A case for community newspapers

Like most rural Iowans, I’m used to hearing about deserts — "food deserts,” “medical deserts,” “legal deserts.” And now comes the latest grim coinage: “news deserts.” The term itself is a loaded one, both because it implies the evaporation of our literacy, where knowledge is water and water is wanting, and because it makes the prognosis sound terminal, since deserts, once formed, seem only to grow. According to Northwestern University’s recent State of Local News Report, more than 3,200 newspapers have disappeared since 2005, including many in the Hawkeye State.

The desertification of our state’s community journalism is personal for me, having begun a writing career at a family-run weekly in my twenties. The local sports editor had abruptly left for greener pastures, and I needed work, having returned home from university to be closer to my dying grandfather in rural Mechanicsville. I had worked as a cub reporter for a couple of summers, so the publisher knew my writing and was willing to throw a drowning man a rope.

A first-generation college student from a long line of Eastern Iowa farmers, I had never before worked for a man who wore a collared shirt to his job, or who made a living in a small town simply by wielding words. That the editor-in-chief trusted me implicitly remains a source of wonder. Though I had taken more than a few classes in the fine art of writing, I had precious little idea how to actually do community journalism, and my ignorance showed. My write-ups were overlong if not ornate, and I was prone to exactly the kind of $10,000 words novelists adore and journalists abhor. I used words like “behemoth” to describe all things large, from monster trucks to basketball centers. I used a profane barnyard word or two (in quotes, mind you) of the sort that would have resulted in a slew of canceled subscriptions in a less tolerant community.

Despite my lack of experience, I was trusted to report on everything from prizewinning hogs to presidential front-runners. On the shoulder of Highway 30, I walked with Iowa’s governor in one feature, and, in another, joined a group of orphaned boys dragging an eight-foot Christian cross down the same stretch of road. Once, acting on a tip, I chased Evel Knievel down Interstate 80 in hot pursuit of an interview that, sadly, never came to fruition. When occasionally my stories succeeded, someone would pull me aside at the checkout aisle of the local grocery to say “nice work.” And when they failed, these same readers would let me know exactly what they wanted more of: pictures of their kids, names of kin, larger type for tired eyes.

When we lose our community newspapers, we lose more than routine coverage of city council and school board meetings. We lose a chance to educate our local journalists as to our wants and needs as readers. We lose the editorial discretion and evenhandedness born of long-rootedness in community. We lose an outlet for the talents and convictions of our homegrown scribes. When local newspapers fail or fade away, a part of our collective memory dies.

By comparison with food deserts, medical deserts, and legal deserts, news deserts are easier for concerned citizens to remedy. We can support the local newspapers that remain; we can patronize the businesses that support the publications that steadfastly report the issues that affect us intimately; we can think creatively when our papers must go up for sale, as did the Daily Iowan when it purchased the Mount Vernon-Lisbon Sun and Solon Economist and kept them running as living laboratories for student journalists. We can plan ahead for the ethical sale or intergenerational succession of our Fourth Estate just as we do for the farms and family-run businesses without which our lives would lack meaning, if not sustenance.

A rural Cedar County native, Zachary Michael Jack is the author of many books on Iowa and the Midwest, including ”The Strange Genius of Ignatius Donnelly.“