A fire is raging. Since 2000, nearly 3,500 U.S. newspapers—almost 40 percent—have shuttered, leaving a quarter of the people in this country with limited or no access to a local print paper. Print circulation has fallen 70 percent since 2005. In my home state of Oregon, 68 percent of cities and three entire counties have no local news. Three-quarters of Oregon newspaper jobs have disappeared since 2001.
Nationally, The Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos recently ordered the paper to fire 300 reporters, a third of its staff. Hundreds of local radio stations are in jeopardy since the Corporation for Public Broadcasting voted itself out of existence in August 2025 after Congress rescinded $9 billion in already-allocated funds to public media at President Donald Trump’s behest.
This fire eats through newsprint, and in its wake, news deserts spread from town to town, but also in our thoughts and conversations about far-flung places—Gaza, Khartoum, Jakarta. Amid this smoke, I set out to ask Miscellany News staffers about the state of American journalism.
I met Editor-in-Chief Alli Lowe ’26 outside of Express. She was wearing a blue and white striped blouse, and I was a little late. “What I like to think of journalism is more of a public service, making information available to people,” Alli told me. “Access to TV and information is the same as, like, electricity and water.”
Earlier that day, I sat in the sun-filled living room of Features Editor Yaksha Gummadapu ’26 and Managing Editor Luke Jenkins ’26. The weak winter sunlight felt warmer inside. Yaksha said she had heard many people describe journalism—especially print journalism—as dying. But she did not feel that dying was the right word: “I think it’s being murdered as opposed to dying.” Luke added, “I definitely think it’s a slow death.” His own local paper sputtered out before COVID-19. A new paper recently began printing, but for years, Luke’s Ohio county had no high-quality local coverage.
I also spoke to my former Co-News Editor Emma Brown ’27. She is currently studying abroad in Dublin, so I called her the other day while we were both doing our laundry. She quickly rattled off a long list of murder victims: local papers that closed; reporters and international desks hemorrhaged by large papers; topics, like the genocide against Gaza, that national papers seem incapable of covering honestly; reporting increasingly dictated by billionaire owners.
“I think that local journalism is the cornerstone of a functioning democracy,” Emma told me. National politics fill our screens and discourse, but local politics—city councils, school boards—shape our daily lives. “When we don’t have local newspapers, people aren’t informed about the events that are happening in their community,” she explained. “When we don’t have local journalists who are doing the due diligence—or don’t have the bandwidth to do the due diligence because there’s one or two reporters in the newsroom—I think that things don’t get uncovered.”
I asked my current Co-News Editor, Hadley Amato ’28, what happens to a community without a local news source. “People know less,” he responded. “Without local news, there is the ability for the people in power to have more harm against the people, because you have no body in the populace that will expose what people in power are doing if they are doing harm.”
We are seeing that here in Poughkeepsie. The Poughkeepsie Journal, for instance, has been part of the USA Today Network since 1977. The vast majority of the articles on its website are transplanted from national USA Today reporters, or, if they are local stories, were written by reporters from other papers. The Journal appears to have only three staffers: a sports reporter who covers high school basketball; a breaking news reporter who writes a lot about local restaurants and crime; and a photographer.
In its place, the Miscellany has been increasingly covering news outside Vassar’s stone walls. This semester, for instance, we have covered Poughkeepsie residents’ calls for free buses and Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s plans to open a detention center in Chester.
“I feel like the effects when we’re at the Miscellany and doing student journalism are so directly tangible,” Alli told me. Emma’s and my article on Vassar’s plans to demolish and redevelop Arlington forced a Letter to the Editor from David Kaminski, who runs the Vassar subsidiary behind the plan, as well as a campus-wide email from President of the College Elizabeth Bradley. We have since heard that administrators have met with business owners. And my coverage with Hadley of Vassar employees’ discontent with their treatment by the administration prompted a conciliatory internal email from administrators. These are tangible impacts our reporting has made: We have forced the administration to directly address serious community concerns. That would not have happened without the Miscellany. But this is only a sliver of what we publish. Most of it is about campus events.
So can our student paper stand in where a local one has fallen?
“I think that student journalism is absolutely able to fill the void of local newspapers,” Emma argued. “I’m hopeful that student journalists in particular have good intentions, and especially at a school like Vassar, where we don’t have a journalism program, you’re…donating your time to write an article that benefits the community.” Senior Editor Kathryn Carvel ’26 said, similarly, “We’re not being paid to do it… We’re just trying to provide a service to the community and help educate people and connect our community with the people around them and the places around them.” Others were more skeptical.
“I think [student journalism] is local journalism, but I don’t think it can be a total replacement,” Alli said, “just because I think there needs to be a bit more stability. We have such a turnover of leadership and writers that it’s harder to have an established culture and quality.” Hadley agreed: “I care a lot about local news as a college student, especially in a place like Poughkeepsie. The retention rate of people who go to Vassar staying in Poughkeepsie is so low. Most people are gonna be here for four years and then leave. So how much are you really part of this community?”
Speaking quietly in the Rose Parlor from a chair that may once have been overstuffed, Contributing Editor Carina Cole ’26 explained, “Local papers fill an important role that student journalists will never be able to fill because we are, at the end of the day, students, and people at local papers, that was their entire livelihood.” Carina was Editor-in-Chief last semester and now contributes to the Hudson Valley magazine Chronogram. “Every day, when they woke up to when they went to sleep, they were worrying about an article,” Carina said. “Student journalists will never be able to do that, and they shouldn’t be expected to do that.”
As student journalists, we work to provide the best possible reporting while knowing that we can never devote ourselves completely to the job. The people I spoke to for this piece—people I spend many hours every week with producing the paper in your hands, people who are passionate, stunningly intelligent, kind and interesting—held this tension throughout our conversations. Perhaps what defines student journalism is that we strive to bring a little more of the world into the College and report how the College affects the world.
But from inside the Vassar bubble, we cannot be a real local newspaper. Our responsibility is first to cover Vassar, and to cover Poughkeepsie when we can. “I don’t think it’s an exclusive thing for the Vassar community, especially as what’s happening at Vassar applies to what’s happening in the community,” Kathryn continued. “As things are becoming more contentious around the country and in our local communities, student journalism is becoming more and more important, and there’s more of a need for young people to step up and share these stories and educate the people around them.” All of my colleagues are right. We can, and often do, provide reliable investigative coverage that no one else will. But it will never be enough. We can keep the fire at bay, but cannot put it out.