“Rob’s family and mine will be forever grateful to the hundreds of you who reached out to us after that heart-crushing day,” Hiaasen wrote in his final column, which he ended with a tribute to the Miami Herald.

Since the pandemic scores of journalists have been laid off across the country, while the Pew Research Center reported that newspaper ad revenue dropped by 42% in the second quarter of 2020 compared to the previous year.Īt least 60 local newsrooms closed during 2020, including the Orlando Sentinel, New York’s Daily News and the Annapolis-based Capital Gazette, where Hiaasen’s brother, Rob Hiaasen, was among five employees shot dead by a gunman in 2018.

Most local papers are gasping for life, and if they die it will be their readers who lose the most.”Įven before coronavirus, closures and cuts to local newspapers meant that 1,800 communities that had a local news outlet in 2004 didn’t have one at the end of 2019, according to the University of North Carolina’s journalism school. “That’s what happens when hometown journalism fades – neighborhood stories don’t get reported until it’s too late, after the deal’s gone down. Without local news coverage, important decisions can slip by unnoticed and unchallenged, Hiaasen warned, with devastating consequences. The local news industry in the US was already in a sorry state before Covid-19, with some 1,800 newspapers closing between 20, and coronavirus only worsened the crisis. Alongside his opinion writing Hiaasen has become a celebrated novelist, known for Florida-set crime thrillers with a dark comedic bent, but his Herald column has remained an important part of his output. Hiaasen, a Florida native who got his start at the Herald as a city desk reporter in 1976, began writing a weekly column for the newspaper in 1985. Your kids ask what’s going on, and you can’t tell them because you don’t have a clue.”

“You wake up one day, and they’re bulldozing 20 acres of pines at the end of your block to put up a. “Retail corruption is now a breeze, since newspapers and other media can no longer afford enough reporters to cover all the key government meetings,” Hiaasen wrote. In his final column for the Herald, Hiaasen also addressed the impact of the long-running crisis in local journalism, at a time when American newspapers are closing in their droves and journalists are being laid off with depressing regularity.

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