The stunning development and uptake of the world wide web over the past twenty odd years has had a highly disruptive effect on the newspaper industry. Adaptation for many publications has centred on their ability to transition from a business model that automatically monetized content (a reader would simply pay for his or her newspaper while advertising brought in additional revenues) to one where it could suddenly be read for free online at a time when internet advertising was limited.
Some have navigated this disruption by continuing to print and charge for the traditional newspaper while offering the content free online; others have simply stopped printing and now offer free content online, relying on advertising; and others have set up various paywall models from offering a few free articles a month, or access to free opinion sections to all content being behind a paywall. The paywall model has involved an uphill task to persuade readers to pay for content but it seems that many newspapers that chose this route have stabilised their finances and in some cases flourished. And this is only right. Quality journalism costs money. The New York Times is a good example. It was hit heavily by the advent of the internet. Between 2000 and 2020, its daily circulation dropped by 55.7%. It shed hundreds of staff as it ran into the red. However it has since gone through the most transformative period in its history using the new technology to create exciting ways to present stories and engage readers. It has also been a success financially having built a base of 8 million online subscribers.
However paywalls do come at a price as not everyone who might want to read an important story or OpEd can do so. This may mean a diminution of a newspaper’s influence, and since a reader must choose and pay for a subscription this can create a compartmentalisation of readership – 91% of NYT readers identify as Demo-crats. For a small country like Guyana that can contribute to a less informed society and one where people are not open to other views or stories that don’t fit their own perceptions. This gives space for the kind of dangerous dis- and mis-information spread by social media to flourish.
At the same time the serious reading of newspapers has gone from a widespread morning activity to one that is somewhat niche in the way jazz went from being wildly popular in the 1950s to a backwater musical genre. In that vein, specialist financial publications such as the Wall St Journal, The Economist or the Financial Times create content that is keenly paid for. There again perhaps it is not the quantity of readership one reaches but its quality that matters. That might sound snobbish but reaching that one politician or political influencer (to steal a phrase from Instagram) often matters far more than a thousand working class readers. After all it is still the elite who decide what is news, what is important in a society. Just see the reams of newsprint spent on local content policy lately….
Local or community newspapers in particular have been devastated by the internet. According to Poynter, a non-profit journalism school and research organization, since 2004, about 1,800 newspapers have closed in the United States, 1700 of them being weeklies in small communities, and creating what are known as “news deserts”. Covid-19 has only accelerated the rate of closures. Researcher Penny Abernathy says “When you lose a small daily or a weekly, you lose the journalist who was gonna show up at your school board meeting, your planning board meeting, your county commissioner meeting,” she said. Communities lose transparency and accountability. Research shows that taxes go up and voter participation goes down in such deserts. It is a great pity especially for the hardworking journalists who were truly part of these communities and worked hard to keep going…like whalers in the second half of the 19th century as fossil fuels came to scuttle their ships.
Some local newspapers have survived but have had to drastically cut costs and morph into a hodge podge of advertorials and cut and pasted wire stories from national news. Instead as the playwright Arthur Miller suggested “A good newspaper…is a nation talking to itself.” In other words the average reader should feel he or she recognises their country on the printed page or phone screen .
Community journalism is all about that and has an important part to play. Local news perhaps is at its most effective when it shines a spotlight on what might seem to an outsider as a small injustice within a neighbourhood. A businessman is building some illegal or environmentally hazardous structure or has blocked a public road or drain. These kinds of community based grievances, as opposed to an important legal fight in the high court, often involve people who live around each other and know members of NDCs or mayors. It can be very messy. By highlighting the issues in a balanced way, a story surprisingly often has the effect of reaching a satisfactory outcome. Other stories about what community members are doing or a village’s history are keenly read and even cut out for a home’s scrapbook.
It all seems quaint in this Facebook world where you can see what your neighbour is doing not from looking out of the window but by seeing his or her “story”. The level of interconnectedness is extraordinary although it can never be a substitute for what are reliable accounts when it comes to serious matters.
Perhaps without the multiple reports in all the newspapers as well as from other professional media outlets, the aftermath of the Henry boys’ murders in Cotton Tree, West Berbice last year might have been much worse. On the whole they delivered the facts and dispelled the dangerous rumours in what was a precarious situation. We will never know but it does seem that the rise of social media is leading to unreliable information that can inflame societies. The storming of the Capitol on January 6 being a case in point.
Community journalism when done right can even strengthen and harmonise communities by helping to show others as humans first. It can also promote local businesses and thereby keep money within communities rather than it going into chain stores.
Ultimately it creates a more rounded image and enhances a sense of community which is after all what every country is made up of – a collection of communities. Finding correspondents willing to take up such roles is not easy but it is worthwhile and part of the service any responsible national newspaper should provide.
