Consolidations come at a cost

Last week, in a Q&A about covering losses in the journalism industry, Poynter reporter Kristen Hare observed that the newsroom mergers and consolidations that have resulted from the coronavirus pandemic often use terminology to obscure the full breadth of the loss. “If you lose a newsroom, and everybody in that newsroom has lost their jobs, and that community no longer has a newsroom, it’s closed,” Hare said. “It’s not a ‘merger.’ It’s a loss for the community.” 

In an ever-growing database tracking newsroom cutbacks, the Tow Center has recorded consolidations or mergers of more than thirty local journalism outlets—most owned by CNHI, a company based in Montgomery, Alabama. In Florida, CNHI-owned newspapers The Suwannee Democrat, The Jasper News and The Mayo Free Press announced the end of their print editions and digital content, noting that localized coverage would appear “periodically” in the Valdosta Daily Times. Local papers in Iowa, Alabama, Indiana, Oklahoma, and Texas—all owned by CNHI—made similar announcements. And in Kentucky, where The Morehead News, The Grayson Journal Times, and The Greenup County News-Times merged with The Daily Independent—spreading local reporting across more than a hundred miles from one coverage area to another—Al Cross from the Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues reported on The Rural Blog that “many dailies have swallowed up sister weeklies, but it’s unusual if not unprecedented for such a consolidation over such a distance.”

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