In 2006, media scholar Jay Rosen published an influential essay titled “The People Formerly Known as the Audience.” It heralded an online era of citizen journalism, when newspaper gatekeepers (newspaper and TV editors) would no longer decide what we read and saw.

Citizens would participate in creating and editing news on the internet. It would be an enriching and inclusive news environment. But Rosen, along with other media scholars and champions of the internet, would watch as, with each passing year, this utopian vision of the future of news was corrupted.

“What was initially understood to be a technology of liberation became, increasingly, a mechanism of control: a means of surveilling the public, selling ads, and generating enormous profits…,” Emily Bell and Heather Chapin write in an article for the Columbia Journalism Review.

At the same time, it was an efficient destroyer of vigorous and trusted journalism, consuming and funneling advertising dollars into the control of a handful of multi-billion-dollar corporations and individuals. Profits, not journalism, were their sole goal.

Without restraint or consequences, they fed their online programs with news they stole from a steadily weakening press. 

As a consequence of the naive glorification of what the internet would mean for individuals, society, and our representative democracy, we’ve seen more than 3,200 newspapers disappear. We’ve seen news deserts expand as more than 200 counties, hundreds of suburban areas, and large metropolitan cities lose their newspapers.

Rather than bringing us closer together, it has polarized and separated us.

Voting is already underway in Minnesota for local, state and federal offices. We will elect our representatives to our school boards, city council, and county commissions. We elect sheriffs and county attorneys. We will choose state House representatives and members of the state Senate. We will vote for a governor, a U.S. representative, and a U.S. senator. A question on funding education is on the ballot. There are levy referendums to fund education.

Despite the critical importance of these elections and ballot questions, and the impact their outcomes will have on our lives and those of our children, hundreds of thousands of Minnesotans will have no source of news that provides a voter’s guide explaining the issues and what the candidates on the ballot stand for.

Why the lack of knowledge every citizen must have to be a competent citizen in a representative democracy? The loss of their local newspapers.

Print’s loss matters; its absence is visible. Rather than a representative democracy strengthened by greater online knowledge, we find that wherever a newspaper has disappeared, the opposite occurs.

Communities that have lost their newspapers see fewer people vote, more incumbents re-elected, and citizens more rigid in their voting, sticking with their chosen party, ignoring a candidate’s criminal past, abuse of power, or lack of effectiveness.

We lose the stories that create a common bond to get things done. We become more polarized and less civil with one another.

“Across the news industry since 2002, 80% of the jobs at newspapers and newsrooms were slashed. Conventional news sources could not fend off the ease of online news without a subscription in many cases, and younger people were either consuming news from different sources or dropping out of public engagement altogether,” a story by WV Metro News of Charleston, WV says.

These losses have consequences for our communities and local governments.

“Over the last two decades national news, social media-based news, and content creators have filled that void, making what’s happening at city hall unmoving for the average resident,” Amy Shuler Goodwin, mayor of Charleston, WV, is quoted.

“So, they’re chewing and swallowing what they’ve been fed on a national level, not a local level,” Shuler Goodwin said. “That is hard because you can’t build a great community if you don’t know what’s going on in your community.”

When people are aware of the challenges facing their community, some, certainly not all, feel invested in finding solutions and volunteering to work to implement change. When they feel invested, they volunteer to serve on the fire department or an EMS ambulance crew. They will serve on community boards and commissions, and maybe even run for a local office.

Take away the news that connects people, and more than news is lost.

In his book, Bowling Alone, Robert Putnam documents the erosion of social capital in American society. Frequent interaction among a diverse set of people tends to create a feeling of goodwill toward one another despite differences, Putnam writes. This civic engagement builds social capital, creating a sense of mutual obligation and responsibility, he says.

In losing community newspapers, citizens lose a sense of belonging, a connection that builds a sense of shared obligation and duty

A community loses its identity when it doesn’t see or hear news about itself. Ruben Abrica, a longtime East Palo Alto resident who was vice mayor, told The Washington Post for a story titled: “What happens to local news when there are no local media to cover it?”

 “It hurts our overall well-being,” he said. “It’s incomprehensible that people don’t know such basic things.” He was talking about not knowing who was running for the city council, what the election results were, and what it was doing.

We believe print’s value is increasing in a world of digital distraction, shallow learning, and growing polarization as people shift from local news to national television outlets and the internet. 

Today, information is fragmented and forgettable.  It’s national, not local. Its impacts are far away, not local. It’s divisive, not community-building.

“The prospect that this ‘information age’ could be characterized by unchecked spin and propaganda, where the best-financed voice almost always wins, and cynicism, ignorance and demoralization reach pandemic levels, is real,” the late Robert W. McChesney and John Nichols wrote. “So, too, is the threat to the American experiment.”

October 4 starts National Newspaper Week. It is a time to treasure and support community newspapers