Quote of the Week (1)

 It has been sad to see our local newspapers disappear. The loss is not ours alone. As Tom Zoellner points out in the quotation below this map, those who follow will know much less about us. 

News Deserts

“What were we doing with all those shorter items we slammed into the paper, however imperfectly, was logging a record of events into the permanent memory of the nation. Crack open any civic history at the bibliography, and odds are excellent that most of the details are sourced from the local paper. If we didn’t publish it, it might as well have never happened, so far as future consciousness is concerned. Now that a daily record of happenings is vanishing from America’s towns and cities, so with it will come amnesia. The stack of newspapers that mattered most, and which we spent no time thinking about, was delivered to the library archives. Future urban historians will come across an abundance of detail about virtually every town and city in the U.S. up until the first decade of the twenty-first century, when the record starts to trail off and the permanent record of what happened across America begins to disappear like brain cells under attack. How far this new Dark Age will last is, as yet, unknown. The COVID-19 lockdown and recession tore through an already feeble business, killing dozens of newspapers that had served their towns for more than a hundred years and leaving the civic lights dimmed, perhaps permanently.”

From: “Late City Final,” in The National Road, by Tom Zoellner, pp.133-134.

The answer here in London, for the London Free Press, is the Postmedia Network, and much of the content in it looks very much like that found in other Postmedia papers across the country.

The Bonus:

The maps above relate to the U.S., but the situation is similar in Canada. A good source for data is the Local News Research Project at Ryerson University's School of Journalism.