Remember those big, fat newspapers that landed on your front porch with a mighty thud? They were filled with news and advertising, with information you needed to navigate life in your community, with entertainment like comics and crosswords, with the latest sports scores and up-to-date TV listings.
For most of my life, they were essential. When I was a kid, my parents got two of them—morning and evening papers—and a third paper on Sundays. They spent hours every day devouring them; they used them to teach me to read, even before I headed off to kindergarten. As I went through high school and college, they were my primary source of information about the world around me.
And then they became my livelihood, first as a reporter and photographer, and then, for decades, as an editor. I didn’t know it at the time, but I was living in newspapers’ golden age, when pre-tax profits often topped 40%, but publishers still were making enough money to invest heavily in staff and technology.
Then it all crashed.
You saw it here in Fayetteville, in the first two decades of this century, as our prized local daily grew thinner and less newsy, and a newsroom staff that once approached triple digits slimmed to a skeletal force. You weren’t alone—almost every community in the United States has been on the same forced information diet. Some towns are already “news deserts,” with no news coverage at all. Most still have a vestige of news, but it’s easy to see the desert advancing.
Books have been written about the collapse of news; journalism school scholars spend their time researching why it’s happened. The bottom line is simple: Digital giants like Google, Facebook, Amazon, and others used technology to corner the advertising market, taking all those ads, even local ones, that once funded more than three-quarters of every newspaper’s operations. The Sunday paper, once measured in pounds, shrank to something that could be thoroughly read in minutes—if you even cared about the content, which too often was about people and places other than your own community.
So here we are: Newspapers are dead or dying. What do we do? Must we navigate life in our communities with no information—or worse, with gossip and hearsay?
No, our civic future isn’t that bleak. News isn’t dead, and neither is good journalism. Students are still going to journalism school, and they’re doing excellent reporting work. If you’re reading CityView, you already know that. You know that the glossy magazine expanded a few years ago to include a daily news report. You know that the staff has slowly but steadily grown, and that includes some of Fayetteville’s veteran reporters, bylines you’ve followed for years.
But you may not know this: Those reporters are paid, in part, through the generosity of local donors and institutional grants. While the CityView operation is somewhat conventional, still able to turn a profit from advertising sales and events, the cash flow is a pale shadow of what once fueled a great, family-owned daily here. Like many other news organizations, CityView depends on its readers to accomplish its mission. That’s why we created the News Foundation of Greater Fayetteville, the nonprofit that funds several of CityView’s reporters. We hope to continue growing our newsroom and expanding our news coverage, but we can’t do it unless you help us.
Really, the new bottom line is this: We can be as good as you help us be. We have a lot of plans, formed in discussions that happen almost every day. We know we need to add reporters so we can give you a more thorough news report every morning. We know we need at least one reporter on Fort Bragg—the biggest (by population) military base in the country and maybe the world. We know we need a business and economics reporter, an arts and entertainment reporter, and more. The list of wants and needs is endless, but it’s only wishful thinking without your help.
As we approach the annual “GivingTuesday” event, which begins Nov. 24, I’m hoping you’ll join me in supporting CityView’s reporting. The fundraiser for Cumberland County community nonprofits runs through Dec. 2. The Cumberland Community Foundation, which runs the event here, has $500,000 in matching funds available thanks to local donors. We’ll have a donation link on the CityView website, and one on the News Foundation’s site as well—faynews.org/givingtuesday. Those gifts are all tax-deductible.
If you can, please help us grow our newsroom team in Fayetteville. Nobody should ever have to live in a news desert.
Read CityView Magazine’s “The Giving Issue” November 2025 e-edition here.
