It’s a couple of years since Glenn Smith and Tony Bartelme noted that accountability was suffering as the number of newspaper closures grew.
The Charleston Post & Courier staffers had pandemic-stricken South Carolina mostly in mind when they originally wrote in 2021 that corruption was flourishing in the rural corners of South Carolina as newspapers folded or shrank coverage.
More than 60 had shuttered across the nation “as the coronavirus strangled an industry already battered by shrinking revenue and draining job cuts,” they wrote, needing an update a year ago, with seven more newspapers in SC alone closing their doors in the past year.
Nearer to home, in February 2025, their own paper was forced to stop printing on Mondays and Tuesdays.
Smith and Bartelme had listed some of the closures, and the impacts each had had on their communities, through lack of transparency and the loss of citizen engagement and voter participation. “Without that scrutiny, corruption can blossom, often in financially strapped places that are least able to afford it,” they wrote. A state law enforcement chief Mark Keel noted that people “would likely be stunned” by the amount of misconduct that goes on in the state, while others had been surprised by the “synergistic effect” between newspapers and law enforcement.
Now, many of those newspapers are gone. One statistic was that a quarter of the nation’s newspapers had vanished in the 15 years leading up to 2020, leaving more than two-thirds of US counties without a daily paper, and more than 200 with no newspaper at all.
In South Carolina, 14 per cent of the state’s newspapers closed between 2004-2019, with seven more closing in the year following. And while some new mastheads have opened, some of these are in communities already served by a paper.
Among 2024 casualties was the Greer Citizen, founded in 1918, which had been bought by Buchheit News Management in 2006.
Pictured: Offices of The Observer in Ware Shoals, which closed in 2020 (top); the Goss SSC press installed in 2003 at proudly family-owned Index-Journal in Greenwood is still looking for a buyer; the paper is now printed off-site three days a week, an arrangement that led to a missed edition last July (photo ImPressions Worldwide, which is marketing the press).