Margaret Sullivan has written and edited for two of America’s most prominent newspapers — The New York Times and The Washington Post — and currently serves as executive director of the Craig Newmark Center for Journalism Ethics and Security at the Columbia Journalism School.
But home for Sullivan will always be The Buffalo News, Western New York’s largest newspaper and where she spent the first three decades of her career. It was at The Buffalo News where Sullivan came to appreciate the great importance of local news — and where she later realized how imperiled it has become.
Sullivan will be speaking at 10:45 a.m. today in the Amphitheater, the second speaker for this week’s Chautauqua Lecture Series theme “Our Greatest Challenges (That We Can Actually Do Something About).” Her lecture will explore the factors leading to the collapse of many local news outlets, as well as what can be done to begin reversing course.
In 2020, Sullivan published Ghosting the News: Local Journalism and the Crisis of American Democracy, a book that details the loss of local news outlets across the country. The book analyzes the collapse of local newspapers through a series of case studies, one of which is that of The Vindicator in Youngstown, Ohio. The Vindicator, which served Youngstown for 150 years, shuttered its printing press in 2019, selling its name and branding to a media company based in a different city.
Many reporters and editors at The Vindicator expressed how disastrous the loss of the only newspaper in the city could be, especially with Youngstown’s history of corruption and organized crime — that fear has proven to be one of the most pervasive in the current local news crisis.
“There’s a really important watchdog role that the press plays … just by being a witness, by being present at, for example, a town council or city council meeting or school board meeting — it helps to keep public officials honest,” Sullivan said. “When that goes away, we see the results of that, and one of the things that’s been found out in studies is that the cost of municipal bonds actually goes up because the cost of government rises when there’s not local news.”
In addition to increased levels of corruption and unchecked government spending, communities that lose their local news outlets also see increased amounts of partisanship and less community engagement, Sullivan said. Many people instead turn to national news, and focus on national politics, receiving much of their information from more partisan news outlets and hearing very little about the communities they live in.
But Sullivan is not feeling completely hopeless about the state of local news. In many areas where local coverage has disappeared, she said, nonprofit news outlets have started popping up to fill the void. These publications are often digital-only, with a heavy focus on watchdog-style accountability journalism. Public radio has also been on the rise, with more and more listeners tuning in to their local news stations.
But the issue is far from solved.
“I’m hopeful, but not optimistic,” Sullivan said. “I’ve seen so much discouraging news come out of the local news scene that it’s hard to be really optimistic. … But I’m not hopeless. I think that all of these things we’ve talked about are very positive. There are great people working on these things. I think that the public is starting to really recognize that there’s a problem here and that they have a role to play. So I’m not without hope, certainly, and I’m very appreciative of the good things that I do see happening.”
Sullivan hopes Chautauquans see the grave importance of finding a solution to the local news crisis; but she also wants them leave feeling the same grain of hope that she does — and feel compelled to take action to help save local news.
“This isn’t something that’s happening kind of over there,” she said. “But it’s happening in (people’s) lives, in their communities, and they can have a role in helping to fix it.”
