Local news is never out of the game: Q&A with Chris Daggett
Screenshot of Chris Daggett and Zoe Van Gelder on Zoom, captured by Zoe Van Gelder.
In 2023, approximately 2.5 local newspapers shut down each week. This national downhill trend has continued in 2024 and is hitting home in New Jersey. Decisions made by the Newark Morning Ledger Co. and NJ Advance Media have led to the print closures and full closures of multiple local New Jersey news outlets.
This decision raises questions about the future of local news and access for communities that rely on local sources for information on local legislation, voting, food and agriculture reports, arts and more. According to the New Jersey Civic Information Consortium, the loss of local news outlets and their print will mean the loss of access to current information regarding the community for those without digital access, as well as “seniors, low income residents, and others who may pick up a paper occasionally.”
Public Square Amplified reporter Zoe Van Gelder spoke with New Jersey Civic Information Consortium’s Board Chair and Interim Executive Director Chris Daggett about the recent events, their broader implications for local journalism and where the next steps for local news may lead.
Map showing the number of local news originators in New Jersey townships and cities as of 2020. (Center for Cooperative Media) https://newsecosystems.org/njmap/
Public Square Amplified: It makes sense to start with the broader context of things right now. Advance Local has taken a position, essentially that they want to change the landscape of what local news looks like, so they're eliminating their print news outlets which have consistently served communities with scarce news resources. Do you think that this position they've taken will directly create more news deserts?
Daggett: I'm not sure that's quite accurate, I'm going to make the assumption we believe everything they've said, meaning that it's really market conditions that have led to this, that advertising has clearly collapsed in terms of its support of local news. You take that together with the increasing costs of print. If you farm out your printing operations, which virtually everybody does now, those costs have just been driven higher and higher, right? It cuts into your bottom line, you have to make some tough decisions now, so I'm going to believe them at their word that that's why they're doing this. Having said that, it has a big impact, particularly on a couple of classes of people. One, people who don't have access to the internet, so they can't [read] unless they go to their local library. Secondly, people might have access but that doesn't mean they know how to navigate the Internet to find what they're looking for, particularly in a newspaper. So that's another piece. And then finally, where I think it's going to also hurt is a lot of people still either buy it on the newsstand or they bum a copy from a friend, or they find it on a park bench or in a trash can or wherever it happens to be. There are people from all walks of life and economic conditions who still want to know what's going on in the news. So, all of those folks who have that print access no longer will have it because often in these cases, these are people who can't afford to have a subscription or can't afford to buy it every day, and they can't always go to their library to see the edition that's probably there. So, to me, it's impacting a group of people most in need of news and most in need of understanding what's going on in the community and what resources might be available to help them in their daily lives. That's a long answer to the question, but yes, it can have a real impact.
Public Square Amplified: A lot of the conversation around print, as you said, leads to access: What are your thoughts on how we get those who aren't feeling the immediate loss of that access, so maybe my generation, those who are more tech-savvy, those who have been paying for digital or those who are just kind of apathetic – how do we get them to care about it?
Daggett: Yeah, that's related but unrelated at the same time, because that's a broader issue associated with people's access to news in general, and I struggle with that a lot because that's the business we're in. And I tell people when I talk about the internet, the internet is the biggest blessing and curse that we've ever had. The blessing is that we have access to and can find information about virtually anything we want. The curse is we have access to and can find information about virtually anything we want. It's a two-sided coin. And on the first side, it's great because, you know, it has helped people who are shuttered up and don't have access, and so they have access now to people and to information that they wouldn't otherwise have. But the curse is that we now have many sources of information. When I grew up, I had a handful of sources of information – the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Walter Cronkite, David Brinkley, you know, from broadcast leaders to newspapers of great reputation, and we talked about things we had read there or seen there. And now, too often, you have an echo chamber, where all of a sudden, everybody's got a source of information that fits their views, and to some degree, I believe that is a source of our division in this country. So, how do we get people to change those behaviors? My biggest fear is that the cat's out of the bag, and it isn’t going to come back. We’re not going to return to a few sources of information. And so I worry about it for your generation, and, increasingly, for my own, because there's plenty of people in my age category that are spewing things about either Donald Trump or Kamala Harris or whatever that is just off the wall. And yet people say, “Boy, that's the God's honest truth.” Maybe, maybe not. I look to you guys [your generation] almost to say, how can we fix this?
Public Square Amplified: [The Jersey Journal] is my home newspaper and when I saw the news, I was shocked. The Jersey Journal was exclusively print. I'm wondering what you think print journalism does that digital journalism doesn't do? Why do we need to be so vigilant about protecting print journalism?
Daggett: That's a really good question. In the end, maybe we don't. But for me, I don't know it's maybe just a habit on my part, and maybe it's okay to just go online and see 23 stories, and I'm going to pick the one I want. It also diminishes people's breadth, I think. For example, I'm paging through and I go, “Wow, look at that headline. That's interesting. I wonder what that's all about in the arts or in transportation or energy,” or whatever it happens to be, that if I'm only looking at a website, I may not be browsing that way and seeing that range of stories and topics that are covered. So that’s where it might matter some. But overall, as each generation goes through, people develop their own means of communication. So, in the long term, it may not make any difference, but during this transition from one generation to the next, or one medium to the next, it could have a real impact.
Public Square Amplified: Is the responsibility going to now fall on the individual to stay informed even more so than it already does?
Daggett: Well, maybe a little, I'd say it a little differently, because we've always had the responsibility to stay informed, because you could always just not even look at a newspaper, or you could not vote, or you could not care about the election. So, it always rests with the individual, ultimately. Our challenge is to get them to be interested in news and not treat it the way it's become, where all they see is a shouting match between people of differing opinions. We've managed to bring down trust in virtually every institution in our society. And that's one of the scariest parts of all of this. You know, the CDC got beaten down and now there are lot of questions about health agencies. Reporters have gotten beaten down. Politicians have gotten beaten down. One of the few remaining institutions that's trusted at least locally, are libraries, and even those you've got fights over book bans and all kinds of stuff.
Public Square Amplified: How do we work on rebuilding that trust? Because I'm also thinking about it from someone in my age group. In PSA, news journalism is my medium for thinking critically about things. But whenever I step out of that framework, I have to recognize that a lot of journalism has become a commodity, it has become commercialized, it has become corporatized, and I think that lends itself to current distrust. We have this vision of a Fourth Estate, of this tool that's supposed to hold everything or everyone accountable. How do we do that work so that more young people who have an interest can enter?
Daggett: Great question. First of all, you have to earn it back. Once lost, it's hard to earn it back, but you can do it. That's why I also think local news is so important, because the shot you have is if you're locally based, and you get to know people, not just from the reporter’s viewpoint, but as your neighbor, as your fellow citizen or fellow resident, you build a trust level. But when we go into a news desert and we're trying to rebuild a news desert, our first question is, how do you get your news? Our second question is, why do you trust it? The reason we ask that question is because we’ve got to understand what their frame of reference is and where they're coming from, and then we ask them what is missing from your local news that you'd like to have. And it's around those three questions that we try to build some sort of capacity that meets the needs of citizens. So, to the degree that you can go in and meet the needs of your readers, at least initially, and then more broadly, to get to a wider network of residents in your community, you can succeed. But, you have to do that one person at a time and build that trust back. Local news is so important because that's the level where we have to build that trust back.
Public Square Amplified: So, in your work on getting news and information to people who live in news deserts, how do they view their lack of access, if you can say?
Daggett: I don't know if we've asked them how they see it, but I can tell you that in a lot of places we've gone to, they are hungry for it. They're hungry for news, local news. In some cases, they may ask their neighbor, what's going on, what happened last night, or what was that? Or, what were those sirens last night at two o'clock in the morning when I was half asleep? Or, you know, boy, I smelled smoke. Was there a fire around the corner? Or, all those kinds of things that happen. It's just we are in a block and tackling stage, as they say, where we’ve gotta get in there, in the dirt, and grind this out.
Public Square Amplified: Thank you! Maybe we can end on a more optimistic question, which is, what is the ideal picture for local news in New Jersey?
Daggett: The ideal picture starts with people being interested in their local communities, enough so that they want to learn about what's happening. They want to be engaged, and not engaged only when they wake up one day and there's a 2 million square foot warehouse being built in their backyard that they say they never heard about, but there were 20 public hearings about it, and they just never bothered to look about for what's going on in town. So, it starts with individuals doing that, and then it's what you [Zoe] are doing – you start a news operation, and you figure out what are the needs? How do we meet the needs in local news of our residents? And then when you figure that out, you start to address it through whatever medium works. It’s completely different today, it's all collaborative. What does the community need? How can I partner with them to provide them that information? I'll still have an arm's length relationship with them so that I can write about it in a fair and even-handed way. But it's a lot driven by what the needs of the community have become, and so that's the foundational way, if you will, that you begin and then build on this. I think that's the way it's going to work.
