Out of Print: The Unmaking of American News

Eighteen months ago, the Reporter went up for sale. Shortly thereafter, its publisher took it off the market with the promise to continue its publication through the end of the 2025 calendar year. There were no promises beyond that. We've just turned the page onto the 2026 calendar year. So, it's time to find out. Will the Reporter carry on? And just as importantly, we'll explore the reasons why t...

When I walked into the Shelter Island Public Library in June, 2024 to listen to reporter publisher Andrew Olsen explain why he might shut down the Reporter, I saw almost nothing but gray. Even though I was approaching the age of 50, I was the youngest person in attendance for that meeting of about 150 people. I didn't feel much room for optimism about the future of local newspapers. But when I wen...

What's it mean to work for your local community newspaper? What does a longstanding local newspaper mean to the community it covers?  Joining me for this panel discussion were Jackson Rohrer, Reporter sportswriter and Shelter Island High School junior; Amanda Bright, journalism professor and director of the Innovation Lab at the University of Georgia's Grady School of Journalism and Mass Communica...

Shelter Island has undergone an extreme demographic shift since 2007. The houses are bigger. There are more people with more money. It's a lot more white collar than blue. At the same time, it's also grayer, more impoverished and more racially diverse. How did such dramatic changes happen so quickly and what do they mean for the future? Original music and scoring by Felicity G. Williams . Voiceove...

It's whimsical, dreamy, a place where parents need not worry about their kids. Traffic's not a problem, nor is crime. And if you come home to find your front door is wide open, the first thought isn't that a burglar was too inconsiderate to close the door on the way out, but that a wild animal might be foraging through the refrigerator like Goldilocks and the Three Bears. This is the Shelter Islan...

Nature abhors a vacuum. When there's no professional local news source to deliver the news, social media outlets are more than happy to take over. What you end up with is unvetted and unreliable, and oftentimes even worse than that. In the absence of local news, here's what you'll get. Original music and scoring by Felicity G. Williams . Voiceovers by Aaron Bernstein and Martini Jean. Please check...

Helicoptering in - a term for a reporter working for a publication outside the community coming in to do a story. The person helicoptering in usually has no connection or attachment to the community, and will be gone as soon as the story's finished. And that story will look a lot different than coverage of the same event from a local reporter and source. Original music and scoring by Felicity G. W...

Think about what you would lose if your local newspaper closed – a public advocate for the community, a forum to celebrate it, fun gossip – and what that same community would do in order to keep its paper alive were it on the verge of shutting down. Original music and scoring by Felicity G. Williams. Voiceovers by Dani Henion. Please check out my Patreon page and follow me on Instagram and Tiktok...

Shelter Island - a small island at the East End of Long Island town publicly accessible only by ferry boat. There's no way to sum it up in just a few words. That's what makes its local paper, the Shelter Island Reporter, so important. It's the town square - to celebrate the town and community, fight over it, enjoy the high school sports triumphs and gloat and gossip over the police blotter. Welcom...

This is an eyewitness account to the demise of local newspapers... a crisis is a story that's playing out all over the nation. Season 1 dives into the struggles of the Shelter Island Reporter, a local newspaper serving an island town of 2,800 people near the eastern tip of New York's Long Island. Last year the paper I worked for from 2007-09 was on the verge of shutting down, but it received a lif...