A Story About the Collapse of American Journalism, Part 1

The throughline of our three foundational series at The Muckraker is that the people hold the power, the government exercises it on their behalf, and that good journalism exists as the eyes, ears, and voice of the people to ensure that happens. An informed citizenry understands what its powers are and how they are diffused across the legislative and executive branches, often through administrative agencies. When people in power attack journalism, it is often because of its role as the watchdog for the citizenry. After all, corruption is far more difficult to pull off when someone is watching and, more importantly, understands what they’re seeing.

In this first series, we’ll consider the free flow of information, its importance to democracy, and how people with ill intent recognize this and seek to co-opt it to further their own agendas.

Why a Local Newsroom Matters

The collapse of the American press is the piece we lead with because it’s the broken institution that allows all our other institutions to be broken too[^1]. It's also the most personal for me as I was there in the newsroom to watch it all crumble.

I think my biggest mea culpa as I launch this project, specifically as I talk about the importance of local journalism, is that I took it for granted while I was doing it. I did not thoroughly appreciate how important it is to democracy that we were out there on random ass weeknights covering school boards and city councils, zoning boards and county commissions. I did it about 3 nights a week for five years, and while I don’t remember specifically, I probably complained about the mundanity of it all most of the time.

But let me tell you, Bubba, I loved it.

I loved the watchdog aspects, the on-the-spot breaking news coverage, and the effort it takes for small groups of people all around the country to put an issue out every single day. I loved the feel of the newspaper, the smell of the ink, and the noise of the press running. I loved the pressure of writing on deadline and the notion of never being finished with an article, but simply running out of time. I loved cantankerous interview subjects and people with their own motives trying to play me, while other people with their own motives send me emails diming them out. I loved (and still have) the thank-you cards from the elementary schools I would visit and the passive-aggressive notes I'd get from disgruntled politicians unhappy that I told the truth about something. I loved how, at the end of the day, the whole enterprise was sometimes just a peek behind the curtain at the existential absurdity of being human.

But, to quote the poet Patty Smyth, baby, sometimes love just ain't enough.

So I, and thousands of others just like me, simply left to do other things. We'll talk about why that happened and what it meant to local journalism in a couple of weeks. Today, I want to focus on some history, and maybe start by answering a question: Why do local newsrooms matter? The Internet puts the world at our fingertips, so why should any of us care about what we lost when we lost resourced, staffed, viable local news coverage?

To me, local newsrooms matter because they are the thing that connects a community. Some people think it’s the schools[^2]. Others might think it’s the area’s largest employer, or the local bar[^3], but I think it’s the local newsrooms. Over the past couple of decades, as those local newsrooms have shrunk, consolidated, and sometimes just flat out disappeared, I think we’ve seen how when you lose the newspaper, you lose some of what makes your community a community.

And that is the coverage of all of the things.

The local government meetings, obviously, but not just those. Sure, coverage of the local boards, councils, authorities, courts, and schools makes up the spinal column of a community, but it's the other stuff that makes us CARE. It's covering the tractor pulls. The county fairs. The local fishing industry. The school functions. It's covering the closing of a local tavern that has been serving drinks at a rural intersection since people pulled up to it on horses. It's the fundraiser spaghetti dinners or pancake breakfasts, and the opening of new airports and businesses. It's honoring local Veterans on Memorial Day.

So the thing I was most arrogantly wrong about is that those things were annoyances to covering the "real" news, when the reality is that it is the coverage of those things that ties a coverage area into one community. Those are the things that hit at our souls, and they are the reasons we care about the things that hit at our wallets.

Covering those things is what makes people care about what our local and state-level politicians are doing. So once people are invested in their communities, in each other, that's when the community buys in and allows local watchdogs to do what they do to make democracy go.

And as we'll see in a few weeks, without local journalists plugging into a network of coverage without major gaps, the whole damn thing falls apart.

The Design

Before it all blew up, sometime between 2006 and 2010, depending on your perspective[^4], there was a pretty good model. Local papers were largely owned by local owners. Sure, big corporations like Gannett or Hearst might hold properties throughout the country, but even in those newsrooms, it was local journalists in control. Newspapers depended on LOCAL advertising revenue and subscriptions, which meant local journalists kept a sort of geographic monopoly on information. They also tended to compete for that information with at least one other local newspaper and a host of local radio and television stations. This created a professional class of journalists whose job security depended on getting things right rather than getting clicks.

Certainly, the model had its flaws. Local owners are still human beings with their own biases and interests. Ink-stained wretches like myself still had to navigate those, along with the interests and biases of anyone taking ads out in the paper. Still, the model produced something important: a foundation of local accountability journalism that combined with others throughout the country to create an overlapping record of civic accountability.

In a couple of weeks, we'll talk about what it looked like when the model was working at its best. However, human beings understood the importance of free expression - and the power that could be held by controlling it - long before we saw that model rise and fall. Without independent chroniclers of the news to keep them in check, the citizenry had to trust that their politicians were telling them the truth.

Imagine that.

Rome, 59 BC: Was Caesar benevolent or selfish?

We could start earlier (really, Josh, we could?), but I think a good starting point is Rome and Julius Caesar.

Do you know what your representatives in Congress did today? Do you know where to find out? Do you know whether you're getting the update warts and all, or just the parts they want you to get?

The Romans didn't, at least not until about 59 BC, when Caesar decided they should and enacted the Acta Diurna, Latin for Daily Acts, a requirement that proceedings in the Roman senate be published[^5]. Whether Caesar did this because he believed in the people's right to be informed or because he viewed information as a tool of governance is debatable. So the real question, even then, was who would control information and for whose benefit. I think Caesar liked the idea that it could be him.

The Acta Diurna were published in public places and carried by courier throughout the Roman Empire, where folks waited for it to learn what was happening in Rome. While scholars believe they were intended as a way to inform people of the activities of the Senate, there are disputed accounts of things like Gladiator events, birth announcements, obituaries, treasury updates, and the like, appearing as well.

Caesar's enactment created a situation both good and bad for free expression and self-rule. It empowered the people through knowledge and information, but that information was filtered through the Senators who had an interest in what information got out and how it was framed. The Acta Diurna are sometimes considered the world's first "newspaper," but without independent chroniclers and editorial judgment, it was probably more of a government newsletter.

Still, it reflects that as far back as the Roman Senate, people understood that freedom required self-governance and that self-governance required that the individuals executing the people's power be supervised. This Roman model was advanced for its time, but still suffered from flaws related to the lack of an independent chronicler and an inability to quickly and efficiently spread the news.

Europe, 1440-1450: The Printing Press Changes Everything

It is not that easy to find good information on Johannes Gutenberg, which means I can say without worrying that anyone can really prove me wrong that he had a wallet that said "Bad Motherfucker" on it.

Ok fine, probably not.

Either way, what we do know about him is that he is credited with inventing the printing press and, in turn, democratizing information. Before the printing press, it was mostly the very wealthy who had access to things like books or what we might now call a newspaper, as they were often handwritten and very slow and expensive to produce[^6].

Some digging reveals that the Chinese and Koreans beat Gutenberg to the punch on several printing innovations. However, Gutenberg is typically credited as the guy who figured out how to use a modified wine press and inked metal plates to mass-produce identical copies of a piece of writing[^7].

And oh boy did that change things.

Dave Roos breaks it down really nicely at History.com, but for our purposes, the biggest impacts were that this allowed for the launch of what Roos describes as the first global news network, whereby identical copies of a product that contained ideas could be disseminated around the world. This normalized being informed about the daily happenings in the world. The printing press opened the door to more voices to join the public discourse. Anyone who could get access to a press could spread their ideas, making them much more difficult to censor or kill altogether. Finally, it led to the concept of "public opinion," and allowed philosophers and poets ever since to harness it for revolution.

So, Gutenberg was a goldsmith who used his previous experience stamping metals with his father to come up with this machine that was then used throughout history to spread democracy.

All due respect to Jules Winnfield, but if that doesn't deserve a Bad Motherfucker wallet, then I don't know what does.

Strasbourg, 1605: Johann Carolus invents the first product for wrapping fish

Johann Carolus is often credited with creating the world's first newspaper - the Relation aller Fürnemmen und gedenckwürdigen Historien — in Strasbourg in 1605.

Carolus had worked as one of the folks who would make handwritten "newspapers" for wealthy subscribers by collecting and reproducing news from a variety of sources. He acquired a printing press, presumably because he was tired of his hand cramping up all of the time, and began to mass-produce this curated news in a way that made it widely available and no longer just the domain of the privileged and wealthy.

According to Jeremy Norman's HistoryofInformation.com, The Relation's full name translates to "Account of All Distinguished and Commemorable News," and while some dispute whether it was actually a newspaper because of its format, none dispute that it was published to the public at regular intervals to inform.

So, newspaper.

Others would follow, and the result was that information was now available to the general public and democratized in a way it never had been before. More importantly, Carolus and others began to refine the techniques of information gathering and publishing as a tool to hold those in power accountable. Without this work, the stage may have never been set for America's Founders to argue about a free press at all, much less to install it as an institutional watchdog on the People's behalf.

Gutenberg created the machine, but it was Carolus who used that machine to create a newspaper, thereby making journalism mechanical, democratic, and in need of constant and vigilant defense[^8].

Because, as we saw from the time of Caesar, once information becomes democratic, the people in power realize their desire to control it.

Come back next week to find out how they try.

FOOTNOTES

[^1]: The sun is shining, the birds are singing, and I'm feeling good today, so I'm going to use the word "broken." Catch me on a more cynical morning, and I would say "sold."

[^2]: I don't want to bog down the copy with this, but I have to say, schools are the hardest ones to argue against because, well, they're schools. But here it is: If you have 12 different schools in one coverage area, what you really have are 12 different communities. The school districts create a micro-community within that coverage area, but the happenings in one district don't necessarily impact other districts the way a decision by, say, the county commission or zoning board might. There are good reasons to divide a community into school districts, but it doesn't exactly shout "connective tissue" when you do.

[^3]: This is the second-hardest one to argue against because my experience has often been that, especially in smaller towns, the local bar is the place you find the most honesty.

[^4]: Much more about all of this in a couple of weeks!

[^5]: There is a lot of wiggle room here for what exactly appeared in these publications and how they were spread. The best information comes from the writings of Suetonius and Tacitus. Suetonius confirms in "The Twelve Caesars" that 'Caesar's first enactment after becoming consul was, that the proceedings both of the senate and of the people should day to day be compiled and published.' Tacitus described the "newspaper" spread through Rome. For more information, go here.

[^6]: Also, since books weren't widespread, the majority were illiterate and got most of their news from conversation anyway.

[^7]: He also died penniless and never saw the impact his invention had on the world, which might be the most journalism thing that has ever jouralismed.

[^8]: Someone get this man a wallet.