Donut Coverage: What Ails Local Journalism

Before Congress “clawed back” funding for NPR and PBS last summer, I happened to hear an interview with the station manager of a NPR affiliate in Petersburg Alaska, radio station KFSK.

Petersburg, a town of 3,000 is on the north end of Mitkof Island, off the coastal shoreline of southern Alaska. What intrigued me was the role that KFSK plays in its community. It is the primary informational hub for the town.

Station manager Tom Abbott said that, “Yes, KFSK has lost some local support because of NPR’s perceived leftward tilt,” but that he hoped the station would find ways to survive an anticipated loss of $176,000 in federal funding.

Following the funding cuts by Congress, local Seattle affiliates like KUOW radio and KCTS television received a ton of new donations and pledges. Record amounts came their way in the days following the “claw backs,” partly to fill the gap and partly as political protest.

I chose to send my increased giving to KFSK. Why? They needed it more. And when I look at their website and listened to the station, I found Abbott’s description accurate. It was all about local focus. KFSK profiled a new second grade teacher in the town’s elementary school, reported on a high school swim meet, explored the vocalizations of humpback whales, and carried a story about Alaska’s “Fat Bear Week.” I particularly liked their “Homegrown Conversations for Curious Minds” feature. There were Voter Guides for upcoming borough elections and reports on school funding.

In other words, a lot of local news and features. To get to the NPR national coverage on the KFSK website you have to scroll pretty deep.

One of the realities we are facing across the country is a deep decline in local news coverage. Countless newspapers have either gone out of business altogether or ceased their print editions. Reporters covering city hall are far fewer than they used to be. KFSK seems to be a counter to the trend. I wonder how our perceptions about our lives and country might be different if we all got more local news and less national news?

I have heard the Seattle news environment described as a donut. In this highly-educated and affluent city, many people know a lot about national and international topics and are well-connected in those sectors. So much for the outer ring of a donut. Locally? It’s like a hole at the center of the donut: not much there. Low knowledge. Low participation. You also see this in Seattle-based philanthropic foundations which prioritize, for example, global health while eschewing local engagement.

Recently Seattle’s PBS affiliate, KCTS, dropped all local news coverage, firing 16 journalists and leaving three vacancies unfilled. KCTS CEO Rob Dunlop blamed Trump and the congressional funding cuts for the move. But it appears that the station, with huge executive salaries and significant cash reserves, may be using this as a convenient and, in Seattle, politically popular scapegoat for its action.

In a scathing article about the KCTS cuts at Post Alley, journalist Paul Query said there is no other word for the decision by the television station’s “suits” than “cowardice.” Here’s an excerpt from Query’s article, which is titled, “The Cowardly Killing of a Seattle Newsroom.”

“So the aforementioned suits are prioritizing, just to take a sample from today’s TV lineup, Sesame Street, Antiques Roadshow, PBS Newshour, and Amanpour and Company, over actual human beings who covered the state, county, and city their viewers live in.”

In contrast to KFSK, with its strong local focus, KCTS chose to eliminate almost all local news coverage in favor of popular national shows and personality-based short features. This is a bigger trend in both print and broadcast journalism, one that, as Query suggests bodes ill for democracy.

It used to be the political truism that “all politics are local.” But that has been almost completely inverted in recent decades. Now it seems, “all politics are national.” We are deluged with national “news” that often leaves us depressed and feeling powerless. We hear more about Congress than City Hall, more about federal budget bills than the alarming budgets of our own school system.

Moreover, many local stories are needlessly located within the national political narrative, as KCTS did in blaming their cuts on Congress, Republicans, and Trump. It’s an easy, but arguably deceptive, way to tell the story, especially in the blue bubble of Seattle. The entire annual cost of the now defunct newsroom was $1.7 million against an overall $31 million dollar budget, where $2.2 million of the KCTS budget pays salaries in the station’s executive suite.

Local news reporting, and local political focus, are important for a least two reasons. Building problem-solving alliances across party and culture war lines is possible on a local basis when that is seldom true these days at the national level. Conversely, when local politics is subject to the polarized national frame, gridlock and name-calling take over. This was among the key findings of the award-winning book by James and Deborah Fallows, Our Towns, on the cities and towns that are thriving in the U.S.

There’s a lot of talk these days about crossing our cultural and political divides. My hunch is that working together to solve local problems is one of the best ways to build such relationships and overcome our lack of interaction with people on “the other side.”

A second reason for rebalancing toward the local links to our national political travail is the consensus among scholars who study totalitarianism that a crucial barrier to totalitarian takeover is a robust civil society where people interact with people from different walks of life. According to De Tocqueville two centuries ago, such was the distinctive quality of American democracy, noting all the local associational life.

But as scholars like Robert Putnam have documented, that has eroded. This leaves people more on their own as individuals while lacking a rich arena of public life that stands between individuals and families, on one side, and the large corporate and governmental blocks on the other. This erosion of public and civic life makes us more vulnerable to authoritarians like Trump. Connecting and working locally is a way we keep the flame of democracy burning.

What’s to be done? How about more (many more) lower frequency public stations that prioritize local coverage like KFSK does? When voting for people to serve in the U.S. Congress look for those interested in building local community and local solutions in their district over those who focus solely on the national news stage. And of course, people like you and me need to be involved in local religious congregations and civic service groups.

We may now be realizing that stepping away from such local communities has a much larger cost and consequence.