When we were driving back from my great-nephew’s birthday yesterday, Cheri mentioned something that a friend had told her earlier this week. It was a minor incident, one of no great consequence, that happened locally. Neither of us had heard anything about it nor had we seen it in our local newspaper.
I said that it was the type of thing that you would have seen in local newspapers of the past but which no longer appeared in the new reality of print journalism. Our local newspaper, the Elmira Star Gazette, which was the first newspaper that Frank Gannett operated on the way to building his news empire, has evolved over the years from an informative, vital chronicle of the local area to a much leaner, less informative leg of a group of local newspapers that is more regional in coverage, sharing reporters and coverage. As a result, there are fewer reporters covering much greater areas with less space to fill on the pages of each paper. Local coverage consists of a page or two, at best.
Gone are the little details that newspapers of the past provided, the minutiae of day to day life in a locality that gave the reader a true feel of the newspaper’s area of coverage. Less coverage of small incidents, minor arrests, social gatherings, small local events, etc. The type of things that give an area’s readers a sense of definition of what they are as a community.
That’s a lot to lose.
My fear, which is beyond nostalgic longings for a return to some idealized past, is that the generations of the future will actually have a harder time trying to put together the day to day life of any specific area because of the loss of this minutiae that was in the past always gathered in one convenient source, the newspaper. For instance, as I’ve written before, I didn’t know much, practically nothing, about my great-grandfather’s life in the Adirondacks in the late 19th and early 20th century. But by reading the old newspapers of that time and locality ( St. Regis Falls) I was able to get a very good an detailed idea of how that area’s inhabitants lived their lives, their social and family networks and how they operated and interacted as a community. It seemed like every little detail was chronicled in some way that I would never be able to find in today’s papers.
It gave depth and detail to a time and place that is a distant point in the past.
With the loss of the newspaper’s effective local coverage, I don’t know if the same could be said today, even with all the awesome sources of information available to us. There is an enormous amount of data, given all the new technology such as the internet, out there but it’s not unified and day to day in one specific area.
Maybe I shouldn’t care about this. Who does? And maybe I’m just plain wrong. Maybe it will be easier in the future to pull all the data together and get an idea of how specific people lived in specific localities. I just feel there is a loss here that goes beyond the purely nostalgic, especially when examining the historic anthropology of a given area.
I think a small part of our cultural voice and identity will fade away…
Redtree Times 
Gary:
You make a great point here. As a journalist, I worry about the impact of shrinking news budgets and newsholes on our current democracy. But you wisely raise an equally important question — who will write the first draft of history?
Future generations seeking information about how we lived in 2010 will be disappointed when they look at newspapers from our era.
Thanks for writing such a thoughtful and meaningful blog every day.
— Brian
Brian– I was going through the old Star Gazettes from the early 1900’s and I was knocked out by the page after page of local stories. All I could think about was how someone reading today’s paper would not have even a slight taste of how this area really lives as a community, whereas I could read that paper from a century ago and get a real flavor for this area then and all the layers of society that made it up. Maybe this is a reflection of how we live our lives today. I don’t know…
Thanks for the comment, Brian. All my best!
This is a great point, Gary. The novel I’m working on is set in 1941 Washington DC. I couldn’t do it without researching the papers of the day.
Especially the papers that covered the black community. They’re almost the only history that exists for fully a third of the city at that time. If you read the white papers and guide books, you’d never know black people even existed in DC.
Thanks, Dave. I think there is a greater capacity for dissemination of information today, especially on a national or worldwide level, but there is a great void for gathering and chronicling local news, which is a shame because that is where the real living takes place. Coincidentally, there was an* article * in the Huffington Post today about a study involving the Baltimore Sun that reinforces the very point I was trying to make in this post. Most original local news coverage is produced by newspapers with internet sites producing only about 4% of original news stories.
Will the internet and bloggers pick up the slack in reporting locally? Maybe to a small extent but I kind of doubt it. There’s no incentive to do so. Does it matter? Probably not to the average news consumer who takes what is written at face value as being all the news they need. It’s the future that will feel the loss of this recording of our times.
How goes the novel, by the way?
Slow, Gary. I wrote one a year when I was working part time, but now with this full time gig, I can’t work 10 hours, drive home and then pound the keyboard for another 2 or 3.
I know, it’s a lame excuse. But I’m old and don’t have the stamina I had just 15 years ago.
It’s killing me.