The year was 1996, and Muncie’s two largest newspapers, the Muncie Morning Star and the Muncie Evening Press, merged into one: The Star Press. By 2011, this paper would become the only source of daily news in Delaware County.
Keith Roysdon, a writer for the Muncie Evening Press before the merge, witnessed the shift from continuous daily news across multiple newspapers to one daily publication from one source.
“It took a while for people to get accustomed to the fact there was not an afternoon paper anymore,” Keith says.
Accessibility to information throughout the day was a commodity provided by the local paper. Today, the newspaper is a diminishing outlet for information. The Hussman School of Journalism and Media has recorded a 48% decrease in newspaper circulation between 2004 and 2019. Not only are fewer papers providing content multiple times per day, there are more counties across America without access to a local newspaper at all.
This phenomenon is known as a news desert.
According to the Center for Innovation & Sustainability in Local Media (CISLM), “a news desert is a community, either rural or urban, with limited access to the sort of credible and comprehensive news and information that feeds democracy at the grassroots level.”
Data collected from the CISLM’s News Desert Project reports that over a quarter of all local newspapers in the country have disappeared since 2004. Delaware County is no exception.
The Star Press
There is currently one local newspaper that covers content for Delaware County known as The Star Press. The Star Press is a local newspaper that publishes weekly physical newspapers for subscribers and publishes daily online articles. Their articles range from local events to crime stories to community sports.
Cade Hampton, a new sports writer for The Star Press, focuses on college and high school sports. In his articles, he focuses on the local community and ensures his readers are always up-to-date on Muncie sports.
Before his arrival, it had been ten months since The Star Press had a sports writer or any sports engagement at all. Douglas Walker was the only employee working for the newspaper.
“The last guy who had my job as the sports reporter here, he didn’t stay very long,” Cade says. “He left in the middle of the high school sports season. There were still a lot of things going on when he left — that was last December.”
Keith, who worked with Douglas for over 40 years and co-wrote four true crime books about Muncie with him, has full faith in his abilities to maintain The Star Press. He believes that with passionate writers like him, Muncie will not lose its availability to local news.
However, the counties surrounding Delaware County, according to Keith, rely on Muncie and The Star Press to cover information for them.
“I certainly think there are news deserts in those outlying counties around Delaware County,” Keith says. “But at the same time, if somebody working unpaid hours absorbs all the responsibility and takes it on themselves, readers may not notice that much.”
ByGone days
A senior professor of media at Ball State, Chris Flook, is a member of the Delaware County Historical Society. In 2017, he was requested to write a bi-weekly news article for a column known as ByGone Muncie. These articles cover Muncie’s rich history and are published to The Star Press every two weeks.
In one of his columns, ByGone Muncie: Welcome to a dark age of news outlets, he discusses past papers like the Muncie Morning Star and the Muncie Evening Press before their merge and decline.
“I wanted to do a history of The Star Press and tie it into Muncie’s history of the local paper,” Chris says. “It significantly diminished from its height. Compared to 20 or even 10 years ago, there’s way less content.”
According to Chris’s column, the leading cause for declines in local newspapers and curated, fact-checked content is the Internet. With the introduction of social media platforms, the lines drawn between fact and fiction become blurred.
“Sometimes the Internet is legit[imate], sometimes it’s not,” Chris says. “Sometimes it doesn’t have depth, or it’s misleading, or it doesn’t have the right context. You don’t get any kind of accurate picture.”
During Keith’s time with the Evening Press and Star Press, he witnessed the shift from physical newspapers to online news. Though the physical Star Press newspaper still exists for subscribers, most of the news is adapted to digital mediums rather than print.
According to Keith, the Internet allows newspapers to provide faster, more accessible information to the masses. However, Chris counters that the Internet diminishes the value of curated content in a world of free social media.
Creating community ties
Community, as described in Psychology Today, is what makes residents feel connected with their neighbors in a town or a city. This connectedness requires people to look beyond their individual scope and learn about the lives of those around them.
“You should have daily information about what’s going on… in the community, good and bad,” Chris says.
According to the Hussman School of Journalism and Media, in communities where there is not enough digital or print revenue to pay for local newspapers, residents aren’t given the information they need to resolve issues. The school has found that the fate of communities and the vitality of local news are linked, and both struggle without the help of one another.
News deserts tend to impact vulnerable citizens including the elderly, people from lower socioeconomic status, and those less educated than the average American.
Eighteen percent of residents living in a news desert live below the poverty line. This is an increase compared to the national poverty average of 13%.
Without daily information, Chris says, the community loses its primary modem for creating historical archives. The best way for people to support local news in their communities, and to preserve connections, is to subscribe and read news articles, which often requires readers to pay for services from local newspapers. In return, local newspaper reporters are required to keep their subscribers satisfied with their services.
For writers like Cade, many of his stories are free, but some of his stories have to require payment to make a profit for the newspaper.
“I hope that people understand [that] while it is a business and it’s there to make a profit, there are people who will make every effort they can to make sure that the news people want gets in their hands,” Keith says.
Sources: The Star Press, The Hussman School of Journalism and Media, Center for Innovation & Sustainability in Local Media (CISLM), Delaware County Historical Society, ByGone Muncie, Psychology Today,
