WHAT’S A NEWSPAPER FOR?

I get told, sometimes, that I make people’s jobs harder.

Usually it’s after a story someone wishes hadn’t been written. Sometimes someone declines an interview because they didn’t like how we covered a previous issue. Every so often, someone tells me The Sheet is the reason nobody wants to run for office anymore.

I’ve been thinking about those conversations lately because they raise a question I’ve found myself asking:

What is a local newspaper for?

Last week marked two years since I moved to Mammoth. That’s long enough for even major events to start blending together. Another Town Council meeting. Another planning commission. Another budget workshop. Another debate over housing or wildfire preparedness. After awhile, it becomes easy to wonder whether you’re just writing increasingly cheeky versions of the meeting minutes.

Then I go back to The Sheet archives.

Usually it’s because I’m researching a story, but sometimes I’m just curious.

It’s funny – every story that feels brand new usually isn’t.

When housing debates flare up, I find myself reading stories written a decade before I arrived. With all the development in North Village, I look back at the old proposals that faded during the housing crisis. The same mining threats come back every few years. Bears are still getting into garbage, and still getting shot for it. Yosemite is still understaffed. Groundwater is still in trouble.

More often than not, the answer to “How did we get here?” is sitting in a PDF from 2008.

That’s what made me realize that the stories I’m least excited to write are often the ones I’ll rely on most a few years later. Those become the missing pieces that explain why a project changed, why a road was rerouted or why a political board says its hands are tied.

And as I’m here longer, I find myself reading my own archives more and more.

Thinking of this makes me feel differently about a report that Muck Rack, a media monitoring platform, and Rebuild Local News, a media advocacy nonprofit, released this year estimating that local reporting capacity has declined by 81% since 2002.

The study browsed 52,000 outlets in the United States to identify what are called Local Journalist Equivalents, akin to workplace full-time equivalents (FTEs), averaging out the production of news per county.

In many places, there simply isn’t anyone sitting through those meetings anymore. The report calls many of these places “news deserts,” communities with little or no original local reporting.

On paper, Mono and Inyo look better than many parts of the country. Looking around the room at most public meetings, that doesn’t feel true. More often than not, it’s me, Klusmire or Lunch taking notes. Until recently, Ulla was there too. Louis Medina keeps the Register and the Times going.

Count us all up and you’re talking maybe half a dozen real people regularly covering two counties.

So what’s the point?

Well, the report also found that communities with more local journalists also tend to vote more, volunteer more and participate more in civic life. It even found a relationship between stronger local journalism and lower levels of loneliness. Correlation isn’t causation, but the pattern makes intuitive sense. When people know what’s happening around them, they’re more likely to feel connected to the place they live.

If nobody covers a meeting, the immediate consequence is obvious: fewer people know what happened.

The long-term consequence is easier to miss. Five years later, there’s no archive to explain why the vote happened, what alternatives were considered or who made what promises. The community loses part of its memory.

I often hear, when people talk about the decline of newsrooms, that they blame social media or say journalism is one of the careers most vulnerable to AI and therefore easy to replace.

I disagree. The problem isn’t that we lack information. We have more information than ever before. Our phones can capture a wildfire as it starts. Anyone can livestream a meeting. AI can summarize a 200-page report in seconds.

Those are incredible tools. Actually, the more information, the better.

But tools don’t build institutional memory. They don’t know which fight over a zoning change started 15 years ago. They don’t know which promises were made before a project was approved. They don’t know that the person speaking at tonight’s meeting has been raising the same concern since 2012.

They can find the documents, and they should. But they weren’t in the room when the decision was made. That requires people who are paying attention over time.

What has changed is not our access to information. It’s our connection to the places we live and our belief that our participation matters.

Maybe a local newspaper does make some jobs harder. Maybe it should. Asking questions is part of the job. But a newspaper’s purpose isn’t to make government easier or harder. It’s to make a community more informed, more connected and more capable of deciding what happens next.