In Defense of Local Media
So you’re scrolling through this week’s issue of The Kindling, a story piques your interest, you click on the associated link, and you run right smack into a paywall at The Bethel Citizen. Or another local paper. You curse us while thinking “why can’t they just link to free articles? This is so frustrating! Unsubscribe!” Well, perhaps you didn’t unsubscribe because you’re still here – which we appreciate greatly! – so let’s discuss what’s going on.
The Kindling is a conduit for local news and information. The thing is, it's really easy to find free coverage of national and international events because there is significant competition between large, relatively well-endowed international media conglomerates. There is also media that is funded at the federal level through taxpayer dollars, like NPR and PBS. The future of taxpayer funded news sources is uncertain, as Trump invokes the Impoundment Control Act and Republican members of the House of Representatives appear to be intimidated into voting - or abstaining from votes altogether - in ways that they say are directly at odds with the wellbeing of their constituents.
At the local level, there are often only 1-2 sources covering a given event. It costs local media companies money to hire the people who show up and report as a job. The paywalls you run into are what make these things possible. According to a 2024 Pew Research Center report on the relationship that Americans have with local news, only 15% of Americans said that they paid for local news between 2023 and 2024, while 63% said that they believed that their “local news outlets were doing very or somewhat well financially.” Perhaps most notably, the data showed that folks across the ideological spectrum say that their local news outlets are doing a good job, in contrast with news at the national level where polarization is rampant.
All of the paywalled articles in the The Kindling newsletter are covered by subscribing to the two sources below:
1. The Lewiston Sun Journal
Digital subscription is $79 for one year or $2.50/week here
This gives digital access to The Lewiston Sun Journal, The Portland Press Herald, The Bethel Citizen, CentralMaine.com, and lots of the other small, local papers like The Rumford Falls Times and The Rangeley Highlander.
Note: Subscribing directly to The Portland Press Herald also includes these things HOWEVER I chose to subscribe under the umbrella of the Sun Journal to show that I have a specific interest in the reporting the Sun Journal does. The Lewiston Sun Journal is our regional paper and we would lose a lot if they stopped existing. Does that make any sense?
2. The Bangor Daily News
Digital subscription is $89 for one year or $19.99/month here
Their coverage of trans issues following the attacks from Trump has been exceptional and they have really thoughtful op-eds.
At this point you might be thinking “Okay but why don’t you just link to MainePublic? It’s free!”
You’re so right! I link to MainePublic in every newsletter and those articles are “free” because of federal funding through tax payer dollars and private donations that cover operating expenses. The downside of MainePublic is that, like any media source, they are not capable of covering every noteworthy story that is happening in Maine. For example, what happens in Bethel, and is reported in The Bethel Citizen, rarely, if ever, overlaps with MainePublic coverage. Furthermore, it's important to get news from a variety of sources so I work hard to make sure that no issue of The Kindling leans too heavily on any one media source.
The question of paywalls is existential for journalism, and has been for over 15 years. This (free) opinion piece from NPR, circa 2009, aged well and explains the issue quite clearly. To summarize, as news outlets increased their digital content creation, folks began to expect it to be available free of charge. By the time they realized that ad revenue alone was not a sustainable business model, consumer habits had already formed. When news outlets walked back their free content and started charging for digital subscriptions, they lost readers permanently to the sewers of the internet where the ideas and misinformation from free content runs rampant and unchecked.
Author, lawyer, advocate, and multi-hyphenate intellectual Heather McGhee said it best during a conversation on The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart in April:
“[In the last three decades] We’ve lost almost half of the newspapers in this country, Sinclair is broadcasting to 70% of American households and that’s a company that is ideologically right wing. Real information and facts are behind a paywall, so you have this education gap where the stuff that’s free is just flooding the zone - frankly, crap - on social media, and that’s FREE [and algorithmically driven] ]and then you have to pay eighty bucks a year for the Washington Post or the New York Times. So we’ve just got an information ecosystem that is really distorted and that’s dangerous.”
I don’t want to pretend that choosing to subscribe to a news source is a simple financial decision, because it’s not. But I do want to share that in our family, we have transitioned to thinking about our various subscriptions as donations to causes that we care about. In the case of local media, we subscribe because we know how important the free press is as an institution in a lower case “d” democracy. Once a free press disappears, it will be gone. And in an authoritarian vacuum, we will lose access to the information around which we can organize.
I know that the subscriptions above can be cost prohibitive for so many people. It's a can of worms FOR SURE so I’d love to hear what you think!
Did you understand the role of local news before reading this post?
Is the cost for local news too expensive to fit in your budget?
Do you have extra money in your budget that you’d like to use to gift someone a subscription to one of these local news sources?
Do you value the work that local news does in the community?
Thoughts? Feelings? Etc?
Please let me know by replying directly to any email issue of The Kindling or dropping a note here.