Fears that the death of North America’s smalltown newspapers will breed civic apathy and a less-informed public are being borne out in some — but not all — communities. In others, the “news desert” is being irrigated by dedicated journalists with home computers and a sense of mission.
VOA recently visited two small towns near Halifax, Canada, that lost their respective local papers at the same time. The difference was striking, and mainly because of one person.
The Weekly Press of Enfield was shuttered by its parent company Advocate Printing & Publishing in January 2020, leaving its roughly 2,300 residents with no alternative source of local news. Several of the residents told VOA they no longer care.
“Yeah, I used to read the paper,” remarked one woman, who declined to speak to a reporter except on condition of anonymity. She said she has lost interest and stopped reading any news since she has no local options and she finds the national and international news “depressing.”
“I think it’s sad,” she said of the state of media in her town.
But it was a different story in nearby Fall River, where The Laker was shut down by the same company along with The Weekly Press. There, the out-of-work publisher moved to fill the news vacuum with an online version of The Laker that has caught on with the town’s population of about 4,500.
“I check in on The Laker at least a couple times a week,” said Heidi Chartrand, owner of the Bubble Tea Emporium. “So we're always up to date on what's been going on in Fall River.”
“I think that The Laker provides the small community of Fall River with up-to-date, in-depth info that really hits home for the local residents and business owners here.”
The newsletter’s publisher, Patrick Healey, is upbeat about what he has been able to accomplish since relaunching The Laker as a digital product just two months after the print paper closed.
“It was me, my editor, receptionist and marketing consultant who looked after the advertising” before the shutdown, he explained over a coffee at the Good Day cafe in Fall River.
“And right now, it's just me, and I look after the advertising, I look after the advertising and doing the stories, along with the social media and updating the websites. … The community has responded greatly, I think.”
Healey said he has almost 2,000 subscribers to a daily newsletter that arrives in their email inboxes, drawing them to articles on The Laker website.
“The community still likes to come to me,” Healey said. “And when they see me, they know I'm out there covering the stories, when they see my little blue car traveling the roads, they know that I'm usually going to cover a story somewhere, like, and they are supportive.”
The emergence of “one-man shows” like The Laker internationally has been studied by Dave Harte, an associate professor in journalism and media studies at Birmingham City University in Britain.
“There were a lot of men but also some women, and quite a few husband-and-wife operations,” he said in an email. “I was particularly interested in these operations where they were focused on the local and ‘very local’ (a village or a few suburbs, places too small to sustain a commercial newspaper of their own).
“I found lots of amateurs in this space. By that I mean they had no previous journalism training but did have a passion for where they lived,” Harte said.
Despite the passion, Harte wrote, “hyperlocal news is not the future of news, they are too precarious for that. The future of local news is very gloomy.”
He said where the hyperlocal publishers have been successful is when they have incorporated social media into their products, sometimes doing a better job than mainstream operations at building trust with their readers.
“They tended to build networks of local ‘experts’ on social media rather than just use it as a place to throw out content to produce clicks back to websites, as mainstream local online news services tend to do,” he wrote.
Enfield-based realtor Don McCooeye is another who believes digital products cannot fully make up for the loss of print papers.
That approach “incorrectly assumes digital literacy is a skillset everyone has and that access to an online presence of a newspaper is widespread. Which is truer today than it was four years ago, but is still not,” he said.
However, he added, “we saw a great amount of resilience within the communities rallying behind the emergence of The Laker as an online digital presence and that has been so amazing to see.”
Despite the support he has received for The Laker, Healey acknowledged that many residents still miss the print product “and I understand that.”
“They ask me sometimes if I would ever do something like even quarterly, or you know, every three or four months, special issues, like just print the paper. That's not going to happen, because it's costly. It would just not be feasible,” he said.
One of those readers who still longs for print is Chartrand at the Bubble Tea Emporium.
“I think that there is a group of people that truly appreciate reading newspaper in hand and not having to scroll to do it,” Chartrand said. “I'm one of those people, so I absolutely miss having the copies of The Laker news floating around that you know you can pick up and look at whenever you want.”
