What’s lost when newspapers die

Opinion editor’s note: Editorials represent the opinions of the Star Tribune Editorial Board, which operates independently from the newsroom.

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Eight Minnesota newspapers are turning off the lights this month — a turn of events probably noticed by few people and mourned by fewer still. They were small papers, after all, serving communities such as Hutchinson and Savage, and together reached scarcely 40,000 readers. But small beacons can cast bright light. It’s a tragedy for their communities and a bad omen for American democracy that newspapers like these are going dark.

Local newspapers like the Hutchinson Leader and the Savage Pacer stitch our communities together. They record the triumphs of high school athletes and celebrate the deeds of Good Samaritans. They note the deaths of our elders and explain why their lives mattered. In short, they give us common experiences and common interests in a time when common ground in America is growing scarce.

Quite beyond social capital, healthy newspapers build democratic capital. Voter participation and civic engagement go down in communities that lose their newspapers — and the volume of political misinformation goes up, according to studies by the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University and others.

But never mind the platitudes of an editorial writer — listen to voices from the affected Minnesota communities. Lindsay Marshall, executive director of the Scott County Historical Society, says local newspapers are valuable sources for people seeking to understand the history of their community, whether it’s a local business, a storied bank robbery or family genealogy. “They are one way to tell the story of our county’s past,” she wrote in an email to an editorial writer this week. Prior Lake Mayor Kirt Briggs told a Star Tribune reporter, “Quite honestly, I’m devastated by the loss of the community voice.”

The villain of this particular story is a New York investment firm called Alden Global Capital, which owned the eight papers along with scores of others, including the St. Paul Pioneer Press, and is by some accounts now the second-largest owner of American newspapers. Unlike other chain owners, however, Alden doesn’t merely squeeze its newspapers to produce a larger profit. It systematically dismantles them until there is nothing left, a devastating pattern documented in the excellent new documentary, “Stripped for Parts.”

But Alden is only one of many forces crushing newspapers in the internet age. One-third of American newspapers have vanished since 2005, along with two-thirds of newspaper journalism jobs, according to Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism. Some 200 American counties with millions of residents are now “news deserts” without an independent local source of news.

Well, times change, the skeptics say, and now we have other sources of news, such as X and Facebook. Seriously? How many reporters does Facebook employ? Who would trust the future of our democracy to the judgment of Elon Musk? Where do you find Woodward and Bernstein on TikTok?

For all their sins — and they are plentiful — newspapers have historically provided Americans with a “public square” — a common place and a shared set of facts that allow us to do our jobs as citizens. We might disagree about how to shrink the federal budget deficit, but we can agree it’s big and troubling. We might disagree about how to address climate change, but we can agree that the planet is getting hotter.

Here and there across the country promising new journalism models are emerging, often operating as nonprofits supported by members or foundations. And some healthy news organizations with solid ownership, including the Star Tribune, are working to expand news coverage in their regions. Perhaps it’s the process that Joseph Schumpeter famously described as “creative destruction.” For now, however, the destructive part is outpacing the creative one in so many communities. Here’s hoping Minnesota can reverse that trend.