A New Model for Local Journalism is Emerging
And you are part of it...
Rachelle Chase (l) and Beth Hoffman (r), friends and fellow Iowa Writers’ Collaborative members, work on their columns recently at the Coffee Connection in Knoxville.
I’m honored that Deep Midwest: Politics and Culture has over 4,200 subscribers in all 50 states and 55 countries. My columns will always be free and I’d like to thank those of you who choose to be paid supporters. Payment helps me go to more places and see more things. I’m an anthropologist and need to be in places to watch, listen, and learn.
Those of you who are regular readers know that I often report on things I see and hear that others don’t. One example is my latest column, Finding Comfort at the Casey’s General Store in Emporia, Kansas. It also appeared in Sunday’s Kansas City Star, a great newspaper (while visiting the KC Star, please check out this important opinion piece by student Josie Yungeberg, “Shawnee Mission teacher’s lawsuit isn’t an attack on ‘woke.’ It targets us students”).
I’ve been gaining subscribers quickly, and for you newer subscribers, I have bylines in the New York Times, TIME, USA Today, the Des Moines Register, the Iowa Capital Dispatch, The Gazette, the Kansas City Star, all of the McClatchy papers, the Hill, Salon, Civil Eats, and many more. I’ve been on IPR, NPR, WNYC, and many more radio stations. I’ve been on CNN, NBC, and MSNBC, and Howard Kurtz of Fox News once spent over five minutes telling everyone why I was wrong.
I knew I was doing something right in 2016 when Chris Matthews, then of MSNBC, and Tucker Carlson, then of Fox News, wanted me on the air on the same night in June of 2016. I was bumped from both programs because of the horrific shootings at Pulse Nightclub, a gay bar in Orlando.
Over the years, I’ve interviewed over 8,000 Iowans, and nearly every presidential candidate for the past 20 years.
I know what it’s like living paycheck to paycheck, so I’m offering a discount for people who aren’t yet paid subscribers who might be interested in a 50% off subscription for the coming year. If you are, please click here.
If that’s a strain on the budget, I understand. My content will always be free. I’ve started a paid subscriber chat, but I’m still figuring it out.
Thank you for being part of this emerging model for local journalism by subscribing to this substack column, and please consider subscribing to the work of other members of the Iowa Writers’ Collaborative.
Hedge funds are buying up newspapers and radio stations and stripping them for parts. Others are folding because of the lack of advertisers. Social media has stolen their content without compensation.
According to the Northwestern University’s Medill State of Local News Report 2024:
In the past year, 127 community papers have seen their demise and since 2005, more than one in three newspapers have folded. Today, nearly 55 million Americans live in places that could accurately be labeled as "news deserts." News deserts are counties without any locally based source of news.
The U.S. has also lost more than one-third of its newspapers since 2005. The Medill team calculated that since that year, the U.S. has seen a decline of 3,200 newspapers. Experts say that each closure adds to the void felt by communities deprived of local reporting. The impact of these closures is stark with the number of these news desert counties rising from 204 in 2023 to 208 this year.
Thursday morning I read a Substack column by the former federal prosecutor and senior legal columnist for the Los Angeles Times Harry Litman about why he resigned from the paper. Litman had written commentary for the Times for approximately 15 years. I’ll let Harry tell you his story and here is part of it:
My resignation is a protest and visceral reaction against the conduct of the paper’s owner, Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong. Soon-Shiong has made several moves to force the paper, over the forceful objections of his staff, into a posture more sympathetic to Donald Trump. Those moves can’t be defended as the sort of policy adjustment papers undergo from time to time, and that an owner, within limits, is entitled to influence. Given the existential stakes for our democracy that I believe Trump’s second term poses, and the evidence that Soon-Shiong is currying favor with the President-elect, they are repugnant and dangerous.
Soon-Shiong’s most notorious action received national attention. The paper’s editorial department had drafted an endorsement of Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris. Soon-Shiong ordered them to spike it and make no endorsement in the election. (Soon-Shiong later implied he had just ordered up a factual analysis of both candidates’ policies, but that’s at best a distortion: he plainly blocked an already drafted Harris endorsement.) It is hard to imagine a more brutal, humiliating, and unprofessional treatment of a paper’s professional staff. Three members of the editorial page resigned in protest and 2,000 readers canceled their subscriptions.
Patrick Soon-Shiong is obeying in advance the authoritarian Trump, as did Jeff Bezos, owner of the Washington Post who also killed an endorsement of Harris by the editorial board. The Washington Post lost over 200,000 subscribers in the aftermath.
I don’t understand why these billionaires are such cowards. If you, dear reader, and I were billionaires, we would let the newspaper professionals run the newspapers we owned, and we would be building parks, endowing scholarships, feeding hungry school kids, and more. Wouldn’t that be fun? Spreading as much good in the world as we could with our endless resources?
And it’s not just Soon-Shiong and Bezos. There are many more examples of the press bending a knee to Trump, including Kristen Welkers’ weak interview with Trump on Meet the Press on Sunday. At least NBC did a fact-check afterward.
Also, Soon-Shiong is coming out with an AI “Bias Meter,” which long-time journalist Mark Jacob calls “The stupidest new idea in journalism a bias meter—MAGA-friendly Los Angeles Times owner wants to make AI the ultimate editor.”
Harry Litman left the Los Angeles Times to continue to report on Substack at Stop the Presses. Many other great journalists are on Substack. American Doom offers top-notch reporting that also often appears at Rolling Stone, as does TFN and Jonathan Larson. They offer their readers takes you won’t see anywhere else. Check out the historian Heather Cox Richardson’s Letters from an American. She is brilliant.
Substack publishes a list of its top news sites. Some of them are fantastic, from all ends of the political perspective. There are great columns from the left, and also from conservatives who I learn from. Sure, there are MAGA scoundrels in the mix, but I like to read as widely as possible.
I put the photo of my friends Rachelle Chase and Beth Hoffman and fellow Iowa Writers’ Collaborative members at the top to illustrate that Julie Gammack, the creator of the collaborative, has built a remarkable community of over 50 award winning writers who are likely providing as much or more commentary and feature reporting every week than any newspaper in the Midwest and likely beyond.
I love newspapers. I still subscribe to several and hope you do too. But the world has changed. Thanks for subscribing.
I’m a proud member of the Iowa Writers’ Collaborative. Please check out our work here. Subscribe! Become a paid subscriber if you can afford it. Please and thank you. We need you. Thanks for being part of the team! Want to buy me lunch or a cup of coffee? Venmo @Robert-Leonard-238. My friend Spencer Dirks and I have a podcast titled the Iowa Revolution. Check it out! We can get ornery. And have fun! I also publish Cedar Creek Nature Notes, about Violet the Dog and my adventures on our morning walks at Cedar Bluffs Natural Area in Mahaska County, Iowa.
Congratulations on your successful venture into the substack world. You give me hope as we enter the unknown for the next four years. I appreciate your analysis, commentary and generosity to those of us on fixed incomes to be subscribers.
I've always appreciated your writing which showed an independence that was not present with many of the editors of local newspapers that I've encountered over long years of writing which began when I was high school freshman. I was tapped by my English teacher to be part of a group which met during the noon hour once a week to write the Palladium which was published in the Pella Chronicle. This was not part of the curriculum and we received no credit for doing this. Thanks for mentioning my favorite Heather Cox Richardson.