Keeping Local News Alive and The Photographs of Bonny Parham
A Time of Peril and a Community Stalwart
Hi!
Instead of a piece of prose, poetry, or series of photographs created by me, I am using today’s newsletter to urge you to support local news and the journalists that cover your community relentlessly, working extremely long hours for little pay.
You don’t need me to tell you that local news is in trouble, but in case you are unaware, this is from The State of Local News report by Northwestern:
Newspapers are continuing to vanish at a rapid rate. An average of more than two a week are disappearing. Since 2005, the country has lost more than a fourth of its newspapers (2,500) and is on track to lose a third by 2025. Even though the pandemic was not the catastrophic “extinction-level event” some feared, the country lost more than 360 newspapers between the waning pre-pandemic months of late 2019 and the end of May 2022. All but 24 of those papers were weeklies, serving communities ranging in size from a few hundred people to tens of thousands. Most communities that lose a newspaper do not get a digital or print replacement. The country has 6,380 surviving papers: 1,230 dailies and 5,150 weeklies.
Over the last several decades, as locally-owned, small papers have struggled to keep a paying readership in the increasingly digital age, large hedge funds, such as Alden, have swooped in and purchased them by the dozens, laying off staff and reducing coverage to cut costs, hiking up the price of a subscription, and loading the paper down with debt. Subsequently, readers get a lesser product at a higher price. The Atlantic published an in-depth, investigative piece into Alden after they acquired The Chicago Tribune:
“If you want to know what it’s like when Alden Capital buys your local newspaper, you could look to Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, where coverage of local elections in more than a dozen communities falls to a single reporter working out of his attic and emailing questionnaires to candidates. You could look to Oakland, California, where the East Bay Times laid off 20 people one week after the paper won a Pulitzer. Or to nearby Monterey, where the former Herald reporter Julie Reynolds says staffers were pushed to stop writing investigative features so they could produce multiple stories a day. Or to Denver, where the Post’s staff was cut by two-thirds, evicted from its newsroom, and relocated to a plant in an area with poor air quality, where some employees developed breathing problems.”
But Alden isn’t alone. Gannett and McClatchy have both followed similar strategies, and they have refused to cooperate with unions of their employees while not giving raises in pay or meeting employees’ requests for more stringent workplace safety guidelines. At the IndyStar, unionized employees picketed around Monument Circle in downtown Indianapolis demanding a new contract, something they have gone two years without.
What happens when local news disappears? School board meetings go unchecked, the city council has no watchdog to answer to. Click here to read a comprehensive report with specific case studies by PEN America covered in the New York Times. Furthermore, a large portion of national reporting in outlets such as the New York Times and the Washington Post, two newspapers doing well financially, is derived from the work of local journalists. If the local journalists can’t break the story, national outlets can’t amplify it, and everyone is worse off. So what can you do? Subscribe to your local newspaper (which could be as little as a $1 for the first several months), donate to non-profit news organizations that cover your area, and read the pieces they publish.
When I think of the importance of local journalism, the first person that comes to my mind is Bonny Parham, who covered my hometown, Amory, Mississippi, for nearly forty years through both photography and writing. Beginning in the 1960s, she dedicated herself to the small town, covering big events such as elections, train wrecks, storms and quirky human-interest moments such as who could grow the biggest plants in town and the man who had trained his dogs to jump through hoops in a coordinated show. I had the honor of profiling Bonny’s trailblazing career and work for the Mississippi Free Press, a women-founded non-profit outlet covering the Magnolia state. Here is a selection of Bonny’s photographs following, and please read the piece here and consider donating to the Mississippi Free Press, which relies on donations and grant funding to thrive.