Jackie Krentzman is a Bay Area-based writer and editor.

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When Riverside Mayor Patricia Lock Dawson was growing up in the 70s, almost everyone she knew received the local paper, The Press-Enterprise. The paper had reporters covering the city and county, with multiple regional editions, to keep up with local news.

But today, The Press-Enterprise is owned by the Southern California News Group (a part of the Media News Group), itself owned by the investment firm Alden Global Capital. The paper now sporadically covers Riverside, with one dedicated reporter for all the cities in the region.

“The Press-Enterprise blanketed western Riverside County,” said Dawson. “It covered city hall and every angle of civic life and everyday life in Riverside, extensively and deeply. Now it’s a shell of its former self.”

The decline in reliable, factual media coverage has hampered the city’s mission, she says. It has hindered the city’s ability to communicate with residents and engendered false narratives, as people now get much of their information from social media. Many reporters no longer understand the nuances of local government.

Worse yet, the reports that reach the public often come from someone with an axe to grind. “I saw posts that said I had an MoU with other cities to send their homeless people here,” Dawson said. “That is completely untrue and very frustrating.”

Riverside is not alone. Many cities throughout the country are in news deserts. California has lost one-third of its newspapers since 2005. One county has no local news outlets, while 18 have just one. Underserved communities are the hardest hit and struggle to receive fact-based news on issues directly affecting them, such as housing affordability and environmental justice.

Another city suffering from a dearth of reliable news is Richmond. For years, the West County Times (as part of the Contra Costa Times and then the Bay Area News Group), covered this city on the eastern reaches of the San Francisco Bay. But the Bay Area News Group began cutting staff and resources at the West County Times, merging it with another paper in 2016 and making drastic cuts.

While Richmond now has several local digital news sites, the loss of an independent, citywide paper has had repercussions. Council Member Soheila Bana represents an urban-wildland interface closely connected with unincorporated El Sobrante. Much of the area falls within or near a Very High Fire Hazard Severity Zone, presenting shared risks that extend beyond municipal boundaries.

Bana says that although some digital media outlets focus exclusively on Richmond, they often overlook issues impacting nearby El Sobrante, even though the communities face similar challenges. In the past, printed regional media would have provided a more comprehensive view of shared concerns within a geographic area.

“The limited focus of digital news leaves critical issues in El Sobrante unaddressed, which ultimately hinders efforts to effectively tackle these problems for District 4 as well,” Bana said.

The social media conundrum

Without local papers, social media has stepped in to fill the breach. The share of Americans using social media for news has jumped to nearly half, although many have well-founded concerns about its accuracy. Social media groups and pages are frequently partisan, disseminating disinformation and misinformation alike.

“Combating misinformation and disinformation on social media is our biggest challenge,” Dawson said. “We are constantly trying to stay ahead of that with our narrative, the truthful narrative. But the problem is, when something gets posted that is completely inaccurate, and that narrative takes hold, it is very difficult to claw back from that.”

Redlands Council Member Denise Davis said the dangers posed by social media forces city officials to combat false narratives on a regular basis.

“Our city council meeting last night ended in a strange way,” she said. “We have space at the end of the meeting in which we report on recent and upcoming activities. But instead, the mayor used that time to address comments he received on social media, to correct the record.”

“Not only are you getting unvetted information on social media, but you are also not getting news that affects your life,” says Paulette Brown Hinds, founder of an Inland Empire journalism innovation organization. “Instead, you are more likely to read about the car crash down the street or a parade for the Heisman trophy winner, than what is happening at city hall.”

For example: Nextdoor, a hyperlocal social media site, often skews to the lurid and negative, inducing fear mixed with anger or frustration. This makes it hard for residents to get information on local issues.

Journalist-driven solutions

Journalism advocates have found creative ways to increase local news coverage. The biggest thrust has been an effort to hold large technology companies, in particular Facebook and Google, responsible for their role in gutting local news outlets.

State lawmakers introduced several bills in 2024 that would have required those companies to pay a fee to use news content. In August, policymakers reached a watered-down deal with Google that will provide $250 million in funding over the next five years to local newsrooms, a figure far below the level sought in the initial bills and one widely criticized by journalists.

Other measures are targeted to a particular region. One successful model is Cityside Journalism, which began the digital news platform, Berkeleyside, in 2009. Today it also runs Oaklandside and, as of this summer, Richmondside.

Cityside launched the Richmond satellite after researching which Bay Area cities were most impacted by the loss of news coverage and listening sessions with over a hundred community members. Surveys revealed that there was a hunger for more coverage of city government, schools, public safety, transportation, food, and culture.

“Not only did people ask for nitty gritty hard-hitting news stories, they indicated that they wanted more ways to find out how they can enjoy their city,” said Richmondside Editor-in-Chief Kari Hulac. “Richmond is a very diverse city with a lot to offer. Unlike the impression many have, it’s not just a city with problems. So, we added a freelancer devoted to a weekly arts and entertainment column.”

Residents also indicated they wanted to learn more about their neighbors. Without a citywide paper reporting on local issues and events, people tend to get atomized, which can lead to higher levels of mistrust. And regional news outlets tend to only write about Richmond when the story is sensational, such as gun violence or a refinery oil spill. Social media posts reinforce this narrative, creating a distrustful feedback loop.

“The ‘info’ on Nextdoor only promotes bad news and leads to fearmongering of your neighbors,” said Richmond’s Bana.

The result is lower community engagement and trust in one another and the city itself, local officials say. “When you don’t have trustworthy news about your community, that sense of community, that we are there for each other, is missing,” Bana continued. “People feel less connected to their community and the city.”

In the Inland Empire, Brown Hinds is the publisher of Riverside’s Black Voice News, one of the few fact-checked media outlets that regularly covers city hall and the community. It is among 150 ethnic newspapers in California, many of them new.

To Hinds and other media observers, the Inland Empire is not actually a news desert, but a news mirage. It gives the appearance of a robust news ecosystem because The Press-Enterprise, San Bernadino Sun, and the Redlands Daily Facts still exist. But they are significantly diminished, with reduced local stories, staffing, and circulation numbers. This hits under-resourced communities the hardest, who often receive disproportionately less verified news about issues important to them.

“The front page of the [these papers] are often the same,” Hinds said. “And oftentimes they aren’t even presenting local news, because they are part of the Southern California News Group, so we are as likely to be getting news from San Diego, Los Angeles, and Orange County as here.”

Earlier this year Hinds founded the Journalism Innovation Hub+Fund, a collective to cultivate fact-based civic journalism in the Inland Empire. The collective distributes grant money from large foundations to smaller news outlets that cannot attract these grants on their own. It also helps share strategies, produce collaborative reporting projects, support innovations, and strengthen community-based journalism, such as those that produce news for a local LGBTQ+ community.

Another initiative is the California Local News Fellowship, housed at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. The program trains and places early-career journalists in local news outlets — mostly in small cities. Last year, fellows published close to 4,000 stories, often about underreported and underrepresented communities.

“The impact is really substantive, as the fellows provide significant additional reporting capacity around the state,” said Project Director Christa Scharfenberg. “We are very intentionally working with a lot of small newsrooms, such as ethnic community news outlets and smaller nonprofit, startup newsrooms. In many cases, our reporter may be the first or only full-time reporter that the newsroom has ever had.”

Anthony Victoria is a California Local News fellow working for the NPR member station KVCR. He grew up in the Inland Empire and remembers when the region supported an array of news organizations. Those reporters inspired him to join the profession. By the time he graduated college, the industry had shrunk so much that he had to give up his dream.

Instead, he went into public relations. “It was devastating to not be able to find a journalism job,” he said.

The fellowship allowed him to realize his lifelong ambition. Victoria has been able to parlay his KCVR experience to launch his own news organization, The Frontline Observer, which covers the warehouse and logistics industry and how the development is impacting communities.

“We are all figuring out creative ways to give the citizens once again a comprehensive and full picture of their communities,” Victoria said.

What are cities doing?

For better or worse, cities have found that what often works best for them is serving as their own newsroom. Phil Pitchford, the public information officer for Riverside and a former reporter, said the city has developed a robust social media presence, reaching over 36 million people on 39 different accounts over the past year. It churns out press releases that it posts on Nextdoor and produces several digital newsletters.

The city also does a good deal of heavy lifting for overworked local news outlets by providing them with photos and video b-roll, which in the past the media handled themselves.

“If you don’t provide the media with all these extras, the word simply would not get out about what the city is doing,” he said. “Providing the elements required for a good news story makes it far more likely your story is going to be told and told well.”

Many overburdened cities can’t keep up with the flow of news, which makes journalists’ jobs harder.

“Some of the cities, especially the smaller ones, don’t have resources, so they may designate someone else on staff to be media liaison, but as that isn’t their core job, they don’t give us what we need to report,” said Victoria. “And as a result, they can be late getting out information we may need — say about a lawsuit — and we are up against a deadline and relevant information doesn’t get out.”

Davis, the Redlands council member, said that since she joined the council in 2018, local media coverage has fallen off. So, she has picked up the slack.

“I’ve developed a pretty strong Insta presence, which I use to post recaps of the city council meetings,” she said. “People thank me all the time and say that is how they learn about what is going on in the city.”

Some cities don’t see this as a burden and embrace the new reality. Rachel Zermeno, the community engagement manager for the city of Shafter in Kern County, says the reduction of local coverage led Shafter to increase its digital communications with its residents, giving the city control of its messaging. (The Shafter Press and Wasco Tribune combined as a result of COVID-19.)

“This allows us to inform our community in real time, versus a week later with our local newspaper,” she said. “It therefore provides our residents with a quicker way to have a sense of community; it is a cost-effective way of communication, enhances public safety, and increases public participation.”

As regular news coverage drops in cities across California, one could think that cities are quietly relieved that the intense spotlight previously shined on their workings has dimmed out, as problems in city government stay behind closed doors. But by and large, that isn’t the case.

“News coverage engenders trust in your government,” Mayor Dawson said. “There’s this trope that all government is corrupt, right? Well, if we had reporters digging into that, people would see that we’re not corrupt, that in fact, we are working for them.”