CARBONDALE, Ill. — Jackson Brandhorst rose to editor-in-chief of the largest newspaper in southern Illinois by the age of 21 but his promising career was cut short by industry turmoil.
He was caught in a downturn that created vast news deserts in the Midwest over the last three years, especially in Illinois, where a series of mergers, layoffs and shutdowns left much of the state’s southern region with little to no local news coverage.
Brandhorst’s story also raises concerns about how cost-cutting decisions by remaining newspaper chains alienate not only readers but also promising young journalists needed to build the industry’s future.
“You know, the whole situation is that it was a decaying outlet at the time that I came in, and I watched it just crumble,” said Brandhorst, who is now 25.
I interviewed Brandhorst in September while reporting on newspaper closures in Illinois, as part of a project with the Local News Initiative at Northwestern University’s Medill School.
Its State of Local News report released Tuesday found Illinois had more newspaper closures than any other state, including 30 closures over the last year. Nationally 170 newspapers were lost to closures or mergers over that same period.
There’s still a regional daily in the state’s southern region, The Southern Illinoisan. But it’s down to just a few reporters and prints only three days a week.
Brandhorst started working there right out of high school, first as a clerk. He liked it so much he changed his major at Southern Illinois University from engineering to journalism, then paused studies to work full-time at the paper.
That verified comments his mother made. A librarian and reading teacher, “she was always like, ‘you should be writing,’” Brandhorst recalled.
“And I was like, ‘no, I’d like to make money, I want to be an engineer, I want to do all that stuff,’” he said. “And then I fell in love with news and with words and with reading and writing and I was like, ‘You’re right, Mom.’ So I switched.”
A few years later he was leading a dozen journalists at his hometown daily’s newsroom.
In another era that could have been the start of a career that led to Chicago, New York or even a Hollywood tale.
But not during the 2020s in Illinois.
In 2023, the year after Brandhorst became editor, the chain that owned the paper sold it to another chain, which ordered him to fire the entire, unionized newsroom. He decided instead to quit, return to school and pursue another line of work.
Change was a constant during his brief career. The editor when he was hired quit or was bought out during a downsizing. The next one left for a public relations job and the third was transferred by the paper’s owner at the time, Lee Enterprises, to a regional investigative team.
Brandhorst rose from assistant editor to deputy editor, “which was already a big deal at 21.” The company then asked him to serve as interim editor-in-chief while it did a national search for candidates.
“And then one day the Midwest executive director was like, ‘You want to just do it? You’re doing good (work). And I was like, I guess I might as well get paid for it and have the title,” he said.
That was mid 2022 and Brandhorst was barely old enough to order a beer.
In late 2023, Lee, an Iowa-based chain that owned the paper since 1979, sold The Southern Illinoisan to another chain, Kentucky-based Paxton Media Group.
“I look forward to expanding our coverage,” Paxton’s group publisher, Bill Evans, said in the news release.
The opposite happened at The Southern Illinoisan, which started in Carbondale but is now based in Marion.
“When Paxton came in, they were like, ‘we’d like to keep you. We want you to continue to be the editor-in-chief but the entire staff is going to be let go,” Brandhorst recalled.
Employees could reapply if they wanted to, he was told.
“I didn’t take very kindly to that situation so I politely declined to be retained,” he said.
Tensions were rising before the sale. Brandhorst recalled Lee spiking a column by a longtime staffer and union leader. He found out when page designers, working at a Lee office in Indiana, returned a completely different opinion page filled with national content.
During his tenure Brandhorst was only able to hire two or three people. One was a sports reporter who moved from Detroit.
“Up and coming young kid who really wanted this job and wanted to cover sports,” Brandhorst said. “He had been there for about six months, completely upended his life in Michigan, came all the way down to Carbondale, six months later he’s gone. I was just really heartbreaking to see a lot of that stuff.”
The Southern now has three news reporters plus two sports reporters. That’s nowhere near enough to cover southern Illinois, especially after 13 weeklies around the region were closed in June by another chain, Paddock Publications.
“We try to pick the biggest things going on and cover them,” said Marilyn Halstead, the current editor. “Our coverage area has diminished over a number of years as the staff has gotten smaller.”
The situation has created another short-term opportunity for Brandhorst.
A nonprofit news organization dedicated to covering the region, the Southern Illinois Source, was just launched by the Illinois Press Foundation. It will complement the foundation’s government-focused news service, Capitol News Illinois.
Brandhorst will work for the Source after graduating in December. But only through the summer, after which he plans to attend graduate school.
“It won’t be in journalism,” he said in the office of SIU’s student newspaper, The Daily Egyptian, where he’s currently a reporter.
Brandhorst wants to study semantics or language “through a sociological lens instead of journalism.” He’d like to get a Ph.D. in linguistics and become a professor, perhaps even teaching a journalism class someday.
So much for the newspaper career.
“It’s tough. It’s something I’ve thought about for a while,” he said. “I’m a proponent of physical news. I do like the print product. I think it’s important to chronicle and catalog things that are going on that are separate from the digital landscape. But I’m also of my generation and very much in tune with how people are consuming news and information.”
Especially on campuses like SIU, “I think we should be teaching students how to meet people where they’re at,” he said, “and where they’re at is not in front of a newspaper these days.”
I’m holding out hope for newspapers. Their work is still valued by tens of millions of Americans who subscribe and depend on papers to report on their communities and hold officials and institutions accountable.
Younger generations may come to appreciate newspapers, especially as AI makes it harder to discern authentic sources of information and easier to propagate truly fake news.
Meanwhile some independent newspapers and publishing groups are finding success with new models, such as bolstering newsrooms with philanthropic support.
The industry’s trajectory may also change if copyright lawsuits, including one brought by The Seattle Times, lead to newspapers getting fairly compensated by tech giants pilfering and regurgitating their work online.
But newspapers’ success ultimately depends on whether they can attract and nurture rising journalists and leaders like Brandhorst.
Publishers in Illinois and Kentucky, of all places, ought to know more about the importance of seed corn.
Brier Dudley on Twitter: @BrierDudley is editor of The Seattle Times Save the Free Press Initiative. Its weekly newsletter: https://st.news/FreePressNewsletter. Reach him at bdudley@seattletimes.com.
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