Van Buren County, with a population of roughly 6,000 people, is located along the Cumberland Plateau, made up of hilled farmland populated by cows and hay bales. Spencer, Tennessee, is the county’s largest town, making up a fourth of the county’s population, but locals only receive their news from Facebook bulletins, X and word-of-mouth.  

The close-knit community lacks the demand for a traditional local newspaper, so the community switched to alternative forms of coverage. Officials from Van Buren County and Spencer residents report their county’s news to their community Facebook bulletin through postings, listings from business signs and cork boards, and small-town word-of-mouth. 

Van Buren County’s lack of a local newspaper isn’t unique. The county is one of four Tennessee counties considered “news deserts,” according to the UNC Hussman School for Journalism and Strategic Media. News deserts are communities that have limited or no access to credible news sources at the grassroots level, according to the UNC Center for Innovation and Sustainability in Local Media.  

The county relies heavily on the Van Buren County Community Bulletin, run by co-admins Tina Simmons and Gregory Cope. It allows public officials and neighboring counties to source all news information regarding emergencies, road blockages and other messages to its 6,200 members. Members receive pre-approved posts from various county and school officials and emergency officers such as firefighters and road supervisors.  

“We have no other sources to keep us informed on anything,” Simmons said. “If we don’t see it posted on Facebook, we don’t know about it.” 

Van Buren’s Adaptations: Creating an Ecosystem 

When a news desert like Van Buren loses a local newspaper, it damages the county’s information ecosystem, an organization of dynamic social relationships and a complex adaptive system that includes information infrastructures, tools, media, producers, consumers, curators and sharers, according to Internews. The Facebook bulletin is the community’s information ecosystem, as they created the bulletin to communicate changes in their environment.  

Information ecosystems are the set of institutions and actors that are involved in circulating information, including formal media, Daniel Hallin, a professor of communications at the University of San Diego, said. Obituaries, weather coverage and emergent breaking news topics like road blockages and fires are essential functions of local newspapers, broadcasts and radio. They’re difficult to substitute. 

“Social media to some extent fill[s] that gap, but I think that there’s limits to that,” Hallin said. 

Those ingrained into the small-town culture of Spencer, Tennessee, rely on the bulletin as a main tap into the community. For example, during the COVID-19 pandemic, many public health officials relied on Facebook to communicate, Hallin said. 

Spencer’s Substitutions 

Twenty-year-old chamber member and Spencer Funeral Home employee Abbygail Sullivan delivers local obituaries to the community through four mediums: the massive sign that fronts the funeral home, calling the funeral home, on their website or via email notification system found on their website. Locals prefer the sign, which includes the name of the deceased, the day and time of the funeral and visitation and the location. People drive past to read it every day, she said. 

 “People pull over onto the side of the road to see this sign,” Sullivan said. “[I’ve] seen someone drive up the wrong side of the road to look at this sign.” 

The town adopted a do-it-yourself attitude, but they lack the time and resources necessary to cover issues that require in-depth research, like city infrastructural problems a news team could accomplish. Substitutions to circulate information without the presence of strong local media are a net positive, but they have their limitations and cannot make sufficient replacements, Hallin said. 

“All of our grandparents were nosy,” Simmons said. “This is the same thing, really. Instead of going to the store to find out what’s went on for the week or for the day, all they have to do is jump online.” 

Local volunteer reporters can sometimes be limited by their expertise, as they’re not trained for journalistic information gathering, Hallin said. Professional reporters offer better quality research through fact-checking sources and are paid for their work, he said. They have more time to attend city hall meetings and the training to cover important events.  

“Nobody’s paying them to do it, and they have another job. So, it’s going to be uneven,” Hallin said. 

Local Newspapers 

Van Buren County attempted nine local papers to cover the city of Spencer from 1915 through 2018, but none survived, according to data collected from the Tennessee State Library and Archives Catalog. The Van Buren Eagle, the most recent attempt at a local paper, ran as an addition to the Expositor in 2017 and lasted about a year. The Eagle went out of business, and its successors haven’t performed well enough to stay open, Sullivan said. 

“A paper has just never really done well up here,” Sullivan said. 

Past newspaper content was trial and error, with some outlets publishing unlocalized content in a two-page issue for a dollar a piece, Simmons said. These past experiences bred hesitant attitudes toward journalists, as the small community doesn’t know if a future paper will cover content the community values at a reasonable price. 

“There’s not a whole lot you can find out just out and about,” Simmons said. “It would… have to involve Facebook to find anything that you wanted to publish in this county.” 

The Expositor and Southern Standard use their platforms to cover Van Buren, and Southern Standard, White County’s local newspaper, covers Van Buren County under the local news tab when they can. Recent staff shrinkages forced the outlet to prioritize White County. However, Southern Standard used to have a beat dedicated to Van Buren County, managing editor for Southern Standard, Seth Wright said. 

“We’ve got four reporters and one sports editor,” Wright said. “So, our staff is smaller than it used to be. We still try to keep a little presence going.” 

The Modern Media Landscape 

Since 2008, local news media took a sharp downturn, and news deserts are more prevalent across rural areas of the U.S. The states with the lowest amount of local news users are Alabama, Mississippi, Tennessee, Arkansas, Louisiana, Oklahoma and Texas, according to the UNC Center for Innovation and Sustainability in Local Media. Alabama and Louisiana have two counties without a newspaper, Oklahoma has four and Texas has 21 deserts. 

“Sadly, there’s more and more of those all the time and we’re doing our best to make sure Warren County doesn’t become one, but for newspapers, it gets harder all the time,” Wright said. 

The modern media landscape diminished over about 17 years, according to former UNC Knight Chair Penelope Abernathy, author of “The Rise of a New Media Baron and the Emerging Threat of News Deserts.”   

“Social media, of course, is a problem too that we have to compete with,” Wright said. “The changing of times [has] hurt news…but we’re doing our best to hang in there.” 

In 2004, the three largest newspaper companies owned 487 papers with a combined circulation of 9.8 million, but 12 years later they owned about 900 papers with a combined circulation of 12.7 million, according to Abernathy’s report,  

Even in the larger cities, newspapers have thinned in numbers and disappeared all over the U.S. Even if local news is more likely to be consumed in places like New York or Pennsylvania, local newspapers all over the country have dwindled significantly. When Hallin was a young boy growing up in Silicon Valley, there were plentiful newspapers, and by the 1980s, they’d all vanished, Hallin said. 

“The big metropolitan newspapers had, you know, taken over all those markets,” Hallin said.