Trying to protect profit margins, media outlets have reduced staff and chosen to strictly limit coverage to circulation/viewership boundaries. This hollowing out of news coverage has created a void of important information between communities in the same region, even though climate, culture and cousins, river, rail, and road connect them. In the event of community health issues, or an environmental accident, sharing information regionally moves from “downright neighborly” to “downright crucial”. What happens in Arkansas matters in Tennessee and Alabama and Mississippi. Yet there is no organized communication network between them.
• When a recently repurposed, sixty-year-old, pipeline ruptured in Mayflower, Arkansas, it spilled thousands of barrels of diluted bitumen (tar sands oil) into a stream feeding a popular recreational lake. First responders and residents were sickened and fresh water was fouled. Two hundred miles to the east, the Memphis newspaper relied on wire reports scattered throughout its editions. There are currently pipelines running through Memphis that are now in the repurposing and permitting process but the newspaper hasn’t connected the dots.
• When twenty-five oil tanker cars went off the tracks in Aliceville, Alabama, it set off an inferno that could be seen from ten miles away and polluted tributaries to the Tom Bigbee River system. Newspapers in Little Rock and Memphis again relied on wire reports and could not determine the volume of oil transported by rail through Tennessee or Arkansas, the energy logistics hubs of the South.
• Aggressive efforts in Memphis to combat obesity and increase nutrition among low-income communities have not made news in Little Rock or Birmingham, even though the entire region leads the nation in food deserts and obesity rates. Nutrition
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