Rural newspapers are fighting to survive. So what happens when major news hits?
Over the last 20 years, local news has seen massive consolidations, as small town papers lost advertisers and were forced to sell to large corporations. Since then, the number of newspaper employees in the U.S. has dropped by 57%. In Wyoming, three large corporations own over half of the local newspapers, including all the largest circulations. But staffing there isn’t what it used to be. So what happens when major news hits?
Back in April, Sublette County, Wyoming, found out. It made headlines when a local man brought a wolf into a bar, muzzled and injured. He’d purposefully run over it with a snowmobile and later killed it. Hunting wolves is legal in most of Wyoming, but many saw it as animal cruelty. It was immediately an international story.
Cali O’Hare, editor of the local Pinedale Roundup, said she was so busy covering other events, other media beat her to it. Since then, she’s made up for lost time.
“We’ve covered it in great detail, and I’ve been boots on the ground for that,” she said.
Her publisher is News Media Corporation, which owns more than 150 publications in five states — 16 just in Wyoming. The company laid off both her reporters last winter. Since then, O’Hare has been running the 120-year-old weekly newspaper by herself. The company didn’t respond to numerous requests for comment.
O’Hare said she really wished she’d had an editor for such a major story. “It does make me nervous not having another set of eyes reading over my stuff, so I tend to read over it until I’m cross-eyed.”
It was an important and ongoing local story too. When protestors came to town against the treatment of the wolf, they clashed with residents, and O’Hare felt threatened. People blasted truck horns to drown out her interviews. With her camera and her microphone, she felt like a target.
“I went to that protest with a gun on my hip, a knife in my pocket,” she said.
“When local news contracts, it creates a vacuum,” said Steve Waldman, the president of the media advocacy group Rebuild Local News. “It’s an information vacuum. The vacuum is filled by national media and social media. National media tends to be more partisan, so the contraction of local news leads to more polarization, more people demonizing each other.”
Waldman says studies show real harm to communities from the collapse of local journalism, especially in rural areas.
“People don’t have the information they need to decide who to vote for or to know what’s going on at their school. We know from studies and our own eyes that when there’s less local reporting, there’s less accountability, and there’s more corruption and there’s worse city services,” Waldman said. “There was even a study that said in areas that you had less local news, you had lower bond ratings and higher taxes because there was less accountability and just more inefficiency.”
And even when legacy papers do survive, they often turn into what Waldman calls a ghost paper.
“It’s still printing, it still has words and some pictures, but it’s cut way back on local reporting,” he said.
O’Hare is fighting to keep the Pinedale Roundup from becoming a ghost paper. She continues to cover the wolf story as the state decides whether to take action and is still covering things like the Little League.
“Because, of course, now I’m a sports reporter too,” she said.
That’s not all she does. “I do all the social media management. I do all the website management. I pay the bills to keep the lights on and the rent, the gas, the trash. Answer phones. Photographer.”
And she does all it for $41,000 a year.