Is the death of newspapers the end of good citizenship?

"Name one community where people won't say that," Mr. White says, addressing local claims of inadequate coverage. "This is a silly conversation." Asked in a phone interview about the home page of the Haverhill Gazette's website, where the most recent story in the schools section was more than 100 days old, he replied, "Do you want to have a conversation, or do you just want to harangue me?" Then he hung up the phone.

The effects of closing daily newspapers have been more formally studied by Lee Shaker, a communications professor at Portland State University in Oregon. Professor Shaker examined the death of the Rocky Mountain News in Denver and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer's print edition. "They were deeply embedded in their communities, in terms of people waking up in the morning and reading them and also as clearinghouse institutions where reporters had spent their entire careers," Shaker says. "[The reporters] knew how things worked and could shed light on the truth." Both papers were approaching their 150th anniversaries when publishers pulled the plug in 2009.

From a research perspective, they couldn't have expired at a better time. Months earlier, the US Census Bureau had started collecting data to assess how deeply citizens were involved with their communities in big cities across the country. This set the stage for what social scientists call a "natural experiment."

Shaker examined the bureau's findings from before and after the closures of the Rocky Mountain News and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. Even though Denver and Seattle were each left with one daily print paper – previously, both had been two-newspaper towns – the change was significant. Shaker saw a decline in certain public-minded behaviors, including boycotts, which outpaced other cities.

The data did not explain why. So, asks Shaker: "Did civic engagement decline because people stopped reading a newspaper? Or because you took a newspaper out of the community?" After all, newspapers play a dual role: keeping readers informed and acting as watchdogs.

Having a paper around, Shaker adds, "is a public good we all benefit from, even if we don't read it, because it means journalists are pounding the pavement, holding officials accountable, activating the community."

The death of The Cincinnati Post, the final edition of which appeared on New Year's Eve in 2007, created a similar effect, according to another scholarly paper, which is forthcoming in the Journal of Media Economics. When the Post and its sister edition, The Kentucky Post, closed, political participation dropped across the northern Kentucky suburbs. Though the area's other daily newspaper, The Cincinnati Enquirer, remained in business, the Post had provided 80 percent of the papers' combined coverage of that suburban zone.

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