With 14 community newspapers due to close, too many parts of NZ are becoming ‘news deserts’

When media company NZME proposed the closure of 14 community newspapers last week, the so-called “news desert” encroached a little further into the local information landscape.

The term refers to those many regions in both town and country where newspapers that for generations have kept their citizens informed – and local politicians and planners (mostly) honest – have been shut down.

As a metaphor, the desert evokes a sense of arid emptiness and silence. But it also suggests a featureless place where we lose a sense of direction. Many of these papers were their community’s central or only source of verified local news.

Research from the United States has shown the death of a local newspaper leaves citizens struggling for information about community events, and feeling more isolated. People worry about a loss of community pride and identity. Volunteers struggle to fill the void.

Among the NZME titles facing closure for being unprofitable is the Te Awamutu Courier, which has been publishing for more than a century. It and its stablemates may well soon join the 28 local papers Stuff sold or closed in 2018.

Between those two headline events many other little papers have gone, financial burdens on their owners in an age of online advertising and shifting consumption habits. Those that still exist, at least the ones owned by major news publishers, are often shadows of their former selves.

The power of a local press

The effect of this trend, of course, is to remove a kind of media town square. Affected communities are left to the perils of community social media, which are not professionally moderated, can be defamatory, and which post largely unverified content.

For all the faults that come with local newspapers – and most journalists can tell you about an editor who was too vulnerable to influence, or a publisher who meddled in the newsroom – these news organisations connect their communities to their cultural, physical and human geographies.

Good ones – and there have been many – identify the social issues that unite and divide their communities, and then represent and champion their readers or play the role of moderator.

Authorities are put on notice when local coverage amplifies the complaints and demands of residents and ratepayers. When enough pressure on politicians and officials is exerted in this way, things have even been known to change.

The papers that survive now are often the ones which reinforce a strongly-felt community identity in places as diverse as the West Coast of the South Island, Waiheke Island and Mahurangi.

Readers will rally behind a paper that gets behind them, and a collective voice of sorts emerges. A community’s struggles – be they over housing, employment or the environment – help define its identity, building knowledge and resilience.

A training ground for good journalism

In telling these stories, young journalists (many of whom are destined for metropolitan newsrooms later in their careers) learn how government is meant to work – and how it actually works in practice.

It’s where they learn how to report without fear or favour, how to find reliable sources, and where official information can be accessed – the nuts and bolts of journalism, in other words.

It’s also often where journalists first experience the powers of the bureaucracy and the executive. There’s nothing like a bully on a local board or a vindictive council official to help a young reporter up their game.

Of course, local politics are now often conveyed via social media in disordered, fragmented and incendiary ways. Politicians and other powerful players can reach voters directly, telling their own stories, effectively unchallenged.

Yet this persuasive power, and the prevalence of misinformation and disinformation, only underscore the need for political information to be ordered and moderated by accountable community journalists.

Digital solutions struggle

Newspapers do seem anomalous today, it’s true. Growing pine forests to share news is, frankly, quite ridiculous.

But online-only ventures in community news have largely struggled. Crux, a Central Otago site for robust community journalism since 2018, was proposed as a model for a network of regional news sites, but it has recently gone into hibernation.

According to its founder, journalist Peter Newport, Crux had “tried, tested and implemented every single type of digital publishing innovation”. Newport has instead taken to Substack, where freelancers can build paying newsletter audiences, to publish his brand of investigative community journalism.

With Google now threatening to stop promoting New Zealand news content if the government goes ahead with the Fair Digital News Bargaining Bill, the plight of local papers is in danger of being overshadowed by a wider crisis. Whole television news networks have closed, and others are being hugely downsized.

Elsewhere, philanthropists such as the American Journalism Project are recognising the risk to democracy and social unity from the loss of local news sources, and are funding attempts to restore it. As yet, however, a sustainable model has yet to rise.

In Aotearoa New Zealand, there are now calls from local councils themselves to strengthen existing government support for local-democracy reporting. This and more should be done. The longer we wait, the closer the news desert creeps every day.

Greg Treadwell is affiliated with the Journalism Education Association of New Zealand. He was previously a community newspaper editor.