Before my byline landed at the NKyTribune, I had worked as a freelance writer for some of the nation’s largest and smallest newsrooms, from the “Philadelphia Inquirer” to the “Chestnut Hill Local.” I have worked in and around journalism since 1990.
Along the way, I’ve had a front-row seat to lots of changes in journalism, many of them for the worse.
The first alt-weekly I wrote for folded in 1991 after less than a year in print. Then, a year later, the New York Times Company sold many of its local newspapers, including the “Atlanta Daily News,” a paper I contributed to after the alt-weekly shut down.
When we moved to Covington last summer, I had freelance contracts with two Pittsburgh newsrooms and I expected to continue contributing to those publications long after the move. I also had an assignment to write for Cincinnati City Beat weeks before movers packed up our household.
Those plans quickly evaporated as City Beat cut its freelance budget, NEXTpittsburgh put my work on hiatus until March and “Pittsburgh City Paper” went out of print on New Year’s Eve, a few days before another former employer, the “Pittsburgh Post-Gazette,” announced its 240-year run would end later this year.
The rapid contraction in journalism concerns me on multiple levels. The most obvious one is how it impacts me professionally and financially. Journalism is how I make my living.
Another way that it impacts me is as a citizen. Fewer newspapers and newsrooms means there will be even less information about the world around me. There will be less robust coverage of local government, the arts and social conditions.
Many local newsrooms already struggle to spread precious resources — a small number of reporters and small budgets — adequately to fulfill their missions to readers. Back in Pittsburgh, there was very little coverage of how a broken historic preservation regulatory regime adversely affects the city’s history and impacts local development. One editor with whom I worked confessed that they simply didn’t have the bandwidth to learn about the issues and assign reporters to cover them.
Finally, the loss of so many newsrooms and the stories they produced will impact the field where I spent more time than journalism in the past 40 years: history. As a public historian and teacher, newspaper archives were essential research tools. It’s true that journalism produces history’s first draft.
That first draft provides a roadmap for scholarly research and provides windows into events that happened long ago. The events and voices captured in news reporting are not accessible anywhere else because no one thought to save important papers or write personal accounts.
Those personal accounts range from details about major events in a community, like a catastrophic flood or heinous crime. Or, they may be about more mundane things like the decisions made by city leaders that helped to shape growth and development.
Our democracy and our society need journalism to survive. The closure or contraction of each newsroom is like a single brain cell dying. At some point, after so many brain cells die, the organism also dies.
After the Post-Gazette announced that it would be going out of print, a student reporter for Carnegie Mellon University’s newspaper interviewed me about the state of journalism and my experiences.
I laid out my concerns for how the Pittsburgh newsroom closures would impact the city and its people.
“Oftentimes, historically marginalized communities [couldn’t] get their events publicized in the mainstream press and relied upon things like alt-weeklies to get their news out,” I said about City Paper’s demise. “The only documented record that may be available for [marginalized communities] is in the archives of these alt-weeklies. If the alt-weeklies disappear, and their physical archives and digital archives also disappear, that’s going to leave historians at a great disadvantage.”
Closer to home, I wonder what’s going to happen to Cincinnati City Beat’s archives. I also wonder about all the news that I don’t see locally, whether it’s because of slim budgets, reporters stretched too thin or corporate gatekeepers who seem to have forgotten that the news should be reported without fear or favor.
David S. Rotenstein is an award-winning reporter with more than 35 years of experience writing for community newspapers, big-city dailies, magazines and digital newsrooms. He has a Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania and spent much of his career as a history consultant for government agencies, corporations, and individuals. He is continuing research begun in Pittsburgh into the history of gambling and organized crime in the Ohio River Valley. He lives in Covington.