If you haven't noticed, lately newspapers have been hitting the floor like birds at Chernobyl.
The Rocky Mountain News ... done.
Seattle Post-Intelligencer & Detroit Free Press... online only.
The New York Times ... massive layoffs.
Tribune Company & Philadelphia Newspapers ... bankrupt.
Even Yahoo News had to reorganize.
And our own EdWeek has experienced alleged ... "staff reductions".
In total, in the last quarter of last year newspapers sales fell 2 billion dollars.
And, those are the big names you are hearing about. Rural newspapers have been hurting for decades and many are now already gone.
Here is James DeLong's conclusion:
If the newspapers do not survive, then what takes on the crucial social and economic roles they have performed over the past century and more? That is unknowable. Failing some inventive institutional spark, some vital functions might simply go unperformed. The Internet is creating a “tragedy of the commons” situation for news, and no one ever claimed that all problems have solutions. Decay and decline are always options, and—unless some mechanism is found to let producers of information monetize their work—inevitabilities. Absent institutional invention, a government-funded news service seems not just possible but likely, possibly supplemented by privately funded organizations with varying axes to grind.
So, if the government is going to have to be a bigger player, the question is whether there is a role for schools to fill this void? As schools become more technologically savvy and have more and more publishing equipment on hand, perhaps they can play some role in producing local news? Even if it is just online. In some small towns the local news is literally the beautyshop, the church bulliten and the school newsletters. In many rural communities the local newspaper basically was the school marketing arm anyway, publishing everything from sports photos, to the honor roll, to the cafeteria lunch schedule. In urban communities, as the companies cut-back local positions and purchase more and more of their content from AP like sources, the local school events are being ignored.
I think schools need to be better at media and marketing anyway. What if they just took some responsibility to produce a little local news in whatever form they had the capacity to accomplish? I know it is one more thing, but I could see quite a few benefits. First and foremost, from an administration standpoint, you get to control the local narrative. That's very important. But, also, this could help student writing if they wrote most of the stories. They would also learn more about their local communities. Students might go to city council meetings, for instance. It would also help communities by continuing to give them a voice and identity.
This wouldn't be the first time that schools assumed a community role. The downtown playhouses of the past are now just empty shells, but the auditoriums are still in our high schools regularly putting out South Pacific. The school has the local band. Hosts local dances. Provides weekend entertainment with local football and basketball games. In a lot of ways the schools have slowly been becoming the local hubs of entertainment and information anyway. Could this be next?
Something to think about when the local paper closes shop in your community.