Stay Tuned—Your Local News Isn’t Next…or Is It?

In Chapter 5 of The Elements of Journalism, “Independence from Faction,” Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel make some predictions about the future of localism.

News consumption will move away from local topics.  National electronic news organizations will arise.  Internet news will further polarize society.  Small interest groups will spring up.  And it’s already happening!

Old Horry County Courthouse.  Conway, South Carolina.  1908.  Photographed 
by Stephen Milligan (April 3, 2011). 

Just when you thought localism might be an antidote to all the ill feelings people seem to have toward the national media…

According to the authors’ research, news consumers have more confidence in their local media than in the national media, but local media may go the way of the film camera if the these startling predictions come to pass.                         

At least the predictions were somewhat startling to me.  Through my rose-colored glasses, I thought people would always want to see their children’s names and photos in the paper or clip and save a beloved relative’s obituary.

What a quaint notion!  Why wait for a photo of a child to be published?  Children are already famous—what parent doesn’t whip out a ubiquitous cell phone, snap a photo of the child doing something allegedly cute, and upload it to a social media site, if not multiple social media sites?  Every moment of one’s existence is captured and published these days.

And why wait for that obituary to be published when it can be found instantly online?  You can even sign the online guestbook—no need to attend a visitation to sign a real guestbook, or rather print in it since no one is taught cursive writing anymore.

In the dark ages of my childhood, my hometown, little old Conway, South Carolina, had two newspapers, The Field and Herald (named for the town’s agricultural heritage) and The Horry Independent (pronounced OR-ee and named for the county, Horry, which developed a reputation for independence since it’s cut off from the rest of South Carolina by rivers; the county was named for local Revolutionary War hero Peter Horry).

Now, keep in mind both of these newspapers were weekly papers, so we had to wait an entire week to see the school honor roll or the latest tobacco crop yield report.

The Field and Herald has been long gone, but The Horry Independent is still thriving; in fact, it’s part of a larger publishing group, Waccamaw Publishers (named for the river that runs through the heart of the county; ultimately named for the local Native American tribe), that prints weekly newspapers for several of the smaller, rural towns and communities in the county (The Sun News is the county’s daily paper out of Myrtle Beach).

Maybe this publishing group is an anomaly, an anachronism, in today’s media world.

Or maybe localism is still alive…in your local newspaper, your local magazine, your local radio news show, your local television news program.

In another word—dare I say it?  Locally.