Last month, the Tulsa World laid off seven reporters and editors – the second round of cuts this year alone. The World’s newsroom has been shrinking for two decades, but the latest cuts drew extra attention for claiming well-known reporters with decades of experience covering Tulsa communities.
As Alicia Chesser memorably highlighted, the 33 years of Tulsa arts and culture coverage by laid off reporter James Watts has served as community infrastructure, “a bridge between local creators and local audiences, and a bridge between those creators and the rest of the world.”
This is how local news works at its best, empowering us to find each other. It turns me into we, transforming a random collection of neighbors into a community with a shared identity.
We can like or dislike that identity. We can disagree about what stories matter most. But without local news, our shared experiences lose meaning altogether. Without shared information, communities can’t solve problems together because they can't even agree on what the problems are.
Stay in touch
Sign up for our free newsletter, The Talegate
The consequences are measurable. Research shows that the decline of local news is associated with higher political polarization, decreased voter turnout, increased government corruption, and higher bond costs. When no one's watching city hall or the school board, special interests fill the vacuum. When no one's investigating local businesses, consumers lose protection. When no one’s connecting us to local arts and sports, our attention and dollars flow elsewhere.
But local news is also a business disrupted by huge technological, economic, and policy changes. The Local Journalist Index (LJI) from Rebuild Local News and Muck Rack reveals the average number of local journalists has dropped by 75% since 2002, from 40 journalists per 100,000 residents to less than 10. In Tulsa County, the LJI found 6.2 journalists per 100,000 people, even lower than the national average.
Local journalism didn't fail. Its business model collapsed, and we haven't sufficiently built a new one to replace it. For more than a century, newspapers were sustained by local monopolies on advertising and reader attention. If you wanted to buy a car, rent an apartment, or find a job, you looked at the local newspaper’s classified ads. If you were a business reaching local customers, you advertised there too.