Forty years ago I got my first job in journalism, working over a summer holiday for The River News – a weekly newspaper serving the town of Waikerie in the South Australian Riverland. Circulation was about 2,000 – which meant that just about every household in the town and surrounding areas bought a copy each week.
The River News wasn’t particularly a bastion of quality journalism. One of my jobs was to write the advertorial. Such was my naivety that I approached what was meant to be an advertising feature on the local Ford dealership as an investigative project – and had my first experience of copy being comprehensively rewritten as a result.
But it was at the River News that I realised I wanted to be a journalist. I simply loved it – reporting the courts, the local council, the impact of salinity in the Murray River and the school swimming carnival. I loved the licence it gave me to ask questions and to enter the business of the town and the details of people’s lives.
I loved amplifying and informing the conversations in the street. And the regularity with which I ran into the subjects of my reports in the street and the supermarket queue was a great way of teaching me to be factually accurate and robust.
I went on to get a cadetship at The Age newspaper in Melbourne and never again had to cover a school swimming carnival. Rather a pity, really.
Last week it was announced that I am now involved in another venture in local journalism – PS Media. I mention this by way of declaration of interest. If you want more details on the new venture, you can read about it here.
Since the announcement, I have been asked why I want to go local again after so long in national media.
So let me explain. The commitment is born of fear and hope. I have never been more frightened about the fragmentation of our society, and the dangers brought by disempowered, poorly informed communities.
I have Donald Trump and the QAnon conspiracy theory to thank for bolstering my argument.
In the USA, a large minority of citizens have become so disconnected from reality that they have begun to believe the most extraordinary conspiracy theories – global networks of paedophiles, DNA harvesting through Covid tests, baby-eating Satanists and more.
You can’t entirely blame them. The President encouraged them, and so did mainstream news outlets such as FoxNews.
Journalists rapidly became irrelevant. Reliable outlets were dismissed by the President as “fake news”. Meanwhile, the conspiracy movements created their own media, and targeted the disaffected and the distressed. Soon, it didn’t matter what the national and city based media said. People didn’t trust them.
We saw the result of all this in the insurrection in Washington on 6 January. There are now real questions about whether the USA can still be governed – whether its democracy can survive.
The death of local news is a big part of this story. Dating from the late 1990s, local newspapers across middle America died, or were hollowed out. That created the vacuum in which extremism could breed.
Local news plays a particular part in credibility and trust. Citizens know enough about their local communities to have an instinctive sense of the voracity and relevance of the news.
A local news outlet will tell you why the potholes in the road haven’t been fixed, or the story behind the column of smoke on the horizon last week, or the reason the chief executive of council resigned in a huff, or the outcome of criminal charges.
The connection with the lived experience of the community makes it impossible to dismiss it as fake news. People might disagree with the slant, but there is an agreed basis of facts.
And it is hard to dismiss the journalist you run into in the supermarket queue as an agent of some international evil conspiracy.
Local journalism, done well, can take the visceral connection to community and expand the knowledge and understanding of its audience, and contribute to citizens’ sense of agency. It can explain how the affairs of the nation play out in the neighbourhood.
Detailed studies in the USA show that in communities without newspapers, household incomes and high school graduations are lower than the national average, and poverty rates higher. As local news vanishes, new ways of manipulating the public proliferate on social media platforms, including by malign and foreign actors.
I have spoken of the USA, but this story is also playing out in Australia.
The News Mapping Project, maintained by the Public Interest Journalism Initiative, has tracked 194 contractions in Australian newsrooms since January 2019 – with most of these being in local news outlets. The “contractions” include print newspapers closing down, decreases in service, closure of newsrooms (even when the masthead, notionally, continues to exists) and masthead and station closures.
This is the latest lurch in a longer term story.
Over the last twenty years news deserts have emerged in our suburbs and regions. The edge of urban areas are of particular concern. This is where so many social problems arise, and where communities, often of first generation Australians, struggle to establish themselves and cohere.
This is where extremism of all kinds can foment.
When city-based news media does report these areas, it is often as the location of a “problem” rather than as a functioning community. Mainstream media comes to be seen as a hostile visitor. It demonises and is easily demonised in return.
We have great national issues – such as the future of the Murray Darling Basin, or aged care, or insecure work – that drastically impact people’s lives. Yet we fail to give them communities information that might help them to understand what is happening, and what might be done about it, and how their voices might be heard.
This is fertile ground for conspiracy theorists. And in Australia, too, we have politicians who will capitalise on that.
Sadly, Australia is one of the countries where the USA born QAnon conspiracy has gained a significant grip. We are fourth in the world, after the USA, Canada and the UK for QAnon material being shared on social media.
The state of rural and regional news services in Australia has been repeatedly highlighted as a cause for special concern, and government action. The 2012 Finkelstein report found that regional news service “requires especially careful monitoring” and that there “is some evidence that both regional radio and television stations and newspapers have cut back substantially on their news gathering, leaving some communities poorly served for local news.”
Nothing was done, which means it got much worse. More recently, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission also highlighted the decline of local news as justifying urgent action.
There are some welcome examples of innovation in national and international media. Outlets such as The Guardian in Australia have found a footing, partly through philanthropic donations and reader’s voluntary contributions. Other national media outlets have had some success with digital subscriptions. But so far none of this has been successfully translated to local media.
There are now few ways to bring people together in our communities. Establishing a collective understanding of what’s going on – and what is important for the future – brings unity and an acceptance of diversity.
Without it, communities become unsure of each other, and assumption and misinformation can replace understanding.
Without local news, our country is weakened, and our population deprived of information, power and voice.
This is why, after forty years as a journalist, I have again turned to local news.
It is about the nature of our country and our democracy. Without local news, I fear for the future. With it, I have every hope.
And perhaps I will again report on the local swimming carnival.
Margaret Simons is an award-winning freelance journalist and the author of many books and numerous articles and essays. She is also a journalism academic and Honorary Principal Fellow at the Centre for Advancing Journalism, University of Melbourne. She has won the Walkley Award for Social Equity Journalism, a Foreign Press Association Award and a number of Quill Awards, including for her reporting from the Philippines with photojournalist Dave Tacon.
Support quality journalism.
As an inkl member you can directly support the work of journalists like Margaret Simons, while also getting access to 100+ publications like Foreign Affairs, The Independent, The Economist, Financial Times and Bloomberg.
As part of our commitment to building a sustainable future for journalism, a portion of your monthly inkl membership fee will go directly to Margaret for as long as you remain a subscriber.
BECOME A MEMBER
