Despite the sexiness of the internet, print is not dead. If you are not spending more time reading your community newspaper, you are on the wrong road, for yourself and for the health of our society.

Granted, decades ago television supplanted newspapers as the dominant source of news and information for the majority of North Americans. And now the internet has passed newspapers.

The Pew Research Center in the United States is one of the most respected research organizations because of the balance of their approach to tracking political, social, economic and cultural trends and patterns.

Late in 2008 they reported that 40% of Americans get their news mostly from the internet, up from 24% just 2.5 years ago. Newspapers have slipped to 35%. Canadian trends usually follow the Americans.

There are many reasons for this shift, largely obvious, but they don’t reflect the whole story.

Certainly internet media sites have improved their capacity to deliver information with far more appeal and better organizational tools for users. The Air America radio network, Alternet.org, Rabble.ca, BC’s TheTyee.ca and other progressive online media have been well served by new technologies like podcasting and people’s need to look outside corporate media to find critical information and analysis on this decade’s radically right wing governments in BC, Canada and the United States.

At the same time, increasingly concentrated corporate media ownership, with increasing ownership by foreign corporations, has led to cost cutting through centralizing reporting and firing breathing journalists. Corporate media often prefers to often just be the de facto communications department of right wing governments by reporting as “news” often verbatim press releases.

This has led to the dilution of meaningful content in newspapers, declining paid subscriptions, and full-page ads on the front page of newspapers. People notice the decline. Even daily newspapers have been dumping papers for free in public spaces to be able to claim their circulation is high despite decreasing subscriptions and actual paying consumers. Declining circulation leads to declining ad revenue: a debilitating revenue feedback loop. Large North American cities are losing their status as two-newspaper towns as large dailies close.

But the other side of the story is about the necessity of a free press in a healthy, functioning democratic society: an increasing rarity with such corporate concentration of ownership.

While the internet has risen in prominence, television is responding with enhancing relevance. On the progressive side, MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow have drawn more viewers. Even CNN’s reporters have become more critical than soon after 9/11. Farid Zacharia would never have been able to get a show on CNN 6 years ago.

Sadly, the same kind of improvement in critical capacity has not emerged in Canadian television. CBC TV’s high profile pundit panel consists of centre, centre-right and right wing commentators, with no progressive voices.

But community papers are a vibrant resistance front against ignorance, apathy and right wing governments preferring to elude the spotlight.

During our global economic crisis and increasing oil prices, globalization of goods and services will decline. People will be buying local more, supporting bioregional agriculture and production.

In a world of global corporate media ownership, people still long for news, commentary and analysis that affects them and not just some nebulous World Economic Forum policy from Davos, Switzerland.

Indeed, in the global economic, environmental and energy crises we are entering, it is the community itself that will be the our way out. People of all political stripes on the prairies, and where Gordon Campbell cynically calls BC’s heartlands, have known this for generations.

Community papers have breathing journalists who see what happens on their streets, in their closing mills and in spin-off sectors throughout their regions. They see how people live and breathe and how suffering shows up. There is far less centralization and homogeneity of reporting.

And as long as community papers are financially viable it is their publishers’ and editors’ duty to enhance their content since global corporate media owners and the internet’s capacity to inform people about life outside their communities provide just one scope of information.

Community papers do recognize the role they play in reflecting and influencing the fabric of local society. They have to make sure what they publish is worthy of reading.

Similarly, people need to realize they have a part to play in ensuring a free press can exist. They can do this by reading their local papers, demanding quality analysis, engaging in community discussion about issues in the paper and supporting local advertisers.

There are a handful of community papers in the province that excel in quality journalism and commentary. There are many more that sometimes rise to a significant level, but there are many more that are not reaching that standard. This needs to change.

It is the public’s job to demand more from their local media. The public must complain about press releases from city hall or the health authority showing up as news without analysis and contextualization. We must be vigilant in writing letters to editors. We must contact journalists and editors directly to tell them when what they publish is good, and when and how it can be better.

The effectiveness of a free press in a democratic society is eroding, and that is not accidental. But it doesn’t have to decline. And while it is very hard to force the CRTC to break up concentrated corporate media ownership across the country, it is far easier to walk into the office of your local paper with some Timbits for the staff and your opinions about your community, what is working and what needs improvement.

Directors of right wing think tanks can always get meetings with the editorial boards of large corporate media. But on a community level, the leaders of community groups, activists, all citizens need to realize that they deserve to have the ears of their local media.

After all, community media is about us, the community. And the more we insist that it reflects our lives, the more robust our media will be.

And if we let our community newspapers become Pablum or die, that will be our fault. Our society deserves a freer, more vibrant press. We need to do our part in ensuring that.

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