By Emily Soto

I participated in a summer journalism bootcamp in 2021, hosted by a small, hyperlocal newsroom in the Chicago suburbs. The team of three journalists ─ yes, just three reporters ran the entire newsroom ─ taught us about the importance of preserving local news and the responsibility it has to the people in a community. They showed us how to use our reporting to reflect and support a neighborhood in a way that empowers its people to engage with each other. They stressed that local journalists were able to hold officials accountable, especially the ones who typically slide under the radar.

But isn’t local news dying? At least that’s what I heard in journalism school. A few professors even advised me to stay away from certain forms of media for fear of no path forward.

Are they right? The 2022 State of Local News report from Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism said that since 2005, the U.S. is on track to lose a third of its newspapers by 2025. When the large chains which own much of the nation’s newspapers need to make cuts, the locals are the first to go.

The report added, “The loss of local journalism has been accompanied by the malignant spread of misinformation and disinformation, political polarization, eroding trust in media, and a yawning digital and economic divide among citizens…Even in their diminished state, newspapers still provide most of the news that feeds our democracy at the state and local level.”

This is just as I was told at the bootcamp. So, with such a big responsibility, how do we ensure a future for this news source?

Local news has the ability to do things the legacies and national networks can’t do and it’s time we realize this.

We’ve already seen it happening in Chicago when Block Club Chicago and Borderless Magazine partnered to publish a series of profiles called “After The Busses” which followed 10 of the Venezuelan migrants bussed to Chicago from Texas as they figure out life in the city.

We’ve seen it when publications like the Harvey World Herald are the only source of media coverage on their municipal elections, or city council meetings.

But what we are really seeing from these and many other local news sources are journalists who are fulfilling a duty that has been taken for granted. As the SPJ Code of Ethics puts it, they are “ensuring we remember that public enlightenment is the forerunner of justice and the foundation of democracy.”

During the bootcamp, the publication’s Editor-in-Chief also shared with us one instance when he met a young journalist on the job for a legacy paper. When my instructor mentioned he works for a hyperlocal news organization, the young reporter responded saying, hopefully he might see this Editor-in-Chief in his major newsroom someday.

As long as we continue to have this mentality that local news is for the journalists who “didn’t make it,” those publications will continue to crumble, and journalists will keep failing to fulfill their duty.

It’s time to take the small newsrooms seriously.

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