In the process of reporting this story, many of the sites and merger announcements have turned into 404s or begun automatically redirecting users to the websites of nearby publications. Owner: Black Mountain Institute, University of Nevada, Las Vegas The Devil Strip Owner: Bonnie Mullens, Charles Mooney and Mynette Taylor The Believer RELATED: Here are the newsroom layoffs, furloughs and closures caused by the coronavirus The latest Kokomo Perspective Also, if you can make it to the end, you’ll see there are a few bright spots, too. We’re sure we missed some, please help us fix that. As many of the sites mentioned here are disappearing with no notice, we wanted to show they once did exist. When possible, we’ve included clippings from that newsroom or about it. Here, we’ve collected everything we’ve found about the local newsrooms we’ve lost because of the coronavirus.
“We started publishing the paper in 2007 to fill a news desert in a community we felt was on the upswing.” “The Record has never been profitable, but we were in this for the long haul,” publisher Greg Popa told readers. Some are newer, like the Waterbury Record in Vermont, which launched in 2007. It has come to drive the darkness from our neighboring city.” (That site has also disappeared, instead directing readers to The Norman Transcript website.) After The Edmond Sun started publishing in Edmond, Oklahoma, in 1889, the nearby paper that’s now the Oklahoman told readers “The Edmond Sun now shines on our table. The Journal-Express in Knoxville, Iowa, was founded by a Civil War veteran who was friends with Abraham Lincoln, the site (which now redirects visitors to a “Knoxville” page on the website of the nearby Oskaloosa Herald) reported. Some of the places listed here grew up alongside their communities.
Then, she said, research shows that taxes go up and voter participation goes down. “And when you lose a small daily or a weekly, you lose the journalist who was gonna show up at your school board meeting, your planning board meeting, your county commissioner meeting,” she said.Ĭommunities lose transparency and accountability. The pace might be faster, but Abernathy’s research shows a trend that’s still playing out in the middle of a pandemic - the newsrooms that are closing are mostly weeklies in small communities. “Between places switching to online only and those that are merging, this is a really sharp increase,” she said, “and not surprising either.” The pace of closures, up till now, has been about 100 a year, said Abernathy, a professor at the University of North Carolina’s Hussman School of Journalism and Media.
Since 2004, about 1,800 newspapers have closed in the United States, Penny Abernathy reported in her research on news deserts. And a few are - were - owned by local families. Several are owned by Forum Communications Company.
But that “merger” means the end of news dedicated to those communities, the evaporation of institutional knowledge and the loss of local jobs.Īt least 14 of the newsrooms now gone are owned by CNHI. Some report they’re merging with nearby publications. Now, small newsrooms around the country, often more than 100 years old, often the only news source in those places, are closing under the weight of the coronavirus. Just to get through the crisis, newsroom leaders told readers. In many places, it started with a cut in print days.