I recently cut the cord with a local newsroom I had been writing for since January. It’s a small family-run newsroom that covers Northern Kentucky. Its entrepreneurial model both attracted and scared me. I recognize the importance of entrepreneurial journalism and I’ve written about how its disappearance can be harmful.

But, I also recognize that small newsrooms have fewer resources to ensure a quality product and to protect their journalists. The Northern Kentucky newsroom had — has — both of those deficiencies. As more communities have become news deserts when newspapers and broadcasters cut coverage or disappear, online newsrooms have filled essential gaps. Sometimes for the better, oftentimes not.

The low-hanging fruit in a tall tree growing in Northern Kentucky includes typos and sloppy editing. The examples where the editor misspelled my name occupy space on those branches.

Inept and unsophisticated indexing (article tagging) occupies a branch a little higher up the tree.

The site’s dedication to privileging press release churns over actual reporting was an ethical lump that I couldn’t swallow. The press releases, sometimes categorized as “government” or “business,” frequently were indistinguishable from the news published in the site.

I also missed the thoughtful and professional constructive collaborations I have with other editors, along with the contracts binding me to ethical and professional conduct and memorializing our mutual obligations. The site’s editing was far from thoughtful or collaborative. One hint should have been comments by a Kentucky source I interviewed for a story I wrote for a Pittsburgh newsroom last year. My Kentucky source, in a discussion about his documentation of local history, told me how the newsroom’s editor had mangled his work.

A huge red flag should have been the Kentucky newsroom’s refusal to execute a contract. It was the first and last time in more than 35 years of journalism experience that I’ve worked without a contract.

Too often, the online newsrooms that replace established (legacy) ones cannot provide the communities they serve with the news that they need. I saw this in the Atlanta area with the rise of “reporterishes” and it’s pervasive here in Northern Kentucky. Newsroom are either vulnerable to allegations of bias and conflicts of interest or their products are more like the “Hooterville World Guardian” than the UK’s Guardian newspaper.

As I told a Pittsburgh college journalist who interviewed me earlier this year after the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette announced that it would be going out of print in May, I worry that the decimation of local news may be the death knell for our democracy. That’s a thought that occupies one of the higher branches in the metaphorical tree I’ve constructed here. A lower branch is more personal: a writer’s product is only as good as his/her last editor. If I want to produce work without the benefit of an editor, I can stick to posting in this blog. At least here, I take full responsibility for content, transparency, spelling, grammar, and tagging.

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