Losing a newspaper means the greater Cortland area becomes a news desert, joining 54 million Americans who lack reliable access to local news, according to a report by the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University.
More than 3,200 newspapers have closed since 2005, the researchers note in a report late last fall, nearly a third of all the newspapers in America.
Beyond the lost jobs — nearly 270,000 news jobs lost between 2005 and 2023 across the nation and now 17 more in Cortland — the community loses something else:
•Better-informed voters: Joshua P. Darr, Matthew P. Hitt, and Johanna L. Dunaway — researchers at Louisiana State University, Colorado State University and Texas A&M University — compared ballots in communities where a local newspaper closed between 2009 and 2012 with communities where local newspapers remained. They found that voters in communities without a local newspaper were likely to vote the party line, whereas other voters were more likely to split the ticket, voting for both Republicans and Democrats.
That’s not because voters without a local newspaper were necessarily less-well informed, the researchers said, according to a summary by the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard University. It’s because of the way local media frame their coverage compared with national media.
•Money in the form of higher taxes: According to researchers at the University of Notre Dame and the University of Illinois at Chicago, a community without a local newspaper spends more. Long-term borrowing costs for local governments without a newspaper and its reporters to second-guess them and perform the whole public watchdog function pay up to 11 basis points more than without a newspaper.
It comes, the researchers told Citylab, an online publication of the Atlantic Monthly Group, because nobody is there to make sure politicians do the job right.
“We wanted to show that, if you look at the municipal bond market, you can actually see the financial consequences that have to be borne by local citizens as a result of newspaper closures,” Chang Lee of University of Illinois told Citylab.
The researchers studied 204 counties whose local news coverage dropped to two or fewer daily newspapers between 1996 and 2015 — think Syracuse, for example. Within three years of a paper’s closure, the cost of issuing a bond increased 5.5 basis point, and 6.4 basis points in the secondary market. That’s about a 1% increase.
•An avenue to economic development: Local news is supported by advertising, which encourages regional economic growth by helping businesses reach consumers, reports the Hussman School of Journalism and Media at the University of North Carolina.
