No news is bad news

There's an elephant in the newsroom.

Not the editor, though he did eat too many Hudson's burgers the other day. No, we're talking about that thing you're holding in your hand right now or perhaps perusing on a computer screen. The big, gray monstrosity that too few are willing to acknowledge or debate openly is what's happening to American journalism. Most of those who are talking about it shrug and file it under "bad news."

That seemed to be underscored Thursday when an important report, commissioned by the Federal Communications Commission and written by a respected former journalist, concluded that quality local reporting is receding at an alarming rate. The study warns that by decreasing coverage of state and local governments, those governments are increasingly powerful, more able to set their own agendas and function as they wish.

"In many communities, we now face a shortage of local, professional, accountability reporting," writes Steven Waldman, formerly of Newsweek and U.S. News and World Report. "The independent watchdog function that the Founding Fathers envisioned for journalism - going so far as to call it crucial to a healthy democracy - is in some cases at risk at the local level."

The study found that the proliferation of online news sources has not been accompanied by a commensurate volume of quality local reporting. In fact, it's headed the other direction.

"Breathtaking media abundance lives side by side with serious shortages in reporting," Waldman's report says. "Communities benefit tremendously from many innovations brought by the Internet and simultaneously suffer from the dislocations caused by the seismic changes in media markets."

Keeping with the earthquake analogy, Waldman says, local television reporters and reporters on a national level use the stories generated by local newspapers as tip sheets. Cutbacks on local newspaper staffs thus create "ripple effects throughout the whole media system," Waldman says.

Because they're so dependent on advertising, newspapers have been badly hurt by the recession. Other wounds, though, have been self-inflicted: Online competition like Craigslist popped up and began eating newspapers' lunches; newspapers were slow to respond, many thinking they were seeing just another passing fad. The result is that newspapers have lost great sums of revenue and readership from the subsequent decline in classified advertising.

The FCC-ordered report includes non-binding recommendations, including steering more government advertising dollars toward local rather than national media; requiring actual in-the-field reporting at journalism schools; even altering the tax code to make donations to nonprofit media organizations more attractive.

In our small corner of the world, we abhor the idea of a free press sustained by governmental policies and practices. A better solution is that we do our jobs better so that you find enough value in your local newspaper to advertise there.

The elephant suggests that after thousands of journalists have lost their jobs, fear of job loss is a powerful motivator for the rest of us. But that's not the only fear. We're afraid for our Republic, too.