They say all politics is local. So where’s the local news coverage this election year?
I’ve been traveling to what are called “news deserts” in Super Tuesday states to hear about the business models that are failing or informing voters as they make their choices on Tuesday. We began our “Democracy in the Desert” coverage this week in Val Verde County, Texas, part a group of six contiguous counties close to the U.S. border listed as news deserts. Yesterday we heard about the last daily newspaper in Val Verde county that folded more than three years ago. Today we are focusing on who’s covering things now?
On a winter Wednesday in the county seat of Del Rio, Texas, the best show in town may be this regular meeting of the elected commissioners who see to the county’s business. The presiding officer for the county is unhappy with the city, and his language is Texas spicy.
The commissioners, experts and residents are looking to fix low water pressure in one neighborhood. Things also get edgy about a location for early voting in the run-up to next week’s election. The more cramped space wins. It’s crucial stuff, and is there a reporter in this news desert to write up the highlights … you know, other than a visitor like me? Well, there is: A very experienced reporter named Karen Gleason.
“All politicians will talk to me, I make a deal with people, I say, ‘either answer my phone call, or tomorrow morning, I’m gonna show up outside your office,'” Gleason said. “And over the years, I have built trust with these people.”
Karen Gleason, reporter for The 830 Times. (David Brancaccio/Marketplace)
Gleason’s been reporting from this part of Texas since the 1980s, with many years at the Del Rio News-Herald, the daily paper that died in 2020. Now she works for the local online news site here called The 830 Times; 830 is the local area code.
Karen’s coverage runs the gamut from small stories to enormous ones.
“They started coming across the river, just upstream of the international bridge where it’s very shallow,” she said.
She’s talking about 2021, when thousands of people from Haiti gathered under the border bridge here seeking asylum. (If you need context and depth, our colleagues at Texas Public Radio have since produced an incisive and extensive podcast series called “Line In the Land.“)
But in the very first days of the story, locals were desperate for news on what was happening on the ground with border patrol limiting access. It was Gleason with the contacts to enlist help from the mayor, who’d gone to school with her son.
“He goes, ‘We’re gonna hide you in the back of my car,'” she said. “They covered me with blankets. And we went through the border patrol checkpoint at the fence. And he’d tell me like, ‘OK, nobody’s looking.'”
The 830 Times is nonpartisan and has a paper edition that comes out Fridays, plus occasional Facebook Live broadcasts. It’s not the newspaper of yore, but it is a resource. Joel Langton, The 830 Times publisher, tells me it’s a “crock of” you-know-what that media researchers call this a desert.
“We put out anywhere from 24 to 40 pages of news every week,” he said. “It’s hyperlocal. But if you talk to some pointy head from Northwestern University, they’re gonna say it’s a news desert. Well, guess what? You haven’t set foot here.”
He’s selling ads and paid legal notices to bring in money. Langton had a long career with the Air Force and did public relations for the base here, Laughlin. Like many a startup, The 830 Times has been supported in part by Langton’s own savings.
“My retirement fund is not as good as it was,” he said. “But it’s not being drained as quickly as it was at one time, either.”
And, for now, his business also depends on the family money of one of his reporters, who — let me emphasize — is not complaining.
“You know, I am making probably about a third of what I was making at the News Herald,” Gleason said. “I am married to a very, very wonderful man who has agreed to basically pay all my bills.”
In spite of its “news desert” classification, Langton says he can count at least six other info sources in the region. Info, but is it news? A former border agent named Frank Lopez Jr. has a Facebook page with the handle “U.S. Border Patriot” where he does standups to camera, TV correspondent-style, often from the border fence. He calls the people coming across “invaders.”
Lopez wears many hats. “Border Patriot,” former chair of the county Republican Party, and candidate for U.S. congress next week. But as I look across the scrubland here in south Texas, it’s worth noting what a desert is.
“You still have shrubs, you have various plants, you just don’t have as lush landscape as you did in the past,” said Penny Muse Abernathy, a professor at Northwestern University’s Local News Initiative that has done key work on the decline of local news in America.
Her group lists 204 news deserts across the U.S. and 228 counties on the watch list as being high risk for losing their last news outlet. Tomorrow we’ll turn to another Super Tuesday state, North Carolina, to hear what happened when one of the biggest election scandals of the modern era played out in a county without many reporters.
