by Kayla Molander
“Stop reading the news.”
That search term on Google delivered 1,570,000,000 results in 0.31 seconds
I did not have to type my entire inquiry into the box. I merely typed “stop read” and “stop reading the news” was the first suggestion.
“Stop reading comments” was last.
Perhaps this means that Americans find news to be more useless and harmful than comments. I like to think that not reading the comments is so obvious by now people don’t need to search for it anymore. There’s no way to know for sure.
What is certain, from the search results, is there is an anti-news movement in this country. Those who believe in purging news from their lives are passionate enough to write essays about it. Hundreds of people comment on those essays. They converse about why my entire industry should stop existing.
This anti-news movement, as I have chosen to call it, is different from the cries of “fake news,” “media elite” or “corporate news.” All of those terms imply that a certain type of news is wrong. News itself is good, journalists are simply doing it incorrectly.
The anti-news movement claims news is a poison that lowers quality of life.
In his essay “This is what happens when you stop reading the news” for Medium, Nick Maccarone writes, “I’m happier, calmer, and still somehow know enough to be informed.”
Martjin Schirp agrees that the news is useless on HighExistence.com in his article titled “Why avoiding the news makes you smarter.” “Almost all news is irrelevant,” he writes, in a sentiment woven through all of these articles.
These authors argue that news should have a direct affect on your day-to-day life, and if it doesn’t, it’s a waste of your time and emotional energy.
Nat Eliason says it best in “The news is a waste of your time”:
“You might feel like it’s important to know what’s going on with ISIS, but you’re not going to do anything about it unless you’re in the military or politics, so stop worrying yourself. Don’t waste your time on it.”
The articles make the point that everything you need to know you can get from word of mouth. The emphasis is smaller, more local.
The problem with that thinking is when people place no value in journalism, the first news outlets to die are the local ones. Nearly 2,000 local papers have died in the last 15 years.
In October 2019, the Boston Globe told the story of Biddeford, Maine, where the local paper, the Journal Tribune, shut down publication after 135 years.
“The three city leaders are distressed. That said, none of them was subscribing to the paper when it published its last issue,” author Zoe Greenberg writes.
Those city leaders were not alone in not subscribing. Although the newspaper served a community of 40,000, there were only 2,000 paying subscribers at the time it closed.
The people of Biddeford are not anti-newsers – at least not all of them. Many mourned the loss of their local paper. Many care about the news – just not enough to dish out a little bit of cash for it.
Now Biddeford is what is increasingly common around the country – a news desert. There is no one sitting in their town hall meetings, digging through court records, and asking tough questions. No one is going to take a peek at the city’s financials to see if anything is out of whack.
The people of Biddeford made that choice. They decided that journalists were not worth the price tag. One-by-one communities around the country will have to make that same decision. America is approaching a day when it must decide whether or not journalism is something worth fighting for.
The people of Biddeford are proof that this is, indeed a fight. Biddeford didn’t burn the Journal Tribune down. The Journal Tribune died a slow, tragic death at the hands of indifference.
It’s not enough to not be anti-news. It’s not enough to like the idea of the First Amendment. It’s not enough to bounce around news outlets and browsers until you hit a paywall. If we want journalism to survive, we have to pay for it, just like we pay for other things we value, like college, doctors, and Starbucks.
As America ponders journalism’s worth, I send out resumes for jobs that may not exist in twenty years. Planning for retirement is hard when you don’t know what will last longer, your career or your industry.
I’ve been told that journalists are not supposed to make predictions, so I will not guess about the fate of my profession. I can only Google “stop reading the news,” and hope to one day find different results.