'Ghosting The News' Author Says Local Journalism 'Freefall' Is Accelerating

So last summer, there was a surprise announcement that The Vindicator in Youngstown, Ohio, which is a substantial city, was going to close its doors the next month. The announcement was in July. They would - their last day of publication would be in August. And it was a shocker to the community. The paper had been around for over 150 years, mostly family-owned during that time and still family-owned. And people just couldn't believe it.

So I actually went off to Youngstown and spent quite a bit of time chatting with people and trying to - spending time in the newsroom there and trying to understand what had happened and what the cost of it would be. It's a very disturbing story because it would leave a pretty decent-sized city without its own newspaper anymore and one that had been a real part of the community. Everybody called it The Vindy. Everybody had, you know, had a story about delivering it. Or your mom's obit had been in it. Or they covered my sports event - whatever it was. This was going to go away.

I attended a community meeting, and people were in tears about it. But a - one of the editors who I spoke with later said, well, that was very poignant, but I wonder if we had had a show of hands about who among the crying audience had actually been seven-day-a-week subscribers - I wonder what that would have been. And his theory was that not very many. Circulation had gone way, way down.

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