Solutions are particularly urgent now. In 2023,
local newspaper closures shot up to a dismal
2.5 per week. More than two hundred counties — almost all places where working-class and poor people live — are now “news deserts” where people no longer know what’s happening at their statehouses or their courthouses.
Near-term policy reform is just the beginning, of course. To create an equitable and sustainable media ecosystem, we should change our mindset about and framing of what media is. Not-for-profit media must become the norm — not the exception. Media, after all, is a form of education.
We should, for example, consider a return to a Works Progress Administration (WPA) model, where 6,600 reporters were sent out into the field, underwritten by the government, as part of the New Deal’s response to the Great Depression, covering the lives of some of the poorest Americans. Our organization, the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, is a version of this — only, given the absence of WPA-style policy programs of late, without the public funding part. We support hundreds of journalists, a good number of them financially struggling, to report on their experiences and communities and then copublish them nationally. But we are a staff of four, and this is a nonprofit that we raise money for each year. The government needs a version of what we are doing on a much larger scale.
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