California’s Inland Empire is a news mirage
Grassroots media collaborations, local and national philanthropic initiatives, and smart public policy could help change that.
Alden’s duplicative IE dailies
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?
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.
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.”
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.
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.”
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.
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.
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.