Today is Local News Day — the first of what we can hope will become an annual reminder of the importance of community journalism. Organized by the nonprofit Montana Free Press, the event “is a national day of action connecting communities with trusted local news. Our mission is simple: reconnect people to trusted local outlets, empower newsrooms to grow, and spark a national movement that sustains local news for generations.”
We gave Local News Day a plug on the latest episode of “What Works,” our podcast about local news that I host with Ellen Clegg. The day is sponsored by a number of heavy hitters, including Press Forward, a major philanthropic effort that supports community journalism; and The New York Times; the American Journalism Project, another large philanthropy.
You may be seeing messages in your inbox and on social media asking you to support your local news organization. You should.
Poynter media columnist Tom Jones reports that MS NOW, newly freed from NBC, is investing in local news in a big way, lending support to investigative and local reporting by partnering with the Pulitzer Center, States Newsroom and The Marshall Project. “Perhaps it’s no coincidence that the announcement comes today, which is Local News Day,” Jones writes.
On Wednesday evening, I showed my students a documentary I never tire of watching — “Storm Lake,” about the Storm Lake Times’ struggle to stay afloat in rural Iowa despite the demise of local businesses at the hands of corporate agriculture. (The paper is now known as the Storm Lake Times-Pilot following a 2022 merger.) We follow Pulitzer Prize-winning publisher-editor Art Cullen and his family as they report on everything from the precarious corn crop to a member of the Latino community who’s competing in a Spanish-language talent competition on television; from the 2020 Iowa caucuses (do we know who won yet?) and into the early months of the COVID pandemic, which is where the film concludes.
Local news is the lifeblood of democracy. Not to sound defeatest, but there’s not much we can do about Donald Trump’s authoritarian regime, enabled by a supine Republican Congress, other than to vote. But we can work with our neighbors to support each other and solve problems in our own communities. We need reliable news in order for that to happen.