The Case for Staying Local: Notes From a Regional Newsroom

I have been asked, more than once, why I stayed. The question usually comes from journalists who have moved to larger markets or into different kinds of work, and it is asked with genuine curiosity rather than condescension — or at least I choose to hear it that way. My answer has changed over the years, but it has not fundamentally altered. I stayed because the work here is the work I want to do, and because I have come to believe, more firmly over time, that it is work that matters.

Regional journalism is not smaller journalism. It is journalism at a different scale, with different pressures and different rewards. The scale at which I work — a single metropolitan region, a handful of counties, a few hundred thousand people — is a scale at which it is possible to understand the institutional landscape in depth, to know the actors over time, to follow a story through its full arc rather than arriving at its most dramatic moment and leaving before the consequences settle.

What You Learn by Staying

What I have learned by staying in this region for the better part of my career is not primarily a set of facts, though I have accumulated many of those. What I have learned is how things actually work here, which is not always how they are described as working, and how they have changed, which is not always in the directions that the most prominent voices in the community would have you believe. That knowledge takes time to acquire. It cannot be imported.

I cover municipal affairs and planning and civic institutions. These are not glamorous subjects. They are also, in my experience, the subjects that most directly determine how people's daily lives unfold — whether the road gets repaired, whether the school gets funded, whether the zoning decision serves the community or the applicant. I think that matters. I think it is worth covering. I intend to keep doing it.