Tech giants Facebook and Google try to boost local news efforts even as local dailies disappear in a vast region where many of their employees live.
In this July 5, 2019, photo, an East Bay Times newspaper sits in the bottom row of empty news racks in the Financial District in San Francisco. Ownership changes and consolidations have left the region known as the East Bay with just a single daily newspaper. The East Bay Times, based in Walnut Creek, attempts to cover a region nearly the size of Delaware with a fraction of the staff of the former dailies.
“It is really shocking that the place with the demographics and the business and the universities and the progressiveness, that this is a news desert ... ” said U.S. Rep. Mark DeSaulnier, a Democrat who represents a significant part of the East Bay. But some wonder if that philanthropy is too little, too late. In Fremont, Dan Smith used to have two copies of The Argus delivered daily, one to his family’s funeral home for the obituaries placed on behalf of clients and the other to his home, where he turned to sports and comics.
“And everything that happened in the city of Richmond showed up in the newspaper the next day or two, a detailed, blow-by-blow account of every city council meeting, every planning commission meeting,” Butt said. A few miles down Interstate 80, Martin Reynolds gazes up at the 22-story Tribune Tower that defines the Oakland skyline and was home to the Oakland Tribune for decades before the paper was sold and its headquarters moved. The Tribune’s nameplate with fancy gold script remains over the building’s main entrance.
But ownership consolidated and newsrooms shrank. The Digital First-owned Bay Area News Group eventually announced it would collapse the East Bay’s daily papers into one. Bay Area News Group Executive Editor Frank Pine said he understands the loyalty people have for the newspapers they grew up with, but said there is no way to turn back time.
Apple’s iPhone conditioned people to abandon print and seek information with a swipe of a screen. Since the iPhone debuted in 2007, employment in U.S. newspaper newsrooms has dropped by nearly half, according to the Pew Research Center. Representatives of Google and Facebook reject the suggestion that their companies are responsible for the decline of newspapers, saying business models, readership and the way society operates changed dramatically.
Campbell Brown, a former television journalist and current head of global news partnerships at Facebook, said publishers she talks to want to be less dependent on platforms such as Facebook. Josh Mabry, Facebook’s lead for local news partnerships, said publications need to remind people why local journalism matters — and why they should pay for it.
Founded in 2009 by three journalists, Berkeleyside is a beacon in a bleak local news landscape. The site has a staff of seven and an annual operating budget of $800,000, with just under half of its revenue from advertising, Taylor said.
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