It was front page news last week when the Clarion-Ledger reported that three weekly newspapers in Mississippi had ceased operation — the Leland Progress, the Jasper County News and the Smith County Reformer. All three newspapers have been operating for more than135 years.
There were dozens of Facebook comments on the closing:
“Who will pick up the torch from here?”
“Thank you for providing us all with a weekly paper to keep us all abreast of the happenings. It will be missed! We appreciate your years of service to our community!”
“So sorry to see another newspaper has gone out of business. I will miss it very much.”
“That's a big loss to the community.”
“Thank you for all the years you provided the news for all of us.”
“We thank you for your faithful coverage of events in Jasper, Smith and Jones Counties. We are already missing y’all and your newspapers.”
“A shame... End of an era for Jasper County.. Enjoyed the informative paper. Our Family has patronized the JCP for decades. Praying for Carolyn and all the family and employees. May God bless.”
And so on.
Sixteen thousand three hundred and sixty six people live in Jasper County. There will not be a single local journalist whose job it is to report basic local news. That’s a travesty for the richest major country in the world.
People love to bash the national media for being biased, but that’s not what we’re talking about here. We’re talking about basic coverage of things like garbage pick up, the board of supervisors meeting, crime news, economic development and the like.
The United States has lost half its journalists in the last decade, going from approximately 50,000 journalists to 25,000. Most of these were local journalists.
Facebook is fine for keeping up with friends and neighbors. It has a role in communicating local news. But a Facebook post is not the same as a genuine local article written by a properly trained professional journalist.
Twenty years ago, nearly every major college or university had a journalism department. Most of these still exist and turn out thousands of trained journalists a year. But the number of reporting jobs declines every year. It’s becoming a bridge to nowhere.
In journalism school, you are taught the proper way to write a story: verifying your facts, getting a response from both sides, objectivity, searching government records, libel laws and a hundred other aspects of professional reporting.
Meanwhile, anybody can make a Facebook post. The posts that go viral are the ones that are most inflammatory, most outrageous and often the most false. Without a local journalist to at least serve as a fact checker, the Facebook news in Jasper County is going to significantly decline.
Ironically, the more viral and fake the news, the more eyeballs click on it and the more ad impressions Facebook sells. It’s a recipe for disaster.
Add to that the absurdity that Congress has given Facebook and other Internet platforms immunity from the libel laws that the Jasper County News had to follow for 140 years.
It’s called Section 230 of the Communications Act of 1996. It is a perfect example of the law of unintended consequences. Congress didn’t think Internet platforms could get off the ground if they were constantly getting sued for information they published. Thirty years later, the monster Congress created has reared its ugly head.
People thought the Internet would be democratizing. Let a thousand flowers bloom. Instead, it laid the groundwork for the biggest monopolies in human history. But this time it’s not Standard Oil monopolizing oil, it’s Google, Twitter and Facebook monopolizing information.
Over the decades, I have written hundreds of times about threats to our society and political system. It has been a great honor to make a living commenting and reporting on our democratic republic — the greatest in the world.
But now I’m commenting on something that I am intimately involved in — the production of local news. It’s dying and this is a threat to our democracy.
Polls show that the general public doesn’t realize the dire financial straits local news producers face. But it’s a reality.
And this is not just a matter of newsprint being obsolete. Every local newspaper also publishes a website and is active on social media. The problem is not the medium being obsolete. The problem is there is no longer a way to monetize the production of professional local news.
How is this? One answer can be found in the U. S. Department of Justice’s Antitrust Division’s lawsuit against Google for monopolization of digital advertising. They control every facet of it, from top to bottom.
Imagine one company owning all the stock exchanges, all the financial apps, all the banks, and all the stock brokerages. That’s the way it works in America for digital advertising. It’s 99 for Google, one for the local publishers.
There are federal laws that have come close to passing to help sustain journalism. Mississippi Senator Roger Wicker is a co-sponsor of the Journalism Competition and Preservation Act, which would make the big platforms pay a royalty to local news providers when they use their content, similar to the way Spotify must pay songwriters. But Google and Facebook kill it every time.
State legislators in New York, Ohio and California have all passed multi-million dollar tax credits for journalists. That’s a start.
There is one simple thing the Mississippi state legislature can do to help. Adjust the amount newspapers get for publishing public notices. The rate hasn’t been adjusted for over 25 years, even though the Mississippi Press Association has invested heavily in a statewide publicly available database for such notices.
This one simple thing would go a long way to preventing weekly newspaper closures such as the ones in Leland, Jasper County and Smith County.
