It is hard to believe, but I have been writing this column now for two years. Initially I thought the paper offered me this this opportunity because I grew up here, come from a conservative background, and have grown more liberal as I aged. In this way, I am a local who mirrors the shift of Philadelphia’s suburbs from solidly red to purple.
More probably, the editors offered me this space because they were tired of reading my letters.
I have received a wide range of feedback since I started. Some of my favorite comments have been unfavorable, but amusing. In response to a column I wrote about how nearly 90% of Americans believe we should have universal background checks for gun purchases, one lady wrote simply, “Beta male.”
In response to another piece where I connected the American Colonies boycotting British imports (and occasionally throwing them into the harbor) to “cancel culture,” a gentleman wrote, “I’d like to teach this guy a history lesson.”
Some of the feedback appears to be in direct reaction to the only part of the column that I do not usually write: the headline. This happens often enough that my brother-in-law once suggested I write a column called, “I don’t write these headlines.”
I have also run into people who had nice things to say about something I wrote. My favorite feedback, though, came from one of my father’s old friends. He contacted me to say that my dad would be proud of the writing I am doing, even if he would have disagreed with everything I write.
But lately the feedback I have been hearing a lot is not about me. It is about local newspapers generally, and how they too often have news items from other places. This feedback has brought me all the way back to my very first official column, “Support your local newspaper.”
I know I am preaching to the choir here, but the importance of a local newspaper cannot be overstated. Who but a local journalist is going to attend a township meeting to document a proposed subdivision, or sit in on a trial of local importance, or interview the members of a school board, or run a piece on a new, locally-owned coffee shop?
Being in the Philadelphia suburbs, we have the four major television network affiliates running news shows. These focus heavily on Philadelphia, only occasionally sending reporters out here for a story. When I was growing up, to find out what was happening here, our parents had subscriptions to the local paper.
As a member of Generation X, I take my share of the blame for news’s decline. When I was at my first job out of grad school —serving as an intelligence officer — I read the news online. That was back before paywalls, back when the Internet promised that ad revenue alone would cover the cost of running just about anything. When that turned out not to be the case, my generation had a hard time adjusting to the idea that we would have to pay for news.
The steady decline in subscriptions led to the steady paring of jobs in news. As the jobs were shed, fewer local stories could be written, and so the papers lost more local subscribers. This cycle has cost the U.S. around 3,000 local papers and 43,000 journalists over the last two decades. This has put many communities in a position where there is no local reporting, and all the news comes from national or regional news sources or from social media.
Social media is great for seeing what your cousins or old friends are up to, but it is not a source of unbiased, in-depth news about your community. Plus, you may have noticed, both national news and social media have tended towards partisan extremism.
Cancelling your subscription because the local reporting is scarce will ensure that there is even less, or none. The best remedy for this problem is to get more people interested in subscribing to local newspapers. The alternative is to live in a news desert where you only hear from national candidates who couldn’t find your town on a map or someone with an axe to grind working alone at a keyboard in their kitchen.
Will Wood is a small business owner, veteran, and half-decent runner. He lives, works, and writes in West Chester.
