A town without newspapers

As the drumbeat of bad news beats on, with the very real possibility that San Francisco will be without a major daily metro to call its own soon, Time Magazine asks the musical question What Happens When a Town Loses Its Newspaper? (Spoiler alert: It’s bad news.)

The study is very small in scope, since the Post had a total of only 27,000 subscribers in Cincinnati and northern Kentucky. And it measures only the outcomes in northern Kentucky, since Ohio has not had municipal elections since the Post’s closure. But even with those limitations, a few trends seemed to emerge: in towns the Post regularly covered, voter turnout dropped, fewer people ran for office and more incumbents were reelected. That is, when there were fewer stories about a given town, its inhabitants seemed to care less about how they’re being governed.

It’s not a particularly big study, to put it mildly, but there will likely be ample opportunity to get more data later this year.

The study’s conclusions match up with my personal observations of what happens when local politics aren’t covered extensively.

No Comments »

No comments yet.

RSS feed for comments on this post.

Leave a comment

Line and paragraph breaks automatic, e-mail address never displayed, HTML allowed: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <s> <strike> <strong>