In the rapidly expanding geography of American “news deserts,” the most visible casualties we track are usually political. We rightfully mourn the loss of the watchdog reporter at city hall, lament the subsequent drop in local voter turnout, and measure the corresponding rise in partisan polarization. But having spent decades navigating the intersection of media architecture, regulatory policy and cultural institutions, I see a parallel tragedy unfolding just beneath the surface: the quiet starvation of our local arts organizations.
The connection between the two is rarely discussed in policy circles, yet they are structurally and inextricably intertwined. Media researchers and civic advocates often operate in silos, but viewing this through a broader social science lens reveals that local journalism and the arts are two sides of the same civic coin. When a community loses its local news ecosystem, its cultural heartbeat inevitably begins to fade.
The most immediate impact of a shrinking newsroom is the severing of the local arts visibility pipeline. Over the past two decades, we have watched thousands of newspapers vanish or hollow out, leaving millions of Americans with limited access to local reporting. Long before a paper shuts its doors completely or a local broadcaster slashes its community programming, the first desks to be cleared out are almost always the arts and culture beats.
During my tenure leading a major cultural institution, The Museum of Television & Radio (now The Paley Center for Media), I saw firsthand how vital this media ecosystem is to the survival of the arts. Historically, local newspapers and regional broadcasters provided a critical translation function. The local critic or arts reporter didn’t merely review a gallery opening or a community theater production; they contextualized it. They signaled to the public that art originating within their own community had intrinsic value.
Without this “community-first criticism,” local theaters, symphony orchestras and museums lose their primary mechanism for audience development. The belief that social media marketing can fill this void is a dangerous illusion. Algorithmic distribution cannot replace the validating, community-wide spotlight of a trusted local feature story. Stripped of local media coverage, arts organizations become siloed, forced to preach to the choir of their established donor base rather than engaging the broader public.
The disconnect is heavily compounded by the structural changes I frequently analyze across the television and streaming industries. As local broadcasting yields to nationalized, algorithm-driven streaming platforms, the curation of our culture is increasingly centralized in a few coastal metropolises. Local television stations, which once dedicated significant airtime to local cultural affairs and community events, have seen their own resources squeezed. Today, a resident is far more likely to be served a hyper-targeted advertisement for a global streaming docuseries than a local broadcast segment on their own town’s art museum. This loss of local media architecture doesn't just silence regional arts; it homogenizes our entire cultural consumption.
Beyond visibility, local news and local arts share a profound, identical civic function. The data consistently demonstrates that when a local news source folds, civic engagement plummets and social cohesion weakens. Arts advocates have long measured their own sector’s impact using these same metrics. A thriving local arts scene fosters community identity, bridges socioeconomic divides, and improves neighborhood livability. Both sectors act as the essential connective tissue of a community. When citizens stop reading about their neighbors, they stop gathering with them, too.
This shared civic destiny exposes a shared economic vulnerability. The structural deficits facing local journalism and the performing arts are functionally identical. We accept that a performing arts organization will only cover a fraction of its expenses through ticket sales; no rational board would ask a symphony to fire its string section simply because box office revenues dipped. Yet, for decades, we expected local news to survive purely on the commercial whims of advertising and circulation.
As traditional mass-market models fail both sectors, our approach to civic funding and media policy must evolve. We can no longer treat them as competing charities. Philanthropy is increasingly stepping into the breach to subsidize local news, treating it as a public trust much like a municipal museum or a regional theater. But isolated, parallel grants are only a stopgap.
Local governments, community foundations and national philanthropies should systematically incentivize partnerships between local media and arts organizations. Imagine a collaborative funding model where a grant supports not just a local theater's new production, but also a digital news startup’s capacity to cover it. By embedding arts coverage mandates into emerging non-profit journalism models, we can ensure that cultural institutions regain their megaphone.
We cannot sustain a vibrant local democracy without an informed public, and we cannot maintain a resilient, cohesive community without the shared experiences that are provided by the arts. The health of our local news and the vitality of our cultural institutions are inextricably linked. It is time we start saving them together.
Stuart N. Brotman is Digital Media Laureate at The Media Institute and the author of “Free Expression Under Fire: Defending Free Speech and Free Press Across the Political Spectrum.” He can be reached at snbrotman@gmail.com.
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jvelazquez
In his Nov. 5 column for Editor & Publisher, “Why the news media ecosystem is critical to the survival of the arts and the broader health of the community,” Stuart N. Brotman makes an important argument: The decline of local journalism threatens not only democratic accountability but the cultural vitality of the communities it once served.
He's right.
Unfortunately, his proposed solutions expose some of the very assumptions that have helped make independent local journalism economically unsustainable.
I founded The Greylock Glass in 2015, in the Berkshires of Western Massachusetts, a region whose cultural identity is shaped by an extraordinary concentration of theaters, museums, galleries, music venues, and working artists. For eleven years, we've covered the region's cultural life, from internationally recognized performers to emerging local talent.
I've seen firsthand how independent coverage helps artists find audiences, introduces cultural institutions to new communities, and gives regional creative work a place in the public conversation.
I've also spent eleven years on the receiving end of press releases, publicity requests, invitations, and expectations of free promotional coverage from organizations that routinely charge audiences $50, $75, or $100 for admission.
There's a contradiction here that Brotman largely overlooks: if independent journalism is essential to the survival of the arts, why is its labor so often treated as something the arts should receive for free? Brotman correctly observes that arts journalism does something institutional marketing and algorithm-driven social media cannot: it provides independent context, criticism, and cultural legitimacy. But that distinction cuts both ways.
An interview with a playwright about the social issues explored in a new production is journalism. A critical assessment of that production is journalism. A reported examination of how a regional theater serves, or fails to serve, its community is journalism.
But let's be honest with ourselves — a press release merely announcing ticket availability is marketing.
And there's nothing inherently wrong with marketing. Cultural institutions need to get "butts in the seats," attract patrons, and develop audiences. They employ communications professionals, purchase advertising, and invest in promotional campaigns to accomplish those goals. Yet, independent local news outlets are frequently expected to contribute to these campaigns without compensation.
Consider the economics. A theater selling 300 tickets at $75 apiece can generate $22,500 in gross revenue from a single sold-out performance. That doesn't mean the theater is profitable. Producing live performance is expensive, and many arts organizations operate on precarious margins.
But those expenses include paying the people and businesses whose labor makes the production possible. Why should the publication helping that theater reach prospective ticket buyers be excluded from the calculation?
Let's be perfectly clear: This is not an argument for “pay for play.” No arts organization should be able to purchase favorable reviews, guaranteed editorial coverage, or immunity from criticism. Nor should a publication withhold coverage of genuinely newsworthy cultural events simply because an organization declines to advertise.
The distinction is between journalism that serves the public interest and promotion that serves an organization's commercial interests. The former must remain entirely independent of financial considerations involving the subjects of coverage. The latter is a service for which publishers have every right to expect compensation.
An arts organization purchasing advertising should receive precisely what it paid for: advertising. Nothing more, nothing less. Its financial relationship with a publication should have no bearing whatsoever on editorial decisions.
A publication's decision not to reproduce a press release for free is not evidence that it has abandoned its cultural mission. It may simply be evidence that its publisher understands the cost of labor.
Brotman proposes that governments, foundations, and philanthropists incentivize partnerships between arts organizations and local media, including grants that support arts coverage through nonprofit journalism models. It's an appealing idea, but it raises an obvious question: Why nonprofit journalism? The public value of journalism does not depend on whether its publisher operates under a 501(c)(3) designation.
For-profit newspapers built much of America's local journalism infrastructure. They exposed corruption, documented public affairs, reviewed performances, covered exhibitions, and served as the public record of their communities. Small, independently owned publications continue performing those functions today, often under extraordinarily difficult financial circumstances.
Yet philanthropic efforts to rescue local journalism frequently privilege nonprofit structures, leaving independent commercial publishers with limited access to the very funding intended to preserve their work.
There are legitimate legal and administrative reasons that charitable foundations structure grants around nonprofit organizations. But those constraints should encourage the development of more inclusive funding mechanisms, not become a rationale for treating commercial journalism as less worthy of preservation.
A publisher who has invested years building an independent local news organization should not have to surrender its business model, assume the costs of nonprofit conversion, or reorganize its governance simply to be recognized as a legitimate contributor to the public good.
Judge journalism by its work, its independence, and its service to the community — not by the tax form filed by its publisher.
There's another, potentially more troubling, problem with tying arts journalism funding directly to the organizations being covered. What happens when the news isn't flattering?
Suppose a regional theater helps fund a local publication's arts reporting. Later, credible allegations of serious misconduct, say sexual harassment, emerge against its artistic director. Does its editor feel entirely free to pursue the story? Does the theater's board renew its support the following year? Does the publication's future coverage become a subject of discussion when the next grant application arrives?
Financial influence need not involve an explicit threat. The possibility of losing essential funding can create pressure long before anyone makes a demand.
Advertising relationships have always presented potential conflicts of interest for publishers, and responsible news organizations maintain clear boundaries between commercial relationships and editorial decisions. Philanthropic support deserves no exemption from those standards.
Independent journalism must be free to scrutinize its supporters, challenge their leadership, investigate their financial practices, and publish criticism that may make them uncomfortable; otherwise, what we're financing isn't independent journalism. It's public relations with a press pass.
If foundations and arts organizations genuinely want to sustain independent reporting, funding arrangements must protect editorial autonomy, prohibit donor interference, and avoid making any publication financially dependent on a single institution it covers. Editorial independence isn't simply the freedom to publish an unwelcome story. It's the financial ability to survive publishing it.
Brotman's strongest observation is that arts organizations and local journalism face similar structural challenges. Both create public value that cannot be fully captured through ticket sales, subscriptions, or advertising. Both enrich communities beyond the immediate customers they serve. Both rely on labor whose cultural significance often exceeds its commercial compensation.
But the relationship between them is not merely one of mutual vulnerability. Arts organizations, particularly in culturally rich regions like the Berkshires, also make choices about where their marketing dollars go.
As an independent publisher, I see that imbalance firsthand. My inbox regularly fills with promotional press releases from cultural organizations seeking coverage of their latest productions, exhibitions, and events. Yet when I approach some of those same organizations about purchasing advertising, the conversation often ends before it begins. Invitations to discuss advertising opportunities go unanswered. Emails and telephone messages receive no response. Sometimes I'm told there simply isn't money in the budget.
Meanwhile, I encounter advertising for some of those organizations on social media, in large regional publications, and on billboards.
I don't begrudge cultural organizations their right to determine how and where they spend their marketing dollars. Nor do I expect them to purchase advertising simply because they've sent me a press release. But there is something fundamentally contradictory about an organization investing in paid promotion through other channels while continuing to expect a local independent publisher to provide promotional exposure for nothing.
And this is hardly a problem unique to my publication. Conversations with fellow independent publishers suggest that the expectation of free publicity, coupled with reluctance to invest in the outlets providing it, is a familiar feature of the local media landscape.
The consequence is a peculiar form of economic extraction: Cultural institutions seek access to the audiences, credibility, and community relationships that independent publishers have spent years building, without necessarily recognizing the financial investment required to maintain them.
That arrangement is not sustainable. And it is certainly not the partnership of equals that the survival of both sectors demands. This is not an argument that every cultural organization can afford substantial advertising expenditures, or that every exhibition, concert, and theatrical production deserves coverage. It is an argument that arts organizations should recognize independent local media as part of the cultural ecosystem they depend upon — and make meaningful financial commitments to its survival.
That might mean purchasing advertising. It might mean supporting independently administered regional journalism funds. It might mean encouraging foundations to underwrite journalism without dictating its subjects, conclusions, or editorial priorities. It should certainly mean recognizing that a journalist's time, experience, and professional labor have economic value.
I agree with Brotman that local journalism and the arts share a civic destiny. But preserving that relationship requires something more substantial than embedding arts-coverage mandates in nonprofit journalism grants. It requires a change in how cultural institutions understand independent media.
Journalists are not extensions of arts organizations' marketing departments. Independent publishers are not supplicants seeking permission to serve their communities. And commercial news organizations are not inherently less deserving of support than nonprofit ones. An economically sustainable relationship between the arts and local journalism must respect the independence and financial needs of both.
The arts need journalists who will take their work seriously enough to cover it thoughtfully, criticize it fairly, and occasionally investigate the institutions producing it. And journalists need an arts community that takes their work seriously enough to help sustain the independent media infrastructure on which that coverage depends. If local journalism really is essential to the survival of the arts, then its survival cannot remain somebody else's financial responsibility.
Jason Velázquez
Editor, The Greylock Glass
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