If you’d like a sense of how fraught the local news business is right now, check out the Poynter Institute’s running list of publications that have shut down, laid off or furloughed employees, or implemented massive pay cuts. 

A lot of them are alt-weeklies (like the INDY) that rely on ad revenue from restaurants and bars that are closed and events that have been canceled:

  • The Stranger (Seattle), suspended print, laid off 18
  • The Portland Mercury, suspended print, laid off 10
  • Dig Boston, Oklahoma Gazette, suspended print
  • Austin Chronicle, printing every other week
  • Pheonix New Times, Miami New Times, Dallas Observer, Westword (Denver), Houston Press, 25-percent-and-up pay cuts, layoffs likely
  • Monterey County Weekly, laid off seven
  • Seven Days (Vermont), laid off seven
  • San Antonio Current, laid off 10
  • Riverfront Times (St. Louis), laid off seven
  • Orlando Weekly, laid off 13
  • Detroit Metro Times, laid off eight
  • Creative Loafing (Tampa), laid off seven
  • Cincinnati CityBeat, SF Weekly, Mountain Xpress (Ashville), furloughs and pay cuts
  • Cleveland Scene, laid off five
  • Sacramento News & Review, Chico News & Review, Reno News & Review, suspended print, laid off most of staff
  • Shepherd Express (Milwaukee), The Chatanooga Pulse, Isthmus (Madison), closed

All of those papers were alive and (somewhat) well six weeks ago. Even Teen Vogue gets how devastating this pandemic has been.

At the INDY, we’ve been fortunate. While we’ve reduced our print publication to every other week through May and cut our freelance budget to zero, we’ve not had to cut salaries or institute furloughs or layoffs. In large part, that’s due to the generosity of the INDY Press Club; our members’ contributions, both in the last month and over the last year, have quite literally enabled us to survive when others failed. (If you’d like to keep fiercely independent local journalism viable in the Triangle, please do so today.)

Nonetheless, we’re in a precarious position—and the longer this situation drags on, the more precarious it becomes. 

It’s not just alts getting pummeled, either. The Tampa Bay Times—owned by Poynter—slashed positions and cut five days of print. The Cleveland Plain-Dealer gutted its newsroom. The New Orleans Times-Picayune furloughed 10 percent of its staff. Gannett’s newsrooms began furloughs and pay cuts all over the country. Alden Global Capital’s infamous MediaNews Group got out the machete, as well, slashing, among many other things, the entire sports staff at The Mercury News and East Bay Times. And that’s just the beginning.

This is an unmitigated crisis for local media—and even more so for the communities that rely on them.

In a letter to congressional leaders today, a coalition of First Amendment, good government, and news organizations—including the Association of Alternative Newsmedia, of which the INDY is a member and I am the on the board of directors—asked the federal government for help: “As you consider further economic stimulus legislation to help the country at this precarious moment, we urge you to include targeted assistance to local journalism, just as you have with other industries deemed essential to our nation’s health, prosperity, and recovery.”

“In an industry that employs more than 80,000 people nationwide,” they continue, “many outlets are now struggling to cover even half of their reporters’ salaries, with newsroom layoffs increasing across the country. These cuts significantly impact communities’ ability to receive critical news and information.”

Local news outlets, they acknowledge, can compete for a potentially forgivable loan through the CARES Act, but “none of those funds were specifically set aside in recognition of the ‘essential service’ provided by local journalism, nor are those funds enough to meet the need. We’re calling on you to specifically include the journalism sector in the congressional assistance packages revitalizing affected industries and sustaining workers across our nation.”

In the next stimulus package—which, at this point, seems inevitable—they ask lawmakers to set aside $5 billion for local media. (For perspective, that’s 1 percent of the corporate bailout slush fund the Treasury Department now controls.) Included in this funding, they say, should be: 

  • additional money for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting;
  • “emergency funds targeted at preserving newsrooms and reporting jobs at local commercial and nonprofit news outlets”;
  • investments to address the “civic-information needs” communities most affected by news deserts;
  • more federal spending on public health and other government advertising, with a focus on local and community media;
  • and safeguards to ensure this money doesn’t come with editorial strings attached.

At the Columbia Journalism Review, Craig Aaron of the advocacy group Free Press—one of the lead organizations on the letter—explained in detail the rationale for these requests in a post on March 24, when the CARES Act was still taking shape and there was hope that journalism might be included. (It was not.) 

“We are long overdue for a major investment in services that provide community information,” Aaron wrote. “To restore what’s been lost and meet growing needs, Congress should take COVID-19 as an opportunity to revive and reimagine journalism’s future.

“A forthcoming recovery or stimulus bill should include another $2 billion to seed a ‘First Amendment Fund’ to support new positions, outlets, and approaches to newsgathering,” he continued. “Such a fund … could offer grants to meet civic information needs, create jobs dedicated to newsgathering and community engagement, and prioritize places and populations that the mainstream outlets have never served well.”

It’s unclear how much appetite there is in Congress to bail out even local media outlets, especially given the president’s antipathy toward journalists. Nor is it clear whether such a stimulus would be anything more than a Band-Aid on a bullet wound. 

In reality, the coronavirus has only accelerated a decline that’s been underway for more than a decade. As PEN America trustee Ayad Akhtar wrote in the free-speech organization’s 2019 report “Losing the News: The Decimation of Local Journalism and the Search for Solutions”: “In the face of market failure, adaptation and innovation alone cannot address the crisis at scale. … Local journalism is too important for our policymakers to simply stand by and hope the industry can self-correct. Given the scope and stakes of the problem, we must pursue a major reimagining of the local news space, in which local reporting is re-conceptualized as a public good rather than a commercial product.”

The re-conceptualization, the report argues, will be multipronged—and involve untold billions of dollars from a variety of sectors. 

“The scale of the challenge will require investment and action from the philanthropic, private, and public sectors,” the report says. “Firstly, recent growth in philanthropic giving for journalism will need to further expand dramatically and prioritize local news specifically. Secondly, the balance between tech giants and news media must be redrawn to ensure that local news outlets receive a greater financial return from the online consumption of content that they themselves produce at great expense. Thirdly, regulators must implement laws and policies that prioritize the health and diversity of local news outlets and that proactively assist the production of local journalism. Finally, both federal and state governments should significantly expand their public support for local journalism. Most ambitiously, this support should include new sources of public funding for news-gathering activities.”

“In total, these proposals represent an outright reimagining of how the United States conceives of news gathering and the value of local watchdogs in a representative democracy,” the report continues. “Underlying all of them is the idea that journalism is not merely a commercial enterprise but also a public good. The social utility of a vibrant local news ecosystem—holding the powerful to account and providing critical information—justifies sweeping and ambitious plans to save it.”

A $5 billion bailout is neither sweeping nor ambitious enough to save local journalism writ large. But it would tide much of the industry over, give it a chance to regroup, and signal that local journalism is, in fact, more than a dispensable commodity, but rather, it’s a public good that deserves to protection from market forces. 

If you’d like your local members of Congress to support funding for local journalism in a forthcoming stimulus bill, contact:

In the meantime, please continue to support local journalism as best you can. Subscribe to your local newspaper. Support local businesses that advertise with local media. And—in case I haven’t mentioned this already—join the INDY Press Club. 

When you invest in journalism, you’re investing in your state, your city, your neighborhood. Better journalism, after all, makes a better community. 

Congress Local News Stimulus 04082020 by Jeffrey Billman on Scribd

Contact editor in chief Jeffrey C. Billman at jbillman@indyweek.com.

DEAR READERS, WE NEED YOUR HELP NOW MORE THAN EVER. Support independent local journalism by joining the INDY Press Club today. Your contributions will keep our fearless watchdog reporting and essential arts and culture coverage viable in the Triangle, coronavirus be damned.