Friday, December 9, 2011

America marked by news deserts

Layoffs and shutdowns and other corporate decisions are leading to news deserts in America, according to Tom Stites at the Nieman Journalism Lab. What's a news desert? It's an area where news isn't being well-covered because of a lack of media.

Stites' observations are right on, and they reminded me of a conversation I had recently with a senior editor at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, which has won three Pulitzer prizes in the last four years. He was talking about all the news around Wisconsin that the newspaper just can't cover. "We don't have the reporters," he said.

Thankfully, we don't have a news desert here. But it's close.

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