The Toledo Blade might close this year. So might other papers like it. This isn't really a story about bad reporters or boring news. It's a story about us.
A lot of people don't want news anymore. They want a team. They pick a tribe, and then they go find whatever tells them their tribe is right. One study even found that Americans are more likely than people in other countries to pick news that already matches what they believe.
Once you pick a team instead of the truth, everything gets stupid fast. We argue for days about what a woman is. And somehow we still find time to argue about corruption, but only in terms of the "other side."
Meanwhile, some guy on TikTok is teaching 14-year-olds how to invest in gold because banks are "in on it," and somehow that gets more views than the city council meeting where a group screaming they want more democracy just chased away half the business community, and the money that paid for schools, police, and fire went with them.
That's the actual news. Nobody's watching, and for good reason. It's impossible to cover most of that stuff with a straight face.
If you watch the Ohio governor's race, or at least the commercials, you know exactly what we mean. Instead of examining how the candidates' policies will touch our lives, a lot of the debate is whether one candidate is a con man or the other has a drinking problem.
The Pennant started because we noticed something: betting markets often told the truth faster than headlines did. Money doesn't care about your tribe or your feelings. It just follows where there's more of it.
So we started watching those markets, and then we started watching papers like The Blade, The Plain Dealer, and The Columbus Dispatch, because local news used to be the closest thing we had to plain truth, right in your town.
Nothing forced people away from newspapers. The industry split into two paths, chasing clicks or chasing subscriptions. It's just getting fed up and leaving. As in, I can't take it anymore.
Journalism schools used to teach reporters to follow the who, what, where, why, and how of a story. So here it is:
Who: people, and the phones that have become their link to, well, everything.
What: we stopped agreeing on facts, or even on what's factual.
Where: everywhere, including Toledo.
When: it's been going on for a while; it's just that more people are noticing, probably the ones who still use their phones to call people.
Why: feelings got louder than facts.
How: pick truth over tribe, one story at a time.
Sometimes adults have to hold their noses and accept something they hate as truth, no matter how much it may hurt our feelings. That's a hard ask for a generation raised on 120 characters. Most of them have never had to hear "no" from someone looking them in the eye.