Kansas State University is not only a place for students to learn and grow in their future careers but a place where many professors on campus are developing and experimenting within their field. Steven Smethers of the A.Q. Miller School of Journalism is currently working on the effects that news deserts have on rural communities in the state of Kansas. News deserts are defined when communities lose their centralized source of news, typically a newspaper publication.
Steven Smethers grew up in a small town and has always had a strong interest in communities – especially in his home state of Kansas. He said one of the reasons he chose to work at Kansas State was because this university is known for “going out and helping communities solve community issues.”
Steven Smethers has plenty of expertise in the area of journalism and communication. He hosted a radio show for five years in Salina, Kansas, and he was the chamber president. He has also been working at Kansas State University since 2002.
Steven Smethers is genuinely passionate about bettering communities and towns in the state of Kansas. So when it came time to develop a research project this was right up his alley.
Steven Smethers teaches the Mass Communications in Society course at Kansas State. In this class, he talks about how the medium, or platform, of news changes over time. He likes to show a cartoon of Uncle Sam standing at a grave site.
On each grave is a typewriter, an 8-track tape player, an analog TV, and a grave is being dug for print media. This cartoon is depicting the idea that like many other media platforms from the past have died off, there is a real crisis that print media and newspapers are heading in the same direction. When communities lose their centralized source of news, that community is then called a news desert.
The current climate for print newspapers and their circulation numbers are very low. Many community newspapers in rural areas are the first to go. But say print media is not the future, the issue still is how do we create a centralized news source for communities across the county?
As Marshall McLuhan once said, “the medium is the message.” This means that the message doesn’t necessarily matter as much as the medium, or platform for which the message is being conveyed through that matters the most.
For example, consider Steven Smethers’ research project. He is using the community of Baldwin City, Kansas as a way to experiment with other news mediums to get local information out to the public. “There are two types of change; the kind you plan and the kind that happens abruptly,” Steven Smethers explains.
In 2015 Baldwin City’s newspaper, the Baldwin City Signal, announced that they were publishing their last paper. This announcement was made by the publishing company in charge of this newspaper, which was the Lawrence Journal-World Publishing company.
Scott Stanford, a publisher for Lawrence Journal-World Publishing remarked, “At the end of 2015, we were the publishers for four weekly newspapers. We had a weekly newspaper in Bonner Springs, Kansas; Shawnee, Kansas; Tonganoxie, Kansas; and Baldwin City, Kansas. As we analyzed these newspapers overtime, the Baldwin City newspaper was the weakest of the four newspapers.”
While this newspaper was considered to be the weakest, the citizens of Baldwin City risked missing out on relevant news stories. This continues to be a real problem for the elderly population as they tend to be technophobic when it comes to changing their habits of a printed newspaper.
From a community leader’s perspective, Jennette Blackmar, who is the executive director of Baldwin City’s chamber of commerce and a resident of Baldwin City for 18 years, says she sees the disconnect of losing the town’s newspaper first hand.
“The communication at multiple levels and the challenge of people coming to my door asking where can they get information, where’s the news, especially in the senior community was obvious there was a lack of coordinated, consolidated, and central point of news getting to the residents,” she says.
Currently Steven Smethers is working on trying to hold communities together, by finding a centralized news source that communities can actually use. He wants to find a way to keep print media around, but if it’s not savable, then discovering a new localized source of news that works for communities that are missing this key aspect.
