Local journalism needs coronavirus stimulus, too
By Margaret Sullivan / The Washington Post
It’s a harsh paradox.
Media readership and viewership are soaring as citizens seek life-or-death information about the coronavirus: Where to get tested? Does my hospital have enough ventilators? Is it safe to go outside?
But the accompanying economic decline is killing off advertising — for restaurants, cars, travel, entertainment — and other support that has kept many news organizations going.
For some, the events of the past few weeks have already proved too much for their fragile existence. Alternative weeklies have stopped printing. Local dailies are laying off staff at already decimated newsrooms. Many others, including digital-only newsrooms, are hanging on by a thread.
It’s happening around the world: Newspapers in Australia and Britain announced in the past few days that they were going out of business or suspending print publication.
“Journalists are essential in this moment,” Craig Aaron, president and co-CEO of Free Press, a Washington-based advocacy nonprofit, told me in an interview. “We need to keep reporters working, and we have to do it now.”
Toward that end, Aaron is pressing for a variety of steps that might have seemed radical just weeks ago. His proposal, published this week in Columbia Journalism Review, includes doubling federal funds for public media, direct support for newsrooms committed to local coverage, the establishment of a “First Amendment Fund” to support new approaches to newsgathering.
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