Last Thursday, a small but lively crowd gathered in downtown Modesto to celebrate the coming launch of The Modesto Focus, an online newspaper that will offer a new model for local news coverage of Stanislaus County and nearby. Long considered a “news desert,” the northern San Joaquin Valley has wanted for truly local and civics-oriented news for decades.
Back in the 1980s into the 1990s, when print journalism was nearing the end of its Golden Age, the McClatchy-owned Modesto Bee thrived because want ads and traditional print advertising provided ample funding for award-winning photographers like Al Golub and tough journalists like Nancy Marinan. Even as late as the twenty–teens, fearless reporters like Joanne Sbranti didn’t let local power barons keep her from telling the truth about the economic forces behind dry wells at people’s small home ranches.
Nevertheless, the realities of tectonic shifts in media platforms as well as declining ad revenues had even then reduced local news to a few dimming lights in a growing sea of darkness, brought on by the juggernaut of sensationalism Rupert Murdoch brought to American shores when he purchased the New York Post late in 1976.
Once Murdoch acquired Fox in 1985, the shift from print to electronic media accelerated. Within a few years, radio talk shows and tabloid television would become driving forces for “alternate” news sources that would gradually became mainstream and dominant…