those who wish to discredit their journalism will point out that not only is Mississippi Today liberal, but it is also run by outsiders. Nave, for instance, went to the University of Missouri and “hung out with the j-school crowd.”73 He acknowledges that he’s not exactly sure how many job interviews he’s gotten just because people have seen Missouri on his résumé. Nave is also well networked at the National Association of Black Journalists, which has taken important stands on racial inequality. Mississippi Today, too, has likely benefited from the association with Lack and NBC. The outlet has been covered by the Associated Press, is connected with the founders of the Aspen Institute, and was invited to an event at New York’s Paley Center just after launching. “Certainly, we get into rooms because of who we are connected to,” Nave said. But the funding that comes with these connections is important. Even with these backers, Nave still has to raise additional revenue, but the urgency is somewhat muted. As he points out, “I think there are people who are hesitant to admit there is just one really rich guy who is bankrolling all of this, and I think that’s fine to be honest and transparent about that. . . . We would not exist if it wasn’t for our founders.” He also underscored the observed tendency toward pack philanthropy and elites giving to other elites: “We’re lucky in that we had that initial investment[;] it’s really collateral that [other] foundations feel confident [in supporting us].”74 To some degree, Nave cares less about the doubters than he does about building new audiences that have previously been ignored by the state’s power structure. There’s an essential and existential question about whether it matters to engage with the power structure if newer audiences, potentially less powerful and less financially able to provide support, are starting to pay attention to Mississippi Today. Still, Nave is optimistic: “It’s a two-fer. You center a lens on people who represent the problems and the solutions you want to bring out and the influences who can do something, and the people who are interested are communities you are shining a light on, and before, that wasn’t case;  a lot of Blu e Ne w s Sur v iv ing

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news organizations are waking up to this fact [that] maybe if we are more inclusive in coverage our readers will become more diverse.” Mississippi Today is not shying away from controversy. This kind of repair is fundamentally necessary—and the organization is embracing these values of diversity in its staff. Whether speaking back to power changes power remains to be seen. And whether Nave is able to succeed in bringing new audiences to this kind of journalism is another open question. If Mississippi Today were not a nonprofit, it’s hard to imagine that it would be able to have this freedom to focus on racial inclusivity and to challenge white supremacy. Such coverage is possible because a rich white man’s wealth is being put to use by a Black man who is consciously centering issues of racial injustice. In West Virginia, a different but related scenario faces 100 Days in Appalachia, a nonprofit news startup aimed at reframing the narrative in the wider cultural imagination about Appalachia. Funders outside the region are unfamiliar with the area’s issues, and those both from inside the region and outside of it have been quick to dismiss the outlet because of its ties to “liberal” funders. First proposed as a “pop-up” news startup that would end its efforts at the end of the first hundred days of President Trump’s presidency, 100 Days has far surpassed this marker. The need for the outlet was clear when, on Trump’s hundredth day, white nationalists held a rally in Pikesville, Kentucky. The story drew national attention, but it also reinforced to 100 Days that there was a real need to continue covering the region in the era of Trump. Dana Coester, its executive editor, added, “That sort of became a premise for us to launch this as a national publication talking outward; it wasn’t about trying to build an audience in West Virginia and Kentucky.” 75 One of the hardest aspects of selling a mission of reframing the narrative of Appalachia is that it doesn’t mean just doing PR stories, and that makes 100 Days vulnerable to critique. Even after 100 Days launched with regional funding, Breitbart took aim at the organization, tagging 100 Days in an article about Google trying to index hate speech: The Google/ProPublica coalition partners are all Center-Left Bias or Left Bias including the New York Times, BuzzFeed, Univision News, WNYC, First Draft, The Root, Meedan, New America Media, Latino USA, Ushahidi, The Advocate and 100 Days in 226

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Appalachia. Although the coalition states they will work on civil rights issues with the highly respected University of Miami School of Communications, they also will rely on input from George Soros’ Open Society Foundation-funded and the radically Left Southern Poverty Law Center.76

Conservatives and conservative media outlets branded it as just another liberal media outlet. A hate group attacked the outlet via its Twitter feed, suggesting that 100 Days was indoctrinating students via PolitiFact, the fact-checking outlet. Coester explained: “None of it was accurate, but it was something we immediately had to navigate, including internally to conservative voices in the region. I tried to gently explain to folks that we can’t be an outlet that is designed to surface missing voices from the Appalachian narrative and then not surface those missing voices.” Some of the big projects of 100 Days have included stories about Affrilachia, the LGBTQ community in Appalachia, a documentary project on Muslims, and the ravages of the opioid epidemic. Coester referenced what a fellow editor, Mike Costello, had said about the difficulty of covering the region, “I think sometimes we fall into this trap, feeling like every story of Appalachia should encompass everything we like and nothing we despise about this place.”77 The funding challenges 100 Days has faced provide additional evidence to support the quantitative findings that philanthropic dollars favor elite connections and known nonprofits. Unlike Mississippi Today, which has benefited from the networks and connections of its wealthy founders, 100 Days has had to work much harder to get national funding, though it now has some. It launched along with an associated project, the NewStart Newspaper Ownership Initiative, which aims to create sustainable business models for small print newspapers and was initially supported by a regional funder focused on economic and community development, not on journalism. Private funders who have a relationship to the region and the College of Media at West Virginia University provided additional support. Maryanne Reed, a former dean of WVU’s College of Media and now its provost, is no stranger to raising university dollars. She put the challenges of attracting money from outside the region to support news Blu e Ne w s Sur v iv ing

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philanthropy this way: “There is a culture of providing funding to known entities, so you have to work hard to break into the inner circle. When you’re located in a rural environment and your program doesn’t necessarily have a storied history or reputation, you just have to be really persistent in building a case.”78 West Virginia University’s media innovation incubator, which houses both of the projects, launched them as a proof of concept before they had much financial support to sustain them. Both Reed and Coester see such proof as a necessity for “oddball projects” that are outside of the traditional philanthropic power structure. For example, some post-Trump philanthropy has taken on the goal of diffusing racism through dialogue and discourse, and news outlets have been recipients of these dollars, as well as conveners in these efforts. In small communities, projects that aim to help people resolve racial, ethnic, and religious stereotypes don’t work the same way as they might in an urban place. In a rural area, as Coester explains, the person at the meeting might be the only Muslim in their town, so the threat of exposure and the sense of vulnerability can be even more acute. If funders primarily have experience with media and outlets in urban, metropolitan settings, solutions that work there aren’t necessarily transferable to rural communities. Coester, in fact, feels a sense of fragility that comes from having broken into the tight circle of newsroom philanthropy. She has raised these concerns about this sense of exclusivity with foundation funders and points out that there seems to be the same programs funded over and over again. “There is a set of journalism people, and we are very clearly an anomaly in that set . . . and people comment on that to our faces.” Still, there is reason to think that the tide is turning, at least for this set of projects. Coester recalls having submitted multiple grant applications to the Knight Foundation, which historically had not funded projects in locations that did not have newspapers owned by the Knight family. (Its portfolio has since grown far more diverse.) “I feel like we broke into that network, and it’s not because we haven’t been trying. . . . We finally got an invited grant after seven previous rejections; oh my gosh, it is embarrassing,” Coester said. There’s also an element of proud self-reliance, too, as West Virginia is not a news desert. Despite the rhetoric about poorly informed rural 228

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voters created by the national media, the lack of availability of quality journalism, unlike in Mississippi, is not the problem. “We have a fairly competitive media landscape. But we are not trying to compete. Rather, we are trying to elevate the good work of others by publishing and sharing their content,” Reed explains. One benefit of 100 Days has been that it has been able to partner with both smaller freelancers and larger nonprofit organizations and commercial outlets for support and distribution. In this sense, 100 Days is an intentional insider within the Appalachian media ecosystem, even if the goal is to change the larger narrative about Appalachia in national coverage. Both Coester and Reed reminded me that the popular imagination of West Virginia and Appalachia more generally was coal, miners, and rural West Virginia and Kentucky, but the reality is more complicated. Yes, the region has high poverty rates, but it is topographically, demographically, and economically diverse in ways that are not part of that conventional imagination. This disconnect can be a struggle when dealing with funders, as Coester notes, “We created ourselves by desiring to help provide external access to national media about our region. If you are looking for truth, you have to accept the truth even if it is not your preconceived idea.” 100 Days faces a different set of challenges as a news nonprofit than Mississippi Today, but it shares an important similarity: it is bringing to the forefront stories that have been previously under-reported by local and national news media about the region. And while 100 Days is intended to be a corrective to national media’s broad stereotyping (Coester cracked that it was as if every miner left in West Virginia had been interviewed by the Guardian, CNN, or the New York Times), it is also not shying away from telling stories that reveal new, different hardships. Both 100 Days and Mississippi Today are intended as efforts at repair, trying to change the stories that are conventionally told about a place and to tell new ones. These two outlets each have their own way of articulating what they see as what it means to be an authentic and important voice for the state or region. Authenticity is easily tarnished by any associations that these outlets have from outside their region. Being viewed as an “outsider” looking in on the state’s or region’s problems can make it harder for the outlets’ work to have an impact, especially if the journalism can be Blu e Ne w s Sur v iv ing

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dismissed as having liberal motives. Notably, the elite patterns of funding we observe in our quantitative data also emerge in the case studies. In Mississippi, it required an outsider’s cash to start a news organization dedicated to journalism about racial justice, which isn’t winning friends with the state’s legacy of white supremacy. Nave may have the right idea to dismiss the power establishment and instead look to people in places that have not been adequately covered as a way to challenge entrenched power. 100 Days’ experience trying to get outside funding is concerning. Coester’s observation that West Virginia and rural journalism more generally does not fit the national news philanthropy mold of an expected grant recipient is a reminder that even well-intentioned philanthropy has blind spots. L E S S O N S F O R P L AC E - B A S E D N E W S P H I L A N T H R O P Y

These abbreviated case studies and the data analysis described in this chapter underscore that throwing money at the problem of declining resources for journalism on its own will not work. Supporting quality journalism is not as simple as just funding journalists and news outlets to go replace the newspapers that have closed and the journalists who were fired. First, there are questions about who is giving the money and where it is going, and second, there are indeed patterns highly suggestive of inequity. In aggregate, journalism funding is not going to where it is most needed, but it is going to places that overindex for being Democratic and to big cities. These dominant trends should not impute a blanket political or social identity to any journalist, news organization, or news consumer living in a place. Nonetheless, physical location, power, identity, and inequality are connected through the broader conceptual lens of place. News philanthropy’s patterns of giving matter because they reveal blind spots; places that need the money the most may not be getting the assistance. In a political communication context already too fraught with accusations of “liberal media bias,” funders who want to support journalism need to be careful about where they give and whom they give to. Philanthropists and foundations can give money wherever they want, and it is not the case that philanthropy needs to go to the neediest cases or is otherwise meaningless. That said, if news philanthropy aims to help 230

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support and even repair journalism, its internal blind spots create external problems that may make it harder for the funded journalism to have an impact. Philanthropy is often accused of having monolithic intentions. Consider right-wing conspiracy theories around George Soros’s Open Society, which also supports journalism. This chapter is not intended as just one more blanket assault on this sector. Instead, my aim is to question what amounts to path dependency in philanthropy in journalism, that is, how previous philanthropic interventions, existing networks, and previous successes unintentionally, rather than malevolently, set the course for much needed investments that can nonetheless reinscribe inequities. Directing too much of this investigative funding to “red states” could backfire as liberal funding; however, just because Republicans might see nonprofit journalists as Democratic lackeys does not mean that these journalists see themselves that way, nor does it mean that these journalists will hold back on Democrats in office. Though the data did not show a correlation between news provision, news philanthropy, and corruption, Illinois is a good example of a “blue” state thick with corruption, a long history of strong investigative journalism, and ample philanthropic support for journalism. Its last Republican governor was able to run on a message of cleaning up the Democrats’ mess. Questions around the partisan lean of funders and recipients deserve far more consideration from scholars and journalists alike, especially when it comes to Republican philanthropic support for journalism. Conservative foundations have a strong tradition of supporting partisan think tanks, right-wing magazines, and research. The data on news philanthropy overall show that foundations with established political ideologies do support journalism, especially magazine journalism, but funding for investigative journalism does not share these explicit ideological markers. Republican funders themselves are not necessarily welcomed into the more general-interest news philanthropy space. For example, in 2018, the Koch Foundation offered support to the Poynter Institute and the American Society for News Editors, though the conservative Koch family has been quick to discredit mainstream news outlets that write negative stories about Koch Industries.79 The Koch Foundation also partnered with the Knight Foundation and others to support research on Facebook and election interference. These Blu e Ne w s Sur v iv ing

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decisions prompted some sharp criticism in journalism circles, caused by what an ASNE staffer obliquely referenced as “sensitivity around the Koch name.”80 News philanthropy may be the “hot” cause in the moral panic around misinformation and fears about growing news deserts, but news philanthropy presents challenges for grantees. Interest in news philanthropy may evaporate. Perhaps more worrisome than any partisan bent to news philanthropy is the rise of tech platforms directly funding journalism. Some worry that the big platform companies are just buying off these local news outlets, squeezing out journalism content to improve their own products and using cash to squelch critics. As the Columbia Journalism Review’s Mathew Ingram put it, “Facebook is both killing and funding local journalism.”81 In a hyperpartisan environment, there is nothing that is politically neutral; journalism is a field oriented toward looking at social problems and questioning power. Does stated support for racial diversity, inclusivity, and equity in journalism make a funder like the Democracy Fund or the Knight Foundation a “liberal” funder? These organizations selfdefine as nonpartisan, but self-definition may not matter. Journalism itself slides quickly from lower-case l liberal, concerned with information provision and transparency, to upper-case L Liberal because the pursuit of social justice is associated with a progressive agenda. When those in power are Republican, it is easy to dismiss those challenging the establishment as being wrongly intentioned because they are liberal, and in such a context the journalism can be conveniently dismissed as liberal media bias or, worse, “fake news.” Both 100 Days and Mississippi Today are revealing uncomfortable truths that would rather be conveniently ignored by their region’s power establishment. In each case, partisanship, especially accusations of media bias from the right, stands to undermine these upstarts, regardless of their efforts at repair. The establishment does not welcome journalism asking hard questions— regardless of which party is in power—but in the current political climate, and with the current state of financial pressure on journalism, the implicit partisanship associations about the flow of dollars to news outlets matter. As we look to the future of news and information in the United States, we should all be concerned that we see evidence of partisan 232

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patterns in supporting the news. More research is needed to figure out why this is happening, including figuring out the extent to which these dynamics are the result of conscious choices on the part of funders or some result of implicit bias or networks of elite (liberal) do-gooders, how issues like trust in news media and election outcomes affect these funding patterns, and, ultimately, the capacity of this journalism to help inspire social change. News philanthropy has some hard questions to ask itself about how to support journalism without also making that journalism easy to undermine by those in power. Nonprofit philanthropy in journalism is vulnerable to the same patterns of inequity and exclusion found elsewhere. This support for journalism should be careful not to reproduce or reinscribe these disparities. Rather, fostering local news and information requires thinking about journalism, community information providers, and community resilience to loss of legacy journalism in new ways. The conclusion turns to a proposal for thinking about news resilience to support a vibrant democratic culture.

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Place as the Way Forward

In Citrus County, Florida, the county commission needed to provide final approval for the public library system to invest in a roughly $2,700, three-year digital subscription to the New York Times. Instead of approving the subscription with a rubber stamp, elected lawmakers rejected the proposal out of allegiance to the Trump administration and their avowed distaste for the newspaper. “I don’t want the New York Times in this county,” Commissioner Scott Carnahan said at a board meeting, adding, “I don’t like them. It’s fake news.”1 He told a reporter for the Citrus County Chronicle, “I support President Trump. I would say they put stuff in there that’s not necessarily verified.” The digital subscription would have given seventy thousand county residents access to the Times for free through their library login. Citrus County, “locally known” for being the only place in Florida where one can swim with manatees, now has another claim to fame: a site in the culture wars over digital media subscriptions to national news outlets.2 According to the local coverage of the brouhaha, none of the commissioners read the Times. Commissioners told the Citrus County Chronicle that “approving a subscription to the New York Times could open the door to requests for subscriptions to radical publications.”3 After the decision, the local newspaper was flooded with comments on its site and on its Facebook page. The fight over the subscriptions drew

national attention, and the president even tweeted about it.4 The American Library Association put out a statement arguing, “Public libraries are government agencies subject to the First Amendment. Rejecting or censoring a publication based upon its political viewpoint represents both content and viewpoint discrimination that is contrary to the spirit of the First Amendment’s promise of freedom of speech and freedom of belief.”5 Commissioners blamed a lack of funds, even though the subscription would save the county $300 a year (the print-only subscription was more expensive compared to the digital deal).6 When over $9,000 in private donations were raised to support the digital subscription, lawmakers explained that they were worried about the precedent of private donations being targeted at the library for such a specific purpose.7 While the library system had paper subscriptions for two of the five branches, they didn’t help those who had accessibility issues, because those patrons either have trouble getting to the library or are vision impaired and rely on screen-reading software.8 In a heated vote after a public hearing, the commissioners eventually decided against the subscription, 3–2, though they agreed possibly to revisit the situation. Some tourists wrote to the county’s visitors bureau and said they would no longer travel to the area as a result of the decision.9 For seniors living in warm Citrus County, about forty miles from “the Villages”—perhaps America’s most famous retirement community— and an hour from Tampa, those “free” digital subscriptions from the library can be the difference between their reading the Times and not. Free and unfettered access to news and information thanks to the web is not so free and unfettered in the era of paywalls and political gatekeepers. In Citrus County, local politics means that the “red” lawmakers are keeping news they call “blue” out of the hands of the public. Without journalists at the Citrus County Chronicle covering the fight over the Times, it’s hard to know whether this controversy would have received such intense local and national attention. The demand for national news is clearly quite strong among residents, while the Citrus County Chronicle thumps along with a $6.50/month paywall and a creaky website. It is alive for now but, given present trends, likely to become a ghost newspaper before disappearing altogether.

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What happened in Citrus County is emblematic of what communities are facing when it comes to the future of news and information. The case of Citrus County brings together many of the core themes of the book and the role of place in the future of journalism. Place, news, and politics intersect in the larger context of a fractured and divided country. The United States is experiencing material, geographic realignment around social well-being and opportunity in the postindustrial, capitalist landscape. Today’s political geography feels particularly fraught, a simmering kettle about to boil over, and it’s unclear how to stop it. This sense of urgency may well be because we cannot grasp our own place within a far larger and longer historical context, but that shouldn’t matter. This is the moment we are living in, right now. In this book, I’ve illustrated the importance of thinking about the crisis in journalism through place, which enables a robust discussion of how markets, race, class, and politics intersect to shape the news we ultimately see. This place-based approach helps reveal the inequitable power distributions that are not just found in disparities seen in material geography but also in sociocultural relations—one’s place in the world relative to power. For news audiences and news organizations alike, place enables and constrains access and opportunity. Certain places have particular resources and opportunities (affordances) that make them compelling markets for news organizations. There are many places in the United States that have been chronically under-resourced in access to news and information; these areas often track demographic factors like poverty and rurality, though certainly not exclusively, as places proximate to major media markets often lack meaningful local news, too.10 Goldilocks newspapers are particularly challenged; they have historically served not just a large city but also a region and a state, and as a result, their chances for survival in a digital era are compromised. They are not big enough but also not small enough, and thus just right to be squeezed of all they offer thanks to the perverse logic of digital revenue and Google and Facebook’s data and advertising duopoly. The differences between the haves and have-nots of news are growing worse. Sadly, the news industry’s efforts to save itself are reinforcing these imbalances.

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In almost fifteen years as an academic researcher, I have talked with journalists, watching them work and thinking about the conditions that affect how news gets made. As an outsider with an insider view, I am well positioned to suggest alternatives and paths forward as a way out of the dismal future of news for the rich, white, and blue. I do not have a magic-bullet solution that will somehow “save the news.” That said, I suggest there are five paths forward that guide our ability to weather the coming news drought, which is likely to plague most, if not all, types of American communities. Each path depends on radically rethinking what type of journalism is being lost and what kind of journalism should be preserved. 1. Accept the death of local news as we know it (or as we imagine it) and move toward a post-newspaper consciousness 2. Unbundle journalism’s core functions and focus on what news journalists do best, leaving the rest to other community institutions 3. Prioritize authenticity, diversity, and inclusivity 4. Consider partisan news media a feature rather than a flaw of American journalism, especially if it can provide a reliable local news alternative 5. Understand news resilience: the factors that enable communities to weather and rebound from diminished geographically specific (local) journalism If we reimagine the core functions of journalism, leverage expertise, and consider how to take the best of what the newspaper ethos of journalism can offer to places that have lost geographically specific news, the news that powers democracy can be more inclusive. We get the democracy we deserve based on the core functions we demand from the news media. In the introduction, I offered a snapshot into the disconnect that plagues elite newsrooms convinced of their own importance, and in chapter 1, I threw some cold water on the myths that many stakeholders are invested in maintaining, that of an ahistorical and falsely nostalgic view of how local news has served democracy. In chapters 2 and 3, I showed how the financial constraints of the contemporary news environment

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worsen the preexisting structural challenges that face news organizations and journalism writ large: limited class and race diversity and long-standing deficits of quality journalism in communities that have not been able to support a market for it. Chapter 4 brought to life the disconnect between being in a place unlike most other places in the United States, Washington, D.C., and in a time of limited financial resources, the difficulty and importance of covering journalism authentically and comprehensively for a geographically specific audience beyond the Beltway. Chapters 5 and 6 looked more closely at newspapers as an industry, explaining the financial “why” behind newspapers abandoning places. These chapters detail how the destruction of the admittedly faulty model of ad-supported newspaper journalism leads to a last-ditch focus on trying to build a digital subscription base—one that is rich, white, and blue—and for the Times, the most likely survivor, an audience that is a global class of elites. Perhaps what scares me most is not the market failure of newspaper journalism but the well-intentioned solutions that, if poorly executed, threaten to further undermine trust in quality journalism. As I discuss in chapter  7, if news philanthropy is going to be what funds journalism that can no longer be supported by the market, funders and recipients need to think carefully about where to distribute resources, what kinds of journalism to support, and the consequences of outsiders supporting journalism in communities that may be suspicious of their intentions. Journalism’s ideal type often imagines local journalism as an unimpeachable democratic good, but many newspapers (and news outlets more generally) have systematically marginalized communities and participated in retaining a problematic status quo. Nonetheless, the “sense of place” fostered by journalism is the cultural glue that can bridge fractures and divides because it can tell us stories about places that give us a sense of our own identity and our relationship to a larger collective.11 Losing the news, then, threatens our ability to retain not just a functioning political system but also a democratic culture. Ultimately, only some places are able to support journalism, and the disparities will continue to grow, with significant consequences for access to news and information. While I don’t expect the death of newspapers to lead to the end of “American democracy,” I do think we need to be 238

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careful about considering the kind of democracy that will be our collective legacy and reform accordingly. T H E D E M O C R AC Y W E WA N T A N D T H E N E W S WE NEED

Though democracy may well be a rhetorical myth that we’ve talked ourselves into believing, its relative functionality matters less than whether we choose to believe it.12 This myth gives us social unity and a collective identity.13 Different kinds of democracies demand different kinds of media systems. The question before us is what kind of government policies, institutional and collective social structures, and market incentives we need to support the media we need for the democracy we want.14 Democratic theory is a wide, rich field. That said, one of the clearest typologies of different types of democracies and the media systems that they require comes from C. Edwin Baker, a media and democratic theorist revered by many media policy wonks.15 In elite or elitist democracy, which is underpinned by the belief that the best form of government protects liberty, the news media’s primary role is to cover the elites running the show. This version of democracy imagines power transferring from elites to elites. As such, navel-gazing “palace-court journalism,” horse-race coverage of political contests, and focusing on personalities is not necessarily a problem because the public needs to know about the character and actions of elites in order to know which elites ought to lose power. In this model, accountability journalism keeps elites in check and exposes wrongdoing. Baker also considers two forms of participatory democracy, a liberal-pluralist model and a republican one, each of which favors a different type of media system. Liberal-pluralist democracy emphasizes the freedom of individuals as groups, with journalism serving to help people adjudicate their differences to reach consensus. A republican model is probably the one closest to the ideal of journalism that facilitates public discourse and a shared common good; it is an optimistic vision that holds that people are more than just selfinterested actors. Yet all of these forms are insufficient because democracy is more complicated. In fact, Baker refers to his model of democracy as “complex C on clu sion

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democracy,” a mix of both the liberal-pluralist model and the republican one. He uses “the press” and “the media” interchangeably, but in his articulation of a complex democracy, Baker imagines an inclusive public sphere that might also include art, fiction, and other forms of expression. For him, along with other theorists of the late twentieth century like Jürgen Habermas, democracy is constituted through discourse, but a republican model of media and democracy doesn’t sufficiently protect against marginalized individuals and groups being pushed out of the conversation. Baker imagines a media system that serves multiple democratic roles at once: a general-interest “society-wide” press, a partisan press, and a more niche/audience-segmented press that provides a mobilizing opportunity for individuals and groups. To some degree, this sounds like our present high-choice media environment, but clearly, something is not working according to Baker’s plan, with that generalinterest, society-wide press barely able to survive in today’s market. Baker’s book was written in 2002, before significant digital and financial disruption to the news media, so specific policy recommendations seem dated, but his overarching message of an inclusive media is well taken. As I’ve articulated throughout this book, not everyone shares the same “place,” even if they are in the same location. In a complex democracy that is losing local news, the problem seems to be that the market incentivizes journalism that serves an elite democracy. But there’s something fundamentally unsatisfying about the elite democracy as a model and the kind of journalism it supports; it is detached from the rhetoric of shared identity and collective self-governance. The introduction of the book, with the Washington Post’s celebration of its relaunch and new building, offers a snapshot of what the news media of elite democracy looks like—for and by elites, certainly quite powerful, but far from inclusive and plagued by blind spots about the concerns of those outside this hub of power. Places—individual places, not just individuals—get marginalized discursively at a national level, distanced from the journalism that purports to offer a society-wide sense of commonality. For a model of democracy that does more than just keep elites in check, what we need to retain is what newspapers do in geographically specific places and find a way to facilitate the journalistic functions they serve. This does not mean propping up failing newspapers but instead 240 C onclu si o n

requires strategizing how to provide the essential functions journalists have traditionally offered to places in new ways, given the reality of market failure. In fact, we should be agnostic about whether journalists are actually still the right people to play some of the roles that newspapers have traditionally served in a place. A post-newspaper reality is the present status for many places in the United States. By my count, 2,051 counties in the country lack meaningful newspaper employment, about 65  percent of the United States. Vague hope in noncommercial rescue is problematic, as I have shown, and as a pragmatist, I hold little faith that we would ever be able to have a much stronger U.S. public media system than we have now. However, there are ways to keep places informed as well as united (focusing on news resilience), maximize what professional journalists spend their time on (unbundling the news), and make journalism more inclusive (becoming authentic, diverse, and, yes, more partisan). Taken together, these suggestions lead us to an ideal type of thinking about a postnewspaper complex democracy and the role professional journalists play in it. P R O P O S A L 1: AC K N O W L E D G E A N D E N A B L E A P O S T- N E W S PA P E R C O N S C I O U S N E S S

“Post-newspaper consciousness” is a way to think about journalism in a news environment where traditional newspapers have been largely decimated. We cannot save newspapers, but we can focus our efforts on trying to shore up the journalism we worry most about losing. Absent newspapers, what do we want journalism to look like? I suggest we draw inspiration from newspaper and newspaper-style journalism (as now found at some digital-first sites) to orient our efforts toward thinking about how to support the kind of journalism that enables a complex democracy. A post-newspaper consciousness, then, is an orientation for thinking about how to do the best of newspaper-style journalism in a time of limited resources. The best of newspaper-style journalism has a normative valence with limited patience for injustice. Professional journalism can and should facilitate a shared conversation buttressed by the belief that the future can be better than the past and the present. This means journalism is emboldened by a vision of C on clu sion

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progressivism that is not progressive or liberal in the political sense: Ronald Reagan pushed for “morning in America,” and Barack Obama promised “hope and change.” A post-newspaper consciousness in journalism speaks to a version of progressivism that functions as a belief in a shared civic conversation about the future. Post-newspaper consciousness is grounded in the imaginary of what journalism can do. It recalls a traditional understanding of what modern journalism promised to offer. As Mr.  Dooley, the fictional nineteenth-century Irish bartender often featured in the Chicago Evening Post, is often credited with saying, “The job of the newspaper is to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.”16 James Ettema and Theodore Glasser, in their book Custodians of Conscience, point to investigative journalism’s most important contribution: a distinct sense of morality.17 There are basic values that seem to transcend political ideology and harms we can all agree on as simply not acceptable. Children shouldn’t be abused, public officials shouldn’t steal public money, doctors shouldn’t mistreat patients, and so on. When journalists can surface these violations and start the process of redress, offering what scholars call a “morally engaged voice,” professional journalism shines. This is an emphasis far different from the predominant understanding of journalism in the service of an informed democracy, as I discuss in chapter 1. Journalism can offer so much more to American public life if its role as a beacon for public issues comes with a clear moral valence— what ought to be done, who the villains are that deserve to be punished, and what viewpoints and perspectives do not deserve an equal airing in general-interest news media or haven’t been given the attention they deserve. Ettema and Glasser wrote their book before the birth of contemporary multimedia, interactive, and data journalism. Twenty-first-century journalism that can surface quantitative data to visualize and to interrogate these moral claims of injustice can tell stories at scale in new ways. These stories can be particularly potent, with the structure of the multimedia text serving as an interactive argument through which to guide a news consumer.18 They reflect a depth of commitment to reportage and presentation associated with the best of what newspapers promised to offer (and what the best national newspapers like the New York Times and the Washington Post, along with fortunate digital-first outlets 242

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like ProPublica, still provide). Journalism’s status as a profession has never been particularly sound when viewed according to most status markers: there’s no entrance exam, there’s no requirement for special journalism training, and there’s no codified, agreed-upon ethics that if violated, would mean that professional credentialing institutions would kick someone out of the profession forever (unlike law or medicine). Journalism’s claim to professionalism comes from providing specialized knowledge beyond what ordinary people might know, understand, or be able to monitor on their own. To remain a valued social institution, mainstream journalism needs to double down on what makes it valuable to society. To start, this means journalism needs to embrace core values that are explicitly antiracist and committed to social justice, approaching journalism with the goal of making life better than it is at present for all Americans. Journalism must use its power wisely and be informed by tolerance, compassion, authenticity, and rigorous inquiry to inspire a collective narrative. The power of journalism to create places may be one of its most important cultural functions for American social life. It provides an opportunity for journalists emboldened to use their skills and expertise to change places for the better. In many ways, this is a reclamation of the original ethos of Progressive-era muckraking—muckraking was investigative journalism with a moral valence: the United States did not have to be as unjust as the muckrakers had found it. Lynchings did not have to be a feature of American life, nor did poor working conditions or ruthless monopolistic practices. This era of American journalism that has so inspired so many journalists was fundamentally about making the country a better, more just society. As such, a post-newspaper consciousness in journalism would also challenge the status quo. There are hints of a culture war brewing within the most august news organizations in the United States, where journalists are not content believing simply that they are vectors for serving “truth” to the public so they can then make informed, rational decisions.19 Rather, as seen most explicitly through efforts like the Times’ 1619 Project, which focuses on retelling the four-hundred-year history of slavery, journalism can be used to systematically critique the status quo. The 1619 Project has been widely contentious, in part because of its historical claims but also because it challenges the fundamental C on clu sion

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perception of what the function of a newspaper is in a democracy. Newspapers report news, according to the detractors of the project; newspapers shouldn’t actively and consciously try to reshape public narratives.20 The 1619 Project moved beyond the traditional temporal orientation of journalism to re-report history toward a form of public, civic education that does not lose its relevance after the next major news cycle. Solutions journalism is another indicator that journalism is turning toward this hope of a better future. Solutions journalism, which aims to provide solutions rather than simply dispassionately reporting on problems, is another benchmark of a fundamental ideological reorientation in mainstream, contemporary U.S. journalism. Some newsrooms have resisted solutions journalism because of concerns about advocacy, but other newsrooms see it as a way to move past the legacy of journalism’s focus on negativity and marginalization.21 A post-newspaper consciousness in journalism would guide the orientation of reportage toward an assessment of the potential of various policy directions for public problems. Many journalists might find taking a “position” to be anathema— but ultimately, there is a right side of history, and as journalists are chronicling history as it happens, they might as well be thinking about what a better future looks like. To remain presumptively independent is to dodge an important role that journalism can play in serving as a moral guidepost in a complicated society—and independent, morally neutral journalism obfuscates rather than offers clarity. A post-newspaper consciousness in journalism is also a reflection of a fundamental ideological reorientation that must take place in American journalism: ceasing to laud journalism for its ability to stand apart, “independent” from social life, and instead imagining journalists as involved in identifying the harms and charting a way toward a better future. PROPOSAL 2: UNBUNDLE THE NEWS

A post-newspaper consciousness should prompt us to think about what professional journalists do best—and the reality is that journalism cannot do everything, especially given the implosion of the traditional adsupported model for news publishing. Newspapers have been their 244

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community’s bundlers for news, information, and audience attention for much of contemporary American history. One way to maximize scarce resources is to reduce the amount of labor we expect from professional journalism, but I don’t mean cutting jobs; I mean scaling back journalistic functions—unbundling the news. In chapters 5 and 6, I showed how the internet disrupted the most basic, core premise of the print newspaper advertising model: the bundled audience and the bundled news product. As an advertiser, if you wanted to advertise to a sports fan, you were also advertising to anyone else who bought the newspaper. As a reader, you couldn’t just buy the sports section; you had to buy the whole thing. This “bundle” metaphor is well worn by the future-of-news punditocracy, but most strategists haven’t considered “bundling” and “unbundling” as a way to think about breaking up the core functions of journalism in a time of limited resources. Newspapers are on the front lines, trying to do it all for geographically specific communities because they are (and conceive of themselves as) the largest original content providers, but they should hold back. We ought to unbundle the core functions of professional journalism, leaving other sources and community institutions that are already able to pick up some of these functions to do so. Through their labor, newspaper journalists “bundle” various forms of knowledge and cultural cohesion that matter for a robust, civic community. Newspapers mark a place’s history, recording the dead in obituaries and celebrating various openings, closings, victories, and so forth. We can think of it as the boosterism function of a newspaper, its role in establishing a sense of place for a particular geographically specific community, both for itself and in the context of the rest of the world. Newspapers also, at least ideally, serve as a check against the powerful—if not as contemporaneous accountability, than as a record by which the future can judge the past. Newspapers also serve basic information needs: listing events and providing basic services (information about crime, education, traffic, health, weather, etc.) and the kind of local community information needs that many scholars worry so much about communities losing. As a bundle, this journalism is simply too much for any one newspaper, especially a Goldilocks newspaper, to have to offer under the present market failure. C on clu sion

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Not all things can and should be covered by newspapers or by professional journalists. In the past, newspapers could feel confident deciding not to cover small-scale events of only minor news interest to a small audience. Now, newspapers, especially Goldilocks newspapers, need to stop chasing after local television audiences and worrying about the resources they need to cover all the potentially important meetings and events that take place in a large geographic region over the course of a day.22 This chase is simply a race to the bottom, exhausting newspaper resources; devaluing the core market proposition of complete, comprehensive news; and setting up a contest against less expensive television news, with which newspapers cannot compete.23 The press we need for a robust democracy doesn’t have to be a traditional press. Other community institutions can serve community information needs, and news outlets need not be duplicative. There are dozens of organizations that maintain and list community events, from religious organizations to the local chamber of commerce. School boards can post meeting minutes and livestream their meetings. Newspapers don’t need to put out who has snow day closings on their website if the school board can do it. Traffic and transportation information can and should be the purview of any municipality. Public health information may even be more accurate (at least in the United States) when it comes directly from a trusted community health institution, such as a local hospital providing information about a flu clinic.24 In the case of COVID-19, the case count was often most reliable from county- or municipal-level officials, where it wasn’t drawn from aggregated data by national news organizations, state agencies, or other big data trackers. Places with already robust civic institutions can take over the core “community information needs” that a newspaper provides. In other words, to reduce the civic knowledge “bundling” that newspapers have often seen themselves as responsible for providing, it is reasonable to offload the least “journalistic” aspect of this work to others. What about the core function of newspapers and professional journalism in civic memory? One concern many scholars, journalists, and community leaders have, as seen throughout this book, is that there is no shared site of news consumption that unites audiences. We worry that this hybridized, high-choice media environment, along with

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algorithmic sorting, contributes to political fragmentation and tuning out. My aim has been to demystify the widely held normative presumption that newspapers and local journalism are a net positive; the myth and false nostalgia of the importance of newspapers may be far more powerful than the practice. That said, it may be more important than ever in our fractured social, political, cultural, and economic reality for newspapers to facilitate a shared sense of place, but a newspaper alone does not have to bear that burden. Other community institutions and civic actors can also contribute. Rather than serving as a newspaper of record, perhaps it is better to remain a newspaper of accountability for a place. Professional journalists with top-notch skills in reporting and presentation should use their skills to provide a unique value proposition that cannot be found elsewhere. They should focus on the quality journalism that feeds democracy, namely, accountability journalism. There is no reason to start an investigative nonprofit if a Goldilocks newspaper already has a strong investigative tradition, especially if that Goldilocks newspaper chooses to avoid covering the news of the day. This resource management might well be one way to realign labor with costs as there are clear indications that the market offers little incentive for investigative journalism, despite its social value.25 A singular focus may reduce other financial demands to keep a news organization running. For example, if an editor has to choose between the daily reportage— say covering bond court and profiling suspects accused of crimes—and the issue of possible racialized patterns in the amounts set for bond, I’d suggest they choose the latter. In other words, the fear of the loss of geographically specific news because of the fabric it creates for community life may be overstated, at least in practice, which suggests that newspapers could shift their attention to focus exclusively on accountability journalism in a community. The Boston Globe has begun to move in this direction, deciding to deemphasize pro forma stories. In a memo, its editor Brian McGrory spelled the death of the obligatory “because it happened” story. He told the staff, “We’re going to be more crusading. We’re going to grab seismic issues like inequality and drive them in smart, relentless fashion. Likewise, we are going to do whatever we can to put the 600-word incremental story out of its sad little end-state

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misery.”26 That six-hundred-word story is the kind of labor a newspaper doesn’t have to provide. Collective memory creation includes covering the stories of consequence to a community, not passively recording what is happening with the idea of serving as a “first draft” of history. Now, professional journalists must choose where to invest their time, and it is not about more—it is about better. In the future, we must ask, what are the stories that only a newspaper or journalists with “post-newspaper consciousness” have the time and resources to tell? I’ve suggested accountability journalism, but these decisions may be specific to each place and each newspaper, given the set of issues and values important to that community. Most journalists I’ve talked to about my proposal for unbundling journalism dislike it. They argue that decoupling the communitywatchdog function of journalism from the day-to-day chronicling of community life is a terrible idea. They point out that the way one knows what to watchdog is from that day-to-day experience of being in places where news is made. They cite the importance of developing sources and listening to material that might not be recorded in official meetings but is nonetheless public. Yet organizations like City Bureau, a Chicago local news startup, have provided a proof of concept of the remarkable potential of ordinary people to serve the “being there” role traditionally accorded to journalists. Through City Bureau’s Documenters project, ordinary people, some of whom would be attending public meetings anyway, are trained to take notes and look for potential stories.27 They are paid, nominally, for their time. They provide a first-level form of surveillance that can be outsourced to civic-minded members of the public, leaving journalists, now unbundled, to pursue other significant functions. Newspapers (and journalists more broadly) are not the only storytellers in a community. If journalists cannot create all content for a community, then determining which kinds of content can be left to other storytellers is a rich potential site of future research. It would require us to move past our traditional understandings of journalism and, instead, think more broadly about community features that enable unbundling. Stakeholders need to focus efforts on understanding community resilience to the loss of traditional news institutions. We also 248

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need to think about how to take the professional news organizations that remain and make them more inclusive and empathetic. P R O P O S A L 3: J O U R N A L I S M O F AU T H E N T I C I T Y AND DIVERSITY

Journalism is a knowledge-producing social enterprise. Its blind spots are blind spots that ricochet throughout any person or organization that relies on journalism for insight. As journalism grows more distant from audiences, materially and conceptually, these blind spots grow. In a complex democracy that enables interest groups to advocate for themselves, news media needs to be inclusive. Professional journalism needs to be inclusive for people of color and for sexual and gender minorities, people with disabilities, those from low-income backgrounds, and those with a range of political perspectives. The national and international news outlets that are likely to survive comprise only a handful of large organizations owned by a few billionaires and publicly traded companies with a few large shareholders. These places of power are not traditionally welcoming or accessible to marginalized groups. One way to build authenticity and compassion is for the journalists who are left in these big national outlets to think about their blind spots honestly and openly and seek input from those they cover in ways that are open-minded and avoid stereotyping. Thus far, efforts to rebuild local news ecosystems by putting reporters back into places that have lost them have had mixed results. Report for America, modeled after Teach for America and the Peace Corps, provides funding for a local reporter in a place to cover news, but this new and often young journalist is not always seen as part of the community.28 That said, the project is still new and will likely amend some of these concerns. Diversity alone, as I have shown, will not be enough. Diverse populations in news organizations need to be in positions of leadership and power. Authentic and inclusive journalism is not just the responsibility of diverse journalists, either. As P. Kim Bui, a thinker and leader in news innovation and inclusion, notes, “A truly diverse newsroom represents the community in its makeup, but also shines light on people and communities through understanding. All journalists, not just those of C on clu sion

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certain backgrounds, should be able to thoughtfully cover the world around them.”29 A knowledge-producing social institution is only as good as the people producing the knowledge. One way to make journalism more inclusive is to make it less exclusive—and this means thinking about how to minimize barriers to entry. Some of these suggestions are being considered by many institutions similarly struggling with equity, especially higher education. When there isn’t much money to spend on the core aspects of news gathering, it might seem presumptive to suggest money be spent differently—and so a priority is to identify where there are current cash flows that remain relatively stable and rethink them. Higher education reform might be one of the best places to start thinking about how to fix journalism’s diversity and inclusion problems. By rethinking the federal work-study program, costs to news organizations can remain revenue neutral while fixing a major, exploitative gap in the unpaid intern economy. To make journalism more inclusive, the unpaid internship racket has got to end. Work-study jobs are part of a student’s financial aid package that helps them earn money for basic living expenses. Schools designate a certain amount of work-study dollars a student can earn, and while the money is not guaranteed, the basic idea is that a student has a job, sometimes mundane, sometimes directly related to their interest, and that money is not part of the loans they will have to pay off. The bonus is that federal work study is money given to universities to pay students. Work-study varies widely across universities. However, in many cases, only a handful of off-campus opportunities exist for students. The Harvard Crimson offers a work-study program independent from the university for students who need work-study funds, but they must raise money from alumni to help support the program—and what happens at Harvard isn’t exactly generalizable. Currently, federal work study programs can support student jobs at nonprofits so long as the work is in the “public interest,” and while employers often pay some portion of the student’s salary, the program can offer a cost-effective labor boost.30 If federal work-study programs could be rethought to include student-run media, even those independent from the university itself, more students would be able to participate in these organizations. This 250

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would allow them to develop their journalism skills without sacrificing paying for living expenses or having to work extra jobs. These federal work-study funds could also go to support internships and potentially even summer internships at news organizations. This would help news organizations minimize the costs of these programs and have a way to include students for whom such internships would be a barrier to entry. Filling the ranks of national journalists with more people who represent the diversity of the United States could go a long way. The growing challenge will be for large national news organizations that are well resourced to cover unfamiliar places to do so in ways that do not amplify the tendencies to split the country into partisan, highly stereotyped publics, further undermining trust among partisans and seeding further division. Alternatively, another way to rethink journalism is to become comfortable with a space for partisanship within the ranks of respectable and not-so-respectable news media in the United States. P R O P O S A L 4: AC K N O W L E D G E T H E PA RT I S A N M E D I A SYSTEM AND PROSPER

In a complex democracy, partisan media can be a feature rather than a flaw. National news outlets at the “society-wide” level provide the primary source of original news content for the rest of the partisan media system. Partisan media has a dependency on general-interest national news media; it distrusts it, but it is not doing nearly the scale of original news gathering because of it. This reliance sets up a strange dynamic among those journalists who profess to hold themselves to the journalism school invocation of “unbiased media,” objectivity, and neutrality and an American audience that somehow thinks that journalism should be “unbiased” but nonetheless happily consumes partisan news media. Most journalists see partisan media as acceptable in magazines and on talk radio, cable TV, and internet platforms like YouTube, but newspapers and many digital-first outlets refrain from stated commitments to particular political ideologies. Yet this partisan media system, especially on the right, is thriving, thanks to strangleholds on audience attention and political backers willing to invest huge sums to keep them running. In most other democracies, a well-established partisan press is part and parcel of the reality of journalism. The expectation is that news will C on clu sion

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be informed by political orientation. The journalism industry—the presumptive “mainstream” news industry I have focused on here—should reorient, openly and authentically, around the explicitly stated political ideologies that inform their journalism. In fact, it is important for interest groups to be able to adjudicate their needs through partisan media, which can be a healthy way to embrace a spirit of pluralism of thought and interest. Should a complex democracy accommodate hyperpartisan sites that bleed into “fake news”? My answer is yes. There’s no question that social media facilitates the spread of misinformation, with significant consequences for those groups most vulnerable to its false claims. It remains a vexing public policy and corporate governance question about how to avoid these negative externalities. One of those negative externalities is that people are choosing to consume news and information that is tangentially based in reality—and we must remember that this is their choice to make (algorithmic curation notwithstanding). However, partisan local media may be one financially sustainable option that should not be feared but encouraged. In some places, there is robust local right-wing and religious radio, sometimes run through nonprofits. They do not report on news but offer commentary. Perhaps it is not too much of a stretch to think that there is room for reporting growth in these organizations. Some scholars have raised concerns about hyperpartisan local news outlets that provide geographically specific news and are funded by political organizations that obscure their right-wing connections (so-called pink slime sites). Liberal advocacy groups are catching up in their own efforts.31 However, scholars and media policy advocates alike need to be open-minded about what such local news media might offer.32 Identity-based media that moves away from national politics and takes as its focus local issues that reflect people’s direct, lived experience might well serve as a buttress against some of the most extreme and dubious claims found in right-wing, hyperpartisan national news. Steven Waldman and Charles Sennott, two media policy experts and the force behind Report for America, have even made the case that conservatives need to invest in local media, especially in nonprofit local news. Writing in the National Review, they argue, “Conservative philanthropists should help fund local, nonpartisan, objective reporting, and 252

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talented young conservative writers should seriously consider becoming local journalists—not just commentators.”33 The “fake news” moral panic and fears about polarization and partisanship obscure the potential of a credible, opinion-driven news media. Equating partisan journalism with fake news or misinformation is problematic, and it is important to remember that all journalism is a product of the selective perception of journalists making choices about what to include or exclude. Trends in the United States suggest that a partisan realignment within the journalism industry is overdue, and in fact, the rise of a robust partisan press, in addition to existing partisan television and radio, would be in keeping with the media ecosystems in many other thriving democracies. U.S. news outlets that think of themselves as in the business of providing “truth” ought to take a reality check and look at the larger dynamics of partisan media.34 Journalists have often imagined journalism, especially newspaper journalism, as a neutral actor in the communication of reality. This delusion needs to end. While there are signs that the decline in local newspapers may be associated with hardening partisanship, the rise of populism on the right and the left in the United States has causes that are far broader than just decaying local legacy media. To think about how to move past newspapers to a post-newspaper consciousness and to unbundle the traditional understanding of local news, it is helpful to think about news resilience, or the ability of a place to withstand the loss of traditional news yet still retain a healthy civic life and offer residents access to basic community information needs. This approach may also enable a more holistic approach to supporting communities that can diminish partisan resistance and claims of liberal, outsider intervention. P R O P O S A L 5: U N D E R S TA N D N E W S R E S I L I E N C E

If we can identify markers of news resilience, then we may be able to better direct our efforts at funding and supporting journalism in ways specific to direct community needs. Resilience often appears in literature on risk, disaster, and natural resources or, in political science, as a benchmark against some rupture or past democratically undesirable event (for example, resilience to authoritarianism). In the case of a natural C on clu sion

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disaster, a city might be assessed for its ability to bounce back from the event, and researchers would work to develop a matrix for assessing factors that made a place more or less likely to be able to return to its predisaster context. Such an assessment often entails a close look at civic resources, social demographics, and political efficacy. Likewise, the idea that there are certain, enduring characteristics that can be nurtured to help a community withstand extreme strain is worth further exploration. In chapters 3 and 7, I showed how, at scale, certain types of places have historically been underserved by professional journalism. Some of these places might seem to be chronically under-resourced in other dimensions as well, from access to social services, education, and jobs to economic opportunities, thus limiting the options for personal mobility; the affordances of place leave some people “stuck in place.”35 Yet, at scale, it is difficult to judge whether a place actually does have a strong, social fabric and the resilience to withstand further challenges. This is the trouble that national journalists have when in new places. By all measures, a community may “look” a certain way to an outsider but have features that make it markedly more resilient than it seems. There may be mechanisms for the creation of shared civic identity and communication of essential information that aren’t picked up. Consider the journalism scholar Sue Robinson’s detailing of the parallel communication network of black communities in progressive, liberal cities, which exists on Facebook groups and through email forwards and is facilitated through community leaders.36 To journalists in these cities, this information hub was barely noticed.37 A news desert may be a news desert by the standards of a researcher sitting thousands of miles away, but that place may have a strong social infrastructure that facilitates the flow of information and collective identity that comes through settings many would not consider “places of news” (churches, schools, gas stations, diners, and casinos). To move past essentializing what places do and don’t have, the urban planning scholar T. L. Green proposes “opportunity geography” as a corrective. If we think about places from the perspective of opportunities and possibilities rather than deficits, we can begin to think about how to best support what is possible.38 Through the work of Eric Klinenberg, an urban ethnographer with interests in media sociology, it 254

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becomes clear that communities can be, by all appearances, similarly disempowered yet vary greatly in terms of their resilience.39 Klinenberg found that two downtrodden neighborhoods in Chicago had vastly different capacities to respond to challenges. The neighborhoods that had a healthy “social infrastructure”—places like libraries, public parks, gathering places, and religious organizations that facilitated healthy and meaningful social interactions—had a stronger support system for those who had found themselves in even harder times. I propose that we begin thinking about how to support news resilience in communities that are likely to lose news or who have never had much quality journalism about them at the outset. As stakeholders who care about civic life, we need to think about what features of places serve to support their underlying communication infrastructure and work to strengthen and to support that infrastructure, offloading some of the bundle of services professional journalists provide. There is precedent for this approach, though it has thus far been applied at the micro level in urban neighborhoods. During the Rodney King uprisings in Los Angeles in 1995, the USC scholar Sandra Ball-Rokeach looked down from the heights of the plush LA neighborhood of Cheviot Hills. From her backyard, she could see the fires burning in Watts. Rather than see the deficits, though, she suggested that there was another way to think about communities. In the aftermath, Ball-Rokeach’s work identified the importance of local community storytelling networks: civic and nonprofit organizations, local and ethnic media, and residents. This “communication action context” could constrain or facilitate communication but was not what scholars have traditionally considered as important. It included considerations of street safety, benches, pedestrian traffic, meeting and greeting spaces, and local resources and services.40 The neighborhood level makes sense for mapping community health interventions or civic efficacy, as much of Ball-Rokeach’s team has gone on to do,41 but it may also be simply too micro and urban centered. The answer to both assessing and supporting news resilience may not be park benches, libraries, or playgrounds. Different places have distinct communication action contexts. In fact, as the vignette about Citrus County makes clear, some community leaders are openly hostile to facilitating the free flow of information through libraries. In other C on clu sion

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places, citizens have little love for tax-supported institutions, and libraries may lack basic resources or be shutting down.42 The trick will be figuring out which civic institutions are best positioned to support the more generic tasks of information provision and community cohesion that newspapers have traditionally offered so that journalists can unbundle, focusing their attention and skills on quality journalism of high social value that no other civic institution or type of skilled profession can promise to offer. In short, if we want to support journalism, we need to support places and the features in those places that build community life and fulfill some of the functions we traditionally ascribe to local newspapers. The worries we have about fraying social cohesion might be a reflection of macro tensions in this great American experiment, but if we strengthen communities in places and build or rebuild local storytelling networks and civic and social infrastructure, we can work toward a news media that serves the needs of a complex democracy rather than an elite one. Extreme caution is required: Efforts to shore up journalism’s core functions should not be guided by a perception of deficit and should resonate authentically and inclusively with those living in these places. Creativity will be needed to find unexpected strengths and capacities for news resilience. For example, as of 2017, Detroit has a designated, government-employed “chief storyteller” who supports community storytelling to counterbalance news institutions with long histories of marginalization.43 Since many ways to help spread and share information take advantage of access to digital infrastructure, one obvious policy solution is meaningful broadband expansion in rural and low-income communities. Wiring people won’t solve problems, but it will lower the costs of access to vital communication. Right now, in wired communities, platforms like Next Door and Facebook are serving as hyperlocal community bulletin boards. In times of distress, these electronic bulletin boards can provide key information: COVID testing sites, the latest details about protests, unofficial food pantry sites, and so forth. This benefit comes with a dose of digital surveillance, an electronic “who are the people in your neighborhood” that can amplify racist understandings of who does and doesn’t belong.

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This information sharing happens on platforms owned by big tech companies, with civic interests and civic failures alike the source of data and ultimately profit for these companies. This is not what we should want the future of community news to look like. The “place” to begin reform is by supporting community conversation and amateur news gathering and information sharing. Proposals to create noncommercial digital platforms for news and information are an important step forward, but these noncommercial information efforts can quickly become political warring points, as we see with libraries and public broadcasting. Unfortunately, big tech has already won the battle of scale—leaving behind big tech for noncommercial digital options is unlikely to be widely adopted by those who find Facebook easy to use to find out what’s going on. Ultimately, to save journalism we need to save ourselves from being unwitting profit sources for big technology and unwitting targets of behavioral advertising that seeks to seed misinformation, division, and distrust. One way to mitigate the effect of market failure on journalism, where quality journalism exists for the rich, white, and blue, is to make sure that the new purveyors of news and information have the public interest and public needs as core guiding principles. This requires regulatory reform to reshape the power of big tech, treating Facebook, Google, and their ilk as common carriers, much like AT&T and railroads once were regulated. These laws exist in our current regulatory toolkit, but they need to be used.44 Meaningful data privacy reform and antitrust regulation are the most likely political pathways that exist to subsidize the market failure of journalism; breaking up the power of big tech also ends big tech’s ability to suffocate a profitable digital publishing model. Regulation will not end big tech’s disruption to our news and information ecology, but it will mitigate its worst effects. For a long time, scholars have recognized the power of journalism to serve as a platform for the rhetorical construction of a shared political reality, a story we tell ourselves about our world and our place within it.45 But the type of quality journalism I’ve invoked is in serious danger of disappearing, especially in the wake of COVID-19 and the stresses of a global economic slowdown. Action is needed, and it begins with rethinking the future of journalism with a clear-eyed, critical

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assessment of what journalism can be rather than mourning a past colored by faulty nostalgia. We may not save newspapers, but we can create an information environment and culture of democratic life that builds on a post-newspaper consciousness, looks to the news resilience of communities, and seeks to create equity and inclusion in the communication that powers civic life.

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Appendix A: Methods

April  22, 2020: We’re about six weeks into COVID-19 safer-at-home social distancing. Wednesday is my designated work day, according to my present spousal understanding. Morning editing got done because 5:30 a.m. anxiety is a powerful motivator to get out of bed. The day really starts with a half-hour chat at 10 a.m. with Tim Marema, the editor of the Daily Yonder, a nonprofit news site run by a rural advocacy group. I had interviewed him for the book, but that wasn’t why he was calling (in fact, he didn’t remember at first); he needed some help with interpreting some social media data about rural America’s priorities during social distancing. As we end the call, I break it to him that I didn’t think our interview from a year ago had made it into the book, and he offers to help talk up the book when it was out. I actually hadn’t realized I’d be quoted until his story runs.1 I return to my editing briefly, and then notice a Twitter direct message from Geoff Ingersoll, a personal friend who also happens to be editor-in-chief of the right-wing Daily Caller, a digital-first outlet. He’s frustrated by coverage about yet another preprint, pre–peer review study, this time in Vox, about University of Chicago economics professors who suggest a link between Sean Hannity and the spread of the coronavirus.2 I don’t have time to talk, but I share with him a piece I’ve written in Columbia Journalism Review about how journalists can cover

academic research more carefully3 and then direct him to two other academics who can comment on the story. A call with a colleague follows, some more efforts at editing, and then I remember thanks to an automatic calendar alert that I need to join a two-hour Zoom meeting with PBS News Hour to talk about their efforts to improve the public’s understanding of math and science in their coverage. I’m an NSF advisor for their grant, which means I am getting paid a small stipend to offer advice about their study. For two hours, rather than meeting in person in New York City, I’m Zooming in to a meeting that includes a rundown of web analytics for PBS NewsHour; a presentation of the study’s progress; and a wide-ranging discussion with the editorial staff, study consultants, and a few other NSF advisors from range of disciplines about stories that could be done differently, missing COVID-19 voices, and more. I message an academic friend also on the call via Zoom’s chat function to say, “This is just like every news meeting,” and I engage in some backchannel chatter with the other academics. One, a junior professor in computer science, messages back, “It’s neat to see how the news gets made.” I respond, “Yeah, that’s pretty much what I do for research.” I hadn’t thought of my meeting as fieldwork because I wasn’t taking notes as such, I didn’t have any questions in mind, and I had been the one to sign the IRB consent form. I was just at a meeting with journalists talking about journalism. The day before, I taught a Zoom distance-learning class. I invited a HuffPost journalist to speak with my students about reporting on gender and inequality, the topic on the syllabus for that day. I am a frequent source of the journalist, so figured I could ask her for some of her time. We chatted about how her beat had been derailed by the epidemic. When I was back on childcare duty, I had an email exchange with old friends from my college newspaper who were collaborating for the first time since college on some COVID-19 stories for ABC News.4 I learned from some Twitter contacts that the New York Times’ in-house psychologist was now sending mass emails to the company. And of course, there is the ever-running Google chat with my childhood best friend, who was on the COVID-19 reporting team for NBC. Throughout the day, we chatted off and on about how her reporting could lead to PTSD. Why share these accounts with you in a methods section?

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Because even in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic while sitting in my home in a college town in central Illinois, I no longer know when fieldwork begins and ends. The distinctions between home and work, between offline and online, and between research and socializing have completely blurred. I’m constantly engaging with journalists as I go through my day-to-day life. I wouldn’t just describe this book’s methodology as a mixed-methods project that uses fieldwork, interviewing, statistics, and geospatial analysis, though it uses all of these. I’m not sure I’d describe it as a multisited case-study approach to studying journalism, either, though I’ve taken insights from dozens of field sites. Rather, I suggest that the methods used for this book might be described as gestalt scholarship, the sum total of everything I’ve learned and thought about to this point, now squeezed into the structure of a book that happens to have a particular argument. So rather than count interviews and time in newsrooms and chart out my countless visits, formal and informal, to places of news, startups, newsroom cafeterias, press clubs, and informal sites of socialization, it’s best to consider my approach to methods as an “always-already way” of doing research.5 SPECIFIC NOTES

Overall: All positions referenced are current as of the time of the interview. Unless otherwise noted, after first citation, assume that subsequent quotes from an interviewee should be attributed to this first citation. There are a handful of anonymous interviews, which are referenced by general date to avoid decoding the respondent. As much effort as possible has been taken to check quotes with journalists or others cited in the text before publication, though not all respondents were able to be reached or responded. The book received IRB “exempt” approval from both George Washington University and the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Introduction: I received access to attend the weeklong events via a press pass, which I obtained by covering the event for Columbia Journalism Review. Chapter 2: I am conscious about concerns about erasure of scholars of color, and in this regard want to acknowledge that this chapter does

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not offer a literature review of research on news and diversity and thus leaves some important voices uncited. In journalism studies specifically, I wish to highlight the influence of Imani Cheers, Danielle Kilgo, Meredith Clark, Deen Freelon, Michelle Ferrier, Travis Dixon, Lanier Holt, Rachel Mourão, Marisa Smith, Shakuntala Rao, Linda Steiner, Candis Callison, Mary Lynn Young, Sue Robinson, and Catherine Squires on my thinking. I am a white, queer woman writing about problems with race and class, and I acknowledge my own blind spots. Chapter 3: Please see appendix B. Chapter  4: These interviews were conducted between 2017 and 2018, with a handful of follow-ups in 2019. I obtained a day pass to follow the Senate Press Gallery thanks to an interviewee; I was granted a one-day pass because I do not meet any of the qualifications for membership in the press gallery. I am a member of the National Press Club through the “communicator” division. The second floor of the Press Club is off the record, although my time there does inform some of my insights. In checking quotes, it was devastating to see how many of these journalists had lost their jobs or chosen to leave for more stable positions in the two years between interviewing them and finalizing the chapter for publication. Chapter  5: I used a key-informant approach to interviews for this chapter. I also took advantage of the 2019 International Symposium on Online Journalism in Austin to interview a number of key thinkers in person. Chapter 6: Doing research on the Times for the first time since 2015 presented new challenges. In the age of Trump and the increasingly difficult financial portrait for news generally, the Times was in a far more cautious place than it had been in 2010 when I conducted my dissertation fieldwork. It is also a vastly more complicated organization. I emailed Danielle Rhodes Ha, the Times’ VP for communications; I told her I could write this chapter with or without the Times’ participation: enough people had left that I could interview many of these individuals without the Times signing off. Rhodes Ha agreed to assist with my research, scheduling interviews and/or introducing me to interview schedulers, although she had no input on questions and did not join my interviews. She was allowed to review the final chapter for accuracy. The time she spent on this project and related texts is indicative of her 262

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professionalism and commitment to the newspaper, and I thank her for being everything an ethical comms person ought to be. I visited the Times in New York for two days, July 1–2, 2019, and visited the Times’ London bureau on September 19, 2019. I also conducted one interview at the Times’ Washington bureau. On a far more somber note, the Times in New York had put up concrete barriers between the street and its building entrance and was concerned I might reveal the geographic location of some of its bureaus, thus endangering journalists. Chapter 7: please see appendix C. Conclusion: This chapter is informed by thirteen interviews conducted with local media entrepreneurs and legacy journalists in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois.

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Appendix B: Extended Methods from Chapter 3

DATA S E T S

Newspaper Employment We used the annual county averages of the Bureau of Labor and Statistics State and County Employment (Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages). This counts only filled jobs, whether full- or part-time, temporary or permanent, by place of work. The BLS Quarterly provides data based on quarterly reports filed by employers for over 7 million establishments subject to unemployment insurance laws (see https:// www.bls.gov/bls/employment.htm). There are limitations to the data. Because “the QCEW data is based on an establishment census which counts only filled jobs, it is likely that a multi-job holder will be counted two or more times in QCEW data. . . . Major exclusions from UI coverage include self-employed workers . . . and employees of certain small nonprofit organizations.”1 We used the U.S. government–assigned NAICS code “51111, Newspaper publishers,” which “comprises establishments known as newspaper publishers. Establishments in this industry carry out operations necessary for producing and distributing newspapers, including gathering news; writing news columns, feature stories, and editorials; and selling and preparing advertisements.”2

Newspaper employment data includes all of those jobs that can be considered part of the support jobs of producing a newspaper. That said, it is reasonable to count those who work to produce the news and those working in other capacities to support this production as a coherent indicator of the bulk of what the News Measures Research Project calls “news media infrastructure” in their analysis. Note that the BLS offers few details about which employers are included in the account, but working backward, this category would not include the AP, a wire service, or BuzzFeed. Pew has dealt with the cross-media data and as such has insights into more specific categorizations.3 Though I had data from UNC’s News Desert research project, I didn’t want to look at the presence or absence of a newspaper itself as indicative of whether there was local news in a county because the geographic footprint of a newspaper might be broader than where its headquarters is located. One of the weaknesses of the BLS data is that for communities with very few newspaper jobs, these data are “private” or “NA”—in part because if there are only two or three journalists in a county, they are very easily identifiable. Therefore, there are counties without any newspaper employment (zero counties) and counties without any data entry (NA counties). (Technically, zero counties do have data; they just don’t have any employers.) We took the data as given in the original BLS dataset, so zero counties come into the analysis with the numeric value of zero, and NA counties automatically drop out of the analysis. There are two types of “missing data”—places that just don’t have any local newspaper employment (0) and places that have so little newspaper employment that to report the raw numbers would risk identification. These data, as noted, are labeled “private” or “NA” and are treated as NA, which means they drop out of the analysis in most cases. In 2007, there were 12 counties with NA data and 2,189 counties reporting 0 journalists, while in 2018, the number grew to 45 counties with NA data. We have tracked the counties that have changed across 2007, 2012, and 2018. The BLS dataset includes 3,117 entries: 2,675 county entries + 382 MSAs + 4 national totals + 56 state entries (Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands are in this category). After deleting these entries, we have a total of 2,630 entries for the dataset. When I discuss the 65 percent of U.S. counties that lack regular access to local news, I am considering the NA/Missing data and the 0-newspaper-employment counties together. 266

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Community Type The second dataset used to categorize community types comes from the American Communities Project dataset, drawn from U.S. Census data. Through a cluster analysis of 36 different indicators ranging from population density to numbers of military servicemembers in a county, the ACP data designates fifteen “community types” that share cultural proximity, even if they are not geographically proximate, and assigns each of the United States’ 3,143 counties one of these 15 community types.4

Partisanship The third dataset, used to analyze partisanship, comes from MIT’s Election Data and Science Lab.5 The MIT dataset includes actual vote counts of presidential elections for every county in the United States. We compared data from the 2008 and 2016 elections. All of these datasets contained county-level identifiers (FIPS code), which allowed us to merge these datasets. We arranged the dataset so that we could deal with non-numerical values. Not every county has newspaper employment; these counties have “0” as the entries in the dataset. Some of the counties have missing entries, which is denoted as NA in the dataset. VA R I A B L E S

Deriving the Proportional to Industry Measure In this case, we compared a county’s changes in newspaper employment by dividing the number of employees in each county by the total number of employees in the newspaper industry. For this proportion variable, the counties that had zero values in 2007 return infinity as a result. For these counties we changed infinity into NA so that we could better illustrate changes in other counties.

Deriving the Employment to Population Measure We created a newspaper employment to population variable with population data of 2007 and 2018 from the U.S. Census website App e n di x B : E x t e n d e d Me t h o d s f r o m C h ap t e r 3

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(http://www.census.gov). The proportion variables are calculated by dividing each county’s newspaper employment by its population in 2007 and 2018 and are transformed into percentage values by multiplying by 100. For example, in 2007, Nantucket County, Massachusetts, has a value of 0.750, which means that 0.75% of the total population is employed in the newspaper industry. Note that we considered the counties that gained employment across these measures to see if there were any outliers. Most of the counties that “gained” were very similar in composition to one another, and thus we do not think the “outlier” concern is valid.

Partisanship Measure To assess partisanship, we calculated the absolute difference between Democratic and Republican votes. If the difference was bigger than zero, we labeled counties as Democratic, and if smaller than zero, Republican. In terms of “labeling” counties red or blue, we used a “plurality” rather than “majority” method. We calculated the absolute difference between Democratic and Republican votes, and if the difference was bigger than zero, then we labeled counties as Democratic, and if smaller than zero, Republican. This dummy variable of partisanship is based on the 2016 presidential election data. Second, we created a variable to compare changes in the vote shares of Republicans between the 2016 and 2008 elections. After taking the differences in the total votes across Democratic and Republican candidates, we created a variable that calculates the changes in vote-share gaps between the two parties. For example, if a Republican candidate won in a county by 30% in the 2008 election and then won again by 20% in the 2016 election, this county gets −10% (20% − 30% = −10%) as its entry for this variable, which indicates a slight Democratic turn in this county. Thus, we assessed partisanship in two ways: we used one variable based on the 2016 presidential election and a second variable comparing changes in the vote shares of Republicans between the 2008 and 2016 elections. This offers a more holistic sense about changes in partisanship rather than election preferences—it’s not just whether a party won or lost but how much more “red” or “blue” a county became. 268

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In research question 3, I explored the relationship between declines in newspaper employment and changes in partisanship in two ways: as an aggregate comparison across counties looking at overall populations as well as by ACP county type. In this case, rather than looking at the proportion of a county’s news industry employment, the overall population trends matter more. If there is a bigger population, at least theoretically, there’s more for journalists to cover. But if places are losing population, it would make sense to have fewer journalists; thus, we used a newspaper employment–to-population variable rather than the industry-to-industry proportion variable we used earlier.

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Appendix C: Extended Methods from Chapter 7

Media Impact Funders provides extensive media-related funding data, including specific information on funders and recipients, number of grants per recipient and state, and dollar value of those grants. The website enables data collection on funder- and recipient-specific entries of every grant, which are further classified into the types of grants (e.g., journalism, news, and information; media content and platform; and media access and policy). From this website, I collated the names of the top 1 funder and top 1 recipient for each U.S. state with the geographical locations of those actors (zip code, city, and state) and the number and value of grants. Their data can be found here: https://mediaimpactfunders .org/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/Map-Report_final-to-print.pdf. The other main data source is the News Measures Research Project. (The News Measures Research Project data can be found here: https:// dewitt.sanford.duke.edu/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Assessing-News -Media-Infrastructure_Report-2.pdf.)1 This report contains observations on the number of news outlets and workers per state and their percent deviation from the predicted values. Since the key variables in the report are transformed into per 100,000 residents, I also transformed the value of grants from Media Impact Funder into per 100,000 residents values based on the 2017 U.S. Census population data. I have collected other main variables that are not included in the previous two sources.

These two variables, news outlets and news workers, are highly correlated with each other, and the census is compelling. It is drawn from the Cision database, a proprietary data service, which, as it takes into account print, broadcast, radio, magazines, and online news outlets focused on news and current affairs, provides a cross-media measure at the state level. The News Measures Research Project shares the preoccupation I have with the state as a significant political unit, and I share their concern that it requires some arm twisting to use a “state” as the unit of analysis for media infrastructure research, given that media markets don’t fit neatly into state borders. States are imperfect media markets, and it is important to acknowledge this, although the importance of the “state” as a political unit offsets this concern. It is worth noting that ascribing too much political unity to a state points to an overreliance on thinking about states as electoral college votes rather than as having their own diverse political demography, but the measures used here provide important suggestive evidence of the patterns explored in the chapter and bolster the overall state-based analysis. In order for the News Measures Research Project to create this “percent deviation from expected news infrastructure,” according to Napoli’s explanation (via personal communication), first the team ran regressions of news outlets and news workers per 10,000 on logarithmically transformed population size as the independent variable. Then the team divided the residuals from those analyses by the predicted value to get a sense of the magnitude of deviation from the population size– based prediction. Those regressions had R-squareds in the .44 range, which, while certainly not a perfect estimation, as brute force were a worthy starting point. The measure is based on whether a state has more or fewer outlets and news workers per 100,000 than expected. To compare states in a meaningful way, the Duke team standardized news outlets and news workers as a reflection of 100,000 per capita. For our research, we created another variable, per 100,000 grant provision, of the total grant funding given to the state for investigative journalism divided by the population times 100,000. For example, if funding is $10 million and population 1 million, then ($10 million/1 million) x 100,000 = 1 million. In our analysis, for the regression in research question 2, we continued to use the two sets of main variables from the previous analyses. We 272

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used the log of the grant values per 100,000 residents as the main outcome variable of the regression analysis. Then we ran regressions on percent deviation of news workers per 100,000 residents and on percent deviation of news outlets per 100,000 residents as the main explanatory variables. We have included five control variables here to account for potential confounder effects: the proportion of urban residents, measuring the proportion of the population living in places of 50,000 or more population (Urban); the relative income-to-poverty ratio (Poverty); party classification for each state based on the Gallup survey (Party Classification); and the physical distance between the top 1 funder and the top 1 recipient (Distance). Corruption is included as the last control variable to account for the possibility that states with more corrupt bureaucracies may deter the inflow of funding for investigative journalism or might inspire more funding for journalism, as measured by the number of corruption convictions of public officers at the federal level. For research question 2, we considered the partisanship of a state based on the share of voter self-identification from the 2017 Gallup survey. States are classified into five categories, “Solid Republican,” “Leaning Republican,” “Competitive,” “Leaning Democrat,” and “Solid Democrat,” based on the proportion of voters and their self-identified partisanship. States are denoted as “Solid” if a party has a 10 percent-point advantage, “Leaning” if the advantage is from 5 to 9 percent points, and “Competitive” if parties have within a 5-percent-point margin.2 We also used a dummy variable measuring states into Republican or Democrat based on the 2016 presidential election results. The Urban and Poverty variables are retrieved from the U.S. Census data (Urbanization: https:// www.census.gov/history/www/programs/geography/urban_and_rural _areas.html; Poverty: https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library /publications/2017/acs/acsbr16-01.pdf). Lastly, the distance variable measures geographical stretch between funder and recipient, which is calculated from Google Maps. ROBUSTNESS CHECKS

We conducted a number of checks for robustness. One concern was whether the regression was producing significance because of the control App e n di x C : E x t e n d e d Me t h o d s f r o m C h ap t e r 7

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variables rather than the dropping of our outliers that did not get funding for investigative journalism. We excluded those dropped observations from the dataset and reran the regressions. Table B.1 shows regression results from the original models (1–4) and from the smaller dataset after dropping observations (5–8). Basically, Models 3–4 and 7–8 are the same; the only difference is between Models 1–2 and 5–6. In the latter, we have a smaller number of observations—from 50 to 42—and the results suggest that it is dropping those observations that resulted in significant coefficients. We have a coefficient of 0.032 with the news workers variable and 0.016 with the news outlets variable, and both of them have larger point estimates and statistical significance. Before dropping those outliers, we do not have significant results, but after dropping them, the slope gets steeper, meaning a more positive relationship between main variables. These results, once again, indicate that dealing with those outliers can change the interpretations of outcomes from the main regression analyses. In other words, dropping the cases drives the significance, not the controls. Table A.1 shows results from a robustness check to see if the main results with control variables are driven by a specific control variable. We excluded one control variable for each model and ran regression models. Model 1 includes only the two main variables, Model 2 includes all the control variables, and Models 3–7 exclude control variables one by one from Model 2. This table presents results only with the news workers variable, but the same results hold with the news outlets variable. Focusing on the main variable effects, we see a consistent effect size and significance with the news workers variable—the effect size of 0.041 and significance at the conventional 0.05 level. One exception is Model 6, where we dropped the distance variable. Here, the effect size and statistical significance both drop, but the results still show significant effects of the news workers variable. Also notable is the consistent effects of the partisanship variable in the table. In all the models, partisanship is one of the determining factors of media grant provision. And its effects get stronger when we include all the states in the model (Model 6). To make sure that partisanship itself was not driving the findings and that the news variables were indeed also part of the relationship, we ran a second robustness check. We test this argument by including only 274 Ap p e n di x C : E x t e n d e d Me t h o d s f r o m C h ap t e r 7

−0.119 (0.121) 0.546** (0.238) 0.0004 (0.0004) 0.434 (0.406)

Poverty

Party classification

Distance

Corruption

0.042*** (0.012) 0.006 (0.027)

(0.019)

(2)

Urban

Percent deviation: newspaper workers per 100k residents

(1)

0.416 (0.394)

0.0004 (0.0004)

0.565** (0.221)

−0.116 (0.119)

0.041*** (0.012)

(3)

0.309 (0.385)

0.0005 (0.0004)

0.575** (0.236)

0.004 (0.027)

0.041*** (0.012)

(4)

0.373 (0.429)

0.0005 (0.0004)

−0.153 (0.127)

0.028 (0.027)

0.041*** (0.013)

(5)

0.336 (0.533)

0.931*** (0.330)

−0.167 (0.156)

0.064* (0.037)

0.032* (0.017)

(6)

Dependent variable: Grant provision per 100k residents (log)

TABLE A.1 Robustness check of the main regression analysis in table 7.2

(continued)

0.0005 (0.0004)

0.529** (0.238)

−0.078 (0.115)

0.001 (0.027)

0.041*** (0.012)

(7)

−0.006 3.714 0.730

Adjusted R2

Residual standard error

F statistic

Note: *p < 0.1; **p < 0.05; ***p < 0.01

0.015

50

7.747*** (0.525)

(1)

R2

Observations

Constant

TABLE A.1 (CONTINUED)

3.250**

2.105

0.248

0.358

42

7.420*** (2.599)

(2)

3.994***

2.078

0.267

0.357

42

7.811*** (1.979)

(3)

3.712***

2.104

0.249

0.340

42

5.903*** (2.088)

(4)

2.546**

2.227

0.159

0.261

42

8.177*** (2.726)

(5)

4.490***

3.18

0.263

0.338

50

2.163 (3.740)

(6)

Dependent variable: Grant provision per 100k residents (log)

3.657***

2.109

0.245

0.337

42

7.794*** (2.580)

(7)

TABLE A.2 Regression analysis of grant provision of newspaper employment Dependent variable: Grant value per 100k residents (log) (1) Percent deviation: newspaper workers per 100k

(2)

0.037*** (0.011)

Percent deviation: newspaper outlets per 100k

0.016*** (0.006)

Partisan classification

0.599*** (0.216)

0.519** (0.222)

Constant

6.948*** (0.793)

7.108*** (0.817)

42

42

R2

0.294

0.242

Adjusted R2

0.258

0.204

Residual standard error

2.091

2.166

8.121***

6.242***

Observations

F statistic Note: *p < 0.1; **p < 0.05; ***p < 0.01

two variables in the right-hand side of the regression equation, excluding other control variables. Results in table A.2 show that it is not just partisanship but also the news variables that determine the amount of grants. These results correspond to the results from the earlier section; we do find significant relationships between the key variables after we drop those outlier cases from the dataset.

Additional Analyses of Investigative Funding, After 2016 We also conducted another analysis to probe possible partisan patterns. Given the “fake news” moral panic during and following the 2016 U.S. election, along with growing evidence of a partisan divide in trust in App e n di x C : E x t e n d e d Me t h o d s f r o m C h ap t e r 7

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Figure A.1 Changes in grant amounts before and after the 2016 election, selected states.

journalism, we were curious about whether there might be some sort of observable shift in funding for investigative journalism (see figure A.1). After all, the new president won his race after a campaign that denigrated the national news media, a pattern that continued into office. Sharp partisan divides between rural and urban dwellers took on stereotypes of Hollywood proportions. Advocates for local news were well positioned to appeal to funders to support journalism and improve the quality of news and information available. While there might be a lag in reporting donations or in donations more generally, nonprofits often report the end of their fiscal year in June or July, and donations after the 2016 election year could appear in both 2016 and 2017 tax returns. It is worth noting, though, that despite all of the importance that journalists placed on speaking truth to power during the campaign, funding for investigative journalism actually went down after Trump’s election. We wanted to see whether funding for investigative journalism increased or decreased after the election and whether partisan patterns might be evident. We had data for before and after the 2016 election for 278

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nine states. Overall, we found that grant funding decreased in six states (WA, NH, ME, LA, CT, AZ), increased in only one state (OK), and stayed the same in two states (NC, CO), as seen in table A.1 In other words, grants decreased after the election in most of the states under study, while they increased only in Oklahoma. This data may reflect pre-election boosts in media funding or a decrease in funding only to Democratic states. Further study is required to look into a longer temporal trend in grant changes.

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Notes

I N T R O D U C T I O N : P L AC E , P O W E R , A N D T H E F U T U R E OF JOURNALISM 1. Author’s field notes, January 27, 2016. See also Nikki Usher, “The Washington Post Celebrates Its New Building with DC Elite and High-End Catering,” Columbia Journalism Review, January  29, 2016, https://www.cjr.org/analysis /washington_post_new_building.php. 2. Jennifer Lee, “Invite to Cover: Jeff Bezos, Muriel Bowser, Larry Hogan, Terry McAuliffe to Speak at the Washington Post’s Grand Opening,” digital press release sent via e-mail, January 14, 2016. 3. The third journalist/Hollywood celebrity was Michael Kinsley, former cohost of CNN’s Crossfire, who appeared in a trio of nineties movies including The Birdcage. 4. Author’s field notes, January 28, 2016. 5. Jordan Valinsky, “Washington Post Tops New York Times Online for First Time Ever,” Digiday, November 13, 2015, https://digiday.com/media/comscore -washington-post-tops-new-york-times-online-first-time-ever/. 6. I point this out as the Trump administration turned a blind eye toward endangered journalists abroad, as Times publisher A. G. Sulzberger has articulated: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/23/opinion/press-freedom-arthur-sulzber ger.html. 7. Paul Farhi, “The Washington Post’s New Slogan Turns Out to Be an Old Slogan,” Washington Post, February  24, 2017, https://www.washingtonpost.com

/ lifestyle /style /the -washington -posts -new -slogan -turns - out-to -be -an - old -saying/2017/02/23/cb199cda-fa02-11e6-be05-1a3817ac21a5_story.html. 8. Ethan Kaplan, Jörg L. Spenkuch, and Rebecca Sullivan, “Measuring Geographic Polarization: Theory and Long-Run Evidence,” paper presented at the American Political Science Association conference, Boston, August 30– September  2, 2018, http://econweb.umd.edu/~kaplan/ big_sort_APSA .pdf; and Greg Martin and Steven Webster, “The Real Culprit Behind Geographic Polarization,” The Atlantic, November  26, 2018, https://www.theatlantic .com /ideas/archive/2018/11/why-are-americans-so -geographically-polarized /575881/. 9. Pew Research Center, “Newspaper Fact Sheet,” July  9, 2019, https://www .journalism.org/fact-sheet/newspapers/; Pew Research Center, “Most Americans Think Their Local News Media Are Doing Well Financially; Few Help to Support It,” March  26, 2019, https://www.journalism.org/2019/03/26/most -americans -think-their-local -news -media -are - doing -well -financially -few -help-to-support-it/. 10. Penelope Muse Abernathy, The Expanding News Desert, (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018), https://www.cislm.org/wp-content /uploads/2018/10/The-Expanding-News-Desert-10_14-Web.pdf. 11. Penelope Muse Abernathy, News Deserts and Ghost Newspapers: Will Local News Survive (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2020), https:// www.usnewsdeserts .com /reports/news -deserts -and-ghost-newspapers -will -local-news-survive/. 12. Knight Foundation, “Indicators of News Media Trust,” September 11, 2018, https:// w w w . knightfoundation . org /reports / indicators - of - news - media -trust. 13. Nicole Hemmer, Messengers of the Right: Conservative Media and the Transformation of American Politics (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016). 14. Jim Rutenberg, “News Outlets Wonder Where the Predictions Went Wrong,” New York Times, November  9, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/10 / business/media /news -outlets -wonder-where -the -predictions -went-wrong .html. 15. Bill Bishop, The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America Is Tearing Us Apart (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009), 15; R. D. Enos, The Space Between Us: Social Geography and Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), chap. 1; Lilliana Mason, Uncivil Agreement: How Politics Became Our Identity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018), 14. 16. The Media Insight Project at the American Press Institute found that Democrats are more likely to subscribe because they care about supporting local

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journalism than Republicans, who are motivated by promotions; Democrats describe news quality as the main motivating factor for their choice to do so. Media Insight Project, “What Drives Republicans or Democrats to Subscribe to Local News,” American Press Institute, February  27, 2018, https://www .americanpressinstitute.org /publications/reports/survey-research /partisans -republicans-democrats-subscribers/. 17. Of course, today, the census is used for a whole host of civic purposes, from allotting federal aid to providing important demographic benchmarks. 18. Daniel C. Hallin, “Cartography, Community, and the Cold War,” in Reading the News: A Pantheon Guide to Popular Culture, ed. Michael Schudson and Robert K. Manoff (New York: Pantheon, 1986), 110. 19. Jay Rosen, “The View from Nowhere,” Pressthink, September 18, 2003, http:// archive.pressthink.org/2003/09/18/jennings.html. 20. Matt Carlson, Journalistic Authority: Legitimating News in the Digital Era (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017), 18, 21. 21. Barbie Zelizer, “On ‘Having Been There’: ‘Eyewitnessing’ as a Journalistic Key Word,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 24, no. 5 (2007): 408–28. 22. Carlson, Journalistic Authority. 23. For a more robust theoretical discussion of these core concepts, please see my “Putting ‘Place’ in the Center of Journalism Research: A Way Forward to Understand Challenges to Trust and Knowledge in News,” Journalism & Communication Monographs 21, no. 2 (2019): 84–146. 24. Markus Prior, Post-Broadcast Democracy: How Media Choice Increases Inequality in Political Involvement and Polarizes Elections (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), chap. 4. 25. Matthew Hindman, The Internet Trap: How the Digital Economy Builds Monopolies and Undermines Democracy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018), 102–32. 26. “Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Media Ownership Rules,” Congressional Research Service (2018): 1–29, https://www.everycrsreport.com/files /20181009_R45338_1f8fcea2a1ec4f4df5577b40abae74b5bdbbffb3.pdf. 27. Laura Hazard Owen, “Republicans and Democrats Live in ‘Nearly Inverse News Media Environments,’ Pew Finds,” Nieman Lab, January  24, 2020, https://www. niemanlab . org /2020 /01 /republicans - and - democrats -live -in -nearly-inverse-news-media-environments-pew-finds/. 28. David Harvey, “From Space to Place and Back Again: Reflections on the Condition of Postmodernity,” in Mapping the Futures: Local Cultures, Global Change, ed. Jon Bird, Barry Curtis, Tim Putnam, and Lisa Tickner (New York: Routledge, 2012), 17–44; Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (1974; Oxford: Blackwell, 1991).

In tr o du ction

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29. Yi-Fu Tuan, Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience (1977; Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 138. 30. Paul C. Adams, “Place and Extended Agency,” in Distributed Agency, ed. N. J. Enfield and Paul Kockelman (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 213–20. 31. Doreen Massey, “Imagining Globalization: Power-Geometries of Time-Space,” in Global Futures: Migration, Environment, and Globalization, ed. Avtar Brah, Mary J. Hickman, and Mairtin Mac an Ghaill (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1999), 27–44. 32. Doreen Massey, “Power-Geometry and a Progressive Sense of Place,” in Mapping the Futures: Local Cultures, Global Change, ed. Jon Bird et al. (London: Routledge, 1993), 59–85. 33. Nick Couldry, The Place of Media Power: Pilgrims and Witnesses of the Media Age (London: Routledge, 2002), 4. 34. Damian Radcliffe and Christopher Ali, “Local News in a Digital World: SmallMarket Newspapers in the Digital Age,” Tow Center for Digital Journalism, 2017, https://academiccommons.columbia.edu/doi/10.7916/D8WS95VQ. 35. Michael Schudson, Journalism: Why It Matters (Malden, MA: Polity, 2018). 36. C. Edwin Baker, Media, Markets, and Democracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 129–53. 37. Robert N. Bellah, “Civil Religion in America,” Daedalus 96, no. 1 (1967): 1. 38. Herbert J. Gans, Deciding What’s News: A Study of “CBS Evening News,” “NBC Nightly News,” “Newsweek,” and “Time” (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2004), 10.

1 . M Y T H S O F L O C A L N E W S A N D W H Y N E W S PA P E R S M AT T E R , A N Y WAY 1. Author’s field notes, April 22–25, 2013. Some text has been adapted from Nikki Usher, “Putting ‘Place’ in the Center of Journalism Research: A Way Forward to Understand Challenges to Trust and Knowledge in News,”  Journalism & Communication Monographs 21, no. 2 (2019): 84–146. 2. “Fans Celebrate Miami Heat Win,” NBC 6 South Florida, June 20, 2013, https:// www.nbcmiami .com /news / local /fans -gather-in -miami -for-miami -heat-vs -san-antonio-spurs-game-7-of-the-nba-finals/1940943/. 3. Joshua Benton, “When a Local Team Wins a National Championship, Your Daily Newspaper Will Tell You All About It! (Um, 36 Hours Later),” Nieman Lab, June, 28, 2019, https://www.niemanlab.org/2019/06/when-a-local-team -wins-a-national-championship-your-daily-newspaper-will-tell-you-all-about -it-um-36-hours-later/.

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4. Benton, “When a Local Team Wins a National Championship.” 5. This happened before the Gatehouse/Gannett merger of 2019. 6. Brooke Baitinger, “Sun Sentinel to Print Miami Herald Starting in April,” South Florida Sun Sentinel, January  21, 2020, https://www.sun-sentinel.com /local/ broward /fl-ne-sun-sentinel-prints-herald-20200122-byshzhgzs5cgpjd swsx3u2khvm-story.html. 7. Daniel C. Hallin, “Cartography, Community, and the Cold War,” in Reading the News: A Pantheon Guide to Popular Culture, ed. Michael Schudson and Robert Karl Manoff (New York: Pantheon, 1986), 146–96. 8. Burton Speakman, interview with the author, July 1, 2019. The Vindicator name and website were sold to another local newspaper company, and a newspaper with the Vindicator’s branding has been reestablished, but not its staff. Joshua Benton, “So Youngstown Will Have a Daily Named the Vindicator After All. But It’s a Brand Surviving, Not a Newspaper,” Nieman Lab, August 19, 2019, https:// www.niemanlab .org /2019/08/so -youngstown -will -have -a -daily-named -the -vindicator-after-all-but-its-a-brand-surviving-not-a-newspaper/. 9. Justin Gest, The New Minority: White Working Class Politics in an Age of Immigration and Inequality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). 10. Will Bunch, “How the First  U.S. City with No Daily Newspaper Will Help Trump in 2020,” Philadelphia Inquirer, June  30, 2019, https://www.inquirer . com /opinion /commentary / youngstown -vindicator - closing -newspaper -trump-0hio-20190630.html. 11. Lewis  A. Friedland, “Networks in Place,” American Behavioral Scientist 60, no. 1 (2016): 25. 12. Kristy Hess, “Breaking Boundaries: Recasting the ‘Local’ Newspaper as ‘Geosocial’ News in a Digital Landscape,” Digital Journalism 1, no. 1 (2013): 48–36. 13. John Zaller, “A New Standard of News Quality: Burglar Alarms for the Monitorial Citizen,” Political Communication 20, no. 2 (2003): 109–30. 14. Kurt Lang and Gladys Engel Lang, “The ‘New’ Rhetoric of Mass Communication Research: A Long View,” Journal of Communication 33, no. 3 (1983): 128– 40; Jeffrey C. Alexander, The Civil Sphere (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006). 15. Christopher Ali, Media Localism: The Policies of Place (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2017), 2, 3. 16. Lewis A. Friedland, “Communication, Community, and Democracy: Toward a Theory of the Communicatively Integrated Community,” Communication Research 28, no. 4 (2001): 358–91. 17. Heidi J. S. Tworek, “Communications and Technology Policy,” in The Oxford Handbook of American Political History, ed. Paula Baker and Donald  T. Critchlow (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), 408–23.

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18. Alfred Lee, “The Editorial Staff,” in The American History Teacher, ed. Bonnie Brennen and Hanno Hardt (New York: Routledge, 2011), 185–210. 19. David  P. Nord, “The Victorian City and the Urban Newspaper,” in Making News: The Political Economy of Journalism in Britain and America from the Glorious Revolution to the Internet, ed. Richard  R. John and Jonathan Silberstein-Loeb (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 73–106. 20. Nord, “The Victorian City and the Urban Newspaper,” 73–106. 21. For photography and an early history of now-established newspapers, see David Dary, Red Blood and Black Ink: Journalism in the Old West (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1958). 22. Sharon A. Boswell and Lorraine McConaghy, Raise Hell and Sell Newspapers: Alden J. Blethen and the Seattle Times (Pullman: Washington State University Press, 1996), 94, 203. 23. “What Others Say,” Omaha World-Herald promotional brochure, 1999. 24. Author’s field notes, June 4–7, 2013. 25. Aurora Wallace, Newspapers and the Making of Modern America: A History (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2005), 81, 86, 94. 26. “What Others Say.” 27. Michael Schudson, The Power of News (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 104–31. 28. Jay Rosen, What Are Journalists For? (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999), 181. 29. Erik Peterson, “Not Dead Yet: Political Learning from Newspapers in a Changing Media Landscape,” Political Behavior (2019): 1–23. 30. Lee Shaker, “Dead Newspapers and Citizens’ Civic Engagement,” Political Communication 31, no. 1 (2014): 131–48. 31. Esther Thorson, “Mobilizing Citizen Participation,” in The Press, ed. Geneva Overholser and Kathleen Hall Jamieson (New York: Oxford University Press), 214. Emphasis added. 32. Thorson, “Mobilizing Citizen Participation,” 214. 33. Meghan E. Rubado and Jay T. Jennings, “Political Consequences of the Endangered Local Watchdog: Newspaper Decline and Mayoral Elections in the United States,” Urban Affairs Review (2019): 1–30. 34. Rubado and Jennings, “Political Consequences of the Endangered Local Watchdog.” 35. Sam Schulhofer-Wohl and Miguel Garrido, “Do Newspapers Matter? ShortRun and Long-Run Evidence from the Closure of the Cincinnati Post,” Journal of Media Economics 26, no. 2 (2013): 60–81. 36. Schulhofer-Wohl and Garrido, “Do Newspapers Matter?”

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37. Pengjie Gao, Chang Lee, and Dermot Murphy, “Financing Dies in Darkness? The Impact of Newspaper Closures on Public Finance,” Journal of Financial Economics 135, no. 2 (2020): 445–67. 38. Danny Hayes and Jennifer L. Lawless, “As Local News Goes, So Goes Citizen Engagement: Media, Knowledge, and Participation in US House Elections,” Journal of Politics 77, no. 2 (2015): 447–62; Danny Hayes and Jennifer L. Lawless, “The Decline of Local News and Its Effects: New Evidence from Longitudinal Data,” Journal of Politics 80, no. 1 (2018): 332–36. 39. Federal spending is lower in areas where there is less press coverage of the local members of Congress. James M. Snyder Jr. and David Strömberg, “Press Coverage and Political Accountability,” Journal of Political Economy 118, no. 2 (2010): 355–408. 40. Laura Hazard Owen, “An Analysis of 16,000 Stories, Across 100 U.S. Communities, Finds Very Little Actual Local News,” Nieman Lab, August  10, 2018, https://www.niemanlab.org/2018/08/an-analysis-of-16000-stories-across-100 -u-s-communities-finds-very-little-actual-local-news/. 41. Steven Waldman, “The Information Needs of Communities: The Changing Media Landscape in a Broadband Age,” Federal Communications Commission, 2011, https://transition.fcc.gov/osp/inc-report/The_Information_Needs _of_Communities.pdf; Lewis Friedland, Philip Napoli, Katherine Ognyanova, Carola Weil, and Ernest J. Wilson III, “Review of the Literature Regarding Critical Information Needs of the American Public,” Federal Communications Commission, 2012, iii–xii, https://transition.fcc.gov/bureaus/ocbo/Final_Literature_Review.pdf. 42. “For Local News, Americans Embrace Digital but Still Want Strong Community Connection,” Pew Research Center, March, 26, 2019, https://www .journalism .org /2019/03 /26/for-local -news -americans -embrace -digital -but -still-want-strong-community-connection/. 43. James Hamilton, Democracy’s Detectives (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016). 44. Summary via Anya Schiffrin, “Book Aims to Pin Down Economic Return on Investigative Reporting,” Columbia Journalism Review, April 11, 2017, https:// www.cjr.org/q_and_a/investigative-reporting-value.php. 45. Aymo Brunetti and Beatrice Weder, “A Free Press Is Bad News for Corruption,” Journal of Public Economics 87, no. 7–8 (2003): 1801–24. 46. Robert  E. Gutsche  Jr., “News Place-Making: Applying ‘Mental Mapping’ to Explore the Journalistic Interpretive Community,” Visual Communication 13, no. 4 (2014): 487–510. 47. Robert  A. Caro, The Passage of Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson, 4 vols. (New York: Knopf, 2013), xix.

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48. Michael Clay Carey, The News Untold: Community Journalism and the Failure to Confront Poverty in Appalachia (Morgantown: West Virginia University Press, 2017), chap. 6. 49. Seth Fein, a local community organizer and media maker in Champaign, Illinois, shared this thought with me about our local news environment in January 2020. 50. Phyllis Kaniss, Making Local News (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 107. 51. Victor Pickard, Democracy Without Journalism? Confronting the Misinformation Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 70–71, 118. 52. Jennifer Jerrit, Jason Barabas, and Toby Bolsen, “Citizens, Knowledge, and the Information Environment,”  American Journal of Political Science  50, no.  2 (2006): 266–82. 53. Matthew Hindman, The Internet Trap: How the Digital Economy Builds Monopolies and Undermines Democracy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018), 102–32. 54. Kimberly Meltzer, “The Hierarchy of Journalistic Cultural Authority: Journalists’ Perspectives According to News Medium,” Journalism Practice 3, no.  1 (2009): 59–74. 55. Erik Peterson, “Not Dead Yet: Political Learning from Newspapers in a Changing Media Landscape,” Political Behavior (2019): 1–23. 56. Philip Napoli and Jessica Mahone, “Local Newspapers Are Suffering, but They’re Still (by Far) the Most Significant Journalism Producers in Their Communities,” Nieman Lab, September 9, 2019, https://www.niemanlab.org/2019 /09/local-newspapers-are-suffering-but-theyre-still-by-far-the-most-significant -journalism-producers-in-their-communities/. 57. “How News Happens: A Study of the News Ecosystem of One American City,” Pew Research Center, 2010, https://www.journalism.org/analysis_report/how _news_happens/. 58. Amy Mitchell, Jesse Holcomb, and Dana Page, “Local News in a Digital Age,” Pew Research Center, 2015, https://www.journalism.org /2015/03/05 /local-news-in-a-digital-age/. 59. Jeffery J. Mondak, “Newspapers and Political Awareness,” American Journal of Political Science (1995): 525. 60. Rasmus Kleis Nielsen, Local Journalism: The Decline of Newspapers and the Rise of Digital Media (London: I. B. Tauris, 2015), 1–2. 61. For more on the logic of dropping a paywall, see Mike Ananny and Leila Bighash, “Why Drop a Paywall? Mapping Industry Accounts of Online News Decommodification,” International Journal of Communication 10 (2016): 3359–80.

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62. Michael Luo, “The Fate of the News in the Age of the Coronavirus,” New Yorker, March 29, 2020, https://www.newyorker.com/news/annals-of-communi cations/the-fate-of-the-news-in-the-age-of-the-coronavirus. 63. Tyler Cowen, Public Goods and Market Failures: A Critical Examination (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1992), 2–5. 64. Elizabeth Grieco, “U.S. Newsroom Employment Has Dropped by a Quarter Since 2008, with Greatest Decline at Newspapers,” Pew Research Center, July 9, 2019, https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/07/09/u-s-newsroom -employment-has-dropped-by-a-quarter-since-2008/. 65. Rowan Gerety, “Steadying the Miami Herald Newsroom, After Cuts and a Digital Reinvention,” Columbia Journalism Review, June 8, 2018, https://www .cjr.org/united_states_project/miami-herald-clickchain-jobs.php. 66. James Hamilton, All the News That’s Fit to Sell: How the Market Transforms Information Into News (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), 9–10. 67. Hamilton, All the News That’s Fit to Sell. 68. Ananny and Bighash, “Why Drop a Paywall?”; J. L. Salvaggio and R. A. Nelson, “Marketplace vs. Public Utility Models for Developing Telecommunications and Information Industries,” in Mediation, Information, and Communication, ed. Brent David Ruben and Leah A. Lievrouw (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 2019), 3, 253. 69. Nikki Usher, Making News at the “New York Times” (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2014), 10. 70. Michael Stamm, Dead Tree Media: Manufacturing the Newspaper in Twentieth-Century North America (Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press, 2018), chaps. 1, 9. 71. Anthony Downs, An Economic Theory of Democracy (New York: Harper and Row, 1957), chap. 3. 72. Sidney Verba, Kay Lehman Sclozman, and Henry E. Brady, Voice and Equality: Civic Voluntarism in American Politics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 16. 73. Philip J. Tichenor, George A. Donohue, and Clarice N. Olien, “Public Opinion Quarterly,” Mass Media Flow and Differential Growth in Knowledge 34, no. 2 (1970): 159–70. 74. David Tewksbury, Andrew  J. Weaver, and Brett  D. Maddex, “Accidentally Informed: Incidental News Exposure on the World Wide Web,” Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly 78, no. 3 (2001): 533–54. 75. Paul Dimaggio, Eszter Hargittai, Coral Celeste, and Steven Shafer, “Digital Inequality: From Unequal Access to Differentiated Use,” in Social Inequality, ed. Kathryn  M. Neckerman (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2004), 355–400.

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76. Derrick Bryson Taylor, “Extra! Extra! Starbucks Will Stop Selling Newspapers,” New York Times, July  12, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/12 /business/media/starbucks-newspapers.html. 77. Susan Ellis, “Kroger Will Eliminate Free Magazines, Newspapers from Its Stores,” Memphis Business Journal, August 23, 2019, https://www.bizjournals .com /memphis /news /2019 /08 /23 / kroger -to -remove -free -magazines -news papers-from.html. 78. Alfred Hermida, “Twittering the News: The Emergence of Ambient Journalism,” Journalism Practice 4, no. 3 (2010): 297–308. 79. Kjerstin Thorson, Yu Xu, and Stephanie Edgerly, “Political Inequalities Start at Home: Parents, Children, and the Socialization of Infrastructure Online,” Political Communication 35, no. 2 (2018): 178–95. 80. Antonis Kalogeropoulos and Rasmus Kleis Nielsen, “Social Inequalities in News Consumption,” Digital News Publications, 2018, 1–7, https://reutersinstitute.politics .ox .ac .uk /sites/default /files/2018–10/Kalogeropolous%20 -%20 Social%20Inequality%20in%20News%20FINAL .pdf. 81. Markus Prior, “Media and Political Polarization,” Annual Review of Political Science 16 (2013): 101–27. 82. Edward C. Relph, Place and Placelessness (London: Pion Limited, 1976), 79. 83. Doreen Massey, “Power-Geometry and a Progressive Sense of Place,” in Mapping the Futures: Local Cultures, Global Change, ed. John Bird, Barry Curtis, Tim Putnam, and Lisa Tickner (London: Routledge, 1993), 59–69. 84. Jonathan Freedland, “The Road to Somewhere by David Goodhart: A Liberal’s Rightwing Turn on Immigration,” The Guardian, March 22, 2017, https://www . theguardian . com / books /2017 /mar /22 / the - road - to - somewhere - david -goodhart-populist-revolt-future-politics. 85. Heidi  J.  S. Tworek, News from Germany: The Competition to Control World Communications, 1900–1945 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2019). 86. Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006). 87. Massey, “Power-Geometry and a Progressive Sense of Place.” 88. Nick Couldry and James Curran, Contesting Media Power: Alternative Media in a Networked World (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003). 89. Michelle  D. Layser, “The Pro-Gentrification Origins of Place-Based Investment Tax Incentives and a Path Toward Community-Oriented Reform,” 2019 Wisconsin Law Review 745 (2019). 90. Patrick Sharkey, Stuck in Place: Urban Neighborhoods and the End of Progress Toward Racial Equality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013).

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91. Matt Carlson,  Journalistic Authority: Legitimating News in the Digital Era (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017). 92. Kevin Hetherington, “In Place of Geometry: The Materiality of Place,” Sociological Review 45, no. 1 (1998): 183–99. 93. Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage, 2012). 94. Zizi Papacharissi, “Toward New Journalism(s): Affective News, Hybridity, and Liminal Spaces,” Journalism Studies 16, no. 1 (2015): 28. 95. James G. Gimpel and Jason E. Schunknecht, Patchwork Nation: Sectionalism and Political Change in American Politics (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004). 96. Lilliana Mason, Uncivil Agreement: How Politics Became Our Identity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018), 6. 97. Lewis A. Friedland, “Community Journalism as Metropolitan Ecology,” in Foundations on Community Journalism, ed. Bill Reader and John A. Hatcher (Los Angeles: Sage, 2011), 151. 98. Daniel  J. Hopkins, The Increasingly United States: How and Why American Political Behavior Nationalized (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018), 28. 99. Matthew Hindman, The Internet Trap: How the Digital Economy Builds Monopolies and Undermines Democracy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018). 100. Joshua P. Darr, Matthew P. Hitt, and Johanna L. Dunaway, “Newspaper Closures Polarize Voting Behavior,” Journal of Communication 68, no.  6 (2018): 1007–28. 101. Matthew Gentzkow and Jesse M. Shapiro, “Ideological Segregation Online and Offline,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 126, no. 4 (2011): 1799–1839. 102. Candis Callison and Mary Lynn Young, Reckoning: Journalism’s Limits and Possibilities (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020), 24–50.

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6. Jeffrey Gottfried and Elizabeth Grieco, “Nearly Three-Quarters of Republicans Say the News Media Don’t Understand People Like Them,” Pew Journalism Research, Pew Research Center, Washington, D.C., January  18, 2019, https://www.pewresearch .org /fact-tank /2019/01/18/nearly-three-quarters-of -republicans-say-the-news-media-dont-understand-people-like-them/. 7. Ryan  D. Enos, The Space Between Us: Social Geography and Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 12–13. 8. Lilliana Mason, Uncivil Agreement: How Politics Became Our Identity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018), chap. 3. 9. Cara Wong, Boundaries of Obligation in American Politics: Geographic, National, and Racial Communities (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 106. 10. Cara Wong, Jake Bowers, Daniel Rubenson, Mark Fredrickson, and Ashlea Rundlett, “Maps in People’s Heads: Assessing a New Measure of Context,” Political Science Research and Methods 8, no. 1 (January 2020): 160–68. 11. James Fallows and Deborah Fallows, Our Towns: A 10,000 Mile Journey Into the Heart of America (New York: Vintage, 2019). 12. Katherine J. Cramer, The Politics of Resentment: Rural Consciousness in Wisconsin and the Rise of Scott Walker (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), 209. 13. Cramer, The Politics of Resentment, 209. 14. Phillip Longman, “Why the Economic Fates of America’s Cities Diverged,” The Atlantic, November  28, 2005, https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive /2015/11/cities-economic-fates-diverge/417372/. 15. Patrick Sharkey, Stuck in Place: Urban Neighborhoods and the End of Progress Toward Racial Equality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013). 16. Pew Research Center, “For Local News, Americans Embrace Digital but Still Want Strong Community Connection,” March  26, 2019, https://www .journalism .org /2019/03 /26/for-local -news -americans -embrace -digital -but -still-want-strong-community-connection/. 17. Pierre Bourdieu, “Social Space and Symbolic Power,” Sociological Theory 8, no. 1 (Spring 1989): 14–25. 18. Robert K. Merton, “Local and Cosmopolitan Influentials,” in Perspectives on the American Community, ed. Ronald  L. Warren (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1966), 251–65. 19. Heather Bryant, “So This One Time at a Journalism Conference,” Medium, July  14, 2017, https://medium.com/@HBCompass/so-this-one-time-at-a-journal ism-conference-5d0662bb18b5. 20. Bryant, “So This One Time at a Journalism Conference.” 21. Heather Bryant, “Talking About Journalism’s Class Problem,” Medium, October  27, 2017, https://medium.com/@HBCompass/talking-about-journalisms -class-problem-c962659cee37.

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22. Nicole S. Cohen, Writers’ Rights: Freelance Journalism in a Digital Age (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2016). 23. Errol Salamon, “Freelance Journalists and Stringers,” International Encyclopedia of Journalism Studies (April 2019): 1–9. 24. The number of journalism majors across the country was either flat or on the decline until recently and has actually spiked following the 2016 election. Maria Lamagna, “The Rise of Fake News Is Producing a Record Number of Journalism Majors,” MarketWatch, April 24, 2018, https://www.marketwatch.com/story/the -rise-of-fake-news-is-producing-a-record-number-of-journalism-majors-2018 -03-19; Diane Lynch, “Above and Beyond: Looking at the Future of Journalism Education,” Knight Foundation, n.d., https://knightfoundation.org/features /je-the-state-of-american-journalism-education/; “Reporters, Correspondents, and Broadcast News Analysts,” Bureau of Labor Statistics, September 4, 2019, https://www.bls.gov/ooh/media-and-communication/reporters-correspondents -and-broadcast-news-analysts.htm. 25. Justin Ward, “The Death of the Working Class Reporter,” Noteworthy: The Journal Blog, June  25, 2019, https://blog.usejournal.com/the-death-of-the -working-class-reporter-48b467300f4d. 26. Kimberly Amadeo, “Average Income in the USA by Family and Household,” The Balance, September  16, 2019, https://www.thebalance.com/what-is -average-income-in-usa-family-household-history-3306189. 27. Aaron Taube, “Conde Nast Settles Its Unpaid Intern Lawsuit—Here’s How Much Each Intern Gets,” Business Insider, November  14, 2014, https://www .businessinsider.com/conde-nast-settles-unpaid-intern-lawsuit-2014-11. 28. “Donations and Financial Aid,” Harvard Crimson, 2020, https://www.the crimson.com/about/donate/. 29. William S. Flanagan and Michael E. Xie, “Median Family Income for Harvard Undergrads Triple National Average, Study Finds,” Harvard Crimson, January  25, 2017, https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2017/1/25/harvard-income -percentile/. 30. Theodore Kim (@TheoTypes), Twitter, March 4, 2019, 11:33 a.m., https://twitter .com/TheoTypes/status/1102623219826245634?s=20. 31. Farnoush Amiri, Michael Lee, Shafaq Patel, and Amanda Zhou, “How America’s Top Newsrooms Recruit Interns from a Small Circle of Colleges,” Voices, August 2, 2019, https://voices.aaja.org/index/2019/8/1/how-americas-top-newsr ooms-recruit-interns-from-a-small-circle-of-colleges. 32. Amiri et al., “How America’s Top Newsrooms Recruit Interns.” 33. Meg Dalton, “When the Math Doesn’t Work,” Columbia Journalism Review, Spring/Summer 2018, https://www.cjr.org /special_report /journalist-side -hustles.php.

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34. Brian Creech and Robert Bodle, “The View from Journalism’s Post-Crisis Generation: Navigating Precarity and Opportunity in Philadelphia and Cincinnati,” Center for Media at Risk, Philadelphia, December  2018, https://www .miccenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/Creech-Bodle_1-2.pdf. 35. Dalton, “When the Math Doesn’t Work.” 36. Mason Walker, “Who Pays for News in the US?” Pew Research Center, September 12, 2019, https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/09/12/who-pays -for-local-news-in-the-u-s/. For more discussion on partisan differences in paying for news, see chapter 3. 37. “The Income Gaps in Higher Education Enrollment and Completion,” AAC&U News, June/July  2018, https://www.aacu.org/aacu-news/newsletter/2018/june /facts-figures; Asian Americans of all incomes are more likely to go to college. 38. Editorial Board, “Even College Doesn’t Bridge the Racial Income Gap,” New York Times, September 20, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/20 /opinion/college-racial-income-gap.html. 39. Hsiang Iris Chyi and Ori Tenenboim, “Charging More and Wondering Why Readership Declined? A Longitudinal Study of US Newspapers’ Price Hikes, 2008–2016,” Journalism Studies 20, no. 14 (2019): 1–17. 40. “For Local News, Americans Embrace Digital but Still Want Strong Community Connection,” Pew Research Center, March  26, 2019, https://www .journalism .org /2019/03 /26/most-americans -think-their-local -news -media -are-doing-well-financially-few-help-to-support-it/. 41. Laura Hazard Owen, “Even People Who Like Paying for News Usually Only Pay for One Subscription,” Nieman Lab, June 11, 2019, https://www.niemanlab .org/2019/06/even-people-who-like-paying-for-news-usually-only-pay-for-one -subscription/. 42. Thomas  J. Billard and Rachel  E. Moran, “Networked Political Brands: Consumption, Community, and Political Expression in Contemporary Brand Culture,” Media, Culture & Society (August 2019): 1–17. 43. A study on the Minneapolis market, with a 90  percent white sample, found that higher education was correlated with less likelihood of subscribing and that income did not seem to matter in likelihood to support digital subscriptions; similarly, this report found that local news subscriptions were more likely to be predictors for national subscriptions than vice versa. This is contrary to other research and may reflect the Minnesota-specific market, but it is nonetheless a valuable study. See Matthew  S. Weber, Jonathan Anderson, Eugene Lee, Renee Mitson, Allison J. Steinke, Sarah Kay Wiley, and Hao Xu, “Connecting the Dots: Digital Subscriptions,” News Media Alliance, 2019, https://www.newsmediaalliance .org /release -new-study-reveals -connection -entertainment-news-media-subscriptions.

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44. Media Insight Project, “What Drives Republicans or Democrats to Subscribe to Local News,” American Press Institute, February  27, 2018, https://www .americanpressinstitute.org /publications/reports/survey-research /partisans -republicans-democrats-subscribers/. 45. Mark Coddington, “The Wall Becomes a Curtain,” in Boundaries of Journalism, ed. Matt Carlson and Seth C. Lewis (London: Routledge, 2015), 67–82. 46. Herbert J. Gans, Deciding What’s News: A Study of “CBS Evening News,” “NBC Nightly News,” “Newsweek,” and “Time,” 25th  anniversary ed. (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2004), 10. 47. Phyllis Kaniss, Making Local News (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), chap. 2; Lewis Friedland, Philip Napoli, Katherine Ognyanova, Carola Weil, and Ernest  J. Wilson III, “Review of the Literature Regarding Critical Information Needs of the American Public,” unpublished manuscript submitted to the Federal Communications Commission, 2012, 15–19, http://transition .fcc.gov/bureaus/ocbo/Final_Literature_Review.pdf. 48. Philip M. Napoli, Sarah Stonbely, Kathleen McCollough, and Bryce Renninger, “Assessing the Health of Local Journalism Ecosystems: A Comparative Analysis of Three New Jersey Communities,” Media + the Public Interest Initiative, Rutgers University, 2015, http://mpii.rutgers.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/129/2015 /06/AssessingLocal-Journalism_Final-Draft-6.23.15.pdf. 49. Peter  D. Howe, “Newsworthy Spaces: The Semantic Geographies of Local News,” Aether: The Journal of Media Geography 4 (2009): 43–61, https://mgm. arizona.edu/issues/volume-four. 50. James  T. Hamilton and Fiona Morgan, “Poor Information: How Economics Affects the Information Lives of Low-Income Individuals,” International Journal of Communication 12 (2018): 2832–50, https://ijoc.org/index.php/ijoc /article/view/8340/2399. 51. Christopher  R. Martin, No Longer Newsworthy: How the Mainstream Media Abandoned the Working Class (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2019), 7. 52. Hsiang Iris Chyi, “Online Readers Geographically More Dispersed Than Print Readers,” Newspaper Research Journal 32, no. 3 (2011): 97–111. 53. Penelope Muse Abernathy, “The Expanding New Desert,” Center for Innovation and Sustainability in Local Media, 20, https://www.usnewsdeserts.com /reports/expanding-news-desert/download-a-pdf-of-the-report/. 54. Abernathy, “The Expanding News Desert,” 19. 55. Author’s field notes, January 19, 2018. 56. Nikki Usher, “Is the Times’ Coverage of the Super-Rich Alienating Millennials?,” Columbia Journalism Review, April 9, 2015, https://www.cjr.org/analysis /is_the_times_coverage_of_the_super-rich_alienating_millennials.php.

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57. Julie Satow, “Turning a Second Home Into a Primary Home,” New York Times, July  24, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/24/realestate/coronavirus -second-homes-.html. 58. The Times was brutally mocked on social media for these stories about COVID-19 second homes. 59. Marc Tracy, “Top Editor of Philadelphia Inquirer Resigns After ‘Buildings Matter’ Headline,” New York Times, June  6, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com /2020/06/06/business/media/editor-philadephia-inquirer-resigns.html. 60. Ryan Deto, “Pittsburgh Post-Gazette Removes a Black Reporter from George Floyd Protest Coverage, Says Union,” Pittsburgh City Paper, June  4, 2020, https://www.pghcitypaper.com/pittsburgh/pittsburgh-post-gazette-removes -a -black-reporter-from -george -floyd -protest-coverage -says -union /Content ?oid=17403485. 61. Britni de la Cretza, “Tom Cotton’s Op-Ed Puts Black Lives In Danger—& the New York Times Needs to Denounce It,” Refinery29, June 4, 2020, https://www .refinery29.com /en-us/2020/06/9853761 /tom-cotton-op -ed-new-york-times -black-lives-danger. 62. “Latino Journalists at the LA Times Pen Open Letter for Better Newsroom Representation,” LAT Guild, July  21, 2020, https://latguild.com/news/2020/7 /21/latino-caucus-letter. 63. Associated Press, “AP Changes Writing Style to Capitalize ‘B’ in Black,” AP News, June 19, 2020, https://apnews.com/71386b46dbff8190e71493a763e8f45a. 64. Erin E. Evans, “If It’s Racist, Call It Racist: Associated Press Stylebook Changes Guidelines for Journalists,” NBC News, March 29, 2019, https://www.nbcnews .com /news /nbcblk /if -it- s -racist- call -it-racist-associated -press - stylebook -n989056. 65. Matt Daniels and Amber Thomas, “Newspapers: A Black & White Issue,” The Pudding, October 2017, https://pudding.cool/2017/10/asne/. 66. Kanya Stewart, “NABJ Unveils Its Hall of Fame Inductees as Annual Convention Approaches,” News & Press: NABJ News, July 5, 2019, https://www.by waterbooks.com/washington-posts-metro-seven-inducted-into-nabj-hall-of-fame/. 67. “ASNE Diversity History,” American Society of News Editors, n.d., https:// members.newsleaders.org/content.asp?admin=Y&contentid=57. 68. ASNE used the language of “minority.” 69. Meredith D. Clark, “ASNE’s Diversity Survey Results Reflect Low Participation but Encouraging Shifts,” ASNE, November  15, 2018, https://members.news leaders.org/diversity-survey-2018. 70. Clark, “ASNE’s Diversity Survey Results.” 71. Daniels and Thomas, “Newspapers.” 72. Daniels and Thomas, “Newspapers.”

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73. Lars Wilnat and David Weaver, “The American Journalist in the Digital Age— Key Findings,” Indiana University School of Journalism, 2014, http://archive .news.indiana.edu/releases/iu/2014/05/2013-american-journalist-key-findings .pdf. 74. Daniels and Thomas, “Newspapers.” 75. Daniels and Thomas, “Newspapers.” 76. Mark Jacob, “Local News Is the ‘Biggest Crisis’ in Journalism, but a Sustainability Campaign Is Under Way,” Local News Initiative, October 24, 2018, https:// localnewsinitiative.northwestern.edu/posts/2018/10/24/local-news-crisis/. 77. Peregrine Frissell, Ala’a Ibrahim, Sheila Raghavendran, and Avery Yang, “Missed Deadline: The Delayed Promise of Newsroom Diversity,” Voices, Asian American Journalists Association, July  25, 2017, https://voices.aaja.org/index /2017/7/25/missed-deadlines. 78. “Los Angeles Times Guild Metpro Study,” 2018, https://static1.squarespace .com/static/59f32b4b12abd94fac1a508b/t/5b8082960e2e72fa78ea8831/15351486 94674/LAT+Guild+Metpro+Study.pdf. 79. “Los Angeles Times Guild Metpro Study,” 1. 80. Letrell Deshan Crittenden, “The Pittsburgh Problem: Race, Media, and Everyday Life in the Steel City,” Columbia Journalism Review, October  25, 2019, https://www.cjr.org /tow_center_reports/racism-black-burnout-in-pittsburgh -journalism.php. 81. Catherine  R. Squires, “Black Talk Radio: Defining Community Needs and Identity,” Harvard International Journal of Press/Politics 5, no. 2 (2000): 73– 95; Isabel Molina Guzmán, “Competing Discourses of Community: Ideological Tensions Between Local General-Market and Latino News Media,” Journalism 7, no. 3 (August 2006): 281–98. 82. The most famous Black publishing company, Johnson Publishing, once publisher of Ebony and Jet, filed for bankruptcy in 2019. They also owned the only Black-owned building on Magnificent Mile and are selling off its extensive art collection, which reflects decades of Black art in America. 83. New York Times Company, “2018 Diversity and Inclusion Report,” https:// www.nytco.com /company/diversity-and-inclusion /2018 -diversity-inclusion -report/. 84. Liz Spayd, “Preaching the Gospel of Diversity but Not Following It,” New York Times, December 17, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/17/public-editor /new-york-times-diversity-liz-spayd-public-editor.html. 85. Tanzina Vega, “How Newsrooms Can Stop Being So White,” CNN Money, December  19, 2016, https://money.cnn .com /2016/12/19/media /newsroom -diversity/index.html. 86. Vega, “How Newsrooms Can Stop Being So White.”

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87. Don Heider, White News: Why Local News Programs Don’t Cover People of Color (New York: Routledge, 2000). 88. Stuart Hall, Chas Critcher, Tony Jefferson, John Clarke, and Brian Roberts, Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State, and Law and Order (London: Springer, 2013/1978). 89. Allissa  V. Richardson, Bearing Witness While Black: African Americans, Smartphones, and the New Protest #Journalism (New York: Oxford University Press 2020), 23, 179. 90. Daniels and Thomas, “Newspapers.” 91. Elizabeth Grieco, “It’s More Common for White, Older, More-Educated Americans to Have Spoken to a Journalist,” FactTank: Numbers in the News, Pew Research Center, May  10, 2019, https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank /2019/05/10/its-more-common-for-white-older-more-educated-americans-to -have-spoken-with-local-journalists/. 92. Mingxiao Sui, Newly Paul, Paru Shah, Brook Spurlock, Brooksie Chastant, and Johanna Dunaway, “The Role of Minority Journalists, Candidates, and Audiences in Shaping Race-Related Campaign News Coverage,” Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly 95, no. 4 (December 2018): 1079–1102. 93. Tracy Everbach, Jake Batsell, Sara Champlin, and Gwendelyn S. Nisbett, “Does a More Diverse Newspaper Staff Reflect Its Community? A Print and Digital Content Analysis of the Dallas Morning News,” Southwestern Mass Communication Journal 34, no. 1 (2019). 94. Bob Giles, “Nieman Reports Revisits the Coverage of Black America,” Nieman Reports 57, no. 3 (Fall 2003): 3, https://niemanreports.org/wp-content/uploads /2014/04/03fall.pdf. 95. How we assign whiteness or “count” whiteness is extremely consequential, but for the sake of understanding these racialized category assignations, implicit bias or “racialized indicators” are helpful even if not “correct” based on the self-identity of those being racialized. It’s about how the world sees you rather than how you wish it saw you. 96. Sue Robinson, Networked News, Racial Divides: How Power and Privilege Shape Public Discourse in Progressive Communities (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018). 97. Alice Yin, “Most Violent Weekend in Chicago This Year, at Least 52 Shot, 8 Fatally,” Chicago Tribune, June 3, 2019, https://www.chicagotribune.com/news / breaking /ct-met-50 -shot-10 -fatally-weekend-gun-violence -20190603-story .html. 98. Harry Jaffe, “Homicide Watch’s Laura Amico on the Site’s End,” Washingtonian, December 11, 2014, https://www.washingtonian.com/2014/12/11/homicide -watch-dcs-laura-amico-on-the-sites-end/.

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99. Jaffe, “Homicide Watch’s Laura Amico on the Site’s End.” 100. Annys Shin, “The Death of Homicide Watch DC: Bloggers Take Their Last Case,” Washington Post, December  28, 2014, https://www.washingtonpost .com / local /the - death - of-homicide -watch - dc -bloggers -take -their-last- case /2014/12/28/dce867fa-86f2-11e4-9534-f79a23c40e6c_story.html. 101. Jaffe, “Homicide Watch’s Laura Amico on the Site’s End.” 102. Nikki Usher and Yee Man Margaret Ng, “Sharing Knowledge and ‘Microbubbles’: Epistemic Communities and Insularity in U.S. Political Journalism,” Social Media + Society 6, no. 2 (2020).

3 . J O U R N A L I S M’S B I G S O RT: I S T H E N E W S T H AT ’S L E F T JUST NEWS FOR THE LEFT? 1. Olga Khazan, “People Voted for Trump Because They Were Anxious, Not Poor,” The Atlantic, April 23, 2018, https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018 /04/existential-anxiety-not-poverty-motivates-trump-support/558674/. 2. Charlie Karlsson and Robert G. Picard, eds., Media Clusters: Spatial Agglomeration and Content Capabilities (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2011). Michael Curtin, “Media Capital: Towards the Study of Spatial Flows,” International Journal of Cultural Studies 6, no. 2 (2003): 202–28. 3. Tali Arbel, “Trump Bump? NYT Adds Subscribers, Grows Digital Revenue,” Associated Press News, February 6, 2019, https://apnews.com/652e36fee140b0 0ca7074c536e846af9. 4. Jeffrey Gottfried and Elizabeth Grieco, “Nearly Three-Quarters of Republicans Say the News Media Don’t Understand People Like Them,” Pew Research Center, https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/01/18/nearly-three-quarters-of -republicans-say-the-news-media-dont-understand-people-like-them/. 5. Elizabeth Greico, “One in Five Newsroom Employees Live in New York, Los Angeles, or DC,” Pew Research Center, October 24, 2019, https://www.pewr esearch .org /fact-tank /2019/10/24/one-in-five-u-s-newsroom-employees-live -in-new-york-los-angeles-or-d-c/. 6. Kristy Hess and Lisa Waller, “River Flows and Profit Flows: The Powerful Logic Driving Local News,” Journalism Studies 17, no. 3 (2016): 263–76. 7. Andrew McGill, “U.S. Media’s Real Elitism Problem,” The Atlantic, November 19, 2016, https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/11/fixing-amer icas-nearsighted-press-corps/508088/. 8. This section draws upon the following publications, in some cases, verbatim: Nikki Usher, “Putting ‘Place’ in the Center of Journalism Research: A Way Forward to Understand Challenges to Trust and Knowledge in News,” Journalism & Communication Monographs 21, no.  2 (May  2019): 84–146; Nikki Usher,

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“Moving the Newsroom: Post-Industrial News Spaces and Places,” Tow Center for Digital Journalism Publications (2014): 1–65; Nikki Usher, “Newsroom Moves and the Newspaper Crisis Evaluated: Space, Place, and Cultural Meaning,” Media, Culture & Society 37, no. 7 (June 2015): 1005–21. 9. John Mair, “That Was Then, This Is Now: From ‘Loony TV’ to ‘Local TV,’ ” in What Do We Mean by Local? The Rise, Fall—and Possible Rise Again— of Local Journalism, ed. John Mair, Richard Keeble, and Neil Fowler (Suffolk: Abramis Academic, 2013), 21. 10. Aurora Wallace, Newspapers and the Making of Modern America: A History (Santa Barbara, CA: Greenwood, 2005). 11. Blair Kamin, Why Architecture Matters: Lessons from Chicago (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001). 12. In fact, my reaction to these newsroom moves sparked the impetus for this book. 13. Nixon Smiley, Knights of the Fourth Estate: The Story of the Miami Herald (Miami: E. A. Seemann, 1974). 14. Andres Viglucci, “Miami Herald’s Iconic Building Is History,” Miami Herald, March 3, 2015, https://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/community/miami -dade/article12269438.html. 15. Douglas Hanks, “Old Herald Building Smoking, Thanks to Burn Notice,” Miami Herald, July  26, 2013, https://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment /article1953588.html. 16. Usher, “Newsroom Moves.” 17. Amanda Marqués González, “Miami Herald Is Moving Out of Its Office Building in Doral,” Miami Herald, June  9, 2020, https://www.miamiherald.com /news/local/community/miami-dade/article243391186.html. 18. Anna Clark, “ ‘This Used to Be a Newsroom’—The Scene at the Cleveland Plain Dealer,” Columbia Journalism Review, January 17, 2014, https://archives.cjr.org /united_states_project /newsroom_culture_is_gone_at_cleveland_plain_ dealer.php. 19. Tim Warsinskey, “Staff Cuts in the Plain Dealer Newsroom Announced as Industry Financial Pressures Grow,” Cleveland, March 9, 2020, https://www . cleveland . com /news /2020 /03 /staff - cuts -in -the -plain - dealer -newsroom -announced-as-industry-financial-pressures-grow.html; Tom Feran, “Plain Dealer Lays Off a Third of Unionized Newsroom Staff,” Cleveland, April  1, 2019, https://www.cleveland.com/news/2019/04/plain-dealer-lays-off-a-third -of-unionized-newsroom-staff.html. 20. Frank G. Jackson, Michael McGrath, and Calvin D. Williams, Cleveland Division of Police Staffing Report 2017, May 2018, http://www.city.cleveland.oh.us /sites/default/files/forms_publications/PublicStaffingPlan.pdf.

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21. Joseph Lichterman, “Politico Will Be in Every American State Capital—Plus Lots of World Ones—by 2020,” Nieman Lab, Walter Lippmann House, September 28, 2015, https://www.niemanlab.org/2015/09/politico-will-be-in-every -american-state-capital-plus-lots-of-world-ones-by-2020/. 22. Joseph Pimentel, “LA Times Moving Out of Its Iconic HQ for News Offices in El Segundo,” Bisnow, June 28, 2018, https://www.bisnow.com/los-angeles/news /office/after-80-years-la-times-is-moving-out-of-its-iconic-hq-for-new-offices -in-el-segundo-90063; Meg James and Andrea Chang, “Patrick Soon-Shiong Plans to Move Los Angeles Times to New Campus in El Segundo,” Los Angeles Times, April 13, 2018, https://www.latimes.com/business/hollywood/la-fi-ct-la -times-el-segundo-20180413-story.html. 23. Nikki Usher, “What Happens When a Big City (Los Angeles) No Longer Is Able to Tell Its Own Stories?” Medium, February 7, 2018, https://medium.com /@nikkiusher/what-happens-when-a-big-city-los-angeles-no-longer-is-able-to -tell-its-own-stories-21aab8e13c41. 24. “The 2016 Pulitzer Prize Winner in Breaking News Reporting: Los Angeles Times Staff,” Pulitzer Prizes, 2016, https://www.pulitzer.org/winners/los -angeles-times-staff. 25. Todd Alexander Postol, “America’s Press-Radio Rivalry: Circulation Managers and Newspaper Boys During the Depression,” Studies in Newspaper and Periodical History 3, no. 1–2 (2009): 155–66. 26. William B. Friedricks, Covering Iowa: The History of the Des Moines Register and Tribune Company, 1849–1985 (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 2000). 27. These comments are drawn from my fieldwork at the Omaha World-Herald. Between July 12 and 20, 2016, I conducted forty-six interviews with reporters, copyeditors, top-level newsroom editors, and business executives. Observations included attending eighteen news meetings and a self-described “old-timers” roundtable; shadowing the breaking-news team, online staff, and the newspaper delivery process; and socializing offsite with journalists. 28. Brad Lendon, “Detroit Newspapers to End Daily Home Delivery,” CNN, December  16, 2008, https://edition.cnn.com/2008/US/12/16/detroit.newspapers /index.html?imw=Y. 29. Ed Madison and Ben DeJarnette, “Journalism’s Local Newsrooms Lost Their Scale,” Medium, July 19, 2017, https://medium.com/s/how-journalism-became -a-dirty-word/journalisms-local-newsrooms-lost-their-scale-31b22035f069. 30. Mike Snider, “ ‘Journalists Are Not the Enemy’: 350 Media Outlets Push Back Against Trump Rhetoric,” USA Today, August 16, 2018, https://www.usatoday . com /story /money /media /2018 /08 /16 /news - outlets - across -u - s - confront -trumps-enemy-people-stance/1006865002/.

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31. John Gramlich, “Q&A: What Pew Research Center’s New Survey Says About Local News in the U.S.,” Pew Research Center, March 26, 2019, https://www .pewresearch .org /fact-tank /2019/03/26/qa-what-pew-research-centers -new -survey-says-about-local-news-in-the-u-s/. 32. Elizabeth Grieco, “U.S. Newsroom Employment Has Dropped by a Quarter Since 2008, with Greatest Decline at Newspapers,” Pew Research Center, July 9, 2019, https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/07/09/u-s-newsroom -employment-has-dropped-by-a-quarter-since-2008/. 33. Nikki Usher, “News Cartography and Epistemic Authority in the Era of Big Data: Journalists as Mapmakers, Map-Users, and Map-Subjects,” New Media & Society 22, no. 2 (2020): 247–63; Philip M. Napoli et al., “Local Journalism and the Information Needs of Local Communities: Toward a Scalable Assessment Approach,” Journalism Practice 11, no. 4 (2017): 373–95. 34. The original datasets have around 3,200 observations, which include all the counties + state totals + MSAs + Puerto Rico + U.S. totals. After deleting these entries, we have a total of 2,630 entries for the dataset. 35. James Graydon Gimpel and Jason E. Schuknecht, Patchwork Nation: Sectionalism and Political Change in American Politics (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2009), 21. 36. The News Measures Research Project argues that news media employment is almost entirely a function of population size (especially at the state level) but that efficiencies of scale in large cities can actually distort some of the perceptions of the size of the employment relative to the population. See Philip Napoli et al., “Assessing News Media Infrastructure: A State-Level Analysis,” April  2017, https://dewitt . sanford.duke.edu/wp -content/uploads/2017/05 /Assessing-News-Media-Infrastructure_Report-2.pdf. 37. Natalie Jomini Stroud,  Niche News: The Politics of News Choice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), chap. 5. 38. Jeffrey Gottfried, Galen Stocking, Elizabeth Grieco, Mason Walker, Maya Khuzam, and Amy Mitchell, “Trusting the News Media in the Trump Era,” Pew Research Center, December 12, 2019, https://www.journalism.org/2019/12 /12/trusting-the-news-media-in-the-trump-era/. 39. “Putting a Price Tag on Local News: Americans’ Perceptions of the Value and Financial Future of Local News,” Knight Foundation and Gallup, 2019, 3, https:// knightfoundation .org /wp -content /uploads/2019/11 /Putting-a -Price -Tag-on-Local-News-final-updated.pdf. 40. William H. Frey, “U.S. Population Disperses to Suburbs, Exurbs, Rural Areas, and ‘Middle of the Country’ Metros,” The Avenue, March  26, 2018, https:// www.brookings.edu/blog /the-avenue/2018/03/26/us-population-disperses-to -suburbs-exurbs-rural-areas-and-middle-of-the-country-metros/.

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41. Sarah Jones, “Scapegoat Country,” Dissent, 2019, https://www.dissentmagazine .org/article/scapegoat-country. 42. Michael Kruse, “Johnstown Never Believed Trump Would Help. They Still Love Him Anyway,” Politico, November  8, 2017, https://www.politico.com /magazine/story/2017/11/08/donald-trump -johnstown-pennsylvania-suppor t ers-215800. 43. Ryan Deto, “Johnstown Progressives Are Sick of National Media Painting Them Solely as Trump Country,” Pittsburgh City Paper, November 10, 2017, https:// www.pghcitypaper.com /Blogh /archives/2017/11 /10/johnstown -progressives -are-sick-of-national-media-painting-them-solely-as-trump-country. 44. Matthew Hindman, “Stickier News: What Newspapers Don’t Know About Web Traffic Has Hurt Them Badly—But There Is a Better Way,” Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics, and Public Policy, April 3, 2015, https://shorenstein center.org/stickier-news-matthew-hindman/. 45. Tom Jones, “ ‘The Greatest Crisis in American Journalism Is the Death of Local News,’ Plus a Bleak Outlook in Reading and Seattle’s Tips for Converting Readers to Subscribers,” Poynter, May  23, 2019, https://www.poynter.org /newsletters/2019/the-greatest-crisis-in-american-journalism-is-the-death-of -local-news-plus-a-bleak-outlook-in-reading-and-seattles-tips-for-converting -readers-to-subscribers/. 46. Michael Massing, “How Not to Cover America,” American Prospect, April 10, 2018, https://prospect.org/infrastructure/cover-america/. 47. Massing, “How Not to Cover America.” 48. “Listen to America,” HuffPost, https://www.huffpost.com/feature/listen-to -america. 49. NBC News Digital job posting for National Reporter, https://nbcnewsdigitaljobs .com/post/184037957473/national-reporter. 50. Laura Hazard Owen, “With ‘Times in Person,’ the New York Times Puts Its National Journalists in Front of Local Crowds,” Nieman Lab, January 30, 2018, https://www. niemanlab .org /2018 /01 /with -times -in -person -the -new -york -times-puts-its-national-journalists-in-front-of-local-crowds/. 51. Marc Lacey (@marclacey), “We have a bounty of fabulous new jobs on the @NYTNational staff, all aimed at deepening our coverage of the country. All of them will be based outside of NY and DC. Interested? Follow along:,” Twitter, February 10, 2020, https://twitter.com/marclacey/status/1226926872593944584. 52. Sydney Ember, “I Wanted to Understand Iowa. So I Moved There,” New York Times, February 3, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/03/reader-center /iowa-caucus.html. 53. Guardian US and the Columbia Journalism Review, “The Media Missed the Rise of Trump in 2016. Are They Ready This Time?” The Guardian, January 6,

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2020, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/jan/06/sleepwalking-into -2020-media-missed-donald-trump-rise-lessons-learned-2016. 54. Molly Hennessy-Fiske, “We Lived on the Texas-Mexico Border for Four Months, Next to Residents, Smugglers, and Border Patrol. This Is Why We Went,” Los Angeles Times, December  20, 2018, https://www.latimes.com /projects/la-na-roma-texas-house/#nt=outfit. 55. Tiffany Stevens, “One Way to Improve Coverage of the US-Mexico Border? Move There,” Columbia Journalism Review, February 25, 2019, https://www.cjr .org/united_states_project/mexico-border-latimes-nytimes.php. 56. Regina P. Branton and Johanna Dunaway, “Spatial Proximity to the US-Mexico Border and Newspaper Coverage of Immigration Issues,” Political Research Quarterly 62, no. 2 (2009): 280–302. 57. “For Local News, Americans Embrace Digital but Still Want Strong Community Connection,” Pew Research Center, March 2019, https://www.journalism .org /2019/03 /26/for-local -news -americans - embrace - digital -but-still -want -strong-community-connection/. 58. Mark Jurkowitz, Amy Mitchell, Elisa Shearer, and Mason Walkier, “U.S. Media Polarization and the 2020 Election: A Nation Divided,” Pew Research Center, January  24, 2020, https://www.journalism.org/2020/01/24/u-s-media-polariza tion-and-the-2020-election-a-nation-divided/. 59. Joshua L. Wiener and John C. Mowen, “Source Credibility: On the Independent Effects of Trust and Expertise,” ACR North American Advances 13 (1986): 306–10. 60. Adam Gabbatt, “How Local ‘Fake News’ Websites Spread ‘Conservative Propaganda’ in the US,” The Guardian, November  19, 2019, https://www.the guardian . com /us -news /2019 /nov /19 / locality -labs -fake -news -local - sites -newspapers. 61. Gregory J. Martin and Joshua McCrain, “Local News and National Politics,” American Political Science Review 113, no. 2 (2019): 372–84.

4. T H E B E LT WAY V E R S U S T H E H E A RT L A N D, E M B O D I E D : T H E C A S E O F WA S H I N G TO N C O R R E S P O N D E N T S 1. Author’s field notes, February 13, 2018. 2. Jonathan Matusitz and Gerald-Mark Breen, “An Examination of Pack Journalism as a Form of Groupthink: A Theoretical and Qualitative Analysis,” Journal of Human Behavior in the Social Environment 22, no. 7 (October 3, 2012): 898. 3. This also helps explain why senators can sound like they have no idea what they are talking about; I am more sympathetic to their flubbed responses after watching them try to outrun the press shouting questions at them.

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4. “Occupational Employment and Wages: Reporters and Correspondents,” Bureau of Labor Statistics, May  2018, https://www.bls.gov/oes/current /oes273022.htm#st. 5. Interview by author, May 18, 2018. 6. Tom Goldstein, ed., Killing the Messenger: 100 Years of Media Criticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 251. 7. U.S. Senate Press Gallery, https://www.dailypress.senate.gov/?page_id=70, https://www.dailypress.senate.gov/?page_id=17. 8. U.S. Senate Press Gallery; for 114th Cong. Directory, see Official Congressional Directory, 114th  Cong., 6 January  2015. https://www.govinfo.gov/app/details /CDIR-2016-02-12/CDIR-2016-02-12-PRESSGALLERIES; sampling was done from this gallery. 9. Interviews took place between 2017 and 2019. 10. Mark Leibovich, This Town (New York: Blue Rider, 2013). 11. Daniel C. Hallin, “Cartography, Community, and the Cold War,” in Reading the News: A Pantheon Guide to Popular Culture, ed. Michael Schudson and Robert K. Manoff (New York: Pantheon, 1986), 110. 12. “GW Memes for Horny Horny Hippo Teens,” Facebook, https://www.facebook .com/groups/gwmft10mpat/about/. 13. Lance  W. Bennett, Regina  G. Lawrence, and Steven Livingston, When the Press Fails: Political Power and the News Media from Iraq to Katrina (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 131–64. 14. Lance  W. Bennett, “Toward a Theory of Press-State Relations in the United States,” Journal of Communication 40 (June 1990): 103–27. 15. The Upshot Staff, “Political Bubbles and Hidden Diversity: Highlights from a Very Detailed Map of the 2016 Election,” New York Times, July 25, 2018, https://www .nytimes.com/interactive/2018/07/25/upshot/precinct-map-highlights.html. 16. Leo  C. Rosten, “The Professional Composition of the Washington Press Corps,” Journalism Quarterly 14, no. 3 (September 1937): 221–25; Leo C. Rosten, The Washington Correspondents (1937; New York: Arno, 1974). 17. Bennett, Lawrence, and Livingston, When the Press Fails; Daniel  C. Hallin, The Uncensored War: The Media and Vietnam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989). 18. Tim Markham, “Journalism and Critical Engagement: Naiveté, Embarrassment, and Intelligibility,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 11, no. 2 (2014): 158–74. 19. Nikki Usher and Yee Man Margaret Ng, “Sharing Knowledge and ‘Microbubbles’: Epistemic Communities and Insularity in U.S. Political Journalism,” Social Media+ Society 6, no. 2 (2020); Nikki Usher, Jesse Holcomb, and Justin Littman, “Twitter Makes It Worse: Political Journalists, Gendered Echo

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Chambers, and the Amplification of Gender Bias,” The International Journal of Press/Politics 23, no. 3 (2018): 324–44. 20. “Gallery Rules and Guidelines,” U.S. Senate Press Gallery, https://www .dailypress.senate.gov/?page_id=70. 21. Pew Center for Research on Journalism, “Who Provides Coverage of the Federal Government to Local Communities?,” December  3, 2015, http://www . journa lism . org / 2015 / 12 /03 / who - prov ides - coverage - of - the - federa l -government-to-local-communities/. 22. Joshua P. Darr, Matthew P. Hitt, and Johanna L. Dunaway, “Newspaper Closures Polarize Voting Behavior,” Journal of Communication 68, no. 6 (December 1, 2018): 1007–28. 23. Pew Center for Research on Journalism, “Who Provides Coverage of the Federal Government.” 24. Pew Center for Research on Journalism, “Who Provides Coverage of the Federal Government.” 25. Timothy  E. Cook, Governing with the News: The News Media as a Political Institution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 6. 26. Nikki Usher, “Are DC Bureaus Worth Saving?,” Columbia Journalism Review, January 26, 2016, https://www.cjr.org/united_states_project/do_we_really_need _washington_correspondents.php. 27. Interview by author, November 9, 2017. 28. Interview by author, November 7, 2017. 29. “Orrin Hatch,” Wikipedia, last modified January 31, 2020, https://en.wikipedia .org/wiki/Orrin_Hatch. 30. Interview by author, April 20, 2017. 31. Interview by author, May 15, 2018. 32. Interview by author, May 18, 2018. 33. Interview by author, March 1, 2018. 34. Interview by author, November 6, 2017. 35. Interview by author, May 16, 2018. 36. Interview by author, March 7, 2017. 37. Interview by author, March 7, 2017. 38. Interview by author, September 12, 2018. 39. Jerry Zremski, “The Briefing: The Chris Collins, Innate Coverage Began with a Lie,” Buffalo News, August  13, 2018, https://buffalonews.com/2018/08/13/the -briefing-the-story-behind-the-chris-collins-story/. 40. Jerry Zremski, “Collins Loses Millions as Stock Collapses—but Others May Have Gotten Out Early,” Buffalo News, June 28, 2017, https://buffalonews.com /2017/06/27/collins-loses-millions-stock-collapses-others-may-gotten-early/.

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41. Zremski, “The Briefing.” 42. Shane Goldmacher, “Can Chris Collins Be Re-elected While Indicted? Michael Grimm, an Ex-Felon, Has Thoughts,” New York Times, August 9, 2018, https:// www.nytimes.com/2018/08/09/nyregion/chris-collins-indicted-advice-grimm -election.html. 43. Interview by author, September 12, 2018. 44. Erica Martinson (@EricaMartinson), “Hire me! I’m hard-working and a quick learner. I have a White House hard pass and that’ll probably transfer, right? They have my fingerprints. You can reach me with opportunities at erica(dot) martinson at gmail,” Twitter, September  12, 2018, https://twitter.com/Erica Martinson/status/1039853396185030656. 45. Daniel Bush, “A Quiet ‘No’ and Other Dramatic Moments Leading Up to Saturday’s Final Kavanaugh Vote,” PBS NewsHour, October 5, 2018, https://www .pbs.org/newshour/politics/a-quiet-no-and-other-dramatic-moments-leading -up-to-saturdays-final-kavanaugh-vote. 46. Interview by author, May 15, 2018. 47. Interview by author, May 16, 2018. 48. Arlie Russell Hochschild, Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right (New York: New Press, 2018), 135–52. 49. Erving Goffman, “Role Distance,” in Life as Theater: A Dramaturgical Sourcebook, ed. Dennis Brissett and Charles Edgley (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 2005), 101–11. 50. Interview by author, November 7, 2017. 51. Interview by author, April 10, 2017. 52. Interview by author, November 14, 2017. 53. Interview by author, March 7, 2017. 54. Stephen Hess, The Washington Reporters, vol. 1 (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 2010); William L. Rivers, Columbia Journalism Review 1, no. 1 (1962): 4. 55. Stephen Hess, “Washington Reporters,” Society 18, no. 4 (May 1, 1981): 55–66; Hess, The Washington Reporters; Rivers, Columbia Journalism Review, 4. 56. Hess, “Washington Reporters”; Hess, The Washington Reporters; Rivers, Columbia Journalism Review. 57. Hess, The Washington Reporters, 117; my emphasis. 58. Hess, The Washington Reporters; Rivers, Columbia Journalism Review, 4. 59. Interview by author, April 4, 2017. 60. Interview by author, March 2, 2018. 61. At the time, five out of the ninety-eight journalists in my dataset were black.

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62. “Black Women Covering the Trump White House,” February 8, 2018, George Washington University School of Media and Public Affairs, https://smpa.gwu .edu/black-women-covering-trump-white-house. 63. Doreen Massey, “Power-Geometry and a Progressive Sense of Place,” In Mapping the Futures: Local Cultures, Global Change, ed. John Bird, Barry Curtis, Tim Putnam, and Lisa Tickner (New York: Routledge, 2012), 75–85. 64. This was their age at the time of our interview. 65. Interview by author, April 18, 2017. 66. Interview by author, March 1, 2018. 67. Personal communication with author, July 23, 2020. 68. Interview by author, April 18, 2017. 69. Personal communication with author, July 23, 2020. 70. After Clemson’s back-to-back appearances in the College Football Bowl championship series in 2019 and 2020, this likely would not be the case, but the interview happened before Clemson’s national championship. 71. Herbert J. Gans, Deciding What’s News: A Study of “CBS Evening News,” “NBC Nightly News,” “Newsweek,” and “Time” (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2004), 116. 72. Anna Douglas, “Lessons from a Town—D.C.—with Transgender Bathroom Rights for the Past 10 Years,” The News & Observer, June 6, 2016, https://www .newsobserver.com/news/politics-government/article81709387.html. 73. Douglas, “Lessons from a Town.” 74. Douglas, “Lessons from a Town.”

5. P L AC E A N D T H E L I M I T S O F D I G I TA L R E V E N U E : G O L D I L O C K S N E W S PA P E R S A N D T H E C U R S E OF GEOGR APHY 1. Aminda Marqués Gonzalez, “Behind the Scenes: How the Miami Herald’s ‘Cuba Plan’ Became a Reality,” Miami Herald, November  26, 2016, https:// www.miamiherald .com /news / local /news - columns -blogs /from -the - editor /article117284483.html. 2. Author’s field notes, April 22–25, 2013. 3. Castro’s official time of death was November 25, 2016, at 10:29 p.m. 4. Gonzalez, “Behind the Scenes.” 5. Gonzalez, “Behind the Scenes.” 6. Neil Reisner, “In Cuba’s ‘Second Capital,’ Covering Castro’s Death a Letdown for Journalists,” Columbia Journalism Review, November  30, 2016, https:// www.cjr.org/local_news/fiden_castro_south_florida_cuba.php.

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7. Bourree Lam, “Newspaper Ad Revenue Fell $40 Billion in a Decade,” The Atlantic, October  23, 2014, https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive /2014/10/newspaper-ad-revenue-fell-40-billion-in-a-decade/381732/. 8. eMarketer Editors, “US Digital Ad Spending Will Surpass Traditional in 2010: Amazon’s Ad Business to Grow More Than 50%, Taking Bite Out of Duopoly,” eMarketer, February  19, 2019, https://www.emarketer.com/content/us-digital -ad-spending-will-surpass-traditional-in-2019; Ross Benes, “Digital Ad Revenue Gains Remain Elusive for Magazines and Newspapers,” eMarketer, April 10, 2019, https://www.emarketer.com/content/digital-ad-revenue-gains-remain -elusive-for-magazines-and-newspapers. 9. Greg Sterling, “Almost 70% of Digital Ad Spending Going to Google, Facebook, Amazon, Says Analyst Firm,” Marketing Land, June  17, 2019, https:// marketingland . com /almost - 70 - of - digital - ad - spending - going -to - google -facebook-amazon-says-analyst-firm-262565. 10. Interview by author (phone), April 26, 2019. 11. “Aggregation Theory,” Stratechery, July 21, 2015, https://stratechery.com/2015 /aggregation-theory/. 12. Douglas Gomery, “Media Economics: Terms of Analysis,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 6, no. 1 (1989): 43–60, https://doi.org/10.1080/15295038 909366730. 13. Paul Starr, “Goodbye to the Age of Newspapers (Hello to a New Era of Corruption),” New Republic, March  3, 2009, https://newrepublic.com/article/64252 /goodbye-the-age-newspapers-hello-new-era-corruption. 14. “Local Monopoly in the Daily Newspaper Industry,” Yale Law Journal 61, no. 6 (1952): 948–1009. 15. Robert W. McChesney and John Nichols, The Death and Life of American Journalism: The Media Revolution That Will Begin the World Again (Bold Type Books, 2011). Some larger cities were able to support two or more newspapers, and some still do, but there is still a leading “flagship” newspaper. 16. Robert G. Picard, “Measures of Concentration in the Daily Newspaper Industry,” Journal of Media Economics 1, no.  1 (1988): 66, https://doi.org/10.1080 /08997768809358167. 17. Starr, “Goodbye to the Age of Newspapers.” 18. USA Today, 2019 Advertising Rate Card, Russell Johns Associates, December 19, 2018, https://www.russelljohns.com/pdfs/usat-print.pdf. 19. Katharine Graham, Personal History (New York: Knopf, 1997), 348; Robert W. McChesney, The Political Economy of Media: Enduring Issues, Emerging Dilemmas (New York: New York University Press, 2008). 20. Interview by author, April 12, 2019.

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21. Bharat Anand, The Content Trap: A Strategist’s Guide to Digital Change (New York: Random House Group, 2016), 11. 22. Hsiang Iris Chyi and Ori Tenenboim, “What If the Future Is Not All Digital? Trends in US Newspapers’ Multiplatform Readership,” in The Routledge Handbook of Developments in Digital Journalism Studies, ed. Scott Eldrige II and Bob Franklin (Philadelphia: Routledge, 2018), 157–71. 23. Many other news organizations had paywalls before this “modern” paywall era, including the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, which started a paywall in 2003. The Dallas Morning News ended its first paywall program in 2014, only to restart it in 2016. Hsiang Iris Chyi and Yee Man Margaret Ng, “Still Unwilling to Pay: An Empirical Analysis of 50 US Newspapers’ Digital Subscription Results,” Digital Journalism (2020): 1–22, https://doi.org/10.1080/21670811 .2020.1732831. 24. Jeremy W. Peters, “The Times Announces Digital Subscription Plan,” New York Times, March  17, 2011, https://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/18/business/media /18times.html. 25. Lucas Graves and Felix M. Simon, Pay Models for Online News in the US and Europe: 2019 Update (Oxford: Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, May 2019). 26. Matthew Hindman, Stickier News: What Newspapers Don’t Know About Web Traffic Has Hurt Them Badly—but There Is a Better Way (Cambridge, MA: Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics, and Public Policy, April 2015). See discussion in Matthew Hindman, The Internet Trap: How the Digital Economy Builds Monopolies and Undermines Democracy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018), 102–62. 27. Peters, “The Times Announces Digital Subscription Plan.” 28. Peters, “The Times Announces Digital Subscription Plan.” 29. Chyi and Ng, “Still Unwilling to Pay.” 30. There are those who would make the argument that display ads do not discriminate based on audience location and that scale is still profitable when it comes to display advertising; however, the platform duopoly and the digital ad industry more generally chip away at the revenue from news publishers. 31. Author’s field notes, June 4–7, 2013. 32. Some newspapers have begun to sell a sports-only subscription, which shows some promise; however, shortly after the Miami Herald boasted of its success in 2019, McClatchy, its parent company, announced its declaration of bankruptcy. Jeff Rosen, “The Miami Herald and Kansas City Star Are Now Offering Sports-Only Digital Subscriptions,” Nieman Lab, August  24, 2018, https:// www. niemanlab .org /reading /the -miami -herald -and -kansas - city -star -are -now-offering-sports-only-digital-subscriptions/.

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33. Clifford Chi, “Total Addressable Market (TAM): What It Is & How You Can Calculate It,” Hubspot (blog), July  12, 2019, https://blog.hubspot.com /marketing/total-addressable-market. 34. Gavin Dunaway, phone interview, May 1, 2019. 35. Others have chronicled that these losses likely only amount to a small portion of the advertising crash. See Robert Seamans and Feng Zhu, “Responses to Entry in Multi-Sided Markets: The Impact of Craigslist on Local Newspapers,” NET Institute Working Paper, no.  10–11 (May  28, 2013), http://dx.doi.org/10 .2139/ssrn.1694622; Mathew Ingram, “No, Craigslist Is Not Responsible for the Death of Newspapers,” Gigaom (blog), August  14, 2013, https://gigaom.com /2013/08/14 /no -craigslist-is -not-responsible -for-the -death -of-newspapers/. Further, newspapers were aware of the potential to develop “e-classifieds” as revenue but unwisely chose not to. Nikki Usher, Making News at the ‘New York Times’ (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2014), 42–44. 36. Damien Geradin and Dimitrios Katsifis, “An EU Competition Law Analysis of Online Display Advertising in the Programmatic Age,” European Competition Journal 15, no. 1 (2019): 55–96. 37. Brad Bender, “Demystifying the Display Advertising Landscape,” Marketing Land, May  30, 2016, https://marketingland.com/demystifying-display -advertising-landscape-178291, emphasis mine. For an excellent discussion of Google’s monopolistic tendencies, see Fiona  M. Scott Morton and David  C. Dinielli, “Roadmap for a Digital Advertising Monopolization Case Against Google,” Omidyar Network, May 2020, https://www.omidyar.com/sites/default /files/Roadmap%20for%20a%20Case%20Against%20Google.pdf. 38. Morton and Dinielli, “Roadmap for a Digital Advertising Monopolization Case.” 39. Aditi Sangal, “The Washington Post’s Aram Zucker-Scharff: You Can’t Solve Transparency by Adding More Technology,” Digiday, February  12, 2019, https://digiday.com/media/washington-posts-aram-zucker-scharff-cant-solve -transparency-adding-technology/. 40. Shoshona Wodinsky, “The Washington Post Is Making Its Programmatic Platform Available to Publishers Web-Wide: Assistance from Its Programmatic Sales and Engineering Team Is Also Available,” Adweek, May 29, 2019, https:// www . adweek . com /programmatic /the -washington - post -is - bringing -its -programmatic-tech-web-wide/. 41. That said, most web pages do contain multiple ads, so the RPM, or the full revenue per thousand impressions, is probably both a better measure and a bigger take home per overall page impression. Patrick Appel, “How Many Ads to Pay a Writer?” Traffic, September 22, 2016, https://traffic.piano.io/2016/09 /22/how-many-ads-does-it-take-to-pay-a-writer-for-a-year/.

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42. Jess Zafarris, “Adweek’s Guide to COVID-19 Coverage: How the Advertising and Marketing World Is Forging Ahead: This Week’s Top Coronavirus Stories and Insights,” Adweek, March  21, 2020, https://www.adweek.com/brand -marketing /adweeks -guide -to -covid -19 -coverage -how-the -advertising-and -marketing-world-is-forging-ahead/. 43. Ben Smith, “Bail Out Journalists. Let Newspaper Chains Die,” New York Times, March  29, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/29/business/coronavirus -journalists-newspapers.html. 44. Campbell Brown, “Facebook Invests Additional $100 Million to Support News Industry During the Coronavirus Crisis,” Facebook Journalism Project, March  30, 2020, https://www.facebook.com/journalismproject/coronavirus -update-news-industry-support. 45. “About Lookalike Audiences,” Business Help Center, Facebook, https://www .facebook.com/business/help/164749007013531. 46. Andrew Marantz, “The Man Behind Trump’s Facebook Juggernaut,” New Yorker, March 2, 2020, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/03/09/the -man-behind-trumps-facebook-juggernaut. 47. Interview by author, March 12, 2018. 48. Interview by author (phone), June 5, 2020. 49. Interview by author (phone), June 5, 2020. 50. Nikki Usher, “Going Web-First at the Christian Science Monitor: A Three-Part Study of Change,” International Journal of Communication 6 (2012): 1898–1918. 51. Nikki Usher, “What Impact Is SEO Having on Journalists? Reports from the Field,” Nieman Lab, September 23, 2010, https://www.niemanlab.org/2010/09 /what-impact-is-seo-having-on-journalists-reports-from-the-field/. 52. Nikki Usher, “Breaking News Production Processes in US Metropolitan Newspapers: Immediacy and Journalistic Authority,” Journalism 19, no. 1 (2018): 21– 36; author’s field notes, Fort Worth Star-Telegram, June 4–5, 2013. 53. In Europe, news publishers were particularly frustrated by Google News aggregating their content without paying for it, though, of course, that’s exactly what a platform aims to do—host rather than fund (zero supply costs). In the case of Spain, Google preemptively shut down Google News to avoid paying for content. News publishers saw 10 percent reductions in traffic, and news consumers actually consumed 20  percent less content. Joshua Benton, “Google Is Threatening to Kill Google News in Europe If the EU Goes Ahead with Its ‘Snippet Tax,’ ” Nieman Lab, January 22, 2019, https://www.niemanlab .org /2019/01/google-is -threatening-to -kill-google-news -in-europe-if-the-eu -goes-ahead-with-its-snippet-tax/.

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54. Sneha Antony, “Keynote: To Trust Google or Not?” ONA 15 Newsroom, December  24, 2015, https://newsroom15.journalists.org/2015/12/24/to-trust -google-or-not/. 55. Emily Bell et al., “The Platform Press: How Silicon Valley Reengineered Journalism,” Tow Center for Digital Journalism, May  26, 2017, https://doi.org/10 .7916/D8R216ZZ. 56. Damon Kiesow, “Google Has a Local News Problem,” Medium, September 14, 2018, https://medium.com/media-stack/big-tech-may-profess-to-care-about -local-news-but-they-dont-and-maybe-they-can-t-f7c339b0eda3. 57. Interview with the author (phone), June 5, 2020. 58. Sean Fischer, Kokil Jaidka, and Yphtach Lelkes, “National News Outlets Are Favored Over Local News Outlets in News Aggregator Results,” Nature Human Behavior (in press). 59. Author’s field notes, March 13, 2018. 60. Gessler pointed out to me during our follow-up phone interview on June  5, 2020, “ ‘There’s no truth here’ on that day meant there’s not actionable data, not that there’s lies.” 61. Nushin Rashidian et al., “Friend and Foe: The Platform Press at the Heart of Journalism,” Tow Center for Digital Journalism, February 27, 2019, https://doi .org/10.7916/d8-15pq-x415. 62. Rashidian et al., “Friend and Foe.” 63. Robert G. Picard, “Measures of Concentration in the Daily Newspaper Industry,” Journal of Media Economics 1, no.  1 (1988): 66, https://doi.org/10.1080 /08997768809358167. 64. Mary Alice Shaver, “Application of Pricing Theory in Studies of Pricing Behavior and Rate Strategy in the Newspaper Industry,” Journal of Media Economics 8, no. 2 (1995): 50, https://doi.org/10.1207/s15327736me0802_5. 65. Shaver, “Application of Pricing Theory.” 66. Henrik Örnebring, “Journalism Cannot Solve Journalism’s Problems,” Journalism 20, no. 1 (2019): 226–28, https://doi.org/10.1177/1464884918808690. 67. Ken Doctor, “Newsonomics: This Is How the 5 Biggest Newspaper Chains Could Become 2—and It All Comes Down to One Day, June 30, 2020,” Nieman Lab, December  6, 2019, https://www.niemanlab.org/2019/12/newsonomics -this -is -how -the -5 -biggest-newspaper - chains - could -become -2 -and -it-all -comes-down-to-one-day-june-30-2020/. 68. Doctor, “Newsonomics.” 69. Interview by author, July 23, 2019. 70. Interview by author, July 23, 2019. 71. Doctor, “Newsonomics.”

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72. David Jackson and Gary Marx, “Will the Chicago Tribune Be the Next Newspaper Picked to the Bone?” New York Times, January  19, 2020, https://www .nytimes.com/2020/01/19/opinion/chicago-tribune-alden-capital.html. 73. David Carr, “At Flagging Tribune, Tales of a Bankrupt Culture,” New York Times, October 5, 2010, https://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/06/business/media /06tribune.html. 74. The Hearst Company is also privately held, but “privately held” does not mean the same as “family run.” Author’s field notes, Seattle Times, Seattle, July 8–11, 2013. 75. Paul Roberts, “Last-Minute Federal Legislation Brings Pension Relief, and Much-Needed ‘Runway,’ for Community Newspapers,” Seattle Times, December, 20, 2019, https://www.seattletimes.com/business/local-business/last-minute -federal-legislation-brings-pension-relief-and-much-needed-runway-for-commu nity-newspapers/. 76. Ben Bergman, “Should Eli Broad Buy the Los Angeles Times and Return It to Local Ownership?” 89.3 KCPP, October  22, 2015, https://www.scpr.org/news /2015/10/22/55160/should-eli-broad-buy-the-los-angeles-times/. 77. Bergman, “Should Eli Broad Buy the Los Angeles Times?” 78. Connie Bruck, “The Art of the Billionaire: How Eli Broad Took Over Los Angeles,” New Yorker, November  29, 2010, https://www.newyorker.com /magazine/2010/12/06/the-art-of-the-billionaire. 79. Otis Chandler, in fact, would say this outright and saw the LA Times as a project of booster promotion for the great, glimmering, postmodernist beacon on the West Coast. About fifty years later, when I was an intern on the metrodesk, I recall feeling that I was finally working for a newspaper where I would not have to turn to a second newspaper to get a comprehensive overview of national and international news. 80. Austin Smith, “Why Do Billionaires Decide to Buy Newspapers (and Why Should We Be Happy When They Do)?” Nieman Lab, August 29, 2018, https:// www.niemanlab.org /2018/08/why-do-billionaires-decide-to-buy-newspapers -and-why-should-we-be-happy-when-they-do/. 81. “The DeBartolo-York Family,” Youngstown State University Sports, 2020, https://www.ysusports.com/fan_zone/hof/bios-hof/debartolo_york. 82. Mike Kersmarki, “DeBartolo Family Legacy Includes Allegations of Mob Ties, Dirty Deals,” Medium (blog), February 19, 2020, https://medium.com/@mike .kersmarki /debartolo -family-legacy-includes -allegations -of-mob -ties -dirty -deals-b4070a0dace6. 83. Jim Martin, “Erie’s Tom Hagen Ranks Among State’s Wealthiest Residents,” Goerie .com, March  22, 2017, https://www.goerie.com/news/20170322/eries -tom-hagen-ranks-among-states-wealthiest-residents.

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84. Jim Martin, “Erie’s Tom Hagen Ranks Among State’s Wealthiest Residents,” Omaha World-Herald, January 29, 2020, https://www.omaha.com/news/local /buffett-sells-world-herald-other-newspapers-to-lee-enterprises/article_422d7 b68-8bf2-5936-a1e6-352bbce16dd9.html. 85. Dan Kennedy, “Amid Union Strife, John Henry Now Says the Boston Globe Is Profitable,” Media Nation, December 19, 2018, https://dankennedy.net/2018/12 /19/amid-union-strife-john-henry-now-says-the-boston-globe-is-profitable/. 86. Don Seiffer, “The Boston Globe Now Has More Online Subscribers Than Print Ones,” Boston Business Journal, May 20, 2019, https://www.bizjournals.com/bost on/news/2019/05/20/theboston-globe-now-has-more-online-subscribers.html. 87. Dan Kennedy, personal communication with the author (email), June 6, 2020. 88. Reid Wilson, “Which of the 11 American Nations Do You Live In?” Washington Post, November 8, 2013, https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/govbeat /wp/2013/11/08/which-of-the-11-american-nations-do-you-live-in/. 89. This program was eliminated in the wake of COVID-19. 90. The article notes, “Some 46.9% of area adults have a bachelor’s degree or higher, compared to 31.3% of American adults.” Samuel Stebbins and Michael B. Sauter, “25 Richest Cities in America: Does Your Metro Area Make the List?” USA Today, May 23, 2018, https://www.usatoday.com/story/money /economy/2018/05/17/25-richest-cities-in-america/34991163/. 91. Stebbins and Sauter, “25 Richest Cities in America.” 92. Dave Levy, “Boston Globe: Two Websites, One Paper, and a Paywall (Not in a Pear Tree),” State of the Fourth State (blog), September  27, 2011, https:// stateofthefourthestate.wordpress.com/2011/09/27/boston-globe-two-websites -one-paper-and-a-paywall-not-in-a-pear-tree/. 93. Ricardo Bilton, “The Boston Globe Is Getting Smarter About Digital Subscriptions—and Tightening Up Its Paywall,” Nieman Lab, May  31, 2017, https://www.niemanlab .org /2017/05 /the -boston -globe -is -getting -smarter -about-digital-subscriptions-and-tightening-up-its-paywall/. 94. Chyi and Ng, “Still Unwilling to Pay.” 95. Joshua Benton, “Getting the Boston Globe Delivered Will Soon Cost Almost $1,350 a Year,” Nieman Lab, March 7, 2018, https://www.niemanlab.org/2018 /03/getting-the-boston-globe-delivered-will-soon-cost-almost-1350-a-year/. 96. Benton, “Getting The Boston Globe Delivered.” 97. Smith, “Why Do Billionaires Decide to Buy Newspapers?” 98. Penelope Muse Abernathy, The Rise of a New Media Baron and the Emerging Threat of News Deserts (Chapel Hill: Center for Innovation and Sustainability in Local Media, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2016), http:// newspaperownership .com /wp - content /uploads /2016 /09 /07.UNC_RiseOf NewMediaBaron_SinglePage_01Sep2016-REDUCED.pdf.

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99. “#319 John Henry,” Forbes, https://www.forbes.com/profile/john-henry/ #1e45a3141194. 100. Steve Wulf, “The (Dis)Passion of John Henry,” ESPN, September  26, 2011, https://www.espn .com /mlb/story/_ /id /7005442 /mlb -how-john -henry-built -sports-empire-espn-magazine. 101. Dan Kennedy, “Despite Ongoing Losses, John Henry Insists that the Boston Globe Is Not for Sale,” WGBH, July  25, 2018, https://www.wgbh.org/news /commentary/2018/07/25/despite-ongoing-losses-john-henry-insists-that-the -boston-globe-is-not-for-sale. 102. Dan Kennedy, personal communication with the author, June 4, 2020. 103. John Egan, “Dallas-Fort Worth Crowned One of World’s Top 10 Wealthiest Places,” CultureMap Dallas, January  24, 2019, http://dallas.culturemap.com /news/city-life/01-24-19-dallas-fort-worth-worlds-wealthiest-places-wealth-x -mini-millionaires/. 104. U.S. Census Bureau, “New Census Bureau Population Estimates Show DallasFort Worth-Arlington Has Largest Growth in the United States,” press release CB18-50, March  22, 2018, https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases /2018/popest-metro-county.html. 105. Mike Wilson, the paper’s editor, pointed out to me that the newspaper received considerable flack from subscribers for this position but stood firm in their concerns about Trump. Personal communication (email), June 21, 2020. Editorial, “We Won’t Recommend a Candidate for President in 2020 and Here’s Why,” Dallas Morning News, February 16, 2020, https://www.dallasnews.com /opinion /we -recommend /2020/02/16/we -wont-recommend-a-candidate -for -president-in-2020-and-heres-why/; “We Recommend Hilary Clinton for President,” Dallas Morning News, September 7, 2016, https://www.dallasnews.com /opinion/editorials/2016/09/07/we-recommend-hillary-clinton-for-president/. 106. “About A. H. Belo,” A. H. Belo Corporation, http://www.ahbelo.com/about/. 107. “What Is the Local News Landscape of Dallas?” Interactives, Pew Research Center, last modified March 26, 2019, https://www.journalism.org/interactives /local-news-habits/19100/. 108. “Finalist: The Dallas Morning News Staff,” Pulitzer Prizes, https://www .pulitzer.org/finalists/staff-190. 109. Personal communication (email), June 21, 2020. 110. Christine Schmidt, “How to Build a Newsroom Culture That Cares About Metrics Beyond Pageviews,” Nieman Lab, March  13, 2019, https://www .niemanlab.org /2019/03/how-to -build-a-newsroom-culture-that-cares-about -metrics-beyond-pageviews/. 111. Krystina Martinez and Rick Holter, “New Dallas Morning News Editor Mike Wilson on Changing the Face of Newspapers,” KERA News, May  15, 2015,

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https:// www . keranews . org /post /new - dallas -morning -news - editor -mike -wilson-changing-face-newspapers. 112. Christine Schmidt, “The Dallas Morning News—Still Family Controlled— Shears Its Newsroom by 20,” Nieman Lab, January  7, 2019, https://www .niemanlab.org/2019/01/the-dallas-morning-news-still-family-controlled-shears -its-newsroom-by-20/. 113. Schmidt, “The Dallas Morning News.” 114. Michigan Symposium on Media and Politics, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, February  21, 2020, https://sites.lsa.umich.edu/polcom-lab/events /msmp2020/. 115. Interview by author, Austin, Texas, April 13, 2019. 116. Interview by author, Austin, Texas, April 13, 2019. 117. Personal communication (email), June 21, 2020. 118. This might reflect the whiteness of this approach, as Cowboys owner Jerry Jones is notorious now for his dismissal of Black Lives Matter, though Wilson countered that this claim was a bit unfair and indirect to link the event with Jones’s controversy. See Nicholas Kozankywycz, “How the Dallas Morning News Uses Perks to Reward Subscribers,” Lenfest Institute for Journalism, April  24, 2019, https://www.lenfestinstitute.org /facebookaccelerator/2019 /04/24 / how-the - dallas -morning-news -uses -perks -to -reward- subscribers /#comments. 119. Elizabeth Hansen and Emily Goligoski, “Guide to Audience Revenue and Engagement,” Tow Center for Digital Journalism, February 6, 2018, https://doi .org/10.7916/D8BG410W. 120. Hansen and Goligoski, “Guide to Audience Revenue and Engagement.” 121. See https://membershippuzzle.org/about. 122. Katharine Viner, “The Guardian’s Reader Funding Model Is Working. It’s Inspiring,” The Guardian, November 12, 2018, https://www.theguardian.com /membership/2018/nov/12/katharine-viner-guardian-million-reader-funding. 123. Christine Schmidt, “Three Years Into Nonprofit Ownership, the Philadelphia Inquirer Is Still Trying to Chart Its Future,” Nieman Lab, August  22, 2019, https://www.niemanlab.org /2019/08/three -years -into -nonprofit-ownership -the-philadelphia-inquirer-is-still-trying-to-chart-its-future/.

6. T H E C O U N T E R P O I N T: T H E N EW Y O R K T I M E S ’ C H A S E FOR GLOBAL READERS 1. Polgreen was, as of March 2020, head of content at Gimlet Media, a podcasting company now owned by Spotify. I refer to her here as editor-in-chief at HuffPost to designate her rank, as those outside industry circles may not recognize

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Gimlet’s place in the news innovation ecosystem. Lydia Polgreen, interview by author (phone), July 15, 2019. 2. Jason Seawright and John Gerring, “Case Selection Techniques in Case Study Research: A Menu of Qualitative and Quantitative Options,” Political Research Quarterly 61, no. 2 (2008): 294–308, https://doi.org/10.1177/10659129 07313077. 3. Marc Tracy, “New York Times up to 4.7 Million Subscribers as Profits Dip,” New York Times, August  7, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/07 /business/media/new-york-times-earnings.html. 4. Edmund Lee, “New York Times’ Digital Subscription Growth Story May Be Ending,” Vox, August 25, 2014, https://www.vox.com/2014/8/25/11630194/new -york-times-digital-subscriber-growth-hits-ceiling; See https://www.nytco .com/investors/reports-and-filings/, this is a point the Times contests, although it is clear from other company documents/statements and coverage of the Times’ plans that the TAM is a reality in the United States, although the actual ceiling may be bigger than previously considered. 5. Richard Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class, Revisited, rev. and exp. ed. (New York: Basic Books, 2014). 6. Stephen Dunbar-Johnson, interview by author (phone), September 27, 2019. 7. Schiller also adds a third point, that the internet moves from “probabilistic to individual marketing,” although this last aspect is dominated by Google and Facebook (see chapter  5). Dan Schiller, Digital Capitalism: Networking the Global Market System (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), 135. 8. Michael Luo, “The Fate of the News in the Age of the Coronavirus,” New Yorker, March 29, 2020, https://www.newyorker.com/news/annals-of-communi cations/the-fate-of-the-news-in-the-age-of-the-coronavirus. 9. Nikki Usher, “The Late Great International Herald Tribune and the New York Times: Global Media, Space, Time, Print, and Online Coordination in a 24/7 Networked World,” Journalism 16, no. 1 (2015): 119–33, https://doi.org/10.1177 /1464884914545743. 10. Doreen Massey, “Power-Geometry and a Progressive Sense of Place,” in Mapping the Futures: Local Culture, Global Change, ed. John Bird, Barry Curtis, Tim Putnam, and Lisa Tickner (London: Routledge, 2012), 75–85. 11. Manuel Castells, The Rise of the Network Society (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), 101–32. 12. Doreen Massey would identify this as an example of the “social geography of knowledge production,” which gains “at least part of its prestige from the cachet and exclusivity of its spatiality.” See Doreen Massey, For Space (Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE, 2005), 75. 13. Interview by author (phone), September 27, 2019.

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14. David Morley and Kevin Robins, Spaces of Identity: Global Media, Electronic Landscapes, and Cultural Boundaries (London: Routledge, 2002), 5–18. 15. Thomas Eisenmann and Joseph Bower, “The Entrepreneurial M-Form: Strategic Integration in Global Media Firms,” Organization Science 11, no. 3 (2000): 348–55, https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.11.3.348.12501. 16. “The Weekly: About the Show,” FX, https://www.fxnetworks.com/shows/the -weekly; Charanna Alexander, “Love Letter: The Modern Love TV Series Is Here!” New York Times, October  18, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10 /18/style/love-letter-the-modern-love-tv-series-is-here.html. 17. Sarah Perez, “NYT’s ‘The Daily’ Now Reaches 2 Million Listeners per Day,” TechCrunch, April 29, 2019, https://techcrunch.com/2019/04/29/nyts-the-daily -now-reaches-2-million-listeners-per-day/. 18. It’s worth acknowledging that these are far more diverse organizations. 19. Ingrid Volkmer, News in the Global Sphere: A Study of CNN and Its Impact on Global Communication (Bedfordshire: University of Luton Press, 1999), 3. 20. Ulf Hannerz, “Foreign Correspondents and the Varieties of Cosmopolitanism,” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 33, no. 2 (2007): 305, https://doi .org/10.1080/13691830601154260. 21. Interview by author, July 2, 2019. 22. Interview by author (phone), July 5, 2019. 23. Matthew Pressman, On Press: The Liberal Values That Shaped the News (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018), 119. 24. Pressman, On Press, 119. 25. Sydney Ember, “A. G. Sulzberger, 37, to Take Over as New York Times Publisher,” New York Times, December 14, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12 /14/business/media/a-g-sulzberger-new-york-times-publisher.html. 26. NYT communications noted the Times’ own reporting did not mention that the newspaper was taking away subscriptions from local papers. Lisa  M. George and Joel Waldfogel, “The New York Times and the Market for Local Newspapers,” American Economic Review 96, no. 1 (2006): 435–47, https://doi .org/10.1257/000282806776157551. 27. Joshua Benton (@jbenton), “The @nytimes sells about 120 copies a day across Montana and both Dakotas,” Twitter (photo), June  27, 2016, https://twitter .com/jbenton/status/747489810047172613/photo/1. 28. Jen Chung, “New York Times Ends Times Select,” Gothamist, September  18, 2007, https://gothamist.com/arts-entertainment/new-york-times-ends-times -select. “What Is TimesSelect?” New York Times (web archive), https://archive .nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/products/timesselect/whatis.html. 29. Dolia Estevez, “Mexican Billionaire Carlos Slim Sells Part of His New York Times Stock,” Forbes, August 1, 2017, https://www.forbes.com/sites/doliaestevez

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/2017/08/01/mexican-billionaire-carlos-slim-sells-part-of-his-new-york-times -stock/#6e1661123d30. 30. Although Warren Buffett has only recently abandoned his hobby of investment in newspapers and was at one time on the board of the Washington Post, he’s not the $250,000,000-loan type. 31. Ken Doctor, “Newsonomics: 10 Numbers on the New York Times’ 1 Million Digital-Subscriber Milestone,” Nieman Lab, August  6, 2015, https://www .niemanlab.org /2015/08/newsonomics-10-numbers-on-the-new-york-times-1 -million-digital-subscriber-milestone/. 32. Doctor, “Newsonomics.” 33. Myles Tanzer, “Exclusive: New York Times Internal Report Painted Dire Digital Picture,” BuzzFeed, May 15, 2014, https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article /mylestanzer/exclusive-times-internal-report-painted-dire-digital-picture. 34. Nikki Usher, Interactive Journalism: Hackers, Data, and Code (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2016), chap. 1. 35. Monojoy Bhattacharjee, “ ‘Read in Every Country on Earth’: NY Times Charts Its Course to 10 Million Subscribers with a Dynamic Paywall Plan,” What’s New in Publishing, March 13, 2019, https://whatsnewinpublishing.com/read-in -every-country-on-earth-ny-times-charts-its-course-to-10-million-subscribers -with-a-dynamic-paywall-plan/. 36. David Leonhardt et  al., Journalism That Stands Apart (New York: New York Times, January 2017), https://www.nytimes.com/projects/2020-report/index.html. 37. Interview with author (New York Times), July 2, 2019. 38. Hendrik Hertzberg, “Adieu, Herald Tribune,” New Yorker, March  1, 2013, https://www.newyorker.com/news/hendrik-hertzberg/adieu-herald-tribune. 39. “New York Herald Tribune T-shirt,” NYTStore, New York Times, https://store .nytimes.com/products/herald-tribune-t-shirt. 40. Nikki Usher, “The IHT Wasn’t Just a Brand or a History—It Was an Alternate Editorial Lens,” Nieman Lab, February  27, 2013, https://www.niemanlab.org /2013 /02 /nikki -usher -the -iht-wasnt-just-a -brand - or -a -history -it-was -an -alternate-editorial-lens/. 41. Gerry Smith, “New York Times to Invest $50 Million in Global Digital Expansion,” Chicago Tribune, April  14, 2016, https://www.chicagotribune.com/business/ct -new-york-times-global-digital-expansion-investment-20160414-story.html. 42. Bhattacharjee, “‘Read in Every Country.” 43. “The Year in Numbers: 2018,” New York Times Company, https://www.nytco .com/the-year-in-numbers-2018/. 44. Elizabeth Greico, “U.S. Newspapers Have Shed Half of Their Newsroom Employees Since 2008,” Pew Research Center, April  20, 2020, https://www

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.pewresearch .org /fact-tank /2020 /04 /20 /u - s -newsroom - employment-has -dropped-by-a-quarter-since-2008/#more-304666. 45. David W. Dunlap, “Reporters Get New Datelines so They Won’t Seem out of Place,” New York Times, April  16, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/16 /insider/dateline-byline-reporters.html. 46. This process deserves wider attention from organizational communication scholars who focus on how high-tech global companies innovate and collaborate. See Jennifer Gibbs, “Dialectics in a Global Software Team: Negotiating Tensions Across Time, Space, and Culture,” Human Relations 62, no. 6 (2009): 905–35, https://doi.org/10.1177/0018726709104547. 47. Organizational scholars provide critical insights into the way various forms of authority and identity are created by discourse and sociohistorical conditions. See Linda L. Putnam, Gail T. Fairhurst, and Scott Banghart, “Contradictions, Dialectics, and Paradoxes in Organizations: A Constitutive Approach,” Academy of Management Annals 10, no.  1 (2016): 65–171, https://doi.org/10.1080 /19416520.2016.1162421. 48. Michael M. Grynbaum, “New York Times Will Move Part of Hong Kong Office to Seoul,” New York Times, July 14, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07 /14/business/media/new-york-times-hong-kong.html. 49. Yi-Fu Tuan, “Space and Place: Humanistic Perspective,” in Philosophy in Geography, ed. Stephen Gale and Gunnar Olsson (Dordrecht: Springer, 1979), 387, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-9394-5_19. 50. Interview by author (phone), June 29, 2019. 51. Usher, “The Late Great.” 52. Nikki Usher, “Service Journalism as Community Experience: Personal Technology and Personal Finance at the New York Times,” Journalism Practice 6, no. 1 (2012): 107–21, https://doi.org/10.1080/17512786.2011.628782. 53. The close of the Paris bureau still raises significant ire, and as a result, I’ve anonymized some of these comments. As the interviews are attributed elsewhere in the chapter, I have also removed the dates but can provide validation upon request. 54. Interview by author (phone), June 29, 2019. 55. Interview by author (phone), September 27, 2019. 56. Patrick LaForge, interview by author, July 1, 2019. 57. Anonymous, interview by author, July 2019. 58. Anonymous, interview by author, July 2019. 59. Roy Greenslade, “New York Times to Set Up Digital Hub in London,” The Guardian, December 19, 2014, https://www.theguardian.com/media/greenslade /2014/dec/19/new-york-times-to-set-up-digital-hub-in-london.

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60. Joshua Benton, “Goodbye, International New York Times; Hello, International Edition of the New York Times,” Nieman Lab, October 12, 2016, https://www .niemanlab.org /2016/10/goodbye -international -new-york-times -hello -inter national-edition-of-the-new-york-times/. 61. Interview by author (phone), July 15, 2019. 62. Nikki Usher, Making News at the “New York Times” (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2014). 63. Usher, “The Late Great,” 129. 64. Usher, “The Late Great,” 131. 65. Interview by author, July 1, 2019. 66. Interview by author, July 12, 2010. 67. Interview by author, July 2, 2019. 68. Interview by author (phone), July 9, 2019. 69. Interview by author, September 19, 2019. 70. Interview by author, September 19, 2019. 71. Personal communication (by email), June 1, 2020. 72. Interview by author, July 12, 2010. 73. Interview by author (phone), June 26, 2019. 74. Interview by author, July 12, 2010. 75. Interview by author (phone), July 15, 2019. 76. Interview by author (phone), July 26, 2019. 77. Interview by author, July 2, 2019. 78. Interview by author (phone), July 5, 2019. 79. Interview by author (phone), September 27, 2019. 80. Justin Ellis, “On the Road to Sao Paulo: Why the New York Times Sees Opportunity in Brazil,” Nieman Lab, October 18, 2012, https://www.niemanlab.org /2012 /10/on -the -road -to -sao -paulo -why-the -new-york-times -sees -oppo rtu nity-in-brazil/. 81. Interview by author (phone), July 5, 2019. 82. Interview by author (phone), July 15, 2019. 83. Paulina Chavira (@apchavira), “Con mucha tristeza y pesar les informamos que hoy cierra operaciones @nytimeses. Para NY es una decisión «corporativa», pero para nosotros (@albinsonl, @borismunoz, @ebudasoff, @marina _ef, @MJVega, @patynietog, @Nat_Guti, @eldacantu) fue un proyecto al que le pusimos todo el corazón,” Twitter, September 17, 2019, https://twitter.com /apchavira/status/1174070393801494529; Laura Hazard Owen, “The New York Times shutters NYT en Español After Three Years: ‘It Did Not Prove Financially Successful,’ ” Nieman Lab, September 18, 2019, https://www.niemanlab .org/2019/09/the-new-york-times-shutters-nyt-en-espanol-after-three-years-it -did-not-prove-financially-successful/.

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84. Patricia Nieto, “Algunas de Nuestras Historias Favoritas en New York Times en Español,” New York Times, September  17, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/es /2019/09/17/espanol/america-latina/nytimes-en-espanol-historias.html. 85. Interview by author (phone), September 27, 2019. 86. Interview by author, July 2, 2019. 87. Interview by author (phone), July 5, 2019. 88. Interview by author (phone), July 5, 2019. 89. Interview by author (phone), September 27, 2019. 90. Interview by author, July 5, 2019. 91. Interview by author, July 2, 2019. 92. Interview by author (phone), July 9, 2019. 93. Interview by author (phone), July 15, 2019. 94. Interview by author (phone), July 15, 2019; see also Jessica Bennett, “The New York Times Celebrates International Women’s Day Worldwide,” New York Times, February  26, 2019, https://www.nytco.com/press/the-new-york-times -celebrates-international-womens-day-worldwide/. 95. This has changed somewhat; what I described earlier represents my observations of the page from about 2017 to 2019, although subsequent guidance from the Times’ communication staff suggested that moderated comments from the public were allowed. 96. Interview by author (phone), July 9, 2019. 97. Interview by author (phone), July 9, 2019. 98. Interview by author (phone), August 12, 2019. 99. Interview by author, September 19, 2019. 100. Interview by author (phone), July 9, 2019. 101. Interview by author (phone), August 12, 2019. 102. Nushin Rashidian, Pete Brown, and Elizabeth Hansen, “Friend and Foe: The Platform Press at the Heart of Journalism,” Tow Center for Digital Journalism, Columbia Journalism Review, June 14, 2018, https://www.cjr.org/tow_center_ reports/the-platform-press-at-the-heart-of-journalism.php. 103. Interview by author, July 2, 2019. 104. Interview by author (phone), July 26, 2019. 105. Rashidian, Brown, and Hansen, “Friend and Foe”; Sara Rafsky, “Does the Media Capital of the World Have News Deserts,” Columbia Journalism Review, January  7, 2020, https://www.cjr.org/tow_center/new-york-city-local -news.php. 106. Rafsky, “Does the Media Capital of the World Have News Deserts.” 107. Paul Moses, “The New York Times Turns Its Sights Away from New York City,” Daily Beast, May 5, 2017, https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-new-york-times -turns-its-sights-away-from-new-york-city.

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108. Azi Paybarah, “Why the Truth Is Local,” New York Times, June  10, 2019, https://www. nytimes .com /2019 /06 /10 /nyregion /newyorktoday/new -york -times-truth-campaign.html.

7 . B LU E N E W S S U RV I V I N G : T H E B I G S O RT I N N E W S PHIL AN THROPY 1. Magda Konieczna, Journalism Without Profit: Making News When the Market Fails (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 48. 2. “Worldwide, Foundations Have Invested More Than $11 Billion in Media Since 2009,” Media Impact Funders, https://mediaimpactfunders.org/the-field/about -the-field/. 3. These efforts include universities and museums. The Knight Foundation’s endowment originates from the Knight family’s profits from its newspaper and television holdings and grew thanks to subsequent investment strategies. Google’s funding is global, though there is an emphasis on North America; Facebook’s funding is also global, though they have promised $16 million in small grants to U.S. local news organizations in the wake of COVID-19. 4. Mike Scutari, “ ‘There Is No Turning Back.’ Philanthropy and Journalism After COVID-19,” Inside Philanthropy, April  21, 2020, https://www.insidephilan thropy.com / home /2020/4 /21 /there -is -no -turning -back-philanthropy -and -journalism-after-covid-19. 5. The New York Times Company 2018 Annual Report (New York: New York Times, 2019), https://s1.q4cdn.com/156149269/files/doc_financials/annual/2018 /updated/2018-Annual-Report-(1).pdf. 6. Doreen Massey, For Space (London: Sage, 2005), 93. 7. William Shakespeare, King Lear, ed. Barbara  A. Mowat and Paul Werstine (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2005), I.iv.302–3. 8. David Callahan, The Givers: Wealth, Power, and Philanthropy in a New Gilded Age (New York: Vintage, 2017), 44, 190. Note that conservative think tanks and philanthropists are behind nonprofit right-wing news media efforts, but this chapter focuses on general-interest news. 9. Public broadcasting in the United States depends on philanthropy to survive; only about 0.01 percent of the federal budget goes to federal funding, which amounts to about $1.35 per year for each American. For comparison, Brits pay about US$200 in a licensing fee for support. Patricia Nilsson, “Can the BBC’s Public Funding Model Survive?” Financial Times, November 8, 2019, https:// www.ft.com/content/22113748-fcba-11e9-98fd-4d6c20050229; “Federal Funding for Public Broadcasting,” WFYI Indianapolis, https://www.wfyi.org/federal -funding-for-public-broadcasting.

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10. Chenjerai Kumanyika, “Challenging the Whiteness of Public Radio,” NPR, January  29, 2015, https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2015/01/29 /382437460/challenging-the-whiteness-of-public-radio; Michael Soha, “Who Loses If Trump Cuts Public Media Funding? His Supporters,” American Prospect, March  22, 2017, https://prospect.org/culture/loses-trump-cuts-public -media-funding-supporters./. 11. “Audience,” National Public Media, https://www.nationalpublicmedia.com /Audience/#-conscientious. 12. Do not conflate audience preferences with the slant of the news content itself. 13. Rodney Benson, “Can Foundations Solve the Journalism Crisis?” Journalism 19, no. 8 (2018): 1059–77. 14. Benson, “Can Foundations Solve the Journalism Crisis?” 15. Interview with anonymous, July 2019 (dates kept general to ensure anonymity). 16. It is worth noting that among nonprofit journalism outlets and some new, digital-first, for-profit enterprises, the diversity numbers are far more positive than those of the rest of the industry. 17. Nikki Usher and Michelle D. Layser, “The Quest to Save Journalism: A Legal Analysis of New Models for Newspapers from Nonprofit Tax-Exempt Organizations to L3Cs,” Utah Law Review 4 (2010): 1315. 18. “Gaining Ground: How Nonprofit News Ventures Seek Sustainability,” Knight Foundation, 2015, https://knightfoundation.org/reports/gaining-ground-how -nonprofit-news-ventures-seek-su/. 19. Konieczna, Journalism Without Profit, 89–118. 20. Matthew Hindman, The Internet Trap: How the Digital Economy Builds Monopolies and Undermines Democracy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018), 102–32. 21. Natalie Hope McDonald, “Can Nonprofit News Help Save the Media Industry?” Editor & Publisher, November  5, 2018, https://www.editorandpublisher .com/feature/can-nonprofit-news-help-save-the-media-industry/. 22. Report for America also dispatches journalists to cover populations or beats that have not been adequately covered by existing news outlets. 23. “About the Local Reporting Network,” ProPublica, https://www.propublica .org/about/local-reporting-network. 24. Patrick Ferrucci and Jacob L. Nelson, “The New Advertisers: How Foundation Funding Impacts Journalism,” Media and Communication 7, no. 4 (2019): 45– 55, https://doi.org/10.17645/mac.v7i4.2251. 25. Harry Backlund, “Is Your Journalism a Luxury or a Necessity?” City Bureau, July  18, 2019, https://www.citybureau.org/notebook/2019/7/17/journalism-is-a -luxury-information-is-a-necessity.

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26. John  H. Hanson, “The Anthropology of Giving: Toward a Cultural Logic of Charity,” Journal of Cultural Economy 8, no.  4 (2015): 501, https://doi.org/10 .1080/17530350.2014.949284. 27. Katie Donnelly and Jessica Clark, “Supporting Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion in Journalism,” Democracy Fund, June  19, 2018, https://democracyfund.org /idea/supporting-diversity-equity-and-inclusion-in-journalism/. 28. Matthew Nisbet et al., “Funding the News: Foundations and Nonprofit Media,” Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy, June 18, 2018, https:// shorensteincenter.org/funding-the-news-foundations-and-nonprofit-media/. 29. Some of the data reflects transfers from different foundations, such as the Annenberg Foundation to the Annenberg School of Communication, or support for the now-defunct Newseum from the Freedom Forum. The Democracy Fund does not appear in the dataset I used because it was still a relatively new funder in news philanthropy at the time. 30. Lea Trusty, “A Growing Gap in Philanthropic Support for Newsroom Diversity,” Democracy Fund, June  19, 2018, https://democracyfund.org/idea/new -report-a-growing-gap-in-philanthropic-support-for-newsroom-diversity/. 31. Stephen  F. Ostertag and Gaye Tuchman, “When Innovation Meets Legacy,” Information, Communication & Society 15, no. 6 (2012): 922, https://doi.org/10 .1080/1369118X.2012.676057. 32. Benson, “Can Foundations Solve the Journalism Crisis?” 33. Nisbet et al., “Funding the News.” 34. James  T. Hamilton, Democracy’s Detectives: The Economics of Investigative Journalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016), chap. 1. 35. Despite my interest in questions of equity in philanthropic efforts in journalism, I didn’t take a closer look at the lack of funding for underserved communities (poor, people of color, rural, etc.). These communities have been ignored by news institutions writ large for a long time, and the fact that so few dollars are going to fund this kind of journalism makes it likely that these disparities will continue. 36. James T. Hamilton, All the News That’s Fit to Sell: How the Market Transforms Information Into News (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), 30–36. 37. Hamilton, Democracy’s Detectives, 101. 38. James Ettema and Theodore Glasser, Custodians of Conscience: Investigative Journalism and Public Virtue (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998). 39. Leah  A. Lievrouw and Sharon  E. Farb, “Information and Equity,” Annual Review of Information Science and Technology 37, no. 1 (2005): 499–540. 40. Peggy Holman, “Media Seeds: Fresh News in an Appalachian Media Desert,” Medium, July  21, 2019, https://medium.com/journalismthatmatters/media -seeds-fresh-news-in-an-appalachian-media-desert-5720aa417503.

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41. In chapter 3, I was specifically concerned about the geographical redistribution of journalists, and my proxy was newspaper employment as an assessment of the relative health of a local news ecosystem at the county level. 42. Philip Napoli, Ian Dunham, and Jessica Mahone, “Assessing News Media Infrastructure: A State-Level Analysis,” DeWitt Wallace Center for Media and Democracy, 2017, 1–36, https://dewitt.sanford.duke.edu/wp-content/uploads /2017/05/Assessing-News-Media-Infrastructure_Report-2.pdf. 43. Napoli, Dunham, and Mahone, “Assessing News Media Infrastructure,” 5. 44. Napoli, Dunham, and Mahone, “Assessing News Media Infrastructure,” 19. 45. Napoli, Dunham, and Mahone, “Assessing News Media Infrastructure,” 15. 46. The data also includes Washington, DC. To compare states against each other in a meaningful way, the Duke team standardized news outlets and news workers as reflections of 100,000 per capita. 47. These data support our finding from the newspaper employment data in chapter  3, which showed that news deficits in terms of newspaper employment were found across myriad community types, not just in rural areas. But there were also areas that historically have been underprovisioned for news. The current crisis in media isn’t making the situation any better there, but perhaps it’s also not much worse. 48. The two states that have missing data because of errors in the database are Indiana and South Carolina. 49. The positive trend is bigger with the news workers analysis than with the news outlets analysis, so we used the news workers variables to help make the associations between grant provision and news infrastructure clearer, as seen in table 7.1. 50. The positive trend is bigger with the news workers analysis than the news outlets analysis, with California having many more news outlets than what is predicted based on population size. 51. Similarly, looking at the rank of states, as data points are positive integers from 1 to 51, the unit differences between states do not fully illustrate the actual differences in news infrastructure endowment. 52. “2017 U.S. Party Affiliation by State,” Gallup, 2017, https://news.gallup.com /poll/226643/2017-party-affiliation-state.aspx. 53. These findings support our previous analysis, which suggested that amid the proportional losses of newspaper employment, Republican counties actually gained relative to their liberal counterparts. Partisanship has little to do with actual news provision when viewed from this perspective. 54. “Working-Class Country” is not well endowed for journalism more generally, as our findings in chapter 3 suggest. 55. In a separate analysis (see appendix C), we found that funding for investigative journalism actually went down after Trump’s election.

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56. This trend aptly raises the question of whether investigative journalism is a luxury good or a necessity. 57. Randall Stross, “It’s Not the People You Know. It’s Where You Are,” New York Times, October  22, 2006, https://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/22/business /yourmoney/22digi.html; Andrew  A. Schwartz, “Rural Crowdfunding,” UC Davis Business Law Journal 13 (2012): 283–94, https://heinonline.org/HOL /LandingPage?handle=hein.journals/ucdbulj13&div=15&id=&page=. 58. Meric S. Gertler, “Tacit Knowledge and the Economic Geography of Context, or The Undefinable Tacitness of Being (There),” Journal of Economic Geography 3, no. 1 (2003): 75–99, https://doi.org/10.1093/jeg/3.1.75. 59. “Methodology,” American Communities Project, 2020, https://www.ameri cancommunities.org/methodology/. 60. The absence of these outlets provides some face validity to our funding analysis and the media impact funder data’s tagging for types of contributions. 61. Vanessa Romo, “Mississippi Gubernatorial Candidate’s Condition for Female Reporter: Bring a Man,” NPR, July  11, 2019, https://www.npr.org/2019/07/11 /740913524/mississippi-gubernatorial-candidates-condition-for-female-reporter -bring-a-man. 62. Felicia Sonmez, “A Second Candidate for Mississippi Governor Says He Won’t Meet Alone with Women,” Washington Post, July  16, 2019, https://www .washingtonpost .com /politics/a-second-candidate -for-mississippi-governor -says-he-wont-meet-alone-with-women/2019/07/16/23518a4c-a830-11e9-9214 -246e594de5d5_story.html. 63. “ISOJ 2019 Day 2—Saving Local News in the U.S. (Ryan Nave),” YouTube video, 8:27, posted by “Knight Center,” June  12, 2019, https://www.youtube .com/watch?v=3Hgfk0h5bR4. 64. R. L. Nave, interview by author, July 9, 2019. 65. R. L. Nave, interview by author, July 9, 2019. 66. Chris Matthews, “America’s Most Corrupt State Defends Itself,” Fortune, July 28, 2014, https://fortune.com/2014/07/28/most-corrupt-us-state-mississippi/. 67. “ISOJ 2019 Day 2,” 8:27. 68. The prospects for investigative journalism in Mississippi has improved more than the 2009–2017 data suggest. The Mississippi Center for Investigative Journalism has added to the state’s news infrastructure and now collaborates with Mississippi Today. 69. Anonymous, interview by author, September 3, 2019. 70. “Mississippi’s Ongoing Incarceration Crisis,” FWD.us, 2018, https:// 36shgf3jsufe2xojr925ehv6 -wpengine . netdna -ssl .com /wp - content /uploads /2019/01/MS_Problem_statement_FWDus.pdf. 71. R. L. Nave, interview by author, July 9, 2019.

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72. R. L. Nave, interview by author, July 9, 2019. 73. R. L. Nave, interview by author, July 9, 2019. 74. R. L. Nave, interview by author, July 9, 2019. 75. Dana Coester, interview by author, July 31, 2019. 76. Chriss  W. Sweet, “Google Doubles Down on Purging Conservative Speech,” Breitbart, August 22, 2017, https://www.breitbart.com/local/2017/08/22/google -doubles-purging-conservative-speech/. 77. Dana Coester, “Our Complicated Appalachia in To the Bones, Weedeater, and the Evening Hour,” 100 Days in Appalachia, July  2, 2019, https://www .100daysinappalachia.com/2019/07/02/our-complicated-appalachia-in-to-the -bones-weedeater-and-the-evening-hour/. 78. Maryanne Reed, interview by author, July 23, 2019. 79. “Hewlett, Knight, Koch Foundations, with Other Funders, Will Support Independent Research on Facebook’s Role in Elections and Democracy,” Knight Foundation, April 29, 2018, https://www.cjr.org/analysis/koch-foundation-asne -grant.php; https://knightfoundation.org/press/releases/independent-research -on-facebook-role-in-elections-and-democracy/. 80. Paul Farhi, “Charles Koch, Champion of Free Speech? His Grants to News Media Accelerate,” Washington Post, July 5, 2018, https://www.washingtonpost .com / lifestyle /style /charles -koch - champion - of -free -speech -his - grants -to -news-media-accelerate/2018/07/05/41d0ebf8-7e19 -11e8-bb6b -c1cb691f1402_ story.html. 81. Mathew Ingram, “Facebook Is Both Killing and Funding Local Journalism,” Columbia Journalism Review, July  18, 2019, https://www.cjr.org/the_media_ today/facebook-local-journalism.php.

C O N C LU S I O N : P L AC E A S T H E WAY F O RWA R D 1. Mike Wright, “Read All About It! County Says No to NY Times,” Citrus County Chronicle, October  25, 2019, https://www.chronicleonline.com/news/local /read-all-about-it-county-says-no-to-ny-times/article_4acceeca-f76a-11e9–932e -7fec20f83a0b.html. 2. Josh Fiallo, “After New York Times Vote, Tourists Boycott Citrus County, Emails Claim,” Tampa Bay Times, November 24, 2019, https://www.tampabay .com /florida -politics / buzz /2019/11 /24 /after-new -york-times -vote -tourists -boycott-citrus- county-emails-claim/. 3. Fiallo, “After New York Times Vote.” 4. Fiallo, “After New York Times Vote.” 5. Macey Morales, “ALA Responds to County Commission Decision to Deny Digital Access to New York Times in Citrus County Public Libraries,”

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American Library Association, November  5, 2019, http://www.ala.org/news/ press-releases/2019/11/ala-responds- county- commission- decision- denydigital-access-new-york-times. 6. Mike Wright, “Board’s NY Times Decision Catches Public Ire,” Citrus County Chronicle, October  28, 2019, updated November  20, 2019, https://www .chronicleonline.com /news/local / boards -ny-times -decision-catches -publics -ire/article_196d5d2a-f9cb-11e9-b4a5-cf20e35c898d.html 7. Mike Wright, “Libraries to ‘Catch Our Breath’ on Subscription Issue,” Citrus County Chronicle, November 20, 2019, https://www.chronicleonline.com/news /local /libraries -to -catch-our-breath-on-subscription-issue/article_f947557c -0bdc- 11ea-b30a-f32e75a7cd6d.html. 8. Amy Rea, “Library Denied Access to New York Times Online,” Library Journal, November 26, 2019, https://www.libraryjournal.com/?detailStory=Library-De nied-Access-New-York-Times-Online. 9. Fiallo, “After New York Times Vote.” 10. Philip M. Napoli, Ian Dunham, and Jessica Mahone, “Assessing News Media Infrastructure: A State-Level Analysis,” News Measures Research Project, April 2017, 1–26, https://dewitt.sanford.duke.edu/wp-content/uploads/2017/05 /Assessing-News-Media-Infrastructure_Report-2.pdf. 11. Robert E. Gutsche Jr. and Kristy Hess, Geographies of Journalism: The Imaginative Power of Place in Making Digital News (New York: Routledge, 2018), chap. 5. 12. Michael C. McGee, “In Search of ‘the People’: A Rhetorical Alternative,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 61, no. 3 (1975): 247, https://doi.org/10.1080/00335637509383289. 13. Robert N. Bellah, “Civil Religion in America,” Daedalus 96, no. 1 (1967): 1–2. 14. The following section is inspired by James W. Carey’s thinking across many of his essays, in particular his 1995 essay “The Press, Public Opinion, and Public Discourse: On the Edge of the Post-Modern,” in Public Opinion and the Communication of Consent, ed. Theodore L. Glasser and Charles T. Salmon (New York: Guildford), 373–402. 15. C. Edwin Baker, Media, Markets, and Democracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 129–53. 16. David Shedden, “Today in Media History: Mr. Dooley: ‘The Job of the Newspaper Is to Comfort the Afflicted and Afflict the Comfortable,’ ” Poynter, October  7, 2014, https://www.poynter.org/reporting-editing/2014/today-in-media -history-mr-dooley-the-job-of-the-newspaper-is-to-comfort-the-afflicted-and -afflict-the-comfortable/. 17. James S. Ettema and Theodore L. Glasser, Custodians of Conscience: Investigative Journalism and Public Virtue (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998).

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18. Nikki Usher, “Interactive Visual Argument: Online News Graphics and the Iraq War,” Journal of Visual Literacy 28, no. 2 (2009): 116–26. 19. Joe Pompeo, “ ‘Journalism Is Not About Creating Safe Spaces’: Inside the Woke Civil War at the New York Times,” The Hive, April 3, 2018, https://www.vanityfair .com/news/2018/04/a-woke-civil-war-is-simmering-at-the-new-york-times. 20. Robby Soave, “Public Schools Are Teaching the 1619 Project in Class, Despite Concerns from Historians,” Reason, January  28, 2020, https://reason.com /2020/01/28/1619-project-new-york-times-public-schools/. 21. Andrea Wenzel, Daniela Gerson, and Evelyn Moreno, Engaging Communities Through Solutions Journalism (New York: Columbia Journalism School, 2016), https://www.cjr.org /tow_center_reports/engaging_communities_through _solutions_journalism.php. 22. Nikki Usher, “Breaking News Production Processes in US Metropolitan Newspapers: Immediacy and Journalistic Authority,” Journalism 19, no. 1 (2018): 21–36, https://doi.org/10.1177/1464884916689151. 23. Nikki Usher, “The Constancy of Immediacy: From Printing Press to Digital Age,” in The Crisis of Journalism Reconsidered: Democratic Culture, Professional Codes, Digital Future, ed. Jeffrey  C. Alexander, Elizabeth Butler Breese, and María Luengo (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 170–89. 24. In particular, the authors point to journalists’ tendency to sensationalize, problems with bias and conflicts of interest, lack of follow-up, and stories and subjects that are omitted or not covered. But, as we have seen with COVID-19, public officials may often suppress health information, too. Miriam Shuchman and Michael S. Wilkes, “Medical Scientists and Health News Reporting: A Case of Miscommunication,” Annals of Internal Medicine 126, no.  12 (June  1997): 976–82. 25. James Hamilton, All the News That’s Fit to Sell: How the Market Transforms Information Into News (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004); James Hamilton, Democracies Detectives: The Economics of Investigative Journalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016). 26. Brian McGrory, “Memo from Brian McGrory on the Boston Globe Reinvention,” Boston Globe, April  17, 2017, https://www.bostonglobe.com/specials /2017/04/17/memo-from-brian-mcgrory-boston-globe-reinvention/9fJP19bfvs h1KDq5D8hCKN/story.html. 27. “Documenters,” City Bureau, https://www.citybureau.org/documenters. 28. Andrea  D. Wenzel, Sam Ford, and Efrat Nechushtai, “Report for America, Report About Communities: Local News Capacity and Community Trust,” Journalism Studies 21, no. 3 (2020): 287–305, https://doi.org/10.1080/1461670X .2019.1641428.

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29. P. Kim Bui, “The Empathetic Newsroom: How Journalists Can Better Cover Neglected Communities,” American Press Institute, April  26, 2018, https:// www . americanpressinstitute . org /publications /reports /strategy - studies /empathetic-newsroom/. 30. “Federal Work-Study Jobs Help Students Earn Money to Pay for College or Career School,” Federal Student Aid, Department of Education, https:// studentaid.gov/understand-aid/types/work-study. 31. Malachi Barrett, “News Websites with Political Ties Spread Across Michigan Before 2020 Election,” M Live, November 8, 2019, https://qz.com/1837224/well -funded-liberal-news-network-pushes-partisan-covid-19 -content/; https:// www.mlive .com /public -interest /2019/11 /news -websites -with -political -ties -spread-across-michigan-before-2020-election.html. 32. Many of my colleagues are quick to malign Sinclair Television’s growth and its right-wing political journalism; however, in markets I have lived in, it is the Sinclair stations that have often provided the most local political news (though often at the state level). Local television is often not local, so I am not hopeful that this approach will be a solution. 33. Steven Waldman and Charles Sennott, “Journalism Conservatives Should Love,” National Review, December 26, 2018, https://www.nationalreview.com /2018/12/conservatives-should-support-local-news-outlets. 34. Nikki Usher, “The NYT in Trump’s America: A Failure for Liberals, a Champion for Liberalism,” Political Communication 37 (2020), https://doi.org/10 .1080/10584609.2020.1777686. 35. Patrick Sharkey, Stuck in Place: Urban Neighborhoods and the End of Progress Toward Racial Equality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013). 36. Sue Robinson, Networked News, Racial Divides: How Power and Privilege Shape Public Discourse in Progressive Communities (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017). 37. Robinson, Networked News, Racial Divides. 38. Terrance  L. Green, “Places of Inequality, Places of Possibility: Mapping ‘Opportunity in Geography’ Across Urban School-Communities,” Urban Review 47, no. 4 (2015): 717, https://doi.org/10.1007/s11256-015-0331-z. 39. Eric Klinenberg, Palaces for the People: How Social Infrastructure Can Help Fight Inequality, Polarization, and the Decline of Civic Life (New York: Broadway Books, 2018), introduction. 40. Holley A. Wilkin et al., “Applications of Communication Infrastructure Theory,” Health Communication 25, no. 6–7 (2010): 611–12, https://doi.org/10.1080 /10410236.2010.496839. 41. Holley  A. Wilkin et  al., “Communication Resources for Obesity Prevention Among African American and Latino Residents in an Urban Neighborhood,”

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Journal of Health Communication 20, no. 6 (2015): 710–19, https://doi.org/10 .1080/10810730.2015.1018559 42. Kirk Johnson, “Anti-Tax Fervor Closed Their Libraries. Now Residents Are Trying to Go It Alone,” New York Times, October  17, 2018, https://www .nytimes.com/2018/10/17/us/oregon-library-taxes.html. 43. Candice Norwood, “A New Gig in Government: Chief Storyteller,” Governing, April  24, 2019, https://www.governing.com/topics/mgmt/gov-detroit-chief -storyteller.html. 44. See Barry  C. Lynn, Liberty from All Masters: The New American Autocracy Versus the Will of the People (New York: St. Martin’s, 2020), chap. 9. 45. In particular, this section has benefited from Loge’s theoretical analysis of key texts; Loge considers the long-standing potential of American civic cohesion through an ethical framework that recognizes difference. Peter Loge, ed., Political Communication Ethics: Theory and Practice (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2020), chap. 5.

APPENDIX A: METHODS 1. Tim Marema, “Rural Social Media Continues to Criticize Trump While Adding New Concerns About Economy,” Daily Yonder, April  23, 2020, https:// www. dailyyonder .com /rural - social -media - continues -to - criticize -trump -while-adding-new-concerns-about-economy/2020/04/23/. 2. Zack Beauchamp, “A Disturbing New Study Suggests Sean Hannity’s Show Helped Spread the Coronavirus,” Vox, April  22, 2020, https://www.vox.com /policy-and-politics/2020/4/22/21229360/coronavirus-covid-19-fox-news-sean -hannity-misinformation-death. 3. Nikki Usher, “What to Look for Before Writing a Story About an Academic Study,” Columbia Journalism Review, February  19, 2019, https://www.cjr.org /analysis/academic-study-journalism.php. 4. Daniela Lamas, “On the ICU Front Lines,” ABC News video, 6:22, April  21, 2020, https://abcnews.go.com/US/video/icu-front-lines-70255080. 5. “Overview: Always-Already Given,” Oxford Reference, https://www.oxford reference.com/view/10.1093/oi/authority.20110803095406640.

A P P E N D I X B : E XT E N D E D M E T H O D S F R O M C H A P T E R   3 1. “Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages,” U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, last modified September  26, 2019, https://www.bls.gov/cew/questions -and-answers.htm#Q16.

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2. https://www.census.gov/econ/isp/sampler.php?naicscode=51111&naicslevel=5. 3. Elizabeth Grieco, “U.S. Newspapers Have Shed Half of Their Newsroom Employees Since 2008,” Pew Research Center, April  20, 2020, https://www . pewresearch . org /fact -tank /2019 /07/09 /u - s -newsroom - employment -has -dropped-by-a-quarter-since-2008/. 4. The original datasets have different levels of completeness. We looked at all the available data and thus have a total of 2,630 entries for the final data analysis. 5. MIT Election Data + Science Lab, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, https://electionlab.mit.edu/.

A P P E N D I X C : E XT E N D E D M E T H O D S F R O M C H A P T E R   7 1. Philip Napoli, Ian Dunham, and Jessica Mahone, “Assessing News Media Infrastructure: A State-Level Analysis,” DeWitt Wallace Center for Media and Democracy, 2017, 1–36, https://dewitt.sanford.duke.edu/wp-content/uploads /2017/05/Assessing-News-Media-Infrastructure_Report-2.pdf. 2. “2017 U.S. Party Affiliation by State,” Gallup, August  25, 2019, https://news .gallup.com/poll/226643/2017-party-affiliation-state.aspx.

334 Ap p e n di x B : E x t e n d e d Me t h o d s f r o m C h ap t e r 3

Selected Bibliography

Abernathy, Penelope Muse. The Expanding News Desert. Center for Innovation and Sustainability in Local Media, School of Media and Journalism. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018. https://www.usnewsdeserts.com /reports/expanding-news-desert/download-a-pdf-of-the-report/. Ali, Christopher. Media Localism: The Policies of Place. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2017. Amadeo, Kimberly. “Average Income in the USA by Family and Household.” The Balance, September  16, 2019. https://www.thebalance.com/what-is-average -income-in-usa-family-household-history-3306189. Anand, Bharat. The Content Trap: A Strategist’s Guide to Digital Change. New York: Random House, 2016. Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. 3rd ed. London: Verso, 2006. Baker, C. Edwin. Media, Markets, and Democracy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Bell, Emily, Taylor Owen, Peter D. Brown, Codi Hauka, and Nushin Rashidian. “The Platform Press: How Silicon Valley Reengineered Journalism.” Tow  Center for Digital Journalism, May  26, 2017. https://doi .org /10.7916 / D8R216ZZ. Bellah, Robert N. “Civil Religion in America.” Daedalus 96, no. 1 (1967): 1–21. Bishop, Bill. The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America Is Tearing Us Apart. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009.

Bourdieu, Pierre. “Social Space and Symbolic Power.” Sociological Theory 8, no. 1 (Spring 1989). Callahan, David. The Givers: Wealth, Power, and Philanthropy in a New Gilded Age. New York: Vintage, 2017. Callison, Candis, and Mary Lynn Young. Reckoning: Journalism’s Limits and Possibilities. New York: Oxford University Press, 2020. Carey, Michael Clay. The News Untold: Community Journalism and the Failure to Confront Poverty in Appalachia. Morgantown: West Virginia University Press, 2017. Carlson, Matt. Journalistic Authority: Legitimating News in the Digital Era. New York: Columbia University Press, 2017. Castells, Manuel. The Rise of the Network Society. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010. Clark, Meredith D. “ASNE’s Diversity Survey Results Reflect Low Participation but Encouraging Shifts,” ASNE, November  15, 2018. https://members.newsleaders .org/diversity-survey-2018. Cohen, Nicole S. Writers’ Rights: Freelance Journalism in a Digital Age. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2016. Couldry, Nick. The Place of Media Power: Pilgrims and Witnesses of the Media Age. London: Routledge, 2002. Cowen, Tyler. Public Goods and Market Failures: A Critical Examination. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1992. Cramer, Katherine J. The Politics of Resentment: Rural Consciousness in Wisconsin and the Rise of Scott Walker. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016. Crittenden, Letrell Deshan. “The Pittsburgh Problem: Race, Media, and Everyday Life in the Steel City.” Columbia Journalism Review, October 25, 2019. https:// www.cjr.org /tow_center_reports/racism-black-burnout-in-pittsburgh-jour nal ism.php. Daniels, Matt, and Amber Thomas, “Newspapers: A Black & White Issue.” The Pudding, October 2017. https://pudding.cool/2017/10/asne/. DiAngelo, Robin. White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism. New York: Beacon, 2018. Domke, David, Mark D. Watts, Dhavan V. Shah, and David P. Fan. “The Politics of Conservative Elites and the ‘Liberal Media’ Argument.” Journal of Communication 49, no. 4 (1999): 35–58. Edgerly, Stephanie. “Red Media, Blue Media, Purple Media: News Repertoires in the Colorful Media Landscape.” Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media 59, no. 1 (2015): 1–21. Enos, Ryan D. The Space Between Us: Social Geography and Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017.

336

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Ettema, James, and Theodore Glasser. Custodians of Conscience: Investigative Journalism and Public Virtue. New York: Columbia University Press, 1998. Florida, Richard. The Rise of the Creative Class, Revisited. Rev. and exp. ed. New York: Basic Books, 2014. Franklin, Bob, and David Murphy. Local Journalism and Local Media: Making the Local News. London: Routledge, 2006. Friedland, Lewis, Philip Napoli, Katherine Ognyanova, Carola Weil, and Ernest J. Wilson III. “Review of the Literature Regarding Critical Information Needs of the American Public.” Federal Communications Commission, 2012. https:// transition.fcc.gov/bureaus/ocbo/Final_Literature_Review.pdf. Gans, Herbert  J. Deciding What’s News: A Study of “CBS Evening News,” “NBC Nightly News,” “Newsweek,” and “Time.” Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2004. Geradin, Damien, and Dimitrios Katsifis. “An EU Competition Law Analysis of Online Display Advertising in the Programmatic Age.” European Competition Journal 15, no. 1 (2019): 55–96. Gieryn, Thomas F. “A Space for Place in Sociology.” Annual Review of Sociology 26, no. 1 (2000): 463–96. doi:10.1146/annurev.soc.26.1.463. Gimpel, James Graydon, and Jason E. Schuknecht. Patchwork Nation: Sectionalism and Political Change in American Politics. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2009. Gutsche Jr., Robert E. “News Place-Making: Applying ‘Mental Mapping’ to Explore the Journalistic Interpretive Community.” Visual Communication 13, no.  4 (2014): 487–510. doi:10.1177/1470357214541754. Guzmán, Isabel Molina. “Competing Discourses of Community: Ideological Tensions Between Local General-Market and Latino News Media.” Journalism 7, no. 3 (August 2006): 281–98. Habermas, Jürgen. “The Public Sphere: An Encyclopedia Article.” In The Idea of the Public Sphere: A Reader, ed. Jostein Gripsrud, Hallvard Moe, Anders Molander, and Graham Murdock, 114–120. Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2010. Hallin, Daniel  C. “Cartography, Community, and the Cold War.” In Reading the News: A Pantheon Guide to Popular Culture, ed. Michael Schudson and Robert K. Manoff. New York: Pantheon, 1986. Hamilton, James T. Democracy’s Detectives: The Economics of Investigative Journalism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016. Harvey, David. “From Space to Place and Back Again: Reflections on the Condition of Postmodernity.” In Mapping the Futures: Local Cultures, Global Change, ed. Jon Bird, Barry Curtis, Tim Putnam, and Lisa Tickner, 17–44. New York: Routledge, 2012.

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337

Hemmer, Nicole. Messengers of the Right: Conservative Media and the Transformation of American Politics. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016. Hess, Kristy, and Lisa Waller. “River Flows and Profit Flows: The Powerful Logic Driving Local News.” Journalism Studies 17, no. 3 (2016): 263–76. Hess, Stephen. The Washington Reporters. Vol.  1. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2010. Hindman, Matthew. The Internet Trap: How the Digital Economy Builds Monopolies and Undermines Democracy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018. Hochschild, Arlie Russell. Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right. New York: The New Press, 2018. Hopkins, Daniel J. The Increasingly United States: How and Why American Political Behavior Nationalized. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018. Jacobs, Jane. The Death and Life of Great American Cities. New York: Vintage, 2016. Jones, Sarah. “Scapegoat Country.” Dissent, 2019. https://www.dissentmagazine .org/article/scapegoat-country. Kaniss, Phyllis. Making Local News. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991. Klinenberg, Eric. Palaces for the People: How Social Infrastructure Can Help Fight Inequality, Polarization, and the Decline of Civic Life. New York: Broadway Books, 2018. Konieczna, Magda. Journalism Without Profit: Making News When the Market Fails. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. Kumanyika, Chenjerai. “Challenging the Whiteness of Public Radio.” NPR, January  29, 2015. https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2015/01/29/382437460 /challenging-the-whiteness-of-public-radio. Layser, Michelle D. “The Pro-Gentrification Origins of Place-Based Investment Tax Incentives and a Path Toward Community Oriented Reform.” Wisconsin Law Review 745 (2019). Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space. Trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith. Oxford: Blackwell, 1991. Lievrouw, Leah A., and Sharon E. Farb. “Information and Equity.” Annual Review of Information Science and Technology 37, no. 1 (2005): 499–540. Loge, Peter. Political Communication Ethics: Theory and Practice. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2020. Martin, Christopher R. No Longer Newsworthy: How the Mainstream Media Abandoned the Working Class. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2019. Mason, Lilliana. Uncivil Agreement: How Politics Became Our Identity. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018. Massey, Doreen. For Space. New York: Sage, 2005.

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Massing, Michael. “How Not to Cover America.” American Prospect, April  10, 2018. https://prospect.org/infrastructure/cover-america/. McChesney, Robert W. The Political Economy of Media: Enduring Issues, Emerging Dilemmas. New York: New York University Press, 2008. Merton, Robert  K. “Local and Cosmopolitan Influentials.” In Perspectives on the American Community, ed. Ronald L. Warren. Chicago: Rand McNally, 1966. Morley, David, and Kevin Robins. Spaces of Identity: Global Media, Electronic Landscapes, and Cultural Boundaries. London: Routledge, 2002. Nord, David P. “The Victorian City and the Urban Newspaper.” In Making News: The Political Economy of Journalism in Britain and America from the Glorious Revolution to the Internet, ed. Richard R. John and Jonathan Silberstein-Loeb, 73–106. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. Papacharissi, Zizi. “Toward New Journalism(s): Affective News Hybridity, and Liminal Space.” Journalism Studies 16, vol. 1 (2015): 27–40. Peterson, Erik. “Not Dead Yet: Political Learning from Newspapers in a Changing Media Landscape.” Political Behavior (2019): 1–23. doi:10.1007/s11109-019 -09556-7. Pickard, Victor. Democracy Without Journalism? Confronting the Misinformation Society. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019. Pompeo, Joe. “ ‘Journalism Is Not About Creating Safe Spaces’: Inside the Woke Civil War at the New York Times.” The Hive, April 3, 2018. https://www.vanityfair .com/news/2018/04/a-woke-civil-war-is-simmering-at-the-new-york-times. Prior, Markus. Post-Broadcast Democracy: How Media Choice Increases Inequality in Political Involvement and Polarizes Elections. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Relph, Edward C. Place and Placelessness. London: Pion, 1976. Richardson, Allissa  V. Bearing Witness While Black: African Americans, Smartphones, and the New Protest #Journalism. New York: Oxford University Press, 2020. Robinson, Sue. Networked News, Racial Divides: How Power and Privilege Shape Public Discourse in Progressive Communities. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017. Sassen, Saskia. Deciphering the Global: Its Scales, Spaces, and Subjects. New York: Routledge, 2013. Schiller, Dan. Digital Capitalism: Networking the Global Market System. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999. Schudson, Michael. Journalism: Why It Matters. Cambridge: Polity, 2018. Shafer, Jack, and Tucker Doherty. “The Media Bubble Is Worse Than You Think.” Politico, May/June  2017. https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/04/25 /media-bubble-real-journalism-jobs-east-coast-215048.

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Shaker, Lee. “Dead Newspapers and Citizens’ Civic Engagement.” Political Communication 31, no. 1 (2014): 131–48. doi:10.1080/10584609.2012.762817. Sharkey, Patrick. Stuck in Place: Urban Neighborhoods and the End of Progress Toward Racial Equality. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013. Squires, Catherine R. “Black Talk Radio: Defining Community Needs and Identity.” Harvard International Journal of Press/Politics 5, no. 2 (2000): 73–95. Stamm, Michael. Dead Tree Media: Manufacturing the Newspaper in TwentiethCentury North America. Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press, 2018. Thorson, Kjerstin, Yu Xu, and Stephanie Edgerly. “Political Inequalities Start at Home: Parents, Children, and the Socialization of Infrastructure Online.” Political Communications 35, no. 2 (2018): 178–95. Tuan, Yi-Fu. Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001. Tuchman, Gaye. Making News: A Study in the Construction of Reality. New York: Free Press, 1978. Tworek, Heidi J. S. News from Germany: The Competition to Control World Communications, 1900–1945. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2019. Usher, Nikki. Making News at the “New York Times.” Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2014. Vega, Tanzina. “How Newsrooms Can Stop Being So White,” CNN Money, December  19, 2016. https://money.cnn.com/2016/12/19/media/newsroom-diversity /index.html. Volkmer, Ingrid. News in the Global Sphere: A Study of CNN and Its Impact on Global Communication. Bedfordshire: University of Luton Press, 1999. Wallace, Aurora. Newspapers and the Making of Modern America: A History. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2005. “What We Believe.” Black Lives Matter. https://blacklivesmatter.com/what-we -believe/. Wilkin, Holley  A., Vikki  S. Katz, Sandra  J. Ball-Rokeach, and Heather  J. Hether. “Communication Resources for Obesity Prevention Among African American and Latino Residents in an Urban Neighborhood.” Journal of Health Communication 20, no. 6 (2015): 710–19. https://doi.org/10.1080/10810730.2015.1018559. Wong, Cara. Boundaries of Obligation in American Politics: Geographic, National, and Racial Communities. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Zelizer, Barbie. “On ‘Having Been There’: ‘Eyewitnessing’ as a Journalistic Key Word.” Critical Studies in Media Communication 24, no. 5 (2007): 408–28.

340 S ele cte d Bibliog raphy

Index

ABC News, 260 accountability journalism, 14, 239, 248 ACP. See American Communities Project AdMonsters, 141 adversarial journalism, 22 advertising: brand advertisers, 135, 139; digital advertising, 71, 310n30; e-classifieds, 311n35; on Facebook, 133, 137; on Google, 133–34, 137; in newspapers, 134; programmatic advertising, 141–45; television commercials, 135 African American South community type, 78; dyad distribution of funder-recipient, 220; as news desert, 86; newspaper employment in, 85; partisanship in, 93 aging farmlands community type, 80; newspaper employment in, 85; partisanship in, 93 A. H. Belo corporation, 157 Albuquerque Journal, 108, 112 Alden Global Capital, 151

Ali, Christopher, 20 All the President’s Men (film), 2 Amazon, 1, 52, 133, 141 American Communities Project (ACP): community types defined in, 78–80; role of, 77 American democratic project, 23 American experiment, 256 American Journalism Project, 199 American Press Institute, 158 American Society of Newspaper Editors (ASNE), 57, 231 American Way of Life, 14 Amico, Chris, 64 Amico, Laura, 64 Anand, Bharat, 136 Anchorage Daily News, 112 Annenberg Foundation, 326n29 Annenberg School of Communication, 326n29 antitrust regulation, 257 Appalachian news, 28. See also 100 Days in Appalachia Apple News, 147, 189–90

Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, 310n23 Asian American Journalists Association, 50 ASNE. See American Society of Newspaper Editors Associated Style Press Stylebook, 56 asymmetric polarization, 87–90 Atlanta Journal Constitution, 81 Atlantic, 44 audiences: Goldilocks newspapers appealing to, 192; Goldilocks newspapers chasing, 246; journalists distanced from, 68; local, 139–41 Australia, 185–88 authenticity, 237; in inquiry, 243; in place and future of journalism, 249–51; tarnishing of, 229 authoritarianism, 253 Backlund, Harry, 200 Bagamery, Anne, 173 Baker, C. Edwin, 239–40 Ball-Rokeach, Sandra, 255 Baquet, Dean, 5, 96 Barboza, David, 182 Barksdale, Jim, 225 Baron, Marty, 2, 96–97 Bartlett, Donald L., 23 BBC, 165, 189 Beam, Kerry, 150 Bellah, Robert N., 14 Beltway bubble, 104–7, 121 Bennett, James Gordon, Jr., 169 Bennett, James Gordon, Sr., 20 Benson, Rodney, 197, 202 Benton, Joshua, 155 Bezos, Jeff: at new headquarters, 3; Washington Post rescued by, 1–2, 4 big cities community type: diversity in, 80; dyad distribution of

342 In d e x

funder-recipient, 220; Goldilocks newspapers in, 81; journalists in, 80–84; newspaper employment in, 85; partisanship in, 93 big sort in journalism, 5, 6; journalists in big cities question, 80–84; loss of local journalism question, 84–87; mapping retrenchment in, 75–80; newspaper employment, 82, 83, 85, 88; newspaper employment and partisanship question, 87–94, 93; in news philanthropy, 203–5; overview, 66–68; retrenchment in, 69–75; symbolic declines in, 69–75; Trump Safari journalism and, 94–100 big tech, x, 139, 145, 193, 257 bios politiken, 165 Black Entertainment Television, 3 Black Lives Matter (BLM), 55, 62, 95, 223, 317n118 Black people: Black reporters, 57, 60; Chicago Tribune journalists, 63; coverage for, 61; Omaha WorldHerald journalists, 62–63; voice, in newspapers, 60, 63 Blethen, Alden, 21 Blethen family, 151–52 BLM. See Black Lives Matter blue: in big cities, 76; election outcomes, 7; funding for, 205; future of news for, 237; Goldilocks newspapers and digital revenue, 158–61; journalists in blue bubbles, 68; labeling of, 268; news for and by, 64–65; public, 235; quality journalism and, 257; red/blue divide, 160. See also red booster journalism, 20–22, 245 Boston Globe, x; on busing, 27; digital subscriptions, 152–53; focus on

inequality issues, 247–48; interns, 155; place and, 154–57; relocation to downtown, 71; two-site digital strategy of, 155; user experience in, 156 Bourdieu, Pierre, 45 boutique journalism, 20 Bradlee, Ben, 1, 2 Bradsher, Keith, 176–77 brand advertisers, 135, 139 breaking-news reporters, 71 Breitbart, 226–27 Broad, Eli, 152 Brown, Tom, 156 Bryant, Heather, 46–47 Buffalo News, 110 Buffett, Warren, 153, 320n30 Bui, P. Kim, 249–50 Bunch, Will, 17 bundled news, 244–49 Bureau of Labor Statistics Quarterly Census of Employment and Wage, 77, 265–66 Burr, Thomas, 107–8, 114 busing, Boston Globe on, 27 BuzzFeed, 12, 168, 266 cable news, 9, 203, 251 Callison, Candis, 39, 61, 262 Cambridge Analytica, 144 Capitol Building, Washington, DC, 103; access to, 105; congressional reporters, 101–2; conversations in, 108; Dumain in, 124; national reporters, 109, 122–23 Carey, James W., 330n14 Carey, Michael Clay, 28 Carnahan, Scott, 234 Carter, Amos G., 22 Castells, Manuel, 36

Castro, Fidel, 130–31, 139 Cave, Damien, 186–88 Chandler family, 22, 314n79 Chartbeat, 135 Chavira, Paulina, 184 Cheers, Imani, 262 Chicago Evening Post, 142 Chicago Tribune, x, 12, 81; Black journalists at, 63; building for, 69; on Civil Rights Act of 1964, 27; interns, 50; move to Prudential Building, 42; Page One meetings, 61, 63, 147; platform press, 148; proto-investigative journalism by, 20–21; theater and, 144; Tribune Tower, 41–42 Chinese corruption story, 182–83 Christian Science Monitor, 145 Chyi, Iris, 51 Cincinnati Inquirer, 25 Cincinnati Post, 25 Cision database, 272 Citrus County Chronicle, 234 City Bureau, 200, 248 civic engagement, 17, 24–26, 87, 157 civic institutions, 151, 246, 256 civic knowledge, 246 civic life, xi, 6, 19, 253, 255, 258 civic memory, 77, 246, 248 Civil Religion, 14, 239 Civil Rights Act of 1964, 27 Clark, Meredith, 262 Clinton, Hillary, 5, 95, 157 CNN, 103, 104, 165 CNN Money, 60 coastal elitism, 114–19 Coester, Dana, 226–30 Coleman, Michael, 108, 112–13 collective memory, 18, 248

In de x

343

college towns community type, 79; dyad distribution of funderrecipient, 220; newspaper employment in, 85; partisanship in, 93 College World Series, 15–16 Collins, Chris, 110–11 Collins, Susan, 111–12 Columbia Journalism Review, 50, 106, 232, 259, 261 Columbus Dispatch, 109, 112 commodity news, 32 communication action, 255 community building, 256 complex democracy, 239–40, 252 Condé Nast, 49 Congressional Directory, 117 Congressional Quarterly, 121 congressional reporters, 101–2 consensus, 5, 14, 65, 239 conservative media, 4, 9, 43, 227 Consolidation Games, 150 conspiracy theories, 231 Consumer Reports, 187 content trap, 136–37 correspondents. See reporters; Washington, DC correspondents corruption, 27, 273 Costello, Mike, 227 cost per mille (CPM), 136–37, 139, 143 Cotton, Tom, 56 COVID-19, 54, 133; case count reporting, 246; consequences of, ix; digital advertising and, 71; Goldilocks newspapers and, 143; migration patterns and, 94; newspapers and, 30–31; paywalls during, 30; quality journalism and, 257; reporting on, 260; spread of, 259; suppressing health information on, 331n24; television news and, 33; testing sites, 256

344 In d e x

CPM. See cost per mille Craigslist, 141, 147 Cramer, Katherine, 44 creativity, 256 Crittenden, Letrell Deshan, 59 CSPAN, 96, 104 Cuba plan, 130 cultural proximity, 77, 219; community types sharing, 267; defined, 43; geography as proxy for, 220; inequity in, 51; news and, 64; place and, 43–46 custodian of conscience, 204, 242 Custodians of Conscience (Ettema and Glasser), 242 Daily Caller, 259 Daily podcast, 165, 179 Daily Yonder, 259 Dallas Morning News, x, 316n105; digital revenue and, 157–60; paywall of, 137, 310n23; race coverage in, 62 Daniels, Matt, 57–58 Dash, Leon, 57 data privacy, 257 datasets: for community type research, 267; for newspaper employment research, 265–66; for partisanship research, 267 Daugherty, Alex, 109, 118 Dayton Daily News, 109, 112 “Death of the Working Class, The” (Ward), 47 DeBartolo, Eddie, Jr., 153 DeJarnette, Ben, 74 democracy, 4, 27, 204; complex democracy, 239–40, 252; consideration of, 238–39; Democracy Fund, 196, 200–202, 232, 326n29; elite, 13–14, 240; journalism and, 7,

24–25, 30; news and, 12–14; participatory democracy, 239; place for wanted, 239–41 Democracy Dies in Darkness (Washington Post slogan), 4 Democracy’s Detectives (Hamilton), 27, 204 democratic liberalism, myth of, 19 Democrats: investigative journalism and, 216–18; journalists distrusted by, 88; labeling of, 268; news deserts and, 77; newspaper employment and, 90; news quality and, 282n16; paying to access news, 89 Deto, Ryan, 95–96 Detroit Free Press, 61, 155; delivery cut, 73–74 Detroit News, 74 Diaz, Kevin, 109, 113 digital advertising, 71, 310n30 DigitalContentNext, 134 digital-first media, 161, 198–99, 222, 241–42; BuzzFeed as, 12, 168, 266; Daily Caller as, 259; local news, 99; news production, 71, 172; 24/7 agenda, 173, 175–80. See also New York Times, global news and digital news, 35, 39, 51–54, 96; evolution of, 145; New York Times and, 164. See also online news digital subscriptions: Boston Globe, 152–53; growth in, 238; to New York Times global news, 181 digital surveillance, 256 disconnected journalism, ix; in newsrooms, 237; with Washington, DC correspondents, 114, 238 discoverability, 188, 189, 193 diversity, 9, 43, 237; in big cities community type, 80; deficit, in

newsroom, 56–60; news philanthropy for bolstering, 200; newsroom, 11, 50, 56–59, 159; in place and future of journalism, 249–51; in quality journalism, 238 Dixon, Travis, 262 Doctor, Ken, 150, 168 Douglas, Anna: hometown insights of, 125–26; outsider status of, 123; start for, 122; suspicions of, 124–25; on transgender bathroom bill, 126–27; on Trump, 125; as Washington, DC correspondent, 119–27 Downs, Anthony, 33 Dremeaux, Lillie, 176, 178–79 Drudge, Matt, 140 Dumain, Emma, 109; background of, 120; Beltway bubble and, 121; in Capitol Building, 124; credibility through family, 123–24; as Washington, DC correspondent, 119–27 Dunaway, Gavin, 141 Dunbar-Johnson, Stephen, 164–65, 174, 182, 184–85 e-classifieds, 311n35 economic opportunity, 254 Economic Theory of Democracy, An (Downs), 33 Economist, 166 electoral college, 272 elite democracy, 13–14, 240 elitism, x; coastal elitism, 114–19; elite reporters, 116, 118; news philanthropy and, 218–22; white elites, 119 Ember, Sydney, 97 Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, 57 equity, 200, 202, 232, 250, 258 Erie Times-News, 153

In de x

345

Ethics and Excellence in Journalism Foundation, 196, 221 Ettema, James, 242 Eurozone crisis, 180 evangelical hubs community type, 78; newspaper employment in, 85; partisanship in, 93 exurbs community type, 78; dyad distribution of funder-recipient, 220; newspaper employment in, 85; partisanship in, 90, 92; Republicans and, 94 Facebook, 9, 26, 104, 132, 147; advertising on, 133, 137; bulletin boards, 256; complaints on, 150; funding by, 324n3; marketing dominance, 168; news philanthropy and, 232; New York Times and, 190; programmatic advertising and, 141–45; support from, 194 Fair, Meg, 50 fake news, 4, 99, 232, 234; partisan news media and, 253, 277–79 Fallows, James, 44 federal spending, 250, 287n39 Fein, Seth, 288n49 Ferrier, Michelle, 262 Ferruci, Patrick, 199 first-level surveillance, 110–14 Flake, Jeff, 118 Floyd, George, 55 flyover country, 68 food pantries, 256 Foreign Correspondents’ Club, 172 Fort Worth Star-Telegram, 22, 140; on Van Cliburn International Piano Competition, 145–46 Fox News, 99, 109

346 Ind e x

Freedman, Dan, 110, 113; career of, 115–16 Freedom Forum, 326n29 Freelon, Deen, 262 Friedland, Lewis, 18, 38 Gannett corporation, 16, 107, 118 Gans, Herbert, 53 Gauthier, Robert, 98 Gaylord family, 221 GDPR, 190–91 geography: geographically specific markets, 148–49; geographic asymmetry, 14; geographic space, 45; news provision by geography, 209; of poverty, 53; proxy for cultural proximity, 220; social geography of knowledge production, 318n12 geospatial inequities, 5, 193; in news philanthropy, 203 gerrymandering, 7 Gessler, Kurt, 144, 147, 313n60 gestalt scholarship, 261 Gilbert, Craig, 127–28 Gillibrand, Kirsten, 110 Gimlet Media, 317n1 Gingras, Richard, 146 Glasser, Theodore, 242 global news. See New York Times, global news and Goffman, Erving, 114 Goldilocks newspapers, 11–13; adversarial journalism of, 22; audience appeal of, 192; audience chasing by, 246; in big cities community type, 81; boutique journalism of, 20; COVID-19 and, 143; decimated staff of, 31; dominion over place, 128; false nostalgia in, 74–75; focus of,

247; market failure of, 129; national attention drawn by, 131; subscriptions to, 55; survival of, 236; tracking moves of, 69; value to area covered, 30; Washington, DC correspondents for, 102. See also local news Goldilocks newspapers, digital revenue and: Boston Globe and role of place, 154–57; brand advertisers and, 135; Dallas Morning News and, 157– 60; geographically specific markets in, 148–49; local ad dollars in, 133–35; local audiences and, 139–41; overview, 130–33; place and, 149–54; platforms controlling scale, 145–48; programmatic ads and, 141–45; rich, white, blue and, 158– 61; supply and demand misunderstood in, 135–39 Goldwater, Barry, 4 Google, 132; advertising on, 133–34, 137; funding by, 324n3; Google News, 145–47, 312n53; hate speech and, 226–27; in-country domains of, 189; marketing dominance, 168; programmatic advertising and, 141–45; search algorithm of, 146–47; support from, 194 Graham, Lindsey, 109 grant funding, 209–11, 211, 213, 216–18, 272 graying America community type, 78; dyad distribution of funderrecipient, 220; as news desert, 86; newspaper employment in, 85; partisanship in, 93 Great Chicago Fire of 1871, 20 Great Depression, 116

Great Recession, 168, 194 Greeley, Horace, 22 Green, T. L., 254 Greenslade, Roy, 174 Grossman-Cohen, Rebecca, 189–90 Guardian, 160, 163; growth strategy of, 166 Guardian Australia, 186 Habermas, Jürgen, 240 Hagan, Tom, 153 Haile, Tony, 135 Hallin, Daniel C., 8 Hamilton, James T., 27, 32, 204 Hanks, Tom, 2 Hannity, Sean, 259 Hannity Radio, 99 Hanson, John H., 200 Harding, Warren G., 21 Harvard Crimson, 49, 250 Harvey, David, 10 Harvey/Lefebvre matrix, 37 Hatch, Orrin, 107 hate speech, 226–27 Hayes, Danny, 26 Hearst, William Randolph, 21, 53 Hearst Company, 314n74 Hennessy-Fiske, Molly, 98 Henry, John, 156 Henry, Linda, 156 Hess, Stephen, 116 Hispanic centers community type, 79, 96; newspaper employment in, 85; partisanship in, 93 Holt, Lanier, 262 Homicide Watch, 64 homophobia, x Honolulu Civil Beat, 221 Hopkins, Daniel J., 38 Houston Chronicle, 103, 109, 113

In de x

347

“How the First U.S. City with No Daily Newspaper Will Help Trump” (Bunch), 17 HuffPost, 97, 162, 317n1 Hulu, 52, 165 Hunke, David, 74 identity-based media, 252 IHT. See International Herald-Tribune inclusion, 200, 202, 258 inclusivity, 54, 65, 226, 232, 237 Increasingly United States, The (Hopkins), 38 inequality, x; in cultural proximity, 51; local news perpetuating, 24–30; in online news, 33–34; place and, 37; social media and, 34. See also geospatial inequities information asymmetry, 13 information cost, 33 informed citizen myth, 20 informed electorate, 14 Ingersoll, Geoff, 259 Ingram, Mathew, 232 Ingrassia, Larry, 166, 182 Innate Immunotherapeutics, 110–11 Insideclimate News, 199 insider trading, 110–11 Instagram, 142 intergroup differences, 43 International Herald-Tribune (IHT): beginnings of, 169–70; brand of, 175–76; changed to International New York Times, 174; closing of, 171–75; coverage of, 173; New York Times investment in, 170 International New York Times, 174 International Symposium on Online Journalism, 223, 262

348 In d e x

internet, 33, 38, 54; access to, 74; bundled news and, 245; entertainment and social connections through, 135; governance, 190–91, 193; user behavior, 138. See also social media internships: at Boston Globe, 155; at Chicago Tribune, 50; in journalism, 48–50; at Los Angeles Times, 50; at New York Times, 50; at NPR, 50; at Politico, 50; unpaid internship racket, 250; at Wall Street Journal, 50; at Washington Post, 50 investigative journalism, 17, 21; as custodian of conscience, 204; Democrats and, 216–18; economics of, 27; grant funding, 211; Midwest Center for Investigative Reporting, 221; in Mississippi, 328n68; muckraking as, 243; nonprofit funding and, 201; partisanship and, 204–5; partisanship in funding, 216–18; patterns for funding and, 205; Republicans and, 217–18; Wisconsin Center for Investigative Reporting, 221 “I Wanted to Understand Iowa. So I Moved There” (Ember), 97 Jackson, David, 151 Jennings, Jay T., 25 Johnson, Alexis, 56 Johnson Publishing, 297n82 Jones, Chris, 144 Jones, Jerry, 317n118 journalism: accountability journalism, 14, 239, 248; adversarial journalism, 22; booster journalism, 20–22, 245; boutique journalism, 20; core functions of, 237; on decline, x;

democracy and, 7, 24–25, 30; employment, 47–48; grant provision and funding for, 213, 214, 215, 215–16; internships in, 48–50; market logics for, 55; news philanthropy process in, 196–200; pack journalism, 102, 108; palace-court journalism, 239; parachute journalism, 46, 97; place shaping, 6–7, 10, 13; power of, 8; public good and, 30–35; public-interest journalism, 21, 25; in red communities, 76, 91; for and by rich and white, 43; role of, 5; schools and universities, 48–50; solutions journalism, 244; students, 250–51, 293n24; trust in, 4; urban journalism, 20; watchdog function of, 26; watchdog journalism, 203–4; working class and, 54; yellow journalism, 20. See also big sort in journalism; disconnected journalism; investigative journalism; place, future of journalism and; quality journalism Journalism & Communication Monographs, xi journalists: Asian American Journalists Association, 50; in big cities community type, 80–84; communicators of culture, 7–8; coverage of, 53; Democrats and Republicans distrusting, 88; distance from audience, 68; educational background of, 117; income of, 48, 50–51; influence of, 8–9; pay for, 48; with post-newspaper consciousness, 248; Trump and endangered journalists, 281n6. See also reporters; Washington, DC correspondents

Kamin, Blair, 42 Kaniss, Phyllis, 53 Kavanaugh, Brett, 111–12 Kennedy, Dan, 154, 156 Kerner Commission, 56–57 Kerry, John F., 3 Kiesow, Damon, 147 Kilgo, Danielle, 262 Kim, Sanghoon, 76, 203 Kim, Theodore, 49 King, Rodney, 255 Kinsley, Michael, 281n3 Kint, Jason, 134, 140 Klinenberg, Eric, 254–55 Klobuchar, Amy, 108 Knight, James L., 70 Knight, John S., 70 Knight Foundation, 194, 196, 198, 221, 228, 231; endowment origination, 324n3 Koch Foundation, 231 Konieczna, Magda, 198 Kruse, Michael, 95 Lacey, Marc, 97 Lack, Andrew, 224–25 Lawless, Jennifer, 26 Layser, Michelle, 198 LDS enclaves community type, 79; dyad distribution of funderrecipient, 220; newspaper employment in, 85; partisanship in, 93 Lee, Alfred McClung, 20 Lefebvre, Henri, 10, 37 Lenfest, Gerry, 161 Lenfest Institute for Journalism, 160–61 Levy, Clifford, 192 LGBTQ community, x, 227 liberal media bias, 230

In de x

349

Limbaugh, Rush, 99 local news: core premises for, 17–18; cutbacks in, 76; death of, 237; digital-first media, 99; diversity problems and, 58; health of, 206; hyperpartisan, 252; invention of, 20; lack of, 66–67; market failure in, 67; nostalgic view of, 237; overview, 15–19; perpetuating inequities and status quo, 24–30; place as proxy for power in, 35–40; private good and, 30–35; as recent invention, 19–24; reporters for, 249; Republicans and, 88–89; romanticizing of, 19–20 Loge, Peter, 333n45 Los Angeles Times, x, 12, 22, 81, 314n79; anti-Latino hysteria and, 56; on Border Patrol, 98; interns, 50; Metpro program, 58–59; relocation of, 72–73; sale of, 152–53; subscriptions to, 52; swarm of, 73 Madison, Ed, 74 Making Local News (Kaniss), 53 Marema, Tim, 259 marginalized communities, 7, 27, 29, 63, 65, 238–40, 249 market failure, 218, 241; defined, 31; of Goldilocks newspapers, 129; impact of, 74; in local news, 67; mitigating effects of, 257; in news, 11; of newspapers, 13, 30–31, 33–35, 43, 162, 170, 238; news philanthropy as solution, 194; place and, 154, 195; quality journalism and, 40 Marqués Gonzalez, Aminda, 131 Martinson, Erica, 112 Marx, Gary, 151 Mason, Lilliana, 38 Massey, Doreen, 10, 318n12

350 In d e x

mass media, 45 Maynard, Robert C., 62 McClatchy company, 70, 109, 122; bankruptcy, 71, 150, 310n32; newsrooms of, 150 McCormick, Robert R., 41 McGrory, Brian, 247 McKinsey consulting firm, 162–63, 168 Media Impact Funders, 194, 201, 271 Media Insight Project, 282n16 Medill, Joseph, 20–21 Membership Puzzle Project, 160 memberships, 6, 52 Merton, Robert, 45 Metpro. See Minority Editorial Training Program Miami Heat basketball team, 15–16, 140 Miami Herald, 12, 109, 118; on Castro, 130–31, 139; Cuba plan of, 130; Miami Heat basketball team reporting, 15–16; new offices of, 15, 71; power of old headquarters, 70; reporters, 131; sports-only subscriptions, 310n32; as understaffed, 31. See also McClatchy company middle suburbs community type, 80; dyad distribution of funderrecipient, 220; newspaper employment in, 85; partisanship in, 93 Midwest Center for Investigative Reporting, 221 military posts community type, 78; dyad distribution of funderrecipient, 220; as news desert, 86; newspaper employment in, 85; partisanship in, 93 Miller, George, L., 21 Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, 127–28 Minority Editorial Training Program (Metpro), 58–59

Mississippi Center for Investigative Journalism, 328n68 Mississippi Today: coverage areas for, 223–24, 226; fundraising for, 225; networks and connections of, 227; news philanthropy case study, 222–30; origins of, 224–25; truths revealed by, 232 Mondak, Jeffery, 29 morally engaged voice, 242 Mormons, 79, 160, 220. See also LDS enclaves community type Mourão, Rachel, 262 Moynihan, Daniel Patrick, 116 muckraking, 243 Mullany, Gerry, 164, 176, 178, 187–88 Murdoch, Rupert, 186 Murkowski, Lisa, 111–12 Murphy, Kim, 98 Napoli, Philip, 206 National Association of Black Journalists, 225 national identity, 14 national journalism, x–xi National Press Club, 103, 114 national reporters, 109, 122–23 National Review, 252 Native American genocide, 21 Native American lands community type, 79; as news desert, 86; newspaper employment in, 85; partisanship in, 93 nativism, 27 Nave, Ryan L., 223–26 NBC News, 97, 260 need for news: areas of, 206; measurement of, 207–8, 207–8; news philanthropy and, 205–8. See also news deficits

Nelson, Jacob L., 199 Nesbit, Matthew, 200–201 Netflix, 52, 165 news: Appalachian news, 28; for and by blue liberals, 64– 65; cable news, 9, 203, 251; changing where of, 18; commodity news, 32; cultural proximity and, 64; democracy and, 12–14; digital-first media production, 71, 172; industry of, x, ix; market failure in, 11; news media, 4; news organizations, 6, 11; online news, 28–29; paying for, 52; place and future of, 8–14; place as setting, 37; by rich, 46–51; for rich, 51–52; social media as distribution portal, 33, 146; from Twitter, 146; unbundling, for future of journalism, 244–49; by white, 55– 61; for white, 51–52, 61– 64. See also digital news; local news; television news News and Observer, Raleigh, North Carolina, 119, 122 News Corp, 165, 186 Newsday, 22 news deficits, 327n47; grant provisions and, 213; news philanthropy and, 203–8; state-level, 196 news deserts, 4, 19, 26, 254; as civic problem, 24; Democrats and, 77; fear of, 232; historical, 85–86; New York City and, 192; Republicans and, 67, 77; rise of, 34; U.S. News Deserts project, 54, 266; West Virginia and, 228–29 Newseum, 326n29 News Measures Research Project, 26, 28–29, 206–8, 266, 271–72, 302n36

In de x

351

newspaper employment, 327n47; in African American South community type, 85; in aging farmlands community type, 85; in big cities community type, 85; in big sort in journalism, 82, 83, 87–94, 93; in college towns community type, 85; Democrats and, 90; employment concentrations, 83; employment decline, 4; employment in 2007, 88; employment in big cities, 76; employment levels, 85; in evangelical hubs community type, 85; expanded analysis of, 269; in exurbs community type, 85; in graying America community type, 85; in Hispanic centers community type, 85; increases and decreases, 82; in LDS enclaves community type, 85; in middle suburbs community type, 85; in military posts community type, 85; in Native American lands community type, 85; partisanship and, 87–94, 93; Republicans and, 90, 91, 92, 327n53; research methods for datasets, 265–66; in rural middle America community type, 85; in urban suburbs community type, 85; variables for, 267–68; in workingclass country community type, 85 newspapers: absence of print, 33–34; ads in, 134; benefactors for, 151–53; buildings as power source, 69–70; circulation of, 73; for collective memory, 18; as content generators, 28–29; COVID-19 and, 30–31; death of, 238; decline of, 9; delivery of, 73; as expensive, 51–52; market failure of, 13, 30–31, 33–35, 43, 162, 170, 238; trial by newspaper, 20; voice of Black

352

In d e x

people in, 60, 63. See also Goldilocks newspapers; journalism; newsrooms; paywalls; post-newspaper consciousness; specific newspapers news philanthropy: big sort in, 203–5; for bolstering diversity, 200; elitism and, 218–22; Facebook and, 232; flow of funds in, 208–13; geospatial inequities in, 203; grant provision and funding for journalism, 213, 214, 215, 215–16; investigative journalism grant funding, 211; lessons for place-based, 230–33; as market failure solution, 194; Mississippi Today case study, 222–30; need for news and, 205–8; news deficits and, 203–8; news provision by geography, 209; nonprofit philanthropy, 13, 197, 200–203; 100 Days in Appalachia case study, 222–30; overview, 194–96; pack philanthropy, 202–3, 218–22; partisanship in, 195–96, 216–18; place-based inequities in, 195; process of in journalism, 196–200; Republicans and, 231; research methods for, 271–79; trickle-down, 199 news provision by geography, 209 news resilience, 206, 237, 248; focus on, 241; identification of markers, 253; in place and future of journalism, 253–58; strengths and capacities for, 256 newsrooms: digital, 54; disconnection in, 237; diversity in, 11, 50, 56–59, 159; of McClatchy company, 150; moving of, ix, 69, 71; of New York Times, 169–73, 175, 177; nonprofit, 103; power in, 10, 43, 60; racism in, 55–59, 62; resources of, 203;

solutions journalism and, 244; whiteness in, 60, 119 New Yorker, 49 New York Times (NYT), 12, 13, 103; building for, 69; city coverage of, 192; commitment and promises of, 242; digital news and, 164; dissent at, 56; Diversity and Inclusion report, 59–60; Facebook and, 190; interns, 50; newsrooms of, 169–73, 175, 177; nonprofit funding and, 201; paywall of, 137, 167–68; in Person campaign, 97; platform press, 148; readers of, 54; research and interviews on, 262–63; 1619 Project, 243–44; subscriptions to, 52; as survivor, 238; traffic numbers for, 2; on Trump election, 5; Trump supporters and, 234–35; on Trump taxes, 219; Twitter and, 190; Washington, DC correspondents, 104 New York Times, global news and: arrogance in, 166; Australia expansion, 185–88; Chinese corruption story, 182–83; closing of IHT, 171–75; discoverability in, 188, 189, 193; exceptionalism in, 162, 166–71, 191–93; first 24/7 digital global operation, 175–80; Hong Kong office, 172; International New York Times and, 174; investment in IHT, 170; London office, 178–80; NYT en Español, 183–84; overview, 162–64; Paris office, 173–74; place in, 162–63; placelessness in, 164–66; platform and regulatory challenges in, 188–91; reporters for, 176–77; subscription growth, 181; translations and country-specific efforts, 182–85; worldwide marketing, 180–82

New York Today, 178 Next Door platform, 256 NFL protest, 95 Nielsen, Rasmus Kleis, 12, 29 Nieman Lab, 155, 161 nonprofit philanthropy, 13, 197, 200–203 NPR, 104, 197; interns, 50 NYT. See New York Times NYT en Español, 183–84 Oakland Tribune, 62 Obama, Barack, 3, 242; as Antichrist, 95; election of, 77 Ochs, Adolph, 166 Oklahoman, 221 Oklahoma Watch, 221 Omaha World-Herald, 21–22, 153, 169; Black journalists at, 62–63; fieldwork at, 301n27; subscriptions to, 52 100 Days in Appalachia: hardships revealed by, 229; hate groups and, 227; mission of, 226; news philanthropy case study, 222–30; projects for, 227; racial justice and, 230; self-reliance of, 228; truths revealed by, 232 online news, 28–29, 206, 272; experiments with, 17; inequality in, 33–34 opportunity geography, 254–55 Ostertag, Stephen, 202 pack journalism, 102, 108 pack philanthropy, 202–3, 218–22 palace-court journalism, 239 Papacharissi, Zizi, 37 parachute journalism, 46, 97 parochialism, 45–46, 77, 174, 180 participatory democracy, 239

In de x

353

partisan news media, 39, 94, 99, 237; fake news and, 253, 277–79; in place and future of journalism, 251–53; public broadcasting, 324n9. See also Republicans partisanship, x, 203; in African American South community type, 93; in aging farmlands community type, 93; in big cities community type, 93; in college towns community type, 93; datasets for, 267; in evangelical hubs community type, 93; expanded analysis of, 269; in exurbs community type, 90, 92, 93; fears of, 253; in funding investigative journalism, 216–18; in graying America community type, 93; in Hispanic centers community type, 93; investigative journalism and, 204–5; in LDS enclaves community type, 93; in middle suburbs community type, 93; in military posts community type, 93; in Native American lands community type, 93; newspaper employment and, 87–94, 93; in news philanthropy, 195–96, 216–18; in rural middle America community type, 93; in urban suburbs community type, 93; variables for measure, 268; in working-class country community type, 93. See also Democrats; partisan news media; polarization; Republicans Patterson, Alicia, 22 paywalls, 34, 36, 288n61; of Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, 310n23; during COVID-19, 30; of Dallas Morning News, 137, 310n23; metered, 32–33;

354

Ind e x

of New York Times, 137, 167–68; numbers of, 138 PBS, 187 PBS News Hour, 260 Peace Corps, 249 Pelosi, Nancy, 120 penny press, 53 Pentagon Papers, 1, 2 Philadelphia Inquirer, x, ix, 16, 23; Lenfest Institute for Journalism, 160–61; protest at, 55–56; relocation to new offices, 71 philanthropy. See news philanthropy Picard, Robert, 134–35, 148 Pittsburgh City Paper, 95–96 Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 56 place: Boston Globe and, 154–57; cultural proximity and, 43–46; future of news and, 8–14; Goldilocks newspapers and, 128; inequality and, 37; journalism shaped by, 6–7, 10, 13; as lived, 38; market failure and, 154, 195; news, democracy, and, 12–14; news organizations and, 11; as news setting, 37; in New York Times global news, 162–63; place-based affordances, 12, 14, 17, 36, 132, 193, 254; placelessness of, 35, 37; as proxy for power in, 35–40; role with Goldilocks newspapers and digital revenue, 149–54; shaping by, 10; space and, 10, 36 place, future of journalism and: authenticity and diversity in, 249–51; for democracy wanted and news needed, 239–41; news resilience in, 253–58; overview, 234–39; partisan media in, 251–53; post-newspaper consciousness in,

241–44; unbundling news for, 244–49 Placeless Guy, 35–37 placelessness: in New York Times and global news, 164–66; of place, 35, 37 Plain Dealer (Cleveland), 71–72 platform duopoly, 310n30 platform press, 146–48 Polakow-Suransky, Sasha, 185 polarization, 12, 253; asymmetric polarization, 87–90; media distrust and, 94 Polgreen, Lydia, 162, 175, 181, 183, 186–87, 317n1 police-beat reporters, 72 political regionalism, 77 political reporters, 73 Politico, 98; interns, 50; Trump Safari and, 95 Politics of Resentment, The (Cramer), 44 populism: right-wing populism, x, 67; rise of, 66, 94, 253 Post and Courier, 121, 123 post-newspaper consciousness, 237; building from, 258; journalists with, 248; movement toward, 253; in place and future of journalism, 241–44; progressivism and, 242 poverty, 66, 236; geography of, 53 power: buildings as power source, 69–70; of journalism, 8; in newsrooms, 10, 43, 60; place as proxy for, 35–40; power geometries of space, 10; Washington, DC correspondents in place of, 127–29 Poynter Institute, 231 private good: public good compared to, 32; quality journalism and, 30–35

Probot, Richard, 102 programmatic advertising, 141–45 progressivism, 242 ProPublica, 97, 199; commitment and promises of, 243 protests, 256 public broadcasting, 324n9 public good: journalism and, 30–35; private good compared to, 32 public-interest journalism, 21, 25 Public Ledger, Philadelphia, 20 public need, 239, 257 Pudding digital site, 57 punditocracy, 13, 245 “Putting ‘Place’ in the Center of Journalism Research” (Usher), xi quality journalism: COVID-19 and, 257; diversity in, 238; market failure and, 40; paying for, 31; private good and, 18, 30–35; for rich, white, blue, 257; support for, 6–7 Quinn, Sally, 2 Raasch, Chuck, 102, 108 Race, Tim, 180 racial justice, 230 racism, x, 27, 206; Associated Press Stylebook on, 56; in newsrooms, 55–59, 62 Rao, Shakuntala, 262 reader revenue, 132 Reagan, Ronald, 242 red, 157; election outcomes, 7; funding for, 205, 218, 231; journalism in, 76, 91; labeling of, 268; lawmakers, 235; red/blue divide, 160 Redburn, Tom, 182 Redford, Robert, 2

In de x

355

Reed, Maryanne, 227–29 regional journalists, 100 reporters: Black, 57, 60; breaking-news, 71; congressional, 101–2; elite, 116, 118; for local news, 249; Miami Herald, 131; national, 109, 122–23; for New York Times global news, 176–77; police-beat, 72; political, 73; wire-service, 106 Report for America, 249, 252–53 representational harm, 39 Republicans: distrust in journalism, 203; exurbs community type and, 94; investigative journalism and, 217–18; journalists distrusted by, 88; labeling of, 268; local news and, 88–89; news deserts and, 67, 77; newspaper employment and, 90, 91, 92, 327n53; news philanthropy and, 231; rural middle America community type and, 87; working-class country community type and, 87 research methods: for book writing, 259–63; for datasets, 265–67; for expanded analysis, 269; for news philanthropy, 271–79; for robustness checks, 273–77, 275–77; for variables, 267–68 retrenchment: in big sort in journalism, 69–75; mapping of, 75–80 Rezaian, Jason, 3 Rhodes Ha, Danielle, 262–63 rich: coverage for and of, 52–55; future of news for, 237; Goldilocks newspapers and digital revenue, 158–61; journalism for, 43; news by, 46–51; news for, 51–52; quality journalism and, 257 Rich, Motoko, 184 Richardson, Alissa V., 60

356

In d e x

right-wing populism, x, 67 right-wing radio, 252 Robinson, Sue, 63, 254, 262 robustness checks, 273–77, 275–77 Rogers, Will, 22 role-distance, 114–15 Roll Call, 121, 124 Rosten, Leo, 105, 116 Rubado, Meghan, 25 Rudoren, Jodi, 169, 182, 186–87 rurality, 66, 236 rural middle America community type, 79; dyad distribution of funder-recipient, 220; newspaper employment in, 85; partisanship in, 93; Republicans and, 87 Rusbriger, Alan, 163 Russell Sage Foundation, 33 Russian Internet Research Agency, 144 Rust Belt region, 95, 153 Ryan, Fred, 3 Salant, Jonathan, 117–18 Salt Lake Tribune, 107–8, 114; nonprofit ownership, 160 San Jose Mercury News, 71 Save the Community Newspaper Act, 152 scandal, 14, 42, 104, 129, 223; Watergate scandal, 1, 2, 20, 23, 111 Scheimer Dorey, 115 Schiller, Daniel, 163 Schmidt, Christine, 161 Schreiber, Liev, 2 search engine optimization (SEO), 145 Seattle Times, 21; Blethen family ownership, 151–52 self-governance, 14, 240 Senate Press Gallery, 262

Sennott, Charles, 252–53 SEO. See search engine optimization Sharkey, Patrick, 37 Shorenstein Center, Harvard University, 200–202, 204 Sinclair Television, 99, 332n32 1619 Project, 243–44 Slackman, Michael, 177–78, 184 Slim, Carlos, 168 Smith, Marisa, 262 Snapchat, 146 social geography of knowledge production, 318n12 social media, 66, 77, 105, 108, 130; algorithms, 32; inequality and, 34; information sharing, 63; misinformation and, 252; news distribution portal, 33, 146; posts for, 148; rise of, 24. See also Facebook; Google; Twitter; YouTube social services, 254 social space, 45 solutions journalism, 244 Soon-Shiong, Patrick, 152–53 Soros, George, 231 space: of flows, 36; geographic space, 45; place and, 10, 36; power geometries of space, 10; social space, 45 Spayd, Liz, 60, 192 Speakman, Burton, 285n8 sports-only subscriptions, 310n32 Spotify, 52, 317n1 Spotlight (film), 2 Squires, Catherine, 262 Stamm, Michael, 32 Standing Committee of Correspondents, 105 Starr, Paul, 134 state-based analysis, 272

Steele, James B., 23 Steiner, Linda, 262 Stevenson, Dick, 177 St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 102, 108 storytelling networks, 255–56 streaming, 52, 60 subscriptions: education and income factors, 294n43; to Goldilocks newspapers, 55; to Los Angeles Times, 52; Membership Puzzle Project, 160; to New York Times, 52; to Omaha World-Herald, 52; sports-only subscriptions, 310n32. See also digital subscriptions Sullivan, Bart, 107, 118 Sulzberger, A. G., 167, 170 Sulzberger, Arthur Ochs, Jr., 167 Supreme Court, U.S.: confirmation hearings, 111–12; reporting on, 102 Sykes, Charlie, 97 Syracuse Herald-Journal, 117–18 talk radio, 9, 251 TAM. See total addressable market Tampa Bay Times, 81 Tampa Tribune, 81 Teach for America, 199, 249 Team America, 96–97 telegraph lines, 36 television news, 28–29; commercials, 135; COVID-19 and, 33 Tenenbaum, Ori, 51 Tennessean, College World Series reporting, 15–16, 150 Thomas, Amber, 57–58 Thompson, Ben, 134 Thorson, Esther, 24 Times-Picayune, x Tocqueville, Alexis de, 19, 154–55

In de x

357

Topping, Seymour, 167 Torry, Jack, 115 total addressable market (TAM), 140–41 Tow Center for Digital Journalism, Columbia University, ix, 69, 146, 148, 160, 190 Tower of Truth, Philadelphia, ix transgender bathroom bill, 126–27 trial by newspaper, 20 Trump, Donald, 262, 316n105; Douglas on, 125; election of, 3–5, 66–67, 278; endangered journalists and, 281n6; New York Times on election, 5; New York Times on taxes, 219; presidency of, 226; on press as enemy of people, 74; supporters and New York Times, 234–35; Trump bump, 67; Trump Safari journalism, 94–100 Tuan, Yi-Fu, 10 Tuchman, Gaye, 202 Turner, Ted, 165 24/7 agenda, 173, 175–80 twenty-minute rule, Silicon Valley, 219–20 Twitter, 56, 97, 105, 259, 260; complaints on, 150, 175, 187; news from, 146; New York Times and, 190 urban journalism, 20 urban suburbs community type, 79; dyad distribution of funder-recipient, 220; newspaper employment in, 85; partisanship in, 93 Vanderbilt University, 15–16 variables: for newspaper employment to population measure, 267–68; for partisanship measure, 268; for proportional to industry measure, 267

358

Ind e x

Vega, Tanzina, 60 Vindicator, Youngstown, Ohio, 12; closing of, 16–17; new ownership of, 153, 285n8 Vogue, 49 Volkmer, Ingrid, 165 Vox, 259 Waldman, Steven, 252 Wall Street Journal, 166; interns, 50; readers of, 54 Ward, Justin, 47 Washington, DC correspondents: Beltway bubble and, 104–7; coastal elitism and, 114–19; decline in, 106; disconnection of, 114, 238; Douglas as, 119–27; Dumain as, 119–27; educational background of, 117–18; as eyes and ears, 107–10; as first-level surveillance, 110–14; for Goldilocks newspapers, 102; for New York Times, 104; overview, 101–4; place of power and, 127–29; role-distance of, 114–15; stakeout time for, 101–2; Standing Committee of Correspondents, 105 Washingtonian, 64 Washington Post, 12, 140; alternative ad tech of, 143; Bezos rescuing, 1–2, 4; commitment and promises of, 242; Democracy Dies in Darkness slogan, 4; discrimination complaint against, 57; interns, 50; new headquarters for, 1–5, 240; nonprofit funding and, 201; readers of, 54; Team America launch by, 96–97; traffic numbers for, 2; user experience in, 156 watchdog journalism, 203–4 Watergate scandal, 1, 2, 20, 23, 111

Watts uprisings (1965), 58 Wehrman, Jessica, 109, 112–13 white: future of news for, 237; Goldilocks newspapers and digital revenue, 158–61; journalism for, 43; news by, 55–61; news for, 51–52, 61–64; in newsrooms, 119; quality journalism and, 257; white elites, 119; white supremacy, 61 White House, U.S., 102, 104, 110 whiteness, 317n118; assigning or counting of, 298n95; in legacy news outlets, 55; in newsrooms, 60, 119; wealth and, 51 Wihbey, John, 201 Wilson, Ernest, 3 Wilson, Mike, 157–59, 316n105, 317n118 wire-service reporters, 106 Wisconsin Center for Investigative Reporting, 221 Wong, Cara, 44 Woodard, Colin, 155

Woodward, Bob, 2 working class, 54 working-class country community type, 78; as news desert, 86; newspaper employment in, 85; partisanship in, 93; Republicans and, 87 work-study programs, 250–51 Yahoo, 168 Yang, Hannah, 181, 191 Yankeedom, 155 Yardley, Jim, 178, 183, 189 yellow journalism, 20 Young, Mary Lynn, 39, 61, 262 Young, Paul, 191 YouTube, 9, 142, 146, 251 Zell, Sam, 42, 151 Zoom meetings, 260 Zremski, Jerry, 110–11 Zucker-Scharff, Aram, 140, 142

In de x

359