NewsBeat

August 2018 NewsBeat 23 Altamont Enterprise editor wins international award – again or the ninth time, Enterprise editor Melissa Hale-Spencer was recognized among the best opinion writers in the weekly press. The Golden Dozen awards were announced in Portland, Oregon, during the 2018 conference of the International Society of Weekly Newspaper Editors. F Hale-Spencer was honored for the editorial, "We stand as one with transgender students," written after President Donald Trump rescinded protections for transgender students that, among other things, had let them use bathrooms corresponding to their gender identity. Hale-Spencer has edited The Altamont Enterprise & Albany County Post for more than 20 years and became co-publisher in 2015. She was first named to the Golden Dozen in 1999. She learned to write from her father, a lifelong newspaperman. She took her first reporting job when her parents called on her to help at their Adirondack weekly, the Lake Placid News. establish that there is a causal connection between newspaper closures and government borrowing costs. We also found that, following a newspaper closure, local government inefficiencies become more pronounced. County government employee wages (as a percentage of all wages in that county) increase, as does the number of government employees as a percentage of all county employees. (That is, more tax dollars flow to government positions after a newspaper ceases to monitor governmental activities.) Costly financial transactions by local governments, including negotiated municipal bond sales and advance refundings of callable municipal bonds, also appear more likely. We do not necessarily expect local newspapers to return to those counties where they have shuttered. Alternative news media such as online news outlets are fundamentally changing the way that people consume news, and they are likely to remain the dominant source for news consumption. However, these online outlets do not necessarily provide a good substitute for high-quality, locally-sourced investigative journalism. David Simon, a former Baltimore Sun reporter and the creator of The Wire, remarked during a 2009 Senate hearing about the future of journalism, "The day I run into a Huffington Post reporter at a Baltimore Zoning Board hearing is the day that I will be confident that we've actually reached some sort of equilibrium." In the long-run, perhaps a balance will be struck in which these online-based organizations contract with local reporters and tailor their news to local areas. The evidence suggests that economic growth at the county level will be better off in that equilibrium. ICYMI: Reframing economic injustice in America's poorest big city Has America ever needed a media watchdog more than now? Dermot Murphy is an assistant professor of finance at the University of Illinois at Chicago who specializes in public finance, fixed income, and high-frequency trading. His current research, coauthored with Pengjie Gao from the University of Notre Dame and Chang Lee from the University of Illinois at Chicago, examines the effect of local newspaper closures on public borrowing costs through the government inefficiency channel. His past research has examined how state government policies for assisting financial distressed municipalities affect public borrowing costs. — Reprinted from Editor & Publisher

• Cover