Ghosting the News by Margaret Sullivan

Author:Margaret Sullivan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Columbia Global Reports
Published: 2020-07-16T16:00:00+00:00

Global Problems

The Roman Catholic Church is the largest international organization in the world, overseeing some 1.3 billion worshippers on every continent in practically every country on the globe. So when a group of foreign correspondents and international journalists gathered at the Vatican in September 2019 to meet Pope Francis, they might have been a little surprised to hear the worldwide head of half a million clergy confess that what was on his mind was local news. “It is the most genuine and the most authentic in the mass-media world,” he said, and citizens of all countries need “to intercept the same reality, to be able to transmit to a wider horizon all those values that belong to the life and history of the people, and at the same time give voice to poverty, challenges, sometimes urgent issues in the territories, along the streets, meeting families, in places of work.” Its immersion in “the daily, local reality, made up of people, events, projects, problems and hopes” is what makes it so important, and he implored reporters to do a better job covering news on the local level.

Unsurprisingly, the newspaper business is also declining all over Europe. Anna Masera, the ombudswoman for LaStampa, a daily newspaper published in Turin, told me that, in Italy, print circulation has plummeted from 2.4 million daily in 2008 to less than a million in 2019. But, other than Pope Francis, “hardly anybody in Italy talks about this local news crisis,” Masera told me. “They all struggle on their own.” Small digital sites are cropping up, but “these newsrooms are tiny, and the staff and collaborators underpaid, and they mostly rewrite press releases.” The result is a less informed public, at a time when Italian politics is especially tumultuous. Not only did its government collapse in 2019, but the cash-strapped country was also the European country hit hardest by the coronavirus pandemic.

In conversation after conversation with journalists worldwide, I heard a similar story. Flavia Lima, the ombudswoman for Folha, one of the largest and most influential news organizations in Brazil, said that smaller papers and other news outlets are struggling with the same problems that American papers are having. A study found that 64 million Brazilians, almost a third of the population, live in news deserts or near deserts. All over the country, eighty-one news organizations have closed since 2011.

Angela Pimenta, director of the Institute for the Development of Journalism, or Projor—“an NGO that could be compared to a Poynter Institute wannabe,” as she put it—has been involved in mapping news outlets, both print and broadcast, within 5,570 municipalities, for the resulting research project, Atlas da Notícia. In a country of 208 million inhabitants, the ten leading newspapers garner only 1.44 million subscribers, including print and digital, she said.

She named three overarching factors: the economic crisis in Brazil, digital disruption, and demographics. Adding to this is a new worry: President Jair Bolsonaro’s administration no longer requires government agencies to publish public notices in Brazil’s print newspapers, thus cutting into a steady revenue source.

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