60 Minutes’ final segment on Sunday evening featured NewsGuild member Evan Brandt: “For the last 24 years, he’s chronicled this community of 23,000 for the local newspaper, the Mercury, which at one time had dozens of reporters. Now, Brandt is literally the last reporter standing in Pottstown,” correspondent Jon Wertheim said.
The segment exposed the danger financial firms that own nearly a third of the daily papers in the U.S. pose to local news, a subject NewsGuild members are quite familiar with.
“These new owners are often committed not to headlines and deadlines, but to bottom lines,” correspondent Jon Wertheim reported.
Brandt said the worst culprit is the hedge fund Alden Global Capital, which bought the Mercury in 2011, sold the paper’s building and slashed newsroom staff by about 70%. That’s “severe even by the standards of the newspaper sector that has seen an astounding 57% job loss since 2008.”
The NewsGuild has covered the danger posed by financial firms extensively. Julie Reynolds, who runs the SaveLocalNews.org website, has written numerous exposes about the vulture hedge fund Alden Global Capital, the notorious destroyer of newspapers.
The threat can be summarized in the question Wertheim posed in the intro to the piece: “It all prompts the question: as local newsrooms and local news coverage shrivel up, to what extent does democracy shrink with it?”
The answer? Immensely: There’s less scrutiny of public officials and powerful forces. Increased corruption. Higher taxes. Less civic engagement. And that’s why the Guild supports new business models for local news.
Photo at top: Evan Brandt at work in his attic, the replacement newsroom of the Pottstown Mercury.