EOTO #2

News Desert

 The policy that I chose to research was news deserts. A news desert is a community, either rural or urban, with limited access to credible and comprehensive news and information that feeds democracy at the grassroots level. News deserts have been popping up across the country since the early 2000's. The total number of newspapers in the U.S. went from 8,891 in 2004 to 7,112 in 2018. The numbers have risen significantly since then. The pandemic and the ensuing recession have greatly accelerated the loss of local news that has been occurring over the past two decades. The issue is not that people don't want to try and save these newspapers, it is that there is a serious lack of capitol and funding available to support them. A wide variety of for-profit, nonprofit and publicly funded news organizations have attempted to counter the rise of news deserts but have been unsuccessful. As a result of the pandemic and the changing technology many newspapers have switched to a digital platform. However this still leaves people at a disadvantage for receiving their news. Many communities that lost newspapers were among those who were the most vulnerable, who were struggling economically and who live in very isolating locations. The people who live in these news deserts tend to be poorer, older and less educated Americans. Therefore having an online news platform tends not to be helpful to these people. Because of their location they may not have access to high speed internet and since the demographic of these areas tends to be poorer and older Americans they may not even have a device that allows them to access the internet.

News Deserts

More than 1,300 communities in the U.S. are considered news deserts. Within these news desserts are ghost papers. A ghost paper is a newspaper that has scaled back their coverage so much that they are unable to fully cover their communities. A ghost paper is almost as good as no newspaper. In many of these news deserts there tends to be either one or no newspapers. This is a serious problem because without access to the news people cannot be properly informed or educated on certain events. One of the largest news deserts in the country is Colin County and Williamson County in Texas with a combined population of nearly 1.3 million people. That means that over a million people do not have proper access to news. These news deserts have an effect on many things such as elections, both state and local. These news deserts leave people with either none or a very one sided opinion of the news. Some places only have access to one newspaper and this leaves them without the opinions or views of other papers. This leads peoples views to be very one sided and close minded.

News deserts are still continuing to pop up around the country and not much is being done about it. People tend to overlook this issue, but it is one that needs immediate attention. The American people have a right to be informed and with the rising number of news deserts this right is slowly starting to disappear along with the newspapers.