Untitled Flashcards Set

THREE JEWEL OF THE HILLS IN 1998, during my last year of college, I looked for a job as a newspaper photographer. I wrote to a dozen small papers between Birmingham, Alabama, and Homer, Alaska. One made me an offer: The Exponent Telegram in Clarksburg, West Virginia. The editor offered me $230 a week as an intern in the photo department. I packed up my car and headed south. Clarksburg—population 16,400—lies in the green highlands of northern West Virginia, between the Ohio River and the Allegheny Mountains. It traces its roots to 1785, when ambitious settlers sought to create a regional capital of culture and politics—“the Athens of Allegheny, Virginia,” as the historian Stephen W. Brown put it. By the mid-nineteenth century, they were profiting from shipping coal up the West Fork River to steel mills in Pittsburgh. When J. H. Diss Debar, a French traveler, visited Clarksburg in 1846, he found that its people prided themselves on “superior culture and manners,” even if their modern buildings “did not exceed a dozen.” Politically and culturally, the city straddled the line between North and South. In Clarksburg, citizens rose to prominence on both sides of the Civil War; the Confederate general Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson became, in Robert E. Lee’s words, “my right arm.” Nathan Goff Jr., a major in the Union Army, was so valuable that when he was taken prisoner, Abraham Lincoln personally intervened to secure his release. (Goff went on to be a federal judge, a U.S. senator, and secretary of the navy.) In the twentieth century, the ambitious grandees of Clarksburg set out to build a metropolis. They installed some of the first telephones in West Virginia, and opened eight banks, three hospitals, and a streetcar line. Nathan Goff, the Civil War veteran, built a luxurious hotel called the Waldo (named after his father, Waldo Goff), as well as one of West Virginia’s first “skyscrapers,” which consisted of two nine-story towers. Elsewhere in the tiny downtown, the Robinson Grand became one of the first theaters in America to be wired for talking pictures. By 1920, the population of Clarksburg had grown to 28,000, and prosperous families built gracious Victorian mansions in a neighborhood dubbed Quality Hill. Throughout that history, the land beneath their feet provided an abundant source of opportunity. Rich reservoirs of natural gas and vast acres of sand gave rise to a flourishing glass industry, which attracted craftsmen from Europe and lent the small city a worldly air. Artisans from Belgium spoke French in the streets. Hazel Atlas, the largest glass company in America, had a factory in town, as did Pittsburgh Plate, Anchor Hocking, Rolland, and Harvey Glass. Clarksburg was nicknamed the “Jewel of the Hills.” The standard of living rose steadily for three decades after World War II, as it had in much of America, when the national economy doubled in size and the earnings of the average worker doubled with it. Workers in the local glass factories could afford to buy a house and a car and to raise a family. On Main Street, in front of the handsome Art Deco courthouse, the city hung a billboard that said, “You have a right to be proud!” The local government built so many parks and sewers and roads that, in 1957, the National Municipal League named Clarksburg an “All-America City,” for its commitment to such values as “civic engagement” and “inclusiveness.” (More than forty years later, when I moved to town, the title still appeared proudly on signs hung from lampposts.) The first time I drove into Clarksburg, it felt like a tiny fragment of a city transplanted to the mountains; it had a grid of downtown streets, tall, corniced office buildings, and elevated roadways. The FBI had recently opened a vast complex nearby, with 2,700 jobs, processing fingerprints and digital records on the site of an old coal mine. People in town were feeling flush. I rented an apartment downtown for $250 a month. On one side of the building, I looked out at a car wash and a Wendy’s; on the other, I had a view of a quiet residential neighborhood, with streets named for native local trees —Sycamore, Beech, Birch, Locust. The houses were wood-and-brick bungalows, with well-kept lawns, inhabited, in many cases, by retired couples who subscribed to The Exponent Telegram and attended the United Methodist Temple on the corner. The nearest house had the most lovingly cared-for car I’d ever seen—a sixties sedan with a white convertible top and a body painted in a brilliant shade of turquoise. The car was always buffed to a luminous shine, and, on my way home from work, I sometimes stopped and snapped pictures of the car. It reminded me of the billboard about being proud. The Exponent Telegram occupied a small stout headquarters, made of stone, with columns flanking the front door. The paper was almost as ambitious as the rural city it covered. We published two newspapers a day, seven days a week: The Clarksburg Exponent in the morning, and The Clarksburg Telegram in the afternoon. In one form or another, the papers could trace their roots back to 1861, and in the early years they had represented fiercely partisan positions in local politics; the Exponent leaned left, and the Telegram leaned right. The editors had to contend with the passions of their neighbors. “It wasn’t a safe occupation,” David Houchin, a Clarksburg archivist, told me not long ago. “It was not uncommon for our editors to be stabbed and shot for things they printed.” An early editor of the Telegram, Wilbur Richards, was shot at “on more than one occasion—and he’d fire back,” Houchin said. “By the time you get past the turn of the twentieth century, they’re not shooting newspaper editors anymore. They’re just clubbing them or whipping them.” In 1903, an up-and-coming local lawyer named John W. Davis flayed the editor of the Telegram with a buggy whip—he was unhappy with the paper’s comments about his father—and then promptly turned himself in to the police. The beating did not harm the assailant’s career; Davis was elected to Congress eight years later and went on become the Democratic nominee for president in 1924, having launched his campaign with a ticker-tape parade through downtown Clarksburg. Davis lost to Calvin Coolidge but retained political power—sometimes at the expense of racial progress: in 1954, he represented South Carolina before the Supreme Court, arguing, unsuccessfully, for “separate but equal” schools. Davis helped establish the elite Council on Foreign Relations, and is enshrined in the name of the law firm Davis Polk. By the middle of the twentieth century, the mayhem in Clarksburg journalism had subsided, and the local papers had strong economic reasons to shed their political ideologies: the more subscribers they attracted, the more they could charge for advertising. So they aimed to be inoffensive. By the time I arrived, the Exponent and the Telegram confined their politics to the editorial pages, and those of us who filled the news pages were barely aware of the politics. The papers shared a motto—“My Life, My Home, My Newspaper”—and they shared an editor in chief. His name was Bill Sedivy; he was forty-two and over six feet tall with a silver goatee and a broad chest. On weekends, he worked as a whitewater guide, which lent him a casual air that disguised his intensity. Sedivy, raised outside Cleveland, had run small papers in Indiana and Ohio before coming to Clarksburg with the goal of making it the best newspaper in West Virginia. The owners wanted to boost profits, and he persuaded them to try raising the quality of the paper instead of cutting jobs. They agreed, and let him expand the staff of reporters and editors and photographers to twenty people. He called us “troops,” and on a good morning he would unfurl the front page and announce, “We kicked ass yesterday.” I loved the job. My task was to shoot any story that the two more experienced photographers didn’t have the time or desire to cover. Most weeks, I drove hundreds of miles around West Virginia, taking pictures at schools, farms, junkyards, factories, and coal mines. I covered local boxing matches, bar bands, house fires, and government meetings. Our pages had all of the usual grist of a community newspaper—the schedule at the senior citizens’ home and small ads wishing someone a happy birthday—but the paper also reported aggressively and ambitiously, on striking miners, environmental protests, and plans for new prisons. Now and then, we tried to draw a connection to an event far away. In the spring of 1999, a few months after I arrived, two teenagers in Littleton, Colorado, attacked their classmates at Columbine High School—a massacre then still so rare that it dominated the news for days. We published four stories about it, including reactions from parents in Clarksburg. A mother reassured her daughter that Columbine was an “aberration.” She said, “Your school is safe, and you’re safe, and our town is safe.” Appalachia always had more than its share of small newspapers, for a practical reason: bad mountain roads made it hard to distribute a paper very far. So you rarely went more than twenty miles without seeing a tiny newspaper office—or sometimes two, competing for dominance of a one- stoplight town. In the oil fields, workers could choose among The Derrick, The Volcano Lubricator, and the West Virginia Walking Beam. During the Civil War, local military units commandeered local presses to crank out The Knapsack for the North and The Guerrilla for the South. “A good newspaper,” Arthur Miller once said, “is a nation talking to itself.” Throughout American history, the scrutiny and sustenance provided by local news had been intertwined with democracy. How else, asked Alexander Hamilton in 1788, would Americans “regulate their judgment of the conduct of their representatives”? Local news also had a powerful effect on social cohesion. Studies showed that people who read local papers were more likely to vote and to run for office. Their reading also connected them to their neighbors around shared complaints and triumphs and sensations, the furnishings of what scholars called the “imagined community.” Local newspapers played a role akin to the plankton in a food chain of American awareness, feeding the regional, national, and international understanding of the country itself. Yet local news had been under threat for nearly as long as it had been around. In 1844, Samuel F. B. Morse, the pioneer of the telegraph, conducted the first public demonstration of his invention, with the message “What hath God wrought?” Morse predicted that his creation would unify Americans, making “one neighborhood of the whole country.” Indeed, the telegraph brought benefits beyond measure. But it also began a process that pushed news and politics toward entertainment and fear, lighting a fuse that would stretch across generations. The day after Morse unveiled his device, a newspaper used a telegraph to relay the first squib of news from Washington to Baltimore. By the end of the century, readers were wading through small stories of war, crime, fires, and floods far away. Neil Postman, one of the twentieth century’s most prominent scholars of communications, wrote, “The telegraph may have made the country into ‘one neighborhood,’ but it was a peculiar one, populated by strangers who knew nothing but the most superficial facts about each other.” Postman, in his 1985 book, Amusing Ourselves to Death, identified a fundamental change in the nature of American communication that has become only more visible in the decades since he wrote it. The world of information steadily became what Postman called a “peek-a-boo world, where now this event, now that, pops into view for a moment, then vanishes again.” Decades before Americans conceived of communicating in snippets of social media, he warned of a world with less time for context and connection—“a world that is, like the child’s game of peek-a-boo, entirely self-contained. But like peek-a-boo, it is also endlessly entertaining.” In the era of television news, the sense of discontinuity took the form of a small, elegant phrase: “Now … this,” which newscasters used to signal, as Postman put it, “that what one has just heard or seen has no relevance to what one is about to hear or see … The newscaster means that you have thought long enough on the previous matter (approximately forty-five seconds)” and “that you must now give your attention to another fragment of news or a commercial.” In 1968, the average sound bite on a network news broadcast was more than sixty seconds; by 2004, it had shrunk to less than eight seconds. Eventually, the concept of “Now … this” became so suited to the era of shortening attention spans that a company even adopted the name without irony. A video news producer calling itself NowThis launched in 2012, offering short videos and articles intended to be read on mobile phones. It became one of America’s most popular mobile news sites. In a small state like West Virginia, reporters took prickly pride in their closeness to their communities. “You have to be careful how you treat someone, because they may know your mom,” Vicki Smith, who worked in the local bureau of the Associated Press for nearly two decades, told me. Smith was often offended by out-of-town reporters’ caricatures of the state’s complicated history of poverty and sacrifice. While covering a mine explosion that killed twelve men, Smith once turned a corner and nearly collided with Nancy Grace, the hypercaffeinated cable television host. “It felt like a violation, like, ‘What are you doing here? You don’t know us, you don’t care about this.’” When I arrived, the paper maintained the tradition of taking sometimes gleeful pride in poking at local notables. When Julie Cryser, the city editor, published a story on people grumbling about Clarksburg’s long-serving mayor, the man himself walked four blocks from city hall and stormed into Sedivy’s office. “He was pounding his cane on the floor,” Cryser recalled. “He’d point it out at me in the newsroom, and then he’d pound his cane on the floor again.” Politically, Clarksburg, like most of West Virginia, had been a stronghold of the Democratic Party since the Great Depression. When the economy collapsed and West Virginia coal production sank by 40 percent, Franklin Roosevelt pushed poverty-relief programs into the mountains. In 1960, the state played a pivotal role in the party’s nomination contest. Senator John F. Kennedy faced widespread doubts that a Catholic could win votes, but he made a point to tour West Virginia, which was overwhelmingly Protestant. He was often accompanied by Roosevelt’s son, Franklin Jr., who was greeted as a celebrity. A coal miner told him “your daddy’s picture” was on the family’s wall at home. In 1960, Clarksburg attracted visits by Lyndon Johnson, Hubert Humphrey, and a parade of Kennedys, including three visits from Bobby and one from Ted, who said his brother’s “political future is going to be decided in Clarksburg” and towns just like it. JFK came, too; he toured a glass factory and sat for a live broadcast on local television, in which people were invited to call in and ask him questions. His campaign opened an office at the Stonewall Jackson Hotel, the tallest building in town, where you could get free postcards with the unusually specific claim that Clarksburg was “the smallest city in the world with a 200-room hotel.” Kennedy gave a speech in the ballroom, calling for a higher minimum wage and a federal health insurance plan for the elderly. “We are the party that started Social Security. And we are going to finish the job,” he said. In an admiring story, the Exponent reported that the crowd “became so quiet that one could hear a pin drop.” Three weeks later, Kennedy won the primary, which defused concerns that anti-Catholic bigotry would thwart his campaign. Were it not for West Virginia, he said as president, “I would not be where I now am.” Now and then, the local far-right fringe made news. In 1996, Clarksburg attracted national attention when federal agents discovered a plot to blow up the local FBI complex. Seven men, including a lieutenant in the city fire department, called themselves the Mountaineer Militia and stockpiled guns and studied blueprints. Yet the stereotype of West Virginia as a racist backwater had a way of effacing years of painful work by local Black activists. Jim Griffin had grown up in Clarksburg, where he was barred from segregated restaurants. As a teenager, Griffin bagged groceries at the A&P, frustrated that nobody who was Black was permitted to work the cash register. On a whim one day, an ally—a white cashier—asked him to sub in for her. A customer said, “I don’t want him to run my groceries.” But the white cashier held firm: “If he can’t check your groceries out,” she told the customer, “put them back on the shelf.” Jim Griffin graduated from high school in 1965, just weeks after marchers led by the twenty-five-year-old voting-rights activist John Lewis were attacked by police on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama. Griffin felt the pull of the civil rights movement. At the age of eighteen, he revived a moribund branch of the NAACP in Clarksburg to fight segregation in local courts. Even though West Virginia had sided with the Union and African Americans had moved there to escape the Deep South, some in the state retained sympathies for the Confederacy. Over time, many African Americans had migrated farther north, and West Virginia became one of the whitest states in America. Griffin sought to change his home state from the inside. He worked as a laborer at Union Carbide, the chemical corporation, while he attended community college. After six years, he became the company’s first Black supervisor. In Clarksburg, he helped establish the Human Rights Commission, which investigated discrimination, and the West Virginia Black Heritage Festival. He encouraged a friend named David Kates, a Black pastor, to get into local politics, and when a vacancy opened up on the city council, Kates was appointed to it. In 1999, members of the council elected Kates to be the first Black mayor in the city’s history. “Timing is everything,” Griffin liked to say.

People often felt a deeper attachment to the hollows where they grew up than to the cities where they settled. They spoke of themselves as inseparable from the mountains, the water—the “home place.” But this was not the same as preserving it. Harvesting profit from the land was as much a part of West Virginians’ self-image as the coal miner on the state flag. The historian John Alexander Williams, a professor at Appalachian State University, told me, “If West Virginia has one enduring theme, it was in the words of those first explorers who described it as a ‘pleasing, tho’ dreadful’ land.” Since the nineteenth century, very little of those profits had been directed to local people. In the 1870s, West Virginia established a system that legally separated the ownership of land from the astronomically valuable mineral rights beneath it. As a result, the people who worked the land, and bore its environmental harm, were not the people who enjoyed its profits—an arrangement that cast a shadow for generations. In New York, a pamphlet for investors hailed “The Oil-Dorado of West Virginia,” with an untapped hoard of petroleum and coal and ore “which only needs development to attract capitalists like a magnet.” West Virginia, the authors wrote, was “destined to become one of the richest sections of this great country.” But that was not its destiny. Out-of-state companies and investors used their profits to buy political influence that prevented the creation of a permanent tax fund of the kind established in Alaska, which distributes a portion of oil revenues to state residents. By the 1890s, local politicians were helping companies put down local strikes. A lumberman from the north said, “All we want here is to get the most we can out of this country, as quick as we can, and then get out.” By 1920, timber companies had gutted the ancient forests that once covered two thirds of the state. A. B. Brooks, West Virginia’s first game warden, marveled that “nearly the whole population which originally earned its living from the ground has been pushed out from places of seclusion into a whirl of modern industry.” West Virginians lost control of their most precious asset: their land. Miners relocated to coal camps, where they paid their employers for everything, including the drinking water. Crystal Wimer, of Clarksburg and the historian of Harrison County, told me, “It was very hard to fight what our people were up against without having a lot of influence.” She said, “A lot of folks didn’t know how to read, and they were told, ‘If a railroad runs by your house and a spark comes off the train and burns your barn down, you can’t sue them.’ The laws were always skewed so that common people couldn’t get ahead.” When John Gunther visited West Virginia in 1945, it struck him as a world apart. “I once heard an irreverent local citizen call it the ‘Afghanistan of the United States,’” he wrote in his book. By 1960, the year that Kennedy made his historic visit to West Virginia, central Appalachia had yielded fortunes for others, but more than half of its homes still had no central plumbing. When people complained, the answer was often the same: If you think it’s bad now, imagine how much poorer you’d be without the coal companies. In 1963, the Kentucky lawyer and writer Harry Caudill drew America’s attention to the depth of human suffering in the region. He said, “This is what happens to a great industrial population when you abandon it, give it just enough food to keep it alive and tell it to go to hell.” When I arrived in Clarksburg, the state was embarking on a new chapter in environmental history: the coal-mining revolution known as “mountaintop removal.” In the 1990s, companies had discovered a cheaper way to reach Appalachia’s coveted, low-sulfur coal; instead of sending crews of miners underground, they could blast the tops off the mountains and scrape away the fortune. The method, which was mostly employed in the southern part of the state, yielded two and a half times as much coal per hour as digging underground. Companies started buying rights to knock off vast stretches of the mountains; the biggest mines, a couple of hours from us, grew larger than the island of Manhattan. My editor, Bill Sedivy, saw mountaintop removal as the makings of a disaster. He wrote a series of skeptical columns and editorials. He worried about the damage to West Virginia’s rivers and landscape—“I’m a river guide, for god’s sake,” he told me—and he questioned the economic mythology that extraction was the path to progress. “I was doing it because I was tired of seeing people saying, ‘Coal is going to save us.’” The industry retaliated against his columns. Lobbyists bought large ads in The Exponent Telegram that hailed mountaintop removal as a matter of state pride. “Coal is a necessity of life,” the ads said. “West Virginia communities enjoy clean water, better sewer facilities, ambulance and fire service, even lower electric rates than many other states, thanks to the contribution that coal makes to our economy.” They ended with a note of reassurance: “Anyone who has built a home understands when it’s under construction it’s not a pretty sight.” But come back in a few years, they promised, and “you’d never know mining had ever taken place.” Around town, Sedivy’s campaign was controversial. He told me, “There was a segment of the community that said, ‘Wow, it’s been a half century since we’ve had this kind of watchdog reporting.’ But then there was another half of the community that was very, very vocal. They missed stories about who came over to whose house for brunch after church.” Sedivy wondered if he had pushed too far, too fast. “I had preached the philosophy that if you have a kick-ass local paper, where you’re digging at those hard realities, you’re going to sell newspapers and make money,” he told me. But readers were losing patience. Resistance was growing in town. A few months after I arrived, Sedivy announced that he was moving on. He accepted a job in Idaho, running a nature conservation group. Around town, it felt as if people were putting ever more of their hopes in coal mining because other pillars of the Clarksburg economy were crumbling. Since the 1970s, the local glass factories had been closing in the face of competition from larger, more advanced plants in Mexico and Japan. So many young people were leaving in search of work, West Virginians joked that local kids learned the three Rs: reading, ’riting, and Route 77—the road out. By 2000, the population of Clarksburg was half of what it had been in 1940. A familiar spiral took hold: the declining population paid less in taxes, which forced the local governments to cut spending on police, firefighting, public parks, and garbage collection—which, in turn, made it easier for more people to leave. The neighborhood pools ran out of money. In the tiny downtown, stores closed and buildings began to decompose. The Waldo Hotel moldered into a hulking wreck, with weeds climbing out of the upper windows toward the open sky. We didn’t know it yet, but in the final moments of the twentieth century, tiny cracks were forming in the economic foundation of newspapers like ours. The Internet, which would revolutionize the delivery of news and entertainment (and disinformation), was just starting to reach private homes across West Virginia. In 1999, one of our editors, Bob Stealey, wrote a column about the simple act of signing on to AOL and sending his first email —to what he called “a perfect stranger out there in cyberspace.” He was hooked. “I’m blazing my own trail of glory,” he wrote. When I happened on that column again years later, it reminded me of the message that passed across the early telegraph: “What hath God wrought?” In the years afterward, when I was abroad, I sometimes signed on to the Exponent Telegram website for a glimpse of what was happening in Clarksburg. There was always some good news—year after year, the local high school had some of the state’s top math scores. The FBI complex attracted a cluster of small technology companies, which helped Clarksburg’s economy grow faster than that of other parts of the region. The city even developed a real-estate claim to fame, of sorts: the largest strip mall in West Virginia. Yet there were clear signs of trouble. West Virginia was a case study of radical inequality. The southern coalfields were losing jobs and population, while the eastern panhandle was booming, from money radiating out of Washington, D.C. More than half of West Virginians’ income growth since 1990 had gone to the state’s top 1 percent. Between 2007 and 2017, West Virginia lost 18,000 people, faster than any other state. It had some of the country’s highest rates of smoking, obesity, diabetes, and prescription drug abuse; it trailed much of the nation in the rate of college graduation. Four out of five workers lacked a four-year college degree. And with its population sinking, its political power sank with it. If the trends continued, the state would lose one of its three congressional seats by 2022. All of these trends were visible in the pages of The Exponent Telegram. Local stores, which once advertised, were vanishing, and the Internet was consuming the classified ad sections. Between 2000 and 2012, print advertising across American newspapers fell by a catastrophic 71 percent. Digital advertising would never remotely make up the loss. In twenty-seven years, from 1990 to 2017, U.S. newspaper circulation dropped by 50 percent, even as the nation’s population grew by 30 percent. In 2002, The Exponent Telegram had announced it could no longer afford to produce two newspapers each day and merged them into one edition. The Highland family, which had owned the papers for decades, wanted to sell. Relatives had moved out of town; eventually, the only remaining family member in charge of the paper lived four hundred miles away, in Ithaca, New York. As news moved to television and the Internet, the effects extended to politics in ways that resonated starkly with Postman’s warnings of a world “populated by strangers” equipped with only the “most superficial facts about each other.” In the digital world, the incentives and attractions were unrecognizable from what had governed the local newspaper era. Instead of touting nonpartisanship, digital news organizations promoted precisely the opposite: they attracted attention with explicit, provocative politics. In their 2014 book, The Outrage Industry, the scholars Jeffrey Berry and Sarah Sobieraj described the new mode of communications for talk-show hosts and online commentators: they relied on “overgeneralizations, sensationalism, misleading or patently inaccurate information, ad hominem attacks, and belittling ridicule of opponents” because it paid off. “Emotional responses (anger, fear, moral indignation) from the audience” were more likely to keep people watching. Vicki Smith, the longtime West Virginia reporter, told me that the effect of social media on news was unnerving. More and more, her editors at the Associated Press were encouraging her to dig into items that were popular on Twitter or Facebook. “You’d have to run down things that were gossip or pure fiction, or waste your time shooting down rumors,” she told me. “But it’s not news. Why are we responding to that? We had bigger, more important, more meaningful stories to tell here.” And the audience was changing. “It became painfully apparent that the news consumer no longer wanted as much objective, factual reporting. They wanted news that comported with their worldview.” That tilt was altering the geography of the mind. Americans were learning less about people in their local communities and more about the distant figures, abstract disputes, and entertaining memes of national politics. Daniel J. Hopkins, a political scientist at the University of Pennsylvania, found that the share of Americans who could name their governor declined sharply between 1949 and 2007, even as the share who could name the vice president remained unchanged. By 2012, Americans were directing far less of their donations to politicians in their own states than they had a generation earlier, and when asked to name the politician they hated most, only 15 percent of respondents named someone in their own state; most of their political attention was directed far away. The “nationalization” of politics and public life was even changing how citizens described themselves. In Hopkins’s book The Increasingly United States, he analyzed the texts of digitized books to measure the frequency of phrases such as “I am American” compared with “I am Californian” or the like. Earlier Americans had focused on their state identity, but the expression of national identity took the lead around 1968, and has held it ever since. Television, and eventually social media, allowed people to dissociate from their physical communities. They were powerful tools of self-segregation. Between 2005 and 2020, more than 2,100 American newspapers closed down, according to a count by Penny Muse Abernathy, a professor at the University of North Carolina. American newspapers eliminated more than 45 percent of their newsroom staff. Farai Chideya, a journalist who joined the Ford Foundation, framed the decline in ecological terms: a “mass extinction event.” In her 2020 book, Ghosting the News, Margaret Sullivan, the media columnist at The Washington Post, extended the metaphor: “As with issues like the global climate emergency, it is hard to convince a significant chunk of the public that they ought to care deeply about this, or do anything about it.” Indeed, most Americans were impressively unaware of it; nearly three quarters of those surveyed by the Pew Research Center in 2019 said local news outlets were in good financial shape. Although the disappearance of local news generated little public concern, the consequences on voting and government work were very real. Research by PEN America, the writers’ organization, found that as local journalism declines, “government officials conduct themselves with less integrity, efficiency, and effectiveness, and corporate malfeasance goes unchecked. With the loss of local news, citizens are: less likely to vote, less politically informed, and less likely to run for office.” A study published in the Journal of Financial Economics found that in the three years after a paper shut down, local taxes rose by an average of $85 per citizen, and payroll costs climbed by 1.3 percent beyond the usual pace. In other words, when local papers closed, governments became less efficient and more generous to themselves. For newspapers in distress, the options were unattractive. Some escaped extinction by selling out to conglomerates, which saved money by reducing the ranks of reporters and selling off unused space—a process that Sullivan called “strip-mining.” In practice, those papers often ended up as glorified ad circulars, filled mostly with snippets from the national newswires—a disjointed gallery that Postman would have recognized as peek-a-boo news. I expected that future to befall The Exponent Telegram in Clarksburg. But, in 2012, a century and a half after it started publishing, the fate of the paper took a surprising detour. Brian Jarvis, a local tax lawyer with a sideline in the oil and gas business, stepped in to buy it. He was barely thirty years old, but his father, Cecil, had served as president of the paper, and even after going off to college in Tennessee, Brian came home in the summer to intern in the newsroom while his father worked upstairs. Cecil Jarvis was a local institution—a civic booster, a competitor in Ironman triathlons—who died in a bicycle accident in 2007. When I stopped by on a trip to Clarksburg, Brian told me, “My original plan was to move back and practice law with him. But he died while I was in law school.” Buying it was a nod to his father’s memory. He said, “He absolutely loved the newspaper.” We sat at a long table stacked with ancient bound leather copies of the newspaper, going back to the Civil War. Brian worried that losing the paper would kick away one more pillar that held up the city. “I’m looking at the issue from 1863, before we even became a state,” he told me. But he was allergic to grand pronouncements. He said dryly, “I needed to do something else besides sit in a room and write wills and trusts.” In business terms, he was realistic. Print, he said, was a “dwindling community.” He hoped to stem the decline by drawing in younger readers online and shoring up print subscribers with an appeal to pride of place. He was running ads that cast the paper in the kind of language usually reserved for selling local cuisine: “Hand Delivered & Printed Every Night by West Virginians for West Virginians.” I wandered down to the newsroom to see the editor in chief, John Miller, whom I’d known for twenty years. When I was an intern, he had been the sports editor and an assistant managing editor. By now, I told him, you must have ink in your bones. He smiled and corrected me: “My weary, old, tired bones,” he said. In his late fifties, Miller was tall, with dark, attentive eyes and a thick brown goatee. Not much happened in the newspaper, or in the city, that did not cross his desk. He walked with the heavy step of a man with a lot on his mind. Miller had lived in Clarksburg all his life, and had been at the newspaper almost as long. When he was nine, he joined his three siblings on their paper-delivery route. Their terrain expanded, and by the time he was a teenager, the Miller kids were responsible for slinging papers across a vast swath of the city. Miller wanted to be a teacher, but in 1981, during his freshman year of college, his father suffered a heart attack and Miller had to find work. He started writing sports stories for the paper and eventually got hired on at night so he could finish his college classes during the day. Whenever he talked about happenings in Clarksburg, or in West Virginia, he spoke in numerals. He still had the soul of a sports writer, hoovering up stats that might bring shape to his world; he could tell me the price of an aspirin at the local hospital, and the number of dilapidated buildings scheduled to be demolished. Most of all, always, he knew the number of jobs opening up and disappearing. “Losing fifteen hundred in Morgantown,” he said one day. Another time, he announced, “Two hundred and fifty coming from Mitsubishi.” When Thelma’s Hot Dogs closed down, he said, “Two- person operation. One of my favorites.” After three decades at the newspaper, Miller viewed his life through the stories he published, good and bad—the economic revival that came with the FBI, the election of Mayor Kates, the rebuttal to the KKK. He remained willfully optimistic. “I’m kind of old school; I don’t look at having to tell bad news as something to brag about,” he said. In recent years, Clarksburg had more than its share of bad news. The opioid epidemic was intertwined with West Virginia’s economic history; in a state where industrial jobs like coal mining meant physical aches and pains, painkillers arrived first as legitimate treatment, then rippled outward across what the economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton called a “sea of despair.” The epidemic fed on poverty, stress, and unemployment. Between 2007 and