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. The publication’s 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. Newsrooms 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.

Before my byline landed at a Northern Kentucky newspaper, I had worked as a freelance writer for some of the nation’s largest and smallest newsrooms, from the Philadelphia Inquirer to the “Chestnut Hill Local.” I have worked in and around journalism since 1990.

Along the way, I’ve had a front-row seat to lots of changes in journalism, many of them for the worse.

The first alt-weekly I wrote for folded in 1991 after less than a year in print. Then, a year later, the New York Times Company sold many of its local newspapers, including the Atlanta Daily News, a paper I contributed to after the alt-weekly shut down.

When we moved to Covington, Kentucky, last summer, I had freelance contracts with two Pittsburgh newsrooms and I expected to continue contributing to those publications long after the move. I also had an assignment to write for Cincinnati City Beat weeks before movers packed up our household.

Those plans quickly evaporated as City Beat cut its freelance budget, NEXTpittsburgh put my work on hiatus until March and Pittsburgh City Paper went out of print on New Year’s Eve, a few days before another former employer, the “Pittsburgh Post-Gazette,” announced its 240-year run would end later this year.

The rapid contraction in journalism concerns me on multiple levels. The most obvious one is how it impacts me professionally and financially. Journalism is how I make my living.

Another way that it impacts me is as a citizen. Fewer newspapers and newsrooms means there will be even less information about the world around me. There will be less robust coverage of local government, the arts and social conditions.

Many local newsrooms already struggle to spread precious resources — a small number of reporters and small budgets — adequately to fulfill their missions to readers. Back in Pittsburgh, there was very little coverage of how a broken historic preservation regulatory regime adversely affects the city’s history and impacts local development. One editor with whom I worked confessed that they simply didn’t have the bandwidth to learn about the issues and assign reporters to cover them.

Finally, the loss of so many newsrooms and the stories they produced will impact the field where I spent more time than journalism in the past 40 years: history. As a public historian and teacher, newspaper archives were essential research tools. It’s true that journalism produces history’s first draft.

That first draft provides a roadmap for scholarly research and provides windows into events that happened long ago. The events and voices captured in news reporting are not accessible anywhere else because no one thought to save important papers or write personal accounts.

Those personal accounts range from details about major events in a community, like a catastrophic flood or heinous crime. Or, they may be about more mundane things like the decisions made by city leaders that helped to shape growth and development.

Our democracy and our society need journalism to survive. The closure or contraction of each newsroom is like a single brain cell dying. At some point, after so many brain cells die, the organism also dies.

After the Post-Gazette announced that it would be going out of print, a student reporter for Carnegie Mellon University’s newspaper interviewed me about the state of journalism and my experiences.

I laid out my concerns for how the Pittsburgh newsroom closures would impact the city and its people.

“Oftentimes, historically marginalized communities [couldn’t] get their events publicized in the mainstream press and relied upon things like alt-weeklies to get their news out,” I said about City Paper’s demise. “The only documented record that may be available for [marginalized communities] is in the archives of these alt-weeklies. If the alt-weeklies disappear, and their physical archives and digital archives also disappear, that’s going to leave historians at a great disadvantage.”

Closer to home, I wonder what’s going to happen to Cincinnati City Beat’s archives. The paper, which was struggling to stay afloat by the time we moved to Covington, ended up being purchased by another regional media company.

I also wonder about all the news that I don’t see locally, whether it’s because of slim budgets, reporters stretched too thin or corporate gatekeepers who seem to have forgotten that the news should be reported without fear or favor.

Note: A shorter version of this post was previously published.