Politicians have long liked to say this or that is “the challenge of our time.” It’s an over-used phrase, but for those of us born after World War II, the coronavirus pandemic is surely that. And it is especially a challenge for community newspapers because it comes on top of another unprecedented challenge they already faced. How will they respond?

“What happens when the news is gone?” The New Yorker magazine asked in January, in its headline over a long story about the failing local-news ecosystem in Jones County, North Carolina. It is the best case study of the local-journalism crisis I’ve seen, and we did a Rural Blog item about it at https://tinyurl.com/tnqk4au.

Newspapers cover almost every imaginable topic, but when it comes to understanding and explaining their own roles in society, many community newspapers fall short.
They keep doing business and journalism pretty much like they always did, with digital media as a sideline because they can’t make much money at it. Their presence on social media is often desultory and uninspired, even though social media have become the dominant form of mass communication.

PORTLAND, Oregon – Small, rural newspapers can win open-records battles with state agencies and beat larger news outlets at covering big stories in their communities, says a journalist who spent most of his career at a metropolitan daily but has returned to the business of publishing a rural weekly.