Hello friends,
Back in 2020, I spent an afternoon wandering Virginia City, a Gold Rush-era ghost town that served as the territorial capital of Montana from 1865 to 1875. I'd been to Virginia City once before, on a family vacation in my early teens. This time, I was on my way home from a reporting trip in North Dakota, one where I tagged along with the crews who were plugging abandoned oil wells.
The people who preserved and rebuilt Virginia City as a National Historic Landmark in the 1940s made sure to reconstruct the offices of the Montana Post, the first newspaper in Montana Territory. I’m always interested in stories of booms and busts, so I lingered at the old newspaper building, curious about how this frontier news outlet shaped coverage of the state's Gold Rush era and the myths of the West. One of the interpretive signs mentioned that the newspapers that once chronicled Montana's early days were among the longest-lived businesses in the state.
The sentence floored me, because in 2020 many of those long-lived businesses were going bust. I'd just written a piece for Stateline about how many newspapers around the U.S. had closed during the first six months of the pandemic—all at a time when people needed credible news sources more than ever. In fact, I'd led the article with how, in Montana, the publisher of the Missoulian had just announced its parent company was selling the newspaper building on valuable downtown riverfront property, and how soul-crushing that was for a staff that had already been cut nearly in half by layoffs.
As demoralizing as it is to lose the physical presence of a newspaper office, it's even worse if a newspaper loses a chunk of its staff, or if it folds. Since 2005, more than 2,200 American newspapers have shuttered. But it's not just newspapers, it's journalism. And as many of you are probably aware, this has been a particularly brutal week and month for journalism. Sports Illustrated all but collapsed. Writers at Condé Nast magazines walked out over proposed layoffs. National Geographic and Time magazine both announced major layoffs, as did Business Insider. And the Los Angeles Times laid off 115 journalists—about 20% of its staff.
Please consider a moment of silence for the journalists who have died covering the war in Gaza. The Committee to Protect Journalists estimates that at least 83 journalists have been killed, most of them Palestinian.
It's been bleak, but it's getting even worse. Overall newsroom employment in the U.S. has dropped from 114,260 in 2008 to 84,640 in 2020. And the impact on local news is especially dire. Study after study demonstrates that when a local newspaper closes, democracy suffers. As I wrote back in 2020, there's a drop in civic engagement, elected officials are less accountable, corruption is more pervasive and voter participation plummets and becomes more polarized.
One of the things that's so grim about the layoffs at the Los Angeles Times is that it covers the news for a national audience with a Western gaze. It is (was?) the largest U.S. news organization based in the West. This is important because most American media has a New York- and Washington-centric perspective, and the journalism put out by the Los Angeles Times was the highest-profile corrective to an East Coast news bias. The layoffs are a blow to news coverage that originates out of the West and that explains the West's role in our national story.
The West is home to Amazon and Boeing and Microsoft and Apple and Alphabet and Intel and Chevron and Disney and Nike and Starbucks and Costco—all Fortune 500 companies that drive the global economy and shape culture. (For better or worse.) And let us not forget: The vice president and two of the past three speakers of the U.S. House of Representatives are from California. Most public lands are in the West. The movement to legalize marijuana began here. And we have active volcanoes.
What happens in the West matters, and losing 115 journalists who understood events from that Western point of view is a loss, no matter your opinion of modern journalism.
For a moment, let's go back to Virginia City and the Montana Post.
In its heyday, the newspaper covered one of the nastiest episodes at the heart of the myths of the West: the Vigilante era of frontier justice. Within about six weeks in 1864, settlers put together a so-called "vigilance committee." The committee formed posses, and without due process, hanged 21 men accused of being highwaymen, among other crimes. Many sources suggest that the first book published in Montana was The Vigilantes of Montana, a compilation in 1866 of the stories that ran in the Montana Post in the prior years. When the newspaper suggested it was time "to bring these gents to rope," it was no doubt thoroughly heard as a call to action. Normalizing a lack of due process, and even romanticizing it, made it Western lore.
"The vigilante brand has been carefully distilled as an expression of Montanans’ rugged independence and heroic self-reliance. But it also sells the idea that Montana was built by white pioneers who settled a wild place full of reckless people by any means necessary," wrote Gabriel Furshong in High Country News in 2019.
There's a throughline from Virginia City’s earliest days to now. That little newspaper—in a Montana town that busted when the gold play ended—is responsible for so much Western mythmaking.
At their best, frontier newspapers like the Montana Post were chaotically and characteristically American: Lurid, messy, curious and stuffed with the gossipy goings-on of their towns. They told it like it was, in the distinctive, biased voices of owners and reporters who rarely bothered to cower behind any sort of mythical objectivity. These men—they were almost exclusively men—wore their partisanship openly. Their newspapers were often affiliated with political movements or parties. Their readers understood they were getting a canted version of the news. They probably really liked the feisty nature of their papers.
At their worst, the frontier newspapers were racist, deeply prejudiced and caught up in cronyism. Newspapers were often unabashed commercial ventures; their owners were just as intent on making a fortune from the frontier as the miners staking their gold claims. The Montana Post's motto was this, for example: "Devoted to the mineral, agricultural and commercial interests of Montana Territory." Nowhere is this hustle more apparent than in one of my favorite short-lived frontier newspapers in North Dakota, the Bad Lands Cow Boy of Medora. The editor laid it out plainly in the 1886 inaugural edition of its nearly three-year run: "We do not come as the agent or tool of any man or set of men. There is a wide field and we intend to cover it. We do come, however, to make some almighty dollars."
Guess what also fueled the boom in Western newspapers? Homesteaders and land speculators. All those homesteaders proving their 160-acre claims were required to file legal notices in newspapers. The federally required advertising was a big source of income for frontier papers. My own great-grandfather, for example, paid to publish a notice in the Columbus Reporter that said he was proving up my great-grandmother's claim. I have a copy of the notice saying he did it, but no receipt showing how much it cost to advertise for five weeks, alas.
The land booms that fueled the growth of all those newspapers in the western U.S. took place on stolen or unceded Indigenous land. That means the publications—and media empires—descending from those early newspapers have multi-generational financial ties to the attempted genocide of the people who were here before European settlers arrived. Not to mention financial ties to the resource extraction that accompanied westward expansion. (To be sure, many newspapers have confronted their past sins, including the Los Angeles Times and my hometown newspaper, the Oregonian.)
The notion of vigilantism, revenge and frontier justice all detailed in the Montana Post back in 1864 continue to color our politics. You can see the narrative traces in the story of the Bundys and the occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, in the rise of the constitutional sheriff movement, and yes, the Jan. 6 insurrection. That's why it's important to have major news organizations and journalists based in this region with the capability of explaining such throughlines.
The journalism that exists in our country today is inextricably bound up in capitalism and resource extraction and warmongering and arguments over due process, and it has been for all of its existence, particularly as the American West boomed. Journalism has also long suffered the interference of millionaires and billionaires—Bezos and Soon-Shiong are nothing new. (See Hearst et al.)
Yet even knowing what I know, I've never wanted to be anything else but a newspaper reporter. I stopped working directly for newspapers in 2013, but remain a freelance journalist. (In fact, a Stateline article I wrote ran on the front page of the Oregonian earlier this month.) Journalism is flawed but it makes change. It holds people in power accountable. It muckrakes and it scolds. It entertains and informs and it lifts up human stories that would otherwise go untold. It tells you what's happening in your neighborhood and keeps tabs on your school board and your mayor. It is fundamental to democracy. And if you believe in democracy—and I do—you must see that a free and thriving press makes life more fair for more people, not less.
There are plenty of theories about how newspapers stumbled with the transition from newsprint to digital mediums. One of the reasons is pretty simple: Greed and easy money made newspaper owners and managers lazy and slow to innovate. (Local TV has this problem, too!) Newspapers in the early days of my career made 20% profit margins. As a former publisher of the Miami Herald once bragged to my colleagues in the early 2000s, they were making "barrels of cash." So I don't think we should spend too much time wringing our hands over the missteps made by billionaire owners and corporate hacks who couldn't get their act together to hire the brightest minds in product design when the World Wide Web, Craigslist, and Facebook arrived.
But journalism? Yes. Let's get behind it.
The newsrooms thriving today are those that have innovated, like the New York Times; those that have strict paywalls limiting access to paid subscribers, like my former employer E&E News; those that are owned by their employees, like Defector; and those that have stuck to their fundamental principles of informing and entertaining the community in print, such as the weekly Nugget in Sisters, Oregon. I'm also intrigued by nonprofit news models, including the newly announced 19th News Network. I'm not saying any of these examples are perfect or accessible to all or sustainable in the long term—or that a career in journalism will make you rich. But I'm heartened by them, and eager to hear about solutions and other innovations that ensure news remains a vital part of our democracy. I want to be a part of them. And I want journalists and journalism and democracy to thrive.
So here is my call to action: Support local news in your community, in whatever form it is. (And support journalists when they unionize or go on strike.) Give to organizations that back nonprofit newsrooms. Contribute to your local NPR affiliates and the dinky community radio stations that fix their transmitters with duct tape and baling wire. And pay for news!
And yes, in case you were wondering, I put my money where my mouth is. I subscribe to the digital editions of the Oregonian, the Seattle Times, the Denver Post and the Los Angeles Times, as well as the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal. Our household is a sustaining member of Oregon Public Broadcasting, the local NPR affiliate. We also support Friends of Willamette Week, a local alt-weekly, and Street Roots, a Portland newspaper focused on homelessness. I pay for High Country News, Oregon Business Magazine and Portland Monthly. And the New Yorker and The Atlantic, ack.
Yes, these publications are tax-deductible business expenses for my own tiny media empire, Windfall LLC. And yes, it's way more news than I can ever read, watch or listen to. But it's also the cost of living in a democracy.
So pony up!
Yours,
Erika
THE NEWS
All the links…
Some exciting news! Windfall is a finalist for an Oregon Book Award in the category of creative nonfiction. I'm in such incredible company—my fellow authors on the list represent the incredible talent and rich literary life of this state. And if you’re in Portland today, you can grab a copy of Windfall for 30% off at Powell’s, which is having its annual friends-and-family sale this weekend.
America Ferrera when she learned she got an Oscar nod. "I just sat here quiet and stunned and then my phone started blowing up." So cute.
As global temperatures continue to warm, could coast redwoods and sequoias have more of a place in the forests of the upper Pacific Northwest?
See also: In the tree-hugging Pacific Northwest, what happens when one of the most powerful symbols of our collective identity hurts us?
Freelance journalism rates have stalled. Yep.
I'm happy for you and your success, I love to see women succeeding. I'm glad newspapers exist (those that do), but I'm not a fan of the paywall for everything. Seems to be major news should be available for all to read. Front page at least. We have a lot of poor people in this country, but almost everyone has access to the internet, if only via the library. They (we) shouldn't have to rely on second-hand news via Facebook or Tik Tok.