As a retired newspaper editor, I have heard plenty of longing in the last few years about a return to the glory days of local news. I saw some irony in it: I never felt like readers considered us a community treasure when I was doing the work, because criticism was always present and sometimes earned.
But undeniable was the accelerated downward spiral of The Herald-Times, the newspaper where I had worked for more than four decades in Bloomington, Indiana, and several other small dailies and weeklies our company owned.
It began happening the day after I retired, Jan. 31, 2019. To be clear, my departure was not the precipitating event. Ownership changed the next day — from family-owned Schurz Communications Inc. to GateHouse, which later also took over Gannett. Control switched from a family who wanted to make money while being active participants in their communities, to a private equity company that only wanted to make money.
WFIU/WTIU News, where I work now in my post-newspaper life, is an affiliate of National Public Radio. When Poynter’s Beat Academy asked for applications to investigate the effects of private equity companies in communities, our newsroom leadership was interested in applying to look at the area we were most familiar with: the effect on local news.
The partnership between Poynter and the Omidyar Network allowed us to dedicate hours to reporting, research and data visualization work we would not otherwise have been able to support. It allowed us to bring together dozens of people to discuss the impact of diminished local newspapers on south-central Indiana communities. And it allowed us to explore solutions being launched to fill gaps in local coverage.
Our Beat Academy journey started with webinars provided by Poynter. We followed up with interviewing experts on private equity companies to better understand the basics. We discovered we were not pursuing an evil entity that set out to destroy local news, but rather a construct that had one simple goal, as Indiana University’s Niklas Huether put it: “To maximize profit.”
We studied academic and industry research on the subject. We tested the family vs. private equity difference by visiting with Todd Schurz, who was president and CEO of Schurz Communications when the family group sold their newspapers. He explained the company’s community commitment, the stark realities of the newspaper business model and the decision to sell. Gannett’s leaders would not talk to us, though they did send a short statement attributed to Jill Bond, news director of The Herald-Times. Bond said: “The Bloomington Herald-Times, Spencer Evening World and Bedford Times-Mail have deep roots in their communities and throughout the south-central Indiana area. Our newspapers leverage local resources while relying on our USA TODAY Network to ensure continued coverage.”
We were able to document the path to maximizing profit. It followed steep staff reductions, consolidated printing schedules that crippled timeliness, the sale of newspaper offices and production facilities and massive content cuts. The Herald-Times staff dropped from 29 journalists at the time of the sale to seven when we reported the series in 2023. Other former Schurz newspapers in the area fared worse, becoming “ghost newspapers” with no local staff members.
Local residents told us what they missed the most: coverage of governmental agencies, which one former Bloomington mayor and Indiana legislator called “a threat to democracy”; coverage of high school sports, which a rural resident said harmed the close-knit nature of his community; coverage of local business news, which a long-time local leader said hurt the economic vitality of the community. Others missed coverage of arts and community events, social issues and education. Some people lamented the lack of opinion pieces — editorials, local columns and letters to the editor — that shed light on local issues.
Indiana University Media School professor Jason Peifer summarized at a public event on the subject that dramatic cuts to local newspapers tear at the fabric connecting communities. Local voices noted that when community news is replaced by divisive national political discourse, distrust filters down to the local level.
Our research documented a decline in Bloomington’s local newspaper content from more than 1,100 items in September of 2014, to 970 in September of 2018. That showed some cutbacks were occurring before the sale to private equity owners. But the deterioration accelerated to less than 250 pieces of local content in September 2023. The number of obituaries stayed roughly the same, as the kind of news missed by readers declined.
Finally, we were able to look at startups hoping to fill in some of the gaps. A weekly print newspaper began publishing in one county where a ghost newspaper still operated, and a new website supported by a community foundation launched in another town with a ghost newspaper. We interviewed leaders of an Indianapolis-based news operation and a collaboration between a formerly family-owned newspaper and an NPR station in Pennsylvania.
In Bloomington, no return to glory days — whenever they were — are projected. But groups such as the public library and the community foundation are considering how local news coverage can be enhanced to offset the new ownership reality.
