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Painted in 1848 during the height of the Mexican- American War by Richard Caton Woodville, “War News from Mexico” shows how newspapers and the “penny press” were once the latest in high-technology, bringing information to millions. This genre-scene depicts a variety of everyday Americans—including immigrants, men, women, children, and African Americans—and their reactions to the man reading from the newspaper on the steps of a hotel. Image courtesy of Maryland Center for History and Culture.

To protect democratic values, journalism must save itself

By Sara Goudarzi | September 5, 2024

On February 22 of this year, Vice Media CEO Bruce Dixon announced that the company will eliminate several hundred positions and shut down the media group’s Vice.com, ending the popular website’s nearly three decades in operation. The company, once valued at $5.7 billion, had gone from media powerhouse to has-been.

It’s an all-too-familiar fate for many US national and local newspapers and media outlets. In the last decade-and-a-half, the United States has lost nearly two-thirds of its newspaper journalists (Abernathy 2023). In 2023 alone, some 20,342 media employees lost their jobs, with 2,681 of them in the news industry (The Challenger Report 2023). The first quarter of 2024 didn’t bring much relief: The Los Angeles Times, Time, the Wall Street Journal, National Geographic, Business Insider, NBC News, and many other news outlets made cuts, some major. Significant other digital outlets, including The Messenger and music criticism site Pitchfork, either shut down or were absorbed by others.

It’s a grim world for US journalists and other media employees. But it’s equally—if not more—concerning for citizens of the nation participating in this year’s elections. With fewer journalists keeping watch over politicians on ballots and the process of elections, democracy is under threat. The spotlight, for many in the United States and around the world, is the November 5 face-off between Vice President Kamala Harris and former president Donald Trump, a contest with consequences that could reverberate globally. Additionally, all seats in the US House of Representatives, 34 in the US Senate, and many state and local seats will be up for grabs.

And all those elections will take place in an information ecosystem that contains a lot less professional journalism than in the past, and a lot more conspiracy theorizing and propaganda spread by social media and other means.

“We have a confluence of events right now happening that makes me fear that we’re going to get a dumpster fire of misinformation and disinformation for this fall’s election,” says Tim Franklin, senior associate dean, professor, and John M. Mutz Chair in Local News at Northwestern’s Medill journalism school.

Between the loss of national and local news outlets, the proliferation of partisan propaganda sites posing as news outlets, the distortion effects of social media, and the recent rollout of generative artificial intelligence, it’s an election unlike any Americans have seen before. Today’s unique information landscape is the result of several factors that have helped to accelerate the decline of media over the last several years. These include an evolving digital and social media landscape and a loss of trust in journalism. The industry is on a declining path that cannot be changed without a rethinking of media business models and who journalism serves.

Shifting landscape

The internet and social media have changed—and continue to alter—the way news is disseminated and consumed. They have also created an environment where various sources of entertainment and information continually fight for people’s attention.

“Attention is the most important commodity in the internet world that we live in: You’ve got all these different outlets trying to get the same set of consumers’ attention, and so you’ve just got a really competitive environment,” says Danny Hayes, professor of political science and professor of media and public affairs at George Washington University. “Obviously, it’s going to make it hard for lots and lots of news organizations to survive.”

The other thing that is happening is a shift in communication and curation of content. Even after the creation of the World Wide Web and web browsers, for many years readers of news largely found it on journalism websites, where information was handpicked by professional editors. Now, half of adult Americans get their news from social media (Pew Research center 2023) often curated—that is, selected, organized, interpreted, and presented—by their family and friends.

“The editors are being replaced by just people posting whatever they want, so it’s loss of a professional standard about what counts,” explains Stephen Ansolabehere, a government professor at Harvard University. “What is being lost is the idea that people trust an entity, like The [New York] Times, The [Washington] Post, or The Guardian, and instead, the trust relationship in terms of the veracity of the story or the quality of this content is [that] your aunt or your best friend sent it to you.”

What ends up happening, Ansolabehere says, is that people often don’t notice whether shared content comes from a trustworthy outlet or, for example, the government-owned Russian propaganda site “rt.com,” formerly “Russia Today.” (In 2010, the Columbia Journalism Review identified Russia Today as “the Kremlin’s propaganda outlet” [Ioffe 2010].) In many cases, those readers might even be unaware of what rt.com is. “They just know that it came from their friend.”

That behavioral shift creates another problem. When consumers of news don’t go to original websites—such as The Los Angeles Times—and rely merely on social platform posts summarizing articles from those sites, the bulk of digital advertising money doesn’t go to the entity that created the content, but to the social media platform it was posted on.

From a business standpoint, traditional print newspapers were distributors of advertising. People had few other ways of receiving information, and advertisers had few methods for reaching mass audiences. “That meant newspapers had very considerable market power both over the public but also over advertisers,” says Rasmus Kleis Nielsen, director of the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism and professor of political communication at the University of Oxford. “In particular, at the level of one-newspaper towns, which were common across America, it was very common for newspapers to operate at a very significant profit of 25 to 30 percent.”

In the age of the internet, however, newspapers and publishers no longer have that sort of market power. There are plenty of places for readers to get their news and even more ways for advertisers to reach an audience, many of them cheaper and better targeted than a print ad.

“Publishers, as a consequence, have low market power both over audiences and advertisers; and it turns out that is a very difficult place to do business,” Nielsen says.

As a result, many outlets are either folding or making significant cuts to staff in their newsrooms, a problem that has become especially dire on the local level, where a good portion of the daily and weekly newspapers that relied on local business ads have disappeared and where critical news is not finding its way to people.

“We have tens of thousands of local elections that are happening this year—it’s not just the presidential election—and in a lot of communities, you have very few journalists who are covering those elections, who are telling voters who the candidates are that are running for county commission or city council or mayor,” says Hayes. “Consequently, my research and other people’s research have shown that Americans just know less and less about what’s happening in their local governments.”

Local news crisis

Only 6,000 newspapers survive from the 24,000 that served the nation in the early 1900s (Abernathy 2023). The decline, which started around World War II, accelerated in the digital era over the last 20 years, creating what’s known as “news deserts”—communities without or with little newspaper coverage. Currently, more than half of the people in the country’s 3,143 counties and county-like divisions live in news deserts (Local News Initiative 2024).

Although the move from print to digital has been an issue affecting local news worldwide, the problem has hit Americans particularly hard. “The United States is an extreme outlier in the nearly complete reliance on commercial forms of journalism, whereas in northwestern Europe, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Korea, and Japan, there are very significant public service provisions, and also often reasonably significant indirect subsidies for private publishers that cushion journalism from the full force of creative destruction that’s been unleashed,” Nielson says.

This destruction of the US news industry has left voids in Americans’ understanding of what goes on in their communities and created a lack of accountability over the actions of local authorities, providing an opportunity for untruths to take root and for politicians to manipulate the public.

“When you have fewer reliable trustworthy local news sources who are covering politics trying to serve the public interest, then you have the opportunity for politicians to be able to sort of set the terms of the debate on their own, to frame their campaigns however they want, without being challenged by news outlets that might be able to demonstrate that they’re misleading the public or not fairly characterizing their record,” Hayes says.

Further, outlets that are hollowed-out can be so under-resourced that at times they publish political campaign press releases without much or any additional reporting, essentially providing a megaphone for politicians. This can even affect very simple, but important, practical communication like the locations and operating hours of voting centers. “There’s a bunch of very mundane little things that are important about traditional media that are lost in this climate,” Ansolabehere says. “So, one of the things to track is how much of the basics of democratic function go away.”

Despite their contributions to democracy and democratic functions, US news organizations shouldn’t be romanticized; there have been serious shortcomings in the way they have operated and reported.

“Research documents that late 20^th-century American journalism was serving many parts of the public very poorly,” Nielsen says. “It was primarily journalism by white middle class men, for white middle upper class men, and about white middle class men. And it’s just important to be very clear that from the point of view of much of the public, journalism for a long time essentially has been sort of racist, misogynistic, classist, homophobic.”

“While it has moments of holding power to account, it’s also important to recognize that journalism has a very close proximity to power, and that access to journalism is a very real thing as well, and that there are many documented instances of journalism not fulfilling a watchdog function, even when it was at its commercial peak as an industry and a very much more robust institution professionally than it is today,” he adds.

Still, evidence shows that without journalists to keep an eye on city halls and other local offices, authorities can and do make important decisions—such as increased borrowing via bond financing to pay for capital projects (Capps 2018)—without scrutiny from the public.

“There’s been research that shows in news deserts and low-information communities that government spending goes up, that government borrowing costs go up, because those who are writing the bonds realize there’s no watchdog in that community, so the bond rates go up,” Franklin says. According to research, corruption also increases after newspaper closures (Matherly and Greenwood 2024).

Local papers play another important role: They are often a source of moderation and reasoned debate in communities, non-partisan resources for pertinent information about matters of public concern. These can range from local school and government issues to public health. But research shows (Darr et al., 2018) that when local news sources go away, communities become more polarized and partisan, often voting along party lines, instead of based on issues affecting them.

“People replace them [local news] with national media coverage that tends to be more partisan, and is more likely to exacerbate existing political divisions,” Hayes says.

Pink slime

National media is not the only coverage that replaces local news in these barren information grounds. The lack of a robust media system creates an environment in which partisan outlets, or those publishing poor quality content, can masquerade as local news sources and find the opportunity to proliferate. The practice, known as “pink slime” journalism, has taken off over the last several years, especially preceding the last presidential elections in the United States According to the Columbia Journalism Review, there were 1,200 such sites in 2020 (Bengani 2020).

“These are sites that were created by political action committees or ideological players on both sides of the spectrum, but especially on the right, that look like traditional newspapers or home pages that have the appearance of legitimacy when they’re basically Trojan Horses for partisan propaganda, and these are on the rise, and I think will continue to be on the rise,” Franklin says.

The voids also leave room for players who have a stake in what and how information travels through a community to control the discourse. One such example is The Richmond Standard, the only news site currently covering Richmond, California, a city on the San Francisco Bay with a population of a little more than 116,000 people. Funded by the Chevron Corporation—which runs a petroleum refinery and is a major polluter in the city—the news site curates its content to paint the oil company in a favorable light and to convey information beneficial to its interests, reporting shows (Folkenflik & Green 2024).

Last November, intense flaring at the refinery resulted in plumes of thick black smoke blanketing the skies of Richmond and some surrounding areas. Despite concern from residents, unsurprisingly, the city’s only paper did not cover the incident.

And that’s not the only place the oil and gas giant wants to control dialogue. Chevron started running a news site in 2009 and launched another in 2019 in Ecuador where the company is involved in litigation surrounding possible pollution from oil drilling. In 2022, Chevron opened its latest media outlet in a Texas community.

“They’ve started a new site in the Permian Basin in Texas, where there’s a lot of fracking that’s going on, and so their publication kind of touts Chevron’s work and impact on the economy and on drilling in the basin,” Franklin says.

Several states to the east, electrical utility company Alabama Power launched an online outlet, the Alabama News Center, in 2015 that “publishes overwhelmingly positive stories about the power company (Green 2024),” an investigation by journalism non-profit organization Floodlight found. In 2016, the power company’s nonprofit arm, Foundation for Progress in Journalism, also bought the Birmingham Times, formerly a leading African-American newspaper, whose coverage now “consists of reprinted stories from the News Center and the utility’s own press releases.” Both outlets failed to report the power company 2022’s rate increases and other issues that plague residents in the vicinity of its power plants, one of which has been called “the nation’s dirtiest” (Hedgepeth 2023), just a 20-minute drive from Birmingham in West Jefferson.

Local to national

The lack of a robust local news network affects national news also, as the various pockets of news form a connected web that feed information to one another. For example, some of the stringers often employed by local papers or networks—freelance journalists, photographers, or videographers—are no longer doing the on-the-ground work that also fed national journalism outlets.

Ansolabehere, who works for CBS on election nights, has seen this degradation firsthand. At one time the network had a robust network of stringers in places like Arizona or upstate New York, but as more local journalists leave the profession, the national networks can lose access to such trusted talent.

“On an election night, like 2020 where things might be blowing up in Arizona, we just don’t know it,” he says. “We don’t necessarily have an independent person who understands our media newsroom’s standards, who our editors trust to tell us what exactly is going on. So, we’ve become very dependent on whatever is be being said there locally, and a lot of times that’s just coming straight out of the campaigns.”

Without local and trustworthy professionals to work with, national outlets are also relying on analytics and academics who are taking on the burden of the task in a pinch.

The process is much more data driven, Ansolabehere says, but it can miss essential context that explains what’s going on behind the numbers. When there are concerns about, for example, what might be happening in Georgia, or another place where there’s an election controversy like the 2020 Georgia recount, “the data analytics don’t have anything to do with that, you need to understand what’s going on,” he adds.

“The election officers do a very good job by and large, but every once awhile something goes wrong, or they miss something in accounting, and to have an extra pair of eyes looking closely is really valuable. And increasingly, that’s falling to amateurs, to people like academics who are scraping through election data.”

Generative AI, a new player

This will be the first year in American general elections when generative AI models—which can, among other things, exacerbate the spread of disinformation and flood the digital space with phony audio and video content known as “deepfakes”—may play a role. The impact of this role remains to be seen, but elections in other parts of the world, including in Indonesia and India, could provide clues on whether AI will have electoral impact elsewhere.

“So far, it’s not really been a significant factor in the elections we’ve seen across the world,” Nielsen says. “Unless one of the major political parties and their associated political action committees and other organized support groups really double down on using this, I would be surprised to see this play a particularly important role in the US elections this year, other than potentially further deepening the generalized skepticism with which much of the public already treat everything they see—not because they necessarily think it’s completely fake and synthetic but just because we always need to remember that, in particular, in a country like America, we live in a world where most people are very skeptical of almost everything they see from almost everybody, whether or not it’s AI-generated or not.”

Such skepticism will contribute to already low levels of media trust—39 percent of American adults have no trust at all, while 29 percent report “not very much” trust in the news media (Brenan 2023). And the less the public trusts independent news organizations, the more difficult it is to hold power to account.

“The big concern about any of the kinds of changes to the information environment that we’re probably going to be facing the next decade is whether that continues to undermine people’s faith and trust in these traditional institutions that have helped democracy work,” Hayes says.

Artificial intelligence may come to play another role in the fraying of journalism, and consequently democratic functions, by further damaging the digital business model of outlets and contributing to their demise. Recently, Google rolled out AI-generated summaries of news articles. When someone searches for information about a current event, they are not necessarily directed to news outlets—the source of the information—but instead are provided with lines of text recapping the articles—right on the Google homepage. The developer of ChatGPT, OpenAI, is also said to be working on a search engine (Tong 2024).

“That just exacerbates the broader problem that news outlets are facing with reduced traffic and digital advertising revenue,” says Hayes.

The fix?

As newsrooms struggle around the United States, publishers and others in journalism are scrambling to figure out a way to save the industry and make money doing it. Some, like The New York Times, the Star Tribune, and The New Yorker, have found a lifeline by drawing in digital subscribers to generate income. Through placing the bulk of their articles behind paywall, these outlets are pivoting from an ad-based business model to a reader revenue-based one.

“More and more of the news media are shifting their content behind paywalls and away from the advertising model, and that is more like the Penny Press where you had to buy the piece of paper,” says Ansolabehere. But while this might work for some of the larger papers, it will be a tougher model for local papers to adopt.

“How do you go to a paywall if you’re a small-town newspaper?” he says. “The audience isn’t big enough to afford a reporter. That’s the model nobody’s figured out yet.”

Thankfully, philanthropic organizations have begun to pay attention to the issue. Last September, a national initiative called Press Forward—funded by the MacArthur Foundation and the Knight Foundation, among others—announced it will spend $500 million  over the next five years to support local news (Press Forward 2024). And while that funding might not be enough on its own to save these local newspapers, it will provide some time for outlets to figure out a new strategy.

States are also experimenting with public policies and funding to support local news. In April, the New York State Legislature passed a bill to provide tax credits to “incentivize hiring and retaining local journalists” (Hoylman-Sigal 2024).

Launched in 2022, the California Local News Fellowship program provides 40 full-time positions for beginner journalists in the newsrooms of underserved communities for two years. New Jersey awards grants of up to $100,000 per project to “grow access to local news and information” (New Jersey Civic Information Consortium 2024). In May, Illinois passed a measure that provides $25 million tax credit to boost local news.

“There’s also legislation pending in New York, California, and Illinois that would require big tech to compensate local news organizations for use of their content,” Franklin says. Enactment of such laws is important as search engines scrape headlines and bits of content from news sites and sell advertising based on those snippets without paying online media outlets, essentially robbing them of a significant portion of their income. “The California bill is the furthest along; if that passes, that could be a game changer for a lot of news outlets. There are many positive things beginning to happen as people, policymakers and foundations recognize the extent of the problem.”

In some places where local news has diminished or disappeared, startups have taken on the task of filling the voids. One such example is in Baltimore where the paper of record, The Baltimore Sun, has recently changed hands and lost employees, some to a new non-profit startup.

“Baltimore Banner—the independent startup—has basically become the news outlet of record in Baltimore,” Hayes says. “The question is whether once the philanthropic interest in supporting local news fades, which is probably inevitable as foundations’ and philanthropic organizations’ priorities change over time, whether these local media outlets that have emerged to try to fill these gaps can figure out some sustainable business model.”

But Hayes is optimistic that there are currently many people working on the problem and that there is experimentation, like the Baltimore Banner, taking place at the local level.

“Some of those efforts may ultimately prove successful and will help address what we’ve lost in the last couple of decades,” he says.

What Americans have lost, however, has not been the same for everyone. For some communities that have been poorly served by traditional media and suffered troubling consequences, the digital forces disrupting legacy journalism may provide new and fairer platforms.

“The way in which Black Americans have used a combination of mobile-shot video footage and social media to document and publicize and draw attention to police brutality is a key example of this—from Ferguson and the police killing of George Floyd onwards,” Nielson says.

“There is no credible argument to be made that American newspaper journalism in the ‘70s and ‘80s didn’t have the resources to cover that police brutality or that it didn’t happen,” he adds. “It did happen, and the resources were there. So, from the point of view of many communities, the same media that have undermined some of the democratic contributions of journalism may have also enabled some of those communities to self-organize and try to overcome some of the limitations of late-20^th-century journalism.” 

At this point, there needs to be a rethinking of the news through broader discourse, to find a model that maintains journalistic standards, better serves communities, and that not just survives but also thrives in this noisy information and entertainment environment. (If 2023 is any indication, this year will bring the loss of more than 100 local newspapers.)

For now, the energy and commitment from philanthropic organizations to help revitalize local news, and the push for legislation to better protect the industry, is encouraging. Journalists and outlets are also experimenting with ways to reach audiences while scratching out a living. Some writers have turned to generating individually run subscription-based newsletters. Others, like four journalists who were laid off by Vice’s science and technology spinoff “Motherboard,” banded together in 2023 to create the tech publication “404 Media” that is now operating via a two-tiered subscription model. As of February 2024, the company is reportedly profitable (Tameez 2024). In addition to providing their typical content, some outlets like The Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times also offer curated digital versions of their newspapers to subscribers.

Whether any of these experiments prove successful in the long run remains to be seen. But if journalism is to reassume a central position in democracy, one or more of these new ideas will have to achieve a degree of economic success, or lead to other ideas that can.

References

Abernathy P. M. 2023. “The State of Local News.” November 16. https://localnewsinitiative.northwestern.edu/projects/state-of-local-news/2023/report/.

Bengani, P. 2020. “As election looms, a network of mysterious ‘pink slime’ local news outlets nearly triples in size.” August 4. Columbia Journalism Review. https://www.cjr.org/analysis/as-election-looms-a-network-of-mysterious-pink-slime-local-news-outlets-nearly-triples-in-size.php.

Brenan, M. 2023. “Media Confidence in U.S. Matches 2016 Record Low.” October 19. Gallup. https://news.gallup.com/poll/512861/media-confidence-matches-2016-record-low.aspx.

Capps, K. 2018. The Hidden Costs of Losing Your City’s Newspaper: Without watchdogs, government costs go up, according to new research. May 30. Bloomberg. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-05-30/when-local-newspapers-close-city-financing-costs-rise.

Darr, J.P., Hitt, M.P., & Dunaway, J.L. 2018. “Newspaper Closures Polarize Voting Behavior.” November 5. Journal of Communication. https://doi.org/10.1093/joc/jqy051.

Folkenflik, D. & Green, M. 2024. “Chevron owns this city’s news site. Many stories aren’t told.” March 28. NPR.https://www.npr.org/2024/03/28/1239650727/chevron-fossil-fuel-richmond-standard-california-news.

Green, M. 2024. “‘Control the narrative’: How an Alabama utility wields influence by financing news: A Floodlight investigation found Alabama Power runs a news service and its foundation bought a Black newspaper. Neither publishes critical stories about the utility.” January 16. Floodlight. https://floodlightnews.org/control-the-narrative-how-an-alabama-utility-wields-influence-by-financing-news/.

Hedgepeth, L. 2023. “An Alabama Coal Plant Once Again Nabs the Dubious Title of the Nation’s Worst Greenhouse Gas Polluter: A single Jefferson County power plant pollutes more than some entire countries.” October 29. Inside Climate News. https://insideclimatenews.org/news/29102023/an-alabama-coal-plant-once-again-nabs-the-dubious-title-of-the-nations-worst-greenhouse-gas-polluter/?ref=floodlightnews.org.

Hoylman-Sigal, B. 2024. “Empire State Local News Coalition Celebrates Inclusion of $90 Million Local Media Tax Credit in Final FY 2025 New York State Budget.” April 21. https://www.nysenate.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2024/brad-hoylman-sigal/empire-state-local-news-coalition-celebrates.

Ioffe, J. 2010. “What is Russia Today? The Kremlin’s propaganda outlet has an identity crisis.” September 28. Columbia Journalism Review. https://www.cjr.org/feature/what_is_russia_today.php

Local News Initiative. 2024. “Local News Landscape. https://localnewsinitiative.northwestern.edu/projects/state-of-local-news/explore/#/localnewslandscape.

Matherly, T. & Greenwood, B. 2024. “No News is Bad News: The Internet, Corruption, and the Decline of the Fourth Estate.” June 1. MIS Quarterly. https://doi.org/10.25300/MISQ/2023/17869.

New Jersey Civic Information Consortium. 2024. https://njcivicinfo.org/grants/.

Pew Research center. 2023. “Social Media and News Fact Sheet.” November 15. https://www.pewresearch.org/journalism/fact-sheet/social-media-and-news-fact-sheet/.

Press Forward. 2024. “Press Forward Announces First Open Call for Funding Will Address Historic Inequalities in Local News Coverage.” April 22. https://www.pressforward.news/press-forward-announces-first-open-call-for-funding-will-address-historic-inequalities-in-local-news-coverage/.

Tameez, H. 2024. “Six months in, journalist-owned tech publication 404 Media is profitable.” February 12. NiemanLab. https://www.niemanlab.org/2024/02/six-months-in-journalist-owned-tech-publication-404-media-is-profitable/.

The Challenger Report. 2023. “Job Cuts Jump in November 2023 From October; Second Time This Year Cuts Lower Than Same Month Year Ago.” December 7. https://www.challengergray.com/blog/job-cuts-jump-in-november-2023-from-october-second-time-this-year-cuts-lower-than-same-month-year-ago/?_ga=2.90858393.2027400686.1716915933-1187965138.1716915933.

Tong, A. 2024. “OpenAI plans to announce Google search competitor on Monday, sources say.” May 10. Reuters.https://www.reuters.com/technology/openai-plans-announce-google-search-competitor-monday-sources-say-2024-05-09/.

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Keywords: 2024 election, Elections, democracy, journalism, media, social media, voting
Topics: Columnists