Even when I was working full-time in newspapers, I knew the industry was declining. It perpetually felt like the best time to work at a newsroom was about five minutes before I got there.

Because there used to be something like job security, or at least the knowledge that there would always be another paper to work at. There used to be more subscribers. There used to be more advertisers. Every paper I worked at over a 20-year career seemed to be fighting to keep people’s attention, and losing.

Make the stories shorter. Don’t continue them off the front page, readers don’t like that. Use more photos. Cover more pop culture. (Listen to this outside consultant we hired who’s never worked in a newsroom!) Put everything on the internet, people will still pay for the print version. The stories are still too long, make them shorter. We’re doing another round of layoffs, but it’s okay! Every reporter will have to cover an extra couple of towns, that’s all. We don’t need so many editors. We don’t need a books section or a theater critic or a movie critic. We’re increasing the subscription price but we can’t help that the paper is thinner than it used to be. We’ve lost a lot of advertisers. Blame the internet.

Why don’t young people read the paper?

I watched a lot of colleagues lose their jobs. Colleagues with kids in college. Colleagues this close to retirement. I had to reapply for my own job once, during a “restructuring,” and I got lucky while other people didn’t.

Don’t get me wrong, newsrooms could be fun places to work. They tend to attract the quirky, creative, independent-minded types, the people who either view journalism as a sacred calling or need a steady paycheck until their novel or music career takes off. Every copydesk I worked on had its ridiculous in-jokes (“thank you for coming to work today” was an insult), its traditions (Hawaiian Shirt Day, Election Night bloody marys), its camaraderie (Red Sox vs. Yankees snark, post-deadline all-night poker games). I joined my first newsroom before I’d even graduated from college and I never regretted it. I never thought I’d be suited to any other kind of workplace.

But increasingly, I knew that I’d never be able to retire from a newspaper job. I’d never last long enough.

I left my last newsroom—where I’d made it to middle management—for too many reasons to count nearly 10 years ago and started freelancing. Less than two years after I left, the family that had owned that newspaper for generations sold it to a larger chain, and nearly everyone I knew there lost their jobs. I still can’t bring myself to read that paper.

I subscribe to my local weekly, but the chain that owns it has combined a bunch of different towns’ papers into one “regional” edition and seems to be quietly hoping no one notices. There are almost no stories about my town in this paper anymore. The story it recently ran on our Board of Ed was about the previous meeting, weeks ago, and not the one I’d just attended.

The Star-Ledger is the largest newspaper in New Jersey. It’s practically been an institution for generations. It just announced it’s eliminating the print edition and will only be available digitally. No, this is not a good thing. This is an ominous sign for its future.

(A few years back, North Jersey got walloped by an unseasonal snowstorm and massive power outages. My paper shifted its coverage to all-blackout, all-the-time, including suggestions for family activities with no electricity and recipes to make using only shelf-stable ingredients from the pantry. Readers loved it. They were so thrilled the paper kept showing up on their doorstep and kept them informed. I don’t see how a digital-only paper can do the same.)

It hurts my heart to see what’s becoming of my industry, even though I suspected it was going to happen. More to the point: No local news means you don’t know what your local government is doing. You don’t know about crimes in the area. You don’t know what’s going on with your neighbors.

A local newspaper is its community, in a lot of ways. That’s why I grab a paper whenever I’m visiting a new place—I want to learn about it. We visited colleges in two different states last weekend with our senior, and I found decent papers in both places, and yes that is a selling point for me.

What do we do about this? A couple of things. First, if you still have a local paper, subscribe to it. Even if it’s crap. (You can jot down some notes about why it’s crap and ask for a conversation with the editor/publisher. They really do listen to subscribers.) Second, attend your local meetings whenever you can. Your town ought to be livestreaming meetings if you can’t get there in person; the minutes from previous meetings ought to be available on the town website. You need to know what’s going on in your town—and county and state, by extension—and if a reporter isn’t going to give you this information, then you need to get it for yourself.

This country is already drowning in misinformation and propaganda and angry lies. We need to work together to turn the tide.

At the beginning of my career, way back in the last century, I used to cover meetings. School board, town council, etc. And generally speaking, these public officials were playing to empty rooms. There were usually two or three residents who made a point of going to all the meetings, and a lot of empty chairs around them. Once a school board facing budget cuts suggested dropping, among other things, the late buses that help students get home from after-school activities. A roomful of families showed up at that meeting to tearfully beg them to keep those bus routes. The meeting after that? Empty room again.

It’s essentially the same situation now (with a particular exception; let’s come back to that). When I go to meetings—as a resident, these days, not as a reporter—there might be a few people there with questions for town officials, or people getting awards, or Boy Scouts fulfilling badge requirements. But at many meetings, there are plenty of empty seats.

I mention this because I was at a vigil for Nex Benedict over the weekend, and what the speakers kept saying, over and over, is that people say they’re LGBT allies, say they’re supportive, but don’t necessarily show up at the public meetings where rules or legislation affecting LGBT people are being determined, or where books featuring LGBT people are being banned.

That’s true. Who’s been showing up at public meetings over the past few years? Moms for Liberty, or groups that act like them. They tell school boards in towns they don’t necessarily live in to ban books they may or may not have read, and those books almost invariably feature LGBT characters (except when they feature Black characters dealing with racism, or Jewish characters dealing with antisemitism). And they harass librarians in order to get their way. I wrote about this a few months back. Banning books about LGBT people, or banning a Pride flag raising or “safe space” rainbow stickers in schools, are ways of telling LGBT people they aren’t welcome or they shouldn’t exist.

At that vigil for Nex Benedict, multiple trans or nonbinary speakers said they’d never expected to survive to their thirties, or forties, and they wanted trans and nonbinary kids to know they could make it to adulthood, too. They wanted kids to see there was a future ahead for them.

That’s so poignant, and so important.

People who show up at public meetings are more likely to get what they want from public officials. So attend your local meetings. Make sure you know what’s going on in your town. If you disagree with what public officials are saying or doing, make sure you tell them so. And if members of minority groups are being attacked, show up and show them they’re not alone.