THE WASHINGTON POST – 31/03/2020
Erik Wemple
Buena Vista County, Iowa, has yet to log a positive coronavirus case. The media economy associated with the pandemic, however, has arrived. “Advertising has disappeared, so we will lose money in March and it was tough enough before this,” says 62-year-old Art Cullen, editor of the Storm Lake Times, a twice-weekly community newspaper covering Buena Vista and parts of neighboring counties in the northwestern corner of Iowa. There’s a lot to cover in that land, too, as the board of the Pulitzer Prizes found in 2017: It awarded Cullen the top prize in editorial writing for a series of pieces on farmland pollution.
Pulitzers reward fine work; they don’t change business models. Even before the coronavirus hit the Storm Lake Times, the newspaper was fighting the same impoverishing forces that have gutted local news outlets across the country. Ads on Facebook and Google, noted Cullen in an interview last year, had gobbled up a good bit of his revenue. “Small-town businesses discovered Facebook or Google and there goes that 20-buck ad you were living on,” he said. “And we live on $20 ads. That’s how we make a living — the scraps that fall off the table.”