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Today, TomDispatch regular Jane Braxton Little writes about the "news deserts" spreading across rural parts of America. These are often the same regions hit hard by the unparalleled fires, floods, and fierce storms that are increasingly part of a world growing hotter and more violent by the year. Her own town, Greenville, was essentially burned out in 2021 by California's single-largest blaze ever, the grim Dixie Fire (something she wrote about for TomDispatch). In response, as she notes today, she and some of her local friends and associates have bravely started a new community paper, The Plumas Sun, to fill in a bit of her own news desert in tough times.
Meanwhile, those deserts are only growing and not just in rural America either. In a wild social-media world, the newspaper is, it seems, beginning to go down. Only recently, for instance, the LA Times laid off 20% of its newsroom, 115 journalists (especially young ones of color), not to speak of its executive editor, managing editor, and Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington D.C. bureau chief. (And all of that came after a previous set of job slashes in June 2023.)
And the LA Times wasn't exactly atypical. In 2023, the Washington Post also cut 240 jobs or 10% of its workforce, while Time magazine axed 15% of its editorial employees. All three were reportedly losing millions of dollars. (And keep in mind that the LA Times is owned by billionaire Patrick Soon-Shiong, the Post by billionaire Jeff Bezos, and Time by billionaire Marc Benioff.) Last year, there were at least 2,681 job cuts among news reporters across broadcast, digital, and print outfits and the numbers only seem to be growing.
So, as we head into the 2024 election season, news readers, whether in rural America or in some of its biggest cities, may find themselves in growing news deserts -- as You Know Who once again takes center stage, a tweet at a time. Tom
Local Newspapers Are Lifelines for Climate-Disaster Communities
Can They Survive the News Desert?
When wildfires began erupting in the Texas Panhandle in February, Laurie Ezzell Brown, the editor and publisher of the Canadian Record, was in Houston on a panel discussing ways in which losing local newspapers represents a danger to democracy. Running the once-a-week Record from the Panhandle town of Canadian, she certainly knew something about the rise of "news deserts" in this country. While she was meeting with other journalists concerned about disappearing local newspapers, Brown kept an eye on reports about ignitions sparking wildfires west of her town and posted updates from afar so that her readers would remain informed.
"Those fires never stay in the next county," Brown said grimly. And indeed, as the flames galloped through fallow fields and approached her hometown, she began a desperate drive back to Canadian with a friend. In and out of cell coverage, traveling through black-ash smoke, she saw distinctly apocalyptic scenes of torched trees and powerlines dangling from still-burning poles. As she went, she posted every scrap of information she could get for the scattered and distraught readers of her paper. How else would they know about the houses that were being torched ever closer to their own homes?
In the days that followed, as that historic nightmare of a blaze just grew and grew, finally burning through more than a million acres of the Texas Panhandle, Brown continued to keep Canadian Record readers informed about crucial matters like how to apply for financial assistance, where to take fire debris, and when the next embattled town meeting would be held. It was part of what she's been doing since 1993: keeping an eye on Canadian's Hemphill County commissioners, investigating economic salvation schemes, and posting high school sports scores as well as local obituaries.
"There's no one else to do this and people need to know what's happening. It's what I do. It's what I've always done," she told me.
It's what I do, too. Like Canadian, my adopted hometown of Greenville in Plumas County, California, was hit by a climate-driven wildfire in 2021 that devastated 800 homes and left the downtown smoldering on its Gold Rush-era dirt foundations. Two years into rebuilding, the only local online publication announced that it was shuttering. So, I set aside my freelance journalism career, joined a team of like-minded citizens, and launched The Plumas Sun.
Like Brown and hundreds of journalists across the country, we're reporting from the intersection of news deserts and climate disasters. As floods, fires, and tornadoes surge, and daily as well as weekly publications collapse, local journalism maintains an all-too-slender lifeline in devastated rural communities like mine. Local journalists remain after the Klieg lights go dark and the national media flee our mud-strewn, burned-out Main Streets. We continue to report as our friends and neighbors face the challenge of rebuilding (or not).
Somehow, along with flattened towns and shattered lives, disaster sometimes even breeds innovation. Among the ruins left by walls of water and towering flames, bootstrapped publications like mine do their best to keep the news alive in communities now struggling just to survive.
Nowhere Will Be Spared
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