AJR: Cities Without Newspapers
From the June/July issue of American Journalism Review:
This spring, Princeton economist Sam Schulhofer-Wohl and his colleague Miguel Garrido issued a paper of vital importance to print journalists desperate for a sliver of good news: “Do Newspapers Matter? Evidence from the Closure of The Cincinnati Post.”
The economists noted their findings were “statistically imprecise,” yet concluded that newspapers, “even underdogs such as the Post, which had a circulation of just 27,000 when it closed – can have a substantial and measurable impact on public life.”
The Cincinnati Post, a former E.W. Scripps Co. paper that expired December 31, 2007, and its Kentucky Post edition dominated circulation in the northern Kentucky suburbs, where the economists focused their inquiry. They concluded the Post’s closure lowered the number of people voting in elections and the number of candidates for city council, city commission and school board in those areas. It also increased incumbent council and commission members’ chances of staying in office.
“What most surprised me is I actually did find evidence that newspapers matter,” says Schulhofer-Wohl, an assistant professor of economics and public affairs. At 32, he is on his second career. His first, as a journalist, included stints as a copy editor at Alabama’s Birmingham Post-Herald, another now-defunct Scripps paper, and as a copy editor and reporter at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. “I was very worried when I went into this [research] that what I would end up proving is my whole career had been kind of pointless.”
Instead, Schulhofer-Wohl added to a small but growing body of economics research supporting the notion that newspapers make a difference in their communities – evidence emerging even as the industry struggles in a radically changing media environment during the worst recession since the Great Depression.
These attempts to quantify newspapers’ impact on public life come as a handful of major American newspapers close and others barely cling to life. The unsettling possibility looms that some big cities could lose their sole remaining daily newspaper – and that the public won’t care. If the dead-tree edition of a newspaper falls in a crowded media forest, will it matter, except to the journalists who work there? Are newer, hipper online news outlets poised to fill the void? What, if anything, will be irrevocably lost?
As often happens with AJR, there’s a bit too much obsession with major market papers, even when the magazine regularly acknowledges that smaller papers are doing fine.
New York, Washington and other major cities are not going to be without something covering the news roughly like newspapers do currently. Someone will fill the void, for commercial reasons, if no other. And if the early stats about what happens to voter turnout when a paper dies are borne out over time, there will be an increasing demand for post-newspaper news from the public, once they realize that they let bums into office because they were no longer paying for journalists to keep even a periodic eye on them.
Americans may not like reporters at the moment, but they hate politicians, and since newspapers (and the wire services) create most of the original coverage that’s endlessly regurgitated about them, something like newspaper coverage (most likely populated by many of the same faces, if newspapers really do vanish) will always cover them.
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