As another year draws to a close, there is good news — The Columbian is still here, serving Clark County on a daily basis.
That is increasingly noteworthy, with the newspaper industry in a continuing decline. As Nancy Gibbs, director of the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard University, recently wrote in an opinion piece for The Washington Post, “Every couple of weeks you can read about another newspaper shutting its doors, or moving from daily to weekly, or hollowing out its newsroom until it’s little more than a skeleton staff bulked up with J-school students.”
Economists might shrug and attribute this to market forces, and they would not be wrong. The internet has disrupted the advertising industry, including classified ads that once provided a significant portion of newspaper revenue; cable networks have become the go-to news source for many Americans; and online outlets have made a habit of stealing locally reported stories and claiming them as their own (along with the per-click advertising revenue they generate).
But there are good reasons to push back against those market forces. Various studies have documented how the loss of local watchdogs means less government accountability, increased public spending, fewer people voting or running for office, more polarization and decreased social cohesion. In other words, the fabric of our communities is weakened when local news diminishes.
Newspapers are inherently local. While opinions of local residents might be influenced by Fox News or MSNBC — or by national newspapers such as The Washington Post or New York Times — those outlets are not going to report on the city of Vancouver’s climate initiative or Clark County’s creation of a Jail Services Department. The facts and the details about those issues — which impact the daily lives of local residents — can be found in The Columbian.
These arguments are well known to anybody who follows the news industry and its inherent link to democracy. There is a reason, after all, the Founding Fathers included a free press in the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. But Gibbs’ piece in The Washington Post brings up a lesser-known factor that also impacts democracy.
News deserts are most likely to occur in sparsely populated rural areas, and those areas have growing influence on the national political stage.
South Dakota, for example, has 0.27 percent of the nation’s population — and 2 percent of the nation’s senators. Elections in that state play an oversized role in deciding who is president, who controls the Senate and who chooses Supreme Court justices. But about half of the state’s 66 counties have only a weekly newspaper, and seven have no newspaper at all.
The same trend is found in other small states, and Gibbs writes, “The very places where local news is disappearing are often the same places that wield disproportionate political power.”
A map from Northwestern University that tracks the phenomenon indicates a local newspaper in every Washington county except one — Asotin County, which has 22,000 residents in the southeast corner of the state. And a vast majority of the state’s counties have a local daily paper.
Whether or not this results in a more informed populace is open to debate, but it’s clear that Washington residents at least have access to local news.
The Columbian is proud to play a role in that. And we are looking forward to another year of keeping residents informed.
