My hometown newspaper, The Salem Leader, ceased publishing a print newspaper sometime in 2024. They switched to posting everything on their website, which was being redone (not by me, I have no idea by who). But it was poorly done and the site was a poor simulacrum for the print edition. Ads were sold and presented in a way akin to a newspaper, all in sidebars like a relic of the late 90s and early 2000s web.
Then comes news in the middle of last week that they’re shutting down their website entirely within, at the time, three days. Now it is a locked page that says the website has been “retired”. They’ve abdicated all that’s left of the husk of their operations to sporadic Facebook posts. What a shame.
The reason was presumably lack of staff, or skill, or both. Finding people to run a print press became challenging in a small town, and finding people to work on a news website was surely no easy task. This is all exacerbated by the pending retirement of the paper’s owner.
All this to say, I am sad by all of it and somewhat upset at how it unfolded.
Someone asked me recently how journalists and people can record events for posterity and I said, “If you want to be immortal, write a diary, cause no one else does and it’ll be the only that survives.” I added, “You can’t even find what you posted on Facebook last year. How is someone supposed to find those posts 100 years from now?”
The answer is they won’t. Paper, which can burn, degrade, or just be blown away or trashed is, still, the most reliable means of leaving a message to a future generation about what is happening.
Fifty years from now when today’s young people are interested in learning about their ancestors, curious who died and what their obituaries said, what major events shook a community, or just piecing together an idea of what life was like during 2025 will have no clue. Salem, Indiana for all intents and purposes has been wiped off the map because the newspaper is gone.
I recognize the economics of all this. But I also recognize far bigger problems appear to have hatched, all foreseeable and all knowable:
- The business model relied on the same local car dealers, attorneys, and service businesses to continue advertising in much the same way: here’s a “tile” or spot for your ad. Now, you can click on it and go to your website.
- The material presented on the site became a shell of what is actually news. Plenty of car wrecks and mugshots, but a series of press releases from the Secretary of State or a slew of other government agencies copied and pasted into a website with no analysis or reporting is not news. It’s propaganda.
- What little news was reported seemed stilted. An issue with a local zoning ordinance covered the meetings and what people said, fairly enough, but there was no reporting on what that meant or what was happening from before that. It’s wild that a poorly thought, under-considered, and copy-pasted zoning law was shaping up, and the only way anyone knew what the problem was came from quotes at the meeting from a couple of citizens who had concerns and did their own research. Charming, but terrifying.
The site failed for all the reasons sites like this always fail and have for the last 25 years:
- A print subscription was replaced with nothing, giving people free website access
- With the collapse of the subscription income, the material on the site was devalued, and it showed
- The advertisers aren’t stupid, and can see how much value and traffic comes from their ads. It was probably bleak, sending the only remaining income stream in a spiral.
Now, the community has no real record of deaths, births, graduations, news, or events. The only watchdog over the school board, mayor, council, and other elected bodies is just a bunch of random people with cell phones hoping someone screws up so they can get the likes. This is not healthy for a democracy, even if that democracy is measurable by the thousands in a small, southern Indiana county.
For anyone facing this collapse in the future, the path forward is not easy but is possible:
- You have to improve and expand the quality and quantity of the reporting on the site.
- You have to embrace new and expanding kinds of advertising, like video
- You have to charge people for access for nearly all of it, from day one. Once you give it away for free, the toothpaste is out of the tube.
And if you do have to fold, you have an obligation to pay the cheap $15/year for the domain and the hosting costs forever, or, ensure the material in the site can be exported in a text-based format that can be printed, archived, and saved for posterity. Anything else was just a hobby.
