By Ari Jewell
At the beginning of Professor Steve Fox’s News Literacy class, he sets his students a challenge: For 48 hours, they can’t take in any news. No social media, no TV, no newspapers, no websites. When they emerge from the news blackout, his students find ... they still know the latest news.
“It’s impossible,” Fox says with a smile, “which is the lesson.” More than any other source, his students get their news from word of mouth—through their friends and family.
The white-haired professor has taught UMass students for almost two decades. He began his career as a journalist working at newspapers around the country before being hired by The Washington Post in 1996. There he was instrumental in bringing this paper of record into the digital age, helping to run The Post’s website when it was still in its infancy.
The news blackout exercise says a lot about modern news consumption. No matter how hard we work to avoid taking it in, news is a deluge. We are swimming in it, whether that’s via word of mouth or the social media we rely on for a quick hit of cute animals.
Despite the fact that news has become the air we breathe, the institution that informs our understanding of the world is at a crossroads. Attacks on media by politicians have become commonplace. Distrust of long-standing news publishers proliferates. And when it comes to coverage of our neighborhoods, local news outlets are dropping like flies. According to Northwestern University’s Medill Local News Initiative, local newspapers in the U.S. are vanishing at a rate of more than two per week. Since 2005, more than 3,200 print newspapers have shuttered their operations. But the news isn’t all bad—throughout the country, freshly minted journalists are stepping up to the challenge of keeping citizens informed, and new models of journalism are emerging.
Still, some questions remain: In a world flooded with information, in a country where news has become polarized, what is the value of local reportage? How can we strengthen local news—and, in turn, strengthen our communities?