Decline of newspapers harming civic engagement, study finds

Correction appended

Political involvement among citizens is adversely affected by the decline of newspapers, according to a new study by Wilson School researchers on how voting patterns are influenced by news coverage.

In their study “Do Newspapers Matter? Evidence from the Closure of The Cincinnati Post,” economics and public affairs professor Samuel Schulhofer-Wohl and economics concentrator Miguel Garrido ’10 examined the decrease in civic participation in suburban counties after The Cincinnati Post published its last edition on Dec. 31, 2007.

In the study, conducted in the year following the end of the paper’s publication, Schulhofer-Wohl and Garrido found that fewer citizens ran for political office at the municipal level and fewer voters participated in elections. The two said that, based on their results, newspapers “can have a substantial and measurable impact on public life.”

The study compared voter turnout; the number of candidates for city council, city commission and school board; and incumbency advantage in 48 municipalities before and after the closing of The Cincinnati Post. The research focused on northern Kentucky suburbs, where the Post dominated circulation and provided the most local news.

The two researchers expressed different reactions to the survey’s findings.

“I wasn’t particularly surprised, because, given the number of people that read newspapers, it would be surprising if [one closing] had no impact whatsoever,” Schulhofer-Wohl said.

But Garrido said in an e-mail that he found the results of the study somewhat unexpected.

“I didn’t think the closure of a small newspaper would have such a noticeable impact on political engagement and competition,” he said.

Both Schulhofer-Wohl and Garrido added that the results are statistically imprecise due to the small size of their sample.

The current economic crisis has only worsened an already-dire situation for papers across the country, Garrido explained.

“The newspaper industry has been facing unprecedented economic challenges in the past few years, and the recession has only intensified the problems,” he said.

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“In recent months, a growing number of newspapers across the country have filed for bankruptcy or shut down,” Garrido added. “This has major implications for democracy, since newspapers have the ability to hold representatives to account and raise public awareness of important issues.”

Fred Tuccillo, managing editor of The Princeton Packet, said the survey’s results provide evidence that journalism promotes civic engagement.

“This is the first study I see that attempts to explore the impacts in civic involvement in the absence of a community newspaper,” Tuccillo said. “Having been a journalist for over a decade in local and national coverage, I can say that it is definitely the case that when we cover local news, more of the activities we see by local citizens appear to be inspired only because the local newspaper wrote about it.”

In the March 4 cover story of The New Republic, sociology professor Paul Starr also warned of the continued decline of newspapers and the negative effects it has on the democratic system in his article “Goodbye to the Age of Newspapers (Hello to a New Era of Corruption).”

“More than any other medium, newspapers have been our eyes on the state, our check on private abuses, our civic alarm systems,” Starr said.

Tuccillo echoed Starr’s assessment that newspapers play a vital role in maintaining integrity in government.

“Investigative reporting discloses failures of government that local residents would otherwise not know about,” Tuccillo said. “If you remove the primary local newspaper from the field, you are severely reducing the amount of information available to voters.”

Correction

An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated that Miguel Garrido is a Wilson School concentrator. In fact, he is an economics major.