The Inland Empire "news mirage," part 1: The masquerade

In California's Inland Empire, the "vulture" hedge fund Alden Global Capital is passing a single regional newspaper off as four "local" ones, and I.E. communities are none the wiser.

On Wednesday, November 8, 2023, The San Bernardino Sun — the daily newspaper in San Bernardino, California — published a fairly typical front page of its print edition. Above the fold were updates on the Israel-Gaza war, the previous night’s Republican presidential debate, and a bold-print headline about the Temecula School Board’s skyrocketing legal expenses. Temecula is an hour from San Bernardino in good traffic, and its far-right, Christian conservative school board has been in the headlines all year for its attacks on critical race theory and transgender schoolchildren. Below the fold, the Sun’s readers found reports on the L.A.-based California Science Center’s space shuttle exhibit and an expected U.S. Supreme Court ruling on firearms.

Here’s that front page:

The front page of The San Bernardino Sun for 11/8/23

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

The front page of The Riverside Press-Enterprise for 11/8/23

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:

The “Local News” page of the Sun (left) and Press-Enterprise (right) for 11/8/23

The “Opinion” pages of the Sun (left) and Press-Enterprise (right) for 11/8/23

The “Classifieds” pages of the Sun (left) and Press-Enterprise (right) for 11/8/23

Heck, the two papers even ran the same obituaries!

The “Obituaries” pages of the Sun (left) and Press-Enterprise (right) for 11/8/23

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.”

Source: U.S. Census Bureau via the Medill Local News Initiative

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.

The problem in California’s Inland Empire 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.

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.