People show love for local newspapers after Capital Gazette attack

Following the tragic shooting at The Capital Gazette, people are showing their support for local press.

At least five people were killed, with several others "gravely injured," in the shooting on Thursday at the newspaper's offices in Annapolis, Maryland. Police said the suspect was taken into custody, and called the incident a "targeted attack."

The Capital Gazette has been published in Annapolis since 1884. The newspaper's team has even been covering the story of the attack on their own offices, a mark of incredible professional strength.

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Following the shooting, many journalists, editors, and reporters tweeted their support for local newspapers, with other members of the public tagging their own local papers in some threads.

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Many offered help to those feeling helpless in light of the tragic event, and suggested subscribing to The Capital Gazette, or your local newspaper. Alternatively, others suggested donating to journalism schools and organizations.

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If you want to donate directly to The Capital Gazette newsroom and its journalists, Bloomberg reporter Madi Alexander started a GoFundMe page that has raised over $27,000 at the time of writing.

For all their importance to the community, local newspapers have been under immense pressure over the last decade or so, struggling to stay afloat in an increasingly digital media landscape.

With consumers looking to online news outlets, between 2000 and 2015, print newspaper advertising revenue in the U.S. — whether with local or national outlets — fell from approximately $60 billion to about $20 billion. Plus, circulation is down across the board, with the estimated total U.S. daily newspaper circulation (print and digital combined) in 2017 falling 10-11 percent from the previous year.

And resources? According to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 39,210 people worked as reporters, editors, photographers, or film and video editors in the U.S. newspaper industry in 2017. That's down a whopping 45 percent from 2004 — almost halved.

With revenue, staffing, and circulation on the decline, local newspapers have the odds stacked against them. Nonetheless, staff work incredibly hard every day with small teams and limited resources.

"For more than a century, most people in the Western world have taken local journalism for granted," wrote Rasmus Kleis Nielsen, director of research at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, in his 2015 book on the subject.

"Having a local news medium dedicated to covering you and people around you helps mark the identity of the place where you live as somewhere and helps mark people there as someone," he wrote. "Local news helps cultivate consensus, coherence, and stability within a community."

These days, many local papers distribute their content online for free. If you were thinking about paying for that content with a subscription, now is the time to do it.