Journalism and Community

It’s popular to deride journalism these days and deny its importance. It didn’t start with Donald Trump, but he’s managed to make it his own. In a post about what Gannett has done to their markets (including Jackson) my friend Jane Alexander wrote:

Jane Alexander":

“Inevitably they will exit these markets because how they “do” journalism is unsustainable. And then what? You can see the nearly empty Clarion Ledger building downtown as an example, literal and figurative, of the hollowing out of local news. TV is not better and possibly worse because the tactics they use to gain “clicks” over viewers foment fear of the places we live and the people in them. I am sick of seeing a social media “horror” post from WLBT only to find it happened somewhere in the Midwest. Every single one of these chips away at the public sense of community and mutual accountability. And it’s segregating useful and truthful information to those with internet access, time, curiosity, patience and skills in comparative journalism to look past the surface clickbait. Fear kills democracy. Fearful people don’t question things as much as look for someone to make them feel less fearful. If they don’t question things they don’t seek information and answers. Those in the information business find their audience is smaller and more segmented. So they focus information to that audience making themselves irrelevant to all the other people. They create other channels to try to capture the other people they lost, which costs more money. How they think this is sustainable is beyond me.”

It’s important that we think about what Journalism does for communities and then about ways to make and keep it economically viable without making it garbage.