Who suffers when local news disappears

[Commentary] We need to move away from the arguments that the country should care about laid-off reporters or that the suits should be held to account. This can’t be about us. It has to be about why the country should care if local news goes away, which is the trajectory we now find ourselves on. What are the effects on a democracy if local news is no longer in the picture? How is my life as a New Yorker going to be worse now that the Daily News has been so terribly hobbled? If you’re in journalism and you can’t muster an answer to that question, you need to move on.

For the rest of us in this profession, it is the case we now must make, especially in the face of a national administration that has made it its business to question why journalism matters. What does it mean not to have local news in your town? Would it change where you live, how you raise your kids, where they go to school? It would if a local coach were abusing kids, and would have kept doing so if a newspaper hadn’t reported it. It would if money that was supposed to be going to city services was instead going to higher financing costs for government bonds, since no one was paying attention to the deals the city was cutting. It would if there were a spike in health viruses, because there wasn’t the news infrastructure to warn people to be safe. All of those examples are real. And it’s easy enough to add Daily News scoops to the list, something many of its fans, myself included, will be doing as they process this terrible day.

Our job at Columbia Journalism Review—and the job for all of us who care about the importance of the press to democracy—is to answer the foundational questions we face as a country. Our window for addressing them—and, crucially, in a way that resonates with readers—is in very real danger of closing entirely.