Gullixson: Who will the public trust to report the news? Facebook? Donald Trump?

In the remote community of Hardwick, Vt., the town newspaper is holding an unusual contest. The Gazette, which has served the community since before Montana, Washington and the Dakotas were states, is inviting the town's 3,010 residents to write essays on “Why I would like to own and operate a paid weekly newspaper.”

And there's a prize involved. The winner gets the newspaper.

Ross Connelly, the owner of the 127-year-old publication, which covers everything from births and deaths to elections and sports in a region known for sawmills and granite quarries, turned 71 on Saturday. He says he wants to retire but has been unable to find someone to buy the publication, which comes with the newspaper's historic Main Street building “and equipment and proprietary materials necessary to operate the business.” The cost of entering is $175. He's hoping for at least 700 entries.

But whether or not he gets that many, Connelly said he still believes in the value of community newspapers, especially his.

“Just because we're not in the mainstream and not covering the national stories does not mean what we're doing is not important,” he told the New York Times. “I feel strongly that a newspaper is a critical building block for our democracy.”

No disagreement here. But it's another example of how it has been a hard week for newspapers.

The wannabe complainer-in-chief Donald Trump drew jeers from the print industry when he banned reporters from the Washington Post from his campaign events. The Post, the newspaper once lauded for bringing down President Richard Nixon - another politician who liked to refer to himself in the third person - is now relegated to covering the Trump campaign from the bleachers. It joins Politico, BuzzFeed, the Des Moines Register and the Huffington Post, which also has been banished for daring to ask hard questions or writing things that got the Donald's knickers in a knot.

But it would appear that beating up on the mainstream press is not such a political risk these days.

A new Gallup Poll showed that America's trust in newspapers has reached an all-time low. According to the survey, more Americans (36 percent) have low confidence in newspapers that have high (20 percent). Overall, the percentage of Americans who say they have trust in newspapers has been shrinking since 2000.

Ouch.

The only comfort perhaps is that, according to Gallup, Americans are losing their trust in just about all of the country's major institutions, including banks (down 24 percent over past 30 years), public schools (down 23 percent), places of worship (down 27 percent) and Congress (down 31 percent).

But sometimes I wonder whether what is at play is not just a loss of trust but a change in expectation.

Last week, I had two people contact me saying they wanted to cancel their subscriptions, one because we weren't offering enough pro-Trump columns and the other for the fact that we ran an opinion piece - that had appeared in the Washington Post no less - criticizing the president, as Trump had, for not using the words “radical Islam.”

To the Trump supporter, I confirmed that such pieces are in somewhat short supply. (It's an odd year when even our most conservative syndicated columnists including Charles Krauthammer and George Will take turns taking the GOP presumptive nominee to task.)

To the other, I reminded that if we are doing our jobs right, we will be running a balance of perspectives, not just those that reflect our own. The piece that he referenced merely gave insight, like it or not, to the very charges that the president himself had addressed just a day or so earlier.

Such calls are common during an election year. Still, I'm left to ask: If everybody canceled their subscription in opposition to a single page, a single syndicated column, a single editorial or a single political cartoon, where would that leave us as a community?

Yes, I believe in newspapers. I've spent most of my life working for them not because I am holding out hope of becoming rich but because, like Ross Connelly of Hardwick, Vt., I believe that for all their flaws, they still serve a vital role in a community. They provide a place to share ideas, to learn things we may not know and to hear perspectives that we may not otherwise be exposed to. And once they are gone, what will be the alternative?

Social media companies are all too happy to take away newspaper readers and advertising. Total digital advertising spending in America reached a record $60 billion last year, but almost two-thirds of that went to just five technology companies: Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Microsoft and Twitter. Meanwhile, a recent Pew Research study found that 62 percent of people say they now get their news from social media. But isn't that akin to someone saying he no longer gets apple from trees, he buys them at the grocery store? Where do they think most of these news stories come from?

Don't expect Facebook and Google to be hiring reporters and covering city council meetings any time soon, and, even if they did, would the grounds for public trust be any more firm? Facebook took considerable heat last month for the haphazard way it decided what went into the website's “trending” news section. The episode triggered a national debate about whether social media companies are prioritizing liberal viewpoints. And that only concerned how they share the work of other news media.

Meanwhile people like Trump, who has built a political career on countless hours of free media coverage, would be more than happy to have Americans ignore the news when it serves his best interests. But I doubt whether he would be so willing to roll up his sleeves and start covering the news of Washington, D.C., any more that he would keep the presses running and the news flowing in Hardwick, Vt.

It's fitting that, according to the rules of the Gazette contest, among the things a winner will not receive are “any guarantees.” The rules note, “this is the news business and it changes every day.”

True enough. The deadline for entries is Aug. 11. Let's hope enough people step up.

Paul Gullixson is editorial director for The Press Democrat. Email him at paul.gullixson@pressdemocrat.com.