No Local News Is Not Good News
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One of the biggest reasons for such division in this country is the extinction of local news…not Taylor Swift or pickleball. I promise I have no interest in rehashing why the lack of local news has resulted in this country not knowing each other or that news deserts give select mega news sources an inordinate amount of influence. Op-eds across the country covered this issue but it was during at a time when everyone was too wrapped up in playing Wordle. Most of those Op-eds may have gotten too in the weeds so I’d like to try a different approach, my personal story, but I assure you this will probably be the last time I will appear in a newspaper as they are all in trouble (You can Google that. You know, on the internet, the reason so few newspapers are left.).
Cartoonist/writer Bob Eckstein expounds on the fate of newspapers (and magazines) for The N.Y. Daily News which is behind a paywall, but Bob posts the essay on his Substack for those of us not getting through to The News opinion piece.
Bob brings The Daily News into the conversation:
The same can be said for The New York Daily News. I’m not speaking out of school, when I say it’s a ghost ship now. But back in the day I loved The Daily News when reporters and star journalists were who we followed, not someone twerking on TikTok. Jimmy Breslin and sports reporters Mike Lupica and before that, the best sports reporter ever, Dick Young. Sports were just as much about the editorials and beat reporters as the scores. I dreamed of one day being like sports cartoonist, Bill Gallo. We (kids who loved sports) couldn’t wait to see what his latest drawing would be. I would eventually work for the paper as, for a short time, as the legendary editorial cartoonist Bill Bramhall’s stand-in, doing cartoons in this very space. Bill is one reason readers should continue reading the Daily News.
Exploring Bob’s Substack one finds more interesting essays – for example:
For Gag Cartoonists Wondering When Did Selling Become So Difficult; Part 1; Part 2; Part 3.
Bob mentioned news deserts above. I expect those to be in eastern Montana, spread among the great expanse that is Texas, you know, northern Alaska; but New Jersey??!!
Newspaper closures muddle future of notice in New Jersey
The status of newspaper notice in New Jersey was thrown into uncertainty when Advance Publications announced on Oct. 30 that early next year it plans to close a production facility and the print editions of several significant newspapers in the state, including the state’s largest paper, the Star-Ledger.
Although it isn’t clear how many local government units were using the three daily papers and one weekly newspaper that will cease publication in the wake of Advance’s announcement, the scale of the closure’s impact began to come into focus when rural Warren County filed a lawsuit seeking a new outlet for its notices. Warren County has been publishing its notices in the Star-Ledger even though the paper is based in Newark, which is located two counties and 63 miles from the county seat.
The county is seeking relief even though Gannett’s Daily Record is its alternate official paper and qualifies under the state’s public notice statute to publish its notices. The county argues the Daily Record is ill-equipped to serve as its official newspaper because “its circulation is limited to 1,345 subscribers” and it reports on “only a minute slice of eastern Warren County.”
Public Notice Resource Center reports on a problem not quite as important (to me) as loss of comic strips.
The strike at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette is now the longest in the nation. And it’s not over.
More than 18 months had passed since a train carrying thousands of gallons of toxic chemicals derailed nearby in February 2023. The creek developed a metallic sheen and gave off a chemical scent. In September, 2024, Siceloff, a resident who lived a few miles away over the Pennsylvania border, was continuing to document the accident’s impacts, accompanied by Mellon.
Mellon was one of the few journalists from any major outlet still on the ground in East Palestine. But none of his reporting on it has been published in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette – the paper where he made his name and remains technically employed. Instead, it appeared in the smaller, online-only Pittsburgh Union Progress that he helped start with his co-workers.
The Union Progress was created as a strike publication after Pittsburgh Post-Gazette journalists walked off the job in an unfair labor practice strike in October 2022. It’s now the longest ongoing strike in the country, according to the International Communications Workers of America.
As the strike has gone on, tensions between both sides have grown, and it’s unclear how or when the strike will end. On Nov. 13, the first negotiations between the Post-Gazette’s lawyers and the union in over a year ended after [Zack] Tanner [the Newspaper Guild’s president] threw a chair at the wall of a conference room in the Omni William Penn Hotel.
Though not named cartoonist Rob Rogers‘ parting from the newspaper is mentioned in this long article.
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