Before traveling across the United States as part of the WPI fellowship, I used to think the U.S. media industry was doing OK in terms of survival. I come from Peru, a South American nation where most local newspapers and radio stations have struggled terribly to remain active or have disappeared for good.
As a journalist in a troubled country like mine, you always look for references for improving your work and this kind of role model – especially while being a student– was always the U.S. journalism industry. Even having done other fellowships, my perspective was that Americans knew how to navigate problems and keep their journalism running well. But the reality is, American news outlets are also immersed in this global crisis for sustainability.
According to the State of Local News report published by Northwestern-Medill Local News Initiative, 3,000 American newspapers have shut down since 2005. This translates to 1,563 counties with only one news outlet and 208 counties with none. The number of digital-only news sites is around 630 and most of them are in metro areas. This “news desert” portrays a whole subsequent crisis, which is basically that no media outlet is covering what’s going on daily in small towns.
Last week, we had a meeting with the MacArthur Foundation, a philanthropic private organization that, among other things, gives grants to people based on their professional contributions to society. During this talk, the state of the U.S. media came up as an important concern. Naturally, it is worrying not having facts covered by local journalists in some parts of America. This issue also harms diversity, which is one of the bases of media and information freedom.
Three years ago, the MacArthur Foundation awarded Peruvian journalist Daniel Alarcón with their Genius Grant, a very prestigious recognition for his work done for over a decade with Radio Ambulante. Since 2012, Alarcón and his partner Carolina Guerrero have led Radio Ambulante, an innovative and first-of-its-kind Spanish-language news podcast that chronicles Latin American stories. Migration, cuisine, music, political turmoil, resilience and a lot of other subjects that connect Latinos globally are better understood through this project.
It’s no news that journalism is trying to survive everywhere. But in order to survive, people who run news projects and newsrooms need to rethink their business models.
Back to the United States, a country with over 300 million people, there are only 1,033 daily newspapers and 4,558 non-daily newspapers. Going digital is nevertheless the future and the present, but what could come next? Alarcón and Guerrero were sitting in a coffee shop in San Francisco when they both came up with the idea of creating a Latino version of the long-running, highly regarded U.S. podcast “This American Life” produced by Chicago Public Media and distributed by PRX. The idea eventually became a branded reality. And the branded reality eventually became a profitable podcast distributed by National Public Radio (NPR). As his experience demonstrates, for anything to become something –especially in journalism – you need a good idea and a business strategy.
