The Fifth Column: The Incredible Shrinking News Business

That is as true as ever this year, with the recession apparently bottoming out, the local real estate market struggling to get back on its feet and federal, state and Loudoun County elected officials all on traditional late summer hiatus.

The news continues, of course – crime, natural disaster and infotainment never seem to leave us – and all of those bureaucrats will come back from their vacations, eventually. And with job growth and new home sales in the county both showing signs that they may be preparing to rise from the ashes of 2008, advertising in local papers could begin to heat up again soon as well. All signs seem to point to spring 2010 as the first real chance for a return to anything resembling what we all once considered normalcy.

But what local news outlets will survive the coming winter? And does the answer to that question really matter to the average resident of suburban Loudoun County?

A few years ago it became quite trendy to start pouring money into media in this area. There were new newspapers popping up here and there, the Washington Post was talking about local editions and ultra-local web sites, and three of the county’s major sources of local news, WAGE radio and the newspapers Leesburg Today and the Loudoun Easterner, were all bought by large out-of-state media companies. 

But, as the business stumbled into economic problems – some of them related to the recession, many of them having more to do with the newspaper industry’s outdated business model and the explosion of online journalism – Loudoun County news has taken it on the chin. Just this summer, the Easterner and WAGE each closed their doors. Leesburg Today’s parent company has declared bankruptcy, as did the Independent. Further west, the Blue Ridge Leader called it quits after decades covering the news in Loudoun’s rural villages. The Loudoun Times-Mirror, which claims a lineage going back to the late 1700s, has been shedding editorial staff at an alarming rate. And almost forgotten now are the days when the local cable television franchise broadcast a nightly newscast devoted solely to Loudoun County news.

Frankly, the eastern Loudoun County news market had been over saturated for several years. There simply were not enough advertising dollars in the market to keep all of those newspapers afloat. 

It may seem like the failing of a competing newspaper would be good news to others in the market. And, to those on the business side of it, I suppose it is. The death of some of the area’s newspapers and the resulting dispersion of their advertising dollars could help the remaining papers make it to the other side of this financial abyss.

But to those of us who have always devoted ourselves to the editorial side of things, there is no joy in seeing any newspaper fail. John Geddie and Beth Miller, the savants who made the old Easterner a giant in eastern Loudoun, used to say that every community should have at least two independent news sources, and they were right. If the people of Washington, D.C. or Sterling or any of Loudoun’s little rural outposts west of Leesburg get all of their news from a single source – if only one person or one corporation can control what people know about an issue – than that single source can, to a very great degree, control public opinion about that issue and the outcome of an amazing variety of events

Those who believe in the free market should also believe in the value of the free market of ideas. And they should see that revamping the business model that has made American journalism the envy of much of the world for centuries in order to preserve that free market of ideas is more than a admirable goal; for a free society, it is an absolute necessity for survival.

What I find most discouraging about the current trend in media–which seems to be completely dictated by online media and blogging–is that while I keep hearing that it will make the news I receive more "useable" and local than ever, the exact opposite seems to be the case. There are fewer and fewer traditional news source to turn to, especially at the local level. The local news sources all too often turn to out-of-town wire services to fill their pages with out-of-town news, because it is cheaper than paying local reporters. And bloggers, if you are paying attention, tend to publish little than their own personal opinions or reprints of stories culled from the same stumbling traditional media they claim to be replacing. 

There are exceptions, of course; I’ve seen some fine reporting done by independent bloggers. But they’ve also told me that they work for no pay unless they are blogging for–you guessed it–a traditional media company.

Over the years I’ve worked for several of Loudoun County’s newspapers, and I’ve had friends and confidants at all of them, and at WAGE. For the most part, they were good people who believed they were doing the right thing simply by reporting what was going on in the community. There is money to be made in journalism but, like teaching, nobody goes into it to get rich. 

But the reason to want a variety of local news sources to survive may be more practical than any of this. It would be good to know, from someone other than the Loudoun County Government, what is going on in the Loudoun County Government Building in Leesburg. It is a good thing to have reporters sitting in courtrooms and public hearings. It is a daily convenience–a convenience we in Loudoun County no longer have access to–to be able to turn on the radio and hear weather and traffic reports for Loudoun County. 

There is no shortage of reports of backups on the Woodrow Wilson bridge; there is no shortage of online video clips of tropical storms in the Caribbean; and there is no shortage of blogger opinions about Brad Pitt’s and Angelina Jolie’s lifestyle.

But when it comes to news that can help you understand what’s going on in your neighborhood, the market is still contracting. And that’s not a good thing.