The news quickly paid national headlines. Sara Ganim, the journalist behind the story, believed the Patriots By providing the time and space required to chase the narrative. Won a Pulitzer Award for her work next year.
Ganim joined a long legacy of journalists in local documents revealing great stories – such as The Hartford Courant revealing that the US military had sent soldiers with serious psychological issues to fight in Iraq. or the McCurtain Gazette-News The story that discovers a plot from a local sheriff and county officials to kill two journalists and hang black people.
The list continues.
However, despite their extensive effects, local news is out. In 2023, on average 2.5 local newspapers closed every week. More than half of us counties now have little or no reliable local news coverage and the trend is accelerating.
“Not having this journalism is a real loss for society,” he says Michael SinsonAssociate Professor of Strategy at Kellogg, who has studied how competition from other media sources has contributed to this decline.
Together with Charles angelucci by mit and Julia Kisses From Sciences Po Paris, Sinkinson mapped how the early rise of television interrupted local newspapers and how this process, in turn, allowed national political tendencies to overcome local policy and ultimately influence voting decisions.
“What comes back, most basically, is that the business model of a local newspaper depends on the commitment of different types of content together, including local news,” Sinkinson says. “Increased competition in elements of this beam made it harder for them to do their job and just ran smoother businesses.”
Here comes the TV
Television was initially licensed for commercial broadcasting in the US in 1941 and spread quickly to the 1950s.
The extension hit a series of technical and mechanical challenges in September 1948, urging the Federal Committee on Communications (FCC) to stop the licensing of new television stations. This “FCC Freeze” lasted four years, during which the number of television series used increased from 250,000 to almost 17 million.
In total, licenses of 108 local television stations were granted before freezing, and more than 700 applications were held.
“This freezing allowed us to take advantage of a very nice natural experiment,” Sinkinson says. “During these four years, some news markets had seen the entrance of the television, while others did not, and that unfolded quasi, so that we could see the influence on newspapers in these different cities.”
Sinkinson and his colleagues gathered information about the location, height, channel and power of the broadcast towers for each television station.
They used this data to determine the geographical area in which a television signal could be obtained. And then overlap the range of television stations over a map of local newspapers. This allowed them to identify which local newspaper markets were on television before freezing.
The researchers then exported the number of pages published in four days of selected days from each local newspaper, as well as the number of articles and the categories (weather, international, sports, etc.) of the stories. They also garnered traffic numbers, subscription prices and local documents from local documents across the country.
Fewer readers, fewer ads
It was not immediately obvious what the television rise in local newspapers would have.
‘These different sources of news [television and newspapers] They could have been supplements where people hear about a story about the evening news and then want to read something more in -depth, “Sinkinson says.
Overall, television entry has led to a 3.1 % reduction in newspaper circulation and a 3.3 % reduction in subscription prices. At the same time, advertising rates decreased by 2 % and the total amount of advertising in local evening documents decreased by 3.9 %.
The content of local documents also changed.
The total number of stories published by local documents decreased by 6.6 % after television entered the same market. This number is largely due to a drop of 10 % of local species. The number of national stories included in local newspapers, on the other hand, did not change significantly.
“In a way, these results are quite simple,” says Sinkinson. “Fewer people read the paper. So they made less money than advertising and then we see the contents of the newspaper shrink.”
In the end, television development meant fewer people received local news through newspapers. The documents themselves also published fewer articles on local news, and the coverage of national items was kept stable.
In other words, America’s news diet has begun to become more national.
Political lens
This shift to news consumption habits corresponds to what Sinkinson calls “nationalization” of local policy.
He and his associates have gathered evidence at the county level on the elections for the House, the Senate and the Presidency from 1932-1964. They found that counties in which local newspapers competed on television also had a fall in the “split-ticket” vote, where people would vote for candidates for different parties-a Republican spokesman, let’s say, but a democratic president.
Continuing with the fall of local species cover, the way people voted for local candidates in these counties began to align more closely as they voted for the president.
“Today, almost all policy levels have become nationalized,” says Sinkinson, “we see the beginning of this trend in this time.”
Although this shift alone is neither good nor bad, researchers note, raises questions about political accountability locally. To the extent that voters are badly informed of local politics, a local official’s political party can prove more important to election and re -election by real platforms and performance.
An annoying epilogue
The US media landscape has changed a lot in the last 70 years.
The researchers reviewed local newspapers that competed with television markets during the FCC freezing and found that, since 2017, only ten were in print.
The average number of total published stories had been reduced by 37.5 %, from 152 to 95. And only 50 of these stories came from the original report, compared to 86 in the 1940s and 1950s. These papers had been made, Sinkinson says: “A shell of their former self.”
Today, the internet probably contributed to the ongoing decline of local newspapers.
This is what Sinkinson notes, there is an argument that must be done that the internet has at the same time reduced the obstacle to access to stories and has allowed more citizens’ journalism than before. The locations of super -news news that provide neighborhood news per neighbor are in a slight resurgence. National – even international -News stories are produced for huge audiences in social media on the fountain of a phone.
“It is certainly likely that the internet has led or could lead to the democratization of news,” Sinkinson says. “At the same time, however, I don’t want to hang my hat for the argument that the internet was great for new ones.”
