The long, slow demise

Some years ago, when  I taught journalism, Aberdeen had a fairly bustling news cadre working the area.  A news team operated out of KABY TV, which is now a satellite transmitter for KSFY in Sioux Falls.  KELO TV had a correspondent stationed in town. Three radio stations had news staffs working the region.  And there was the local newspaper, which is about all that remains in terms of a coverage presence. There was an abundance of news personnel to draw upon to give students some insights into the realities of the working press.

When there was a news conference or a significant event, journalism students could attend and see working journalists in action.  One could give students practical assignments to write their own news stories about the event and the compare them with the work of the professional press.  One such occasion was during the presidential campaign of George H. W. Bush  (president 41) when his campaign seemed to be lagging.  He came to the student union at Northern State as part of a movement to re-energize his campaign.  The journalism students became part of a large contingent of reporters, regional and national, and produced some impressive coverage, but more importantly got a first-hand experience in how the press handles such occasions.

Now there are no television newspeople stationed in Aberdeen.  Radio stations are programmed digitally from remote locations, so they have no announcing staffs, let alone news people.  

And the newspaper recently eliminated seven staff members, including two from news.  As most news media depend on advertising for their revenue, changes in the economy have a direct effect on their news operations.  The Internet has been an earth-shattering event for news media.  It has siphoned off the news audience with online sources.  And it has eliminated advertising revenues to a large degree because of the online competition in the retail market.

Newspapers for a time enjoyed a surge in revenues with the building of shopping malls.  Stores in malls advertised so much that some newspapers maintained advertising offices in the malls.  Newspapers delivered to homes burgeoned with advertising and were fat with flyers.  But now malls are struggling to survive store closings.  The Aberdeen Mall was a case in point.

The Aberdeen Mall opened with three department stores as anchors:  Walmart, J.C. Penney, and Herberger's.  Walmart built its own center across the street and moved out.  J.C. Penney closed as it shut down a number of its stores throughout the country.  Its mall store in Aberdeen was managed as a boutique whereas its old downtown store relied heavily on children's clothes, workwear, and a line of moderately priced clothing as its main  sources of revenue.  Herberger's, which is having a going-out-of-business sale, will close late this summer, leaving the mall to some scattered specialty merchandisers.  The Sears store is also closing.  The company which owns the mall is known to be on shaky footing, as malls throughout the country are becoming dead malls.  The Aberdeen Mall may be a candidate for that status.

Dead malls portend ill for the news business.  The absence of malls and stores means an absence of the sources of advertising revenue for the media.   Dead malls mean dead media, which means dead minds.


Journalism is the nervous system of democracies.  It records the routine workings of government and organizations that serve the people and signals when things are working.  It signals the problems when things are going wrong.  When journalism in a community diminishes, it is a sign of poor health.  The signals of things working and the alarms of problems are muted.  One or very few sources of journalism are a sign of an economy not robust enough to support it.  Dead malls make for diminished newspapers and radio stations.  They signify a redirection of the flow of money, most of it out of the community.  And diminished sources of journalism result.  TV news and online media tell what is happening in the world and the nation's capitol,  but where local media has shriveled away, people don't know what is going in their local communities.  They get word-of-mouth and online social media accounts, which are inaccurate and often just not true.  And the remaining media gets fearful about offending anyone and losing more of its audience, so it focuses on "feel good" news and avoids anything some might find negative.

Consequently, people often do not know the state of their local community. As one person said on Facebook,  while things around them are deteriorating, the news pages are filled with kids and kittens and someone who makes toothbrush holders for unicorns.  News coverage gets displaced by the desperate attempts to ignore the reasons  for declining revenue and to project optimism even if the facts point to dismal factors.  In Aberdeen, sales tax revenues seem to be stable despite store closings, and with the Supreme Court decision enabling state and local tax collection on online sales, store closings might not matter much.  But sales tax figures which are listed by the category of the establishments which collect the tax show a different story.  They pin point where the biggest fluctuations are.  Aberdeen is taking a big hit in the dry goods category with the closings of Kmart, J.C. Penney, Herbergers.  A few types of business, such as restaurants and bars, have shown a decline of activity over the years.  Some types of retail business have disappeared.  When  I came to Aberdeen there were four men's clothing stores on Main Street and one in Super City Mall.  Now, outside the department stores, there are none.  There were two fabric shops.  Now there are none.  And there were a number of bars featuring adult entertainment or music.  Now, I think, there is one.  The culture has changed in town, but that change has not been much covered in terms of how and how much.

Changes in the culture of a community signal changes in its viability, whether it can meet the needs and aspirations of the people who live in it.  If the Aberdeen Mall is defunct,  where will the people go to find the goods and services and cultural elements of life in provides?  The closing of stores in Aberdeen are only a part of the loss of access to goods and services that are components of community life.

The decline of working news reporters is evidence of low state of the news enterprise in the community.  Their absence also signals an absence of information about how their community is faring in terms of the kind of life that can be lived in it.  It is not that there are few journalists because nothing is happening.    It is that there is a scarcity of people telling others exactly what is happening,  which is a long, slow demise of the community itself.