Me and Bec, circa 1983.
Between the two of us, my sister Becca Tucker and I have won dozens of journalism awards. (No, I haven’t won any.) Now, in addition to being a reporter, Bec has been promoted to deputy publisher of Straus News, making her the fourth generation of our family to help steer the company, which publishes 14 weekly newspapers in New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania. Our aunt, Jeanne Straus, is publisher.
On top of these responsibilities, Bec remains editor and publisher of Dirt, a green living magazine, where she writes a wonderful column.
So, I’m a proud brother. And an apprehensive one.
The newspaper business isn’t the same as it was a generation ago, when me, Bec and our brother David would huddle in the Patent Trader’s conference room on snow days, watching Rambo and other VHS video rentals from the nearby pharmacy. Post-movie, we might scamper over to bug Jerry in production — who used an Exacto knife to manually jigsaw into place the newspaper’s stories and ads (many of which mom sold) — or Joe Lombardi in sports, who deserves a Pulitzer for somehow getting work done as I peppered him with questions.
We had the run of the place because our parents owned the Patent Trader, a local newspaper started by our dad’s dad, which covered northern Westchester County, New York.
Even back then, the days of easy profitability for community newspapers were starting to wane, and we felt this keenly at home, where the financial pressure contributed to our parents’ endless fighting. Not long after dad fired mom (yep, that happened), he sold the paper in 1999 to the Gannett newspaper chain, which kept the publication going another eight years before shuttering it.
Mind you, these were the good years, before the evil trifecta of Google, Facebook and Amazon captured the ad revenue that underpinned generations of community newspapers.
How Amazon Kills Local News
Of these three evil companies, Amazon is given a comparative pass for its role in destroying the free press. The company’s founder, Jeff Bezos, is even billed as a media savior for having bought the Washington Post (which he is terrible at overseeing).
While Amazon may hoover up a smaller (but growing) portion of ad revenue than Google and Facebook, its ruthless (and possibly illegal) business practices have left countless Main Streets without their local toy store, clothing store, book store, etc. Thanks to Amazon, it’s not just stores’ ad dollars being lost, but the actual stores themselves. This destabilizes fragile local economies, and the newspapers that depend on them.
If current trends continue, by the end of the year the US will have lost fully one-third of its newspapers in a span of just two decades. That’s according to a depressing 2023 report by Northwestern University’s Medill Local News Initiative, which notes that over this same timeframe the US has lost nearly two-thirds of journalism jobs, a staggering 43,000 reporters. We could fill an entire stadium with nothing but out-of-work reporters.
The fallout from this isn’t contained to the newspaper industry. As papers shutter, “people know less and less about what their local government officials are doing” and “voter participation in local and state elections declines, corruption in both government and business increases, and local residents end up paying more in taxes and at checkout,” the bleak report states.
As Google, Facebook and Amazon abscond with the bounty that once sustained local papers, left behind are communities suffering from increased polarization and vitriol. “The decline of the news media has been paralleled by the fracturing of American society,” reports the New York Times. “As the media fell, the noise level rose.”
That noise hasn’t spared Bec. The attacks began after her 2021 exposé of a local undersheriff’s past ties to the right-wing militia group Oath Keepers. The next year, Bec followed up on that story (which won her an award) by revealing that the undersheriff’s political opponent had a similar background.
For these and other sins, Bec and Jeanne were targeted in a manner unlike anything our family had experienced before. To cut the tension during this time, I joked with Bec that the smears — accusing her of being a far-left radical, among other things — were true, they just got the wrong sibling.
Bec is none of those things. She’s just an outstanding journalist. And now she’s deputy publisher. And soon, on her shoulders will fall the near-impossible task of keeping afloat a string of local newspapers, amid a business landscape that seems designed to make them fail. If anyone can do it, she can.
