Tim Marema of The Daily Yonder reflects on the changing news ecosystem and how the loss of local news can impact the way rural and urban communities see each other
Oh, we ain't got a barrel of money. Maybe we're ragged and funny, but we'll travel along singing a song side by side.
Tim Marema:There's less information in rural areas. It can interfere with our understanding of what's going on in our community and who our neighbors are and what we ought to be focusing on, how our local money is spent publicly. There are smart people who are figuring out business models and doing the coverage. It's not going to look like what it was in the past. It's gonna be different.
Tim Marema:And whatever comes next, we may not recognize it for a while.
Ellen Wolter:That's Tim Marima, editor of the Daily Yonder and cofounding member of the Center for Rural Strategies, a national rural news platform. He's talking about the current news ecosystem and how it is being reimagined. News deserts continue to increase, particularly in rural areas, and impacts how we understand our communities and our neighbors. Northwestern University reported in 2023 that The US lost an average of more than two newspapers per week. The Rebuild Local News Organization reported that there has been a 60% drop in the number of journalists in the last twenty years.
Ellen Wolter:Tim joined me for a conversation about the evolution of the news ecosystem, including the fragmentation and nationalization of news and its implications on understanding rural and urban communities. Tim also discussed the challenges of defining rural in the news and innovations in journalism like the role of nonprofit news organizations that have the potential to enhance the connection between rural and urban areas through new voices and storytelling approaches.
Ellen Wolter:When they've all had their quarrels imparted, we'll be the same as we started just to travel along singing a song side by side.
Ellen Wolter:This is Ellen Wolter from
Ellen Wolter:the University of Minnesota Extension, and this is
Ellen Wolter:the side by side podcast. Why should rural folks care about what's happening in urban places, and why should urban folks care about what's happening in rural places?
Tim Marema:The kind of academic answer is that we are interdependent. John Dunn asked not for whom the bell tolls. We're all in it together. The health of urban areas depends on the health of rural areas and vice versa. It's impossible to think about how you feed people in urban areas and create energy for urban areas and concerns about modern life that depend on rural America being there and providing those things.
Tim Marema:Also, our culture and our heritage is rooted in so many rural traditions and rural ways of life. How do we think about American music without the Delta Blues? How do we consider the impact of early country radio on all of American music groups like the Carter family? And that's only scratching the surface, And it works both ways. We affect each other economically and culturally and socially.
Tim Marema:We just we're there's no getting rid of either one of us, it seems like.
Ellen Wolter:There's I like that. There's no getting rid of either one of us. We are kinda stuck together. That's true. That's true.
Ellen Wolter:Well, especially with rural places, you know, rural people are often written about, so it's very few news that is written by and for rural people. So I'm wondering if you can just share a little bit about your work with rural strategies and the daily yonder and and some of the things that you're you're trying to do.
Tim Marema:I'd say our approach first and foremost is trying to be culturally aware of how rural people receive information, what they see is relevant, and how you deliver that information to someone in a way that they can actually hear it without getting stuck on the the hurdles, the little pitfalls that we're liable to step into about how we portray people. You know, I have a chip on my shoulder about certain things and the ways some rural topics are discussed irritate me because I feel like they really don't understand what's happening in a rural place or in my community. And we're all that way. It's not just a rural thing. You know?
Tim Marema:If you're Dutch American and they talk about the Dutch in a certain way, and it's like, that's not how it is. There are these there are these little pitfalls that we invariably put in our communication that can alienate and irritate and take people off the intention and content. And so our intention with the Daily Yonder is to provide coverage of rural issues and related topics in a way that honors rural places, does not hold them up as any less than or more than any other place, attempts to understand and deliver information that is culturally appropriate that people can hear. There's a lot of really good coverage of rural policy, rural conditions, economics, school systems, most of that is produced by excellent national news organizations. You know, the stuff I see at the national level.
Tim Marema:It is and not to take anything away from it, but, you know, the New York Times is edited toward an audience of urban, essentially elites, not just in America, but internationally. It's an international audience that understands things a certain way. They don't understand how fun it is to go four wheeling. They think that hunting may be just the activity that they would ever consider doing. They may think of the church as an alienating presence in politics, not that place I go to where I see my friends and my people and have a great potluck.
Tim Marema:And those are just a few of the examples of all the different ways that there might be some culturally specific aspects of rural living that they're gonna be misunderstood one way or the other. You know, the New York Times frequently, when there's a story about rural America, talks about a hamlet. And it's like, calls their town a hamlet? Nobody calls yeah. I never heard the word hamlet in a community.
Tim Marema:I'm going down to the hamlet. Things like that that just are kinda indicators that it's not this is not for us. This is not written for us. This is not edited for us.
Ellen Wolter:One of the examples I have is there was a a story about a year ago that talked about a a rural space and their position on a particular policy. And I read the article, and and in fact, they weren't it wasn't even a rural place. They were misrepresenting that place as rural. You probably know this, Tim, but you can for grant writing purposes, you can go in and and determine whether or not a place is rural. And so there's many different definitions of rural, but I entered in this I think it was, like, West Palm Beach, and no definition that I saw identified it as rural.
Tim Marema:Well, it's a it is a fraught, definition for sure, and there's, you know, over a dozen ways just simply that the federal government in funding programs, maybe many more than that, but, defines rural. And no definition is, perfect, but, you know, Central Park is not rural just because it has a lot of grass in it. And a small town, it can be urban population by a census definition because of the population density, but culturally, it's a market center for a rural area. And so it all depends on what issue you're talking about and, frankly, what point you're trying to prove a lot of times, unfortunately. But I see it defined or not defined all sorts of different ways.
Tim Marema:Political analysis, is fond of finding ways to politically alienate rural America and to define suburbs in a certain way that groups them with rural America or with urban America for the benefit of whatever. And I do it myself. I know that. I have to use definitions and, you know, when the numbers are there, you gotta have some kind of justification and system and categories. But it's it at best, we have to take it with a grain of salt and to try to understand the limitations of the definition we're using for the topic that we're trying to explore.
Ellen Wolter:Mhmm.
Ellen Wolter:One of the things that I was, I guess, not surprised, but it put a name to something that I I was experiencing in in my own life was this idea that news today has become much more fragmented and and much more nationalized. So if you don't have those those local newspapers, how are folks understanding rural and the nuances of rural and and urban communities as well. So I'm just wondering what what did the news ecosystem look like when you started, and and how has it changed? How have you seen things change over time into what what we have today?
Tim Marema:My first job was at my hometown weekly newspaper, which at the time was owned by Berea College where I was going to school, and my labor assignment was to work there. I had a manual typewriter and, you know, fifteen, twenty hours a week and cop's log and general assignment and help paste up ads in the composing room and just anything needed doing and tried to learn a little bit about journalism while doing it. In that time, shortly before then, I think that the Lexington Herald Leader had been purchased by the Knight Ritter Corporation, and it improved. And with the chain purchasing it, it it developed more of a metro of a bureau system to cover other parts of the state, especially Eastern Kentucky. The Courier Journal was up in Louisville and had a big, statewide footprint, television stations in Lexington and Louisville.
Tim Marema:So there was and weeklies and probably to much degree are still part of that ecosystem. And there was kind of a different footprints for different media, all of which kinda come complemented the other. Metro papers would look at the weeklies for story ideas, and that's where a lot of story ideas would come from is like, here's a topic that's interesting. I'll go explore some more in that. The weeklies traditionally, those were the places where community announcements, church announcements, school lunch menus, honor roll, local sports, all of it, plus the city council news and county commission and school board and all that stuff, it all went into there.
Tim Marema:And so it was a de facto paper of record for the community in the best case. There's a book written by Phil Meyer, is one of my professors at UNC journalism school called the vanishing newspaper, and he traces this erosion of that sort of central, newspaper of record. Everything's in there. All things to all people strategy as eroding way back as soon as direct marketing mail began. The advertisers are always looking for a more like, they don't wanna pay to reach 10,000 people when there's only 300 people that are gonna buy a couch.
Tim Marema:They wanna reach the people who are gonna buy a couch. And as soon as these mechanisms came up to reach people more specifically, then the ad base starts to decline. And we've seen the ultimate version of that with digital ads that are geolocated around where you are or what your last web search was or where you've been shopping. So that revenue base for a weekly erodes. That also happens with the metro dailies because you don't have to you you don't have to get your ad in front of the people.
Tim Marema:And I think that coupled with the technology change has allowed massive fragmentation of information. So we don't get it from one place. It's not vetted through a series of editors. It comes to us from in in the best case, it comes to us from this the school board with a announcement about a new policy because you're on their email list. Or your church has a newsletter and you find out about, Habitat for Humanity project.
Tim Marema:Or the Lions Club is communicating with you about this or that. So instead of having to do that through the newspaper, they can do it individually. And that's kind of your best case scenario. That's people with good intentions and good information. It's also opened us up to this whole political discourse based on mistrust and divisiveness and fighting and outright lies.
Tim Marema:And there are those actors in the universe too, and they can get at us just the same way as, the Lions Club can now.
Ellen Wolter:Tim, you know, maybe this is obvious, but I think one of the things that that I've seen at least, and it goes to just exactly what you're describing, is you're getting your news about a particular place or from a particular organization or a particular association. And so rural people tend to be learning about what's happening in their rural communities to the extent that they have news outlets available to them. That's, of course, changing. And then urban folks are are learning about what's happening in in their communities. And so there doesn't seem to be as much connection or understanding about each other.
Ellen Wolter:Urban folks learning what's happening in in rural areas. Probably, it's the case that urban folks are learning more about rural areas, but with some of the caveats that we just, discussed. Right? But I'm curious if thirty years ago, there was a healthy enough news ecosystem where that wasn't happening as much? Would you say that there was a case where folks really were understanding each other and learning about each other, or maybe that's just an idealized version of of a healthy news ecosystem?
Tim Marema:It's it's easy to romanticize yesterday, and I'm guilty of that myself. I love being in a newsroom with a bunch of idiosyncratic individuals and having access to what I considered the early days of the worldwide web, which was the newswire system, reading the New York Times, Newswire, the Associated Press, and the Wall Street Journal, and on and on and on. The reality of kind of a metro daily is that in the best circumstance, it was holding up the community, holding a mirror to the community and shining a light on things within communities, and it was a common reference point. Something gets in the newspaper. Most people know about it.
Tim Marema:That's not the case as much anymore. But the other part of that is that there was agenda setting going on that I wasn't aware of when I was doing it. I was part of it, and I didn't understand it. I was a fish in water kind of syndrome of what stories we chose to cover, how we portrayed people in non mainstream situations, whether that was by culture or race or economic status or citizenship or whatever. And I think we all hoped when the Internet built up that, you know, those early days, it was everybody's gonna be on an equal footing to participate and communicate with everybody else.
Tim Marema:And there's been a lot of truth in that the agenda setting mechanism of old school journalism has sort of been shattered. And the good thing is that, voices that we didn't hear before are getting out there, voices I didn't I was not aware of as a working journalist and that I didn't consider. My mind has been changed. But human nature being what it is, we didn't anticipate how the communication systems and the lack of kind of a centralized gatekeeper would also allow people with ill intentions to communicate in ways to try to manipulate people and mislead and misinform. So it's a double edged sword.
Ellen Wolter:What do you think is needed to to build a healthier news ecosystem that better connects across rural and urban spaces?
Tim Marema:Well, my friend, Bill Bishop, who lives in La Grange, Texas, Fayette County, incidentally, three weekly newspapers, he said, very high readership. He says that the distrust of institutions, which is a phenomenon that's been occurring for fifty years or so, a gradual decline in trust in institutions like government, the church, journalism, that that started it kind of is a precursor to the decline in readership of newspapers. It wasn't like people stopped reading the newspaper and then their trust went down. Their trust went down, then they stopped reading the newspaper. Now I think journalism is a central part of any healthy community.
Tim Marema:You've got to have good information and knowledge of who's in your community and what the issues are. And I would never say that we don't need it, but we have to be careful about assigning it a causal ability that if we fix journalism, we can fix our communities, I think. Mhmm. Mhmm. So how to address the larger issues of lack of civility in local politics, which I have seen in my own community, nationalization of issues that come down to the local level.
Tim Marema:And the only purpose they serve is to make people angry and to get them stirred up about a national topic at the local level. Getting accurate, timely, reasonable information in front of people is important. It doesn't fix those things by itself. So I would say getting efforts that help us interact with our neighbors directly. And a lot of us, our way of interacting is, well, we should get together and talk about our differences and come to some understanding.
Tim Marema:And, really, I think the most effective way is to get out there and do something. Build a house together for Habitat or coach a little league team together or teach Sunday school with somebody who's different or any of those activities that build connection in ways that are not about politics but about local service and common care for other human beings in our community.
Ellen Wolter:Tim, I appreciate you bringing up this idea that we can't say that, you know, if the news ecosystem was healthier, then that would save democracy or save all the issues that we're having. And all of these wicked problems, they take many different solutions and ideas, and they're caused by many different things. Right? So I appreciate you highlighting that.
Tim Marema:Man, if only people voted based on something rational, like what information they had received. Political science would be a lot easier. Journalism would be a lot easier. The reality of political choice, especially in a two party system like we have at the you know, at for the state house in most cases and definitely for all the federal offices. Why do people vote the way they do?
Tim Marema:It's so hard to say. You've got the two choices. Your reason for voting for that person to that topic, their poll their stand on a particular issue. When you could be looking at them and saying, well, I I'm really voting for them for these five other reasons. I don't know why people are voting the way they are in most cases.
Tim Marema:So rural areas, there is more likelihood of I would say it's true that there's less access to information as a rule in less developed areas. Broadband access is a little lower. It could be more cost prohibitive to people because rural incomes tend to be lower than urban. There may not be a TV station. There may be a radio station, and there may be a newspaper.
Tim Marema:There's any number of reasons why there's less information in rural areas. To say that that itself in a particular political response as measurable as a vote is really hard. I'm really comfortable with saying it it can interfere with our understanding of what's going on in our community and who our neighbors are and what we ought to be focusing on, how our local money is spent publicly, how good our kids are doing in school. You know, that definitely, it can affect all of that. But, again, it's really hard to assign a response to that lack of information.
Ellen Wolter:Well, in addition to the to the Daily Yonder, what other kind of innovations or or things that you have seen that you feel hopeful about are our future news ecosystem and our ability to bridge across rural and urban spaces. So just curious what you're seeing and what you think might be on the horizon.
Tim Marema:So a few things make me feel good. When we started in 02/2007, there was not a large body of nonprofit news organizations. So we are nonprofit. We're part of a five zero one c three organization, the Center for Rural Strategies. There is now, hundreds of these outlets.
Tim Marema:They cover places the way a local newspaper might have it back in the day. They cover topics like we do focused on rural issues nationally. There's, Marshall Project focuses on the criminal justice system in The United States. ProPublica looks at government accountability, nationally and works with local news organizations as well. GRIST is a, environmental national publication.
Tim Marema:And then there's any number of like Honolulu Civic Beat, which looks at Hawaii or what in Michigan under the bridge, I think, or the bridge is a nonprofit looking at Michigan. There's States News, which has affiliates in many different states and a national presence. These are all nonprofits. They're all supported either by foundations or individual donors or maybe some revenue from underwriters. And, you know, for a long time, that's been the growth area for anybody kinda coming into the trade.
Tim Marema:Nonprofit news has been where there are actual jobs for people to find. In my experience, it it may not be growing quite as much as it was, but I still think it's a growth area as opposed to daily newspapers, have cut and cut and cut. So that makes me optimistic that people see they think it's important. They're supporting it. There are smart people who are figuring out business models and doing the coverage.
Tim Marema:The Daily Yonder, I would put kinda right right in the middle of that effort. So that's one whole aspect, and that's sort of like a traditional news organization. There are kind of these hybrid models now that are more like civic organizations trying to fill the role for information. There are or more specific instances where they're using text to send community information to people in an area affected by an issue. And this gets it's usually around maybe an issue like development topics or environmental concerns.
Tim Marema:So and there are apps that that allow people to communicate in theory to share what's going on in their communities. And those are sort of these interesting hybrids of a news org is it a news organization, or is it a community organization, or is it you know? And a lot of this, it's not going to look like what it was in the past. It's gonna be different. And whatever comes next, and I hope lots of things come next, I don't think it's gonna be we may not recognize it for a while.
Ellen Wolter:Mhmm.
Ellen Wolter:Yeah. And and you already you already pointed out some of the pros, right, of of having that fragmented system, which is different stories, new voices. But thank you for that. You just named so many outlets that I have not heard of.
Tim Marema:And just, so MinnPost is a member of that is a nonprofit news entity in Minneapolis and serving other parts of Minnesota as well.
Ellen Wolter:Well, Tim, thank you so much for your time today and your your insights on news and and connecting across rural and urban spaces. We really appreciate it.
Tim Marema:Thank you for talking to me about this. I appreciate it a lot.
Ellen Wolter:Thank you for listening to side by side. We welcome your emails at sidebyside@umn.edu. Side by side is a production of the University of Minnesota Extension and is written and hosted by me, Ellen Wolter. Special thanks to Jan Jackola, who designed our wonderful logo, and Jim Griswold, who sings and plays guitar in our opening and closing credits. You can find episodes of side by side wherever you get your podcasts.
Ellen Wolter:We'll be back next week with another episode. I'm Ellen Wolter, and this is side by side.
