Un-breaking the News
What’s happened to local news, and how we fix it
‘Not a natural occurrence’
To answer these questions, we have to start at the beginning. “Today’s media system is not a natural occurrence,” says Josh Stearns ’07MA, managing director of programs at Democracy Fund, a foundation working to build an inclusive, multiracial American democracy. “Policy decisions have shaped our media from the earliest days. The founders of our country established massive postal subsidies to ensure that newspapers could get distributed across the nation and that people could have access to the reporting at little or no cost.” If these subsidies hadn’t evaporated throughout the 20th century, Stearns explains, the country would be spending billions on the delivery of news and information today.
Stearns, who still lives in western Massachusetts, has been teaching, defending, analyzing, and supporting journalism for nearly 20years. He led the Democracy Fund’s Public Square program, which focuses on bolstering local media, including funding up-and-coming local news outlets.
The history of news, Stearns reminds us, includes everything from pamphleteers to union and political party newspapers. “Journalism wasn’t always rooted in nonpartisan reporting,” he says. “In the past, newsrooms stood up for their communities, took a point of view on hard issues, and presented more than just two sides to a story. That had good and bad outcomes.” Then, in the last century, the modern idea of mass media took hold, and along with it came the ethical norms and professionalization of journalism that we’re used to.
That’s not to say that modern nonpartisan mass media serves everyone. “There’s a long history of media that has harmed communities of color,” Stearns says. For example, many newspapers made sizeable portions of their early wealth from advertising the sale of enslaved people. And since the beginning, marginalized communities have created journalism at the fringes—in part due to the harm caused by more mainstream publications. News by and for marginalized communities, particularly by communities of color, has crucially accounted for the gaps left by mainstream journalism.
‘Journalism as a service’
It’s that community-focused ethos that brought Stearns into journalism in the first place. While he doesn’t have a journalism degree himself—his academic focus at UMass was on the intersection of literature and storytelling with social movements—his studies led to an interest in journalism’s role in society and in building and providing for communities.
And that’s where local news comes in. One news organization that the Public Square program helps fund is the San Francisco Bay Area’s El Tímpano. Spanish for “the eardrum,” El Tímpano’s reporting is by and for the local Latino and Mayan immigrant community. “It’s not just about doing journalism and hoping it has an impact for somebody,” Stearns says. “It’s actually about journalism as a service to communities.” This is one of the things that sets local news apart: the ability to give practical and personal information to the community. For example, after publishing a reported piece on soil contamination, El Tímpano hosted a workshop for community members to test their backyard soil for contamination.”
Mission-driven journalism, where service to a community is the priority, is a major factor bringing young journalists to the field, including divina cordeiro ’25. A journalism major, cordeiro also writes for the independent western Massachusetts publication The Shoestring.
“My passion is making information not only accessible but understandable,” cordeiro says. “Having actionable information, especially, is super important to me.”
Neighbor to neighbor
Beyond facts about local politics or pollution, reporting for a community is also about all the intangibles that make your neighbors feel like your neighbors.
Elizabeth Román ’06 grew up in Springfield and has spent her career telling the stories of her community. She started out as an intern at The Republican and has since risen through the ranks of local media. Today, she’s executive editor at New England Public Media (NEPM).
Like many people in the Springfield area, Román is Puerto Rican and Spanish-speaking, and much of her reporting has focused on telling the stories of those communities. At The Republican, Román’s reporting included work for El Pueblo Latino, its Spanish-language weekly offshoot. Eventually, she became the editor of El Pueblo Latino.
Readers of that paper, Román explains, “were sick of seeing stories about poverty, about immigration. They could get that anywhere. What they couldn’t get or what they weren’t seeing were stories of success and stories of triumph of the Latino community. So that’s what that paper really became about.” El Pueblo Latino serves its community, but that service looks different from free tests for soil contamination—it’s about creating a record of a strong community through local news.
For many of us, the parts of local news that we cherish look mundane from the outside: news of the high school play, celebrations of homegrown heroes, or announcements of an art opening. But these small things, put together, make the community feel like our home.
Román understands this concept deeply. Even when the news out of Washington seems grim, she reminds the reporters at NEPM that the basics still matter. “Arts and culture are still important. Food is still important. Little community events are still important,” she says.
The idea behind an informed and bolstered community goes back, in part, to those founders who subsidized postal delivery in service of an informed electorate. One of the driving principles behind robust local news is that it makes our democracy better.
From the nitty-gritty of a city council meeting to analysis of how a sweeping executive order might affect you and your neighbors, local news keeps us politically tuned in, providing a check on powerful institutions.
Today’s headlines
It’s easy to love local news. It’s a one-stop shop where we get cute neighborhood updates alongside the reporting that keeps us informed about our communities. So, why has it been such a struggle for local news organizations to keep the lights on?
For one, the revenue model for newspapers has been forced to reinvent itself since the turn of the century. Professor Fox explains, “For decades, newspapers’ profit margins were built upon classified ads. Apartments for rent, cars to buy, people looking for roommates. Back in the day, you had to pay for that in newspapers. In 1998 or so, Craigslist comes on the scene and kind of blows that up.” Despite that shift happening almost 30 years ago, traditional newspapers still haven’t found a consistent way to make up that revenue.
“Sometimes it’s via subscriptions,” says Fox. “Some are still trying to make it through ads. But along the way, newsroom sizes, especially with medium and small news operations, have been cut down substantially.”
Financial limitations can trickle down to the quality of reporting, too. Román at NEPM says that inside the newsroom, “if you don’t have the funding to hire qualified people, or have the money to train them to become qualified reporters, then the basis of the industry is at a high risk.”
So, that’s the bad news. But there’s good news, too. Despite the fact that misinformation proliferates online and national journalists are often disparaged, our collective trust in local news actually isn’t in dire straits.
“Local media is still far more trusted across political divides than national media is,” says Stearns. “And what we’ve seen is when local media erodes or disappears, people turn more to national media, and it actually exacerbates polarization.” On the other hand, Stearns says, “local media can actually bridge polarization. You see the stories of your neighbors and how these complex issues are taking shape around you in ways that are much more nuanced and complex and relevant to your lives than how it might be covered on national cable news, or even in a national newspaper.”
That’s not to say local news outlets don’t face barriers to earning people’s trust. “The distrust in media has grown, in large part, because of what national leaders are saying repeatedly, over and over again,” Fox says, alluding to the allegations of “fake news” that have become commonplace among right-wing politicians. “And it’s a field where journalists are facing threats every day.”
That’s why, Fox says, “I tell students that we need them. We need good journalism.”
The next generation
Despite clear-eyed knowledge about the turbulence of the field, UMass’s newly trained journalists aren’t dissuaded from entering the profession.
Sarah Robertson ’17 started writing for the Massachusetts Daily Collegian to get the free concert tickets that came along with reviewing local shows. In the years since, she’s worked for all sorts of western Massachusetts news organizations and has reported on a range of vital issues, from unjust evictions to environmental contamination.
“I like asking questions. And I like challenging power. You can do that in journalism,” Robertson says. Despite weathering many shifts to the field since she graduated—in a year working for the Daily Hampshire Gazette, the paper endured two rounds of layoffs—Robertson remains passionate about her ability to spark local change through journalism. Today, she is a news producer for the Northampton radio station WHMP.
Similarly, cordeiro is unfazed. “There hasn’t been a calm moment in journalism, necessarily, and I really believe in the strength of journalists and their passion and commitment to the work, to figure out how to navigate the current political moment,” they say.
Across the country, journalists are doing everything they can to keep covering their communities—and a part of that job is shepherding young and talented journalists through a field in a constant state of evolution. Veteran journalist Charles Sennott ’84 cofounded Report for America, an organization that seeks to support both news organizations and young journalists in the ongoing quest for better local news.
Report for America recruits early-career journalists, then helps match them with local newsrooms throughout the country. It’s a win-win: Organizations get a much-needed infusion of talent, and young journalists get real on-the-ground experience.
Report for America also supports these partner news organizations by paying a significant portion of the journalists’ salaries for three years, training them, and helping newsrooms with their fundraising efforts. This year, Report for America received more than 1,600 applications for 70 available positions. Across the country, young people are itching to dedicate their careers to local journalism.
Ecosystems, not organisms
With the pressures that individual news outlets face today, local news is finding possibilities in new models, evolving from one-stop shops to broader communities of news sources. In contrast to the way that, say, Northampton’s Daily Hampshire Gazette has long been the paper of record for the region, these newer independent media sources have a specific beat—relying on their peer institutions to fill in the gaps. “We don’t just need strong news organizations,” Stearns says. “We need strong news ecosystems.”
In his work at the Public Square program, Stearns was at the forefront of that project, using the tools of philanthropy to support new models of journalism.
“In the last 15 years, we have been building a new sector of independent media for America, with fundamentally different practices and values than many of the long-standing media,” he says. “It’s taking what’s best from vigorous accountability reporting from years past, but then also building it for a new generation looking to serve communities that have often been left unserved by many in the legacy media.”
This new independent media sometimes looks like El Tímpano providing tests for soil contamination. And it sometimes looks like another Spanish-language news source, Conecta Arizona, founded during the COVID-19 pandemic, which shares news through the messaging platform WhatsApp, podcasts, and other methods.
With individual newsrooms often finding themselves under-resourced, a strong ecosystem means that they can pool their resources and, collaboratively, create stronger reporting. Rather than news organizations scrambling to “scoop” each other and get to a headline first, it’s become commonplace for several local news outlets to publish a single story. These co-publishing agreements refute the norm of territorial journalism; instead, a single story might end up with several different audiences, and everyone from reporters to readers are better off for it.
For example, Sarah Robertson’s local reporting has often been published in both the online-only publication The Shoestring and the in weekly print newspaper The Montague Reporter. Each publication has a different audience, and when the goal of journalism is to serve a community, there’s no downside to spreading the wealth of great reporting.
Collaboration can also extend all the way down to community members. Stearns notes one national program, the Documenters Network, which trains local folks to take notes at the public meetings of school boards, city councils, and other government bodies. These notes are then aggregated and published, creating a database of this granular yet high-impact news.
‘A better world is possible’
Throughout the country, many communities lack quality local news, and even if these communities are distant from our own, when their members suffer, we all suffer. The preservation of democracy, the neighborliness of our world, the ability of each of us to make informed decisions about our lives—in some ways, these things rest on the shoulders of local news.
“While parts of local news have been struggling and in decline, there’s an untold story of growth and hope and resurgence under the surface,” Stearns says, “but it still is nowhere near filling the gaps of what we’ve lost over the last 20 years.”
We might have an uphill battle towards stronger local news, but we also have more than a few devotees in the fight. If cordeiro is any indication, we’re in good hands. “I want people to be better,” they say. “I want their material conditions to be better. And I want to give them information that makes it easier to get there. And so, yeah, I do want the world to be a better place, and I also do think a better world is possible, and journalism is my form of struggle toward that better world.”
