The News Biz Is In Deep Shiz (2024)

When John Garrett co-founded the first Community Impact Newspaper covering Round Rock and Pflugerville nearly two decades ago, it was with a very specific mission in mind.

“There were actually a lot of really good community papers around in 2005, and our model was never to be a traditional community newspaper – it was always we wanted to be a business journal for the average resident,” Garrett said. “So we wanted to write about our core subjects: transportation, government, local business, economic development, real estate.”

At the time, Garrett said, there were plenty of existing newspapers delivering other kinds of community-focused journalism in suburbs. Papers like the Round Rock Leader, Pflugerville Pflag, Williamson County Sun, and Westlake Picayune all provided reliable coverage of local news, sports, and related goings-on.

“We always took pride in showing up to city council meetings, and when we started, for instance in Round Rock, it would be us and the Round Rock Leader,” Garrett said. “But now, we’re usually the only ones that show up.”

As a result, Garrett said, Community Impact has broadened its coverage to include more reporting on subjects outside its initial purview – and as that has happened, the paper has expanded throughout the Austin metro area and on into San Antonio, Houston, and Dallas. Next up, Garrett said, is more statewide coverage. “It’s changed dramatically,” he said. At the same time, they’ve had layoffs in recent years.

It’s hard to find a newspaper today that hasn’t experienced a recent round of layoffs. Over the last several decades, the American newspaper industry has been decimated. Newspaper newsroom employment fell by 57% between 2008 and 2020. And with America’s rural population shrinking, poorer, more rural communities have been most significantly impacted by the loss of local media.

But towns in the counties around Austin don’t look anything like rural communities in much of the rest of the country: in the same frame of time as local newspapers have declined and small towns have lost population during the last decade, the runaway growth of Austin proper has fueled extraordinary growth in its surrounding communities. As a result, many of the towns in those counties have become increasingly suburban – flush with new residents, new capital, and new political and cultural relevance to the state at large.

The question for newspaper publishers, editors, and reporters in those places, then, is whether they can figure out how to use that growth to finance and sustain their independent journalism. It’s work that a variety of publications with varied histories and missions are taking on – grappling not just with questions about the viability of different newsroom models but also with questions about how to help form and sustain community in rapidly changing places.

News on a Losing Streak

The region as a whole has not, by any means, been immune from the national downturn in the media industry. Even in Austin proper, which has a relatively robust local media landscape, a number of publications have suffered setbacks. Last spring, the Texas Observer, the Austin-based progressive magazine once led by Molly Ivins, was set to be shut down after nearly seven decades in print. A last-minute crowdsourcing effort raised the funds required to keep the magazine open, and the Observer is operating leanly with two staff writers and a handful of other full-time editorial employees.

Austin’s daily newspaper, the Austin American-Statesman, has faced similar challenges since being taken over by Gannett in 2019. The paper’s daily print circulation has plummeted from 136,980 in 2010 to less than 27,000 in 2022, while the paper’s staff has been cut in half since 2018. In February, staffers in the Austin NewsGuild union walked out on a one-day strike as contract negotiations with the paper’s parent company Gannett stalled. They want an increase in minimum annual pay from $42,000 to $60,000 in a city where a single adult needs to make an annual post-tax salary of around $55,000 to live comfortably.

Even The Texas Tribune, the nonprofit newsroom launched in 2009, endured its first-ever round of layoffs in August of last year when 11 journalists, including the newsroom’s entire copy desk, lost their jobs. In a note announcing the layoffs, Tribune CEO Sonal Shah wrote that “changes in the industry, the unsteady economy and the need to explore new platforms and modes of storytelling” had contributed to an unexpectedly difficult year.

“There are, of course, other challenges facing the media industry: AI, uneven news readership and engagement, changing audience behaviors and the growing phenomenon of news avoidance,” Shah wrote. “There is no media company – commercial, nonprofit or public – that isn’t experiencing some version of this.”

Indeed, 2024 has already been a brutal year for media workers at national publications – with layoffs affecting journalists at publications including VICE Media, Time magazine, Sports Illustrated, the Los Angeles Times, The Intercept, and more outlets. (The Austin Chronicle has also eliminated several positions in the last 12 months.)

The state of small-town news is, in many respects, even more grim. The Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University found that an average two-and-a-half newspapers were shuttered each week last year, leaving more than half the counties in the U.S. with no access or very limited access to local news. Since 2005, the country has lost two-thirds of its newspaper reporters – the majority of whom worked at large city or regional papers. The loss of reliable local news, along with disinformation in the social media news environment, has been linked to deepening political divisions that are contributing to the democratic decline the country is currently experiencing.

Although Texas is often touted as “the best state for business,” the state has not been shielded from this trend. Despite population growth, Texas newspapers as a whole lost more than a million subscribers between 2004 and 2019, with trendlines suggesting a further drop since then. According to the Hussman School of Journalism and Media at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 21 Texas counties have no local newspaper and 134 others are down to just one.

But the situation in the counties around Austin is significantly rosier: all the counties bordering Travis County have multiple newspapers and are not, according to the standard definitions, considered news deserts.

Population Boom and Culture Change

This may be in part because, while much of small-town America is experiencing economic decline, Central Texas is in a different position.

For the first time in two decades, more people left Travis County between July 2022 and July 2023 than moved in. U.S. Census Bureau data suggests many people aren’t going far. Williamson County added more than 20,000 residents during the same period, with Hays County also adding population. Further afield, towns in Caldwell and Bastrop counties have also grown significantly since Austin’s population boom has slowed.

“They have something like 1,800 homes either being built or in the planning stage, and there’s a new development [being approved] either at city council or the county commission every other week it seems like,” said Kyle Mooty, a Pulitzer Prize nominee who edits the Lockhart Post-Register. “And it’s all Austin, bursting at the seams.”

Mooty is from Eufaula, Alabama, a small town on the Chattahoochee River, and has worked at newspapers in 10 different states. Two years ago, family connections drew him to Central Texas from a job in northwest Arkansas. When he arrived, he found a region booming.

“We can’t do everything. There’s so much to cover, but that’s okay – we cover the necessities,” Mooty said. “And it usually means money coming in, as long as there’s businesses supporting everything. Not everyone advertises [with the newspaper] – but obviously when you’ve got that many businesses competing, they’re going to get their word out, and they’ve got to get it out somewhere.”

Austinites Take Notice

As the populations of the counties outside of Austin have boomed, a range of major media organizations within the city and farther south in San Antonio have begun to take notice.

“Hays and Caldwell were not ever covered by Austin and San Antonio media outlets, and in the last few years, that has changed,” said Jordan Buckley, the founder of the new outlet Caldwell/Hays Examiner. “I don’t know if it’s because there’s a grassroots organization [Mano Amiga, which Buckley used to work for] doing amazing work and uncovering salacious information about people in power and floating it to them, or just the fact that these counties are growing so massively, but it’s not quite the desert it once was.”

It may also be that the patterns of coverage have changed. Clark Thurmond, the co-publisher of The Williamson County Sun, said that years ago the Statesman had a news bureau in Williamson County. But while major news organizations in Austin don’t have the reporters dedicated to suburban counties that they once did, news happening in those counties seems to be of serious interest to city readers.

In the last several years, a number of Austin-based media outlets have dedicated significant time and resources to covering the Round Rock Independent School District, conditions at the Hays County Jail, and the arrival of Samsung in Taylor, for example.

The interest from Austin media may speak to the growing profile of its surrounding counties, but it remains to be seen how its new arrivals may change the media landscape there. Indeed, Thurmond suggested the important issue for his newspaper is not how many people are living in Williamson County, but how long they’ve been living there.

Not Quite Austinites

Thurmond recalled that, about 20 years ago, Williamson County did a survey of where people were getting their local news from. The results were striking – suggesting not any kind of political or age divide, but rather a divide between newer and more well-established residents.

“If they’d been here a year, they got their news mainly from television,” Thurmond said. “And the TV guys, the Statesman, generally wouldn’t come up here unless there was something really exciting, spicy, that would be of interest to people. So that was what we saw when they were here for a year. But by the time they’d been here five years, the whole thing had flipped. They got their city news from The Williamson County Sun.”

For this reason, he said, an influx of new residents to outlying counties might not immediately benefit their newspapers. But if those residents stay and build their lives in the county, investing in its politics, schools, and communal life, it might. One of the keys to newspaper viability, Thurmond said, is existing in a “community that thinks it’s a community.” All the new arrivals can be great for business – and are almost certainly great for the businesses that might advertise with the paper – but only if they understand themselves as part of a civic whole.

For now, Thurmond said, he’s seeing changes in the town’s engagement in its civic life.

“There’s not that many people in the community now who are as interested in city politics now as they were before when the community was smaller,” he said. “And that’s just because they’re new, generally speaking. If they’re going to be here for three years and leave, it’s pretty hard to connect. But that fast growth means we don’t see a lot of those folks coming into the paper. But if they stay in town, we will begin to see them as subscribers.”

The Williamson County Sun needs new readers and advertisers. Thurmond said the paper’s circulation is about half of what it was at its peak nearly a decade ago and said the COVID pandemic cut into advertising revenue – with H-E-B’s decision to pull back on advertisem*nts as a particularly tough blow.

Thurmond co-publishes the paper with his wife Linda Scarbrough, whose parents bought it in 1948. Though Linda recently turned 80, Thurmond said the couple plans to work into the foreseeable future – carrying forward a family newspaper legacy that dates back nearly eight decades. But that kind of longevity and stability in newspaper ownership is becoming more and more rare as the industry’s struggles have been compounded by hedge funds purchasing papers and drastically reducing the size of their newsrooms.

New Types of News

At the same time, the major changes underway in the communal lives of the counties outside of Austin have created openings for new kinds of media ventures led by a new crop of journalists.

Buckley, for instance, came to the industry by way of his organizing efforts. Buckley grew up in Austin and attended the University of Texas, living in Guatemala and organizing with farmworkers in Florida before returning to Texas several years ago. Upon his return, he was dismayed by the conservative lean of the local news he was seeing.

“The origin [of my interest] stems from seeing the way in which the right in Hays County used this San Marcos Corridor News website that masqueraded as a legitimate news source most of the year and then became a dumpster fire in election season,” Buckley said.

The San Marcos Corridor News hasn’t published regularly since the summer of 2022, but the publication’s impact during its life span planted an idea in Buckley’s mind: He could start a local news organization that would highlight issues important to the burgeoning progressive movement in Hays County.

Before diving into the project, Buckley spent time at the public library in San Marcos researching the city’s newspaper history – drawing inspiration from La Otra Voz, a Chicano newspaper that was published in San Marcos during the Seventies, as well as the Hays County Guardian, another short-lived newspaper that highlighted ecological concerns when it was published during the Nineties.

In 2021, Buckley launched the Caldwell/Hays Examiner on Facebook – working to bring in a following that could, ultimately, help support a print edition. In February, the newspaper came out with the first of its monthly print editions. It’s now printing 3,000 copies each month, which are available for no cost at more than 50 newsstands throughout the area.

Print editions of the newspaper may include community portraits, original crossword puzzles, and bar reviews, but the paper’s main focus is its investigative reporting on issues Buckley feels have long been overlooked by the area’s media establishment. Recent stories have focused on maternal health care, police accountability, and a local aviation company’s role in transporting migrants at the behest of Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida. The cash bail system is another focus. The Examiner was a plaintiff with The Texas Tribune in a suit against Caldwell County over barring journalists from bail hearings – earlier this year, a federal judge ordered the county to make these hearings public.

“I want for it to continue to be a movement-adjacent publication that’s kind of grounded in the experiences of people that often don’t see their issues and culture and concerns reflected in mainstream journalism,” Buckley said of the newspaper.

If the paper’s editorial bent is new for its market, numbers suggest it’s not out of place. In 2000, George W. Bush won 59% of the vote in Hays County and 68% in Williamson County. Two decades later, both counties supported Joe Biden over Donald Trump.

Versus the Internet

Buckley’s approach and the tone of his publication are tests of Hays County’s appetite for a sharp-edged, progressive publication, as well as a test of one of the significant new models for funding journalism: the Caldwell/Hays Examiner is a nonprofit newsroom that currently relies on two major donors for support (he declined to name them). So far, it’s a lean operation: The paper has one full-time employee and one half-time employee who does graphic design, produces videos, and works on the paper’s layout.

Some believe the incursion of venture capital into the newspaper industry has had an outsize and unaccountable effect on it. The percentage of newspapers owned by private equity increased by nearly five times between 2001 and 2019, with firms frequently gutting newspapers to cut costs and then profiting off of newspaper bankruptcies.

Even for newspapers like Community Impact that haven’t been purchased and stripped by hedge funds, the upheavals of the last 25 years have proved challenging. Garrett noted that part of the challenge for newspapers, even in growing regions like Central Texas, is that businesses are spending their advertising dollars on platforms that didn’t even exist a generation ago.

“When we started, we used to compete [for advertising] with the Austin American-Statesman,” Garrett said. “We don’t anymore. They’re not even on the radar – and that’s bad for us. When there’s more people that are advertising in local news, it creates a market just like a Home Depot and a Lowe’s create a market. The money didn’t go away. You know where the money went? It went to Google and Meta. That’s where the money went.”

Dousing the Fire

The dramatic rise of social media platforms as de facto newspapers has been exhaustively covered and debated in the rise of the 2016 presidential election, with plenty in both the Democratic and Republican parties interested in regulating platforms like Meta to combat disinformation and polarization.

Some legislators are, at the same time, showing interest in working to combat those forces from a different direction – by using state resources to help revive the newspaper industry. The Journalism Competition and Preservation Act, which has bipartisan support in Congress, would empower newspapers to collectively bargain with major tech companies to receive compensation in exchange for those companies’ use of their content. The Local Journalism Sustainability Act, which also boasts bipartisan congressional support, would provide a range of tax credits to media outlets, people who subscribe to local media outlets, and to small businesses who advertise with them.

Those bills, which both stalled in committee in recent sessions of Congress, are just the beginning of possible government interventions designed to boost the industry. Other proposals include using antitrust laws to break up the hedge funds that own nearly half of the country’s newspapers, directing the federal government to spend a portion of its own sizable advertising outlay in local media each year, and directing some of the $100 billion the federal government is spending on broadband expansion into local news organizations to bolster their online presences.

Other proposals for saving the industry have focused on new ownership models, with nonprofit and cooperatively owned newsrooms increasingly emerging in markets across the country. Philanthropy, while not enough to save the industry outright, has played a part in the process of attempting to restabilize the industry as well: Megan Navarro, for instance, started at the Hays Free Press as an intern with a position through the Dow Jones News Fund and stayed on after her internship ended. She now edits the paper and commutes to Hays County periodically from her West Texas home in Fort Stockton.

Fundamentally, Garrett said, people still want and read local news. That is likely a major part of the reason why, despite its myriad and well-documented challenges, the newspaper industry remains profitable: In 2021, the industry generated nearly $21 billion in revenue. In Central Texas, Garrett sees the relationship between news media and communities as symbiotic – arguing that they’re most likely to rise and fall together.

“The stronger the news ecosystems are, the stronger the communities are,” Garrett said. “And the stronger communities are, the stronger we’re going to be.”

Editor's Note Monday, July 29, 10:10am: This story previously stated the Statesman was purchased by Gannett in 2019; GateHouse purchased the paper in 2018 and merged with Gannett in 2019. The Chronicle regrets the error.