![holland sentinel obituaries 2018 holland sentinel obituaries 2018](https://cache.legacy.net/legacy/images/cobrands/hollandsentinel/photos/04d9b816-845b-4699-baca-cc4ea99ad3b2.jpg)
Gannett, which owns 20 Michigan newspapers including the Detroit Free Press and Lansing State Journal, did not respond to a request for comment for this story. “There are very few local reporters now, few local news outlets with the bandwidth to pull the documents, go to obscure committee meetings - that’s where you find the story, the string that you pull that becomes a really good, important local news story.” “I really do believe there’s never been a better time to be a corrupt local politician because nobody is watching the henhouse,” said Sue Ellen Christian, a former Chicago Tribune reporter and now a Western Michigan University journalism professor. That’s worrisome, many say, because of the importance that the media plays in holding government officials accountable, keeping the populace informed and helping to foster community connections. “But there’s never a day in which I imagine it’s an adequate replacement for the newsrooms that I used to work in. “BridgeDetroit is doing really great stuff,” he said. But he’s the first to acknowledge it can’t match the breadth and depth of coverage provided by the Free Press and Detroit News. Henderson is immensely proud of BridgeDetroit, which has six full-time staffers and several contract workers. Henderson left the Free Press in 2017 and helped to found BridgeDetroit, an offshoot of Bridge magazine, a nonprofit news outlet that covers statewide issues. Henderson won a 2014 Pulitzer Prize for his columns on city issues. Henderson was deputy editorial page editor of the Detroit Free Press when the newspaper was covering one huge story after another: The Kwame Kilpatrick scandal, the auto bankruptcies, the Detroit city bankruptcy. It’s a question that Stephen Henderson thinks about a lot.
![holland sentinel obituaries 2018 holland sentinel obituaries 2018](https://www.gannett-cdn.com/community-hub/images/prod/ghl/PPET0371550-1.jpg)
The question is, how are we going to get out of this?” “We’re at a real inflection point for local news in America. “I equate the local news crisis to being journalism’s climate change. Local journalism is “in crisis,” said Tim Franklin, who heads Northwestern’s Local News Initiative and is a former top editor at the Indianapolis Star, Orlando Sentinel and Baltimore Sun. (The author of this story retired from MLive in 2021 and still has a freelance contract with them.) But the chain had four rounds of layoffs and buyouts between 20. Staffing information is not available for MLive Media Group, which has newspapers in Grand Rapids, Ann Arbor, Flint, Bay City, Saginaw, Jackson, Kalamazoo and Muskegon. At the Macomb Daily, the Guild’s membership went from 72 to 11 between 20. In 2023, the Newspaper Guild of Detroit had 75 union members at the Free Press and 31 at The News, which doesn’t include nonunion journalists, according to Guild data. In 2000, The Detroit News had a newsroom of 300, Publisher Gary Miles recently told Axios. The Detroit Free Press had a newsroom of more than 400 before the 1995-97 Detroit newspaper strike, a former Free Press staffer recalls. OPINION: Stronger democracy is worth the investment The Northwestern study tracks “news deserts,’’ where there is no media outlet, as well as the rise of “ghost newsrooms,” where the newspaper is local in name only, with very limited location-specific news that is supplemented by content from elsewhere.īut even the largest news organizations that remain in Michigan have been hard hit. In the past 15 years, a quarter of Michigan newspapers have stopped publishing and 58% of the state’s journalism jobs have disappeared, roughly on par with the rest of the country, according to Northwestern University’s Local News Initiative, which documents the state of American journalism. Today, the Enquirer has a news reporter and a sports reporter based in Battle Creek. It was down to seven when he took a buyout in 2017. He left the Sentinel for the Battle Creek Enquirer, which had a newsroom of 55 in 2000, he said. In the late 1990s, the Holland Sentinel newsroom had 25 staffers, recalls Robert Warner, a Sentinel journalist in 1998-99. The vast majority have one news reporter, one sports reporter and share a photographer and local editor with other publications. “My biggest point of pride is the fact that we are a teeny tiny organization, and we’re able to pull something like this off,” said Leach, who lives in Holland.Īnd the Sentinel is better staffed than other newspapers Leach oversees.
![holland sentinel obituaries 2018 holland sentinel obituaries 2018](https://cache.legacy.net/legacy/images/cobrands/hollandsentinel/photos/222b94fd-11bf-451e-88d4-f0d60c770a8c.jpg)
RELATED: 6 strategies to bolster local journalism in Michigan That’s especially true of traditional print media, where staffing has shrunk considerably. This is Michigan journalism in 2024: While journalists are still working hard to hold public officials accountable, resources are stretched to the breaking point. But Ottawa Impact is such a big story and the Sentinel staff is so small - two news reporters, a sports reporter, a photographer and local editor to cover a county of 300,000 - that Leach feels compelled to pitch in.