Your Local Papers Need Your Support - Editorial
At the Enterprise, each week starts with the editorial meeting—a casual, amiable gathering of reporters and editors where we talk over our ideas for the week’s paper. Points and counterpoints are tossed across the conference table, as are tips on who to approach for a story and how we might foster its growth. The casual chatter across desks, that staple of so many newsrooms (and journalism films), continues now as much as it did 50 or 100 years ago.
The tools have changed—gone is the staccato clack of typewriter keys pounding away at wafer-thin copy paper. The low rumble of the old press no longer reverberates through the halls, though the smell of printer’s ink still haunts the building—a nostalgic reminder of our profession’s origins. Today our pages are created, edited, uploaded and printed digitally. Everything from the first lines of an emerging story to the production of the aluminum plates takes place on an illuminated screen.
Our mission endures—an urgent voice that flows with no less strength now as it did in our past.
The need for community journalism remains a constant, but one that is increasingly unmet throughout the nation. Newspapers help connect a community by chronicling the goings-on of the many interested groups that together make up the communities we call home. They provide a forum for ideas and opinions in the form of editorials and letters to the editor. Too often these functions have been subsumed by digital forums, whose promise of the democratization of ideas have, in practice, worked only to silo thought and blur the line between fact and fiction, allowing anonymity to be wielded recklessly. Spaces for online discussion within communities are beneficial, without a doubt, but they can never truly take the place of a community newspaper with professional journalists at the helm.
Without newspapers—which often provide watch over the town’s democratic procedures—things can, fundamentally speaking, go awry. Just north of here, in Plymouth, a local news startup hit some serious barriers when the town manager put a moratorium on communication with the press, barring town employees from speaking with the paper. The move was a reaction to a dispute over a quote taken out of context, which does happen—journalists are human, after all—but the coverage, having been reviewed by media professionals and ethicists, turned out to be pretty standard for a local news story.
At the core of the issue here, though, as media ethicist Sarah McBride said, is that the town was simply unfamiliar with media coverage. News, especially on the local level, exists to serve the townspeople, not the town hall employees. To the inexperienced, though, such governmental transparency can feel a lot like unwarranted scrutiny. Our reporters’ questions come from a place of curiosity and seeking clarity. Town officials may defensively say, “I’m just doing my job,” but all we really want to know is, “Well, what job is that?”
Local news is more important now, in the age of living behind screens, perhaps more than ever before. Local newsrooms put real people out into the community, meeting and talking with residents and officials face to face about the real challenges facing them and their neighbors. The need for more of this on-the-ground journalism across American communities to combat “news deserts” is well-chronicled.
The challenges of running a newspaper in the 21st century, too, are well-chronicled. The Upper Cape, with each of its four towns having a community paper, is an aberration to the trend of local newspapers drying up, but the general decline of the industry has not gone unnoticed. The decline in print advertising and the shift of audiences to digital platforms have sapped newsrooms of valuable resources. We’ve met these challenges and worked to diversify revenue streams, update our digital presence and branch out to new audiences, all in an effort to support our newsroom and its important work. But this work means next to nothing without the support of our communities, our readers—the ones we do it all for.
The Enterprise is first and foremost a community institution beholden only to you, our reader. Our goal is to grow and innovate so we can continue our mission well into the future, meeting not only today’s challenges, but tomorrow’s as well. Support from our readers is what allows us to continue that mission, and that support can manifest in several forms. Subscriptions, of course, are one way to support our work, as is showing support to the local businesses that advertise with us. And yet another option is our Support Local Journalism fund, which allows you to make a contribution to directly support our work.
Many have said that both local and print journalism are dying industries, but we see it differently—we see two industries fighting to survive, because those on the inside know how crucial the work is. It is a worthy fight, but the cause needs to rally support—your support.