Serge Schmemann, NY Times - Many reporters of my (advanced) age got their starts on small daily or weekly papers, back then fixtures in most every town or suburb. Mine was The News Tribune in Woodbridge, N.J., an independent daily with a circulation of about 58,000. We covered everything from school board meetings to a local kid who made Eagle Scout. The first big story I covered was a local election, a crash course in politics and the source of one of the best — and possibly most prophetic — quotes I ever got, from an incumbent mayor who lost and snarled, “The two-party system is divisive.”
Looking back at those papers isn’t just the nostalgia of an old newspaperman. They were the building blocks of community, democracy, politics. Their loss is a major reason behind the acute polarization and political confusion we are suffering today. “In the past decade, a broad perception has formed that local news is in a serious crisis,” write Ellen Clegg and Dan Kennedy, both veteran journalists, in their new book, “What Works in Community News: Media Start-Ups, News Deserts, and the Future of the Fourth Estate,” which explores ways in which various communities are trying to fill the vacuum.
The News Tribune is long gone as an independent daily. It did not simply die, as so many local papers have; after a series of mergers and sales, it ended up a part of a news site, My Central Jersey, with a staff of only 10 editors and reporters covering an area far greater than the old paper served. Still, it’s a better fate than that of the 2,900 or so dailies and weeklies that have gone under since 2005, one of the last years of “normal” journalism in the United States, 130 of them over the past year, as tallied in “The State of Local News 2023,” a report released this month from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University.
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