No Reporters: The Ghost Newsrooms
By Gregg Wendorf
Advance News Journal
Ghost newsrooms. Meaning, newsrooms filled with no reporters. Newspapers without a single reporter? How is that supposed to work? Apparently, not all that well, according to a Nov. 24, 2023 Wall Street Journal story written by Alexandra Bruell.
The headline reads: “Your Local Newspaper Might Not Have a Single Reporter.”
The story’s lead paragraph reads: “The Gleaner, the local newspaper in Henderson, Ky., has sections focused on features, sports, news and opinion.”
The kicker comes in the second graph: “What it doesn’t have: a single reporter on the staff.”
The Kentucky paper is part of a growing trend across the state and the national landscape — newspapers drying up, closing down, or at the very least, continuing with the masthead but pay nothing for local content (a reporter to write about local affairs).
In Hidalgo County, the most recent ones that come to mind include the Edinburg Daily Review and the Town Crier. Although the Crier was really a shopper and not a newspaper, it had been around forever, started by old Vern Offerman and his wife, and then it wasn’t.
Same for the old Edinburg Daily Review, run for years by Jim Mathis, the former wire reporter who was in Dallas when Kennedy got shot, and who ran the Review like any good yellow-dog Democrat would do, and he never hid which political side he favored. Of course, for most of his career, Democrats controlled the state, certainly the county, and Jim was in good shape.
How does the Henderson, Ky., paper do it, according to the WSJ story? Publish a newspaper without a reporter.
It’s owned by Gannett, one of the largest owners of small newspapers in the country, and so it uses copy written by reporters across their printed spectrum, and even if it’s not local, they plop it onto the pages of the Henderson paper, which no longer even has an office. Apparently, though, it’s still bringing in some revenue.
Once the home of 20 reporters, it’s now been chopped down to a husband-and-wife team who writes on a freelance basis.
According to the Wall Street Journal story, about 2.5 newspapers per week are disappearing in the U.S., and a number even more startling: since 2005, the U.S. has lost almost two-thirds of its newspaper journalists.
On top of that, dozens of newspapers across the country don’t have a single full-time reporter dedicated to that publication, according to the WSJ.
More and more cities, counties, are being labeled “news deserts,” or “media deserts,” which means a community with limited or no access to credible, local news coverage.
Some people start an online news site and attempt to do the job of reporting the news, and sometimes they even scoop traditional media by posting a public document and beating everyone else to the punch, but almost always, or so it seems, the anonymous people working the page are partisan, beholden to some person, slate, or campaign. So they don’t report the news fairly or entirely accurately by either leaving out part of the story or taking parts of it out of context.
On top of that, writing copy, editing copy, interviewing people, collecting facts, takes time. Who’s going to do it for free?
Which makes you wonder, and I haven’t even checked, but who’s going to journalism school these days? I know most departments have been renamed “communications department,” but since traditional news-collecting roles have changed so much — reporter, camera operator, on-screen talent, anchor, writer, news director — and since there are reportedly so few jobs out there (newspapers closing down, etc.), why are students still going to school, paying at least north of $50K to study journalism?
Moving forward, though, there have to be people like these, willing to report the news even if the industry is in a bad state of flux.
One of the people quoted in the WSJ story asks “Who’s holding people accountable? There’s just got to be somebody watching.”
True enough.