KVCR executive director Connie Leyva has said, ”We’re not laying anyone off.” I sure hope that remains the case. But Leyva acknowledges that the loss of federal funding will make it difficult for KVCR to produce local programming like Sofia Figueroa’s Emmy-winning documentary, “The Warehouse Empire.”

Last month I had the opportunity to speak at KVCR’s September 4 fundraiser, “The Fight For Public Media.” In that talk I argued that public media like KVCR are vital for civic and community life, but commercial and political pressures threaten KVCR, Inland Empire journalism, and American democracy, itself.

With KVCR winding down its Oct. 13-16 fall pledge drive, I wanted to share my September 4 remarks (below). Please give them a read if you’re interested. But even if you don’t, please consider setting up a sustaining donation to KVCR Public Media or your local public media outlet today. When you do, please also keep in mind that nearly 40% of your Inland Empire neighbors don’t earn enough to meet their basic needs.

-T.C.

As a public sector educator, it’s an honor and privilege to speak here tonight about another pillar of democratic life -- public media. I’d like to talk broadly about the crisis in journalism in the Inland Empire and then about KVCR’s specific role in that ecosystem.

Local journalism -- the lifeblood of American democracy and civic life -- faces an existential crisis, and nowhere is that crisis more punctuated than in California’s Inland Empire.

In the IE, local journalism is under assault on three fronts. First, as audiences and advertising dollars have migrated to the web and social media, the advertising sales that once supported local news have evaporated. Over the past 20 years, a third of all U.S. newspapers have closed and two-thirds of journalist jobs have been eliminated. This has created vast news deserts -- areas that don’t have the sort of credible, comprehensive news coverage necessary for healthy communities and democracy at the grassroots level.

But as Dr. Penny Abernathy explains, the crisis in local journalism hasn’t unfolded evenly. Economically struggling and historically marginalized communities -- like those so common in the IE -- have been hit hardest by the crisis in local journalism.

Indeed, a recent Muck Rack and Rebuild Local News study found that among U.S. counties with 2+ million residents, Riverside and San Bernardino counties have the fewest journalists per capita in the country. And extensive research shows that where local news disappears, corruption and polarization rise, voter participation falls, people feel less connected to one another, and communities find themselves unprepared for crises. Some research even suggests that communities without local news face higher levels of pollution -- something worth considering in the region with the worst air quality in the country.

The second and related threat facing Inland Empire journalism is predatory media owners. The four Inland Empire daily newspapers -- the San Bernardino Sun, Riverside’s Press-Enterprise, Inland Valley Daily Bulletin, and Redlands Daily Facts are all owned (via the Southern California News Group) by the “vulture” hedge fund, Alden Global Capital.

The third largest newspaper owner in the country, Alden is notorious for buying up papers, slashing staffs, and squeezing the remaining profits from the industry. But in the Inland Empire, Alden has adopted a cost-cutting approach I haven’t seen anywhere in the country.

Whereas the Press-Enterprise alone once employed 200-plus news staffers, today Alden’s four Inland Empire dailies employ just a handful of reporters. So how do they publish four daily papers? They don’t.

Here, for example, are [the September 4th] front pages of the San Bernardino Sun and Riverside’s Press-Enterprise. As you’ll see they’re identical.

In fact, every day, Alden’s four Inland Empire papers publish the exact same content from cover to cover: the same stories, photos, advertisements, and obituaries. They just change the masthead. As a result, some issues of the San Bernardino Sun don’t include any coverage of San Bernardino or surrounding communities. This is one reason I call the Inland Empire a “news mirage.”

What fills the void when local news outlets are gutted? In the Inland Empire we have no dedicated local television newscasts, which is shocking for the country’s 12th largest metro area and 5th largest Latino region. Instead, LA stations pipe in our “local” newscasts, which portray the region as a crime scene. Meanwhile, on social media, newsy influencers spread sensationalism and misinformation and “pink slime” websites abound with propaganda and AI-generated fluff.

There are bright spots in the Inland Empire news ecosystem, though. Two non-profit sites – Anthony Victoria’s Frontline Observer and Alicia Ramirez’s Riverside Record – provide outstanding environmental justice and public meeting coverage, respectively. Other for-profit sites like Inland Empire Community News, Community Forward Redlands, and Riverside’s Raincross Gazette also provide quality local coverage and give voice to community members. Black Voice News, Inland Valley News, and other members of the Black Press are adapting new digital models to serve the region’s African American community. And the Inland Empire Community Foundation’s Journalism Innovation Hub and Fund is fostering collaboration and revenue sustainability among all these outlets.

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Of course we’re here tonight because one entity -- KVCR -- plays a special and vital role in Inland Empire journalism and media.

Like many folks here, I tune in every day to KVCR for fair and accurate coverage of the most pressing issues facing our communities -- from warehouse projects to book bans and from ICE raids to wildfires -- I always know I can count on Rick Dulock, Anthony Victoria, Madison Aument, and the rest of the KVCR news team for the news I need to navigate daily life and make informed choices for me and my family. In working with the Inland Empire Journalism Hub, I’ve also seen the way KVCR collaborates with and amplifies the best coverage of other independent local outlets, like Inland Empire Community News, Black Voice News, the Frontline Observer, Community Forward Redlands, and the Riverside Record.

But KVCR is so much more than news. It also produces and provides:

• the bilingual children’s education show, Learn With Me, and other high-quality PBS Kids programs.

• Emmy award-winning documentaries like Sofia Figueroa’s The Warehouse Empire.

• Outstanding public affairs programs like IE Latino Voices, Black Perspectives IE, Education Insight, and the Emmy award-winning Inland Edition.

• the nation’s first and only broadcast network exclusively devoted to Native American and World Indigenous content – First Nations Experience.

• cultural programming like KVC-Arts.

And, of course, all of this is provided free and without commercials.

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This brings me to the final threat facing local journalism -- the Trump administration’s all-out attacks on press freedom and public media.

James Madison, the chief architect of the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights famously said, “A popular Government, without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a Prologue to a Farce or a Tragedy; or, perhaps both. Knowledge will forever govern ignorance: And a people who mean to be their own Governors, must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives.”

We are now living through the democratic farce and authoritarian tragedy that Madison feared.

Like other would-be authoritarian regimes, the Trump Administration seeks to defund, attack, and cow all spheres of independent authority and expertise, including the law, higher education, and – of course – the press and public media. That an authoritarian would want to neuter the latter shouldn’t be surprising. Public media outlets like KVCR sort fact from fiction, hold powerful people and groups accountable, and give voice to a diversity of perspectives. In this, public media challenge the authoritarian’s efforts to make his bastardized version of reality – including the outcomes of elections – the only acceptable one.

So what do we do in the face of a broken business model, predatory media owners, and an assault on press freedom and public media? Of course, we need viewers and listeners like you to open your checkbooks and support KVCR, whether with a one-time or -- even better -- a sustaining donation. And when you do, please keep in mind that nearly 40% of Inland Empire households don’t earn enough to meet their basic needs. So if you have the means, I hope you’ll keep these community members in mind.

However, because we have so many influential folks in the room, I also want to challenge you to think about how we can create an even more potent and sustainable public media system. Personally, I think state and local policy interventions are a vital and undertapped avenue for revitalizing and transforming public media specifically and local journalism more generally. So, if you’re a local public official, have the ear of one, or are just a concerned citizen, I recommend going to the Rebuild Local News website and checking out their terrific “policy menu” for supporting local journalism.

I genuinely think that both donor support and policy interventions are vital for freedom of the press, an informed citizenry, and the viability of local communities and American democracy.

Thank you.

You’re not imagining things.

A major new report from Muck Rack and Rebuild Local News reveals that the U.S. has seen a drop in local journalists of more than 75% since 2002, and California’s Inland Empire — comprised of San Bernardino and Riverside counties — is among the nation’s most underserved regions.

The report, titled the “Local Journalist Index 2025," is a collaboration between Muck Rack — a tech company that maintains a proprietary media database — and Rebuild Local News — a nonprofit that advocates for nonpartisan policy interventions to address the local news crisis.

“Overall,” the report explains, “the nation has a shortage of local journalists that is more severe and widespread than previously thought.” The number of local journalists in the U.S. has fallen from about 40 per 100,000 residents in 2000 to just 8.2 today.

Rural areas, which are home to many of the country’s “news deserts,” have borne the brunt of the collapse. As the report explains, “Stunningly, more than 1,000 counties — one out of three — do not have the equivalent of even one full-time local journalist.”

However, the report notes that many large and growing urban and suburban areas, including California’s Inland Empire, are “severely undercovered,” too. Among large U.S. counties, San Bernardino and Riverside counties both rank in the bottom 10 for “local journalist equivalents” per 100,000 residents.

One explanation for the Inland Empire’s poor performance is the region’s rapid growth over the past two-and-a-half decades. As the MR/RLN report explains, “Fast-growing counties may be particularly hard hit because their population growth coincided with the moment when local news business models were collapsing.”

Previous research also shows that economically struggling and historically marginalized communities — the places that need local journalism the most — face the greatest struggles sustaining local news organizations. In the Inland Empire, nearly 4 in 10 households don’t earn enough to meet their basic needs.

What makes the Local Journalist Index particularly significant is its focus on journalistic capacity in terms of both the headcount of U.S. journalists and their output.

Previously, the most prominent research on U.S. news deserts identified the nation’s coverage gaps based on the number of news outlets in a county. Based on that approach, San Bernardino and Riverside counties both seem relatively well-resourced, with 23 and 25 news outlets each, respectively.

But as I’ve argued in this newsletter, the Inland Empire is more of a “news mirage” — an area that appears to enjoy more substantive local journalism than it actually does.

For instance, the “vulture” hedge fund Alden Global Capital publishes four “local” Inland dailies that are identical in content from cover to cover. This allows the company to maintain the appearance of local coverage while operating a skeleton editorial staff. This is why studying actual journalistic capacity is so important.

Counting the number of journalists in a county isn't as simple as it might seem, though.

As they explain in their methodology section, the MR/RLN team used Muck Rack's filtering tools to sift through millions of articles and bylines and identify journalists producing local coverage. They then adjusted for work-related factors, such as part-time reporters, freelance contributions, and the number of stories a journalist published during the first quarter of 2025. Finally, they accounted for the fact that big-city outlets sometimes cover outlying areas.

The result was the creation of a new metric — the “Local Journalist Equivalent” (LJE) — which functions like a "full-time equivalent" (FTE) in workplace settings. With those figures in hand, the MR/RLN team could then compare different states and counties based on the number of LJEs per 100,000 residents.

In San Bernardino County, the research team initially identified 112 local journalists in the Muck Rack database. But after adjusting for factors like part-time employment, article output, and proximity to metro areas, the number of Local Journalist Equivalents (LJEs) fell to 50.2, or 2.3 per 100,000 residents.

Riverside County fared even worse, with just 1.7 LJEs per 100,000 residents.

These figures are well below the national average (8.2 LJEs per 100,000 residents), as well as the average for counties of 1 million+ residents (6.1 LJEs).

These findings have serious implications for local communities. As the report notes, areas with severe journalist shortages face "a dearth of reliable information on pressing local issues" while "law enforcement, public officials, and major corporations operate without the sort of close journalistic scrutiny that local democracy requires."

U.S. commercial journalism has fundamental structural flaws that predate the Internet and should not be ignored. However, extensive research also shows that where local news disappears, voter participation falls, corruption and political polarization rise, and communities find themselves less prepared for crises.

Some studies actually suggest that local news coverage may reduce pollution. This is an important finding for the Inland Empire, where an enormous warehousing and logistics boom has resulted in the worst air quality in the country.

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The MR/RLN study does have some noteworthy limitations. Though it accounts for the volume of local news that journalists produce, the report doesn't capture journalistic quality. Additionally, because the report measures journalistic capacity at the county level, it cannot tell us about coverage gaps within counties.

In the vast and diverse Inland Empire, it is my observation that more affluent and white communities, such as Redlands and Palm Springs, enjoy more local news options with (relatively) larger staffs than the region’s less affluent, predominantly Latino cities and towns.

This, too, is unfortunate but not surprising. Investments in newsgathering and reporting tend to flow disproportionately toward communities with the disposable income to support advertising, subscriptions, and donations.

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Consider, for instance, two nearby Inland cities: Redlands and Colton. Though Redlands has seen its news institutions severely undermined by corporate ownership, this relatively affluent, majority-white city of nearly 73,000 still enjoys three local news outlets: the Daily Facts, the weekly Redlands Community News, and the Community Forward Redlands digital news site.

By comparison, in the less affluent, predominantly Latino city of Colton (population 53.8k), the weekly Colton Courier has just one full-time reporter, and he splits time co-publishing the paper, as well as three other area outlets: The Rialto Record, San Bernardino’s El Chicano, and IECN.com.

The San Bernardino Sun also purports to “cover San Bernardino and surrounding cities,” including Colton. However, a search for “Colton” on the Sun’s website shows that, since June 1, the Sun mentioned Colton in just a handful of short reports. Again, this is a city of more than 50,000 residents!

To inform effective interventions, future research should also work to identify such news deserts (and oases) within underserved counties. With 14 cities of 100,000+ residents, as well as many small, rural communities, San Bernardino and Riverside counties are ripe for just such investigation.

This critique aside, the Local Journalist Index is an important step forward in understanding how the local news crisis is unfolding in different states and counties across the U.S. I’m also enthused about their plans to update the Index annually.

Perhaps with enough attention and effective interventions, the Inland Empire can grow its journalistic ranks and provide both the volume and quality of information that local communities need. At least now we have a baseline for measuring change over time.

Since then, I’ve had the opportunity to discuss the region’s local journalism on two local talk shows: Inland Insight and Education Insight. So, I wanted to share those conversations here. I hope you find them as as “insightful” as the shows’ names suggest.

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Inland Insight is a podcast hosted by Manny Sandoval and Denise Berger, co-owners and publishers of Inland Empire Community News. In our conversation, we discuss a range of topics, including the distinction between news deserts and mirages, our region’s duplicative dailies and lack of dedicated local TV news, the role of “churnalism” in enabling Amazon’s corporate propaganda, social media sensationalism and misinformation, and “pink slime” websites. We also talk about the launch of the Inland Empire Journalism Innovation Hub+Fund and the promise of cooperative journalism.

Note: There are audio issues during our discussion of policy interventions from 31-34 mins; feel free to skip.

Education Insight is a radio show and podcast produced by Growing Inland Achievement and KVCR 91.9. The show, which focuses on education in the Inland Empire, is normally hosted by CSUSB’s own Lacey Kendall. In this episode, I talk with Education Insight producer Alyssa Silva about the IE’s news mirage dynamics, including its duplicative dailies, lack of local TV news, and churnalism. However, we also discuss CSUSB’s new Local Journalism Partnerships Initiative, which I coordinate. This faculty- and student-run initiative seeks to support and expand high-quality civic and community journalism in the Inland Empire and develop the next generation of talented homegrown media professions.

What do you think? Is the IE a “news mirage?” And, if so, what should be done? Please drop a comment below.

SCNG publishes 11 daily newspapers in Southern California, including the Orange County Register, L.A. Daily News, and four Inland Empire dailies: the San Bernardino Sun, Riverside Press-Enterprise, Inland Valley Daily Bulletin, and Redlands Daily Facts.

The vote marks the first time journalists at newsrooms owned by the “vulture” hedge fund Alden Global Capital have authorized an open-ended strike. The third-largest newspaper owner in the country, Alden is notorious for buying newspapers and other “distressed assets,” gutting staffs, and siphoning off the remaining profits.

In its September 23 press release, SCNG Guild cited several reasons for the strike vote, including: low pay for most employees and — for some — even poverty-level wages; a decade or more without raises for many reporters; and unfair labor practices and stalling tactics by SCNG management.

Now, Inland Empire MediaWatch has obtained a 2022 SCNG Guild Pay Study Report detailing SCNG’s compensation patterns that have so frustrated Guild members.

Based on data provided by the company for all 126 Guild members as of August 2022, the report documents SCNG’s low salaries, wage stagnation, and race and gender pay gaps. SCNG Guild prepared the report as they entered the economic portion of contract negotiations in 2022.

As the report explains, “Since the [June 2021] creation of the SCNG Guild, the issue of compensation has been front and center in the minds of our newsroom employees and a driving force in our inaugural contract negotiations.”

According to the report, the median Guild member’s salary as of August 2022 was approximately $51,300, with most salaries falling in the $40,000s and $50,000s. The report explains that more Guild members made less than $40,000 than those making above $70,000.

The report also identifies race and gender pay gaps among SCNG employees. The median salary for men was $3,300 higher than for women, and White employees earned $5,700 more than non-White employees.

Experienced SCNG staffers generally earned more than less experienced ones. However, because many reporters have gone years without even cost-of-living raises, the report says “a sizable number of seasoned journalists” earned less than recent hires with minimal experience. The report notes that such wage stagnation is a particular problem for women and people of color.

Persistently low salaries combined with Southern California’s soaring cost-of-living means many SCNG staffers struggle to make ends meet. As the report explains:

While we know that some guild members are in households with other people who earn income, if everyone was the only member of a one-person household, almost 80% of our membership would be considered low income under HUD guidelines, including 13% – most of them living in Los Angeles County – who would be considered very low income.

“To have a reporter in Los Angeles trying to live off of that does impact the reporter directly in how they're going to, you know, pay rent,” said Charlie Vargas, an SCNG Casino and Entertainment reporter and member of the Guild’s contract actions team. “It’s important to be able to fund reporters’ salaries so that they can live in the cities they cover, but also to make sure that there is that watchful eye on public officials.”

Though the 2022 report does not detail staffing figures, Guild members told Inland Empire MediaWatch that, under Alden, deep newsroom cuts have meant SCNG reporters are expected to do more with less.

“You know, we're a much, much, much smaller newsroom than we used to be. There's no doubt about that,” said Orange County Register reporter and Guild unit chief Sean Emery. “Reporters covering more cities and local teams covering much larger geographic areas—. It's just that continual struggle.”

Guild members say that staffing cuts and expanded responsibilities, paired with persistently low salaries and pay inequities, have contributed to burnout and turnover.

“Not being able to, you know, afford to live in the city that you're covering, along with the like strain of having to produce all of these different stories—. You get a lot of burnout,” said Vargas. “Then it's sort of like a domino effect, and the reporter leaves. Now there's one less reporter in the city covering these issues.”

“The readers and the community deserve strong newsrooms that are able to serve in that watchdog role, find important issues, and provide breaking news and emergency coverage,” said Emery. “You need talented, dedicated, and experienced people to do that. But we have so much turnover because people just can't get by on the salaries, and we lose great people that way.”

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SCNG newsroom employees voted to form the Guild in June 2021, and they began bargaining with management on an inaugural contract in January 2022.

Guild leaders say the two sides made some initial progress on non-economic matters. However, Guild unit chair Sean Emery says management has “dragged their feet” in offering a fair contract — particularly around wages and benefits.

In December 2023, amid mounting member frustration, the Guild organized a one-day walkout to try to spur movement on wages and benefits negotiations. However, Emery says SCNG management has continued to stall.

“We have made numerous attempts to adjust our offers to try to get [SCNG management] to the table,” said Emery. “They just will not take part in that process of meeting our offers with ones of their own that are anywhere near acceptable.”

Emery says it has been more than a year since SCNG management presented a proposal on wages and benefits that differs from previous offers.

According to Guild leaders, the union’s proposals include:

• Minimum salaries depending on job title and seniority OR a 9% raise for those who have been with SCNG for 2+ years (whichever is greater);

• Increasing the company’s $0.40 per mile reimbursement rate to the Federal (IRS) rate of $0.67 per mile;

• Introducing a 3% matching rate for 401(k) contributions; and

• Requiring SCNG to increase its contributions to employees’ health insurance plans when premiums rise.

Guild leaders say SCNG management has offered just a 4% raise over two years for employees making less than $46,000 and a $1,500 pre-tax bonus for those making more than that. They also say the company has not presented counterproposals on other economic matters, and it has refused the Guild’s proposal on health insurance contributions.

Southern California News Group management did not respond to requests for comment for this story.

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“The salaries and the offers speak for themselves,” said Emery. “Obviously [Alden] has a reputation, and, in our view, this is the opportunity to prove people wrong and offer a fair contact and salaries.”

Guild leaders urged community members to use SCNG papers’ online comment sections and other feedback mechanisms to let management know that they value quality local reporting and want the contract matter settled fairly and quickly.

SCNG Guild members have also created a GoFundMe campaign to raise money for their strike fund.

The San Bernardino Sun is the paper of record for San Bernardino, California—a city of more than 220,000 in the state’s diverse and rapidly growing Inland Empire region (or “the IE”).  

This Wednesday morning—August 28, 2024—the Sun published front-page articles about special counsel Jack Smith’s revised indictment of former president Trump, the rescue of an Israeli hostage in Gaza, vice presidential nominee J.D. Vance’s upcoming Southern California campaign stops, and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s claims that the Biden Administration pressured Facebook to censor some Covid-19 content during the pandemic. 

That same day, twenty minutes south of San Bernardino, Riverside’s Press-Enterprise published a front page that was identical to the Sun’s. The two papers’ headlines, bylines, articles, photos, and layout were all exactly the same. All that differed were the mastheads. Two other area dailies—the Ontario-based Inland Valley Daily Bulletin and Redlands Daily Facts—published the exact same front pages, too. 

In fact, each day these four Inland Empire dailies publish entirely duplicative newspapers from cover-to-cover, including the same sections, articles, headlines, photos, advertisements, and even obituaries! So, when residents open their “local” daily (or its website), they must wade through coverage of other cities and towns across the massive two-county region—if their community is covered at all. Indeed, Wednesday's print edition of the San Bernardino Sun didn’t once mention San Bernardino or the surrounding cities of Rialto, Colton, Fontana, or Highland.

Why is this happening? Over the past two decades, U.S. newspapers have seen their advertising revenues evaporate, as Google and Facebook have cornered the digital advertising market. As a result, a third of U.S. newspapers have closed, and two-thirds of newspaper journalists’ jobs have been eliminated. So, local newspapers (and ad-supported outlets more generally) must do more with less, or they simply do less. 

But in California’s Inland Empire, there’s an added problem: these duplicative dailies are all part of Southern California News Group (SCNG), which is owned by the “vulture” hedge fund Alden Global Capital. The nation’s third-largest newspaper owner, Alden is notorious for buying local papers, gutting editorial staffs, and siphoning off the remaining profits.  

In 2018, SCNG executive editor Frank Pine said his newsrooms’ staffs had been halved in just two years under Alden. He called SCNG’s business model “broken” and even suggested their papers transition to non-profit status. That hasn’t happened. Instead, Alden passes off a single regional newspaper as four local ones, and most IE residents are none the wiser. 

A news desert? Or a news mirage? 

In recent years, much of the academic and public dialog concerning the crisis in local journalism has focused on “news deserts”—areas with “no, or very limited, access to a reliable local news source—either print, digital or broadcast.” In her 2023 report, The State of Local News, Northwestern University’s Dr. Penny Abernathy identified 204 U.S. counties without any local news outlets and another 1,562 with just one. 

In California's Inland Empire, the problem isn't so much a lack of news outlets, though. (Abernathy’s report identified 48 news providers across San Bernardino and Riverside counties, and Mapping Black California locates even more media outlets, generally). Rather, the problem is that many Inland Empire news outlets publish little, if any, substantive local journalism. And as Alden's duplicative dailies illustrate, this is not always apparent to news consumers. 

I've argued that Calfifornia’s Inland Empire is a “news mirage”—an area that appears to have more substantive local journalism than it actually does. Other journalists and researchers have also used the “mirage” metaphor to describe troubling local news dynamics, including Chevron’s surreptitious ownership of a northern California daily, rural weeklies that employ few if any local reporters, and the rapid proliferation of AI-generated mis- and disinformation. 

The Inland Empire news mirage is multifaceted, and it extends well beyond Alden’s duplicative dailies. As we’ll see, the IE has no dedicated, local TV news. Instead, L.A. stations pipe in our “local” newscasts, which portray the region as a crime scene. Under-resourced local weeklies and digital sites also rely heavily on “churnalism”—the passing along of press releases and other pre-packaged content as news. This enables powerful local actors like Amazon to manipulate public opinion. Meanwhile, popular social media accounts and “pink slime” websites engage in sensationalism and spread mis- and disinformation. 

As a result, IE communities—which are majority-Latino and where 36% of families cannot meet basic needs—face a dearth of reliable information on pressing local issues, such as warehouse sprawl, housing unaffordability and homelessness, food insecurity, health and environmental injustice, and right-wing extremism. Moreover, law enforcement, public officials, and major corporations like Amazon operate without the sort of close journalistic scrutiny that local democracy requires. 

There are reasons to be optimistic about IE journalism, though. A grassroots network of ethnic and community media is innovating with cooperative journalistic approaches to inform and empower local communities. The region’s community foundation has launched a Journalism Innovation Hub+Fund to support those grassroots efforts, and that Hub has linked up with the Press Forward national philanthropic coalition. Finally, the California legislature recently considered two bills that would have had the tech giants pay to restore local journalism, though a recent deal with Google seems to have significantly dampened those efforts.

Whether grassroots collaborations, philanthropic initiatives, and (smart) public policy interventions are successful will determine, to no small degree, whether Inland Empire communities have the news and information needed to grow sustainably, equitably, and democratically. Otherwise, the region will continue to operate with a news ecosystem that, because of its lack of substantive local reporting, enables corruption, racial and economic inequality, and health and environmental degradation. But, first, we must recognize the region for what it is—a news mirage. 

A multifaceted mirage 

Alden’s duplicative dailies are the most galling manifestation of the Inland Empire news mirage, but they are not the only contributor. Flip on a television in the IE, and you’ll find newscasts from the typical local TV affiliates—ABC, NBC, CBS, Fox, and Telemundo. However, except for the relatively tiny Palm Springs market, none of those stations are based in the Inland Empire. Instead, the region’s “local” newscasts are piped in from Los Angeles, and when they do cover the IE, it is almost exclusively violent crime stories. 

At 4.7 million residents, the Inland Empire is the nation’s 12th largest metropolitan statistical area, it has the fifth largest Latino population, and the region is projected to grow twice as fast as the rest of Southern California over the next 25 years. Shouldn’t such a large, diverse, and rapidly growing region have its own, dedicated TV stations and newscasts? 

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Meanwhile, many local weeklies and digital news sites rely heavily on “churnalism”—the passing along of police reports, press releases, and other pre-packaged content as news. Churnalism is cost-effective, and it may well satisfy some readers’ wants. Crime gets lots of clicks, while press releases touting area businesses and non-profits provide a steady, compensatory stream of “good news” (something residents have said they desperately need).  

However, churnalism also skews news coverage toward relatively low-value stories, and it cedes editorial influence to the very institutions journalists should hold accountable, including corporations, law enforcement, and public officials. As Orwell famously said, “Journalism is printing something that someone else does not want printed; everything else is public relations.” 

This has real consequences for Inland Empire communities. A December 2023 document leak revealed that Amazon—the IE’s largest private employer—was (and presumably still is) engaged in a “corporate manipulation” campaign aimed at stifling community opposition to its warehouse sprawl, labor practices, and health and environmental impacts in the region. The campaign includes such tactics as “strategic donations, currying favor with local politicians, [and] methods of cultivating allies and placing of ‘Amazonians’ within community groups and local boards like sleeper spies.” 

Amazon’s PR team can’t execute this corporate manipulation campaign on its own, though. It needs local media to pass along its friend-of-the-community press releases as news, and many IE outlets—time- and resource-strapped as they are—have enabled that campaign.  

Recent newspaper ownership changes threaten to make matters worse. This summer, Arizona-based Times Media Group (TMG) acquired four locally owned IE weeklies and promptly laid off three of those papers’ editors, including the 30-year editor of the Fontana Herald News. TMG has also curtailed community freelance contributions. Apparently the $35 per article freelance rate was cost prohibitive. 

Now, the editor at the Yucaipa/Calimesa News Mirror works double-duty at the Redlands Community News, the Fontana Herald News and Banning/Beaumont Record Gazette are produced by TMG's Arizona-based staff, and the company is closing three of its four local offices. Meanwhile, these papers all use the slogan, “Your Community, Your Newspaper.” Just don't try to find them at the office. 

Sensationalism, misinformation, and “pink slime” 

Like nature, information abhors a vacuum, and some of the sources that have emerged to fill the Inland Empire’s local news void practice journalism that is questionable at best.  

On social media, a slew of newsy accounts like Inland Wire, Inland Empire Pages, What’s Up With Riverside and onthetira (aka Foo News Network) have amassed followings in the hundreds of thousands. These accounts produce mostly sponsored content for local businesses. However, they also plug area events, share community-sourced videos, and some even publish on-the-ground reporting. Unfortunately, much of their local news coverage is sensational crime reports and vehicle accidents that, while eye-popping, does little to inform civic or democratic life. They also rely heavily on churnalism, and some even repackage other area news sources’ reporting without attribution. 

Some of these popular accounts have also published blatant misinformation. For instance, on June 24, 2024, Inland Empire Pages shared with its (then) 237,000 Instagram followers an unattributed, grammatically-challenged Facebook post. It read: 

Sex trafficking ring busted in the old FALLAS building [in Highland, California]. 60 women and children taken in a box truck. They were then taking by Ice. The men arrested driving the truck had ms13 tattoos. 

Over the post, in large bold letters, Inland Empire Pages asked a rhetorical question: “Why isn’t this all over the news?” The answer was quite simple: the sex trafficking story wasn’t true. There had been a cartel-related bust in Highland, but, as the San Bernardino Police Department confirmed, “there were no trafficked women or children involved.”  

Several commenters (including myself) raised alarms about this misinformation. However, Inland Empire Pages did not remove the post or offer a proper correction, and over the following days the post went on to rack up more than 700,000 views, 12,000 likes, and 30,000 shares. Since then, Inland Empire Pages has added an additional twenty thousand followers. 

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Other Inland Empire “news sources” are designed to deceive. The company Metric Media operates 75 “local news” websites across California that purport to “fill the void in community news” by “provid[ing] objective, data-driven information without political bias.” In the Inland Empire, Metric Media’s sites include Coachella Today, Pomona Valley Today, NW and SW Riverside News, Victor Valley Times, and East and West SBV Times in the San Bernardino Valley. 

These outlets look and sound like legitimate local news sources, but they are what journalism analysts refer to as “pink slime” websites. Playing on the public’s trust in and demand for local news, these operations churn out a mix of low-value, AI-generated stories, byline free press releases, and a slew of right-wing propaganda.  

For instance, on July 24, 2024, East SBV Times published a misleading story stating that local Democratic Congressman Pete Aguilar (CA-33) had voted “to make it easier for illegal aliens to vote in federal elections.” In fact, non-citizen voting is a ginned up problem, and bills like the one in question—the SAVE Act—would make it harder for citizens to vote, particularly young people and people of color.  

But the East SBV Times report about Aguilar wasn’t a one-off story; it was part of a national propaganda campaign. For, on that same day, Metric Media ran the exact same story about Pomona Congresswoman Norma Torres and scores of other Democratic Representatives across the country. Metric Media simply swapped out the names and photos to fit their 1000+ local outlets.

The IE information garden 

The University of San Diego’s Dr. Nikki Usher has critiqued U.S. local news research—particularly news deserts studies—for, among other things, its “deficit framing.” By focusing on the last 20 years of closures and cuts, this research can overlook historical news deserts, which have long lacked substantive journalism, and it can valorize problematic institutions, such as commercial news media. 

As the IE Journalism Hub executive director Armando Carmona explains: “For some of us, we’re not trying to save the old journalism because it hasn’t been for us. Especially when you’re talking about communities of color—. When you’re talking about marginalized, excluded communities, there’s a particular approach to media that has had a negative impact.” 

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Here, Usher argues for a focus on local media competencies and opportunities, and in the Inland Empire there’s much to be optimistic about. Listening Post Collective’s founder Jesse Hardman regards the region as a budding “information garden” where “a vibrant community of media-makers” … “have taken it upon themselves to get and share sourced civic information.” According to him, it just “needs a little watering.” 

The Inland Empire information garden includes, among others:  

• nonprofit news websites like The Frontline Observer and The Riverside Record, which, respectively, provide excellent environmental justice and public meetings coverage; 

• for-profit sites like Riverside’s Raincross Gazette, Community Forward Redlands, and The Palm Springs Post, which are filling local news voids (albeit in the IE’s more affluent communities, where advertising and subscription models are more viable); 

• representation-expanding and justice-seeking outlets like Black Voice News, Caló News, and First Nations Experience;  

• topically oriented news sources like Follow our Courts and Education Insight;

• the region’s PBS and NPR affiliate, KVCR, which produces daily news reports, timely and important documentaries, and public affairs programming; 

• KCAA radio, which features local voices like Westside Story Newspaper’s Wallace Allen, Teamsters Local 1932’s “Worker Power Hour,” and I Love San Bernardino’s Robert Porter 

• established community weeklies like the Inland Empire Community News Group and Century Group papers (though Century Group’s new, out-of-state owners present problems here); and

• journalism-adjacent artistic, historical, and community organizations, such as The Space / El Espacio, A People’s History of the I.E., Buzon del Barrio, Just San Bernardino, and The Garcia Center for the Arts. 

The above outlets and organizations all produce local news and information, provide platforms for community voices, or both. However, a common thread among the news outlets is that they are thinly staffed, with most employing just one or two editors or journalists. So, organizations like Listening Post Collective (LPC), Inland Empire Media Roundtable, Latino Media Collaborative, and, most recently, the Inland Empire Journalism Innovation Hub+Fund have worked to cultivate this “information garden.” 

Starting in 2000, LPC conducted a 3-year Civic Media Design initiative in the IE. Led by Hardman and local media maker Quinn Mays, that initiative began with an extensive Information Ecosystem Assessment documenting the challenges and opportunities for civic media in the IE. Then, they provided seed grants and consulting to The Frontline Observer and The Space to produce and distribute empowering, community-focused news and culture. 

LPC also funded a “story grant series” for IE residents to document their experiences with regional air quality and other health and environmental issues. And they organized journalism and media literacy workshops to grow the area’s civic and storytelling muscle. However, arguably the most important outcome of LPC’s work has been the way it has connected area media outlets and journalists for cooperative journalism projects.  

Cooperative journalism in action in Bloomington 

As Montclair University’s Center for Cooperative Media explains on their website, cooperative (or collaborative) journalism involves “news organizations working together (and with other non-news entities) on reporting projects, partnering on audience engagement efforts, co-collecting and sharing data, or even teaming up to build technology that supports multiple organizations working toward a shared journalistic goal.” 

One powerful illustration of cooperative journalism in action is recent reporting on warehouse development in the unincorporated, predominantly Latino community of Bloomington. In March 2024, The Frontline Observer’s Anthony Victoria and Chris Salazar published an article titled “Pavement Politics” that investigated how IE developers like Howard Industrial Partners use campaign donations and charitable giving to influence area land use decisions, such as the 213-acre Bloomington Business Park Specific Plan.  

As Victoria and Salazar explain, the massive Bloomington project will “demolish one school and 138 homes, displacing around 530 people, in order to build a warehouse cluster over 50 football fields in size.” The article also describes the experience of Felipe Ortiz, a Bloomington resident who says his landlord sold his home without his knowledge and whose chain link fence was then knocked down by a bulldozer while his family was home.

Frontline Observer’s reporting on the Bloomington Business Park Specific Plan has been cooperative in a few regards. For the “Pavement Politics” report, Victoria and Salazar collaborated with a professor and students at Pitzer College’s Robert Redford Conservancy, who gathered and analyzed local campaign finance data and tracked warehouse-related land use votes. This collaboration was supported by Montclair State and the Rita Allen Foundation’s Civic Science Journalism Collaborations program.

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A co-founder and former communications strategist for the People’s Collective for Environmental Justice (PC4EJ), Victoria is plugged into the activities of community organizers and environmental justice activists, including Concerned Neighbors of Bloomington, PC4EJ, and the Center for Community Action and Environmental Justice. So, while Frontline Observer’s reports are fair and accurate, they also foreground the voices and experiences of affected community members like Ortiz and those working to organize and empower local residents. 

Victoria is also a UC Berkeley Local News Fellow at KVCR 91.9, the region’s NPR affiliate. For KVCR, he created an audio version of the “Pavement Politics” report. And another area outlet, Inland Empire Community News, also republished the story. Meanwhile, Black Voice News photojournalist Aryana Noroozi published a photo essay on Bloomington and other IE residents’ experiences with warehousing, and Mapping Black California’s Alex Reed published an interactive map to accompany Noroozi’s story. This republishing and multimedia storytelling across the IE information garden has helped the Bloomington story reach more readers and listeners. 

The collaborations haven’t stopped there, though. Over the summer, local artists Tamara Cedré, Fernanda Durazo, and James Dailey organized a community art event named “Bloomington Speaks” that featured a large sculpture made of cardboard packing boxes decorated by Bloomington residents. These artists have also worked with Victoria and archivists from A People's History of the I.E. to create Live from the Frontline–a participatory public art project documenting the region's long history of logistics-related environmental racism. 

The Bloomington warehouse development story really gained steam in early July, when Earthjustice and PC4EJ filed a federal discrimination suit against San Bernardino County for concentrating warehouse development in this majority-Latino community. A week later, Bloomington residents held a “cabalgata” or horse parade to support Felipe Ortiz and his family. Victoria again covered the story for Frontline Observer and KVCR, as did Black Voice News. But by this time, other area media were on the story, too, including the San Bernardino Sun, Los Angeles Times, LAist, and L.A. TV stations.

What effect this media coverage, community organizing, and associated legal proceedings has on the fate of Bloomington and its residents remains to be seen. However, the case illustrates cooperative journalism’s capacity to focus attention on social issues in ways that inform and empower local communities. 

As Hub+Fund chair and Black Voice News publisher, Paulette Brown-Hinds said, “The challenges we face are too great for any one organization to tackle alone. By working together, sharing resources, and supporting one another, we can build a stronger, more resilient local journalism ecosystem.” 

A regional-national philanthropic initiative

Cooperative approaches have the potential to provide local residents with news and information they need while, at the same time, transforming the relationship between local news media and the communities they serve. But if the IE information garden is to make the most of these and other innovative approaches, they will need resources and support. 

Here, an important recent development was Inland Empire Community Foundation’s launch of its IE Journalism Innovation Hub+Fund. The Hub+Fund is part community media cooperative, part philanthropic fund. As an IE VOICE report explains: “The Hub will serve as a central point for collaboration, training, and community engagement, while the Fund will provide financial support to news organizations and partners committed to serving the Inland Empire.” 

At the Hub’s June 3 launch event at ESRI headquarters in Redlands, Dr. Brown-Hinds screened this short video, which describes the Hub as “a network of locally-owned media organizations, independent journalists, and media professionals dedicated to telling local stories and improving access to information.” 

This summer and fall, the Hub+Fund is holding a series of community townhalls and cooperative journalism trainings. The townhalls are intended to “engage the public in setting news agendas by soliciting story ideas, questions, and concerns through interactive platforms.” The trainings will “encourage media organizations, journalists, and citizen journalists to form partnerships and collaborations” and “foster shared ethics and practices across journalists across the region.” 

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The Hub grew out of the work of the Inland Empire Media Roundtable, which, in 2021 and 2022, convened meetings of public officials, community-based organizations, and community and ethnic media. Those collaborations sought an accurate 2020 Census count and timely and accurate public health information during the COVID-19 pandemic. 

Since late 2022, IECF has seeded the Hub with funds from the James Irvine Foundation, Democracy Fund, Google News Initiative, and local donors. At the June 3 kick-off event, Dr. Brown-Hinds also announced that the Hub+Fund has been designated a Press Forward “local chapter.”  

Press Forward is a coalition of major U.S. philanthropic foundations that plan to invest half a billion dollars in local news over 5 years. IECF’s website explains that local chapters like the Hub+Fund “are critical to the success of Press Forward because they are closest to the ground and can identify authentically local approaches that meet the needs of their communities.” 

The Hub’s designation as a Press Forward local chapter is a promising development for the region’s local news ecosystem. It indicates that the IE is on the national coalition’s radar as a region that requires local journalism funding and support. And it presents opportunities for matching local donors’ contributions with those of larger, national foundations. 

It is important to remember, though, that the Inland Empire is also “philanthropy desert,” with IE non-profits receiving a fraction of the foundation funding that other California regions do. So, when it comes to matched giving, an equity-based approach will be essential if Press Forward is to see information gardens like the Inland Empire truly bloom. 

The Hub+Fund is a welcome development for an IE information garden that is “in need of watering.” But philanthropy isn’t a panacea for local journalism's woes. The national coalition's 5-year, $500 million commitment – even if matched by local donors – is a drop in the bucket compared to the tens of billions in annual advertising revenue that U.S. newspapers have lost over the past two decades. 

Lenfest Institute’s Jim Friedlich told the Chronicle of Philanthropy that he thinks initiatives like Press Forward can have a “multiplier effect” in stimulating policy support, commercial investment, and philanthropic interest. But, he argues, “The clearest path to creating billions of dollars of support for local news is public policy.” 

Legislative push to support California journalism ends in an AI deal 

On August 2, 2024, Rebuild Local News president Steve Waldman spoke at Inland Empire Community Foundation’s Policy and Philanthropy Summit. An expert on journalism policy, Waldman described efforts to support local journalism as a “three-legged stool.” They require: 1) product innovations, such as cooperative journalism; 2) philanthropic initiatives like Press Forward and the IE Journalism Innovation Hub+Fund; and 3) smart public policy interventions. 

Waldman noted that policy interventions to support journalism—i.e., public subsidies—can be controversial. It’s not just that budgets like California’s are tight (to say the least). When news outlets receive government funding, it raises questions about their capacity to report impartially and hold public officials and government bureaucracies accountable. As the saying goes, “he who pays the piper calls the tune.”  

Yet Waldman explained that taxpayer support for U.S. journalism is as old as the Republic, and “content neutral” approaches like tax credits can create buffers between government officials and media outlets’ purse strings. International comparisons also show that strong democracies spend much more on public media and journalism than does the United States. In short, well-crafted public subsidies can support local journalism without compromising editorial independence. 

So, it was encouraging this legislative session to see the California legislature seriously consider two bills to support local journalism. The first bill, the California Journalism Preservation Act (AB 886) would have mandated that big tech platforms like Google and Meta pay news outlets for use of their content, with 70 percent of fees going to pay California journalists’ salaries. Modeled on Australian and Canadian legislation, the bill was supported by the California Newspaper Publishers Association, Local Independent Online News Publishers (LION), and the Newspaper Guild of the West. 

The second bill, SB 1327 would have taxed the digital giants on their monetization of user data, and revenues would have funded tax credits for California news outlets to hire and pay reporters. At IECF’s Policy and Philanthropy Summit, Waldman called SB 1327, “The first bill I’ve seen anywhere in the world that would really profoundly address this problem [the crisis in local journalism].” Indeed, the data extraction tax would have generated a whopping $500 million annually for California local news—a sum equivalent to the Press Forward’s entire 5-year national investment plan. 

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I’ve described these two bills in the past tense because, last week, Assemblymember Buffy Wicks (who authored AB 886) announced that state lawmakers struck a deal with Google that effectively killed both bills. The 5-year, (potentially) $255 million deal would create a public-private partnership wherein the State and the tech giant would contribute to News Transformation Fund to support California newsrooms and create a “National AI Accelerator.” The Fund would be administered by UC Berkeley’s school of journalism, which runs the California Local News Fellowship.

In Wicks’ press release, Governor Newsom described the deal as “a major breakthrough in ensuring the survival of newsrooms and bolstering local journalism across California.” California Black Media executive director Regina Wilson said the deal was “especially helpful for ethnic and community media” and that it will “help news outlets and journalists adapt to a changing landscape.”

Others expressed outrage at the deal. Media Guild of the West president Matt Pierce called it a “total rout of the state’s attempts to check Google’s stranglehold over our newsrooms.” And, in an op-ed in the San Franscisco Chronicle, Riverside Record publisher Alicia Ramirez called the deal “a ploy to avoid change.” 

For Ramirez, the problems with the bill are three-fold. First, Google is only guaranteeing $55 million over five years—”an infinitesimal fraction of the profits it has diverted from local news to itself.” Second, much of that money is earmarked for an AI Accelerator with unclear goals, and the underlying technology may well undermine independent journalism. Third, while the deal involves millions in taxpayer dollars, it was worked out privately, without public debate or the involvement of the journalists’ union or independent publishers like her. Ramirez closed her op-ed this way: 

I started the Riverside Record to address one of the many news deserts that have emerged in our state during Google’s surge to prominence, because transparency and accountability in local government matter. Google can’t hold our local elected officials accountable. Its AI won’t, either. Journalists, however, will continue to do the crucial work of holding power to account and ensuring Californians have the information they need to make the best decisions for themselves and their communities. Today, that means shining a bright light into the back room where this deal was concocted and demanding answers.

For his part, Rebuild Local News’ Steve Waldman is cautiously optimistic about the Google deal. He does have a laundry list of concerns about the plan, including that the $45 million in first-year funding doesn’t come close to the estimated $375 annually that is needed to support California local news. However, he called the deal “a down-payment on a strategy to revive local news in California” and an acknowledgement that “the local news crisis seriously harms communities and needs a collective response.”

Seeing through the IE news mirage and creating a stronger regional news ecosystem

On a recent visit to the “Ex-Press-Enterprise Employees” public Facebook group, I came across a Press-Enterprise phone directory from 2003. The directory was 8 pages long, and it listed 200 “News” staffers, including 38 at the “Metro Desk” alone.

Today, the Press-Enterprise’s “Local News” staff includes 2 editors, six reporters, a columnist, and someone to compile the “Community News” section (i.e., the churnalism). Yet these contemporary staffing figures are misleading, as those same 10 editorial staffers are also listed as the “Local News” staff for SCNG’s three other Inland Empire dailies. And many other editors and reporters on the Press-Enterprise “Contact Us” page actually work for SCNG papers outside the IE. No wonder SCNG duplicates its content across all four of its IE dailies; they barely have enough staff to produce one daily paper.

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In previous writing, I’ve focused on Alden’s duplicative dailies because they’re such a striking illustration of the Inland Empire news mirage. But, as I’ve argued here, that mirage is multifaceted, involving local TV news (or the lack thereof), widespread churnalism, out-of-state owners and editors, social media sensationalism and misinformation, and pink slime websites.

Abundant research demonstrates that when local news disappears, whether through closures or cuts, a whole host of civic and community problems follow. Voter participation falls, elections become less competitive, political polarization, corruption, and wasteful spending all rise, people feel less connected, and communities find themselves unprepared for crises. Interestingly for the IE, which has the worst air quality in the country, research also suggests that corporations pollute more when local news isn’t there to hold them accountable.

But the crisis in U.S. local journalism has not unfolded equitably. As Northwestern University’s Dr. Penny Abernathy explains, “Invariably, the economically struggling, traditionally underserved communities that need local journalism the most are the very places where it is most difficult to sustain print or digital news organizations.” This description fits the Inland Empire to a “T,” as the IE is one of the country’s largest majority-Latino metro areas, and 36% of families cannot meet basic needs.

Unlike in absolute news deserts, though, news mirages create the illusion that local communities have the news and information they need. Of course, there’s no sinister cabal conspiring to deny Inland Empire residents of quality journalism (though Alden, Metric Media, Google should all be held accountability for the damage they’ve inflicted on local news). Rather, the IE news mirage is largely a function of media doing what you’d expect them to do when they’re starved of resources: they’re producing journalism on the cheap and polishing it up for public consumption. And to the extent that local news researchers, philanthropic foundations, and policy-makers focus on the raw number of local news outlets in a given region rather than—say—full time journalists per 100,000 residents, they, too, can fail to see news mirages for what they are.

A first step to addressing the IE news mirage is to rigorously study and document the true character of the region’s news landscape, including community information needs, local news and information provision, and the challenges and opportunities area publishers and journalists face. Listening Post Collective’s 2001 Inland Empire Information Ecosystem Assessment was a major contribution in these regards, but as the IE news landscape continues to change, and there is much more to learn. With rigorous critical and empirical research, local media and community members could make an even more compelling case to policy-makers, philanthropists, and entrepreneurs that investing in IE news and information is a needed and worthy cause.

Second, IE residents and community leaders should demand greater transparency, accountability, and ethical standards from area news media. At the very least, Alden’s duplicative dailies should all operate under a single, more honest masthead: The Inland Press-Enterprise or Sun, for instance. They are, after all, a single regional newspaper masquerading as four local ones. Area media should also include the words “Press Release” or “Police Report” before any stories that are based wholly, if not entirely, on such pre-prepared materials. Doing so would help readers more easily distinguish original journalism from churnalism and propaganda. Purveyors of sensationalism and mis- and dis-information—whether legacy media, social media, or pink slime websites—should be called out when they pollute our region’s information landscape. And their advertisers (or “sponsored content” partners) should be put on notice for enabling those practices, too.

Third, area business leaders, nonprofits, philanthropists, policy-makers, and educators must acknowledge the local news crisis as ”a collective action problem” (as Waldman puts it). The news outlets that comprise the Inland Empire “information garden” do vital work, and innovations in cooperative journalism and the launch of the Hub+Fund hold great promise for revitalizing and transforming IE news. But these efforts, alone, will not create a thriving news ecosystem or communities, and we cannot rely on big philanthropy or the California legislature to do it for us (though we should certainly push them to help).

All of us need to ask how—as community members and local institutions—we can contribute to a more robust IE media landscape. We can direct our personal subscriptions and institutional ad budgets to community and ethnic media; work with state and local lawmakers to expand support for public media create subsidies or tax credits for community news (with appropriate safeguards for editorial independence); acquire struggling or owner-undermined news outlets and turn them into community non-profits; and create journalism education curricula and career pipelines to develop the next generation of homegrown Inland Empire storytellers. At CSUSB, we’ve created a Local Journalism Partnerships Initiative to explore such possibilities, and we’re excited to connect with local media and civic partners who are interested in doing the same.

The crisis in local journalism is crisis in civic and community life. Economically struggling and historically marginalized areas like the Inland Empire are experiencing the brunt of that crisis. But it’s also an opportunity to build the sort of media system and society we want to live in. I, for one, am excited about the possibilities.

Dr. Thomas (T.C.) Corrigan is a Professor in the Department of Communication and Media at California State University, San Bernardino where he teaches courses on digital media, media history, and the Inland Empire news ecosystem. He coordinates CSUSB’s Local Journalism Partnerships Initiative, and he writes the Inland Empire MediaWatch newsletter, which provides news and analysis about local media in Calfornia’s Inland Empire.

The Inland Empire has been called the “warehouse capital of the world.” According to Pitzer College’s professor Susan A. Phillips, as of 2021, the IE was home to more than 4,000 warehouses comprising a collective one billion square feet of warehouse floor space, much of it constructed in the past decade. More warehouses have subsequently been approved or are under consideration by area city councils and planning commissions.

The logistics industry and its political allies tout these warehouses for bringing jobs to the region. However, local activists and community members highlight the steep costs associated with the industry’s labor practices, warehouse sprawl, and health and environmental impact—particularly in communities of color.

A few weeks ago, I had an opportunity to attend a partial screening and panel discussion of “The Warehouse Empire” at Riverside’s Civil Rights Institute. In the docuseries, Ms. Figueroa sets out to understand how the logistics industry came to dominate the region and what that means for those who work in and live near warehouse facilities and their networks of planes, trains, and diesel truck routes.

To understand the logistics industry and its impacts, Figueroa interviews various subject matter experts, community members, and activists. In part 1 of the docuseries, Figueroa asks KVCR reporter and Frontline Observer publisher Anthony Victoria why the Inland Empire has become such a hotbed for warehouse development.

Victoria: I think there’s several reasons, but one of the main ones is cheap rent. So, developers find that the land here is leased at very low rates compared to other regions. The other reason is that it’s a strategic point of goods movement, and it always has been if you look at our history.

According to an internal Amazon memo that was leaked in December, a stunning 40 percent of the e-commerce giant’s global goods move from the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach to the Inland Empire where they are sorted and shipped to consumers’ doorsteps. This arrangement provides consumers with quick, cheap access to goods, but it also comes at steep costs for Inland Empire communities, which, among other things, have the worst air quality in the country.

Victoria: Along with the economic disparities, along with the plight, there are people struggling to breathe, people dying of cancer—people like my mom, she died of cancer, unfortunately. So many other people that actually have organized in this movement, who came before people like you and I, have passed away as a result of the impacts. It’s like a slow violence … In a lot of ways, people are fighting for their lives.

As Victoria documents in his Frontline Observer series, “Pavement Politics,” the unincorporated community of Bloomington has become a flashpoint for tensions between warehouse developers, their political allies, and community members. The Bloomington Business Park Specific Plan, which is being developed by Howard Industrial Partners, is currently resulting in the demolition of one school and more than 100 homes, a disproportionate number of which are rented by Bloomington’s majority-Latino residents.

In “The Warehouse Empire,” Figueroa visits two former residents of Bloomington—Thomas and Kim Rocha. In 2014, the Rochas received a letter from the county explaining that a developer was interested in purchasing the land directly behind their home, re-zoning it from residential to commercial, and putting up a 340,000 square foot warehouse.

The Rochas organized neighbors to oppose the development, and they told Figueroa the developer offered them $55,000 to change their tune. The Rochas did not budge, but the warehouse—which Figueroa describes as “dystopian”—went up anyway. I won’t give away all the details of the Rochas’ story, but in one particularly poignant scene, they described the county meeting when the development was approved:

Kim Rocha: We had put, like he said, five years of our life into that [neighborhood organizing]. And, um, they voted, and they passed it 4-1. We had standing room only—people couldn’t even get in there. I mean, people had took off work. They said, like 300 people on the outside—they couldn’t even get in.

Thomas Rocha: You talk about brokenhearted people and devastation … It was like quiet, and we’re like stunned that it passed after all the hard work that we did.

Kim Rocha: We prayed a lot. We cried a lot. And we said like, “What are we going to do?” You know, our quality of life is now gonna be—it’s just so different from what we thought our retirement years would be.

In part 2 of “The Warehouse Empire,” Figueroa explores the region’s historical transition from an economy built on vast citrus groves (the region was formerly known as the “Orange Empire”) to one of “cement, asphalt, and warehouses.” She also talks to two more warehousing and logistics experts—Claremont McKenna College economist Dr. Manfred Kiel and People’s Collective for Environment Justice (PC4EJ) co-founder and policy analyst Andrea Vidaurre.

Dr. Keil explains that employment in the Inland Empire logistics industry really took off with the Covid-19 global pandemic and the associated boom in online shopping. However, he notes that since about February 2022 warehousing and logistics employment has actually declined, resulting in many layoffs. Those who have not been laid off must contend with the industry’s low wages.

Keil: The warehouse industry, the logistics industry—let’s face it—does not, on average, have very high-paying jobs … That is in many ways the criticism of the logistics industry: Yes, it provides jobs, but these are low-paying jobs, and they don’t create a lot of value-added.

Looking ahead, Keil says the Inland Empire’s logistics-heavy economy is “pretty scary” for regional employment, as many warehouse and trucking jobs are highly susceptible to automation.

PC4EJ’s Andrea Vidaurre stresses that environmental and safety risks associated with warehouses are not some future threats, though; they are already here. In addition to pollution associated with the industry’s some 600,000 daily diesel trips, Amazon was recently fined $6 million for labor and safety violations at two IE warehouses. Vidaurre also highlights the risks to drivers and community members when trucks are routed through local neighborhoods.

Vidaurre: We really need policies that say, if you’re going to put in a warehouse, fine. Make sure it’s clean. But make sure the trucking routes are not going close to homes and schools. Make sure that there’s a buffer, right?

The impact of warehousing and logistics is felt by everyone in the IE. However, Vidaurre notes that the costs associated with the industry are disproportionately borne by communities of color. She points to a 2021 report by PC4EJ and University of Redlands students that mapped the growth of the Southern California logistics industry in relation to health, environmental, and racial disparities. The report concluded:

[I]t’s evident that the warehouse industry has failed to take into account the public’s health when building their facilities near communities of color. From cumulative impacts on air quality to unjust land use and zoning decisions, the impact warehouses and the global goods movement has on environmental justice communities is a textbook form of environmental racism.

Vidaurre drives home the basic injustice here:

Vidaurre: There are studies that show that our zip codes here—closest to the warehouses—are the ones that shop the least from Amazon. While the people that shop the most from Amazon—that get a package every single day, that get a shipment of packages every single day—they live the farthest from it, you know?

Figueroa: That’s crazy.

Vidaurre: So, what are our communities being built for? Because they should be being built for us, right? For us to thrive, for us to have opportunities, for us to live long and healthy lives. But if they’re just being built so we can support someone else’s benefit, then that’s not fair.

While there are plenty of troubling insights in “Warehouse Empire,” it is also a story of hope and empowerment. Vidaurre notes that the Inland Empire and L.A. have some of the first regulations in the country to address warehouse pollution. Indeed, in April 2024, Vidaurre won the Goldman Environmental Prize for her grassroots leadership in getting the California Air Resources Board to pass two regulations that will significantly limit trucking and rail emissions. According to the Goldman Prize website, those regulations “will substantially improve air quality for millions of Californians while accelerating the country’s transition to zero-emission vehicles.” And just this August, PC4EJ and its community allies had another major victory when the Southern California Air Quality Management District unanimously passed a similar railway regulation.

One possible critique of “The Warehouse Empire” is that it does not include many voices in support of warehouses. At the June screening, KVCR executive director Connie Leyva explained that this was not for lack of trying; they simply had a hard time getting industry and political supporters to go on record. Still, Figueroa does a solid job representing the pro-warehouse perspective (i.e., “jobs, jobs, jobs”) and letting viewers decide how to evaluate the industry’s costs, benefits, and compromises.

I have only had an opportunity to watch parts 1 and 2 of “Warehouse Empire,” but I am looking forward to watching the remainder tonight. Figueroa’s docuseries provides a fair, informative account of the IE logistics industry. It features authoritative and authentic community voices (including Figueroa’s own), and it tells powerful and poignant stories alongside moments of levity.

I highly recommend tuning in for “The Warehouse Empire” premiere tonight on KVCR TV channel 24, or you can watch it thereafter on the PBS website. When you do, please drop a comment below or on Instagram to share what you think.

That statement seems to have been premature.

On Thursday, July 18, Times Media Group abruptly fired several Century Group staffers, including the editors of three Inland Empire weeklies — David James Heiss at Redlands Community News, Hector Hernandez, Jr. at the Beaumont- and Banning-area Record Gazette, and Russell Ingold at the Fontana Herald News.

Yucaipa/Calimesa News Mirror editor, Rachael Gustuson was not laid off, nor were the paper’s two reporters. But several other Century Group staff, including the group’s graphics manager, Cheri Mitchell, were fired. Mitchell had been with Century Group for 27 years, and former publisher Jerry Bean recently described her as “wonderfully creative and reliable.”

Gustuson said she will now serve both as editor of the Yucaipa-Calimesa News Mirror and interim editor of the Redlands Community News. Someone else has been tapped as interim editor of the Fontana Herald News and Record Gazette, though Gustuson would not identify whom. A receptionist at Century Group’s Yucaipa office said the papers were “being run from Tempe,” where Times Media Group is based.

On the morning of July 18, then-Redlands Community News editor David Heiss received a call from Times Media Group’s director of operations, Nadine Johnson. According to Heiss, Johnson said, “We've been looking at our finances, and, unfortunately, your position as of this morning is being eliminated. It’s a duplication of positions.” Heiss asked if he had done anything wrong. Johnson rseponded, “no,” but that they “had to make some tough decisions.”

After receiving the news, Heiss gathered four or five Redlands Community News staffers, including the paper’s sole reporter, Israel Carreon. Heiss told the team that he, office manager Michelle Ingram, and part-time editorial assistant Sharon Folmer had all been let go. Heiss said his colleagues were shocked and irritated, but he told them, “It was [former publisher] Jerry Bean’s and [former editor] James Folmer’s dream to have a local hometown paper like the Redlands Community News, and I think we should be proud of what we helped build here. I hope I’ll see you guys around town.”

In his final article on July 18, Russell Ingold also said, “my position was terminated for financial reasons by the new owners of the [Fontana] Herald News.” Ingold — the Herald News’s sole editorial staffer — had edited the paper for 30 years and, before that, was sports editor.

With the layoffs, these Inland Empire weeklies lose not just a substantial portion of their staff (the company had 26 employees across 4 locations as of the July 3 acquisition announcement); they also lose years of institutional and community knowledge. Ingold was Century Group’s longest-serving employee. Hernandez, Jr. edited both the Record Gazette and, before it closed in 2022, the Highland Community News. And Heiss worked as a reporter at the Redlands Daily Facts and Century Group’s Record Gazette before being appointed editor of the Redlands Community News following James Folmer’s passing this January.

In addition to the layoffs, Times Media management has taken steps to limit the Century Group papers’ use of freelance contributions. Heiss said he could not confirm what, exactly, the new freelance policy was as the new management was “terrible at communicating what they wanted.” However, when one editor reached out to ask, “We can still use our freelancers, correct?” Heiss said they were told, “No. That is on hold.” A July 16 email obtained by Inland Empire MediaWatch also stipulated that all freelance projects would now need to be approved by management.

Greater reliance on salaried staff, relative to freelancers, may sound like a good thing. After all, Century Group freelancers had been paid just $35 per article and $5 per photo. However, even before the layoffs, the Century Group’s salaried editorial staffing levels were quite thin. The Group averaged just one editor and one reporter per paper, and, as Heiss explained, editors wore many hats, and staff reporters’ time was often occupied with civic matters, such as city council and school board meetings. So, freelance contributions played a significant role in the papers’ coverage of local news and events.

After being told not to use freelancers’ work, Heiss said one editor sent a panicked email saying, in effect, “I don’t know what I’m going to do” to fill the paper. According to Heiss, Times Media Group’s Nadine Johnson “didn’t understand why I and my reporter weren’t stepping up to fill more of the 20 pages that I was normally given.” That task will only get more difficult with last week’s layoffs.

One freelancer also worried that, without their and others’ contributions, the Century Group papers’ value as spaces for community voices and perspectives could be diminished. They noted that while former owner and publisher Jerry Bean did insert himself in editorial processes at the Redlands Community News, including in pursuit of “conservative balance,” decisions about which freelance stories to pursue and publish had been determined more or less by local editors. Now, management in Tempe will make those calls.

Times Media Group purchased Century Group Media on June 30, and the deal was announced in the acquired papers on July 3. The purchase price was not disclosed. Times Media Group is owned and run by CPA-turned-newspaper publisher, Steve Strickbine. The company owns more than 40 community-oriented titles in Arizona and Southern California.

The acquisition marks the end of Jerry Bean’s tenure as owner and publisher of the Century Group papers, and, with his retirement, a 66-year career in the newspaper business. In his commentary about Century Group’s sale to Times Media, Bean said of Strickbine, “He’s a friendly guy with a good sense for successful newspapers and social media. I checked him and others out carefully when I decided it was time to sell. I wanted to make sure our newspapers would be in good hands.”

Strickbine declined to comment for this story.

Heiss said that “Jerry [Bean] deserved to retire, and he’d been basically floating the papers out of his own personal finances just to keep the HR afloat.” But Heiss’s time with Times Media Group didn’t leave him optimistic about the future of the Century Group papers. “No one cared to talk to my newsroom, and I did not get the sense that they were interested in growing the news and paying attention to local news and information.”

One freelancer said they expected to see the Century Group papers turned into local “advertising machines.” They pointed to weekly cannabis coverage in some Times Media Group publications as an example of the company pandering to advertisers.

To be fair, the Century Group papers already provided an upbeat, advertiser-friendly editorial environment, heavy on stories of wholesome community events and local residents’ accomplishments. In fact, Bean launched the Redlands Community News at the recommendation of local advertisers. Still, the Century Group papers provided venues for community voices and some civic journalism — a scarce resource in a region already hit hard by cost-cutting newspaper owners.

Heiss isn’t sure there is a future for him in Southern California journalism, but he said he “felt fortunate to have a job at a time when journalism was having a lot of layoffs.” He is grateful James Folmer and Jerry Bean “saw value in him” and “pegged him to fill in [James’s] spot.”

“I like to think we were contributing to something the community was excited to have,” said Heiss. “And I’m disappointed that they don’t have it to the extent they did before.”

Correction: Former Redlands Community News editor, James Folmer, who passed away in January, was mistakenly identified as “Jerry” Folmer in a previous version of this story. This error has been corrected. My apologies. -T.C.

The answer to that question? As one commenter succinctly put it:

Indeed, the Highland sex trafficking story was a fabrication that Inland Empire Pages passed along without verification or attribution. As the description at the bottom of the reel read:

Later that day, San Bernardino Media News published an Instagram story reporting that the trafficking report was “incorrect” (an understatement). The San Bernardino Police Department confirmed to SBMN that there had been a cartel-related bust in Highland involving “a lot of stolen vehicles, guns, [and] cargo theft.” But — crucially — “there were no trafficked women or children involved.”

The following morning, I reached out to Inland Empire Pages to inform them that the sex trafficking story was erroneous. I also asked where they got their information about the story and whether they would remove the post or issue a correction. Inland Empire Pages did not respond to my query.

Others also raised concerns about the post, as illustrated in these comments from Tuesday, June 25 (screenshots taken on July 1).

Despite these concerns, Inland Empire Pages did not issue a correction until the following day — Wednesday, June 26. And, as I’ll explain below, that correction was wholly insufficient. Meanwhile, the reel racked up more than 700,000 views, 12,000 likes, and 30,000 shares, and many commenters clearly thought the Highland sex trafficking story was legit.

A recipe for viral disinformation

An outrage-evoking, fabricated story about a cartel-related sex trafficking bust is the sort of thing that’s tailor made for social media virality. Social media algorithms are designed to keep users engaged, and one key way they do that is by amplifying highly emotional content. The fabricated Highland sex trafficking story was bound to provoke strong emotions, including: outrage that cartel members would do such a thing; relief that the women and children had been rescued; and fear that it could happen to others. The Facebook screenshot that Inland Empire Pages shared leaned into those fear appeals by suggesting that such traffickers are operating in our neighborhoods and targeting our kids for abduction. It read:

Be aware of your surroundings ! We need to know what's going on in our neighborhood. This is scary ! I was told by a dollar tree employee that 2 men tried to abduct a 6 and 11 year old boys coming out of the store last week also !

(Like the trafficking bust story, Inland Empire Pages provided no verification or further attribution for the alleged Dollar Tree abduction attempt, either).

Inland Empire Pages further stoked readers’ outrage by asking, “Why isn't this all over the news ?” This provokative question implies that the press ignored or perhaps even covered up news of the bust (rather than, you know, treating unattributed rumors with due skepticism and confirming their veracity before publishing). This implication — that the public wasn’t getting the full story — was reinforced by the Facebook screenshot’s claim that “Cops would not let anyone take pictures.” Many commenters jumped to their own conspiratorial conclusions:

Human trafficking is a terrible, global scourge. However, it’s also true that unsubstantiated rumors and conspiracy theories regarding child sex trafficking are widespread on social media. As the Global Center for Human Trafficking at Montclair State University explains:

Many rumors ‘float’ through social media platforms sharing warnings about random kidnappings of children from playgrounds, traffickers marking cars of potential victims, or the ability of traffickers to track the phone number of anyone who responded to a specific text message. Human Trafficking has also moved in the center of elaborate conspiracies such as Pizzagate and the Wayfair Conspiracy, both of which were prominent in the QAnon conspiracy universe.

This trade in rumors and fantasies does real harm to anti-trafficking efforts. A leading anti-trafficking organization, Polaris explains that, “As a result of this misinformation, people who need immediate assistance from helplines are forced to wait on hold and may miss their opportunity to get out of real trafficking situations or to report valuable information about trafficking that is actually happening.” Such mis- and disinformation can also distort public perceptions of human trafficking and result in online harassment, privacy intrusions, and dangerous vigilantism, as the Pizzagate incident illustrates.

The problem is not just social media algorithms and conspiracy theorists, but also the ways users engage with misinformation. Yale University researchers have found that “outrage-evoking misinformation [is] associated with more engagement (likes, shares, replies) than both misinformation that is less outrage-evoking and outrage-evoking factually-accurate news” (my stunned emphasis added). Part of the problem, the American Psychological Association explains, is that people tend to let their guards down when confronted with claims that reinforce their preconceived notions (e.g., that traffickers are lurking around every corner). Yet, the APA adds, “people may share information they know is false to signal their political affiliation, disparage perceived opponents, or accrue social rewards.” Indeed, many commenters simply dismissed the fact that the Highland sex trafficking story had been debunked.

A delayed and inadequate correction

I was curious how much time and effort it would have taken for Inland Empire Pages to reach out to law enforcement and confirm that the Highland sex trafficking story was, in fact, fabricated. So, on Tuesday, July 25, I placed a call to Sergeant Christopher Gray, spokesperson for the San Bernardino Police Department (which has jurisdiction in that area of Highland), and — within an hour — he confirmed that there had been a "multi-agency, multi-location operation involving stolen guns and other items," but "no human trafficking."

Also on Tuesday, July 25, another popular IE-focused social media account, Inland Wire confirmed that Highland sex trafficking story was “erroneous” and that the bust was unrelated to human trafficking (presumably because so many readers had communicated with them about it).

Yet Inland Empire Pages did not issue a correction until the following evening — Wednesday, July 26. And when they did, it was a woefully inadequate one: they simply changed the description under the reel to read: “This is false information, confirmed by local officials.”

This “correction” — if you want to call it that — fails to meet even the basic expectations for journalistic corrections. As corrections expert Craig Silverman explains, effective news corrections should do the following:

• Feel and write like a human;

• Be clear about what was incorrect, and the correct information;

• Provide due prominence;

• Help the truth spread.

Inland Empire Pages’ “correction” attempt fails in each of these regards.

• The revised description expresses no regret for having misinformed readers, nor does it commit to verify or attribute claims going forward.

• The revised description does not explain what information was correct and incorrect — i.e., that there was a cartel-related bust in Highland, but that it did not involve human trafficking. Moreover, the revised description does not indicate that Inland Empire Pages got the story wrong in the first place. Simply including the word “correction” would have gone a long way in providing clarity.

• In revising the reel’s description, Inland Empire Pages also gave its “correction” far less prominence than the original post. That's because when an Instagram post or reel's description is revised, those who previously saw it are not alerted of the change. And even if users do come across the updated reel, they still find the Highland sex trafficking story much more prominently displayed than the note that the story is false (Instagram is a visually-oriented medium, after all).

• If Inland Empire Pages wanted to spread the truth, they would have — at the very least — published a new Instagram post (and accompanying IG story) explaining that the Highland sex trafficking story was false and correcting the record. Instead, by leaving up the offending reel and quietly revising its description, Inland Empire Pages effectively buried the truth about both the bust and their amplification of the story.

More than one reader argued that the offending post should be removed entirely.

News organizations are generally reluctant to fully retract stories where a correction will suffice. However, a compelling case for a retraction can be made here, as the Facebook screenshot so thoroughly misrepresented the facts about the Highland bust, and — as I explained above — it does real harm to anti-trafficking efforts. Yet if Inland Empire Pages did retract the story, they’d need to issue a prominent, informative retraction notice, and their lackluster “correction” doesn’t instill much confidence that they’d do so.

Journalistic standards at the IE’s popular community “pages”

With its 237,000 followers, Inland Empire Pages is one of a handful of popular, highly promotional, community-focused Instagram “pages” operating in California’s Inland Empire. Others include OnlyInTheIE (187,000 followers) Everything Inland Empire (133,000), Whats Up With Riverside (120,000), Inland Wire (83,500), and Riverside Matters (66,900 followers), among others. For a point of comparison, as of July 2023, three of the area’s daily newspapers — The San Bernardino Sun, Riverside Press-Enterprise, and Inland Valley Daily Bulletin — had a combined daily circulation of 75,235, according to the Southern California News Group’s media kit. And SCNG’s Inland Empire Report Instagram account has just over 2,200 followers.

Instagram accounts like these aren’t open community “groups” where any member can post (as is common on Facebook). Rather, they’re better understood as digital publishers that provide a mix of community-focused news, information, and promotional fare. At Inland Empire Pages, that editorial mix includes sponsored posts for area businesses, notices about upcoming events, and sensational crime and traffic reports. Sponsored posts seem to be the way most of these local “pages” generate revenue. At their website, Inland Empire Pages also maintains a directory of local businesses, which is where the term “pages” likely comes from (i.e., it’s akin to the Yellow Pages). The injury law firm, Pedram Law is the lead sponsor for several of these accounts, including Inland Empire Pages, San Bernardino Media News, and Everything Inland Empire — fitting given that these accounts frequently share videos of traffic incidents.

These accounts are vary considerably — from the sponsorship-focused OnlyInTheIE and Whats Up With Riverside to the somewhat more newsy Everything Inland Empire and Inland Wire. In a May 2024 Pew Research Center report, 52% of Americans told Pew Research Center that they get local news from online forums or groups — up 14% since 2018. Meanwhile, reliance on newspapers, TV, and radio for local news has declined. So, it’s fair to ask whether these popular IE pages are upholding the sort of journalistic standards that local communities and democracy require (particularly given their promotional logic, which incentivizes sensationalism). Local news research hasn’t delved into that question — at least not in the IE. But if Inland Empire Pages’ handling of the bogus Highland sex trafficking story is any indication, then a systematic, critical analysis of these pages is sorely needed.

Listening Post Collective founder, Jesse Hardman doesn’t see the IE as a news desert, though. Instead, he regards the region as a budding “information garden” where “a vibrant community of media-makers … and even local citizens … have taken it upon themselves to get and share sourced civic information.” What that information garden needs, Hardman argues, is “a bit of watering.”

Where will that “watering” come from, though?

One promising source of funding and support for local journalism is Inland Empire Community Foundation’s new IE Journalism Innovation Hub+Fund, which held a launch event on June 3, 2024 in Redlands. The Hub+Fund is part community media cooperative, part philanthropic fund. As an IE VOICE report explains: “The Hub will serve as a central point for collaboration, training, and community engagement, while the Fund will provide financial support to news organizations and partners committed to serving the Inland Empire.”

“Community journalism is more important now than ever,” said Hub+Fund’s chair and Black Voice News publisher, Dr. Paulette Brown-Hinds. “In regions like the Inland Empire, where news deserts are a growing concern, we need to find new ways to engage our communities and ensure that they have access to the information they need to participate fully in civic life.”

At the launch event, Dr. Brown-Hinds screened the following short video, which describes the Hub as “a network of locally-owned media organizations, independent journalists, and media professionals dedicated to telling local stories and improving access to information.”

The kick-off event was held as part of the Redlands Forum speaker series at ESRI headquarters. It featured a conversation on the state of local news between Dr. Brown-Hinds and former New York Times executive editor, Dean Baquet. Neither Brown-Hinds nor Baquet sugar-coated the crisis in local U.S. journalism. However, both underscored the vital importance of community journalism for civic and democratic life, as well as the promise of cooperative models.

“The economic model of journalism has shifted dramatically,” explained Mr. Baquet. “We can no longer rely solely on competition to drive our industry. Instead, we need to find ways to work together, share resources, and support one another. This is the only way we can ensure that local journalism remains strong and continues to serve our communities.”

Dr. Brown-Hinds concurred: “The challenges we face are too great for any one organization to tackle alone. By working together, sharing resources, and supporting one another, we can build a stronger, more resilient local journalism ecosystem.”

Since late 2022, IECF has seeded the Hub+Fund initiative with funds from the James Irvine Foundation, Democracy Fund, the Google News Initiative, and local donors. At the June 3 kick-off event, Dr. Brown-Hinds announced that the Hub+Fund has also been designated a Press Forward “local chapter.” Press Forward is a coalition of major U.S. philanthropic foundations that plan to invest half a billion dollars in local news over 5 years. IECF’s website explains that local chapters like the Hub+Fund “are critical to the success of Press Forward because they are closest to the ground and can identify authentically local approaches that meet the needs of their communities.” 

Earlier in the day, Dr. Brown-Hinds and Hub+Fund project director, Armando Carmona also hosted a workshop for community news publishers and journalists, which I had the opportunity to attend. There, Brown-Hinds and Carmona explained the Hub+Fund’s background, structure, and approach, which includes “establishing a cooperative newsroom, engaging the public, promoting transparency and trust, leveraging technology, and strengthening media literacy.” 

Dr. Brown-Hinds and Mr. Carmona also facilitated a brainstorming session on how to enhance community journalism in the IE. Participants’ ideas included more reporting and publishing collaborations, shared editorial support and databases, and local media literacy campaigns. I added that area educational institutions, such as California State University, San Bernardino, could support the Hub+Fund’s efforts by advancing journalism education and local news ecosystem research in the IE.

This summer and fall, the Hub+Fund will hold a series of community townhalls and cooperative journalism trainings. The townhalls are intended to “engage the public in setting news agendas by soliciting story ideas, questions, and concerns through interactive platforms.” The trainings will “encourage media organizations, journalists, and citizen journalists to form partnerships and collaborations” and “foster shared ethics and practices across journalists across the region.”

My take on these developments: 

Community media cooperatives (sometimes referred to as hubs, coalitions, or collaboratives) provide a viable, established model for producing and supporting quality local journalism. Importantly, whereas journalism’s traditional, commercial model relied on competing newsrooms to report about local communities, cooperative models prioritize reporting collaborations among community news outlets and with civic organizations and community members. In this, the launch of an initiative like the IE Journalism Innovation Hub+Fund presents opportunities to not only revitalize IE journalism, but also to transform it and its relationship to local communities.

The IE Hub+Plus Fund's affiliation as a Press Forward local chapter is also an important development for the region’s local news ecosystem. First, it indicates the IE is on the national coalition’s radar as a region that requires funding and support for local journalism. Hopefully that will bear out when the coalition announces its first round of newsroom awardees to “address historic inequalities in local news coverage.” Second, Press Forward local chapters – most of which are run by local community foundations – provide a means of both facilitating local journalism collaborations and matching local donors’ contributions with those of larger, national foundations. Indeed, at a Knight Foundation-funded journalism research conference I recently attended, Press Forward was described as “a giant matching fund.”

Press forward and its local chapters aren’t a panacea for local journalism's woes, though. The national coalition's 5-year, $500 million commitment – even if matched by local donors – is a drop in the bucket compared to the tens of billions in annual advertising revenue that U.S. newspapers have lost over the past two decades. As IECF notes, “The challenge of rebuilding America’s local news landscape is vast and will depend on creating new local efforts alongside new investment by local and national funders, smart public policies, and a variety of other revenue approaches.” I’m of the opinion that public policy interventions, especially, are vital and long-overdue. As the Lenfest Institute’s Jim Friedlich told the Chronicle of Philanthropy, “The clearest path to creating billions of dollars of support for local news is public policy … The likelihood is that Press Forward creates a multiplier effect, generating new policy support and new commercial investment as well as new local and national philanthropic interest.”

I’m also interested to see how Press Forward approaches grant-making – particularly matched grant-making – in communities and regions that are not just news deserts but also philanthropy deserts. According to an analysis of 2016 foundation data by UCR’s Center for Social Innovation, Inland Empire non-profits receive a fraction of the foundation support that other California regions do, and IE-based foundations have smaller asset bases and give less to area nonprofits. This would seem to put IE nonprofits – including media outlets and their support infrastructure – at a disadvantage when it comes to matched grant-making.

There have been coordinated efforts to “change the narrative” and improve both external and internal giving in the region. And IECF plans to use Press Forward funds to hire a dedicated fundraiser for the Journalism Innovation Hub+Fund. Still, an equity-based approach to regional giving will be essential if Press Forward is to see information gardens like the Inland Empire truly bloom.

A side note

Long-time readers of Inland Empire MediaWatch will know that there’s been quite a lull between my first post last fall and this one. I didn’t forget about this project. I’ve just been a little tied up with a labor dispute and a grant-funded effort to forge local media collaborations. However, I have been following and posting about local news developments at the iemediawatch Instagram handle, which I encourage you to follow. And I plan to use this Substack to publish more installments on the IE news mirage, among other topics. Stay tuned, thanks for reading, and please drop a comment to let me know your thoughts on these local news developments.

Here’s that front page:

Twenty minutes south of San Bernardino in Riverside, California, the Sun’s ostensible competitor — The Press-Enterprise — ran a front page looked like this:

No, you’re not seeing things. The Sun and the Press-Enterprise published nearly the exact same front pages on November 8th. Headlines, by-lines, stories, and photos? All the same. All that differed were the mastheads and weather forecasts. And if you open each newspaper and peruse the rest of the issue, you’ll find that every other page of these “local” papers is exactly the same, too — editorial content, advertisements, and all.

Here, for instance, are the Sun and the Press-Enterprise’s “Local News,” “Opinion,” and “Classifieds” pages for that day:

Heck, the two papers even ran the same obituaries!

This duplication doesn’t stop with the Sun and the Press-Enterprise, though. On November 8th, two other dailies in California’s Inland Empire — The Redlands Daily Facts and the Ontario-based Inland Valley Daily Bulletin — both published nearly the exact same content, too (the Daily Facts, to its credit, did slip in one unique local story about the Redlands Family Services Association’s food drive; everything else in the issue was duplicative or wire copy). Moreover, this sort of duplication happens across all four of these newspapers EVERY. SINGLE. DAY. In fact, I went page-by-page through each of these four newspapers for the first week of November 2023 (11/5-11/11), and I found that — other than some small, mostly structural variations in The Redlands Daily Facts — nearly every page of these four “local” papers was exactly the same each day.

A news desert? Or a news mirage?

Over the past several years, Dr. Penny Abernathy and her research teams at UNC-Chapel Hill and Northwestern University have tracked the troubling spread of “news deserts” across the United States. Abernathy defines news deserts as communities with “limited access to the sort of credible and comprehensive news and information that feeds democracy at the grassroots level,” and one of the key indicators she and her team track is the number of local news sources serving a community.

In her most recent report, The State of Local News 2023, Abernathy demonstrates that, since 2005, nearly a third of U.S. newspapers (2,886) have closed their doors, and new digital news sources have not nearly filled the void in local reporting. This has left more half of all U.S. counties (1,766) with one or fewer news sources, and 204 of those counties have no local news source at all. It’s a problem that has hit poor and marginalized communities particularly hard. As Abernathy explains, “Invariably, the economically struggling, traditionally underserved communities that need local journalism the most are the very places where it is most difficult to sustain either print or digital news organizations.”

In California’s Inland Empire (or “the I.E.”), mid-size cities like San Bernardino, Rialto, and (parts of) Riverside have demographic profiles that look an awful lot like those news deserts. In San Bernardino, for instance, where 67.6% of the population is Hispanic or Latino and another 12.5% are Black or African-American, just 12.7% have a bachelor’s degree, and nearly 21% live below the federal poverty line. Other, more affluent I.E. cities like Rancho Cucamonga, Fontana, and Redlands have higher standards of living. However, the region as a whole faces many persistent inequities, including low-wage warehouse jobs, housing unaffordability, food insecurity, environmental injustice, and creeping fascism.

So, yes, the I.E. has plenty of troubles; however, according to Abernathy’s 2023 report, being a news desert isn’t one of them. In fact, Abernathy’s 2023 report identifies 48 news sources in the two-county region — 28 in San Bernardino County and another 20 in Riverside County. And, because of those copious news sources, neither county is listed on Abernathy’s “watch list” of U.S. counties that are “at elevated risk of losing their news.”

But the problem in the I.E. isn’t the number of news sources. Rather, it is that in the region’s population center — the Riverside-San Bernardino-Ontario metro area — the four dailies aren’t really “local” papers (as their mastheads and marketing suggest). Instead, a single regional newspaper — The Press-Enterprise — masquerades as four local ones, and most of the I.E.’s 4.7 million residents are none the wiser.

I call this a “news mirage” — a dynamic wherein local communities appear to have more substantive, local news sources than they actually do. And if we look around California, we see that the Inland Empire isn’t the only region where this is happening. In fact, you find these sorts of duplicative (and duplicitous) publishing practices in other areas of the state where the “vulture” hedge fund, Alden Global Capital, and its subsidiary, MediaNews Group (MNG), own newspapers, as they do in the Inland Empire.

Who are Alden and MNG? Why are their Inland Empire newspapers duplicating one another’s content — news reports, ads, obituaries, and all? Are other news media — weekly newspapers, broadcasters, digital sites, and social media — stepping up to fill the I.E.’s local journalism void? Or are they contributing, in their own way, to this “news mirage?” What are the implications for residents of Riverside, San Bernardino, and surrounding communities? And what should be done about it? This series will try to answer these questions.

In my next post in this series, I’ll dig into the history of how, in the I.E. and across Southern California, Alden and MNG have gutted newspapers while passing off duplicative content as local journalism. Alden has garnered plenty of attention and well-earned scrutiny for its ruthless cost-cutting and profiteering at the expense of local newspapers and the communities they serve. But to really understand the rise of the Inland Empire news mirage, we need to go back 25 years to when MNG entered the I.E. newspaper market.