The Complicated Future of Local News: On Nikki Usher's "News for the Rich, White, and Blue"
Nikki Usher | News for the Rich, White, and Blue: How Place and Power Distort American Journalism | Columbia University Press | 2021 | 376 Pages
Throughout academia, philanthropy, and other institutions, calls to save local journalism have perhaps never been louder. And with good reason—according to a tracking project at the University of North Carolina, there are more than 2,000 communities across the United States without a dedicated news source, with many more seemingly set to join the ranks as private equity, digital media, and changing demographics continue to wreak havoc on the news industry.
But what exactly are we fighting to save? How much of what we say we want is just nostalgia for a time that no longer exists? Nikki Usher, an associate professor at the College of Media at the University of Illinois, examines these questions in her book News for the Rich, White, and Blue: How Place and Power Distort American Journalism.
Usher begins by unpacking the oft-cited connection between local news and civic engagement. The commonly held belief is that people who do not have access to credible local news will be less likely to vote in municipal elections, attend government meetings, and participate in other activities that strengthen democracy. In Usher’s assessment, the correlation is not so clear, particularly when it comes to communities that are traditionally underrepresented in media coverage.
She argues that “critical and comprehensive local news is a recent invention, not a core element of the history of American democracy,” and that, while journalism can strengthen civic engagement, it’s also just as likely to perpetuate the status quo. While academics and media observers hold up newspapers as watchdogs for the public interest, the reality is that newspaper staff are sometimes driven by their own self-interest and ambitions rather than a genuine concern for the public good.
For example, the Chicago Tribune’s investigative reporting started when publisher Joseph Medill became the city’s mayor and grew frustrated with what he viewed as incompetence on the City Council. Medill is one of many news industry tycoons to run for political office, further illustrating what Usher describes as a fraught relationship among people, place, and power. Usher claims the more nefarious aspects of this relationship are often overlooked by scholars and media observers who are apt to call upon Alexis de Tocqueville’s vision of civic life and the growth of investigative reporting in the post-Watergate era to create a romanticized notion of local journalism that was never there in the first place.
News for the Rich, White, and Blue also shines a light on the fact that the economics of mainstream media outlets are currently set up to create a news product that is by and for white, upper middle-class, well-educated professionals. The journalists at large, legacy institutions have the financial stability to not only survive but thrive in a changing industry, while local reporters struggle to provide coverage to their communities amid continuous downsizing and the constant threat of closure. Meanwhile, news consumers see a never-ending stream of news about what’s happening in Washington but remain increasingly in the dark about what’s happening in their own backyards.
Axios media reporters Sarah Fischer and Nicholas Johnston describe this phenomenon as “journalism’s two Americas” where national reporters gain high-profile book deals, podcasts, and gigs as cable news commenters while local reporters take on “side hustles” outside of journalism to make ends meet and are forced to pay their own expenses on reporting trips—if they’re able to take those trips at all. This dynamic, Usher says, will continue as the media ecosystem continues to fracture and tools like Substack push consumers to subscribe to content from multiple individual creators, something that can easily add up and further tilts the market toward those with the means to support it.
Usher has spent two decades conducting ethnographic research in newsrooms across the country, and this book offers access to a world that few people outside of journalism ever get to see. In one instance, she visits a lavish party for the opening of the Washington Post’s new newsroom, complete with lobster canapes and the kind of political power brokers that are often the object of the paper's reportage. In another, an advertising executive at a midsize daily newspaper confides to her that the organization is surviving on the naïveté of local advertisers who have not realized their money can be spent more effectively elsewhere.
Most concerning to Usher are the outlets she describes as “Goldilocks newspapers,” which are large enough to be gobbled up by private equity but too big to receive help from philanthropic organizations focused on news deserts. The book focuses on two such newspapers, the Miami Herald and the Chicago Tribune. These organizations were major pillars of their respective cities at one time but have seen that power erode as they lay off staff and move their newsrooms from the heart of downtown to far-flung suburban locations.
These organizations and dozens of others have borne the brunt of the problems that ail local news. Through interviews with reporters and editors at these organizations, Usher documents how they’ve seen suburban reporters and Washington, D.C. bureaus eliminated, leaving no one to hold local governments or members of Congress accountable to a local audience.
As Goldilocks newspapers continue to decline, national outlets like the New York Times and Axios are trying to fill the void by hiring reporters based outside of major cities and starting their own locally focused news products. Usher argues that while national media might have the resources to invest in reporters across the country, those reporters still fundamentally serve national audiences rather than the people who live in the places that they are writing about. In other words, the news is still primarily written by and for the rich, white, and blue no matter where a story takes place.
Despite the setbacks they’ve faced, Goldilocks newspapers are still considered the primary information sources when big news happens in their respective cities. Unfortunately, the digital advertising landscape means that a large amount of traffic is not likely to result in a large return for the newspaper. Usher uses the Miami Herald’s coverage of Fidel Castro’s death in 2016 to illustrate this point.
…although the newspaper received web traffic from around the world in the wake of Castro’s death, little of it “counted” as traffic that would translate into digital ad dollars. Because of the perverse, upside-down logic of digital economics for journalism, the Miami Herald couldn’t financially benefit from this massive burst of attention, which was considered “drive-by traffic.” The new readers might come for one or two stories about Castro and then never return. Only people in the local market—Miami and environs—mattered in terms of monetizing digital advertising dollars.
Given this dynamic, Usher argues that the current advertising model for local news is unsustainable, particularly at Goldilocks newspapers. She describes the “ticking time bomb of local ad dollars” that started in the early 2000s and has left many local newspapers hanging by a thread as local businesses find they can reach more customers by buying their own ads through Facebook or Google. Combined with the problems of “drive-by traffic” as the Miami Herald experienced, there does not appear to be a good path forward other than trying to build a subscriber base by putting content behind paywalls. Usher is skeptical that this approach will work in the long run. However, she acknowledges that her newsroom sources told her it takes years to build a sustainable paywall program and some may eventually find success.
Over the past decade, philanthropic organizations like the Knight Foundation and the Democracy Fund have stepped in to help newspapers sustain and/or reimagine their coverage amid declining advertising revenue. In addition to directly critiquing the news industry, News for the Rich, White, and Blue also holds up a mirror to philanthropy’s role in funding local news. Usher carefully considers whether place-based inequities are baked into news philanthropy to create a “big sort” that again benefits the rich, white, and blue. She writes that “even the most well-intentioned philanthropies possess a tremendous and largely unchecked power to decide what types of journalism to support.”
As market forces from Google ads to Substack continue to pull the focus away from place-based media, Usher worries that the United States will soon be filled with people who fit her archetype “Placeless Guy”: elites (usually older, white men, she says) who are not at all concerned about becoming involved in their communities and prefer to get their news from a few elite national or international outlets. As you might imagine, this behavior is problematic for local news and those who worry about the trickle-down impacts on democracy. It’s another symptom of the “two Americas” problem and one that journalism as a profession has not figured out how to move beyond. Usher says, “journalists have long used place as a way to claim authoritative knowledge, and this authority has also provided a rationale for audiences to trust them.”
While News for the Rich, White, and Blue does not hold back in describing journalism’s many problems, Usher does offer several suggestions for how to strengthen the market value of local news by expanding its audience base to reach people other than well-educated professionals. One particularly interesting idea is to leverage federal work-study funds to break what Usher describes as the “unpaid internship racket” that privileges students from families with the means to support unpaid internships at media organizations in large, expensive cities. She suggests that universities use federal work-study funds to support internships at student-run media. This, she says, would help students gain the experience necessary for employment without having to bear the financial burden of an unpaid internship. It would also plant the seeds necessary to diversify news organizations as those students graduate.
Usher is also part of a growing number of journalism scholars who argue that the era of objectivity that dominated the news industry over the past century has run its course and is not sustainable in the digital age. She points to the success of right-wing media as evidence of the fact that mainstream outlets can no longer operate as neutral actors in the information ecosystem. Doing so, she says, perpetuates the connection between legacy media and affluent, liberal audiences.
In most other democracies, a well-established partisan press is part and parcel of the reality of journalism. The expectation is that news will be informed by political orientation. The journalism industry—the presumptive “mainstream” news industry I have focused on here—should reorient, openly and authentically, around the explicitly stated political ideologies that inform their journalism. In fact, it is important for interest groups to be able to adjudicate their needs through partisan media, which can be a healthy way to embrace a spirit of pluralism of thought and interest.
As a former small-town newspaper reporter and someone who spends a lot of time thinking about local news and democracy, I found Usher’s book to be a provocative way to challenge the conventional wisdom in journalism, political science, and related disciplines. Many in these fields might not agree with her conclusions, but the points are well worth considering as we all work together to figure out a sustainable, inclusive model for local news.