Tom Stites is a seasoned writer, editor and entrepreneur with a passion for strengthening journalism and democracy. Currently he is a consulting editor for the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists and the founder and president of the Banyan Project which aims to strengthen democracy by pioneering a sustainable and easily replicable new model for Web journalism. As an editor he has supervised reporting that has won an array of major journalism awards, including two Pulitzer Prizes; as an entrepreneur he has been the founding publisher of two print magazines and three Web publications.
Episode Description
Journalism in the United States is imagined as a public good, an institution that aids in the maintenance of democracy as it holds people in power accountable for their actions. Journalists are also tasked with helping citizens understand how their communities are run. However, that’s becoming increasingly difficult as local new rooms around the country shrink or are shuttered completely. Journalism and news deserts are the focus of this episode of Stats and Stories with guest Tom Stites
+Full Transcript
Rosemary Pennington: Journalism in the United States is imagined as a public good, an institution that aids in the maintenance of democracy as it holds people in power accountable for their actions. Journalists are also tasked with helping citizens understand how their communities are run. However, that’s becoming increasingly difficult as local new rooms around the country shrink or are shuttered completely. Journalism and news deserts are the focus of this episode of Stats and Stories, where we explore the statistics behind the stories and the stories behind the statistics. I’m Rosemary Pennington. Stats and Stories is a production of Miami University’s Department of Statistics and Media, Journalism and Film, as well as the American Statistical Association. Joining me are regular panelists John Bailer, Chair of Miami’s Statistics Department and Richard Campbell, former Chair of Media, Journalism and Film. Our guest today is Tom Stites. Stites is a writer, editor, and entrepreneur, and is currently a consulting editor for the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists. He is also the founder and president of the Banyan Project, which aims to strengthen democracy by pioneering a sustainable and replicable model for web journalism. As an editor, he has supervised reporting that has won an array of major journalism awards including two Pulitzer Prizes and last month a story that Stites wrote about news deserts was published on The Pointer news website. Tom, thank you so much for being here.
Tom Stites: It's my pleasure.
Pennington: Could you explain to our listeners what a news desert is?
Stites: My definition is pretty simple, and it is a community where there is no original reporting being done. It’s as simple as that. The people can’t find out what’s going on in their community.
Richard Campbell: There’s another concept too, that you might shed some light on- ghost newspapers. Which is a term, I think Margaret Sullivan of The Post has a book out this week on that term. Can you talk a little bit about that as well?
Stites: Yeah, the term was actually originated by Penelope Muse Abernathy at the University of North Carolina, who’s work I have used a lot as a journalist. And this is the idea that you’ve still got a newspaper; it’s got a nameplate and it looks like there’s paper, and there’s print and there’s ink and all of the things, but the content has no civic value. You know, there are no reporters or so little reporting that there’s not enough information moving into the community to be able to have an informed citizen.
Campbell: So, let’s talk a little bit more about the numbers here too, Tom, and then I’ll let John in.
John Bailer: Oh, thanks, Richard.
Campbell: So, we know that we have lost about 2100 daily and weekly papers over the last 15 years. We know that- I think Peggy or Penny Abernathy’s recent research shows that we’re losing about 30 newspapers a month during the COVID crisis; it’s actually accelerated. And talk a little bit more about the implications of that.
Stites: Well, I find it terrifying because I actually share Winston Churchill's deep belief in democracy which is that it’s the worst form of government ever devised, except for all the others. And I really think that’s accurate, but it’s the best we can do. It’s certainly better than autocracy or theocracy or the various options that there are some people in this country would much rather have than democracy. I think it is fair to say journalism is one component of a successful democracy, but I think that it is something that we can safely say that without an informed electorate you cannot have an informed democracy that actually works. And if you have a whole bunch of communities that have no news coverage that’s presented either on paper or online or any other way, nobody knows what’s going on, you do not have an informed community, and that- those 2100 newspapers represent about 25%- just short of 25% of all the papers that were being published in 2004, so that’s a 15-year span. This is a nontrivial number and I believe now that coronavirus has arrived, this occurrence of local news organizations will accelerate, probably, pretty significantly over the next year. There are in Penny’s most recent report there are two or three people quoted as saying there could be hundreds of newspapers die in the- you know, that are with us now that will be gone by the end of this year. Let’s hope that’s wrong.
John Bailer: So, I’m curious about when you’re talking about the value of local news, and as someone who still subscribes to the local newspaper, I mean I-
Stites: As do I.
Bailer: I enjoy getting this, it’s something that’s wired in, but we also live in a world where we can customize the input that we consume. You know that we can easily live in an echo chamber of beliefs that are very similar to our own and how we consume news. Does the local- the presence of this local news help to combat that kind of self-selection of input?
Stites: Well yeah, for one thing, it becomes something you can select. There are an awful lot of communities now, and more coming, where there is no local reporting to select for your little collection.
Campbell: So one of the things following up on John’s question, one of the things that Brookings Institute- Institution study showed last year was with this absence of local news, particularly in smaller communities and small towns, the default news has become evening cable TV news. And they’re arguing that in a lot of these news deserts, the only news people really are watching are national news stories.
Stites: Yes.
Campbell: They tend to be heavily partisan if you’re watching cable news in the evening. Talk a little bit about that.
Stites: Well, it’s the phenomenon that I think people are beginning in a formal way to discover, but I think it’s been true for a very long time. I believe that the news deserts of America started with the failure of rural newspapers. Rural America is, essentially, a news desert. I mean there are little oases here and there but not many. And it’s been that way for quite a long time. So the- you know if your civic life is not expressed in a way that people can understand and discuss with other citizens- it makes citizenship decisions that you’re called on to do it with some information in your pocket, you’re then left with much more abstract news that you get from national sources. You start talking about issues and you start talking about issues that have no particular, in many cases, expression in the local community, but that suddenly gets to be where your mind goes. And then you start applying all of this issue-think to the community that you live in, and it doesn’t necessarily fit but it’s all you’ve got to work with. And I just think it’s- that as bad as it is, that the newspapers have failed, I think that this amplifies the badness because of it because it’s distracting from the community and it confuses the thought patterns that you need to be an effective citizen in your community.
Campbell: So, you remember- we had George Packer here, The New Yorker writer, a couple years ago and he told a story that really clicked with me. It was an editor in Eau Claire, Wisconsin and Packer asked him, I think, you know, what are your letters to the editor like these days? And he said, well they’re frankly not very much about local issues anymore; they’re cable news talking points. And I’ve heard other stories since then from small-town editors in Ohio who are saying the same thing; that people want to discuss national stories because they have no- there’s no factual foundation from reporting that’s going on in their local communities.
Stites: And there’s another terrible aspect of this and that is the fact that where there is no real information, you’re ripe for serious disinformation. And there are- there’s something called Kentucky Post I’ve mentioned in the story maybe a year ago, close by where you are, and now many places that are published not for-profit, but for propaganda purposes. And they seem like- they look like local newspapers when you look at their websites; they have a nameplate that makes it look like a newspaper. The stories are written in the style of journalism so you think it must be journalism and it’s not; it’s pure propaganda. So, what you do- as the newspapers die and if no digital news sites come into play in that community to keep its journalism going, people are under assault from propagandists and then there’s the social media mess. One of the things I noticed there was- after the first wave of demonstrations that sadly gave way to violence in the evenings, the right-wing talking points had a lot to do with ANTIFA, this anti-fascist group who are way left and quite violent, and are blamed for, and probably accurately in many cases, for causing some of this violence that stank up the atmosphere of the protests. There was a bunch of stuff that went out on social media that said that George Soros funds these people had people up in arms, terrified because buses full of Soros-funded ANTIFA, violent people are coming to our town and they believed it. You know, had there been a local newspaper, had there been a local news website that didn’t rely on that reporting, it would have been debunked immediately. They wouldn’t even have probably bothered to do the social media propaganda if there were a newspaper there, why would- you know, there’s a defense mechanism built into local journalism that’s done in a sound way; it holds out the invaders if you will.
Bailer: So in some of the reporting that you’ve done on this you show a number of maps that are highlighting where these deserts are occurring, and in your previous comment you had noted rural America as being pretty much where you see a lot of these deserts. We also have seen with some even major city publications decreasing their frequency of these publications, even if they continue to exist. Are there other places where you have these types of- this area of concern of under-coverage, with defaulting to the kind of general national talking points?
Stites: Well yes. I think that you know, we- the conversation that’s going on now, thanks to Penny Abernathy’s amazing research, is focused on everything since 2004. The fact is there have been news deserts in this country for a very long time that predate that. And the way I- I actually am the first person to use the term news desert in my writing, it was the first time it was ever published. People asked me if I coined it and I think that’s a grandiose thing to claim. I’m sure that’s it been around, and people have talked about it, but it started a conversation. And what got me started on that was I was on a panel at a convention and there was a reporter there from Chicago who had some statistics that had to do with how people in the different neighborhoods in Chicago responded to a certain set of questions. And in the ones of if you read the downtown newspapers, once you got into the south side and west side, that fell off, but, maybe not even as far as we might guess. But then the question is is the information that you get from the Chicago Tribune useful to you in terms of your life decisions and your citizenship decisions? And the answer was no. So that’s a news desert in terms of civic engagement, civic information that allows you- that lifts you up as a citizen to have a voice. I think that’s been the case for a very long time. Now, Chicago is actually a little bit better off than most places because The Defender, at least in 2004 was still a daily newspaper; anymore it doesn’t print and I’m told, sadly, is hanging on by its fingernails. The- so I think that people who are poor have a very different set of life concerns than people who are affluent, you know. Your financial page for poor people is how to stay out of grips of the payday lenders; it’s not how best to invest my 401k. It’s a different world. And the newspapers tend to write for the middle class and up and they tend to ignore the poor and if you- if I were a poor person and I needed financial guidance, I wouldn’t get it from my newspaper. So when you get down to it, I think that the news deserts of America are demographic as much as they are geographic and that there’s a class problem, there’s a race problem that’s involved in this, and it is structural.
Pennington: You’re listening to Stats and Stories and today we’re talking with writer and editor Tom Stites about the shrinking landscape of local journalism. You mentioned, Tom, that news deserts are not new, necessarily. What is it of the last several decades that has sort of made this become such a pressing concern? Because it is a pressing concern for journalists, for academics, for people who are engaged with political discourse, like it’s a constant sort of drop beat, is this idea of a news desert. Why is there this focus now if this has been a problem for a while?
Stites: Well, it has been- the problem is now that the news deserts are spreading like mad. I think if you are a poor person or live in a big urban black community, you have surely grown up in news deserts; it’s nothing new. But now news deserts are spreading like wildfire and there’s no fire department on the way. So that’s pretty different and that’s terrifying.
Bailer: So that really begs the question of where do we find signs of hope? What are some of the ways that- how do we fight this wildfire that you’ve described? And how do we engage local communities in demanding this type of information? How do you change that expectation and then provide that service?
Stites: Oh boy, that’s the ultimate question at this point. And the answer- the glib answer in my case would be to start a news-co-op using the Banyan Project’s business model.
Bailer: I thought that might be part of your response.
Stites: But I need to say I actually believe it is true, if not I wouldn’t be putting my energy into that at this stage of my life. I earned this white beard, you know. But there is startling little interest in that until recently. But suddenly the journalism school at Columbia has started a sort of a news crisis thing- I don’t think they know what it is yet but they know there is a crisis in the newsroom, or if they do know I just missed reading something, but they just announced it like urgently it’s a crisis, it’s a crisis. And there are people who have been sort of saving strength for ideas for what you might do, other than me, and most of the attention it goes to the idea that the government ought to fund journalism the way that it does in Europe. [Inaudible] any number of very interesting statistics that we in the United States the government spends 85 cents per year per person to support journalism. I’m not making this number up, I’m not quite 100% sure of it but I’m about 99% sure, so I apologize. But in Europe, the numbers are in big multiples of that. They’re not all the same and there are some pretty big disparities, but it’s something that Europe has done for a long time and it’s built into the democracy systems.
Campbell: Don’t we face a lot of pushback from the journalists here who make this argument that well, if you’re getting money from the government, how can you cover it? I don’t know if we have NPR as a model or-
Stites: No, I’m with you, I have the- I think that there are people who have put quite a bit of work into thinking about this very topic, and as a matter of fact I opened the link last night. I was too- I didn’t have enough bandwidth to read it carefully, I still haven’t read it, but it’s somebody who has models- have developed models that would keep the government from meddling in the journalism even though they funded it. So, I’m really interested to read that. I wish that I had thought to read it before we had started talking about it. I find it very difficult to imagine that in this particular country, at this particularly divided time where there are people who are just desperate to control the conversation so that it reflects their biases, I just don’t think- we’ve got to do something else first. Maybe that will come. I’ll tell you there’s one very interesting idea, and it’s in New Jersey and there’s a young man named Simon Galperen, who had another idea and- but for reasons that had nothing to do with him not doing it right, there was a bunch of the money that was coming from the state and it didn’t come, or it came in a tiny amount. He has come up with the idea of starting special interest districts. We’re talking water districts, sewage districts, drainage ditch districts, things like that that have taxing authority, and a little bit go of your property taxes that you pay every year go to all of these- or are divided up amongst these special interest districts. And so, he’s working on, in New Jersey, starting some special interest districts and they would cough up you know, each person would pay a dime, whatever it turns out to be, or 85 cents, and they would end up with a well-funded local journalism outfit. That’s, I think, pretty interesting. I think it’s a fresh idea and it’s the first fresh idea I’ve seen in a long time.
Campbell: Can you talk a little bit about Banyan too? I mean we know we have a business model that’s dysfunctional in journalism. We’ve got Google and Facebook making almost 70% of all digital advertising revenue going to two places. These are middle guys; they don’t produce the news but they’re making the money. And I know they’re trying to help fund Report for America and other places, but the idea of a co-op and getting the community involved is something that I think is really interesting and you’ve been doing this for a while, right?
Stites: I’ve been trying to do it for a while. I still do not have adequate funding. So, funders if you’re listening to this, pay attention. The- let me throw you just a little bit off because I’m going to start talking about credit unions. There are a whole lot of different kinds of cooperatives. Cabot Cheese is a cooperative of dairy farmers and they pool their stuff and they have centralized production stuff. They make more money and have a better place in the market because they are cooperative. A lot of agricultural co-ops. There’s something- there’s a category of cooperatives called a consumer cooperative. And these are cooperatives that are owned by their end-users. Think food co-ops. If you have a taste for a certain kind of food that’s hard to get in your supermarket, you find or start a co-op and you get a bunch of people who want the same kind of food and yadda yadda yadda. The point is not to make money as a grocer, but to get the food you want at the best price you can. Credit unions are consumer co-ops; they are owned by their end-users. It’s really complicated because they are in a special category that is non-profit and I don’t understand it, but nonetheless the depositors that run things; it’s where the authority resides, is with the depositors. In 1929 when the great depression got started with the crash there were 1100 credit unions in the United States. Coming out of the great depression there were 11,000. The way this happened is all kinds of banks went out of business and failed and there was no source of credit in communities except loan sharks. I did a bunch of reporting about the origin stories of credit unions in learning about how to do a news co-op. An astonishing number of them were brought into being for fear of your kneecaps being cracked if you got your credit in the wrong place. I’m serious. Hundreds and hundreds of them. So, credit is something people need, and the market failed literally and in the sense of economics, so the people figured it out and did it themselves. We now- the credit deserts are sure gone, but we have news deserts now. And not everybody has the level of civic interest or energy to be part of anything that goes on in the community; too many people don’t. They don’t think, they don’t know what’s going on and they don’t care. It’s true and it will probably always be true. But there are people in every community who care, and they care enough- there are people wringing their hands, you know? What are we going to do? Well, you know, start your own. The way that- the idea is to have hundreds in a small community or thousands in a large community of local people, ideally very well-distributed through the community, who own- are members of the news co-op, whose mission it is to serve the needs of the community for news and information. It’s a community institution that is not a for-profit business and you get- if you’re a member, you get intangible as well as tangible benefits. You get a little piece of stock and you have a vote in terms of who is going to be the directors that determines who hires the editor and so forth. So, you have a voice. You have a civic voice and that, you know, we don’t know yet the incidents of people who care that much to do this, but we have on a test found a whole bunch of people who would leap to be founding members of such an entity. So, the idea is to create a grassroots community institution that fulfills the information needs.
Bailer: That’s a really interesting idea and I think one aspect- something that I think I’m going to change gears in one second, but just for quick observation, there was an aspect of a need that was being unmet, but there was also an issue of trust of who is able to provide for that need. And I think that’s kind of- it’s a matter of getting people to the point of embracing both the need and the trust component to move forward.
Campbell: The interesting thing about that, John, is that you know, in these national polls about who do you trust, the national polls are 50% and local is 70%. So, there’s a lot of trust in local journalism.
Stites: And if I may just blurt a little more?
Bailer: Please.
Stites: There is no more trustworthy form of business ownership than cooperatives. And the reason for that, if you think about the basic publishing model, that is now dying, is deceptive. We tell the reader this is for you, but you have 80% of your revenue by selling your reader’s attention to advertisers. It’s not- readers are a commodity in themselves. You have to serve them in order to get the attention to sell it, but that’s the primary revenue comes from advertisers. And if you think about gatekeepers, editors are gatekeepers. Every gatekeeper is accountable to whoever signs the paycheck. In a regular newspaper, the publisher signs the paycheck. The publisher is affected by the local advertisers, and the publisher’s accountable usually through some distant set of corporate executives who are then accountable to even more distant investors. In a cooperative, you’re accountable to your readers because your readers are the owners. Not all of them- it’s there for everybody to read, but the members are your most engaged readers and they are the people who vote for the board of directors who hired you as an editors, and if you’re an editor then you better pay attention to your readers in a way that is not like anything we’ve known much. It also gives you the opportunity to make editorial decisions from the readers up, more than from the institutions down, which is essentially the fault in every newspaper. There’s a huge trust component.
Bailer: Amen. So, I’ve got to ask at least one question that has a stat flavor to it, or you know, they might kick me out of the American Statistical Association. You know you never can tell what kinds of consequences there could be. So, I’m going to ask you as someone who thinks about the news and has reported on the news, what kind of statistical literacy is required for journalists and editors? And then as a follow up, how can that be- what should the public have for the expectations for the quality of statistically-related and presented material?
Stites: Well, I’m sad to say that what is required of newsrooms in terms of statistical sophistication is almost never present. There may be one or two people in a newsroom who really have a sense of statistics. I was one; I am one, actually. And I once actually studied statistics, but it’s very uncommon, and that is a sad thing. I think that the readers have every reason to believe that the newspaper is going to deliver considered and accurate statistics. But it is so rare, particularly in things like medical research. People go away from reading the story thinking cancer has been cured and it’s really a tiny study of 18 people that nobody- you know, and it just doesn’t- should never print the story. You know? It’s not worthy of being printed. So yeah. So, I think it’s a terrible problem. What’s his name? John Allen Paulos wrote a book called-
Bailer: Mathematician Reads the Newspaper.
Stites: …Reads the Newspaper. The copy is right behind me on that shelf, as is his innumeracy book, as well. We have to be able to deal with statistics with the full understanding that the core of a newspaper’s readership is innumerate; significantly innumerate, so you’ve got to be very very careful. If it’s okay I will blurt further about this article that I wrote for Pointer about the news desert. Very quickly within two weeks after the pandemic descended, a publisher of suburban weekly newspapers in Chicago, including the most- among the most affluent suburbs anywhere pulled the plug on this business. Fourteen newspapers have gone out of- he just couldn’t sell an ad and he couldn’t collect on an ad he had sold. He just said I don’t see a way to keep publishing. Well, if you can’t publish in communities like that, or can you, I put this in my story, you can just assert that these are affluent places. But what I did was I made a list of them I went into the web, I got the median household income for all 14 of these communities; I got the median household income for Illinois, I got the median income for the United States and they were about that far apart, it didn’t matter much. I worked the median household income for the communities that were served by those 14 newspapers. And it was higher by like double that of the United States. And but the thing is the highest one was 216,000 dollars and change in Wilmette, Illinois. I mean, I used that number in the story. And I think I used two or three numbers out of all that work to say here’s what the median income is for the United States; this is double that, and I didn’t use a number, I just said double that. Anybody can do that, and here is the number of the most expensive place. And anybody can say why did I make 7,000- what’s a median? I don’t know but that’s a lot of money to me. So that the reader could take away from that we’re talking a really, really rich place here, not just affluent suburbs. And I think doing that took me half an hour and I wrote one sentence. I think things like that are at the core of making reporting reliably informative to readers when you use numbers. It’s to understand that they probably can’t do this; they may not understand what a median is.
Pennington: That’s all the time we have for this episode of Stats and Stories.
Stites: Oh, well, we did get to statistics.
Pennington: We did. Yeah, thank you so much for being here today.
Bailer: Thanks, Tom.
Stites: Thank you.
Pennington: Stats and Stories is a partnership between Miami University’s Departments of Statistics and Media, Journalism and Film, and the American Statistical Association. You can follow us on Twitter, Apple Podcasts, or other places where you can find podcasts. If you’d like to share your thoughts on the program send your emails to statsandstories@miamioh.edu or check us out at statsandstories.net and be sure to listen for future editions of Stats and Stories, where we explore the statistics behind the stories and the stories behind the statistics.