LOCAL JOURNALISM IS IN CRITICAL CONDITION!

March 5, 2023

by Brian T. Lynch, MSW

Local journalism in Morris County was severely disabled a decade ago, but its dismantling went
largely unreported. The remaining news organizations didn’t adequately cover the story of their own decline.

 

Example of a Local Newspaper edition in 1968

The Daily Record is just one example. Morris County had 485,000 residents in 2005 when over three dozen journalists and editors worked at the Daily Record. They covered the county seven days a week. The Star-Ledger also had a full-time complement of reporters covering Morris County.

Today, with over 500 thousand residents in the county, the Daily Record has just one full-time reporter, William Westhoven, doing his best to cover it all. Ben Horowitz of the Star-Ledger is assigned to cover Morris County Court news but also covers environmental stories in Northern New Jersey. Other reporters cover the county as part of a more regional news beat.

Since the 1990’s most local newspapers in the county and throughout New Jersey were taken over by giant corporate news conglomerates. Local newsrooms were decimated by layoffs, operations were consolidated, and local news operations were dismantled in what was called cost-saving moves.

In 2005 the Daily Record of Morris County had a vibrant news business with over 14 local news reporters covering every town. Reporters like Michael Daigle, Rob Jennings, Matt Monochio, Rob Seman, Tehani Schneider, Jenna McKnight, Abbott Koloff, and my own daughter Sarah N. Lynch, were among a team of reporters dedicated to covering Morris County. They had no trouble finding important news of interest to their readers.

The Daily Record employed at least six photojournalists back then, including Karen Fucito, Bob Karp, John Bell, Danielle Austen, Tyson Trish, and Dawn Benko. The paper had a Features Team led by Jim Bohen, with respected reporters such as Lorraine Ash. There was also a full complement of sports reporters, a small business desk, a team of assignment and copy editors, and what was called a Plus Section for hyper-local reporting led by Joe Arney.

The Daily Record was purchased by Gannett in the late 1990s. The company owns U.S.A.Today and 235 other newspapers, making it the largest owner of newspapers in the United States. 

I would love to hear from any former Morris County journalists, named or unnamed in this post. What do you have to say about the rapid decline of the local news business here in the county? I would love to hear your story. (Also: Please let me know of any corrections to the information above.)

Of course, the demise of local journalism here and around the country didn’t just happen. It has a history spanning just several decades. But the trend remains a mostly downward spiral.

In October 2013, Richard A. Lee wrote a dissertation on the Role of the Media In New Jersey’s 2005 and 2009 Gubernatorial Elections. His research then is history worth reading. Here are a few quotes from Mr. Lee’s research:

During the first decade of the 21st Century, two developments affected the manner in which New Jersey residents obtained news and information about their state. The size of newsroom staff at the newspapers covering the state was reduced substantially through buyouts, layoffs, cutbacks, and consolidations, and the growth of the Internet altered the manner in which news was gathered, reported, and disseminated, placing new demands on depleted news staffs. Although neither development was unique to New Jersey…

A content analysis of the coverage of New Jersey’s 2005 and 2009 gubernatorial elections, coupled with three sets of interviews with individuals involved in both campaigns, showed that the quality of news coverage declined during this four-year period. Stories were reported in less depth, with less context and with more emphasis on personalities and horserace issues than on substantive public policy matters.

Going back to the 1990s, the drive to turn a profit became a higher priority for media companies and their corporate owners... So when the financial downturn hit in 2008, Gannett’s New Jersey dailies, then numbering six, suffered through what Bob Ingle, a former senior political columnist for Gannett NJ, called a “massacre,” shedding more than 400 jobs in 2008 and 2009. The Trenton bureau became a two-person operation, down from nine.

The decline in local journalism continued. In January of 2017, David Chen in a New York Times article wrote an article about the lack of media watchdogs in New Jersey. At that time he wrote:

The Star-Ledger’s parent company, Advance Publications, presided over a 45 percent paring of the newsroom in 2008, and cut an additional 167 jobs in 2014… Another Advance paper, The Times of Trenton, slashed its newsroom to 30 from 90 between 2007 and 2009, and closed its statehouse bureau, according to Mr. Lee.

More from Mr. Lee's 2013 dissertation:

“News entities no longer are able to regularly provide in-depth stories by experienced reporters unpacking the major issues confronting the state. Fortunately, new news platforms are emerging in New Jersey and elsewhere to fill this void [a reference to TAPinto.com and PATCH.com]. However, the new media landscape requires a greater commitment from citizens. Becoming an informed and educated citizen in the 21st Century is not a passive activity. To fulfill their roles in the democratic process, citizens can no longer rely on the media to provide them with the information they need. Instead, they must seek it out from the plethora of material available online and decide what is credible and what is not, what is valuable and what is not, so they can participate in the democratic process as informed citizens and keep democracy strong and healthy.”

This seems to be especially true in Morris County, which has become somewhat of a news desert with only a handful of municipalities fully covered by local news sites such as Patch.com and TAPinto.net.

For a more historical context, here is a table showing perhaps only a partial list of Morris County newspapers over the years.

NOTE - Nov. 1, 2023: I wrote this piece about local journalism in March of this year but didn't publish it in this blog until this past weekend. I thought I had published it, but it somehow slipped through the cracks in my busy life. I noticed it was missing when local Facebook friends complained that a fatal accident in Mine Hill got no news coverage in any of the understaffed news outlets that cover surrounding towns. This was an opening to have a discussion about the fact that we live in a news desert. Today I learned of a recent article on the subject written by Dan Golden in ProPublica. Dan is a nationally renowned journalist, editor, and author from Massachusetts with years of experience in the news business. His article highlights the complexities of local news reporting and its decline in America. Here is a link to his article:  

https://www.propublica.org/article/local-newspaper-legacy-springfield-massachusetts