Opinion: The last person in the room

Published 1:30 am Thursday, May 7, 2026

Glasgow, Montana, sits in the middle of nowhere. Population thirty-two hundred. The most remote town in the continental United States by one measure. This spring it gained a new newspaper editor named Skylar Baker-Jordan, who left a career in national journalism to move there and run the Glasgow Courier.

Within his first few hours in town, people started lining up to tell him stories. Crime they wanted investigated. Corruption they wanted exposed. Things the community needed to know. Baker-Jordan wrote about the decision in the Daily Yonder. He said the thirst for local news is real and not unique to Glasgow.

A Pew study backs him up. While only 56% of Americans trust national news organizations, 70% trust their local newsrooms. You trust your local paper more than you trust national media. Yet more than one-third of local newspapers in America have closed since 2005. One hundred thirty shut down in the past year alone.

The business model built on local advertising collapsed when advertisers moved to social media. What remains across the country is a growing expanse of news deserts — communities with no one covering the school board, no one at the city council meeting, no one to call when the water rate goes up or the road crew skips your street for the third winter in a row.

When a community loses its paper, it loses more than news. It loses what Baker-Jordan calls a civic institution. Local newspapers are not just instruments for reporting on the dry proceedings of city hall or the school board.

They are institutions helping a community function by and for the people who call it home.

Your local paper is not the stories it publishes. It is the fact someone is watching. Someone is asking questions. Someone is writing down what was decided in the room and making sure your community knows what was decided.

Without the paper, the room makes its decisions in the dark. The people affected by those decisions find out later, or not at all.

I have published in Alaska since 1978. I have watched decisions made in rooms where no reporter sat, and I have seen what happens when communities find out months or years later. The damage is always greater than the original story would have been. Transparency is not the enemy of good government. It is the condition for good government.

Baker-Jordan chose Glasgow because the paper needed an editor, he had the skills, and he decided the work was worth doing. Not because it was glamorous. Not because it would advance his career. Because it mattered.

If your community still has someone covering the school board, the city council, the hospital board, the planning commission — the decisions affecting your street, your tax bill, your children’s education — do not take it for granted. The person in the back row with the legal pad may be the last person standing between your community and the room making decisions in the dark.

Support your local paper. Subscribe. Advertise. Send a letter to the editor. Attend the meetings they cover. Local news matters because local decisions matter. And someone needs to be watching when those decisions get made.

Evan Swensen is a prior-to-statehood Alaskan, pilot, publisher and founder of Publication Consultants in Anchorage. He is the author of “The Power of Authors.”