Shannon Johnson, owner of Shannon’s Stained Glassery in Superior, Wisconsin, said she has struggled to stay informed on local news in Douglas County.
Johnson tries to read the local newspaper, the Superior Telegram, but that presents challenges that drive her to seek her news from other sources.
“You have to pay to see any articles, so I look at headlines but not a ton of articles,” Johnson told The Daily Cardinal. “Television sites like WDIO or Fox are typically where I’ll go.”
Social media sites like Facebook act as a platform for residents to get information online. But they present another challenge: they’re often unvetted echo chambers.
As echo chambers grow online, their potential to influence politics increases, according to research from the University of Pennsylvania that measured the impact echo chambers on sites like Facebook had on the 2020 election.
“Any community that loses its independent media and variety of sources of information is susceptible to echo chambers,” Meg Turville-Heitz, project director for the Beyond the Headlines investigation of the Douglas County news desert at the Wisconsin Humanities Council, told the Cardinal in an email.
Douglas County’s barren media landscape
The Wisconsin-Minnesota border community of Douglas County encompasses the towns of Superior and Solon Springs and has a population of 44,144, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.
Despite its proximity to Duluth, the county is considered a news desert, defined by the University of San Francisco as a community covered by one or zero newspapers.
The county’s sole newspaper, the Superior Telegram, has struggled in recent times.
“There are only two of us reporters, so obviously we can’t cover everything,” Telegram reporter Maria Lockwood told the Cardinal.
For Lockwood, a “big selling point” of a career in journalism as a mother of four children under the age of nine was the speed at which she could get a journalism degree when she went back to college after taking 10 years off to raise a family.
“I had no idea how much I would love this job,” Lockwood said. ”I enjoy research and learning new things. I have an insatiable curiosity and care about the community.”
The Telegram had a full newsroom when Lockwood started in 1999. But the number of employees dropped significantly in 2010.
“Our printing press [shut] down one to two years later, and our staff continually [dwindled] until we began operating with our current team around late 2018,” Lockwood said.
According to the Library of Congress, the Superior Telegram has been Superior’s only local newspaper for more than three decades since the town’s other paper, The Chronicle, ceased publication in 1987 after only three years on the market.
Due to its small staff size and challenges brought to local news outlets by the COVID-19 pandemic, the Telegram started printing only one paper per week in 2020. They had previously been printing twice weekly since 2008 instead of their traditional six-day-a-week model.
In an email, Lockwood added that the Telegram’s news team consists only of herself, fellow reporter Shelly Nelson, a photographer and a paginator, someone who divides a document into pages.
“We’re still here, which I count that as a win, because that’s a win for everyone because there’s still a paper here covering everything they need to know,” Lockwood said.
As of February, the Telegram has approximately 2,591 subscribers, 1,518 of which are print subscriptions while the remaining 1,073 are digital subscriptions, according to an email from Lockwood. This means only 5.9% of Douglas County residents are subscribed to the Telegram.
“We want to let [readers] know what’s going on in their community,” Lockwood said. “We want to give them the information and the resources so they can go out and find out more about what’s going on next door, what’s going on down the street and how they can be involved.”
Resident of Douglas County left isolated
Without a substantial local news presence in Douglas County, residents like Johnson, the Superior Stained Glassery owner, are left to get news and information about their community from social media and other alternative sources.
“I have four kids, so I’m never at home long enough to watch the news, so the best [option] is flipping through Facebook and seeing what headlines are trending,” Johnson said.
Johnson said she wishes local politics was covered more in the local news since it is difficult for her to find information on candidates running for school board positions in Superior “unless they’ve got a Facebook page set up.”
Pew Research Center found 30% of American adults regularly get their information from Facebook, with 40% of those users being between the ages of 30 and 49. Receiving information from Facebook presents its own challenges, as data published in Science shows discussion groups — particularly conservative ones — have a high tendency to become echo chambers online, crowding out unbiased news sources and platforming unverified and often misleading information.
Johnson said she tends to receive news on local political matters such as the school board and municipal elections by looking at trending Telegram headlines on Facebook, not by reading the articles.
She also described using alternative news sources and curators like 1440, an aggregator of headlines from large media outlets that describes itself as “unbiased”, to learn more about the national news topics that interest her as a result of the lack of coverage by local sources.
“Special interest stories that have to deal with anything kid-related since I’ve got teenagers and politics [are what] I keep up with — national politics at least,” Johnson said. “There are a couple of podcasts and blogs that I pay attention to where it’s news with a twist, so I get daily emails from the 1440, which is mostly headlines.”
While Johnson said she uses 1440 to receive national news, she does not receive her local news from them, leaving the drought of reputable sources for local news unaddressed.
Superior resident Lynn Maciej Olson shared a similar story. She primarily accesses the newspapers via Facebook to get her news, which she said is mostly “local sports, followed by local elections/politics.”
Lockwood, the Telegram reporter, said she wishes she could cover more politics, business and feature stories because it would lend the community a stronger voice. But recent structural changes at the Telegram have made that difficult.
“It’s hard to figure out what to cover because people are not really reaching out to us, and our reporters can only do so much as two people,” Lockwood said.
The threat of misinformation
As a result of the Telegram’s regional focus and the friendly atmosphere of Superior, Lockwood said she picks stories for her beat based on what she feels is news that affects the community and will give residents a full picture of current local events.
“I cover education news — that’s the beat I started with and I still love it — and a lot on cops and courts along with business and feature stories because they are important issues that the community needs to hear,” Lockwood said. “People feel that we are conversational, so it’s easier to cover these stories.”
Lockwood said public service motivates her to stay in journalism despite the industry’s struggles.
“Local facts are crucial in fighting the tide of disinformation that can be found with the click of a mouse,” Lockwood said. “Helping neighbors connect is just as pivotal for building a strong community.”
But the rise of Facebook makes her mission more challenging.
Meg Turville-Heitz, the Beyond the Headlines project director, was skeptical about the use of Facebook as a platform for consuming news.
“Some alternative sources of information, such as Facebook, lend themselves more to gossip or speculation, or lack the mediation of trained journalists who might look for multiple sources for a story, or are curated for one perspective,” Turville-Heitz told the Cardinal in an email.
She said there are fewer watchdogs in modern local news, which decreases people’s desire to engage with their community and participate politically. In her view, the formation of echo chambers on social media is a symptom of dwindling local news outlets.
“The movement of people and advertising to the internet reduces the profitability of news outlets in small markets, and as they reduce or cease circulation, the places people go to find out what’s happening become less and less reliable,” Turville-Heitz said.
Turville-Heitz said local newspapers are important for bringing a diversity of viewpoints and topics into the public conversation as opposed to the single-issue focus of Facebook discussion groups.
“[The local news] is also often the place where you may have encountered before the activities of a local politician or gained insight into a local issue,” Turville-Heitz said. “Without that sense of the creation of community identity over time, there can be a disconnect and lack of context for how the state of things — both good and bad — came to be.”
Election misinformation
Misinformation regarding elections has a detrimental effect on the public’s opinion of democracy, with an increased number of voters expressing a lack of confidence in election integrity following the 2020 election, according to the Brookings Institution.
Johnson stressed the importance of voting, saying she votes in every election — both local and national.
“You can’t complain about the change you want in this country if you don’t vote,” Johnson said. “The politicians are our employees, and if we want new employees, we need to get out there and vote for them.”
For election coverage, the Telegram sends out questionnaires to local candidates and publishes their opinions on local issues so the community can have an accurate understanding of the candidates' platforms.
“We’ll be doing that mid-March now because we want to get it out before early voting happens or right as early voting is starting so that people can make informed decisions,” Lockwood said. “We usually rely on Wisconsin Public Radio for more information about state elections. Although Shelley reaches out to [state candidates], it depends on if they get back to us or not.”
And despite the efforts of the Telegram to reach voters, Johnson said she and her colleagues feel like they have to fight to get essential information out to their audience.
“Everything is really based out of Duluth, so unless [a news story] is big, it doesn’t really get picked up much,” Johnson said. “We’ve got local elections coming up and trying to find information on any of the candidates running is next to impossible.”
