Welcome to Iowa This Week I'm Tim Harwood.
We're glad you're listening to this program and hope you're able to find information you need quickly and easily, but you've probably noticed that there are fewer news options, especially in rural communities.
It's not a challenge that's unique to Iowa's rural areas.
University of Missouri professor Nick Matthews takes on the topic in his new book, Deserted Life Without Local News in Rural America.
The book has just been
released we welcome Professor Matthews to the program now.
Thanks for the invitation Tim I'm looking forward to it.
So deserted in your title has a double meaning besides the departure of traditional media you describe many rural communities as being information deserts.
How do you define an information desert?
In terms of the double meaning it's actually more
Instead of thinking of news deserts and information deserts, it's actually more about the sense of being abandoned.
So news audiences have been abandoned by local journalism for the better part of the last 20 years.
And that is with news organizations shuttering in their own right, but also news organizations that are corporately owned from outside of local areas, not providing local journalism to the people who are demanding local journalism as well.
And so it's really more this sense of how people have been, again, abandoned by some of the consolid-
globalization and corporatization of local journalism in the United States
Well, let's talk about the concept though of an information desert and what what trips the definition of information desert
Yeah, in in many ways, so there are a couple things their news deserts is what we really are looking at verse information deserts as much so news deserts are areas of the country without grassroots local journalism
So without a weekly newspaper, without a radio station, with no local journalism whatsoever, we really think of those as news deserts and information deserts.
However, in the book, I actually talk about the idea of a lived news desert.
And this is the audience's lived experience, their lived daily lives.
of being in a news desert, even when there is a news organization there.
And Tim, that's more largely when corporate from across the country owns a newspaper, but there is no local journalist.
There's no local journalism either.
And so even though there is a news organization in the community, it is distant to the local community itself.
And it's really that distance between ownership and between a community.
that frankly causes a lot of grief for a lot of audience members.
We're talking with University of Missouri professor Nick Matthews his recent book just out deserted life without local news in rural America.
Can you give us a case study of a place that you examine in the book that fits this description?
Maybe they have access to a television news program or radio that's distant, but they don't get covered very well.
That's exactly right.
And I tell a pretty detailed story of one of these communities.
It's Nelson County, Virginia.
And there is a 100 plus year old weekly newspaper in the community than Nelson County Times.
Meanwhile, so Nelson County Times is owned by Lee Enterprises, which just so happens to be based in Iowa.
Iowa is to the best of our knowledge, nowhere near the state of Virginia.
And so in Nelson County, there is a weekly newspaper there.
But the ownership is from afar.
The journalists live about an hour away in a metro area, not in Nelson County, Virginia.
So the news, the journalists themselves are not in Nelson County.
And too often, because of the corporate structure of Lee Enterprises, the content in the Nelson County Times is not about Nelson County at all.
So you're saying we're looking at the idea that the ownership is from afar, the journalists are from afar, and the journalism is from afar as well, leaving the audience members truly feeling abandoned by the idea of the local newspaper in their community.
So how is this possible, Nick?
Because when I think back to journalism classes,
We talk about news values, the things that make a story worth covering, or maybe make it something that's not worth covering.
And right at the top of the list is local, the sense that something is in proximity to the audience that's going to be consuming that news story.
How did we get to this point where that key news value suddenly doesn't have its same value?
Yeah, there are so many factors to that Tim.
That's a great question because I mean we are looking at the overall economic situation within local journalism overall.
So that's a big picture on bro of the ecosystem of local journalism and what's happened since pretty much like 2006 in that time frame.
I mean we're we've we are losing
on average to newspapers a week in the United States.
So we continue to be losing news organizations and that's just newspapers that's not including radio stations that are going to be dealing with cuts coming up here and as we're going on to and so like and television stations are becoming even more consolidated.
So that's the big picture element to it but down on the surface level
It means news organizations just have fewer resources.
They have fewer journalists.
Those journalists have less time to actually do this work.
Some of the news organizations I look at have just one journalist.
That one journalist cannot do everything that needs to be done to cover that community.
And so even the journalists
are really wrapped up into this desertion of local journalism in some ways.
They legitimately want to do great work for their communities.
They just don't have the time to be able to do that.
There's only so much time in the week that they can do this.
And so it is an incredibly complex situation that we face ourselves in.
We're talking with Nick Matthews, professor at the University of Missouri.
His recent book, Deserted Life Without Local News in America, looks at the wake of a lot of mergers and takeovers of local news organizations by large corporate entities.
doesn't seem like that's going to stop, nor that there's really a mechanism to stop those large companies from buying out small newspapers that may be running at a deficit, might just barely be breaking even.
What seems like a logical solution?
You know, that's a fantastic question, Tim.
I teach roughly about 200-some-odd freshmen at the University of Missouri every semester.
Now these are students who come to the University of Missouri, which is the first journalism school in the country, and they want to be journalists.
I could not do my job in a good conscience if I didn't believe there was a future for them in this field.
Now in many ways, to your question,
There are fewer jobs at news organizations that currently exist, but I in my heart believe there is a wonderful opportunity for entrepreneurialism in journalism.
where these students and future and journalists who are out there right now can go into communities that need journalism and create news organizations.
Now they might be digital only they might be print they might be radio but they there is an opportunity for very much a entrepreneurial person to go into communities and serve that audience.
Many of the startups in journalism right now are two areas.
They're in metro areas or they're in state capitals and that's roughly about
90% of the news startups across the country.
That leaves a huge swat of our country that is now absent journalism and in need of journalism with the opportunity for those who are interested to do this work and really care about them and are passionate about the idea of journalism.
So entrepreneurial and journalistic aren't necessarily two sets of skills that combine very readily and in traditional media organizations there's been a very clear break between where the business office is and what they do, where the journalism happens and the newsroom.
If you have a one-person operation that's trying to get going
You have to really have a very special talent for sure, but how do you ensure that the news is not being influenced by the business?
A fantastic question, and to your skill set.
So I think about my wife a lot.
She works in the defense legal world.
In that world, when you go to law school, they do not teach you how to run a law firm.
However, that is a skill set that you have to develop over time.
In journalism, that is one of the biggest gaps that we have in our curriculum just across the country.
We are starting to develop programs in curriculum for our students to understand the business side of journalism just as much as the actual journalism itself, which is incredibly important.
Now, part of those conversations that we're having in that curriculum is answering your second question.
How do we do this ethically?
How do we do this in a way that is, that remains independent journalism?
And so those are the questions that we're having.
Non-profits have this all the time.
Four-profits have this all the time already in terms of, like, do not be influenced by commercial entities.
do not be influenced by big government, for instance.
So these questions are not necessarily new, it's just a new platform and a new way of thinking about them.
Your context again, Nick is working with students and folks who want to get into this from essentially a ground floor want to get off the blocks and into a career in journalism.
A lot of communities are going to have somebody who looks around sees this type of entrepreneurial opportunity that you describe and
that person may not have any journalism background.
What are your thoughts on that situation?
Somebody who wants to try to do something in this field to help their community, but that may not have any background and experience, may not take that ethics class that you describe when it comes to separating the business and the news side of some sort of entrepreneurial venture.
That's another fantastic question.
There are opportunities across the country.
I have dear friends, Joey and Lindsay Young own a small newspaper in Newton, Kansas.
As part of their work, their outreach for their community is they create a curriculum that is called Earn Your Press Pass.
And it is an opportunity for folks to learn just what you're talking about, essentially getting a very early look at how journalism is done in terms of how to cover city council meetings, how to cover education, how to maybe do a FOIA request, those kinds of things is a really opportunity.
Now I mentioned earn your press pass and there are others similar to that.
There is more of this kind of curriculum coming up and it is because
Journalism itself realizes how much of this entrepreneurialism that we really need.
We know there are people out there who really care about their communities and really care about the idea of journalism.
We just need to help them in a little bit.
But that kind of passion and interest in their community is first and foremost, we need to find those people who are interested in doing that work and then we'll help them.
Well thinking ahead to a time let's just for a calendar point say 2050.
These entrepreneurs as you described probably not starting a print publication they're probably doing more digital only.
Who knows what radio and television might look like at that point in a little over 20 years.
How would you describe the landscape as you can envision it, especially based on the types of feedback you're getting from your students and from what you're bringing to this cohort of students that will still be very much in the prime of their careers in that span?
I perhaps naively and optimistically just believe there are going to be more options for news consumers.
Because there are going to be new news organizations that are going to start up.
There's going to be content creators that are going to expand into more niche areas.
You know, rural Iowa communities, for instance, could very well be one.
There could be podcasting that's more directed to farming or for solar energy or whatever you name the topic.
There's just going to be a, I think there's going to be more options for news consumers.
Now, some of those options might not be something that all of our consumers agree with, for instance, but there are going to be a lot of options available.
At least I hope so.
Do you have a sense of how these news entrepreneurs are going to get the word out that they're providing something that's there when some of these traditional mediums are not the way that they're going to connect with people?
Social media.
Social media and the digital space is how it's all going to be dealt with right now.
No doubt about it.
Nick Mathews is a professor at the University of Missouri.
He's also the author of a recent book just released, Desserted Life Without Local News in Rural America.
Thank you for joining us and sharing perspective on the current and perhaps future state of news in rural communities.
Thanks for the great questions, Tim.
I appreciate it.
That's all for Iowa This Week.
Listen in for this program again at this same time and on this same station next week.
Thank you for listening.
I'm Tim Harwood.
