Good morning.
Fall begins in Whitewater with partly cloudy skies and a high of 76. Sunrise is 6:42 and sunset is 6:51, for 12 hours, 9 minutes of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 0.6 percent of its visible disk illuminated.
The Whitewater School Board meets at 6 PM.
On this day in 1862, Pres. Lincoln issues a preliminary version of the Emancipation Proclamation.
A news desert, simply defined, is a place without a professional newspaper, as a natural desert is an arid place without much precipitation. (In this metaphor, the presence of a newspaper provides nurturing information the way rainfall nurtures vegetation.)
There are degrees of news deserts: no professional newspapers, professional newspapers behind paywalls that discourage many potential readers, professional newspapers behind paywalls that discourage some potential readers, professional newspapers without paywalls, citizen journalism1 efforts on the web or social media dedicated to news, and social media platforms that discuss news only incidentally and occasionally.
(Obvious point: FREE WHITEWATER is a site of commentary; it’s not a site of reporting the news, but of commenting on the news. This libertarian blogger comes from a newspaper-reading family2, and although there are ever-fewer serious newspapers left in this country, the distinction between news and opinion still makes sense to me.)
The lack of professional journalism is made worse by the lack of accessible professional journalism: few residents in communities like Whitewater pay to get past a paywall. Anyone who tells you otherwise, especially advertising sales teams, is wrong. (In the case of an ad sales team, they’re lying.) What’s behind the paywall stays unread behind the paywall. People may read a paywalled story’s headline on Facebook, and react to that headline alone, but few will subscribe to read the full story.
There’s another problem of a news desert. The communities in which deserts emerge are often also fragmented and factionalized, as Whitewater is. (I’ll leave aside whether the emergence of factions leads to the decline of newspapers or the decline of newspapers leads to factionalization. The causes and effects are not so simple as that.) It’s enough to know that Whitewater has several factions, in the city and small towns comprising the rest of the area’s school district, and they have decidedly different outlooks among them. The Whitewater area’s residents commonly gather and support in unison some events (holidays, sporting events), but are divided on many political and cultural issues. These are deep divisions, and they’ve grown in the 2010s and 2020s.
This fragmentation naturally leads residents to look in different directions, consistent with their outlooks, and there’s no single news source that everyone here reads. Some will read one source, some another, some nothing at all. That’s Whitewater today; that’s the direction in which Whitewater has been traveling for the last quarter century, and certainly since the Great Recession. (Irony: by the time the city developed its own citizen news site in 2006, the Great Recession that began the next year was destined to take the area down a path of socio-economic fragmentation3 that would make a predominant news source, especially one without the gravitas of professionalism, less likely. )
This leaves a community’s grasp of policy and policymaking only weak and partial. Politics may involve a single event (a candidate’s claim, an election result), but policy and policymaking require more detail than those political events. A successful news site must cover many meetings, many details from those meetings, and in doing so give its readers an informed background on a local topic. Social media algorithms, notably, don’t make the history of policy proposals a priority. (Helping readers follow a months-long policy debate on Facebook isn’t Meta’s primary, secondary, or even tertiary goal.)
A successful news site attracts readers who follow along, well-crafted story after story, and so become knowledgeable on a topic. It attracts those readers because it offers that kind of coverage. False claims and misinformation are common in a community without a true newspaper of common record. (The formal designation paper of record means little apart from the publication of legal notices. It’s a community understanding of basic facts on policy and policymaking that makes a news site a community record.)
A community with partial information is at a disadvantage in policymaking, as policymaking requires thorough, accessible, and well-read information about a topic.
Tomorrow: Some solutions for a news desert.
____
- It’s certain — absolutely certain — that a professional journalist who reads FREE WHITEWATER will now contact me and say: “there is no citizen journalism, only professional journalism, and you should know that by now.” I will then reply: “Well, I know that in places without doctors or trained first responders, sometimes communities are left to rely on a few residents with a first aid kit.” My reply will not go over well… ↩︎
- That I’m referring to news sites on the web as newspapers is the tell that I grew up in a print era, when there were printed books, magazines, journals, and newspapers all over the house. So ingrained are these memories that although this site is on the web, I still sometimes refer to professional journalism sites as newspapers. In my practice, almost everything I read and write is digital, and yet my usage sometimes remains rooted in an earlier time. ↩︎
- This reveals the fate of Whitewater’s aged special interest men: the town’s culture — culture, not government — has changed so much that they have nowhere near the clout the last generation had. Simply put, a younger generation cares about many things, but understandably doesn’t base its views on yesteryear’s perspective. ↩︎
Heavy rainfall floods streets in southern France: