Penelope Muse Abernathy is a former executive at The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times, is the Knight Chair in Journalism and Digital Media Economics at the University of North Carolina. A journalism professional with more than 30 years of experience as a reporter, editor and senior media business executive, she specializes in preserving quality journalism by helping news organizations succeed economically in the digital environment. Her research focuses on the implications of the digital revolution for news organizations, the information needs of communities and the emergence of news deserts in the United States.
She is author of “News Deserts and Ghost Newspapers: Will Local News Survive?” — a major 2020 report that documents the state of local journalism, what is as stake for our democracy, and the possibility of reviving the local news landscape, and she is the lead co-author of “The Strategic Digital Media Entrepreneur” (Wiley Blackwell: 2018), which explores in-depth the emerging business models of successful media enterprises.
Episode Description
Cities and small towns across America once woke up to their local newspaper on their doorstep. Over the last several decades, though, those newspapers have begun to disappear a University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill study showing that disappearance has heralded the rise of news deserts in the United States. That’s the focus of this episode of Stats and Stories
+Full Transcript
Rosemary Pennington: Cities and small towns across America once woke up to their local newspaper on their doorstep. Over the last several decades though, those newspapers have begun to disappear. A University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill study showing that disappearance has heralded the rise of news deserts in the United States. That's 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 departments of Statistics and Media, Journalism and Film, as well as the America Statistical Association. Joining me are regular panelists John Bailer, chair of Miami statistics department and Richard Campbell, former chair of media journalism and Film. Our guest today is Penelope Abernathy. Abernathy is the night share in journalism and digital media economics at the Huntsman School of Journalism and Media at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She's also a former executive at the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times. Abernathy's research focuses on the implications of the digital revolution for news organizations, the information needs of communities, and the emergence of news deserts in the US. Penny, thank you so much for being here today.
Penny Abernathy: Well, thank you for devoting time to discuss this very important and interesting topic, I think.
Pennington: I'm just going to ask you to describe how you define a news desert in your work.
Abernathy: Well, my own definition has evolved over the last 5 to 10 years. I think my initial definition was based on a lot of research that have been done starting at UNC in the 1970s around the importance of local newspapers, good local newspapers, and actually setting the agenda for debate of public policy issues that were important to us as residents of a community and would affect the quality of our lives as well as the lives of future generations. So, I initially defined it as a community without a newspaper. And that's important because newspapers have been vitally important to us in this vast country of ours, of kind of establishing not only our connection to the larger democracy, but also in terms of building a sense of community from all of that. So, but how it has evolved since then is I've tended to look at it as we've had the rise of digital alternatives, as I would look at alternative media like ethnic media public broadcasting. What I now say today is a news desert is a community that lacks the readily available, easily accessible access to some sort of the critical news and information we need to make important decisions.
Richard Campbell: Maybe could you talk about some of the numbers this is the stats and stories show just some of the losses over the last few years that you've documented in the just-so magnificent study on news deserts and ghost newspapers you've been doing now for some time? Could you talk a little bit about that?
Abernathy: Well, there are two ways to look at loss. One is loss of newspapers and one is loss of journalists, and so let me talk about the loss of newspapers first, which is where we started right? Between over the past 15 years- between the end of 2004 to the end of 2019, we basically lost a fourth of all the newspapers in this country. That's 2100 newspapers, and of those 2100 most were in small and mid-sized communities. So, one way to look at it is you lose a newspaper, you lose the person who's going to show up and cover what might be a- look to be a routine school board meeting or a routine County Commissioner meeting that turns out to have on the agenda something with huge implications for you. So, you lose the reporter that shows up to do that. When you lose the reporter, we have lost over the past 10 years, we have lost more than half of the newspaper reporters in this country. That's 36,000 reporters. So, and disproportionately we've lost reporters there at the state and regional level. So, one way to think about it is when you lose a reporter at the state and regional level cover for a newspaper, is you're losing the reporter that covers an important beat that binds and region and a state together, like education, like health, like environment. So, you know what we've lost I think in all of this is the ability to understand how we're related to our next-door neighbors. Or how we are related to people in another part of the region or the state that share the same problems and issues we do, but because we don't have that kind of unifying look that says this is important to me locally, this is important to me regionally and in a Statewide matter. We don't have the ability to know what the important issue or do much less set the agenda for how we need to solve these problems.
John Bailer: So, Richard thanks for asking the stats question, man. I mean I do wrong that's like that's taking the arrow out of my quiver. So, Penny let me follow-up and just ask you to explore some of the drivers of this phenomenon. What are some of the things that have happened that have changed and that have kind of pushed the newspapers out of business? Abernathy: Well and let me just say there is there's certain things that have happened that have been unforeseen, right? So, one of the things that we do look back in the year 2000 everybody was It was kind of fashionable to say newspapers are going to be dinosaurs right? We are entering the digital age, the information is going to flourish, your next door neighbor can put out is over his or her own podcast, newspaper, whatever you want to call it from any of that. And what that assumed I think is that there would be the development of a business model that would- a digital business model. So, if we look back 200 years, the for-profit business model that had sustained between nine thousand and eleven thousand newspapers at the turn of the century basically collapsed, and that business model was built around getting eighty to ninety percent of the revenue that supported news rooms from advertising, so that collapse there was an assumption of digital model would develop and in kind of the most stark terms, what we can say is the digital business model has not yet evolved. All right, because in part of the issue is there are between 75 and 80 percent of the revenue- even in small markets in terms of digital dollars- goes to the two Tech Giants Google and Facebook, which do not really create local news. So, we've had kind of a vacuum occur in terms of news being created at the local level. And if you think about it, if they're taking a seventy-five percent of the revenue digital revenue out of there that leaves television stations, newspapers, digital outlets to kind of fight over the other scraps. There's just not a business model now that has replaced the Pratt model.
Campbell: So, one of the phenomena I think that's going on here that I think is interesting with the loss of local journalism- we've just had this election a lot of people sort of don't understand Donald Trump's popularity and I think of being part of it and I think workings institution has done some work on this. I think you have. With the loss of local journalism, the default. For news has become for many particularly conservative people in rural and small-town areas has become talk radio, which is on all afternoon as mostly conservative, and in the evening Fox News. And I've heard George Packer talk about this from The New Yorker that he's talked to some local editors in small towns across this country and he said one of the changes that they see is that people aren't sending in letters and talking medical issues anymore. They're talking about often Fox talking points or conservative radio talking points. Could you talk about have you seen that? And you know, I to me if you really under want to understand the tremendous popularity of Donald Trump, this is- I think this is one area to look at that people just aren't following local news anymore because it's not there.
Abernathy: Well and let me just say I think it's a little more complicated than just saying its conservative talk radio with conservative television. I think the other half of the equation is the algorithm driving propensity of social media and the internet. So, what gets said on the conservative channels gets amplified in social media, and what also happens is that because of the loss of journalists, because of the laws of local newspapers, you have to turn to social media to find out something, right? I mean it’s just not as being covered locally. You don't have a way to know it. So, a classic example is the pandemic most recently, right? I mean you Derek Joseph it was not being covered locally in my local newspaper. I live about 80 miles outside of the Chapel Hill bubble. And so, I get was almost impossible to find any statistics on anything. Right and so even most recently my husband said to me that the local hospital had run out of beds. This was about a month and a half ago in our hometown and Marburg and I said, how do you know? And he said the funeral director posted something on his Facebook page. Now in a way in a way that's probably a more reliable source than you would normally get because of funeral director probably is in touch with what's happening there. He may even be on the board of directors at the local hospital. I'm not sure, but that's how desperate you are to get information. You just don't have somebody covering something is vital to the health of your life, to say nothing of the quality of your life on the local level.
Pennington: You’re listening to Stats and Stories and our Guest today is the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's Penney Abernathy one of the things that I was reading about recently Penny was the rise in some of these communities where there's a dearth of local news of these newspapers that look like news, but are you know pushing an agenda and I wonder if you have started looking at some of that in your work on news deserts and how that sort of is influencing how you were thinking about this issue?
Abernathy: In fact, I think there are a couple of ways to look at what is happening. If you look back over the last decade what we can say is that we had the emergence of a new type of media baron, especially in local news. With the private equity and the hedge funds who just kind of rushed and swooped in after the recession, bought newspapers at just rock bottom prices, and manage them these same way they manage a widget factory, which is and go in and you cut cost and try to get it to profitability and you either then harvest it, sell it, or just shut it down if you can't do it, right? So, if you Look at the decade between 2010 and 2020 you see the rise of these huge conglomerates, right, that own as many as 600 newspapers. That's a grill disconnect with the community that the newspapers supposed to be serving, right? So, as they've also been responsible for shuddering an enormous number of newspapers or merging them together. My fear is we don't know yet know who's going to own the next decade? Right and what we have seen is a huge proliferation over the last year or two of what some people call Pink Slime a right is these partisan base news outlets and some of them are being very deliberately targeted at what are news deserts, right? So, and part of the problem with these partisans’ sides, is that there's no transparency tool right? I've looked at a number of them. You don't know who's funding them. You don't know what the agenda is. You don't even know whether the reporters reporting on him or even local or may be based in another country or another part of the country and supposedly writing up press releases or whatever. There's also a pay-to-play element to their so my concern is if you look at it- just from the company needs the information needs of a community, we're in danger of actually bringing partisanship down to the very local level. And I mean, I think most people don't vote on somebody for the local school board based on whether they're Republican or Democrat. They're voting based on what they want to do in this local school system and what they think the priorities are there.
Bailer: I'd like to just quickly follow up on what one of the things you just said, which was the information needs of the community. Yeah, you've already talked about the idea about- essentially this trend from look there's this trend from local to National this trend from broad coverage these Regional interests. It also from a broad perspective to more customized algorithmically determined focus. But what are the information needs for the community that are not being served? This by these trends?
Abernathy: Well, what I harken back to is what the FCC could produce in 2012 and they basically brought a group of social science scholars together and said identify what I need as an ordinary resident ordinary community to know about so that I can make wise decisions about the quality of my life. The quality of my life, of my children and the quality of future generations. And they identified eight topics of the dscc has them on their website. I use them when we're judging whether a news site is actually news site. It includes things like do they cover education, environment, health, governance, infrastructure, economic development, politics and public safety. I think I got all eight there. That's a first for me. You know, we have used that when we assessed a whole range of things for instance in the 2020 report, we looked at Facebook share with us 300 some odd pieces of local news that ended up on their local news feed and what we concluded is when an algorithm is choosing your news and there's a dearth of local news, what tends to happen is the majority of the news that you give fruits Facebook's local news feed is either related to crime and not even is kind of a wackadoodle crime type thing, and it's also related to human interest types of things. Right? So, you know, we look very specifically at North Carolina, and among the things that we found in North Carolina is when a hurricane was coming through, the warning for the hurricane actually appeared two days after the hurricane was already out to sea. Now if you think about it that’s because it took that long to get enough shares for it to rise to the level that the algorithm picked it up as being an important local news.
Pennington: This makes me think of the argument that we sometimes make when people are arguing over what journalism should be and what we should prioritize, because you know, a lot of the conversations in a lot of our classrooms is, you know, you wanted to give a mix you want to sort of form your community about things that maybe they think they don't care about what that impact them. But also give them a little bit of the of the human interest, and it feels like the argument that we've been making in classrooms that if you just let people choose all they're going to choose as a human interest stuff, which might be might be interesting for them but might not sort of have the same importance to their lives. It sounds like in this examination of Facebook, you've found some evidence of that.
Abernathy: Right, right.
Bailer: So, give us some hope here.
Abernathy: Let me just say here I think that there’s several silver linings in this thunderstorm that is overhead I think that whatever you can say about the pandemic I think that it has helped raise awareness among the [] of how important it is to have local information. And have the facts and the data and the stats right there so that you can make wise decisions just by what you do that day and we saw digital subscriptions from that. now what’s been discouraging to me is that roughly 50% of people in a poll wide survey by Pew Research Center found – said that they were not getting the relevant local news they needed. But 75% said they weren’t aware that there was any financial difficulty, right? So, there's a huge disconnect. Now what I have seen over the last two years is the industry has awakened to the problem that they need to they're going to need help other than just kind of generating it, and we have for the first time, I think, in congress with bipartisan support for a number of policies a that leaves giving short-term support to news organizations going forward on the other, hand short of policy, I also have studied business models- sustainable business models, and I have concluded that if you are in a community with average to above average population and economic-growth prospects and have a publisher/owner founder of a digital site that is truly connected to the community and understands the community's needs and expectations. Then you have at least an average chance of creating a very Diversified for-profit nonprofit or of hybrid model, where I continue to be most concerned is in economically struggling communities that have lost the news organizations and disproportionately that's where we've lost newspapers, because of the collapse of the for-profit model.
Campbell: Penny can you- one of my frustrations that on is the national news media is not covering this as a national problem. It's localized coverage and this I think is partly a problem of Journalism doesn't do a very good job of covering journalists, and I think you mentioned that before, but this reminds me a little bit of the Catholic abuse case where it took 20 or 25 years before realized this wasn't a local problem and Community. This was a national and international problem, and it wasn't until the spotlight team at the Boston Globe made this a national problem. Do you have any hope that the national media will focus on this more and not just sort of treat this as oh here's what's going on in this is community not on an isolated story but one that we all need to be a pay attention to because frankly some of the national newspapers and organizations are doing very well financially, and local systems aren’t. And like we're trying to raise money for our own foundation here to support local news in Southwestern, Ohio. You can't compete. You can't get money because it's all going to National organizations right now, and it is a good time to raise money for journalism, but not at the local level. Abernathy: No, I think you raise a good point. I've actually been impressed that over the last year and a half the number of national and international news organizations that have actually approached me and have done major pieces. I mean, I've actually been quite impressed with the documentaries that have been done on German public television on Japanese public television. They see the US as kind of the canary in the coal mine. So, I think there is in many ways kind of it is come back in on National ones from the international organizations that have actually picked up on this survey that we did on the US. So I think in that case we are beginning to see that, but I do think one of the things that I think we need we overlook a lot of times is when I came here every was in 2008 to become the night chair. Everybody was very concerned about whether there was going to be a business model for the New York Times right? So we tend to look at our media as top-down, when in fact, there's a lot of investments and research that shows that as much as 85% of the news that feeds our democracy comes in through local newspapers, and one good way to think about that is look at the Ahmaud Arbery case right, which was actually first covered by the Brunswick paper in Georgia, but it took the Atlanta Constitution Journal and the New York Times to amplify that into a national story. So, when we lose that kind of on the ground reporting and the connections from the on the ground local reporters to the state and regional reporters who then amplified up to the national level, what we're losing is all of that news at the state and regional level of below.
Bailer: So, I'm curious a little bit about the packaging of news. You know, if you look now, you know from 2000 to 2020 that's another generation news consumers whose experience with news tends to be snippets in the context of social media, not to be a caricature of this but just it's a different model. So, what are what are the things that have- that might need to happen to engage, kind of all, generations in this in this new experience of regional news?
Abernathy: Well, I think there are several experiments that are out there. One is that I think what we've learned is that we form habits early in life and that we tend to take those habits through- with us through life. So for example, I was working at the Times when they first set up nytimes.com, was involved with that. Was that the Wall Street Journal as they were doing wsj.com, but it took me until 2013 to actually start reading the digital editions of the New York Times and The Wall Street Journal routinely. And it took me another year and a half before I was comfortable enough to say this has more value to me now because I've changed my habits. Yeah. I can't remember the last time I picked up a print newspaper, right? But it took- I think about how long it took me someone in the industry to basically change my habits. So I think that part of it is we haven't looked at loyal news consumers in ways that we need to get- transition them and we haven't done enough to figure out how we transition millennials and gen-z-ers into a different form, so, I've been really impressed with some of the electronic newsletters that have come out and think that they may be a business model going forward, or an introductory offer into something larger, right? But I mean we can't know right now what you get is going to be like 10 years from now. So, we need to not only be caring about the people who are still with us the use consumers that are still with us, but also about building that next generation and building the need to be informed and making people understand this is important to our democracy to our society and most importantly to you and the quality of life that you have. Pennington: Well, Penny, that's all the time we have for this episode of Stats and Stories. Thank you so much for being here.
Abernathy: Oh, thank you for having me.
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.