Local news veteran and visual artist Tim Atseff believes news media is at a turning point. It left him wondering what’s next for the industry. He explores that concept in “Final Edition,” his latest exhibit at the Everson Museum of Art.“My fingerprints are all over most of this work, so it’s real personal. This is kind of like a requiem for a newspaper,” Atseff said. “Kind of a tribute too, at the same time.” Atseff’s exhibit responds to the decline in local news — fewer reporters, more news deserts, and less diverse outlets. From 2005 through 2023, the country was expected to lose about a third of its newspapers, according to “The State of Local News,” an annual report by Northwestern University’s Local News Initiative. Atseff spent nearly 50 years working in legacy newsrooms, including the Syracuse Herald-Journal and the Syracuse Post-Standard. He spent time as an editor and an illustrator. His exhibit walks viewers through the evolution of print media, from its early phases through its local and national declines. Atseff’s artwork consists of paintings, political cartoons, and collages. His collages include newspaper clippings and other relics. The exhibit also features a yellow newspaper vending machine, many of these artifacts he has stored in his home studio. “Final Edition” is on display through December 29. “I’m a reactive artist and journalist. My political cartoons are kind of the base for my capacity to jump right on something in real-time,” Atseff said. “That’s just my doing: See something and react to it. I don’t do it for anybody else but myself. It’s kind of my therapy to kind of release that frustration and anxiety.”Atseff, a Syracuse native, began working as a copy boy at Syracuse Herald-Journal  in 1966 at 18 years old. He remembered his first time walking into a newsroom, hearing the click-clacking of a typewriter. The rhythm drew him in. His first experiences in a newsroom led him to pursue a career in news.Atseff saw that newspapers were influential in democracy. He believed newspapers held the duty of keeping people informed. He points to the advantages of newspapers: They’re tangible, you can feel the newsprint and they conjure lasting images. Readers could front pages and editions. “When you have something that’s tactile, you can touch, you can put away, you can save,” Atseff said. “If you find something that’s worthy of saving, especially if it’s personal to you.” Some of those memorable front pages and images are part of his exhibit. In one portion of the exhibit, Atseff depicts former United States presidents. They include Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan’s, where Atseff displays black-and-white hand-drawn images encased in picture frames and reports about Donald Trump and the Jan. 6 insurrection.Newsroom closures and job cuts for reporters have been commonplace since the early 2000s, and Atseff saw a rise in misinformation and disinformation.It was in those moments that Atseff felt compelled to engage with viewers and encourage them to think critically about the news sources they consume.He hopes viewers consider the detrimental loss of print media and its impact on the public’s news consumption and media literacy.“You can see the polarization correlation between lost newspapers, and the rise of polarization and disinformation,” Atseff said. “It’s arising and not having people be as well informed, maybe one sort, because they’re not getting the information they need, and the information they’re getting is from either biased sources or sources that are clearly skewed to add disinformation.”The post Retired Syracuse journalist reflects on the decline of print news in ‘Final Edition’ at the Everson appeared first on Central Current.