New York Times readers weigh in on how the loss of their local paper has hurt their community - Entrepreneur Generations

Over the past 15 years, more than one in five papers in the United States has shuttered, and the number of journalists working for newspapers has been cut in half, according to research by the University of North Carolina’s School of Media and Journalism. That has led to the rise of hollowed-out ’ghost papers’ and communities across the country without any local paper,” Lara Takenga reports for The New York Times.

Times reporters asked people who live in such communities about how the loss of local coverage has affected them. Mount Dora, Florida, a town of 14,000 near Orlando, lost the weekly Mount Dora Topic in 2006 because local advertisers chose to buy as space in larger nearby metro papers. But financial pressures have caused those metro papers to pull back coverage of outlying areas like Mount Dora.

“After years without a strong local voice, our community does not know itself and has no idea of important local issues or how the area is changing and challenged by growth and the impact of climate change. We are a nameless and faceless town defined only by neighborhoods,” wrote Mount Dora resident David Cohea. “A few local blogs pick up commercial events that are relayed on Facebook, but aside from that, we only hear of murders and fires and hot-button controversies — the stuff of TV news.” Read the Times article for more responses.

from The Rural Blog https://ift.tt/2ZfVodf New York Times readers weigh in on how the loss of their local paper has hurt their community - Entrepreneur Generations

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