During 152 years of publication, the Cairo Citizen covered the Illinois town’s boom years, its long, grinding decline, its near-death from floods, its tumultuous racial history and its high-school championships and homecoming pageants. Launched just after the Civil War as the Cairo Bulletin, it published through the heyday of the steamboat, the railroad and the interstate. It didn’t survive Facebook.
When the paper folded in 2020, there wasn’t much in the way of civic mourning. By that time, the Citizen was wizened and sickly, a mirror of its hometown, a historic city wedged onto a triangle of land at the confluence of the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers in southernmost Illinois. What had once been six-days-a-week newspaper had become a weekly, staffed by a single journalist who reported and wrote the stories, shot the photos and laid out the pages. It wasn’t much. It was also a lot.
“Even if it’s just a crappy community paper,” says Issac Smith, former editor of the Citizen, “it offers some level of validation that [a place] exists. There’s no conduit now; there’s no megaphone. They’re worse off.”
With the Citizen gone, Cairo and surrounding Alexander County are firmly a news desert – one of the 208 counties in the U.S. with no local news source, according to Medill Local News Initiative research. Three-and-a-half million people live in news desert counties. More than 50 million live in counties with either no news source or only one.
Reporting about the town is sporadic and usually comes from afar. The Democrat-Gazette, based some 35 miles away in Anna, Ill., circulates in Cairo.
A newspaper gives a town or city life. You know the people you’re reading about. You identify with them. It gave us a sense that we are a community.
Don Patton, Cairo resident and head of the local historical society
Reporters from equally distant towns – Cape Girardeau, Mo., Paducah, Ky., Carbondale, Ill. – sometimes drop in, but their number has been reduced too.
The situation raises this question: Where do people in Alexander County turn for news and information when there’s no locally based, credible source? And how does the loss of local news affect the community?
Not surprisingly, residents are turning to social media for news, but some say it can be unreliable and a haven for rumors and gossip. One local activist started a podcast to try to fill the void. And some residents say news arrives only in one of the oldest forms of communication: word of mouth.
The ripple effects of living in a news desert are stark. The lack of news means people aren’t just less informed; they’re less engaged in governing their communities. “People don’t get involved,” says local resident and activist Steven L. Tarver, “because they don’t know” what’s at stake.
There’s no replacement for the meaty beats that once filled the Citizen: cops, courts, the mayor and city council, the school board, the county housing authority. Instead, people in news deserts like Cairo turn to Facebook and other social media sources, losing the reliability and context provided by local civic reporting.
Of course, it’s not just the big stories that make a newspaper. No one covers the little happenings either, the things that give a small town shape and cohesion: graduations, weddings, family reunions, obits, church and community events, or the kids who scored the winning basket, starred in the school play or died serving their country.
“It brought an identity to the community,” says Don Patton, a lifelong Cairo resident who, in retirement at 73, heads the local historical society. Patton delivered the Citizen when he was in eighth grade; he remembers the exact number of subscribers on his route: 103. “A newspaper gives a town or city life,” he says one morning, sitting on his front porch. “You know the people you’re reading about. You identify with them. It gave us a sense that we are a community.”
Social media is fine, Patton says, but it’s not a substitute. “It can be unreliable. People spread rumors and gossip. And they can be cruel at times. A newspaper can be an asset if they’re doing their job and get their facts right.”
In many ways, it’s remarkable that the Citizen hung on for as long as it did. Cairo (pronounced CARE-o) and surrounding Alexander County have been struggling for a long time. The town and county have been losing people for decades. Cairo’s poverty rate is three times the national average.
First impressions of the place aren’t promising. The highway through town and the main drag, Washington Avenue, are studded with crumbling storefronts and abandoned brick buildings. Commercial Avenue, once the heart of Cairo’s retail and business district, isn’t so much abandoned as vaporized. Grassy lots stand where local stores and chains like JCPenney and Kresge opened their doors.
On a hot weekday afternoon, just beyond the ghostly hulk of the empty Gem Theater and the decorative iron archway announcing “Historic Downtown Cairo,” the town’s heart barely seems to beat. A few trucks rumble out of a grain-processing facility at the far end of the broad avenue. Nearby, a handful of people mill around the entrance to a decaying apartment complex built next to the Ohio River levee.
Yet Cairo doesn’t lack for optimism and resilience. Harold S. Jones hops in his car and gives a visitor a spirited tour of Cairo’s residential area. Pointing to attractive houses and well-tended yards, including his own, he sees progress and promise. The tour ends at a corner lot a few blocks away where the foundation of a duplex house has been poured. Jones points to a contraption sitting at the edge of the foundation, a 3-D construction printer that will soon turn out the walls of the first home built in Cairo in nearly 50 years.
“This is the new Cairo,” says Jones, dressed in a dark suit, white shirt and tie amid the baking heat and construction chaos. “We’re all about looking at the glass half full, not about what used to be.”
Jones’ parents grew up in Cairo, and he spent summers in town as a boy. Since moving back in 2010, he’s run a nonprofit called the Harold S. Jones Fine Arts Center. From an unassuming, L-shaped building on Commercial Avenue, he gives violin lessons and provides a computer lab to local students. A big, open room that was once a dance studio now serves as a performance space and lecture hall. For the past five years, he’s sponsored a local jazz festival over Labor Day weekend.
Jones says a lot of news and information passes by word of mouth in a small community like Cairo, and a lot more moves over Facebook and social media. What’s lacking, he says, is the connection between communities, such as Mounds, the town located eight miles up the highway. “There has to be a unifying voice to bring stability” to the region, he says. “There’s more of a need to know what’s going on in other communities, less about what’s going on right here.”
It took a generation to destroy what was there. It will take another generation to rebuild it.
Sarabeth Berman, chief executive of the American Journalism Project
Cairo—so named because its rich farmland and location suggested the Nile Delta—wasn’t much of a place when Charles Dickens passed through in 1842 on a tour of the American heartland. Dickens described the hamlet as “a dismal swamp.” But the town grew, blessed by a relatively hospitable climate and proximity to two mighty rivers. An aged sign greeting visitors on the Ohio levee hints at part of its story: “Welcome to Historical Cairo: Gateway to the South.”
With Missouri and Kentucky on either side and Tennessee and Arkansas just a few miles farther on, Cairo was the first patch of free soil for enslaved people fleeing north. Many of its residents can trace their lineage to men and women who fled bondage. Decades after Dickens, another writer, Mark Twain, invested Cairo with deep symbolic import. In “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” Huck and the fugitive slave Jim, floating south down the Mississippi, aim to land their raft in Cairo. There they hope to catch a steamboat up the Ohio to travel deeper into the northern states and freedom. When Jim thinks they’ve reached Cairo, he proclaims them safe, but he’s mistaken; a fog had set in, and in the confusion, Jim and Huck had sailed past the promised land, farther into the slave-holding south.
Cairo had the makings of a boom town after the Civil War, a would-be rival to bustling river cities like St. Louis, Memphis, Louisville and Cincinnati. North-south steamboat traffic grew, and the town became a hub for the movement of farm products, timber and coal. Ferries shuttled people and goods across the rivers. Prosperous merchants built grand homes on what was called “Millionaires Row” in the residential part of Washington Avenue. By the early 1920s, Cairo had swelled to around 15,000 residents.
But the development of the railroads, and then railroad bridges over the two rivers, undermined Cairo. Highway development, starting in the 1920s, enabled travelers to bypass the town altogether, leaving it isolated.
Its long, slow decline was exacerbated by years of racial tension and periodic spasms of violence. The death of a Black soldier in police custody in 1967 sparked a riot that led to the burning of several downtown buildings. Two years later, Black residents, angered by discriminatory hiring practices and mistreatment by police, began boycotting downtown merchants. The protest grew uglier, with months of sporadic gunfire in the downtown area. In early 1971, the New York Times published a lengthy magazine piece (“Bad Day at Cairo”) that recounted clashes between a Black group called the Cairo United Front and a white organization, known as the White Hats.
Natural disasters, meanwhile, piled on the manmade kind. The rivers that have been Cairo’s lifeblood have at times been its nemesis. Despite the concrete and earthen levees that protect both sides of the low-lying town, flooding has been a periodic menace. When the Ohio River reached a record crest in 2011, and the levees showed signs of failing, the city came under a mandatory evacuation order. Cairo was saved only after the Army Corps of Engineers relieved the pressure by blasting breaches in downstream levees. A state commission later said the Corps waited too long to act, causing millions of dollars in avoidable damage to Cairo.
The most damaging trend of all, however, may be the exodus of Cairo’s people. The town began emptying out after the Second World War amid the decline of the railroad, manufacturing and river-shipping industries and hasn’t stopped since. One third of its population left between 1960 and 1970; half have departed since 2000, leaving just 1,733 people behind as of the 2020 Census. (Alexander County’s losses have been similar; during the last decennial census it was the fastest de-populating county in the nation.) About 36 percent of those who remain in Cairo live below the poverty line.
Cairo today lacks more than just a hometown news source. There’s no drug store, movie theater, gas station or laundromat. The city hospital closed in 1986. Housing, especially the affordable kind, is in short supply, with the demolition in 2019 of two public housing complexes that the Department of Housing and Urban Development deemed too dilapidated to maintain.
Even if it’s just a crappy community paper, it offers some level of validation that [a place] exists. There’s no conduit now; there’s no megaphone. They’re worse off.
Isaac Smith, former editor of the Cairo Citizen
Steven Tarver has tried to fill some of the information gap in Cairo by starting a podcast in which he interviews local officials and leading citizens. Tarver isn’t a journalist, but he knows the town and its issues. He has served on the local school board, the housing task force and is on the board Rise Community Market, a co-op that opened last year to address the lack of fresh food options in Cairo. He also runs a non-profit youth organization. “I’m the virtual mayor of Cairo,” he says with a smile.
Tarver knows firsthand what academic studies of news deserts have long borne out: that without news, community engagement declines. He cites an obscure but vital issue: A long-running contract between the city and the local electric utility is coming up for renewal, and the renegotiation could affect local power rates for years to come. More news coverage, he suggests, might inspire more community input.
Outside efforts to bring more news to Cairo are ongoing but fitful. Lloyd Williams, a native of nearby Cape Girardeau, began publishing a monthly newspaper, SEMO Urban Voices, in 2022, aimed at the Black communities of southeast Missouri (hence SEMO) and southern Illinois. Williams says he wants the paper to foster “a sense of unity” among African-Americans in the region.
The local media, he says, “doesn’t tell the full story about the Black community. The news is slanted in a negative way in some aspects. There’s a lot of positive things going on.” But Williams, a retired neurosurgical technician who is 74, knows he has a lot of ground to cover and not many resources with which to cover it. Urban Voices circulates in an eight-county area, and Williams is its only full-time staff member. The paper’s most recent issue carries only one story about Cairo: a short piece about Harold Jones’ Labor Day jazz festival.
Veteran journalist Molly Parker, who grew up in southern Illinois, has been among the most active figures in addressing the erosion of reporting in her native region. After years of covering Cairo for the Southern Illinoisan, the daily paper in Carbondale, Parker has continued her reporting via Capitol News Illinois, a nonprofit news organization operated by the Illinois Press Foundation.
Among her recent work: a deeply reported piece for Capitol News and ProPublica about the financial struggles faced by Rise Market and government-subsidized markets like it. Separately, as an assistant journalism professor at Southern Illinois University, Parker and colleague Julia Rendleman last year started the Saluki Local Reporting Lab, which fosters reporting on Alexander County by student journalists.
The paper... reinforced a sense of pride in the place people lived. I helped amplify their voices. I gave them the opportunity to tell their own stories.
Isaac Smith, former editor of the Cairo Citizen
Parker worries that it’s not enough, that sporadic stories exposing discrimination and hardship will reinforce a one-dimensional caricature of the community given that there’s so little else to balance the picture. “The question has long stirred inside of me: Is it responsible to cover a community if you can’t do it right?” she asks. “Is some coverage better than none? What does responsible coverage look like with limited resources?”
Under ideal conditions, Parker says, “we would operate with a robust team, offering investigative journalism, local education and city news, election coverage, breaking news and human-interest stories – the positive, the negative, often-overlooked mundane but important details like city council and school-board votes.”
But Parker knows that conditions aren’t ideal and that Cairo lacks the capital – from advertisers, philanthropists and subscribers – to sustain even a rudimentary newsroom. Even legislative efforts to address the news crisis aren’t helpful in such a place; the Illinois legislature’s passage of a bill in May granting $25 million in tax credits to local news organizations that hire and retain journalists won’t help much in a town that doesn’t have a news organization.
The answer isn’t easy or obvious, says Sarabeth Berman, the chief executive of the American Journalism Project, a philanthropy that seeds nonprofit news organizations. “If there was an easy solution, we’d have it,” she says, and in some cases, “there isn’t a good answer.” The best advice: Start small, and build from there, one community at a time. “It’s slow, hard work,” she says, but AJP’s growing portfolio of grantees (44 news organizations across 33 states) suggests progress is possible.
“It took a generation to destroy what was there,” she says. “It will take another generation to rebuild it.”
At the moment, what’s left of the news in Cairo is mostly a hazy bit of nostalgia. Isaac Smith was 23, newly graduated from college, when he took over as editor of the Cairo Citizen in 2012. A one-man newsroom, Smith wrote up human-interest stories, graduations and council and school-board meetings, shot the first-day-of-school photos and covered the big and small. “I didn’t hide behind my desk,” he recalls. “People knew me.”
The boyish, bespectacled Smith, a young, white outsider in a majority-Black town, became a familiar figure. Locals affectionately called him Peter Parker, the news photographer better known as Spider-Man.
The paper, he says, “reinforced a sense of pride in the place people lived. I helped amplify their voices. I gave them the opportunity to tell their own stories.”
Smith, who left the paper after just over a year, looks back on his experience in Cairo and feels “a little wistful, a little melancholy. Because [the Citizen] isn’t there anymore.”
It wasn’t much. But at the same time, it was a lot.
Maya Ikenberry contributed reporting for this story.
