Nickolas Seibel, Editor and Publisher of the Silver City Daily Press, recently acquired the Deming Headlight from newspaper conglomerate Gannett. The Headlight had seen a large number of layoffs, but once he acquired the paper, it began circulating again in early November.
According to the U.S. Census Bureau,the number of daily newspapers in circulation has dropped from nearly 56 million in 2000 to just over 24 million in 2020. This has come with a massive drop in profits for newspaper publishers, with revenue declining from $46.2 billion in 2002 to $22.1 billion in 2020.
But Seibel says he believes local newspapers like the Daily Press and Headlight still play an important role, with the ability to bring communities together in ways that other forms of media cannot.
“Being able to build community, being able to sort of marshall the forces of people that live in a place, is really one of the only chances that any small rural place has. And I think there are very few tools for doing that that are more effective than a newspaper,” he said.
Seibel explained that starting up operations of the Deming Headlight after the acquisition was difficult due to the previous operation of the newspaper.
“Since it had been under corporate ownership for so long, everything was centralized off somewhere else. I bought a name, I bought some subscribers, but there weren’t people. There wasn’t anybody that was going to handle the obituaries from the mortuary, there wasn’t somebody that was going to copy-edit who knew how to spell the name of the mayor.” he said. “And those kinds of things are fundamental to a community newspaper. So having to build all that from scratch in a few weeks. That’s been the most challenging process of this particular transition.”
Seibel said that he worries about the state of the industry due to so many newspapers with ownership that put profit margins above all else.
“There’s a substantial segment of newspapers out there that are just taking advantage of people. And they’re really just burning the furniture until there’s nothing left. In a way, we, newspapers as an industry, are undermining ourselves. And there’s nothing that those of us who care can do anything about it,” he laughed. “I mean, other than, I guess, this. To try to keep things going and expand the light where we can.”
A report by Northwestern University shows that 20% of the U.S. population either lives in a county with no local newspaper, or is at risk of losing its only paper. According to a report from the UNC Hussman School of Journalism and Media, these so-called news deserts affect disenfranchised communities the most, and the absence of information intensifies political, social, and economic division within the U.S.
Algernon D’Ammassa is the Headlight’s new editor-in-chief. A longtime resident of Deming, D’Ammassa is coming from the Las Cruces Sun-News, another property of Gannett. D’Ammassa said that even though there are benefits working for a large company like Ganett, being independently owned allows for more connection to the community.
“There are certainly advantages of being owned by a large corporation … so we had access to a whole network of journalism and there were opportunities for collaborations and resources that we wouldn’t have purely as a local paper. But we were also subject to the business model of a large capitalist journalistic enterprise that treated it as a commercial business. The decisions that were made involved fewer and fewer local journalists, more and more things were outsourced.”
D’Ammassa said that while the future of journalism is digital, the last print newspapers will exist in rural areas like Silver City and Deming. And if there is an absence of local reporting, the community will be worse off.
“The data couldn’t be more clear, when there is not local journalism, government operates outside of the sunshine. And so corruption, wasteful spending, and other abuses of the public trust take place with more prevalence in areas where there is not local news,” he said. “So local journalism is incredibly important no matter how difficult it is to sustain as a business.”
D’Ammassa said that while other sources of media may produce news in a quicker manner, the goal of the Headlight is to uphold journalistic principals, and ensure the quality and accuracy of the information that they report.
