MY NEWSPAPER DIED.

• Date: 01 December 2022
• Author: Hightower, Jim
• Published date: 01 December 2022
• Author: Hightower, Jim

My newspaper died. Well, technically it still appears, but even when it is delivered it has no life, no news, and barely a pulse. It is a mere semblance of a real paper, one of the hundreds of local journalism zombies staggering along in cities and towns that had long relied on their once vigorous selves. Each one has a bare number of subscribers keeping it going, mostly longtime readers like me clinging to a memory of what used to be and a flickering hope that, surely, the thing won't get worse. Then it does.

Our papers are getting worse--at a time when we desperately need them to get better--because they are no longer mediums of journalism, civic purpose, and local identity. Rather, they have been reduced to little more than profit siphons, steadily piping local money to a handful of distant, high-finance syndicates that have bought out our hometown journals. The Austin American-Statesman, for example, was swallowed up in 2019 by the nationwide Gannett chain, becoming one of more than 500 local papers that Gannett mass produces...