Columnist Margaret Sullivan started out in a vibrant local newspaper industry. Now it disappears, leaving our democracy in jeopardy

In the summer of 2019, with some trepidation, I attended a party at the Buffalo News, the daily newspaper serving my hometown of Buffalo and the surrounding area. It would be the first time I return to the building since I resigned from my position as editor in 2012 to become editor of the New York Times. When I arrived, I found a festive scene. Cocktails and oysters were served on a balcony overlooking Lake Erie harbor and the new construction of the city’s Canalside development, which houses shops, restaurants and, in winter, an ice rink near the arena where the Sabers of Buffalo play their National Hockey League games. .

Buffalo, once the eighth largest city in the United States, went through tough times when its steel and auto plants slipped in the 1980s. But in recent years, it has rebounded economically and become an unlikely darling of tourist gatherings in the coolest cities to visit. He landed on a list of “best places to stay for Generation Y” and my son, a young public defender, heard the call. He lives in a rehabilitated industrial building in the city center, where the high ceilings and low rents are the envy of his coastal friends.

The return of Buffalo, however, is not that of the News. The party atmosphere I encountered during this summer party masked a much darker reality inside the building, where, as I had feared, the changes were breathtaking. Housing a thousand employees not so long ago, the company now employed less than half. In talking to my former executive committee colleagues and others in the know, I didn’t hear anything encouraging. These conversations left me with the depressing feeling that the newspaper, even if it continues, will be significantly changed in the next five years. Its staff would likely continue to shrink, and it could possibly publish a print edition on Sundays only, if at all.

It was hard to hear, but it resonated with everything I knew about the national media coverage for the Washington Post. However, it was personal. This is where I grew up, wrote thousands of stories, met and married another journalist when we were in our twenties, won writing prizes, hired dozens of journalists and even jumped into an ambulance when a pregnant journalist went into labor.

In short, it was my world. And it suffered. For several weeks during each recent summer, I returned to the Buffalo area and worked in a family cottage, always making arrangements immediately for paper delivery to my home. He would land on my foredeck in his orange plastic bag by 6 most mornings. The idea hit me hard that maybe next summer – or the next – it would no longer be possible.

As bad as the news is, it is better off than many other local newspapers. Between 2008 and 2017, American newspapers reduced their editorial staff by 45%; even deeper cuts occurred in the years that followed. Some of the most trusted sources of information are shirking, never to return. The consequences are not always obvious, but they are insidious. As a major PEN America study concluded in 2019: “As local journalism declines, government officials behave with less integrity, efficiency and effectiveness, and corporate embezzlement is not controlled . With the loss of local news, citizens are: less likely to vote, less politically informed and less likely to stand for election. In other words, democracy is weakening and losing its foundations.

The close connection between local news and good citizenship became very clear in 2018 for Nate McMurray, the Democratic candidate for Congress in a heavily republican neighborhood in western New York. Although the Grand Island city supervisor fought against a skewed party registration against him, he had a monumental advantage: his Republican opponent, outgoing representative Chris Collins, had just been charged with insider trading. Buffalo News Washington correspondent Jerry Zremski had broken the story, and the newspaper had followed developments diligently for months. Many of those who would likely have voted for the outgoing candidate crossed the aisle to vote in blue. But that was not always the case in the most remote parts of the sprawling Congress district which were less served by strong local news.

The problem, according to McMurray, was that voters in these regions were shockingly uninformed. “I would go door to door or meet people at a restaurant or a fair, for example, and in the most remote areas, many people had no idea that their own congressman had been charged”, McMurray told me. One of the most difficult places, he said, was Orleans County, which the University of North Carolina professor of journalism, Penny Muse Abernathy, identified as a “news wilderness” – that is, a place with little or no local news.

“The lack of real journalism in many of the most remote areas of the district meant that people were counting on gossip, conservative radio or social media,” said McMurray. “People were really deep in their echo chambers, or they didn’t care.” Collins, meanwhile, has taken full advantage of the decline in credible sources of information. He sent fundraising emails to constituents detonating what he called “fake news” about his wrongdoings and relied heavily on television commercials to spread the word about his supposed effectiveness in Congress . McMurray ended up losing the 2018 election with a mustache – less than half a percentage point. As for Collins, in 2019, he pleaded guilty to two crimes, resigned from Congress and was sentenced to prison. Some of his former constituents may not know it either.

Surprisingly, many Americans either do not know what is happening to the local news or choose not to believe it. In fact, a 2019 Pew Research Center study found that most – almost three in four respondents – think local media is in good financial shape. And less than one in six pays for local news.

How we got to this alarming point was something that I witnessed in my time at Buffalo News, where I started as a summer intern in 1980. As I prepared to graduate from the Medill School of Northwestern University journalism with my newly created Masters degree that year, I was fortunate to have internship offers in my local newspapers, the Buffalo Courier-Express Morning and the Buffalo Evening News. I didn’t know what to do, so I asked my father, a Buffalo defense lawyer, the question. I remember his words: “The News is the dominant newspaper.”

Dominant sounded good. I took the News internship, and when September arrived, I was offered a full-time position as a reporter in the business office. I thought I would stay in Buffalo for a few years and move on – maybe to the Boston Globe or the Chicago Tribune – but that never happened. I stayed, climbing the ladder and doing almost all the work in the newsroom. I got married, bought a house, had two children and finally, in 1999, I became the first woman editor of the newspaper. I would hold this position for almost 13 years.

The newspaper, like many other regional dailies of that time, was stable and financially strong for most of this period. Before I arrived, the News had been bought by financier Warren Buffett and was part of his Berkshire Hathaway empire. But Buffett knew that the Buffalo market could only support one daily newspaper; cities across the country have seen the formwork of the second or third newspaper in the city as the habits of readers and the practices of advertisers have changed. Buffett, through his designated publisher, Stanford Lipsey, and then editor-in-chief, Murray Light, set out to make sure that the winner in Buffalo was the News. Lipsey and Light fought hard to continue to dominate the market, launching a Sunday edition to face the Courier. And they won the newspaper war in Buffalo. In 1982, the Courier-Express published its latest edition. The News dropped “Evening” from its nameplate, started a morning edition, and became exactly what Buffett wanted it to be, from a business perspective: the only game in town.

The News hired some of the Courier’s best talent, including political cartoonist Tom Toles, who would win the News his third Pulitzer Prize. With offices all around the western end of the state and a strong presence in Albany and Washington, The News was a solid and respected newspaper. At its peak in the early 1990s, Sunday circulation was approximately 350,000, and the newspaper had the highest market penetration of any regional newspaper in the United States.

And for years, he had what appeared to be a license to print money. Like other monopoly newspapers, it benefited from profit margins in the 80s and early 90s well above 30%. But he kept a relatively lean staff, which I tried to change when I became an editor. I didn’t go far in terms of increasing the workforce, but I succeeded with another goal: to diversify the staff, far too white for a city like Buffalo. I actively hired people of color; promoted an editor, Rod Watson, to be the first black editor in newsroom management; and made Dawn Bracely the first black woman on the editorial board. I created the newspaper’s first investigative team and focused journalism on inequality in public schools and poverty in the city, where more than two in five children lived below the poverty line. I spoke with Mayor Byron Brown about access to government information, and he did not regret seeing me leave town when the time came. Our surveillance report was aggressive, and we were prosecuted from time to time, but we never lost or even settled a case.

TOP: Buffalo News employees John Sordetto, Anthony Meeks and Chuck McFayden prepare a delivery cycle in 2012. BOTTOM LEFT: Buffalo News printing presses. BOTTOM RIGHT: The Buffalo News building in downtown Buffalo.

Then came 2008. It was a terrible year for the newspapers, followed by many other terrible years in a row. The country’s financial crisis and the ensuing recession have meant bad things for the industry. Print advertising, our source of revenue and the largest source of revenue, has dried up. Traffic, the second source of income, has dropped. And there was no viable strategy for the digital future. When the Internet first appeared, years before the recession, to change the media forever, national newspaper management went far too slowly and made one tactical error after another. In Buffalo, our infrequently updated website was free, and digital advertising has not started to make up for the loss of print ads. It turned out that, despite great hope – if it was wrong – it never would be.

I remember participating in endless meetings with other members of the executive committee. I continued to argue that cutting newsroom staff was not the right way to save money. But for some, cutting jobs seemed to be the most effective way to stay in the dark. The layoffs would have meant the loss of the most recent hires. Instead, we started a series of voluntary buyouts, offering some of the most valuable and experienced employees the money to leave. At the time of my departure in 2012, the staff in the newsroom was less than 150.

But the smaller staff meant that we had to make tough decisions about coverage. We would no longer have a reporter for the suburban schools and one for the city schools. We would no longer have satellite offices in the most populated suburbs, where citizens could enter with a tip or a complaint. The Washington office, which for years had two full-time journalists, a year-round intern and an oversized office at the National Press Building, was eventually reduced to a journalist who worked at his home. Our Sunday magazine was reduced to a monthly and then put out of service, a particularly heartbreaking decision because my husband at the time was the magazine’s editor. We stepped back on missions that required travel. We thought these measures amounted to austerity at the time and, compared to a decade earlier, they seemed drastic. But things were much worse.

After I left, the entire copy office would be dismantled, a move many newspapers were making to streamline their leaner operations. (Even after the recession eased, advertising and broadcasting revenues never rebounded; the habits of readers and the means used by advertisers to reach consumers have changed irrevocably.) And the artistic coverage, so important to Buffalo’s rich cultural life, has faded. There were no more reviews of films or books written by staff, no more daily sections on life and the arts. The newspaper’s role as the center of the city’s cultural life was fading. Yet the purpose of a newspaper is not only to hold officials accountable; it must also be the village square for an entire metropolitan area, to help provide a common reality and a touchstone, a sense of community and place.

A worthy local relationship requires time, expertise, talent and institutional knowledge. We had fewer each month, and readers knew it. Paradoxically, I was perhaps extremely proud of the work we have accomplished and of the overall quality of the document. This is what I felt until my last day of work in August 2012, and I remain proud to be associated with the newspaper, which has continued to do vital work. The day I left the Buffalo News, I sat on the bare desk in my open office, and staff photographer Harry Scull came in to do a final portrait before we went to my farewell party on the USS Little Rock fantail, moored in Buffalo harbor. It was 32 years after I walked in the door as an ambitious summer intern, and everything – everything – had changed.

The same thing has happened in the wider local news landscape. And the situation is deteriorating quickly and constantly. Huge media chains merge, more newspapers cease to operate, digital sites are brutally shut down, journalists continue to be laid off. When the coronavirus pandemic arrived, the immediate economic impact on the press could be felt all over the world. Advertising has almost disappeared. In the United States and elsewhere, new rounds of layoffs or wage cuts have devastated very local newsrooms that are making their readers more vital than ever by covering the public health emergency.

But even before this disaster happened, the serious consequences had occurred in the communities. Officials meetings are held without coverage. Agency budgets and municipal contracts are moving forward without review. Apparently, only a small percentage of the public sees the need to open their portfolios for local newspapers or other local news sources, and as newspapers decrease in staff and quality, they see even less reason to do so. . Overcoming this vicious circle is a steep climb. And we have very little time to go up the hill.

Margaret Sullivan is the Washington Post media columnist. This article is adapted from his next book, “Ghost of the News: Local Journalism and the Crisis in American Democracy», To be released July 14.

Design by Christian Font. Photo editing by Dudley M. Brooks.