Broadband for Communities

When talking about the benefits of broadband, it’s easy to overlook how broadband has become the glue that brings people and communities together. This is becoming particularly important for rural communities but matters to people everywhere. Rural communities have been rapidly losing other forms of media that were the focal point in the past. 2004 was the peak of the newspaper business in terms of readership and revenues. Since then, the number of journalists has been cut in half. In the last fifteen years, we’ve lost more than 20% of all newspapers, and many remaining papers are just barely hanging on financially. Over half of the 3,143 counties in the country now only have one newspaper, which in the majority of cases means only a small weekly paper. In a recent count, over 200 counties have no newspaper. We’ve also lost a huge number of local radio stations. The Internet has stepped in to fill some of this void. It’s easy to be cynical, and write off social media as being entertainment, but doing so ignores the real connections people make on the Internet. And yet, I’ve never seen any list of Internet benefits that includes the power of the Internet to provide local news and a sense of community.