In defense of local journalism

One of my earliest memories is visiting my father at the Anchorage Daily News (ADN) where he was a reporter for around 25 years. I remember being ushered up to his desk in a bright, clean room, with the sound of the office printer drowning out conversation. In those days, ADN existed as a pillar of the community in my mind. I read the comics every morning and parsed out the stories as I was learning to read. But it’s not like that anymore. ADN has suffered just as much from declining readership as any other local paper, and the trend is continuing across the country.

In 2005, newspapers employed just over 365,000 people across the country, according to a report by the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University. In 2023, that number was more than halved, down to 106,230. Additionally, the country has lost nearly 2,900 newspapers — many of them weeklies — which are often the only source of news for small, rural counties.

In a nutshell, that all means that the local journalism well — the kind that informs people like you about the community you live in — is drying up fast. This is bad. Local newspapers report on the stuff that only they can report on, and their communities benefit from it. The New York Times is not going to cover your local assembly meeting or a new city ordinance. ADN, and other papers like it, tell stories about the communities they’re a part of, because no one else can.

The news we report on at the MSU Exponent? That’s local journalism, as local as it gets. If you’re reading this, it likely means you already pick up the Exponent. I implore you to keeppicking it up. This newspaper is entirely funded through the efforts of our advertising staff of one and student fees, and the pay the writers and photographers earn is essentially beer money. No one is paying rent with their work at the Exponent — it’s a labor of love. Journalism, the fourth estate, the news media — whatever you want to call it — they’re your first line of defense when power is levied against your community. Journalists are here to lay bare the facts and present the news to you, as accurately as possible, whether that’s a ski film showing at the Emerson or a potentially serious violation of students’ privacy.

The journalists at the Exponent report on the University because they’re the ones best positioned to do so, but they’re also reporting on Bozeman and on Montana. Reporters here were the first to break the news of alleged hate crimes on campus and in the community, and were the on-scene journalists for the coverage that followed. They cover government, they cover sports, they cover the snowpack at Bridger — anything you might care about, both as a member of the MSU community and as a member of the wider Montana community.

In my time at the Exponent, I’ve met a lot of different kinds of students. Some are all-in because they love journalism. Some are writing majors who want to see their work in print, or who want to get consistent feedback. Some aren’t even writing majors at all — they just want to be involved on campus. I myself joined the paper as a photographer because I wanted to learn how to improve my work. What I ended up learning, however, was that most journalists at the Exponent — like journalists just about everywhere — care about their work. They want to accurately represent the facts and share the voices of their communities. Mainly, the reporters here are not working on an agenda. They’re not working with a specific political goal in mind. They’re working with the facts in mind. The Exponent journalists want to talk about their community to their community — the work they’re putting out is about the place they live, work and go to school in.

Small-town journalism like the kind the Exponent does is by and far as good as it gets. These writers are not some cabal of big media, they’re just the people behind you in line at Town and Country. They’re putting in long hours for little pay because they care.

The journalists that work here are your community reporting on itself. Everything we do is to make our community better. If you’re reading this op-ed, you likely already know all this. I encourage you to keep it in mind and spread the word. Tell your friends! And when you leave MSU — as you probably will eventually — pick up the next small-town newspaper you come across. You might just learn something.