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The Death Of A Local Newspaper Rocks America To Its Core

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The Death Of A Local Newspaper Rocks America To Its Core

The family-owned newspaper announced in June — just days after celebrating its 150th anniversary — that it is permanently ceasing production on Aug. 31. The paper, which started in 1869 just months after Ulysses S. Grant was sworn into office, has been run by the descendants of William F. Maag ever since he purchased the paper midway through Grover Cleveland’s first term.
The closure will cost 144 employees and 250 carriers their jobs and comes just weeks after the GM Lordstown plant down the road turned out the lights, leading to thousands of job losses.
It is one of a series of gut-punches that has dented this area’s spirit since the collapse of the steel industry in September 1977. But losing a local newspaper feels like a bigger blow than most.
“Newspapers are the watchdogs who hold our civic institutions accountable and act as a cheerleader for the unique fabrics in our society,” Democratic presidential candidate Rep. Tim Ryan, the congressman who represents this region, told The Post.
As a young high-school football star, Ryan said he enjoyed glowing coverage in The Vindicator and as an elected official, he has felt the sting of its criticism.

“We’ve had our share of tensions and they certainly have held me accountable, but that is their job — to be that check on government — and I cannot imagine our community without them,” he said.

Closures like The Vindicator’s are sadly more common than ever across the country as old-school newsrooms struggle to compete with digital operations that aggregate web content but lack editorial oversight or seasoned reporters who have a deep understanding of their local area.

In the past 15 years, the country has lost over 1,800 local news organizations, according to a report by the University of North Carolina’s Center for Innovation and Sustainability in Local Media. Half of the country’s 3,143 counties have just one newspaper to cover sprawling, often isolated territories, while nearly 200 counties in the country have no local newspaper at all, the report said.

“A local newspaper is to a community what a central nervous system is to a body,” said Paul Sracic, a political science professor at Youngstown State University. “Like the nerves in our body, the newspaper transmits vital and non-vital information throughout the community.”

And without that, it’s very difficult for a community to maintain its sense of self.

At the local school, Becky Ford has used The Vindicator (formerly known as The Youngstown Vindicator) as a resource for the American history and social-studies classes she teaches. She also relies on it to stay connected with her community. “For us, it was like our New York Times,” Ford said. “Sports, features, local social clubs, volunteer activities, class reunions … you name it, they did it. If you called The Vindicator and asked [them] to be at your event, they were at your event taking pictures.”

High-school athletes, in particular, will suffer from a lack of coverage, said Rick Shepas, athletic director of Youngstown city schools.

It will be “devastating for the kids and their families not to have The Vindicator write those daily articles about the student-athlete’s accomplishments both on and off the field,” he said.

After 150 years of chronicling the Ohio Valley beginning with the Reconstruction, followed by the Industrial Revolution, two World Wars, a Great Depression, civil rights, a moon landing, the Vietnam War, Watergate, 9/11 and the rise of populism, it is hard to believe that The Vindicator is no more.Mark Brown, general manager of the 

Although the Internet is a great source of information, the virtual communities that exist on sites like Reddit aren’t local or even identifiable.

Youngstown Mayor Jamael Tito Brown worries that the disruption caused by the paper’s closure won’t stop at the city line.

“This is a problem for our whole country,” Brown said. “Communities suffer when local journalism closes up shop, and we lose our vitality and connection to each other when that door closes for the last time.

“The bigger problem is: How are we going to stop those doors from closing here — or anywhere?”

FOOTNOTE: Salena Zito is the author of “The Great Revolt: Inside the Populist Coalition Reshaping American Politics” (Crown Forum), out now.

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