It was a typical morning at KION, the Central-Coast based news channel. An editorial meeting had just ended. Then the station’s reporters — all 13 of them — were informed that they had been laid off. 

The Sept. 23 decision to close KION left just one independent TV broadcaster, KSBW, to serve a region of 750,000 people. 

KION’s shuttering is not an isolated incident. According to an October report from Northwestern University, more than 2,000 U.S. local newspapers have closed over the past 25 years, and many more have been acquired by national corporations. 

Journalism teacher and yearbook adviser Stephen Baxter co-founded and ran the Santa Cruz Local before teaching at Harker. He explained that one of the benefits of local publications is their ability to narrow the aperture of national politics to local communities, improving civic accountability and engagement. 

“You get to make things more real, rather than just saying ‘this happened in Washington,’” Baxter said. “Pretend the federal government says that we’re no longer going to have the SNAP program. The job of a reporter might be to find the grandmother in San Jose who survived on that program, and now she can’t eat as much. We have to make the tangible effects clear to people.” 

Thus, places without reliable local news sources can suffer from the lack of on-the-ground reporting. For instance, in Bell, Calif., officials misappropriated hundreds of thousands of dollars in city funds in the late 2000s. Bell had no newspapers of its own, and the corruption came to light only when the LA Times ran the story. Baxter emphasized the problems that these so-called “news deserts” face. 

“There are places in California that now no longer have a daily newspaper, or they don’t have a local TV station,” Baxter said. “So, people rely on rumors, social media and informal networks. Some of that stuff is really useful, but not professionally produced, and so it’s not necessarily fact-checked and not necessarily reliable. There are still so many news deserts, and it’s really a shame.”

The library provides students digital access to the New York Times, and in a survey of 76 students and faculty, 81.6% of respondents said they use the site regularly. Although the Bay Area has local newspapers, they are less popular than more mainstream publications: 64.5% of respondents said they do not regularly interact with local sources. 

Yet there isn’t a dearth of local journalism available to students. Harker’s library department pays for subscriptions to databases like Newsbank, which itself contains hundreds of PDFs of print newspapers from the Bay Area. Librarian Amy Pelman emphasized that connecting students to reliable local journalism is integral to the library’s mission. 

“One of the library’s core missions is to connect its constituents with access to information and news,” Pelman said. “Providing that access is always an important subscription-based thing that the library can do for the community. Lots of people stop at the New York Times and don’t look at local journalism as much, but we actually have multiple newspaper databases. You have to be a little more determined to actually read a local paper, but it’s all here.” 

Sophomore Anusha Saha, who enjoys keeping up with school and professional news, emphasized that national online sources are nevertheless valuable because they have a low barrier of consumption. 

“Having online journalism makes news accessible,” she said. “A lot of news stations now have online apps or websites, so you don’t have to have a newspaper in your hands. You don’t have to have a TV in front of you. How many people are getting physical newspapers these days for anything except the Sunday crossword?” 

According to its mission statement, Harker Aquila aims to “forge meaningful relationships with readers through localized coverage.” Winged Post Editor-in-Chief Ashley Mo reflected that Harker Aquila has shifted into more interactive and multimedia stories to fulfill that goal. 

“Harker Aquila has a lot more content now on Instagram, but also on the website itself, there are so many more interactive polls and articles,” Ashley said. “Having those interactive online elements is really important to help engage readers, because a lot of them come from the website.” 

But the digital shift has left many local publications in the dust. Social media has supplemented and supplanted professional journalism as a source of news; 82.9% of survey respondents said they used professional news websites, while 73.6% said they received much of their news from social media. Ashley expressed concern over the reliability of information shared on social media.

“The national trend is that print and local journalism are on the decline, especially among youth because of social media,” Ashley said. “The biggest problem with that is misinformation. Social media can skew news one way or the other, so I think having reliable print journalism is really important, because we put in the effort to not publish anything that has issues or is biased.”

The other effect of this digitization was a loss of dollars from print advertising to large companies, which forced many independent print newspapers to shut down. Still, Digital First Media owns Bay Area Group newspapers, including Mercury News and the Santa Cruz Sentinel. Although online advertising keeps these chain publications afloat, the hedge fund Alden Global Capital, the owner of Digital First Media, doesn’t reinvest the money into more local reporting. 

The growing void in local journalism has led to the rise of independent, nonprofit news organizations to fulfill local needs. While new, these publications are funded by reader donations and grants from large donors like the Silicon Valley Community Foundation, the American Journalism Project and the Pulitzer Center. The Santa Cruz Local is one such nonprofit.

“We did not have a paywall because not everybody can afford it,” Baxter said. “Also, it’s in our mission, and we want to help everyone get on the same page with the issues. There’s still a big thirst for local news. It’s just that the powers that have funded local newspapers in the past have decided not to anymore.” 

Even as journalists retool local coverage to meet the needs of the digital age, Baxter emphasized that much of the onus of finding thoughtful, intentional news still lies on consumers. 

“People are busy, and people are not interested,” he said. “But if you care about news, right now is a great time to do it. We live in a time where we have amazing news, and I feel that such a small percentage of us are even reading or looking at it because people just haven’t heard of the new organizations. So it takes effort, it takes thought. But if you want to learn more about the world, do it.”