Maybe the Future of Local Journalism is Returning to Party Newspapers

Searching for constructive media criticism in a rebuttal to Ezra Klein and James Bennet.

Quick question, who did you support in 2020? No, not nationally. Who did you support for your local government?

If you’re like me, you might pause for a moment to recall that ballot. It’s no secret that American politics is quite nationalized. While changes in advertising have arguably played a role, this pause might help us understand why traditional forms of local American journalism have declined. You simply don’t care. Consistent stories sourced locally are just not as exciting compared to the big national show. Surely national media is full of winners from this trade in attention. Yet they do not sound very happy.

Last week, the New York Times columnist Ezra Klein bemoaned the losses in mid-sized media operations. Klein loved his Pitchfork, but not enough people did for its revenue, so it is effectively shutting down. Media life is great at the top, but the gravestones of smaller media are all around Klein. As he tells us, “The middle is where local reporting happens and where culture is made rather than discovered.” That middle is in free fall. His tone of writing is mournful and bearing witness to a loss, without any clear path forward for the future.

Ezra Klein’s somber tone reminded me of another article, albeit one looking towards the top of media. Last month, The Economist’s James Bennet argued that the New York Times is now in a slow-moving crisis, having fired him during our last presidential election cycle for partisan reasons. To apply Bennet’s account, the New York Times might not just be growing as local paper revenue dwindles, but also increasing partisan doubt and conflict. It is making everything look worse at the same time that it sucks up subscriptions from random Americans who would otherwise go read the San Francisco Chronicle, Boston Globe, Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, and so on.

But wait a second. What was the name of that last publication?

Back To The Party Rag

The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette is a fun relic of a title. It harkens back to the age when America was full of newspapers explicitly aligned with and financed by our political parties. It makes me wonder while reading the laments of Klein and Bennet, why can’t this happen again? If Americans clearly love reading about partisan conflicts, then could the best way to revive less-than-national reporting be to simply make it more partisan? What would that look like?

Democrats could once again read the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, but for a broader view of what those Southern Republicans and their factories are up to all the time. Republicans on the West Coast could read a once more Republican Los Angeles Times so they could gawk at all of the projects and non-profits progressive Democrats create over there. Obviously I don’t expect either of these papers, which I assume are mostly full of liberals, to turn around and focus on this tomorrow. But let’s talk about the real constraint, money.

I’m no journalist. But I do talk to and read a few people who are. They have informed me of the cash flying around in American politics. Democratic National Public Radio tells us the 2024 Republican Presidential Primary is approaching .3 billion dollars in campaign ads. Imagine a fraction of that going into an ambitious regional newspaper model, partly funded by subscribers and partly by party operatives. Now leave your imagination and learn this might not be so far off from the status quo. Columbia Journalism Review noted in 2022 that local journalism with a political agenda is rising. But I am suggesting more explicit partisanship, not less. Carrying the party banner proudly could enable loyalty on a larger scale, enabling wider geographic scope to reporters and readers alike. It’s not always true, but sometimes prestige can be acquired by simply being the biggest fish in a haphazardly determined pond.

Speaking of haphazard ponds, look at our political parties. Right now, party finances are both massive and decentralized. The defunct Ron DeSantis campaign has burnt through over $100 million this last year, but that’s not because the RNC wrote him one fat check. While some (I) wish he had beat the orange man who is still kind of bad, one can’t help but notice the Los Angeles Times was acquired for roughly half a billion back in 2018. Surely a far smaller operation than that could’ve created a little more convenient reporting for when Governor DeSantis debated with California’s Governor Newsom last November? Halfway through that debate, DeSantis brought up pictures of sexually explicit books found in some public school libraries somewhere in America.

That stunt was due to an important fact; the United States is a truly massive country full of odd stories nobody knows about. Yesterday, an enterprising writer on Substack dug into an FAA ethnic patronage racket that almost no one noticed but has been quietly developing for a decade. State and local politics probably has even more stories of government hijinks that make both of our parties look bad, not less. If you mobilize voters on those stories, you could even have some meager incentive to care that they are locally solved. For a political party though, you get to mobilize votes! So perhaps many people will get mad over half-true stories, but that’s also often true now. The important thing is this is a small improvement over talking as if the President can do most of the things he needs Congress for. Or that the President affects most of one’s own life under American democracy.

The Civil War Scare

Isn’t this just a long-winded call for more ruthless partisanship, now at different levels of our political life? You tell me. But if firmly established local reporting increasingly won’t happen for most Americans and national media is going to be increasingly distrusted on a party basis, the return of the party newspaper might be right on schedule. Starting with a regional partisan reporting focus, one could imagine other features for these papers beyond the political reporting, not unlike Pitchfork delivered on music. Yet reporting on self-government must happen, even if for the sake of making the other party look bad. The customer needs his vegetables. That requires boots on the ground reporting in actual physical places, most of which are not New York City or Washington, D.C.

Still, one might insist that America’s partisan anger is alarming and not to be trifled with for the sake of some new half-tabloids. I am inclined to agree with the first part. But this situation is obviously not regionally divided up, and our democracy is often radicalizing itself through media-saturated low-turnout primaries. That’s a problem. But it’s not a slavery problem, which the American Civil War was clearly about as we expanded westward. Our fights today are simply a lot stupider, often for the better. But honestly, it might be underrated that they’re stupid. Consider a very recent election: New Hampshire this January.

Looking at the numbers, if even half the Americans who voted for Biden in the 2020 New Hampshire presidential election had quietly filed their paperwork to vote for Nikki Haley in the 2024 New Hampshire Republican presidential primary, Donald Trump would’ve lost that state. Sure, he could’ve rallied a few more people, but then Haley could’ve rallied a few more people and won the state just as Biden did in 2020. Why didn’t this happen? Does nobody in New Hampshire think Trump is bad for national politics?

I suspect it’s because they either didn’t know or don’t really care. This is just how life is right now; people give incredibly intense opinions and do nothing. What if we had a few more facts and did a few more things (legally) to solve our problems locally? Even if Trump wins this counter-factual, and I think he probably does, I’d much prefer he did so at a party convention to the truly insane year-long primary schedule we have now.

At any rate, if we really are headed for another civil war and nobody can agree on this upcoming election, I don’t see how scrambling the media landscape is going to be the cause. It wasn’t for the last one. The national media has some haters who obviously cannot get enough of each other. To make things worse, we often exaggerate our disagreements to scare one other. Americans in both parties firmly agree more than ever in the principle of serfdom today. Specifically, becoming serfs to fund old people’s Medicare, Social Security, and exclusionary zoning property values. Congratulations to America’s truly massive bipartisan gentry; you’re doing great, live in every state, and are still insufferable on Twitter. I also enjoy being insufferable on Twitter. But why don’t we try doing something new instead of whining about the New York Times?