The pandemic outlined a scenario of difficulties for the professional press, which include the intensification of repression by authoritarian governments and the aggravation of economic difficulties in the sector. Digital migration and the increased demand for more reliable information, on the other hand, had positive impacts — the most recent example of which comes in a survey by the Poynter Institute in the United States.
According to the agency, more than 50 local journalism vehicles were launched in the US in 2020 and 2021. An article published on the institution’s website, which specializes in media coverage, highlights that the health crisis helped highlight the importance of producing information in American communities.
The text observes that, in addition to these newsrooms coming into operation, during the period almost the same amount of new local newsletters started to be sent. The survey found examples in 27 states and in Puerto Rico, an American territory in the Caribbean. Georgia, New Jersey, Texas, Washington and Florida lead the statistics, with four new vehicles each.
“I think there’s been a recognition by readers that local news matters. The pandemic has highlighted that importance as nothing has done before,” Penny Abernathy, visiting professor at the School of Communication at Northwestern University in Illinois, told the Poynter.
This statement is echoed in the most recent Digital Media Report by the Reuters Institute. The document concluded that vehicles and professionals benefited from the demand for more reliable information. “It could be a temporary effect, but in almost every country we see the public placing more value on accurate and reliable news sources,” said Nic Newman, who led the study, in June.
In the US, although most local digital media have emerged in areas close to metropolitan regions, where there are more economic conditions and chances for projects to find ways to finance themselves, Poynter also mentions launches in rural areas.
Examples include The Border Belt Independent in North Carolina. Dedicated to Bladen, Columbus, Robeson and Scotland counties, it defines itself as an independent website focusing on issues such as poverty, health, race, education and the economy.
Another highlighted point is the emergence of vehicles that emphasize specific audiences, including professional coverage aimed at immigrants, the black population and the LGBTQIA+ community.
As an example, PW Perspective, in Virginia, calls itself the “anti-racist voice” of the state and says it will be dedicated to producing reports, opinion pieces and local news linked to the black, Latino, Muslim and immigrant communities. “Prince William County is the most diverse in Virginia, but inclusion hasn’t come with that diversity. Minorities haven’t had the voice they deserve for a long time,” says the site’s mission statement.
Poynter recalls that these business openings took place in parallel with a series of difficulties for the professional press in the US, with the dismissal of journalists, the end of physical newsrooms (forcing permanent remote work) and especially the closing of vehicles.
The institute itself reported the end of more than 100 newsrooms in local journalism since the beginning of the pandemic in the country — some of them centuries old, such as the Iowa Journal-Express, founded by a friend of Abraham Lincoln.
A New York Times report that assessed the effects of the health crisis in newspapers, magazines and digital vehicles showed that 37,000 employees of media companies in the US were fired, laid off or had their wages reduced since the arrival of the coronavirus —published in April of the year Last, the text was updated in September 2021.
Even so, the Poynter text highlights that five new vehicles claimed to have had the motivation to start with the closing of others. “When 22nd Century Media went out of business in March 2020, reliable local news was withheld from tens of thousands of readers in the Chicago suburbs,” says a report on Wilmette, Illinois-based The Record North Shore.
“three editors [da empresa fechada] came together with the common goal of restoring responsible community journalism to the region.”
In Brazil, the fourth edition of the Atlas da Notícia, published in February this year, showed that the so-called “news deserts” were reduced by 5.9% compared to the study released in December 2019 — the transformation was driven by digital journalism .
The survey on local journalism in Brazil indicates that the country has 3,280 municipalities without any local media, that is, without a newspaper, website, blog or radio and TV station, against 3,487 registered a year earlier.
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