Jackie Spinner

It is an odd paradox in a small community: people shop with their local TV reporters and send their kids to school with the children of the editors of their hometown newspaper. They know their local journalists not simply as a byline but as the reporter who sits in the fourth row from the front on the right side of the church every Sunday. They don’t always see them as “the media.” The media are CNN and The New York Times and the Huffington Post. The media that deserves to be put in pens, like cattle, as Tom Matthews, editor of the Wayne County Press wrote in a recent column.

In the coming months, local journalists, like their national counterparts, are sure to face more criticism as Trump prepares to take office. There are two things at play: one is what role journalists will have under a president who has been outwardly hostile of the watchdogs of government, and the other is to what extent people will be willing to listen if the journalism doesn’t confirm previously held beliefs. In other words, how will any journalist deliver credible news under a model in which people doesn’t necessarily want information but rather something else?