Lamenting the Future of Small-Town News

A genuinely hilarious moment came as a result of my article “Apathy and Corruption in the City of Hillsdale.” In the piece, I had explained that it’s not hard to understand why the Hillsdale County voting public is so apathetic: there’s no real press in Hillsdale anymore. At the time, the Hillsdale Daily News, then owned by GateHouse Media, had a couple of local news reporters, one sports reporter, and if memory serves, a lifestyle columnist. WCSR, the lone commercial radio station in the county that actually produced local programming, was essentially ripping and reading the police blotter for their local news, apart from citing the Daily’s articles for other matters.

And mentioning that fact about WCSR was what set things in motion.  It ruffled their feathers something fierce.  Two of the station’s staff — including the news director — immediately engaged in a social media meltdown that was an absolute embarrassment, attempting to defend the station’s honor while attacking me for saying what the majority of people in Hillsdale County already knew.

The night that piece was published, there was a city council meeting.  I was in the habit of attending them as often as I could, but due to illness, I was unable to make it to that one.  I was, however, watching online and taking notes for my article about it.  This was the time when WCSR’s news director came after me on Facebook.

After going back and forth with me for a little while, and me basically finding different ways to phrase “I said what I said,” I finally asked him, “don’t you have a city council meeting you should be reporting on right now?”

He replied yes, and in fact, that’s where he was!

“Shouldn’t you be focusing on that right now instead of bickering with me on Facebook?”

Suddenly he stopped commenting.

That incident has amused me ever since.

But what isn’t amusing is that the local news situation has only deteriorated even further here in the land of hills and dales.

The Daily, now under Gannett’s ownership, is down to a lone news reporter and a lone sports reporter; and as far as I’m aware, both are tasked with writing for other area newspapers, as well, so they don’t have the time to focus on everything going on here in Hillsdale County alone.

That’s down from a relatively sizeable staff just 20 years ago.  What was the Hillsdale Daily News building in midtown Hillsdale — now a county office building after various factions within the county government completely fucked up on the initial plan to make it the new courthouse — used to have a bustling newsroom on the upper level.  Among my memories of it, that was the first place where I’d ever seen the Flying Toasters screensaver.  People actually worked there.

Today, there’s an office in the city’s industrial park, but the editor works over in Sturgis (some 40 miles to our southwest), and she’s responsible for overseeing the Sturgis Journal and the Coldwater Daily Reporter in addition to the Hillsdale Daily News. The printing presses moved out of Hillsdale long ago, so there’s no stopping the presses when there’s a breaking story. It’ll have to wait until tomorrow’s edition. I have no clue where they’re located nowadays.  Thankfully the Internet has made that an almost non-issue, but that depends on, y’know, actually having the staff available to cover such things.

And then we have radio. WCSR… same problems as nine years ago. Rip and read, citing the Daily for the other stuff, only one reporter (the same lone news director, in fact).

Now, to be fair, I grew up with and was mentored by Parke Hayes, who is a local legend. He not only was WCSR’s news director, but he also served on multiple boards for non-profits and local government bodies in addition to his day job, plus announced sports, plus produced and hosted a local interview show, and managed to do all of that while upholding an exemplary standard for impartiality and accurate reporting..,. not just in spite of his conflicts of interest, but because of them; he was fully cognizant of the fact that if he didn’t maintain that impartiality in his reporting, the entire county would call him out on it.

So I, as someone who learned everything I know about reporting the news from him, and we in Hillsdale County altogether, were absolutely spoiled rotten in having that man as our local source of news.  He ran himself ragged doing that job, but he loved every minute of it.

But that still does not excuse the lack of effort being put in at that station now.  More can and should be done.

Take a look at what WBZV was able to accomplish.

Oh yes, Hillsdale did have another commercial radio station.  For the longest time, it was just transmitting what is now Westwood One’s classic rock satellite service with local commercial breaks inserted at the set times, but after the Lenawee County company that had owned it for most of that time basically evaporated, a Hillsdale man purchased it and set out to compete with WCSR in the local news arena.  And they were doing a fantastic job!  They hired, as their news director, a man from the area who had a long-running call-in show on a station over in Adrian and had been reporting local news via social media for some time.  He moved his show to WBZV and aggressively went after WCSR and the Daily in competition.  We hadn’t seen or heard such wide and detailed coverage here in years.  Not since Hayes retired.

Unfortunately, the impression that I get (due to various technical difficulties I’d heard on their signal) is that the station’s previous owners had severely neglected the facilities, and while WBZV was making inroads with local listeners, the cost to repair and keep up everything that needed to be taken care of was more than the new owner had realized.  He ended up selling the station to Educational Media Foundation — otherwise known as K-LOVE.  So we now are back to only one commercial radio station in Hillsdale County, as WBZV’s license was converted to non-commercial with the call letters WKMH (K-LOVE, Michigan, Hillsdale).

Interestingly, that was not the first time that station had attempted to go head-to-head with WCSR.  When it was first launched as WMXE in 1994, the original owners tried an adult contemporary music format.  WCSR was also running adult contemporary music at the time, but they’re a full-service station running local news and sports, whereas WMXE was not.  Hillsdale County saw no real reason to tune in when they were getting that music and local information elsewhere already.  The original owners then sold the station to that company over in Lenawee County, who promptly switched it to hot adult contemporary (which is basically Top 40 without the “urban” songs).  Nobody here wanted a middling format that cut out all the good stuff in favor of all the stuff that, again, WCSR was already playing, so that failed.  They finally found what they considered an acceptable revenue stream by switching to a classic rock format, and that’s what it was right up until K-LOVE took over.

So WBZV, very briefly, and only recently, actually started successfully competing with WCSR for the first time in its entire history, only to be done in by the shoddy operations of its prior owners and a new owner who, unfortunately, didn’t have the wherewithal to fix it up properly.  EMF certainly has the money, though, and as little as I care for 24/7 national radio networks that have zero local content on their stations, EMF absolutely takes care of their facilities, and you can hear the difference their work has made on that signal.

But, it’s still not local content.  So we’re left languishing.  Honestly, it’s only a matter of time before WCSR loses all of its local content, as well.  I can’t imagine the Daily News hanging on another 20 years.  Then we’ll be relying on coverage from the Lansing TV stations and MLive, and they neither have the resources nor the desire to do any real, in-depth, hyperlocal news reporting from dinky little 47,000-resident Hillsdale County.  That place is so out of the way, anyway.  They don’t even have a freeway running through!

Hell, we’re lucky to have what we still do have at this point.  The only reason our population hasn’t shrunk to damn near nothing is because we’re surrounded by larger cities to which locals can commute (Jackson, Adrian, Coldwater, Bryan) and we’re only a couple hours’ drive from major metro areas like Detroit, Lansing, Toledo, or Fort Wayne.  Grand Rapids or South Bend takes a little longer.  Business isn’t exactly booming in Hillsdale, Michigan, and hasn’t been since at least the Dot-Com Bust.

The 2010 census even made the assertion (which I don’t actually believe) that while the entire rest of Hillsdale County’s population shrank for the first time since 1930, Somerset Township — which is becoming an exurban part of metropolitan Jackson County due to its proximity to US 127 — made up for all of the losses and then some.  Now, I’ve seen the growth there, and while it’s substantial, it wasn’t anywhere near the amount of population that we lost across the rest of the county.  But that’s what the Census says, so that’s the official statistic.  And then in 2020, the Census more accurately marked a 2% population decrease for those ten years (I still think it was more than that).

So given the decline, what is legacy media supposed to do, just throw money at us that they don’t have because they’ve already spent it buying up all these small-town operations with no real intention to run them as they’d been running?

On top of that, radio is dead. That’s just a fact. You’re going to see “Terrestrial Radio Industry Patriots,” as one of my circles of broadcasting buddies refers to them, argue with me about that, but they’re wrong. Period. End of story. Radio is a dead medium. AM is quickly going the way of shortwave. FM is only holding on by virtue of the fact that people who don’t have Bluetooth in their cars still tune in to listen from time to time — proven by the fact that WINS, the legendary all-news station in the nation’s largest market of New York City, only encodes their FM signal for the ratings, even though the AM signal is still on the air. People either stream or listen to podcasts now. Nearly all audio consumption has moved online. Any station that isn’t producing for an online audience FIRST is going to fail. And WCSR is among them.

Newspapers?  They’re not coming back.  Everything a newspaper can do is now done better online than newspapers ever did it.  That’s, no pun intended, old news at this point.  The Hillsdale Daily News has been online for decades, so they at least have that going for them, but… who’s going to report for them?  It will certainly take more than just one news reporter and one sports reporter to do the job properly, and I can tell you right now: Gannett sure as hell isn’t gonna pay any more people than they already are to cover this market.

Unless someone with the financial resources and the understanding of what it really takes to do local news correctly steps up, we’re headed for the void.

And God help us when we get there, because if you think the apathy and corruption are bad now, buddy, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet.