Category Archives: Print journalism

News deserts, Print journalism, Vallejo Sun

The Vallejo Sun – Benicia residents should think about subscribing!

Local journalism is so important…

By Roger Straw, September 27, 2023

The Vallejo Sun is celebrating it’s second anniversary, and has earned my respect with excellent in-depth reporting on police, local government, schools, arts, and local events.  Recently, I re-subscribed with a voluntary increase in my annual renewal amount. You can subscribe here.

Understand – I’m a longtime supporter of our own small town press, the Benicia Herald, and our next door neighbor paper, the Vallejo Times-Herald. And gosh, wouldn’t ya know, I read the Benicia Independent, yes! I hope you do, too, because local journalism isn’t on firm ground anywhere in the U.S. these days. We need a variety of perspectives – and no one source can cover it all.

Here’s how Scott Morris of the Vallejo Sun puts it on the occasion of the Sun’s second anniversary:

Scott Morris, co-founder of the Vallejo Sun. Scott is a journalist who covers policing, protest, civil rights and far-right extremism. His work has been published in ProPublica, the Appeal and Oaklandside.

Dear readers,

I’m writing because the Vallejo Sun just passed a major milestone: Our second year anniversary. While this is cause for celebration, it remains to be seen whether we can keep going for another year. So I’m also asking for your help.

We founded the Vallejo Sun in 2021 because we saw a need for in-depth reporting about local government, policing, and extremist movements in the region. In 2022, we expanded to cover Vallejo’s rich arts and culture.

We hope you’ve enjoyed our in-depth reporting on police, local government, schools and arts, and have found our extensive event listings useful. We think it’s important to bring you the best information available. But we can’t do it without your help.

This year we’ve overcome some challenges. Our founding member John Glidden departed for a new role with the county. Upheaval at social media companies has made it harder for news publishers to reach consumers.

But we remain committed to bringing you the news and added six new contributors in the last year. These new voices have expanded our breadth of coverage and brought you even more of the in-depth news you’ve come to expect from us.

For the first time, you can make a tax deductible contribution to the Vallejo Sun through our fiscal sponsor, the Alternative Newsweekly Foundation. Your contribution means more work for local journalists and more thought-provoking, impactful stories.

Click here to make a tax deductible donation to the Vallejo Sun.

Click here to become a paid subscriber to the Vallejo Sun.

News deserts, Print journalism, Vallejo Times-Herald

Alden Capital bought the Times-Herald, cut staff, moved facilities, weakening coverage of Vallejo, Benicia and American Canyon

National news stories rip owners of Vallejo Times-Herald

By Roger Straw, October 23, 2021

Four national news sources have named the Vallejo Times-Herald in the last two weeks, in stories citing a corporate hedge fund that is gutting newspapers.  (See links below.)

On Thursday, the PBS News Hour published How this ‘vulture’ hedge fund’s gutting of local newsrooms could hurt Americans. Judy Woodruff begins the discussion, “The hedge fund Alden Global Capital has been acquiring scores of U.S. newspapers across the country — then gutting newsrooms and selling off assets. It’s part of a larger trend in the erosion of local news and related jobs in the last decade.”

In three of the four national news stories, former Times-Herald reporter John Glidden is mentioned.

This reporter, John Glidden, told me that he started out as a general assignment reporter, which meant he was kind of covering local crime and community events and whatever came up. Within a few years, he was the only hard-news reporter left in town. He said he had this legal pad that he kept at his desk where he would write down tips that he got from sources. And a lot of them were tips for stories that he knew were important but that he would never get to. He was ultimately fired after criticizing Alden in an interview with The Washington Post. But, you know, when I talked to him, he said it was heartbreaking to see what this once-proud newspaper serving this proud city had been reduced to under Alden’s ownership.

– A Martinez, NPR Business News

Local readers should note that John Glidden has recently joined with Brian Krans and Scott Morris to publish an independent online news publication, The Vallejo Sun.  Another former Times-Herald reporter, Katy St. Clair, also started her own online news medium, katystclair.com.  The Benicia Independent has been in operation since 2007, providing news and views on Benicia, Vallejo, and select issues of concern including climate change and the environment.

Here are links to all four national news stories mentioning the Vallejo Times-Herald:

• How this ‘vulture’ hedge fund’s gutting of local newsrooms could hurt Americans (Full transcript)
PBS News Hour, by John Yang & Ryan Connelly Holmes, Oct 21, 2021

• When this hedge fund buys local newspapers, democracy suffers (Full transcript)
NPR KQED Business News, by A. Martinez, October 18, 2021
• The Chicago Tribune Is Being Murdered Before Our Eyes – And it’s a serial killing
GEN, by Cory Doctorow, October 17, 2021

• A Secretive Hedge Fund Is Gutting Newsrooms – Inside Alden Global Capital
The Atlantic, by McKay Coppins, October 14, 2021

 

Coronavirus, Covid 19, News deserts, Print journalism

The Virus vs. Journalism

The disappearance of local information

A newspaper machine is seen in New Orleans last month. Credit…Chris Graythen/Getty Images

The New York Times, by David Leonhardt, April 30, 2020 •  This article is part of David Leonhardt’s newsletter. You can sign up here to receive it each weekday.

Local journalism was in deep trouble before the coronavirus.

The internet has taken away the main source of revenue for newspapers — print advertisements — leading to a rapid shrinking of the industry. Nationwide, the number of people employed in newsrooms fell about 25 percent between 2008 and 2019, and it’s probably down more than 50 percent from its peak.

If local papers were being replaced by digital publications covering local news, this trend wouldn’t be a problem. But that’s not happening. Instead, many Americans lack basic information about their communities — like what their mayor, school board, local employers and more are doing.

The disappearance of this information has big effects. Academic research has found that voter turnout and civic engagement tend to decline when newspapers shrink or close. Fewer people run for office. Political corruption and polarization rise.

“Local newspapers are basically little machines that spit out healthier democracies,” Joshua Benton, director of the Nieman Journalism Lab, has written.

Now the virus is taking this crisis to a new level.

The rapid shrinking of the economy — at the fastest pace since the Great Depression — has led to a further decline in advertising. Some newspapers that were on the brink may not survive. And many more journalists have been laid off. As The Washington Post’s Margaret Sullivan has noted, “it’s happening around the world,” with newspapers in Australia and Britain announcing that “they were going out of business or suspending print publication.”

What’s the solution? In the short term, Sullivan and some media observers have called for government stimulus money to be directed at local news outlets, as is happening for many other industries.

Writing in The Atlantic, Steven Waldman and Charles Sennott of Report for America offer an intriguing idea:

The federal government can do something quite concrete right now: As part of its stimulus plans, it should funnel $500 million in spending for public-health ads through local media. The government already spends about $1 billion on public-service ads that promote initiatives such as military recruitment and census participation. The stimulus should add another $1 billion to support the communication of accurate health-related information. Some of those ads should go to social-media platforms and national news networks, but half should go to local news organizations. This is not a bailout; the government will be buying an effective way of getting health messages to the public, and could even customize the notices to specific audiences.

Long term, however, stimulus isn’t the answer. Local journalism needs a new business model. (National journalism, by the way, is doing OK, thanks in part to the growth of subscription-based journalism, at The New York Times and elsewhere.)

My hope is that somebody will eventually find a way to make money providing useful local information. Until then, the answer will almost certainly need to involve philanthropy, much as philanthropy has long supported public radio.

You’ve heard me say this before, and it’s never been more true: If you have a local source of news that you trust, I hope you can find a way to support it financially.

That source may still be a traditional local newspaper, which sells subscriptions. But I know many people now live in communities where companies like Alden Global Capital have taken over newspapers and are bleeding them for some final profits. (See Vanity Fair’s Joe Pompeo for more on this.)

In that case, see if your community now has a nonprofit start-up as well, in the mold of the Texas Tribune.

And if you have no good local options, you may even want to think about starting a movement to change that.

For more …

  • Poynter has a running list of the newsroom layoffs, furloughs and closures caused by the coronavirus.

  • Matt Laslo, NBC News Think:

The ability for people to get timely, unbiased information on local conditions in their communities is more important than ever. Doing so, however, is increasingly more difficult than ever before — and could get even worse. Many newsrooms were already facing hard times before the coronavirus pandemic shuttered much of America’s economy. … And in the absence of local news organizations, we could all face an unprecedented attack from a second invisible enemy: Fake news parading as fact, with nothing and nobody to counter its spread.

  • Politico’s Jack Shafer argues against stimulus for newspapers:

It might make sense for the government to assist otherwise healthy companies — such as the airlines — that need a couple of months of breathing space from the viral shock to recover and are in a theoretical position to repay government loans sometime soon. But it’s quite another thing to fling a life buoy to a drowning swimmer who doesn’t have the strength to hold on. Newspapers are such a drowning industry. Readers have abandoned them in the tens of millions. Advertisers have largely abandoned them. For the most part, the virus isn’t causing them to sink. They’re already sunk.

In the triage of rescuing flailing firms, some sectors must be left dead unless we want to make permanent welfare cases out of them — and that’s a much different argument than a bailout. It would also be a grievous error to bail out papers controlled by the Alden Global Capital hedge fund — and other firms like them — that have made a practice of squeezing high profits while simultaneously cutting staff and escalating subscription prices.

David Leonhardt
David Leonhardt

If you are not a subscriber to this newsletter, you can subscribe here. You can also join me on Twitter (@DLeonhardt) and Facebook.  Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram.

David Leonhardt, a former Washington bureau chief for The Times, was the founding editor of The Upshot and the head of The 2020 Project, on the future of the Times newsroom. He won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for commentary, for columns on the financial crisis. @DLeonhardt • Facebook

Benicia Herald, East Bay Times, Local news media, News deserts, Print journalism, Vallejo Times-Herald

Loss of local news coverage by Benicia Herald & Vallejo Times-Herald

Newspapers cut back on Benicia reporting

Image result for print journalism
Hard times for print journalism

These are hard times for print journalists, reporters and home delivery newspapers.  Especially so in Benicia.

On July 6, the Benicia Herald announced a cutback in print publication to 3 days per week.  And this week I asked the editor of our larger neighbor newspaper, the Vallejo Times-Herald who on their staff is currently covering Benicia and the editor replied, “Nobody is covering Benicia.”  The East Bay Times, formerly the Contra Costa Times, quit covering Benicia long ago.

These days, knowing what goes on in Benicia is pretty much a do-it-yourself operation, with amateurs doing the reporting.  For the most part, we need to log in to a social network on a computer or subscribe to alerts on a smart phone.  It’s hit or miss at best.

The editor of the Vallejo Times-Herald is open to publishing stories about Benicia.  In editor Jack Bungart’s words, “We’ll try and pick up what we can.”  I take this to mean that we will see official press releases from the Benicia Police or City Hall.  Hopefully, they will print stories and press releases authored by citizens, too?

Nick Sestanovich, editor at the Benicia Herald, has been responsive in publishing news generated by citizens, but he has no staff reporters other than himself.  He has done a good job covering City Council meetings lately, but he can’t possibly attend the large number of other commissions, organizations and events, not to mention reporting on human interest stories, sorting out the facts regarding local controversies, doing interviews, and following up on investigative leads.

Now that the Herald will only go out on Sunday, Wednesday and Friday, the number of Benicia stories will clearly decrease.  We haven’t been told whether Nick’s hours will be cut – hopefully not.  Will he continue to cover some – if fewer – important events, or, like the Vallejo paper, will he need to rely increasingly on official press releases?

This is important: city press releases don’t begin to approximate the important role of a free press.  Nothing against our City staff, but news should be ABOUT the city, not BY the city.  Same could be said of citizen initiatives and watchdog activities.  Independent reporting is a foundation of American democracy.

The Benicia Independent can’t do it.  I’m a one-person operation, and my work here has been and continues to be advocacy on select issues that are important to me, mostly local and mostly on the environment.  I report on gun violence and a few other important issues of our times, but I don’t pretend to cover Benicia in the way that a local news periodical can and should.

Image result for benicia
Benicia, California

It’s a sad day when there is next to no one actually reporting on the affairs of our beautiful and interesting, newsworthy town.

Roger Straw
Benicia