Two Community Newspapers

 

This year’s order of maple syrup came recently. I order it directly from the producer in Newport, Vermont, as I have for many years, and my mother before me. When I unpacked the shipping box I took out the Newport Daily Express, wadded up to prevent shifting. It was from a Tuesday, and it was ten informative pages. That caught my attention, published in a town with just over 4000 residents. With a few keystrokes I learned that the primary service area, Orleans County, has a population of 27,500, and this apparently thriving daily print edition of a community newspaper serves 3,000 subscribers. Contrast that with the fragile bones of Savannah Morning News in Chatham County with a population of 303,000, where daily print circulation has been in decline since at least 2006, and as of 2022 stood at under 17,000 (10.9% vs. 5.6%). On a hunch I did a dive into the demographics of the two counties looking for answers.              

Other than the obvious differences in population everything else was close except one major factor. In terms of high school education, they are identical. Chatham has a greater percentage of college educated residents, and they are similar regarding households with computers, access to broadband, and household income. The exception was race. Orleans County, Vermont is 96% white and Chatham County, Georgia is 52% white. The difference has to be cultural.

 Another dive took me to the pages of ETS (formerly Educational Testing Service) where a study commissioned in 1972 on reading differences between blacks and whites revealed that blacks read significantly less of all printed material, particularly newspapers, at all educational and economic levels. That apparently has not changed over the intervening 51 years. A 2023 survey by Pew Research found that blacks get their news today primarily from television and social media, and they don’t trust white reporting on black matters.

As an observer, which is all I qualify to be, I see these biases preventing many black families from fully assimilating into the American economy. This is a roadblock to not only upward mobility for so many in the community, but for meaningful participation in a multicultural and pluralistic society. African Americans have been significant contributors to American life with music, art, fashion, and athletics, but not economically or professionally in significant numbers. Hopefully, change is underway. As we know, many more underrepresented minorities are now attending college.

An online non-profit newspaper, The Current, serving our 100 miles of coast, is making inroads. Editors recently announced that one third of a growing readership is black. In spite of my amateur analysis one thing I do know, however, these readers black and white, are not a representative cross section of the Georgia coast. There is still a long, long way to go.