Jason Togyer is a lifelong McKeesport resident who spent most of his career as a journalist in the area, including a stint at the now-defunct McKeesport Daily News. He also founded and still runs Tube City Online, a nonprofit news site and web radio station that strives to fill gaps in news coverage of his hometown.
But look no further than Togyer’s own experience for examples of how mistrust about media has spread, even at the hyperlocal level.
In his chapters in the new book “American Deadline: Reporting From Four News-Starved Towns in the Trump Era,” Togyer describes seeing Tube City’s reporting branded “fake news” … by his own neighbors.
“[It’s] people who can find me, people who can see me in church. You could see me in the grocery store,” he said. “Some will say, ‘Well, I didn't know how to get a hold of you.’ And I said, ‘I'm not hard to get hold of.’ We have social media. We have an office in the old McKeesport Daily News building.'”
“Everyone who contributes [to Tube City] lives in one of the communities, either in McKeesport or one of the surrounding areas,” he added. “But that national branding of fake news, that national branding that the media is the enemy, it is trickling down. I mean, local reporters all over the country are starting to get that pushback sometimes.”Letters from McKeesport
Distrust of the media is just one of the timely topics tackled by Togyer and his three co-authors of the book, published by the Columbia Journalism Review.
CJR recruited the contributors in 2019 and asked them to write letter-style dispatches in real-time as the 2020 election approached. Along with Togyer, they are Greg Glassner, reporting from Bowling Green, Va.; Charles Richardson, in Macon, Ga.; and Sandra Sanchez, in the border town of McAllen, Texas.
For his part, Togyer sketched the political divide in McKeesport and its environs, which he wrote is increasingly a schism between blue-voting Mon Valley towns and red suburbs.
“There's a racial divide in Western Pennsylvania that I think Pittsburgh is finally starting to talk about,” he said. “It translates into this socioeconomic divide and this political divide as well.”
He explores how Big Steel’s reneging on retired workers’ pensions caused many in southwestern Pennsylvania to distrust authority figures — and how, in Togyer’s estimation, Donald Trump exploited that dynamic by promising Baby Boomers certainty about the future. And he looks into how the pandemic — which struck just months after he accepted the book assignment — exposed socioeconomic inequities in education, health care, and the wider economy.The coverage gap
But Togyer — now a communication manager for the University of Pittsburgh — focuses most on the decline of the media ecosystem that once helped hold McKeesport’s community together. Local broadcast media seldom covered McKeesport beyond fires and homicides, he said.
But while he acknowledges that “not everybody liked the Daily News, believe me. I worked there for a year,” the paper’s demise, on Dec. 31, 2015, left a vacuum.
And it wasn’t just the loss of regular coverage of city council and school board business in this economically troubled former mill town of about 17,000 residents. It was also the sudden disappearance of obituaries, fish-fry announcements, high school sports scores, and other seemingly small bits of information that had long made McKeesport McKeesport.
Though Tube City Online and outlets such as the Mon Valley Independent have done their best, that vacuum has been partly filled by social media.
“Facebook in particular has really undermined the community conversation in these towns,” said Togyer. “Now anyone can start a Facebook page, call themselves a community-news page, and put whatever unfiltered gossip they want up there. And it spreads so quickly, and it is so hard to combat.”
In “American Deadline,” Togyer recounts the story of a young trans woman in McKeesport who took her own life during the early stages of the pandemic. Rumors multiplied, largely on social media: that she’d been murdered. That a public memorial service was really a Black Lives Matter rally. That the rally was actually going to be a riot.
“It could have very quickly gotten out of control,” he said. “And it was all hypothesis just pulled out of thin air on social media. That's a real problem. I mean, social media is really driving these narratives in towns like McKeesport and Sandusky, Ohio, and Altoona and San Jose, California, and wherever, and without the unifying voice of a local newspaper or a strong local radio station, there is no counter-narrative.”Citizen journalism?
Local newspapers continue disappearing, thanks largely to advertisers who have migrated online. Togyer acknowledges Tube City Online as a stopgap, at best: The site pays its freelance contributors, but its budget is limited, and it relies heavily on volunteers like himself.
“Tube City Online does not have a sustainable business model,” he said. “So there are things we don't cover, and it's not because we don't want to. It's because we can't. I'm lucky if we can get a couple stories posted today.”
Some observers have placed hope in “citizen journalism” — the idea that everyday people can report on their own communities. But, as he notes in “American Deadline,” Togyer is skeptical. True citizen journalists would need training in journalism, which most don’t have access to.
And even Togyer, who spent years at area newspapers including the Washington Observer-Reporter and the Tribune-Review, struggles to find time for his passion for keeping McKeesport informed.
“My wife sometimes doesn't see me. She didn't see me last night because I was at city council,” he told WESA earlier this month. “We do not have kids, and I have a very forgiving wife. Not everybody is so fortunate that they can take an evening off and go write a news story for free, essentially. And that's where the citizen journalism model really breaks apart.”
