When a small town loses its newspaper, the damage can be both obvious and subtle.
It’s a case study educator and former journalist Andrew Conte tackles in his new book, “Death of the Daily News: How Citizen Gatekeepers Can Save Local Journalism” (University of Pittsburgh Press).
The newspaper in question is the McKeesport Daily News, which was shuttered in 2015, after 131 years in operation at the heart of that Mon Valley city. Conte, formerly an investigative reporter at the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review and now director of Point Park University’s Center for Media Innovation, looked at what happened next, as well as what the future might hold.
McKeesport is now home to about 19,000 residents, but on the eve of World War II – when it was still enough of a manufacturing powerhouse to warrant the nickname “Tube City” – it had nearly three times that many. The Daily News (whose final owner was local conglomerate Trib Total Media) survived the collapse of heavy industry in the region. But, like so many other local papers around the country, it couldn’t weather the loss of advertising revenue and subscribers ushered in by the Digital Age.
“Death of the Daily News,” however, isn’t a business post-mortem. Rather, Conte canvassed community members from politicians like State Sen. Jim Brewster and Mayor Michael Cherepko to business owners and neighbors about how the paper’s closure has affected them.
“People didn't really fully appreciate what they were getting from the newspaper until it was gone,” said Conte.
“Some of the public officials were like, ‘This is great. Nobody's going to be looking over our shoulder anymore. Nobody going to be asking difficult questions,’” Conte said. “But at the same time, there's not anybody there promoting all the things that you do.”
Perhaps less predictably, the paper’s shutdown stripped some of the town’s connective tissue – as Conte puts it, “the little things that you find out when you read the newspaper that, ‘Oh, there's a community event going on,’ or there's, you know, fish fries are happening or the births and the deaths and, you know, the little school activities and those things that we all sort of have taken for granted. But when … the stories about them disappear, it creates these gaps. And people are sort of lost and they get frustrated.”
Because humans naturally crave and trade information, new means of closing those gaps arose. But the holes are not easy to fill, Conte says. Neighborhood pages on Facebook, for instance, are subject to false claims, one-sided anecdotes, and misleading gossip. In McKeesport, professional, or professionally guided, news-gathering outlets appeared: The Mon Valley Independent newspaper, for instance, has one reporter in McKeesport; Tube City Online (founded by former reporter Jason Togyer) covers municipal issues there; and Conte’s own Center for Media Innovation itself helps citizens create original stories and photography through its McKeesport Community Newsroom initiative.
But many people don’t have web access. And even the most dedicated community volunteers will struggle to match the range and thoroughness of coverage McKeesport got from a fully staffed daily paper.
“Now there are lots of little pieces,” Conte said. “And so if people want to find out what's going on, they can still figure it out, but it takes more effort on their part.”
The “citizen gatekeepers” of the book’s title harken to the concept of the traditional media gatekeeper, like the small-city newspaper wire-service editor profiled in a fascinating 1949 Boston University report Conte cites: A single man who controlled, often based on his self-acknowledged whims and prejudices, the national and international news read by some 30,000 subscribers.
While today’s media still employs some such high-level gatekeepers – especially for consumers who stick to single news sources – the landscape overall is relatively chaotic, with journalism (of whatever quality) from countless outlets shared on social media. Citizens too become gatekeepers when they share such news, whether thoughtfully or indiscriminately, said Conte. And citizens become “citizen journalists” whenever they personally gather and spread information.
“For all of us now, anybody with a smartphone or a laptop computer can be a broadcaster and a publisher,” said Conte. “So I talk about the Peter Parker principle, [as in] Spider-Man – ‘with great power comes great responsibility.’ And that's what we sort of all have to accept as content creators, because that's what we all are now. We're all creating content all the time, but we need to use that power responsibly.”
But while citizen gatekeepers might have the power to “save journalism,” as Conte puts it, trained journalists might need to help, he said.
“As professional journalists, we have the ability and responsibility at this point to work with citizens to help them do a better job,” said Conte.
