The news about local news in America stinks, but there’s a few organizations fighting back and making it work. That was the subject of a cover story in the Christian Science Monitor that went live earlier this week.
We thought you might want to read it.
Richland Source and the Mansfield News Journal, two of Mansfield’s major news operations were at the center of the story.
If you would rather download and print the PDF version of the story, you can do that here.
While in Mansfield, freelance journalist Doug Struck spoke to people all over the city including our leadership team, newsroom employees at the Source and the News Journal, Mayor Theaker, and a number of others.
It’s a sign of good journalism when some questions make you a little uncomfortable. At least for our team, they did. Struck challenged our assumptions and made us justify our approach to local news gathering, which is a tossed salad of hard news and community information, dressed with a focus on solutions journalism.
He asked hard questions about our audience engagement work, and our stance as a force for progress and positive change in the region.
In his observations about Mansfield, we didn’t always love what we were reading, but we think he was fair. His quotes from our team were accurate and as we noted, the news about the business of local news in America is generally bad.
Just last month, a merger of Gatehouse and Gannett cleared anti-trust hurdles and will likely result in more dramatic changes in the local news landscape right here in Mansfield. It’s a chilling overall picture for the state of corporate-owned journalism.
According to a report from The University of North Carolina, 1,800 newspapers have closed since 2004 – 1 in every 5 across the country – creating a U.S. map spotted with “news deserts.”
A Pew Research Center analysis in July showed newspaper circulation since 1990 has been cut in half, to 31 million last year. Pew reported jobs in all newsrooms plunged by one-quarter in the past decade.
Yet Struck’s piece also touched on some of the reasons local journalism is so incredibly important — and why readers not just want, but need a locally-invested news organization in their communities.
It goes beyond having a watchdog for public entities, which is critical and obvious. Local news also includes business openings, neighborhood projects and even sports and obituaries. These pieces of information keep us informed, feed our sense of pride in the region, and stitch us together in the fabric of a community.
Our founder, Carl Fernyak, is adamant we remain a source of free online news and information. We’re transparent that our mission is to help change the conversation about north central Ohio through the practice of solutions journalism. But while our journalism is free to read; it isn’t free to report, edit, publish and deliver.
To sustain our mission over the long term, we’ve had to be innovative and think differently. For example, last year over 20 local Newsroom Partners pledged more than $70,000 to support the solutions journalism work of our team, recognizing the site’s importance and impact in the community.
This past year, we radically re-vamped our membership program. It’s grown significantly, but there’s a long way to go. We hope you’ll join, or upgrade your membership today. If you use the code “MONITOR” at checkout, you’ll save 20% on your first month or first year, whichever option you choose.
Thanks for reading Richland Source and for all of your support. If you have questions or concerns, please reach out to either Jay or myself anytime. Our office number is 419-610-2100.
We wondered too, so we did a bit of research.
It was founded in 1908 by a woman named Mary Baker Eddy, and it has one of the more interesting “About Us” pages in the news business.
“We want to help you to see news events as starting points for constructive conversations. We seek to cut through the froth of the political spin cycle to underlying truths and values. We want to be so focused on progress that together we can provide a credible and constructive counter-narrative to the hopelessness-, anger-, and fear-inducing brand of discourse that is so pervasive in the news.”
The Christian Science Monitor publishes a weekly magazine, registers over a million unique visitors a month to its web site, and has won seven Pulitzer Prizes since its founding.
