ZPodmore said. didn’t bring down a corrupt mayor. He did not uncover secret torture sites or expose abuses by a powerful religious institution. But there was something in this article that he had written as a journalist for The Salt Lake City Tribune in 2019, it changed my understanding of the value of local news.
Podmore, then a journalist for the Tribune and a corps member at Report for America, a nonprofit I co-founded, published an article developer that San Juan County, Utah, paid a single law firm hundreds of thousands of dollars in lobbying fees. Among other things, Podmore found that the company overcharged the county, the state’s poorest, by $109,500. Encouraged by his story, the company returned the money. Perhaps because it wasn’t billions of dollars, but rather a more imaginable figure, it struck me: in one story, Podmore had recovered for the county a sum that was three times his annual salary.
You’ve probably heard about the collapse of local news over the past two decades. On average, two newspapers close every week. Some 1,800 communities who used to receive local information don’t do it. Many newspapers still operating are forced to make do with reduced staff numbers as their owners, often private equity firms, seek to cut costs. The number of newspaper editorial staff fell by 57 percent between 2008 and 2020, according to a study. Pew Research Studygiving rise to thousands of “ghost newspapers” that barely cover their community.
Over the past 15 years, I have been part of efforts to reverse this trend. This means that I have become accustomed to talking about the threat that media deserts pose to American democracy. After all, the entire concept of democratic self-government depends on citizens’ knowledge of what public officials do. This is impossible without a surveillance press. Researchers have linked the decline of local news to lower voter turnout and higher corruption rates, as well as increased polarization and more ideologically extremist elected officials. At this point, I can give lofty speeches on this subject in my sleep, complete with Thomas Jefferson quotes and all. Recently, however, I realized that I was ignoring a less noble but perhaps more compelling argument: that funding local news would more than pay for itself.
Unlike other seemingly intractable problems, the disappearance of local news would not cost much to reverse the trend. Journalists are not particularly well paid. Assuming an average salary of $60,000 (generous by industry standards), it would cost only about $1.5 billion per year to maintain 25,000 local journalist positions, a rough estimate of the number that has disappeared nationally over the past two decades. This represents two hundredths of a percent of federal spending in 2022. I personally believe that this amount would be worth sacrificing to save American democracy. But the surprising thing is that it wouldn’t really be a sacrifice. If more public or philanthropic money were devoted to keeping news local, it would most likely produce financial benefits many times the cost.
What do government officials do when no one is watching? Often, they enrich themselves or their allies at the expense of taxpayers. In the 2000s, a few years after its local newspaper closed, the town of Bell, California, a low-income, predominantly Latino community, raised the city manager’s salary to $787,637 and that of the chief of the policy at $457,000. THE Los Angeles Times Ultimately exposed corruption, and several city officials ended up in prison. Prosecutors accused them of costing taxpayers at least $5.5 million because of their inflated salaries. These salaries were approved at town meetings, meaning that if just one reporter (say, with a salary of $60,000) had been present, the town could have saved millions of dollars.
Sometimes the work of journalists results in government investigations into the private sector, which in turn result in fines that are paid into the public’s bank account. After the Tampa Bay Times find that a battery recycler was exposing its employees and the surrounding community to high levels of lead and other toxins, regulators fined the company $800,000. A ProPublica investigation on a company’s questionable mortgage-backed securities triggered an investigation by the Security and Exchange Commission, which ultimately levied $435 million in fines. A review of more than 12,000 submissions to the Investigative Reporters and Editors Awards found that about one in ten triggered fines from the government and twice as many resulted in audits.
In other cases, local news organizations return money directly to consumers by forcing private institutions to behave better. MLK50, a local newsroom in Memphis, associates with ProPublica to report that Methodist Le Bonheur Healthcare had sued more than 8,300 people, many of them poor, for unpaid hospital bills. In response, the faith-based institution forgave nearly $12 million in debt.
Of course, most journalism doesn’t turn into cash that immediately. The impacts can be enormous but indirect. A study of toxic emissions in 40,000 factories find that when newspapers reported on the pollution, emissions fell by 29 percent compared to factories that were not covered. The study didn’t track ripple effects, but it stands to reason that residents in less polluted areas would have fewer health problems, resulting in lower medical costs and less travel time. lost work. Another study, by researchers Pengjie Gao, Chang Lee and Dermot Murphy, examined bond offerings in communities with and without local information from 1996 to 2015. It concluded that for each bond offering, borrowing costs were five to 11 basis points higher in less covered communities. This translated into additional costs averaging $650,000 per issue.
One academic attempted to follow the economic effects even further downstream. In his book Democracy Detectives: The Economics of Investigative Journalism, Stanford professor James Hamilton examined a series by KCBS in Los Angeles that exposed a flawed restaurant inspection program. The expose prompted Los Angeles County to require restaurants to post their inspection results, leading to a 13.3 percent drop in Los Angeles County hospital admissions for food poisoning . Hamilton estimated savings of about $148,000. In another case study, Hamilton analyzed a series of the Raleigh News and Observer which found that because the state’s criminal justice system was not properly tracking people under supervision, 580 people on probation in North Carolina killed someone between 2000 and 2008. After the state put As reforms were implemented, murders committed by people on probation decreased. Applying the “statistical value of human life” used by the U.S. Department of Transportation, Hamilton concluded that the company saved about $62 million in just the first year after the policy changes. The series only cost around $200,000 to produce.
Ideally, investments in local news would come from the federal government, which has more freedom to think long-term than cash-strapped states and municipalities. The Rebuild Local News coalition, of which I am chairman, supports legislation that would provide a refundable tax credit to news organizations that employ local journalists, as well as a tax break for small businesses that advertise in local news. A New version The bill has just been introduced in the House of Representatives by Republican Claudia Tenney and Democrat Suzan DelBene. Civic-minded philanthropists focused on high-impact giving should also invest in local news, given the likely societal impact. It is impossible to quantify exactly how much money would be generated for the government and consumers by restoring the health of local news. But it is almost as difficult to deny that this investment would be largely profitable. And the economy-democracy part? Well, it’s just gravy.
