A loss of newspapers is a loss of good governance

During the sophomore year of college, I chose the most lucrative, highest-paid, most esteemed occupation I could think of. I went into newspapers and started answering phones at the larger metropolitan paper where I went to undergrad.

All joking aside, I learned a lot at newspapers. I learned how to write under unforgiving deadlines, sometimes writing in my car and filing via my phone since I was outside a football stadium late on a Friday night. I was trying to make sense of what happened during the game and had 30 minutes to do it.

Then there was the education in how local governments ran. I was there to cover many in rural and suburban areas. I covered school boards, police departments, arraignments, trials, public hearings and a plethora of committee meetings. I did this all with multiple health issues that went undiagnosed for years. How I did that is a mystery to me. Starting and maintaining such a breakneck pace for that long still baffles me.

But I’m not here to discuss my time in newspapers, but to discuss their importance to the state and local governments they served.

I once worked at a now-shuttered weekly in suburban Washington, D.C. I saved a copy of the front page since it was the first of a redesign. It had a picture I took at a high school football game of the winning team hoisting their helmets up high after a win.

I was proud of that picture. That redesign was needed since we had four other similar publications in our area. We needed that edge, especially since we were all free weeklies and some were not welcome deliveries.

I attached a copy of the front page below. It was from the Loudoun Easterner in Ashburn, Va. When I started there, it was owned by Landmark Community Newspapers, Inc. It was a division of Landmark Communications in Norfolk, Va. that once owned The Virginian-Pilot, The News & Record in Greensboro, N.C., The Weather Channel and other properties.

Like The Loudoun Easterner, Landmark doesn't exist anymore, and the other outlets are owned by different entities.

Yes, that was another time and industries go through numerous changes over time. I get that.

Using that above example, there were five outlets keeping tabs on county government, not counting the ones from the dailies in D.C. and all the other outlets from the District.

Those numbers have contracted and there are less people keeping track of local governments and providing citizens a mostly unbiased view of what’s going on.

I never covered state governments from the statehouse, so this part is pure guessing.

But, like local governments, there are less people keeping track of state legislatures and the state’s federal representatives.

Nonprofit outlets and the newspapers that have grew to cover different regions in their state help, but there’s still a deficit from the time every large metropolitan paper had a statehouse reporter.

Heck, I once worked for a mid-size paper in rural New York that had statehouse and Washington reporters. I worked for another mid-size paper in South Carolina that sent sports reporters to cover home football games of its two largest state-funded schools. The football season I started, I had yet to finish my 90-day probationary period, but I made a company-paid trip to Florida for a pre-Christmas bowl for a few days.

Those days are likely gone, but when we get back to another time when there are enough reporters and editors to keep adequate track of state and local governments, hopefully it can tamp down the collective vitriol that has strangled societal discourse since citizens can get news from trusted sources.

Who knows? I may be off, but it’s worth a try.