When a community loses a newspaper

Remember the lyrics to the Joni Mitchell song, “Big Yellow Taxi?” —“Don’t it always seem to go, that you don’t know what you got ‘til it’s gone.” 

She was talking about the environment. However, the same could be said for this newspaper, which was founded in 1959 and could be gone by the end of the year. 

There are many reasons for the steep decline in community papers. A paper’s revenue comes from readers’ subscriptions and advertising. Without these two components, survival as an independent paper is rare. Many factors have occurred over the years creating a perfect storm for these papers’ demise.

According to the Minnesota Center for Rural Policy and Development, the 1980’s saw the beginning of the 24-hour news cycle with CNN and Fox News changing many people’s concept of news gathering. Once the internet and smart phones became commonplace, people’s needs to read a newspaper plummeted.

Craigslist began offering alternatives to classified advertising, which dealt a blow to those back pages of newspapers. But most unkind to papers was the Great Recession, decimating advertising revenue and forcing many papers to close. 

Enter Facebook and Google, whose targeted advertising cost next to nothing. In order to compete, newspapers went online, but they are always playing catch-up to the tech behemoths.

National news is one thing, and this column is not to bemoan the dumbing down of people’s news interests. It is to talk about what a community newspaper does for a small town and what it means to lose it.

A report by the Federal Communications Commission found that local newspapers provide the sort of public service that “shines a light” on the major issues confronting communities and give residents the information they need to analyze these issues. 

For example, on Shelter Island we can follow the back-and-forth on affordable housing and learn what we need to know about the Island’s water situation. We get local election news. We find out what’s happening with the Town Board and the zoning committee.

Recently we’ve been kept up to date on the ongoing efforts to fill Town Supervisor Amber Brach-Williams’ seat on the Town Council. We are informed about how to contain house size — or not. There is not a huge staff. Staff writer Julie Lane tirelessly covers most of it.

Not everyone agrees with what is being written. But imagine Shelter Island as having no place to read about these things at all. And if you don’t like what you’re reading — write a letter to the editor. It will be printed even if it’s angry or divisive. That is what makes a public forum.

The Reporter comes out in print every Thursday. This continued to be true during the pandemic, when for many it was a lifeline for local information. It is easy to forget the isolation that so many people felt during that time. But we could sit inside and read the paper and know we were not alone, but connected to our community.

So, let’s talk about some of the facets of our paper that make it unique.

Yesterday someone said to me, “I read the police blotter every week to make sure my kids aren’t in it.” After all, the blotter is just one of those Island “things” that everyone knows about. It’s as much Shelter Island as the ferry.

We just had the high school graduation issue. Doesn’t everyone love to see what our seniors are doing next year whether we know them or not? And throughout the year we get to see how our teams are faring. The school has its own newspaper, The Inlet, but many of us do not have children in the school and don’t read The Inlet. We read The Reporter.

The Reporter covers the school extensively, giving parents, grandparents and residents in general knowledge of what’s happening in the classroom and in sports and other extracurricular activities. To those in favor of shutting down the school, our coverage shows what an essential institution the school is to Island life.

And the Reporter’s got talent: Our art director Christine Kelly-Smimmo, Susan Carey Dempsey, Bob Lipsyte, Karl Grossman, Charity Robey, Joanne Sherman, James Bornemeier, Jenifer Maxson, Ambrose Clancy, Peter Waldner, Eleanor P. Labrozzi and Adam Bundy. This is a group that could excel in a much larger paper — and oh, yes, most of them have!

This year the Reporter took home a first-place prize from the New York Press Association in one of its most prestigious categories, the Sharon R. Fulmer Award for Community Leadership. The award was presented for a series of articles and editorials written by Julie Lane and Ambrose Clancy about the Shelter Island Heights Pharmacy cutting off Island residents’ access to Medicaid prescriptions, which has since been restored.

But that highly competitive and important prize wasn’t just a one-off. Over the past nine years, the Press Association has honored the Reporter four times with the Community Leadership Award, for series on affordable housing, clean water initiatives and wetlands protections.

Duff Wilson, who spent an entire career as a newspaper reporter, (most recently with The New York Times and Reuters), immediately stepped up to the plate when he learned about the potential loss of the Reporter. He’s galvanized the community to try to find a way to save our paper. This is a work-in-progress with many options being explored.

To get in touch with Duff, email him at [email protected]. 

We hope our readers who feel strongly that Shelter Island needs the Reporter will join the quest.

And one way to ensure a newspaper’s viability is to advertise and subscribe.

Nancy Green is a retired social worker and a contributor to this newspaper.