The sadness of losing local journalism - Covid Chronicles

In my grandfather’s house there was a room off the hall that held all the curios of a long life – half-opened birthday presents (Aircel singlets usually), old suitcase straps, clothes that no one wanted, extra blankets for winter and a gentle arc of piled newspapers. Every day my grandfather would read our local newspaper, spread out on a rickety card table in the living room where the light was best, and investigate the content, often with a magnifying glass to catch the small details in the classifieds, especially the funerals. Each day, he would find in the newspaper the fodder for the morning call to my mother.

That local newspaper was where I started in journalism. The paper, The Examiner in Launceston, still exists but not as I knew it. In its day, it had one of the highest audience penetration rates of any newspaper in Australia: that translated in to nine out of 10 locals reading it. We were proud to work in a bustling, busy and vibrant newsroom. The skills we learned became the bedrock of some long journalism careers spent overseas, on metropolitan dailies, television and radio. But now, during this unprecedented health crisis, the final bulwark against the end of these vital local publications is being swept away. Across the country, from Broken Hill to Mildura, from Manly to Mornington, the local hard copy publications are being closed, some to digital, others to never reappear.

It turns out that no one in print media was immune from the impact of free digital news and the hair-raising collapse of advertising revenue, especially those reporting on their local communities. And it feels wrong at a time of such widespread grief, despondency and anxiety to reflect on what looks like the end of something as intangible as local journalism. But we should, because of all the things we lose – or have lost already –‘’community’’, in all its breadth and nuance, is a priority. And one of the keys to fostering, recording, reflecting and engaging a community is the local newspaper.

This is not entirely a nostalgic lament. For many of us who dipped in and out of local journalism we kept hearing that despite what were then just cracks in the advertising model that underpinned big media’s viability, there was still hope for community journalism. It was less than 20 years ago that we were being told that the future of journalism was “hyper-local’’ coverage from “citizen journalists’’. Communities would generate their own news coverage and use the internet’s connectivity to disseminate information to provoke, react and debate. But it hasn’t worked out that way.

Practicalities, as usual, got in the way. Who has the time – or more importantly, the skill - to observe and report, collate and write, monitor and re-post these days? How many people in a local community actually know how to go about it? Or even have sufficient interest? Just think about it – how many conversation do you have (or had before social distancing) with people locally – at school, at childcare, over the back fence, at the café or pub, were really an exchange of opinions or parlaying of rumours, rather than a recitation  of facts, verified by another source and tested for accuracy?

These considerations don’t bother everyone. There are plenty of critics who contest the conventional journalistic elements of what makes a ‘story’. Let the audience decide what makes a story. Maybe, but it hasn’t worked out that way: it’s often more to do with how an audience reacts to a story. More problematic, there is widespread disdain for journalists and the work they produce. This was supposed to be a judgement particularly virulent among those people dealing with metropolitan mainstream media. Journalists in regional or rural publications were supposedly held in higher regard because they cared more about their audience – those who lived and reported locally confronted their mistakes in the shopping centre, in the car park or at the council chambers. It was community accountability because everyone had a stake in the story. The local reporters had to wear their errors and usually became better because of it.

But such good intentions – and that’s ultimately what they were – could not protect local journalism from the relentless commercial realities. When I joined Leader Community Newspapers in Melbourne in 2004, we had 200 editorial staff and 33 titles, with a weekly audience of 1.8 million readers. We boasted it was the biggest community newspaper network in the southern hemisphere. But we didn’t believe we were too big to fail. We were already on the runway to a digital future and wrestling the irreconcilable practicalities of wondering how to charge readers for content that they received free in their letterbox. The revenue crash might have taken longer to exert its hold on local journalism sustained as it was by real estate ads, but it became clear that the golden days were not timeless. For the past decade, local journalism has stood on the precipice. The advent of COVID-19 represents the firmest of hands in the small of the back that pushes most of those hanging on, over the edge. I don’t think of myself as a dinosaur: I work in a digital-only environment for a niche audience, as the media forecasters correctly predicted would become an option for journalists all those years ago. But I can’t be happy about what we have lost because we will never get it back and never be able to replicate it. There will never again be well-staffed local newsrooms serving a community of engaged readers who see their local paper as part of their daily routine. Fundamentally, local newspapers – in rural and regional areas in particular – bind people together: they combine those readers’ past and present and give them the recognition of occupying a place in a community. Take that away and we are all satellites, bumping around, untethered and disconnected. Do we really want to feel more anonymous and adrift in this isolation era?

My grandfather died aged 94. In all his life, across the end of one century and towards the tail end of another, he chose to read a local paper. We are the generation who will not be able to claim such a thing or make such a choice. The habit of years has been worn away and finally broken. Such a realisation is, for those of us who still hear the faintest heartbeat of the journalism we love, a cause for deep sadness.