From PJMedia.com
It used to be that local newspapers were essential for people in small towns to know what was going on. Community newspapers were where townsfolks went for local news coverage, often with a quirky, gossipy twist.
Growing up, I’ll always remember visiting my dad’s family in the North Georgia mountains in a tiny town nestled on the border with Tennessee. Almost every time we were up there, the lead story in the little newspaper was a pot bust in the woods near some local resident’s house, while a column called “Eva Dave’s Coffee Break” dished on town gossip.
But over time, local papers began to die. Part of that stemmed from a lack of funding and advertising revenue drying up, but some of it was due to insular publishers and editors. Several years ago, I wrote religion features for my local newspaper, for which the paper woefully underpaid me. I had to give more coverage to the local Episcopal church than to other, more active congregations because that’s where the publisher attended, and what he wanted to cover was what made the pages of the paper.
Recently, that same local paper gave its entire front page coverage to its winning an award as the third-best small-town paper in Georgia. The judges must either have been on drugs, or the competition was pathetic.
In a way, it’s a sign of the competition of capitalism that local newspapers are becoming a thing of the past; if these outlets can’t create a product that people want to pay for and read, then they don’t deserve to survive. Still, it’s sad to see local papers disappear.
We often see corporate conglomerates swooping in to save local papers, but in Middle and South Georgia, one group is buying up a bunch of local news outlets. Who is this group, and why is it alarming that the group is scooping up all these newspapers?
“The non-profit National Trust for Local News is establishing the Georgia Trust for Local News, a new community newspaper company that will serve Middle and South Georgia,” trumpets a press release.
“The Georgia Trust will begin operations in January with a portfolio of 18 newspapers that serve 900,000 Georgians in communities across Middle and South Georgia and an initiative to stand up a new community news source in Macon,” the announcement continues. “Georgia Trust titles will include iconic publications with deep roots in the communities they serve, like The Albany Herald, Dublin’s Courier Herald, The Sparta Ishmaelite, and The Talbotton New Era.”
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It’s an ambitious project. The newspapers the Georgia Trust for Local News is buying include:
The Courier Herald (Dublin, Laurens County); The Albany Herald (Albany, Dougherty County); The Johnson Journal (Wrightsville, Johnson County); The Soperton News (Soperton, Treutlen County); The Montgomery Monitor (Mt. Vernon, Montgomery County); The Wheeler County Eagle (Alamo, Wheeler County); The Wilkinson County Post (Irwinton, Wilkinson County); The Twiggs Times New Era (Jeffersonville, Twiggs County); The Cochran Journal (Cochran, Bleckley County); The Sandersville Progress (Sandersville, Washington County); The Houston Home Journal (Perry, Houston County); The Leader Tribune (Fort Valley, Peach County); The Sparta Ishmaelite (Sparta, Hancock County); The News Observer (Vienna, Dooly County); The Citizen Georgian (Montezuma, Macon County); The Star-Mercury Vindicator (Manchester, Meriwether County); The Harris County Journal (Hamilton, Harris County); and The Talbotton New Era (Talbotton, Talbot County)
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I created a map to show the reach that this newspaper buy will have across the middle and southern parts of the Peach State:
So what’s the big deal with the Georgia Trust for Local News? After all, in its press release, it crows about fostering “non-partisan local news.” All you have to do is look at the names behind the trust, and you’ll see why it’s a problem.
For starters, the trust is placing DuBose Porter in charge of all these newspapers. Porter has a proven track record as a newspaper publisher, so on the surface, the choice sounds like a no-brainer. But Porter has also moved in the highest circles among Georgia’s Democrats for decades; he served in the Georgia House of Representatives for nearly 30 years, unsuccessfully ran for governor in 2010, and led the party apparatus for several years.
It’s one thing to put a Democrat in charge of these local papers, but the organizations behind the trust are even more alarming. The funding for the trust is coming from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, the Robert W. Woodruff Foundation, and the Marguerite Casey Foundation. It’s easy to think of anything with the word “foundation” in it as left-wing by default, but these organizations have shored up their far-left bona fides.
Influence Watch labels the Knight Foundation as “a left-leaning private foundation” that “has funded non-profit news sites, backed paying the salaries of individual reporters at newspapers, and supported many research projects about how newspapers can remain viable enterprises.”
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The Woodruff Foundation claims that it “seeks to improve the quality of life in Georgia by investing in health, education, economic opportunity, and community vitality.” While it focuses primarily on metro Atlanta, the foundation gets involved in some initiatives in other parts of the state, and this trust is one of those non-metropolitan grants.
If the Marguerite Casey Foundation sounds familiar to you as a PJ Media reader, it’s because I’ve exposed its far-left activities before — particularly its anti-police advocacy and its ties to the domestic terrorists who have plagued Atlanta in recent years. And let’s not forget who sits on this foundation’s board: Stacey Abrams.
What will the Georgia Trust for Local News do with these newspapers? There may be some temptation to give the benefit of the doubt that these papers will remain unbiased, but the trust is aligned with the National Trust for Local News, which is of the left. In the press release, the word “sustainable” comes up often, and there’s other rhetoric that points to what the trust could do with these papers.
“The dismantling of local news disparately impacts marginalized communities,” said Marguerite Casey Foundation’s Dr. Carmen Rojas in the press release. “We look forward to supporting the Georgia Trust as it uplifts the issues impacting Georgians and builds stronger community newspapers.” Another foundation representative talks about how “mistrust thrives” when local papers go under.
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There are plenty of reasons for alarm about the takeover of these local newspapers. We can only put our faith in the hard-working people in these parts of Georgia to see through the bias that is sure to come when the Georgia Trust for Local News gets its hands on these small-town news outlets.
All articles possibly rephrased by InfoArmed.com