Local newspapers play essential roles

It was 40 years ago this week that I wrote my first column for North Carolina newspapers. Still in journalism school at UNC-Chapel Hill, I was interning that summer at two outlets based in Nash County: the Spring Hope Enterprise, which covered the southern part of the county, and a startup called the Rocky Mount Record.

Although I enjoyed covering municipal affairs, county government, school systems, and local businesses, I’d long been enamored by the opinion pages of my hometown paper, The Charlotte Observer, and such regular columnists as William F. Buckley on the right and William Raspberry on the left. Having penned columns in my school paper, The Declaration of Independence (High), I asked the Enterprise editor, the late Ken Ripley, for the chance to try my hand at it. He said yes, although he knew my views were very different from his.

Check that — he said yes because he knew my views were very different from his. Ken believed local newspapers ought to offer a spectrum of opinions, not only to reflect the breadth of their communities, but also to inform, challenge, and deepen the understanding of their readers.

As it happened, my first column championed a cause we both favored: abolishing North Carolina’s sodomy laws. They violated the fundamental principle of individual liberty, I argued, as well as the principle of equal protection (married couples were virtually never prosecuted while prosecutors often filed sodomy charges when they couldn’t prove rape or assault).

Over the ensuing four decades of columns, written weekly for the first 25 years and then twice a week for the next 15, I have covered a wide array of subjects, from state politics and history to economic and social policy. The column still runs in the Spring Hope Enterprise. The Record didn’t last long, but I was soon privileged to add the Rocky Mount Telegram to my list. By the mid-1990s, the column ran in more than a dozen North Carolina papers, including the statewide publication I founded in 1991, Carolina Journal. Today, it appears regularly in more than 50 outlets from the mountains to the coast.

If you are reading this in your local newspaper’s print or online edition, thank you. I don’t just mean I appreciate you perusing my column. By consuming local media, you are doing yourself and others a great service.

As we know, nearly all local newspapers have endured shrinking revenues and audiences. Some have closed altogether. I’m a market guy. The invention of the internet was bound to disrupt the newspaper business, which combined revenue streams from want ads, home sales, automobile sales, retail, and subscriptions to finance a bundle of news, entertainment, and consumer information. Some media companies handled the transition better than others, but neither management acumen nor government intervention could ever have blocked it.

Still, that bundle had long conferred many benefits. Readers primarily interested in sports scores or movie listings encountered news, features, or opinions they’d otherwise missed. Local journalists broke stories, exposed misconduct, and dug into complicated issues. You can still have such experiences online, of course, and national news outlets remain plentiful, diverse, and scrappy. What’s missing is regular and trustworthy attention to your own community. You only get that by consuming local media.

What happens when local newspapers shrink or fold? There is no need to speculate. Careful empirical research has found that newspaper closures lead to higher property taxes and borrowing costs for governments and businesses (a watchdog effect), less competition in local elections (an information effect), lower voter turnout (an engagement effect), and revenue losses among small businesses that compete with national chains (a brand-awareness effect).

Neither public subsidy nor protective regulation is the right response to these consequences. As fellow citizens of a free society, we already possess the power to act. Alter your media diet to watch or listen to more locally produced news. Support nonprofits that fund investigative journalism. And subscribe to your local newspaper.

John Hood is a John Locke Foundation board member. His books Mountain Folk, Forest Folk, and Water Folk combine epic fantasy and American history.