‘Nothing good happens when a newspaper dies’
Judy Woodruff, senior correspondent and former anchor and managing editor of the PBS News Hour, made a special appearance in Rappahannock County last Friday to support local journalism.
Nonprofit news organization Foothills Forum hosted Woodruff as the keynote speaker at its annual gathering, held at Chuck and Dee Akres’ Mount Prospect estate in the Town of Washington.
Woodruff, who has covered politics and other news for five decades at NBC, CNN and PBS, was interviewed at the local event by Foothills Forum reporter Tim Carrington.
Judy Woodruff speaking to attendees after her Q&A last Friday. (Photo/Luke Christopher)
Accompanying Woodruff was her husband Al Hunt, a Bloomberg opinion columnist and before that a journalist with the Wall Street Journal for 40 years. He spoke briefly during the gathering.
Foothills’ supporters and friends viewed a clip from Woodruff’s “America at a Crossroads” series about efforts to keep The Recorder, a weekly newspaper in rural Highland County, Va., in operation. Carrington asked Woodruff follow-up questions and moderated an audience Q&A about the threats to journalism today, why we should be concerned and what can be done about it.
“Journalism overall is in a tough, tough place,” Woodruff said, noting 3,300 newspapers have gone out of business over the past 20 years, and even more have laid off staff and cut budgets so they can no longer cover what’s happening in a community.
With the advent of free, though often unsubstantiated information on the internet and social media, Woodruff said, people stopped subscribing to local newspapers and advertisers stopped buying ads — and a shared truth, or shared understanding of the facts of an issue, was lost.
“Nothing good happens when a newspaper dies,” Woodruff said.
She described a very politically conservative rancher she interviewed in Texas who was devastated when his local newspaper died.
“He was in tears as he talked about it, he said this is the newspaper that was the glue in my community, it held us together. …He took me over to a table where he had all these clippings of his children, his grandchildren playing for the high school basketball team football team, he was so proud of all this, and he was in tears, now it’s all gone,” she said.
“When you don’t have local news,” Woodruff said, “people are less engaged, they don’t know the other people in their community, they don’t know as much [about] what’s going on, and they don’t feel they have a stake in it. And polarization is worse, because people turn to national news, where people are yelling at each other, calling each other names. And when that happens, you look differently at your neighbor down the street, and you don’t want to have anything to do with them.”
Foothills Forum board chair Andy Alexander and his wife, Beverly Jones, photographed with Judy Woodruff after the event. (Photo/Luke Christopher)
Woodruff said in the past nobody thought about journalism when they thought about philanthropy.
“Today journalism is in that category of what I call a public good — like libraries and the theater and museums — that needs to be supported,” she said.
Woodruff applauded the partnership between the nonprofit Foothills Forum and the weekly Rappahannock News. Foothills hires journalists to do in-depth stories on local issues — government, elected officials, health, schools, crime, business, agriculture — that are published in the Rappahannock News.
“One of the things we can do is exactly what you’re doing here in Rappahannock, and that is focusing on local journalism and supporting local journalism the way Foothills Forum does,” Woodruff said.
Watch the complete program here.
