This article was originally published on Northwestern University’s Medill Local News Initiative website and is republished here with permission. Richland County is nestled smack dab in the middle of north central Ohio. It’s a mostly rural enclave in the center of a state in the heartland of America. Richland is not a wealthy place. The median household income and the percentage of adults with college degrees are…
It is a story of corruption that will stay secret, politicians who will need fewer votes to win, even dangerous communicable diseases that will spread faster as our best scientists struggle to fight them. The story is the slow and painful demise of local newspapers, a story whose ending is not yet written but which — without bold intervention and strong reader support — could…
“For the first time media is the least trusted institution globally,” Edelman, the global PR and marketing firm concluded in its annual worldwide study on trust in institutions like the media, business and government. These international findings are in line with recent data coming out of the U.S. A 2016 Gallup poll reported that just 32 percent of Americans trusted the mass media, while an…