Margot Susca has long known that closures and cutbacks at local newspapers harm the health of our democracy—but the former reporter’s forthcoming book offers an even more sobering look at what ails the industry.
 
“Every time a journalist is laid off, that’s a beat that doesn’t get covered, a police-involved shooting that doesn’t get investigated, a courthouse that doesn’t have someone [monitoring] cases,” says Susca, the School of Communication’s inaugural professor of journalism, accountability, and democracy. 
 
In Hedged: How Private Investment Funds Helped Destroy American Newspapers, Susca examines the forces behind the closures and layoffs—17,000 so far this year, according to a June report from the Society of Professional Journalists. The book, which drops on January 23, reveals that hedge funds and private equity firms have been scooping up papers—including some of the largest groups in the country, like Tribune and McClatchey—for more than 20 years, “capitalizing off of what’s left of the market and bleeding it dry.” 
 
Susca, who spent years digging into court filings, government documents, and regulatory paperwork, says that the phenomenon has harmed the American newspaper more profoundly than the internet’s rise and advertising revenue’s decline—all too often a “boogeyman” for the industry’s plight. “I don’t think the most important story of contemporary newspapers is a story of money lost, although ours is an industry in crisis,” she writes. “Its most important story is about money being made, often disguised behind the façade andtired trope of a failing industry.”
 
“It’s an American tragedy,” Susca says—and one with deleterious impacts for democracy. 
 
“Across America, readers strive for newspaper substitutes, finding instead algorithmic-driven social media sites and ultra-partisan pollution online,” she writes. A Gallup study released in May, for example, found that 61 percent of Americans get their news from public individuals on social media, with cable news hosts and prominent political figures leading the way.
 
Building on the research about news deserts created by the absence of local papers—which affect 70 million Americans, according to Northwestern University’s Medill Local News Initiative—Susca argues that an ensuing information vacuum has led to an increase in straight-ticket voting, with an increasingly polarized electorate casting their ballots entirely for one party instead of evaluating candidates on their merits.

“It’s getting much harder for people in communities where newspapers [owned or funded by private investors] circulate to get the information that they need to govern themselves,” Susca says. 
 
That’s why she’s now traveling the country, studying alternative financing structures—like nonprofit newsrooms—that could help slow the trend of declining news organizations.

In Charleston, South Carolina, for instance, an innovative business model piloted by the Post and Courier—and featured in Hedged­—has seen the family-owned paper expand its staff with the help of reader donations, while collaborating with small-town papers across the Palmetto State.
 
Meanwhile, on the AU campus, Susca, an associate editor with SOC’s Investigative Reporting Workshop, says she’s proud to be on a faculty that continues to teach the fundamentals of journalism, while preparing students for a media landscape that’s changing—but not disappearing. “We are developing a very specific focus on investigative and data-driven journalism to plan for the jobs that will exist in the future.” 
 
Susca has good reason to be hopeful: Even amid the turmoil, a 2022 Pew Research Center study found that 77 percent of US journalists would choose their career path all over again—a sign of hope for the future of the Fourth Estate.