To understand the seismic shrinking that the newspaper industry has undergone over the past two decades, consider this: there used to be 400 people working at the South Florida Sun-Sentinel. Now there are less than 70.

“That means that there are fewer people to cover local news,” says Rosemary Goudreau O’Hara, who retired earlier this year as the editorial page writer with the Sun-Sentinel. “To cover your city hall. To cover what’s happening to your property taxes. To know what they’re planning to build on the corner. And people don’t really seem to care that much about local news. They seem well aware of what’s happening in Washington. But at a local level, they don’t click on stories about local government.”

O’Hara spoke about the state of the industry as well as her long and illustrious career with Spectrum Bay News 9 from her home in Dunedin last month, a day before she was honored by the First Amendment Foundation celebrating her 44-year career in print journalism.

When it comes to the state of the newspaper industry, the future looks grim.

The local newspaper industry has lost around 70 percent of its total revenue over the past two decades, and 200 counties nationwide have no newspapers covering their communities, according to a report published by the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science & Transportation last fall.

The chair of that committee, Washington Senator Maria Cantwell, has been advocating for more than $2 billion be put into an infrastructure bill for local media, but O’Hara says that it's “tricky business” for the government to get involved in funding journalism, and says that there simply isn’t one “silver bullet” to address the lack of local coverage.

“I think in the end philanthropy has to step up and help fund it,” she says. “I think Facebook and Google and the big tech companies that are getting the money off of local news content need to give more money out. I think state politicians need to quit attacking newspapers by trying to strip their public notices and I think that the companies that own these newspapers have to stop charging so much for these subscriptions.”

She also says that if people care about local print journalism, they have to step up and support it. But as Jack Shafer recently wrote in POLITICO, there simply may not be enough people interested in local news to make it a viable business model anymore.

“I think that the people have to support their newspaper. They have to realize that without somebody keeping an eye on things, bad things happen,” she says.

Though O’Hara was born in Michigan, she moved to Tampa in her early teens and attended Leto High School, before attending J-school at the University of Florida. She then began her career as a cub reporter at the Tampa Tribune in 1978, that period where the reporting of Woodward and Bernstein inspired legions of young people across the country to become journalists.

“It was an era of ‘kick-ass and take names,’” she says. “And look under rocks. And go where they don’t want you to go.”

One of her first major scoops at the Trib was an investigation into the political patronage that was going on at Hillsborough Community College. Her reporting led to the president of the school and seven other key administrators losing their jobs. 

There were later reporting gigs at the Orlando Sentinel and the Miami Herald. Then came editing positions at the Knight-Ridder Washington bureau, the Virginian Pilot and the Cincinnati Enquirer.

She was a medical reporter at the Herald when the AIDS crisis was emerging.

“There were so many gay men who were dying and it was – they had such courage in talking to a newspaper reporter and letting their name be used and I watched so many of those men die,” she recounted.

She returned to Tampa in 2002 to serve as the Tribune’s editorial page editor, and authored the editorial explaining why the Tribune would not be making an endorsement in the George W. Bush – John Kerry presidential race. That was considered a big deal at a time, since the notably conservative editorial page had declined only one previous time since 1952 not to back the Republican in the presidential race.

“The owner was quite upset about that editorial and actually put a note in my file about it and kind of put me on notice,” she says.

O’Hara then spent the last eight plus years as the editorial writer at the South Florida Sun-Sentinel. One of the highlights during her tenure there was being part of The Invading Sea media collaborative, which was originally created between the Sun-Sentinel, the Herald and the Palm Beach Post to write opinion pieces on the threats posed by climate change (that collaboration has now grown to 26 media organizations in Florida)

“Never before had editorial boards of competing newspapers come together to write with a single voice about an issue, and we did it because it’s just that important. Florida – especially South Florida – is at the tip of the spear for climate change. You can see the water rising before your eyes. The water’s bubbling up through storm drains rather than draining down and it was impossible to get Tallahassee’s attention. So we started beating the drum with regular editorials, engaging people to write and trying to get action in Tallahassee to raise awareness among everybody that this is real. It’s happening. It’s slow moving, but it’s coming,” she says.

O’Hara says that there might be consulting work in her future, but she’s content to work on the remodeling of her home in downtown Dunedin and enjoy time away from the daily grind of newspaper reporting.

“I finished that job with my head held high and … and leaving a really good team behind,” she says. “I don’t know what the horizon brings, except some nice long walks on the beach.”