In a Challenge to Newspaper Barons, Burke County Finally Has a Local Paper, Again
In response to declining news coverage in Burke County, The Paper, a hyper-local newspaper launches this week, bucking trends toward absentee ownership.
MORGANTON, North Carolina—Despite having a newspaper operate in Morganton for more than 134 years, many Burke County residents will tell you it feels as if there hasn’t been a local paper for more than what seems like a decade.
Unfairly or not, it’s not uncommon to hear the local daily newspaper referred to as “the News-less Herald” by Burke residents eager to know more about what’s happening in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains than what appears in Morganton’s daily paper.
Without wanting to diminish the work of the diligent writers and reporters at The News Herald, there has clearly been a deficiency in locally focused reporting in our county. However, I want to be clear. The blame for this doesn’t fall on the dedicated journalists of The News Herald.
That fault rests at the feet of large trends in news media, particularly in the actions taken by so-called “Newspaper Barons” who live beyond the Blue Ridge.
The Rise of Newspaper Barons & Decline of Local News
The News Herald’s newsroom, like many across the United States in the past decade-plus, has been gutted by reliance on business models that couldn’t keep up with the evolution of news media. It also doesn’t help that culturally many people have shifted their attention away from the local toward more national news.
This trend toward bigness has impacted most aspects of our society in the 21st century.
Sadly, it’s not unusual for people, for instance, to be able to name more of their state or federal officials and politicians than their city council members or county commissioners. We have abandoned so much of local life for the allure (and tainted convenience) of large-scale business and mass culture (something regularly documented by the Front Porch Republic).
According to a 2022 report by Penelope Muse Abernathy, a visiting professor at Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism, the United States are losing an average of two newspapers a week.
“Since 2005, the country has lost more than a fourth of its newspapers (2,500) and is on track to lose a third by 2025,” she notes. “Even though the pandemic was not the catastrophic ‘extinction-level event’ some feared, the country lost more than 360 newspapers between the waning pre-pandemic months of late 2019 and the end of May 2022.”
Abernathy explains that more than 20% of people in the United States are either in so-called “news deserts,” places with minimal access to local news, or “live in communities at risk of becoming news deserts.” That means roughly seventy million people in more than 200 counties lack a local newspaper, and 1,630 counties have only one.
So, what are the forces behind this decline in local news outlets?
She outlines five reasons:
Unprecedented consolidation in the newspaper industry
The long-term impact of two major recessions (2008 and 2020) decimating local businesses and potential advertisers that still provide most of the revenue and income to newspapers in small and mid-sized communities (places like Burke County)
A suffocating grip on digital advertising revenue by Big Tech, undermining print, digital, and broadcast outlets
A lack of digital infrastructure, particularly in outlying areas and historically underserved communities
The gap in the nonprofit funds needed to support struggling newspapers and digital organizations in more isolated and economically struggling communities (something else Burke County has in common)
No doubt, The News Herald is a victim of these trends.
When you have a limited number of gainfully employed writers, there is only so much local news a paper can provide. The News Herald has a staff you can probably count on two hands—a newsroom too small to effectively cover all the essential and relevant happenings in a rural county with a population of more than 87,000 people.
As Abernathy observes all over the United States, we have seen a consolidation of local media sources over the past two decades. In fact, The News Herald is owned by Lee Enterprises, a publicly traded media company based in Davenport, Iowa. That’s right, hundreds of miles away from Southern Appalachia, with no meaningful ties to Morganton. They boast control of newspapers in 77 markets in 26 states, “attracting more than 44 million unique visitors monthly,” according to their website.
As reported by Greg Burns in “The Rise of the Large Newspaper Barons,” in July 2022, Lee Enterprises is the 3rd largest newspaper group in the United States, owning 152 newspapers, 79 of which are dailies.
In addition to robbing local communities of their right to local news, undermining a key pillar of democratic living, Burns explains these newspaper barons are “kingmakers” that use “their resources to shape public opinion about everything from elections to wars.” When massive conglomerates can dictate not only what you read in the paper, but even how it is written to a large extent, representative democracy suffers.
Civic engagement diminishes and our sense of genuine community deteriorates.
“Invariably, the economically struggling, traditionally underserved communities that need local journalism the most,” says Abernathy, “are the very places it is most difficult to sustain either print or digital news organizations.”
Speaking further on the vital importance of having a local paper, she says, “Strong local news helps us understand those whose experiences and attitudes are different from us, and, in the process, brings us together to solve our most pressing political, economic and social problems.”
Fortunately, there are winds of change in the air for our Southern Appalachian community.
Pushing back against this absentee ownership model that has proliferated in recent years, a couple of journalists and former editors from Burke County are launching a new paper this week.
The Paper: ‘You want national or global news go somewhere else.’
With a clever name that is perhaps a bit tongue-in-cheek, The Paper will publish weekly, available in both print and digital formats. Allen VanNoppen, the owner of VanNoppen Marketing and a multi-generational Morgantonite, is also a former writer for Richmond Times-Dispatch, The News Herald, and Greensboro News & Record.
VanNoppen will publish The Paper, while Bill Poteat will lead the newsroom. Poteat is a former editor with more 19 years of experience at The News Herald, and brings with him a background as a teacher at East Burke High School (9 years) and Draughn High School (9 years), and columnist for The Gastonia Gazette (5 years).
Poteat’s newsroom will include Paul Schenkel as Sports Editor, Marty Queen as Morganton County Governments Reporter, Angela Copeland as Education Reporter, and Pam Walker as Central Burke Reporter. The Paper will likely enlist one more journalist in the upcoming months to fill out its team.
While a member of the North Carolina Press Association, The Paper exists as a direct challenge to these disheartening trends toward bigness that have ravaged our sense of place and community in Southern Appalachia.
Refreshingly, The Paper will be community owned by its subscribers, in a so-called “consumer cooperative ownership” model.
According to its website, readers will “own their local source of news the way that depositors own credit unions. Our goal is to provide a news organization that is literally a grassroots organization. It means that you get to vote on some big things. You don’t get to decide who the reporters are. You don’t get to decide on specific stories. But you will have a say on major, broad issues and you get to feel a sense of literal ownership over The Paper.”
The Paper will focus on Burke County exclusively. A true community paper.
In their own words: “Local news. Only local news. Comprehensively. No local story too small or too big. Sports. Business and Economy. Activities and Events. Education and students. Features. Profiles. The sane and sensible and the unusal and zany. Meaningful editorials and opinions. Letters to the editor. If we’re celebrating it, we’re covering it.”
Burke County’s new paper will be emphatically disinterested in what’s happening outside of our community. “The Paper covers us, and only us,” they say. “You want national or global news go somewhere else.”
Can a New Local Paper Buck the Trends?
This is a very encouraging development for Burke County, and may serve as a model other news-starved communities can follow, if it proves successful. But what reasons do we have to believe The Paper won’t experience the same fate shared by so many local papers lost since 2005?
To that concern, those launching The Paper believe their strength resides in having a community-based model. They’re choosing the cooperative over the corporate.
They believe many “community newspapers, especially those still in the hands of local owners, have bucked these trends,” and have faith their endeavor will be met with success, presuming Burke County residents make the choice to invest in their own community.
The Paper notes, “The value of the estimated 5,000 community newspapers continues to grow as they serve over 150 million readers who are informed, educated, and entertained by a community newspaper every week, according to the National Newspaper Association Foundation.”
To put it bluntly, its ability to thrive rests in the hands of our community: “The Paper will fill the news void in Burke County created by the decline of the local daily. We’re not reinventing the wheel or trying to put EV cars on highways. We’re just going back to the basics and giving Burke County’s residents what they have been asking for—thorough, unabashed, unwavering, and dedicated local news.”
Time will tell whether this is actually what Burke County wants. But they can count on at least one subscriber.