By Edward Lynn
Editor
When a local newspaper shuts down, the community pays a steep price. It shows up in taxpayer costs, weaker oversight of government and a community that knows less about itself.
Research and reporting on the local news collapse repeatedly finds that when reporters stop regularly attending meetings, reviewing budgets and tracking local institutions, accountability declines and the public pays more. “A newspaper goes out of business, corruption goes up, fines go up … there’s a cost to society,” Ann Marie Lipinski of Harvard’s Nieman Foundation told GBH.
One measurable cost is in public finance. A Brookings Institution working paper examining newspaper closures and municipal borrowing found that “municipal borrowing costs increase by 5 to 11 basis points” following a closure, adding substantial expense for local governments — and ultimately local taxpayers.
Those pressures arrive as the industry continues to shrink. The Medill Local News Initiative at Northwestern University has documented continuing losses in printed editions and newsroom jobs, warning that the “loss of local newspapers is continuing at an alarming pace” and that local news deserts are spreading.
Even where digital outlets grow, the gap is uneven. An AP report on Medill’s tracking found newspapers were closing at “more than two per week” in 2023 and quoted Medill director Tim Franklin describing what researchers see in the data: “The local news crisis is snowballing.”
A subscription is, in practical terms, a community’s simplest mechanism to keep routine public oversight alive: the school board agenda that would otherwise go unread, the council contract that would otherwise pass without scrutiny, the local court action that would otherwise never reach voters.
When readers stop paying, advertisers stop trying to reach them. This causes the system that produces verified local information to collapse, and the publications with them. And when the local newspaper disappears, so do the public notices, and school and government reporting, which drives up local expenses and, ultimately, local taxes. And communities end up paying anyway, just through higher costs, worse governance and less shared civic reality.
A year of the Eagle Grove Eagle, even at our most expensive, Premium tier is just under $120 a year. Or a standard annual subscription is just $79 a year. So ask yourself, what’s cheaper? That, or a 5% to 11% increase in your annual property taxes?
Let’s do the math. The median effective property tax rate in Wright County is 1.78%. Add in the proposed local levy rate and rounded up a little for easy math it works out to about $20 per thousand dollars of the value of your home. If you property taxes went up a moderate amount like 8%, after the closure of the Eagle Grove Eagle, your bill goes up about $190 in year one. And that’s before the increases compound year after year after year, and before equity increases your property value. If you’re a home owner, those are direct costs. And if you’re renting, you can count on your rent going up.
So, one way or another, YOU simply can’t afford NOT to subscribe to the Eagle Grove Eagle. Because if you don’t pay for a subscription, you’ll definitely pay higher taxes, or rent.
