Local Journalism

Foreword

This guide is about a quiet emergency. The institutions that once told Americans what was happening on their own streets — the courthouse beat, the school-board meeting, the local zoning fight, the small-town obituary, the high-school football score — have collapsed faster, in fewer years, than any comparable American institution in living memory. Since 2005, more than a third of all American newspapers have closed. Two and a half newspapers, on average, shutter every week. More than two hundred counties — home to several million people — now have no professional source of local news at all. Half of all American counties have only one such source, often a thin weekly that publishes recycled wire copy alongside obituaries and a few high-school sports stories. Whole regions of the country have become, in a phrase coined by the researcher Penny Abernathy, news deserts.

This collapse has happened largely without public attention, which is fitting in a way: when local journalism dies, the deaths themselves stop being reported. A small newspaper that closed in 2014 was unlikely to have its obituary written by anyone except itself, and the closure has consequences that unfold over years — fewer stories about local government, lower voter turnout in municipal elections, higher costs to taxpayers when bond issues go unscrutinized, more corruption when nobody is watching, more rumor and grievance circulating on social media in the absence of professional reporting. None of these effects produces a clean headline. They accumulate.

This guide is meant for citizens who suspect something has gone wrong with the information environment in their communities and who want to understand what happened, what is being tried, and what they personally can do. It does not assume the reader is a journalist or wants to become one. It does assume that local self-government is something worth caring about, and that the kind of free press the founders worried about — not just abstractly, but specifically, as an institution that holds power accountable in the places where most people’s lives are actually lived — is worth understanding and, where possible, sustaining.

The guide takes the topic seriously without either nostalgia or despair. The old model of American local journalism had real virtues and real limitations. Some of what was lost is genuinely irreplaceable; some of it deserved to be replaced; some of what is emerging in its place is promising; some of it is not. Honest engagement requires distinguishing among these, and that is what this guide tries to do. The reader who reaches the end will not have a single answer to what should be done about the local-news crisis — there is no single answer — but will, the author hopes, have the equipment to think about it usefully and to act on it personally.

PART ONE

Why Local Journalism Matters

What local journalism actually is, what makes it different from national news, and what happens to a community when it disappears

CHAPTER 1

What Local Journalism Is and Does

Local journalism is, in its essence, the production of original reporting about places that are smaller than the nation. The boundary is fuzzy — a story about a state’s governor is local in the state, national in Washington — but the core idea is clear enough. Local journalism covers what happens in a particular city, county, region, or community: the schools, the police and courts, the city hall, the businesses, the churches, the neighborhoods, the local economy, the high-school sports teams, the births and deaths and weddings, the floods and fires, the elections to offices most Americans cannot name. It is news about places where the readers live, produced by people who live there too — or at least who are paid to know the place well.

This is sometimes contrasted with “national journalism,” which covers Washington, the federal government, the largest national stories, and the major media markets of New York and Los Angeles, and with “international journalism,” which covers events outside the United States. The distinction is real but porous. Most national stories have local angles — a federal regulation affects different industries in different states, a national political race plays out in particular districts, a Supreme Court decision changes the law in particular places — and good local journalism translates national developments into local consequence. Conversely, local stories sometimes become national, as a city’s scandal or innovation captures broader attention. The point is not that the categories are airtight but that local reporting fills a particular ecological niche: it covers what national journalism cannot, because national journalism is concerned with too many places to attend to any one of them in detail.

The functions local journalism performs

In a democratic polity, professional local journalism performs several functions that no other institution performs as well. None of these functions is glamorous; none generates the kind of audience that produces national fame for the journalists who do them; many of them are tedious. They are nevertheless central to how communities govern themselves.

• Watchdog reporting on local power. City councils, county commissions, school boards, and state legislatures pass thousands of decisions a year that affect the people who live under them. Without journalists in the room — attending meetings, reading agendas, filing public-records requests — these decisions are made effectively in private, and citizens have no practical way to learn about them. Watchdog journalism, when it works, is what keeps local government honest. Its disappearance has been correlated, in study after study, with measurably worse outcomes for the affected communities.
• Coverage of routine civic life. Beyond watchdog work, local journalism covers the texture of community: the new school superintendent, the road that is being paved, the small business that opened, the new high-school principal, the changes to garbage pickup, the new restaurant, the unusually heavy traffic on Saturday because of a parade. None of this is sensational; most of it is what people most need to know about the places where they actually live. National news cannot supply it; social media can only fragment and distort it.
• Documentation of the historical record. Local newspapers, in the aggregate, are the first draft of community history. Birth and death notices, court records, school reports, business openings and closings, weather events, sports scores, election results — all of these are recorded by local journalism in ways that make later research possible. Genealogists, historians, and anyone trying to reconstruct the past of a particular place depend heavily on archived local newspapers. When these papers disappear, this archive is not replaced; later generations simply lose access to the record.
• Building shared community knowledge. Beyond informing individual decisions, local news creates the common ground on which civic life depends. When everyone in a community has read about the same school-board fight, the same new ordinance, the same closure of a major employer, they can argue about it productively. When information fragments — when each citizen learns about local affairs only from social-media posts visible to subsets of friends — the shared deliberative space contracts toward zero. Recovering ground for civic argument is one of the harder tasks of self-government, and local journalism, when it works, contributes to it powerfully.
• Connecting people across difference. A working local newspaper is one of the few institutions that brings together, in a single document, news that affects readers of different ages, races, classes, and political persuasions. The retiree reading the obituaries, the parent reading the school news, the small-business owner reading the local economy column, the football fan reading the high-school sports page — all are reading the same paper, and the paper is the only thing in their day that explicitly serves their shared identity as residents of a place. This shared institutional anchor matters more than is usually appreciated.

What good local journalism looks like

Like any institution, local journalism is performed at varying levels of quality. The differences matter. Strong local journalism shares several attributes that distinguish it from weaker forms.

• Original reporting. Strong local journalism produces stories rather than merely repackaging other sources. A reporter goes to the city-council meeting, reads the budget, calls the mayor, reviews the documents. This is more expensive than aggregation; it is also the actual work.
• Beat coverage. Strong local newsrooms organize reporters around specific institutions — city hall, the courts, the schools, the police, particular industries — so that the reporters develop the expertise and source relationships that produce informed coverage. A reporter who has covered the school district for five years knows things that a reporter parachuted in for a single story cannot know.
• Public-records work. Strong local journalism uses the tools of open-records law — freedom of information requests, sunshine laws, audits — to find what officials would prefer not to share. The capacity to do this work, including the legal know-how to fight when records are withheld, is one of the things that separates real journalism from public-relations channels.
• Independence from interests covered. Strong local journalism reports on the powerful institutions of the community without being captured by them — not by major employers, not by political parties, not by the publisher’s personal friends, not by major advertisers. Real independence is rare and constantly under pressure; in many small towns it has always been compromised. The aspiration matters anyway.
• Accountability for errors. Strong local journalism corrects mistakes openly and explains how they happened. A newspaper that runs corrections regularly is doing a better job than one that never runs them — not because more errors mean better journalism, but because acknowledging errors is what separates journalism from advocacy.

The bottom line

Local journalism is the production of original reporting about places smaller than the nation: cities, counties, communities, regions. It performs functions no other institution performs as well — watchdog reporting on local power, coverage of routine civic life, documentation of the historical record, the building of shared community knowledge, and the connection of people across difference. Strong local journalism does original reporting, organizes beats, uses public-records tools, maintains independence, and corrects its mistakes. None of this is glamorous; all of it is essential to how communities understand themselves and govern their own affairs.

What to read or watch next

• Alex S. Jones, Losing the News: The Future of the News That Feeds Democracy (2009). A former New York Times reporter and director of Harvard’s Shorenstein Center on what serious accountability journalism does and what its loss costs.
• Tom Rosenstiel and Bill Kovach, The Elements of Journalism (4th ed., 2021). The standard treatment of what journalism is, what it owes, and how to recognize it when you see it.
• Knight Foundation, “Informed Communities: How Local News Affects Civic Life” (various reports, knightfoundation.org). A series of reports on the civic functions of local news, written for non-specialists.

CHAPTER 2

How Local News Differs From National News

To understand what is at stake in the local-news crisis, it helps to be clear about how local news differs from the better-known national news. Most public discussion of “the media” treats it as a single category, contrasting outlets like The New York Times, Fox News, CNN, and the major broadcast networks. But local journalism is a different institution, with different functions, different economics, different audiences, and different problems. The collapse of local journalism cannot be addressed by the better-funded national outlets; their work is something else.

Different functions

National journalism covers the federal government, the major political parties, the largest corporations, the financial markets, foreign affairs, the largest cultural events, and the stories that can plausibly claim general interest across the country. Local journalism covers what the residents of a particular place actually live with: their schools, their police, their roads, their businesses, their elections to offices most of the rest of the country has never heard of. The two are not in competition; they are in different businesses.

This difference of function has a practical consequence: the loss of local journalism cannot be “offset” by stronger national journalism, however good the national outlets become. Even excellent reporting on the federal government does not tell a parent in Toledo whether their child’s school is failing. Even the best Wall Street coverage does not warn the residents of a small Mississippi town that their hospital is about to close. The information that local journalism provides is provided by no other institution, and its absence cannot be filled by any institution operating at a different scale.

Different economics

National journalism, especially at the largest outlets, has been able to adapt to the digital era with reasonable success. The New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal each have millions of paying digital subscribers; they have built sustainable businesses on a national — and increasingly international — audience willing to pay for serious journalism. Major broadcast and cable news networks remain profitable, sustained by a combination of advertising and subscription fees built into pay-television packages.

Local journalism cannot replicate any of this. The audience for any individual local outlet is limited to the residents of its coverage area, and that audience is too small to support the cost of high-quality journalism through digital subscriptions alone. A national outlet with one million subscribers paying ten dollars a month has a hundred-million-dollar revenue base. A local outlet covering a city of one hundred thousand might be able to attract — in the most optimistic scenario — ten thousand subscribers, generating a million dollars a year, which is not enough to support a real newsroom. The math of local journalism in the digital era is fundamentally harder than the math of national journalism, and most of the experiments to address that fact are still ongoing.

Different relationship to readers

National journalists usually do not know their readers personally and rarely encounter them in daily life. The relationship is purely transactional: the journalist produces content, the reader consumes it, the cycle repeats. Local journalists, by contrast, often live in the communities they cover. Their children attend the schools they write about; their cars drive on the roads they cover; they encounter their sources at grocery stores, churches, school events, and youth-sports games. This proximity has both advantages and risks.

The advantages: local journalists tend to know their communities in ways that produce richer, more textured reporting; they care personally about getting things right because they will face the consequences of their stories in the rest of their lives; they develop sources whose trust depends on demonstrated long-term integrity. The risks: local journalists can become too close to the institutions they cover, hesitant to break stories that would damage relationships they need; they can be pressured by advertisers, employers, family connections, or simple social discomfort; they can fall into a comfortable boosterism that omits inconvenient truths.

Both the advantages and the risks are part of what makes local journalism distinct. The challenges of independence in a small community are different from the challenges of independence in a national newsroom, and they require different solutions. Some of the strongest local journalism, particularly investigative work, is done by reporters or organizations that maintain enough distance to write hard stories without losing their seats at the table; some of the weakest is done in newsrooms where everyone knows everyone and nobody wants to make the city manager unhappy.

Different relationship to facts

National news, particularly cable news and political journalism, often deals in matters of interpretation: what a politician’s statement means, what a vote signals about party direction, what a poll suggests about public opinion. The facts at issue are real but often contested, and partisan disagreement about them is common. Local news, by contrast, deals more often in matters of fact: the school-board vote was four to three, the budget passed at $48.2 million, the mayor was arrested at 2:34 a.m., the football team won twenty-eight to seventeen. There is room for spin, but the underlying facts are usually unambiguous and verifiable.

This is part of why the loss of local journalism is so corrosive to democratic culture. National political news, increasingly partisan and increasingly contested, has filled the vacuum left by departing local news. Citizens who once received a steady diet of factual reporting on their own communities now receive, instead, ideologically charged commentary on national politics. The shift changes their relationship to information itself: they come to expect news to be infuriating rather than informative, polarizing rather than community-building, oriented toward national tribal disputes rather than toward shared local problems. This is, in part, what people mean when they say that public discourse has degraded; the lower-temperature local journalism that grounded communities in shared facts has been replaced by higher-temperature national journalism that does the opposite.

Different vulnerability to consolidation

National journalism has consolidated, but a few large national outlets retain independence and do serious work. Local journalism has consolidated faster and more completely. Most American newspapers — by far — are now owned not by local families or independent local companies but by large national chains: Gannett, Lee Enterprises, McClatchy, Tribune Publishing’s successor entities, and a handful of others. Many of these chains are owned, in turn, by hedge funds and private-equity firms whose primary interest is extracting cash from declining assets rather than sustaining local news production.

This pattern of ownership has consequences that we will return to in Chapter 8. For present purposes, the point is that the structural problems facing local journalism are different in kind from those facing national journalism, and the policy and civic responses to one are not necessarily appropriate to the other. Citizens who care about local journalism need to understand it as the distinct institution it is.

The bottom line

Local journalism differs from national journalism in function, economics, reader relationships, and vulnerability to consolidation. National journalism covers Washington, foreign affairs, and the largest stories; local journalism covers schools, courts, and city halls in particular places. National outlets can sustain themselves on national or international audiences; local outlets cannot. Local journalists know their communities personally; national journalists generally do not. Local news deals more often in unambiguous facts; national news in matters of contested interpretation. The loss of local journalism cannot be offset by improvements in national journalism, however good those improvements may be. The two institutions perform different work, and citizens who care about local self-government must care about local journalism specifically.

What to read or watch next

• Nicholas Lemann, “Can Journalism Be Saved?” The New York Review of Books, February 2020. The former dean of Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism on the structural differences between national and local outlets and what each requires.
• Pew Research Center, various reports on local news consumption (pewresearch.org). The most reliable source of survey data on how Americans actually use local versus national news.

CHAPTER 3

The Civic Consequences When It Disappears

If local journalism merely entertained or informed in some abstract sense, its loss would be a cultural problem but not necessarily a civic one. Communities adjust to the loss of cultural institutions all the time — movie theaters, bookstores, weekly markets — without demonstrable harm to self-government. Local journalism is different. A growing body of research, conducted by economists, political scientists, and communication scholars, has documented specific civic harms that follow the closure of local newspapers. The harms are not speculative. They are measurable, replicated across studies, and consistent with what one would expect when communities lose their primary source of accountability information.

Higher costs to taxpayers

Several studies have documented that the closure of a local newspaper is associated with higher costs to taxpayers in the affected community. The clearest evidence comes from research on municipal bond markets. When local governments issue bonds to fund schools, infrastructure, or other projects, the interest rates they pay depend partly on the perceived risk that the bonds will be repaid. In communities with strong local journalism, that risk is constrained by the possibility that mismanagement will be exposed. In communities without local journalism, the risk is less constrained, and bond markets price accordingly.

Research by Pengjie Gao, Chang Lee, and Dermot Murphy, published in the Journal of Financial Economics in 2020, found that municipal borrowing costs rose measurably in counties that lost their local newspaper, even after controlling for economic and demographic factors. The effect was not subtle: communities without watchdog journalism paid higher interest, sometimes substantially higher, on the bonds that built their schools and roads. The costs flow through to taxpayers over the multi-decade life of the bonds. The same paper documented increased risk of municipal mismanagement and reduced governmental efficiency in newsless communities.

More corruption, less accountability

Where there is less scrutiny, there is more misbehavior. This is not surprising; it is a basic prediction of any model of human governance. The empirical literature confirms it. Studies have documented that local-government corruption, mismanagement of school districts, and abuse of public-records laws all rise in communities that have lost local newspapers. The mechanism is not mysterious: officials who know their decisions are unlikely to be reported on are freer to make decisions that would not survive scrutiny.

Examples are easy to come by. The pension scandals of small municipalities; the school superintendents who quietly drew six-figure consulting fees from contractors; the city councilors who voted on contracts involving their relatives; the police misconduct that festered for years before exposure — each was eventually exposed by journalism, often after the local newspaper that might have caught it earlier had already closed. The replacement, when there was one, came too late to prevent the harm.

Lower voter turnout, especially in local races

Voter turnout in the United States is highly variable across elections. Presidential elections draw the most voters; midterm congressional elections draw fewer; local-only elections — mayors, school boards, city councils, judgeships — often draw fewer still, sometimes single-digit percentages of eligible voters. This pattern has many causes, but the absence of local journalism contributes substantially. When voters do not know who is running for school board, what positions the candidates hold, or what the school board has done lately, they have no basis for an informed vote, and many simply skip the race or stay home.

Multiple studies, including work by Lee Shaker at Portland State and others at Stanford, the University of Illinois, and elsewhere, have documented declines in local-election turnout following newspaper closures. The effect is sharpest in races where local journalism was most prominently the source of voter information — city council, school board, county commission. National elections are less affected, because national news fills part of the information gap, but local democracy depends on local information, and the loss of one weakens the other.

Increased political polarization

In communities without local journalism, citizens fall back on national sources for political information. National sources — cable news, social-media political content, partisan websites — are typically more polarized than the local journalism they replace. Citizens who once received factual coverage of their own school board’s budget meetings now receive, instead, partisan commentary on national political fights. The result is a political environment increasingly dominated by national tribal disputes, even at the local level.

Researchers at Louisiana State University, Texas A&M, and elsewhere have documented this shift quantitatively. In communities with strong local journalism, citizens are more likely to vote for candidates from different parties for different offices — split-ticket voting, in the political-science term — because they have specific information about specific candidates rather than only national party labels. In communities that have lost local journalism, voting patterns become more strictly partisan. Whatever else this is, it is a measurable change in democratic culture, and it tracks the disappearance of local information sources.

Less civic engagement broadly

Beyond voting, civic engagement — attendance at public meetings, participation in community organizations, contact with elected officials, even informal political conversation — declines in newsless communities. The mechanism is again straightforward: people engage with public life partly because they know what is happening in it. When the information flow stops, the engagement attenuates. People who would have attended a school-board meeting if they had read a story about a controversial vote do not attend if no story is published. People who would have written to their councilor if they had read about a zoning issue do not write.

This effect is hardest to measure but probably the most important in the long run. Healthy democracies depend on a deep substrate of civic engagement — the people who organize the school fundraisers, attend the planning-commission hearings, run for the local commissions, write the letters to the editor, show up to community events. When the visible texture of community life thins out, recruiting these citizens becomes harder. Over time, the supply of people willing to do the unglamorous work of self-government can dwindle, and democratic institutions function less well.

More space for misinformation

Where local journalism does not provide reliable information about a community, the void is filled by other sources — social media posts, neighborhood gossip, partisan blogs, sometimes outright fabrication. These sources are unconstrained by the editorial standards of professional journalism, and they often produce confident misinformation that circulates widely before any correction is issued. In communities with strong local journalism, false rumors get checked against published facts. In communities without it, false rumors compete with one another for attention and frequently win.

Recent years have produced striking examples: small-town panics about phantom crime waves, school-board fights driven by claims about classroom content that turn out to be invented or wildly exaggerated, election-fraud claims that reflect unfamiliarity with how local election administration actually works. None of this is exclusively the fault of declining local journalism, and a working local newspaper does not guarantee a misinformation-free community. But the loss of professional, locally-trusted information sources removes one of the most important checks on the spread of false beliefs about local matters.

The bottom line

The civic consequences of local journalism’s collapse are not hypothetical. Research has documented higher costs to taxpayers — measurable in municipal bond yields — in communities that lose their newspapers; more local-government corruption and mismanagement; lower turnout in local elections; increased political polarization, especially in voting patterns; reduced overall civic engagement; and more space for misinformation to circulate. None of these effects is inevitable; communities can compensate for the loss in various ways. But the default trajectory, when local journalism disappears, is one of measurably worse self-government. Citizens who care about how their communities are run have direct, practical reason to care whether anyone is reporting on them.

What to read or watch next

• Pengjie Gao, Chang Lee, and Dermot Murphy, “Financing Dies in Darkness? The Impact of Newspaper Closures on Public Finance,” Journal of Financial Economics 135, no. 2 (2020): 445–467. The seminal study of municipal bond yields and newspaper closures.
• Daniel J. Moskowitz, “Local News, Information, and the Nationalization of U.S. Elections,” American Political Science Review 115, no. 1 (2021): 114–129. The relationship between local news availability and split-ticket voting.
• Lee Shaker, “Dead Newspapers and Citizens’ Civic Engagement,” Political Communication 31, no. 1 (2014): 131–148. Documenting reduced civic engagement following newspaper closures in Denver and Seattle.
• Penny Abernathy, The Expanding News Desert (2018) and subsequent reports. The systematic mapping of where local news has disappeared and what the affected communities have in common.

PART TWO

How We Got Here: The Collapse

The economic forces that built the local-news system, and the ones that broke it.

CHAPTER 4

The Old Business Model and Why It Worked

To understand why local journalism is collapsing, it helps to understand why it once thrived. For roughly a century — from the late 1800s through the early 2000s — the American daily newspaper was one of the most profitable and durable businesses in the country. Newspapers funded large reporting staffs, owned grand downtown buildings, paid steady dividends, and supported some of the most ambitious journalism the world had ever seen. The economic model that made this possible was specific, peculiar, and — once the conditions that supported it changed — essentially impossible to recreate. Understanding what that model was, and why it worked, is the necessary starting point for understanding what has come apart.

Bundled news, bundled ads

The classic American newspaper was, in business terms, a bundle. A reader who paid for a daily paper got news from city hall, the state capital, Washington, and the world; sports scores from the local high school and the major leagues; the obituaries; the weather; the comics and crossword; the syndicated columns; the recipes; the business listings; and — crucially — a great deal of advertising, including department-store circulars, grocery sale announcements, automobile listings, real-estate ads, employment notices, and the dense little columns of classified advertisements at the back. Different readers cared about different parts of the bundle, but most subscribed for the whole thing because the whole thing was what the paper offered.

On the advertising side, the bundle worked similarly. A local department store taking out a half-page ad reached a known audience: the readers of that day’s paper. There were no good substitutes. If you wanted to advertise to the people of a particular city, the daily newspaper was where you went. That gave newspapers tremendous pricing power. Local advertisers had few alternatives; national advertisers used newspapers as one of a small handful of mass-reach options, alongside broadcast television and a few national magazines. The result was advertising rates that, in retrospect, look extraordinary.

The bundling produced a cross-subsidy that made local journalism economically possible. Most readers were not paying for, and most advertisers were not advertising next to, the time-consuming, expensive, often unglamorous work of city-hall reporting, education coverage, or court reporting. They were paying for sports, comics, classifieds, and shopping. But the bundle distributed the revenue across the whole paper, and a chunk of it ended up funding the reporters who covered the school district. Local journalism, in this sense, was always a kind of accidental beneficiary of bigger commercial flows. Take away those flows, and the journalism becomes hard to fund.

Geographic monopolies

By the second half of the twentieth century, most American cities had a single dominant daily newspaper — sometimes two, but rarely more, and the second paper was usually struggling. This was not always the case; American cities of the late 1800s often had four, five, or more competing dailies. The consolidation toward one-paper towns was driven by economics: producing a daily newspaper involved enormous fixed costs — printing presses, distribution networks, newsroom staff — and once a paper had achieved a circulation lead, the cost advantages tended to compound. The losing papers shut down or merged.

The result was that the surviving local paper in most cities had something close to a monopoly on the single most important advertising channel for reaching that city’s consumers. Economists call this a natural monopoly, and the term is apt: the structure of the business, given the technology of the time, made one dominant provider the most efficient outcome. From the publisher’s perspective, the monopoly was extraordinary. Profit margins at well-run metropolitan dailies routinely ran above twenty percent and sometimes above thirty — figures that would be the envy of most industries. Knight-Ridder, Gannett, Tribune Company, Times Mirror, and other major newspaper chains were among the most reliably profitable enterprises in American business for decades.

The Joint Operating Agreement era

Where two papers persisted in a city, they often combined business operations under what was called a Joint Operating Agreement — sharing presses, advertising sales, and circulation while keeping editorial staffs separate. The Newspaper Preservation Act of 1970 explicitly authorized these arrangements as exemptions from antitrust law, on the theory that a community was better served by two editorial voices than by a strictly competitive market that might produce only one. The JOAs are mostly historical curiosities now — of more than two dozen at their peak, only a handful remain — but they testify to a period when American policy treated newspapers as a special category whose preservation was a public good.

What the model funded

With these economics in place, well-funded dailies supported journalism on a scale that is difficult to imagine today. A mid-sized regional paper in 1990 might employ several hundred journalists. It would have correspondents in the state capital and in Washington; bureaus in surrounding counties; specialized reporters covering courts, education, religion, business, sports, the arts, and city beats; a dedicated investigative team; a foreign correspondent or two; an editorial board; a Sunday magazine; and a substantial copy desk. The Pulitzer Prizes through the 1990s and early 2000s were dominated by metropolitan and regional papers — the Boston Globe, the Los Angeles Times, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the Miami Herald — producing investigative work of national consequence about local subjects.

This level of journalism was sustained not because publishers were uniquely civic-minded — some were, some weren’t — but because the underlying business could afford it. Profit margins of twenty to thirty percent left enormous room for newsrooms that, by any rational accounting, were larger than strictly necessary for selling newspapers. Some of that surplus went to dividends and acquisitions; some went to journalism. The journalism was, in a sense, a luxury good produced as a byproduct of an immensely profitable advertising-and-bundling business.

The hidden vulnerability

In retrospect, the very features that made the old model so profitable were also what made it vulnerable. Bundling worked only when readers had no good way to unbundle: if you wanted classifieds, sports scores, weather, and city-hall news in 1990, you bought the paper because there was nowhere else to get them all together at a comparable cost. Geographic monopolies worked only when the local newspaper was the most efficient way to reach local consumers; if a substitute appeared that reached them better or cheaper, the monopoly would dissolve.

Both of those conditions changed essentially overnight when the internet arrived in mass form in the mid-1990s. The bundle came apart — readers could find classifieds, sports scores, weather, and national news online, separately and often free. The monopoly on local advertising eroded — first to dedicated digital classifieds sites, then to Google and Facebook, which could target advertisers’ audiences more precisely than any newspaper. The cross-subsidy that had funded local reporting collapsed because the things that had been generating the subsidy disappeared. The journalism, expensive as it was, suddenly had to pay for itself — and it never had.

The bottom line

American local journalism was funded for a century by a business model that bundled news with classifieds and other revenue-generating content, sold advertising at prices set by near-monopoly market positions, and used the resulting profits to subsidize expensive journalism that had no direct way to pay for itself. When the internet unbundled the bundle and the monopolies dissolved, the cross-subsidy collapsed. The journalism didn’t become less valuable; it just lost its hidden funding source. Understanding what the old model was makes clear why simple replacements have proven so hard to construct: the question is not how to make a newspaper profitable, but how to fund a public good whose economic sponsor disappeared.

What to read or watch next

• James T. Hamilton, All the News That’s Fit to Sell: How the Market Transforms Information into News (Princeton, 2004). The economics of news production from a leading scholar of the subject.
• Robert McChesney and John Nichols, The Death and Life of American Journalism (Nation Books, 2010). A history of how the old model worked, and why its collapse poses a public problem.
• Alex S. Jones, Losing the News: The Future of the News That Feeds Democracy (Oxford, 2009). A senior journalist’s account of the model that funded the journalism, written from inside the industry as it began to collapse.

CHAPTER 5

The Internet and the Loss of Classifieds

If a single moment can be identified as the start of local journalism’s economic crisis, it is the rise of the internet in the late 1990s and early 2000s — and within that broad shift, the most damaging development was the loss of classified advertising. Classifieds were not the most prestigious part of the newspaper, but they were among the most profitable, and they collapsed first, fastest, and most completely. The Craigslist effect, named for the free online classified-ads site that did most of the destruction, marked the beginning of a long unwinding from which the industry has not recovered.

What classifieds were

Classified advertisements were the dense columns at the back of the newspaper, set in small type and organized by category: jobs, real estate, automobiles, services, garage sales, personals, lost-and-found. They were called classified because they were sorted into classes — unlike display ads, which used images and were placed throughout the paper. Most classifieds were placed by individuals or small businesses paying line rates: a few dollars for a few lines, a few hundred dollars for a sustained help-wanted ad, a few thousand dollars for a long real-estate listing run.

Individually, classifieds were small money. Collectively, they were enormous. A typical metropolitan daily in the 1990s derived something on the order of forty percent of its total advertising revenue from classifieds — and advertising revenue itself was the great majority of total revenue. At their peak in 2000, U.S. newspapers earned about $19.6 billion from classified advertising alone. That number gives some sense of what was at stake. Many large newspapers depended on classifieds for hundreds of millions of dollars per year, and the profit margins on this revenue were extraordinarily high because the marginal cost of running another small ad was almost nothing.

Why classifieds were vulnerable

Classifieds were a near-perfect target for digital disruption for several reasons. First, the value to the user was almost entirely informational — you wanted to find a job, a car, an apartment, a babysitter — and digital information could be searched, filtered, and sorted in ways that print could not. Second, they were geographically organized but not geographically constrained: a job-seeker did not need a physical newspaper, just a way to see local listings. Third, the print classified system imposed real friction — you had to be near a newspaper, you had to read through long columns, you had to call a phone number listed in the ad, and the listing might be days or weeks old. A digital alternative could solve all of these problems.

Fourth, and perhaps most decisively, classifieds were not a relationship product. Readers did not subscribe to a newspaper because they loved its classified section; they used the section instrumentally when they happened to need it. Loyalty was minimal, and switching costs were essentially zero. The moment a free, more searchable alternative appeared, the migration was rational and rapid.

Craigslist and what came after

Craig Newmark started Craigslist as an email list for events in San Francisco in 1995. By 2000, it had become a free classifieds website serving the Bay Area, and it was beginning to expand to other cities. By the mid-2000s, Craigslist was operating in hundreds of U.S. cities, hosting tens of millions of classified-style listings, and charging almost nothing for them. Most categories were free; even the paid categories — chiefly job listings in major metropolitan areas — charged a fraction of what newspapers charged for comparable placements.

The damage to newspapers was immediate and catastrophic. A 2013 study by economists at NYU and Harvard estimated that Craigslist alone cost the U.S. newspaper industry $5.4 billion in classified revenue between 2000 and 2007. Other studies have estimated even larger total losses when other digital classified competitors are included. The decline did not happen all at once — it played out across a decade, category by category — but the trajectory was unmistakable: classifieds revenue at U.S. newspapers fell from approximately $19.6 billion in 2000 to roughly $5 billion by 2010, and continued falling thereafter. By 2020, total newspaper classified revenue had fallen below $1 billion nationally.

Specialized successors

Craigslist was not the only player. Each major classified category eventually developed dedicated, specialized digital competitors that often outperformed both Craigslist and newspapers. Job listings migrated to Monster.com, CareerBuilder, then Indeed and LinkedIn. Real-estate listings migrated to Realtor.com, then Zillow and Redfin. Automobile listings migrated to AutoTrader, Cars.com, and CarMax. Personal ads migrated to Match.com and successor dating sites. Each of these specialized platforms offered better search, better photos, better filtering, and often a more targeted audience than either newspaper classifieds or general-purpose Craigslist could provide.

From the standpoint of the end user — the job-seeker, the home-buyer, the car-shopper — the new system was vastly better than what came before. Listings were searchable, filterable, current, and far more numerous. From the standpoint of the small advertiser, the new system was usually cheaper. From the standpoint of newspapers, the new system was an unmitigated disaster. The thing that had subsidized their journalism was gone, and there was no equivalent waiting to replace it.

Why the journalism couldn’t replace the loss

In the 2000s, many newspaper executives believed that digital readership and digital advertising would eventually offset the print decline. Their newspapers were getting more readers than ever — just online — and surely those readers could be monetized somehow. This hope animated the digital strategies of most newspaper chains throughout the 2000s and into the 2010s. It largely failed.

The reasons are several. Digital advertising rates per reader have always been a small fraction of print rates, partly because supply is essentially infinite (any web page can carry an ad) and partly because advertisers now had ways to reach specific readers without going through publishers at all. Digital readers, even very loyal ones, generated a small fraction of the revenue per reader that print subscribers had. And the migration of classifieds was effectively complete by the early 2010s, while the migration of display advertising — the other major source of newspaper revenue — was still ongoing and would prove almost equally damaging. The next chapter takes up that part of the story.

The bottom line

Classified advertising was a quiet workhorse of newspaper economics: roughly forty percent of advertising revenue, with high profit margins, derived from small ads placed by ordinary individuals and small businesses. Craigslist and successor digital classified services destroyed this business beginning around 2000, costing the U.S. newspaper industry an estimated $5–18 billion in lost classified revenue over a decade. The replacement digital experiences were better for users and cheaper for advertisers — but they routed almost none of that value back to newspapers. The cross-subsidy that had funded local journalism was the first major casualty of the internet, and the wound was essentially uninsurable.

What to read or watch next

• Robert Seamans and Feng Zhu, “Responses to Entry in Multi-Sided Markets: The Impact of Craigslist on Local Newspapers,” Management Science 60, no. 2 (2014): 476–493. The empirical study estimating $5.4 billion in classified-revenue losses from Craigslist alone, 2000–2007.
• Pew Research Center, “State of the News Media” annual reports. Long-running tracking of newspaper revenue trends, including the precipitous decline in classified advertising. Now succeeded by Pew’s Newspaper Fact Sheet.
• Margaret O’Mara, The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America (Penguin, 2019). A broader history of the digital revolution, including its disruption of legacy industries like print classifieds.

CHAPTER 6

The Capture of Digital Advertising

If the loss of classifieds was the first wound, the capture of digital advertising by a small number of very large technology platforms — chiefly Google and Facebook — was the second, and arguably the deeper one. Newspapers had hoped that as advertising migrated from print to digital, they would migrate with it: their readers were going online, after all, and somebody needed to sell those readers ads. What actually happened was that almost all of the value created by the migration was captured by intermediaries that owned neither the readers’ attention nor the journalism, but did own the technical infrastructure for delivering and targeting ads. By the late 2010s, Google and Facebook between them were capturing well over half of all U.S. digital advertising revenue, and growing.

How display advertising used to work

In the print era, a local advertiser — a furniture store, a car dealer, a bank — would call the newspaper, work with a sales representative, and buy a display ad: a quarter-page, a half-page, a full page, with specific placement and timing. The price was set by the newspaper based on its circulation and audience reach. The advertiser had limited information about who actually saw the ad or whether it produced sales — the advertising industry famously joked that half of all ad spending was wasted, and nobody knew which half — but in practice, the system worked because newspapers genuinely did reach the local audience that advertisers wanted, and there were few competing ways to reach that audience.

When advertising began moving online in the mid-2000s, newspapers initially tried to replicate this model. They sold banner ads on their websites, sometimes at premium rates that approached print rates per reader. For a few years, the strategy seemed promising: the New York Times, the Washington Post, and large regional dailies built substantial digital advertising businesses. But the model was unstable, and within a decade it largely broke down.

What targeted advertising did

Google and Facebook offered advertisers something that newspapers fundamentally could not: the ability to target specific users based on detailed information about their behavior, interests, and identity. A Google search for “new refrigerator” produced ads from refrigerator sellers; a Facebook user who had clicked on car-buying content saw ads from car dealers. The targeting was more precise, and the measurement was vastly better: the advertiser could see exactly how many people clicked, how many made purchases, and what the cost-per-acquisition was. For most advertisers, this was a revolution. Suddenly, the joke about half of advertising spending being wasted gave way to detailed dashboards showing what was working.

From the platforms’ perspective, the advertising business was almost ideal. The platforms accumulated data about users at a scale newspapers could not approach. The platforms reached more users than any individual newspaper. The platforms’ advertising systems were highly automated, requiring few salespeople. And, critically, the platforms were two-sided markets: the more advertisers and users they had, the more valuable each side became, producing strong network effects that locked in their dominance.

Programmatic and the auction model

In parallel with the rise of Google and Facebook as advertising sellers, the broader digital advertising market shifted to what is called programmatic buying — advertising space sold through automated, algorithm-driven auctions in real time as users load web pages. A reader who arrives at a local newspaper’s website might trigger, in milliseconds, an auction in which advertisers bid for the right to show that specific reader an ad based on whatever data is available about them. The auction is run through ad-exchange technology, much of it owned by Google.

The economics of programmatic advertising have been catastrophic for publishers. The transparent, automated auction tends to drive prices down to the lowest bidder willing to pay; the various intermediaries (ad exchanges, demand-side platforms, supply-side platforms, data brokers) take cuts that can collectively consume thirty to fifty percent of the original ad spend; and the bottom-line revenue that reaches the publisher is often a small fraction of what an old display ad would have produced. A 2020 study by ISBA, the British advertiser association, traced ad spending through the programmatic supply chain and found that publishers received only about fifty cents of every advertiser dollar; the rest was consumed by intermediaries. Subsequent industry analyses have produced similar estimates.

The platform tax

By the late 2010s, U.S. digital advertising spending was approximately $130 billion per year and rising. Google and Facebook between them captured roughly 60% of it; including Amazon (which has built a large advertising business of its own), the share consumed by the largest platforms approached two-thirds. Newspapers and traditional publishers collectively captured a small share of total digital advertising and a still smaller share of growth. The fastest-growing parts of the digital advertising market — mobile, video, social — were dominated by platforms in which newspapers had limited or no presence.

From the standpoint of the broader economy, this allocation may or may not be efficient. Google and Facebook do real work: they connect advertisers with relevant audiences, and they invest in the technology that makes targeted advertising possible. But from the standpoint of journalism, the result is unmistakable. The journalism produces value — readers come to news sites because they want news — but most of the financial reward for serving those readers ads goes to platforms that produce no journalism. The journalism is a complement to the advertising business, but a complement whose suppliers do not capture much of the surplus they create.

Failed efforts to recapture value

Newspapers and other publishers have tried various strategies to recapture some of this value, with mixed results. Many have erected paywalls and shifted toward subscription revenue, which the next chapters discuss in more detail; this works for large national publishers like the New York Times and Wall Street Journal but has been harder for local papers. Others have negotiated direct deals with platforms — Facebook’s News tab, Google News Showcase, payments under Australia’s News Media Bargaining Code — but these arrangements have been unstable and the payments small relative to the revenue lost. Still others have launched their own ad-tech, joined publisher cooperatives, or attempted to court advertisers directly, with limited overall impact on the platform-dominated structure of the market.

There is one structural fact that no strategy has been able to overcome: the local newspaper is a great place to advertise to a single local audience, but it cannot match the scale, targeting, or measurement of a global platform. As long as advertisers prefer scale, targeting, and measurement — and they overwhelmingly do — the structural advantage will favor the platforms. The newspaper can offer specific local context that the platforms cannot, and a small but stubborn share of advertisers continues to value that. But it is a small share, and it has not been enough to support the journalism that the old model produced.

The bottom line

When advertising migrated from print to digital, most of the economic value was captured by a small number of large technology platforms — chiefly Google and Facebook, with Amazon a growing third — that owned the targeting technology, the user data, and the network effects. Newspapers participated in the migration but captured only a small share of digital advertising and a still smaller share of digital growth. Programmatic auction systems further reduced publisher revenue. By the late 2010s, the combination of lost classifieds and lost display advertising had cut the total advertising revenue of U.S. newspapers by more than two-thirds from its peak. No subsequent strategy has substantially reversed this. The advertising-funded model that built American local journalism is, for almost all local outlets, no longer viable.

What to read or watch next

• Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads (Knopf, 2016). A history of advertising business models from newspapers through Google, situating the platform-era advertising market in a longer trajectory.
• Dipayan Ghosh and Ben Scott, Digital Deceit: The Technologies Behind Precision Propaganda on the Internet (New America, 2018). A clear technical explanation of how programmatic and targeted advertising actually work.
• Jonathan Taplin, Move Fast and Break Things: How Facebook, Google, and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy (Little, Brown, 2017). A polemical but well-sourced argument about platform capture of advertising markets and its effects on cultural industries.
• ISBA and PwC, Programmatic Supply Chain Transparency Study (2020). The empirical study that tracked digital advertising dollars through the programmatic supply chain and found publishers receiving only about half.

PART THREE

News Deserts and Consolidation

Where local news has disappeared, who owns what remains, and how the geography of the crisis tells the story.

CHAPTER 7

What a News Desert Is

The phrase “news desert” entered American political vocabulary roughly a decade ago, popularized by the journalism researcher Penny Abernathy in a series of reports first published at the University of North Carolina and now continued at Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism. The term is evocative — a place where the soil produces nothing, where what should grow does not — and it has proved durable because it captures a real and measurable phenomenon: there are now hundreds of American counties, home to millions of citizens, where no organization is doing original local reporting on a regular basis.

The technical definition

The Medill State of Local News Project defines a news desert as a county — the standard unit of American local government — with no locally based source of original local news. “Locally based” and “original” both matter. A county might receive some coverage from a regional newspaper based in another county, or from a national publication that occasionally writes about the area, or from network television stations whose coverage areas span dozens of counties. None of those count. A news desert is a place where no professional journalist regularly produces original reporting about that specific community.

The definition is conservative in some respects. It does not require daily reporting; a weekly newspaper, even one with a single full-time journalist, would disqualify a county from being a desert. It does not require deep investigative work; routine coverage of school boards, county commissions, and high-school sports is enough. It does not require profitability; a struggling outlet still counts. The bar for being classified as a news desert is therefore quite low, and the fact that hundreds of U.S. counties clear it indicates how stark the situation has become.

The current numbers

As of the most recent Medill State of Local News Report, there are 213 U.S. counties that meet the definition of a news desert. Another 1,524 counties have only one news source. Combined, those 1,737 counties — more than half of all U.S. counties — contain approximately 50 million Americans. That is to say: roughly one in seven Americans lives in a place with little or no working local journalism.

Twenty years ago, when this measurement project began in earnest, there were approximately 150 news desert counties affecting roughly 37 million Americans. The trend has been steadily worsening: about 3,300 newspapers have closed since 2005, more than one-third of the total that existed at that earlier date. Closures have continued at a rate of roughly two per week through 2024 and 2025. Predictive modeling by the Medill team identifies another 250 counties at high risk of becoming news deserts within the next decade. The trajectory of the past two decades, projected forward, suggests substantially more deserts ahead.

What “only one source” means

The 1,524 single-source counties are nearly as concerning as the deserts proper. A single-source county might still have a local newspaper — a real, original, locally-produced one — but it has nothing else: no second paper, no local news website, no functioning local public radio station, no ethnic-press outlet covering immigrant communities, no neighborhood blog, no anything. If that one outlet were to close, the county would become a desert.

Single-source coverage is fragile in other ways too. A single outlet, however well-intentioned, will have blind spots. It will reflect the interests, biases, and limitations of its owner and its small staff. It cannot easily compete with itself or hold itself accountable. Stories its editors are uninterested in will not be reported. Communities its reporters do not know well — typically immigrant communities, communities of color, lower-income neighborhoods — will be undercovered. None of this is a criticism of single-source outlets, which are often heroically holding things together. It is simply a recognition that one source is fragile in ways that a competitive ecosystem is not.

The variety of deserts

News deserts are not a uniform phenomenon. Some are rural and have always had thin coverage; the closure of a small weekly newspaper in a county of fifteen thousand people is a major event for those residents but reflects long-running structural realities of small-town journalism. Some are exurban or rapidly suburbanizing counties that grew faster than their journalism could keep up with: places where the population doubled or tripled over a generation while news organizations consolidated and shrank. Some are urban or peri-urban counties whose papers have either folded or been hollowed out by chain ownership to the point that they no longer produce meaningful original local reporting.

Each type of desert has a slightly different texture. The rural desert has often never had robust journalism and now has none at all; the residents may not realize what they are missing because nothing has changed within recent memory. The exurban desert has populations who came from places with stronger journalism and who notice the absence acutely. The urban hollow-out is sometimes the most disorienting because the masthead of a familiar paper still appears — the residents may not realize that the operation behind it has been gutted to a couple of reporters covering a metropolitan region.

What the residents experience

In a true news desert, certain things simply do not happen that would happen in a community with working journalism. The school board meets and makes decisions; no story appears. A local company is fined or charged with environmental violations; no story appears. The county sheriff’s office releases statistics or announces a policy change; no story appears. A long-time resident dies; the obituary, if there is one, runs in a regional paper that few read. The high school sports team plays its games; the only coverage is the recap a parent posts to a Facebook group. A local political race is held; voters arrive at the polls knowing little about the candidates beyond their party affiliations and yard signs.

Citizens of news deserts compensate in various ways. Some rely on Facebook groups, where neighbors post about what they have seen or heard. Some rely on word of mouth, which can be informative or wildly inaccurate. Some rely on regional papers or television stations whose coverage of the local community is, by necessity, episodic and superficial. Some simply pay less attention to what is happening locally, focusing on national news that is plentifully available. None of these substitutes provides what professional local journalism provided: regular, systematic, accountable, locally-produced coverage of local affairs by people whose job it is to do so.

The bottom line

A news desert is a U.S. county with no locally-based source of original news — a strict but reasonable definition. There are now 213 such counties, plus another 1,524 single-source counties, together containing approximately 50 million Americans. The trajectory has been worsening for two decades, with several thousand newspapers closed and another quarter-thousand counties at high risk in the years ahead. The deserts vary in character — some always thin, some recently hollowed out, some urbanized but ghosted — but the practical experience for residents is similar: a long list of things that would have been covered are now not covered, and the alternatives that fill the gap are narrower, less reliable, and less accountable than the journalism they replace.

What to read or watch next

• Penny Abernathy, The Expanding News Desert (UNC Hussman School, 2018). The original report that established the news-desert framework and produced the first systematic mapping.
• Medill Local News Initiative, State of Local News Report (annual). The continuing project at Northwestern, with current data, county-by-county maps, and analysis. Current edition: 2025.
• Tim Franklin and Zach Metzger, interviews and presentations on the State of Local News Project. The two researchers most associated with the current Medill effort have given numerous accessible accounts of the methodology and findings.
• Margaret Sullivan, Ghosting the News: Local Journalism and the Crisis of American Democracy (Columbia Global Reports, 2020). A short, accessible overview of the crisis from the former public editor of the New York Times.

CHAPTER 8

Hedge Funds, Chains, and Ghost Newspapers

The collapse of the local-news business model did not produce a sudden uniform extinction. Instead, it produced a long process of consolidation, in which newspapers that once would have been individually owned passed into the hands of national chains, and then, in many cases, from chains into the hands of investment vehicles primarily concerned with extracting whatever value remained. The arc of this consolidation has produced a particular and important outcome: many American “newspapers” continue to publish, but with newsrooms so reduced in size and ambition that they barely produce original local journalism. Researchers call these ghost newspapers, and they are now common.

The chain era

Chain ownership of American newspapers is not new. By the 1970s, large publicly-traded chains — Gannett, Knight-Ridder, Tribune Company, the New York Times Company, Times Mirror, Hearst, Cox, Newhouse — owned a substantial share of the country’s daily papers. Chain ownership had real benefits: economies of scale, professional management, deeper capital pools, sometimes higher journalistic standards than struggling local owners could afford. The downsides were mostly cultural: a chain-owned paper was often less rooted in its community, more responsive to corporate demands for predictable returns, less willing to take editorial risks that might offend powerful interests.

Through the boom years, chain ownership coexisted with healthy local journalism because the underlying business was so profitable that the corporate owners could afford to fund quality work even after meeting their dividend and growth expectations. When the business deteriorated, this arrangement frayed. Profit margins of twenty to thirty percent became margins of ten percent, then five, then losses. The chains — most of them publicly traded, with shareholders expecting returns — had to cut. They cut newsrooms, sold properties, closed bureaus, and eventually began to fail outright.

Bankruptcies and acquisitions

Knight-Ridder, the second-largest American newspaper chain, was sold to McClatchy in 2006 amid declining profits. Tribune Company, owner of the Chicago Tribune and Los Angeles Times, declared bankruptcy in 2008. McClatchy itself declared bankruptcy in 2020 and emerged under hedge-fund ownership. Lee Enterprises grew through the acquisition of distressed properties. Gannett, the largest chain, merged with GateHouse Media in 2019 in a transaction that created the largest single newspaper publisher in the United States but did not solve the underlying business problems. The era of the publicly-traded chain owning a portfolio of profitable papers gave way to a different era of distressed-asset acquisitions, with new buyers entering the field.

Hedge funds enter

The most consequential of those new buyers were investment firms, particularly hedge funds and private-equity-style investors, who saw distressed newspapers as opportunities. The leading example is Alden Global Capital, a New York hedge fund whose newspaper-owning subsidiary, MediaNews Group (later renamed Digital First Media and now operating as the parent of multiple branded chains), grew through aggressive acquisition of struggling papers. By the late 2010s, Alden controlled hundreds of U.S. newspapers, including the Denver Post, the Chicago Tribune (acquired in 2021), the Boston Herald, the San Jose Mercury News, and many smaller titles.

The Alden approach is well-documented in journalism trade publications and academic studies. Acquired papers are subjected to rapid and severe cost cuts: newsrooms reduced by half or more, bureaus closed, real estate sold, syndicated content substituted for local reporting, and editorial functions centralized into regional production hubs. Journalists at Alden papers have publicly described the experience in widely-circulated open letters and resignation accounts. The financial logic is straightforward: even a deeply-cut newspaper can produce some revenue from its remaining subscribers and advertisers, and squeezing that revenue out efficiently can produce attractive cash returns to the fund’s investors. Whether the journalism survives is, in this model, not the primary question.

Ghost newspapers

The result of this kind of acquisition is what journalism researchers have come to call a “ghost newspaper” — a paper that continues to publish under a familiar masthead but has been so denuded of staff and original reporting that it functions less as a journalistic operation than as a vehicle for syndicated wire copy, real-estate listings, and the occasional locally-bylined story. The ghost newspaper may run a school-board meeting summary; it may not. It may cover a local election; it may not. Its sports section may consist of stock high-school photos and stat lines without game stories. Its opinion pages may be filled almost entirely with nationally-syndicated columnists.

To a casual reader — someone who picks up a copy occasionally, or skims the website — a ghost newspaper may look much like a healthy newspaper. The differences become visible only with sustained attention: the absence of the kind of dogged, time-consuming reporting that characterizes living journalism, the gradual disappearance of recognized local bylines, the substitution of generic content for community-specific work.

The newer chains

In the past several years, the ownership pattern has shifted again. The largest chains — Gannett especially — have become net sellers, divesting properties they no longer wish to operate. The buyers are increasingly smaller, regional chains: Carpenter Media Group has emerged as the most active acquirer, with hundreds of titles; CherryRoad Media has assembled a portfolio of small-town papers; Paxton Media continues to expand. These newer chains operate with their own logic, often more rooted in local-community ties than the hedge funds but still constrained by the difficult underlying economics.

Some smaller-chain ownership has produced notably good results. A locally-rooted regional chain that genuinely cares about its papers can operate them more sustainably than a distant hedge fund. But the consolidation pattern continues, and most of the smaller chains are also operating thinner newsrooms than the previous generation. The structural problem of insufficient revenue cannot be solved purely by ownership change; it can only be managed somewhat differently under different owners.

Why the ownership question matters

It would be easy to read this chapter as primarily a moral story about bad investors hollowing out good papers, but that would be incomplete. The hedge funds and private-equity-style buyers entered the field because nobody else wanted to. The papers they acquired were typically distressed, often loss-making, and would in many cases have closed entirely without an acquirer of last resort. From a strict economic standpoint, a ghost newspaper that publishes a few times per week with a small staff is more journalism than a closed newspaper that publishes nothing. The owners can be criticized for many things, but they cannot be straightforwardly blamed for the underlying business collapse.

That said, the form of ownership matters in practice. A hedge fund running a newspaper to extract cash flow over a defined investment horizon will make different decisions than a local family running a paper as a multi-generational civic institution. Journalism produced by the latter tends to be better than journalism produced by the former, even when both are working within the same difficult economics. And the consolidation has produced, alongside the deserts, a vast middle ground of ghost newspapers in which the appearance of journalism persists without the substance. Distinguishing healthy local outlets from ghost ones is one of the practical media-literacy skills of the current era.

The bottom line

The collapse of newspaper economics produced a long process of consolidation: independent papers sold to publicly-traded chains, struggling chains acquired by hedge funds, hedge funds running aggressive cost-cutting strategies that reduced newsrooms to a fraction of their former size. The result is a landscape of ghost newspapers — publications that continue to appear under their familiar names but have been hollowed out to the point that they produce little original local reporting. The investors who bought distressed papers are not the original cause of the crisis; they are downstream of it. But the form of ownership matters for outcomes, and the difference between a ghost paper and a still-living one is often invisible to casual readers despite being enormous in journalistic substance.

What to read or watch next

• McKay Coppins, “A Secretive Hedge Fund Is Gutting Newsrooms,” The Atlantic (October 14, 2021). The most widely-read account of Alden Global Capital’s newspaper strategy and its effects on acquired papers.
• Penny Abernathy, The Rise of a New Media Baron and the Emerging Threat of News Deserts (UNC, 2017). The early academic mapping of how chain ownership and hedge-fund acquisition were reshaping the local-news landscape.
• Joshua Benton at Nieman Lab, ongoing reporting on newspaper ownership and consolidation. Particularly useful coverage of acquisition transactions, the rise of newer chains like Carpenter, and the economics of small-paper operations.
• Andrew Conte, Death of the Daily News: How Citizen Gatekeepers Can Save Local Journalism (University of Pittsburgh, 2022). A close-up account of one community’s loss of its newspaper and what came after.

CHAPTER 9

The Geography and Demographics of the Crisis

News deserts are not distributed evenly across the country. They cluster in particular places and affect particular kinds of communities, and understanding that geography — and the demography that goes with it — helps clarify what the local-news crisis really is. It is not, in the main, a crisis of national-news availability: New York City, Washington, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and other major metropolitan areas continue to support large national-facing news organizations. It is a crisis of local information in places that are smaller, poorer, more rural, more demographically marginal, and historically less central to national life.

The rural pattern

The single strongest predictor of news desert status in current Medill data is rural location. Counties without their own functioning local news outlet are disproportionately concentrated in the Great Plains, the rural South, the Mountain West, the upper Midwest outside its metropolitan corridors, and rural sections of the Mid-Atlantic and Northeast. Many of these counties have small populations — sometimes under ten thousand residents — and have always struggled to support full-fledged journalism; their loss of a weekly newspaper that operated for a hundred years is part of a broader pattern of rural institutional decline that includes hospital closures, school consolidations, post-office reductions, and depopulation.

The rural pattern is particularly acute in places that have experienced sustained population loss. A county that has been losing one or two percent of its population per year for decades simply has fewer subscribers to support a newspaper, fewer advertisers to support its advertising side, and a shrinking pool of working-age residents from which to recruit journalists and other staff. The economics that historically sustained small-town journalism — a community of a few thousand people who all read the local paper — break down when the community itself is shrinking.

The poverty pattern

News deserts also correlate strongly with poverty. Counties with median household incomes well below the national average are substantially more likely to be classified as news deserts. This is partly a consequence of the rural pattern — many of the rural counties that have lost their newspapers are also poor — but the relationship persists when controlling for population size. Poor counties, whether rural or urban, have residents who can less easily afford newspaper subscriptions, advertisers with less revenue to spend on advertising, and tax bases that cannot support significant nonprofit-news efforts.

The poverty pattern has direct civic implications. Communities with fewer resources are precisely those whose residents most depend on accountable local government — because they have fewer alternatives when government fails them — and yet they are now the communities least likely to have working journalism to hold that government accountable. The mechanism by which strong local journalism reduced municipal corruption and waste, documented in the research discussed in Chapter 3, is least available in the places that arguably need it most.

The race and ethnicity pattern

News deserts and single-source counties are also associated with above-average shares of Black, Latino, Native American, and immigrant residents in the relevant communities. This pattern reflects several overlapping realities. Communities of color have historically been undercovered by mainstream local journalism even where it existed, and the ethnic press — Black newspapers, Spanish-language papers, immigrant-community publications — that filled some of those gaps has experienced its own collapse, often more severe than the mainstream press. Many communities of color now lack both robust mainstream local news and robust ethnic press. The result is information environments that are particularly thin at exactly the points where local issues intersect with race, immigration status, language access, and historic patterns of marginalization.

The Native American press has its own particular history and challenges; tribal newspapers and Native-focused outlets serve specialized communities and operate under economic conditions that are distinct from the mainstream press. Some have struggled along with the rest of the industry; others have proven more resilient because they serve audiences for whom no substitute is available. Across the broader picture, however, the demographic geography of news deserts overlaps significantly with the historic geography of disinvestment in American communities.

The metro paradox

It might seem that major metropolitan areas would be insulated from the crisis. They have large populations, deep advertising markets, robust nonprofit ecosystems, and educated readerships willing to pay for journalism. To a substantial extent, this is true: the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, the Boston Globe, and a handful of other major papers continue to operate at scale, with national subscribers funding much of their work.

But the metro picture is more complicated than it first appears. The major metropolitan dailies have themselves shrunk dramatically: the Los Angeles Times newsroom is roughly a third its peak size, the Chicago Tribune’s has been hollowed out under hedge-fund ownership, the Philadelphia Inquirer is a fraction of its former scale. More importantly, the core local-coverage function within metropolitan areas has fractured. A given metro might have a great regional newspaper that covers state politics and major cities, but specific neighborhoods, suburbs, and bedroom communities within the metro area can be functionally news deserts in their own right. The Chicago suburbs, Detroit’s satellite cities, Los Angeles’s outlying counties, and the ring around any major American city contain many communities of fifty or one hundred thousand residents that have lost their own local newspapers and receive only sporadic coverage from regional outlets focused on the central city.

The startup pattern

Where new local-news startups have emerged — the more than three hundred digital-only operations launched in the past five years — they have been concentrated overwhelmingly in metropolitan areas. About ninety percent of new local digital outlets are based in metro regions, often in relatively prosperous parts of those regions. The emerging digital-news layer is therefore reinforcing rather than offsetting the geographic inequality of the crisis. The places that already had access to multiple news sources are gaining additional ones; the places that are becoming deserts are not, in most cases, getting digital substitutes.

This pattern has several causes. Digital startups need readers and advertisers, both of which are more abundant in metro areas. They often depend on philanthropic support, and philanthropy is also concentrated in major cities. They typically rely on a critical mass of journalists, which is easier to assemble in places with journalism schools and existing media ecosystems. None of this is anyone’s fault — startups follow opportunity — but the effect on geographic equality is real.

Public media and the rural gap

One partial counterweight has been public radio. Local NPR member stations and other public broadcasters have, in many regions, expanded their local-news production over the past decade, sometimes filling gaps left by closed newspapers. Public radio reaches rural areas more effectively than digital startups do, because the underlying infrastructure — broadcast towers, listener-supported funding, federal pass-through dollars — was built explicitly for geographic coverage rather than market efficiency. In some states, public-radio newsrooms have become the largest dedicated local-news organizations remaining.

The viability of this counterweight depends on continued public funding and on the continued ability of public broadcasters to expand into traditional newspaper coverage areas. Federal funding for public broadcasting has been politically contested for decades, and proposed reductions or eliminations would substantially affect the local-news capacity of public radio stations, particularly those serving smaller markets where private fundraising cannot make up the gap. The 2025 Medill report discusses this issue at some length, noting that defunding scenarios could meaningfully expand the news-desert problem in coming years.

The bottom line

The local-news crisis is geographically and demographically uneven. News deserts are concentrated in rural counties, in poorer communities, in communities of color, and in areas that have experienced sustained population loss — the same communities that have lost hospitals, schools, and other institutions over the same period. Major metropolitan areas have shrunk less dramatically but contain many communities that have themselves become functional deserts at the neighborhood and suburban level. The new digital startups that have emerged are concentrated in metropolitan and prosperous areas, reinforcing rather than reversing the pattern. Public broadcasting has partially filled the rural gap. The crisis is best understood not as a uniform collapse but as a structurally unequal one, in which the places that already had less are losing what remained, while the places that had more are losing somewhat less.

What to read or watch next

• Medill State of Local News Report 2025, geographic and demographic chapters. The most current systematic mapping of where deserts cluster and what their populations look like.
• UNC Hussman School of Journalism, earlier news-desert mapping reports under Penny Abernathy. The original mapping work that established the geographic pattern, with state-by-state breakdowns.
• Sarah Stonbely, The Case for Local News Equity (Center for Cooperative Media, multiple reports). Research specifically focused on how local-news availability varies by race, ethnicity, and language community.
• Sarah Alvarez and Outlier Media, ongoing case studies of local information needs in underserved communities. Practitioner-led work documenting what residents of underserved communities actually need from local information ecosystems and how it differs from what mainstream coverage provided.

PART FOUR

New Models and Bright Spots

What is being built to replace what was lost — and what those replacements can and cannot do.

CHAPTER 10

Nonprofit Journalism

If the for-profit business model that funded American local journalism for a century is no longer working, one of the most active responses has been to fund journalism the way other public goods are funded: through a combination of philanthropy, member donations, and grants, organized through 501(c)(3) nonprofit corporations. The nonprofit model is not new — ProPublica, founded in 2007, was an early high-profile example, and public broadcasting has used variants of the model for decades — but it has expanded rapidly over the past fifteen years and now represents one of the most important ongoing experiments in American journalism.

How nonprofit news organizations work

A nonprofit news organization is, legally, a charitable corporation organized under section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code. Its mission is the production of journalism in the public interest, and contributions to it are tax-deductible to donors. It is governed by a board of directors with fiduciary duties to the mission rather than to shareholders, and it cannot distribute profits — any surplus must be reinvested in the mission. Most nonprofit news organizations also publish their work for free online, removing the paywall barrier to access.

Revenue typically comes from a mix of sources: large foundation grants, individual donations from members or supporters, occasional corporate sponsorships, sometimes paid services like newsletters or events, and increasingly, syndication or republication arrangements with other outlets. The mix varies widely across organizations — some lean heavily on a few large foundations, some on a broad base of small members, some on hybrid commercial-philanthropic models — but the absence of a profit motive distinguishes them all from traditional commercial publishers.

ProPublica and the investigative model

ProPublica, launched in 2008 with founding support from the Sandler Foundation, established the high end of the nonprofit investigative model. It hired experienced investigative journalists from major newspapers, gave them substantial time and resources, and committed to producing rigorous, document-driven, public-interest journalism that would be republished without charge by partner news organizations. ProPublica won its first Pulitzer Prize in 2010 — the first awarded to an entirely online publication — and has won several more since. It has become a major force in American investigative journalism, with offices in New York, Chicago, the Southwest, the South, and elsewhere, and a staff well into the hundreds.

ProPublica’s influence extends beyond its own work through its Local Reporting Network, which since 2018 has funded experienced investigative reporters embedded at local newsrooms across the country. Selected outlets receive a year of full salary support for a single reporter pursuing a defined investigative project; ProPublica provides editorial guidance and amplifies the resulting work. The model has produced significant local-government accountability work in cities and states that would not have been able to fund such reporting independently. Several of these projects have led to policy changes, criminal charges, or other concrete outcomes.

State and local nonprofit outlets

Beyond ProPublica, dozens of nonprofit news organizations have launched at the state and local levels. The Texas Tribune, founded in 2009, was an early and influential model: a digital-first nonprofit covering Texas state government with a substantial newsroom, a major events business, and a broad donor base. It has been profitable in operating terms for most of its history and now has a newsroom of more than fifty journalists — larger than that of many state capitols’ traditional newspapers. The Texas Tribune model has been studied and partially replicated by the CalMatters in California, MinnPost in Minnesota, Mississippi Today, the Honolulu Civil Beat, the Connecticut Mirror, and numerous others.

At the city level, nonprofit local newsrooms have appeared in many places: the Voice of San Diego (founded 2005, an early pioneer), Block Club Chicago, the Baltimore Banner (a particularly well-funded recent launch), Mountain State Spotlight in West Virginia, the 19th in Washington, and dozens more. The Institute for Nonprofit News, the trade association, counted over 480 member organizations as of 2024. Their scale ranges from one or two journalists working on a shoestring to substantial newsrooms with dozens of reporters. Some are general-interest local outlets; many specialize in investigative work, in particular policy areas, in service to specific communities, or in particular geographies.

The American Journalism Project

A particularly important institutional development was the founding of the American Journalism Project (AJP) in 2018. AJP is a venture-philanthropy intermediary: it raises money from large donors and foundations, then makes substantial multi-year grants to local nonprofit newsrooms, often combined with intensive operational support to help them grow. AJP’s thesis is that nonprofit newsrooms succeed not just when they receive grants but when they have professional management, business development capacity, and audience-building infrastructure that small organizations cannot easily afford on their own. By 2024, AJP had raised more than two hundred million dollars and made grants to dozens of grantees across the country, with measurable effects on those grantees’ sustainability.

Public broadcasting

Public broadcasting deserves its own discussion in any account of nonprofit journalism. NPR, the national public radio network, and its hundreds of local member stations together represent one of the largest journalism operations in the United States, employing thousands of journalists and reaching tens of millions of listeners weekly. Local member stations vary enormously in their journalism capacity — some are small classical-music broadcasters, others run substantial newsrooms with dozens of reporters — but the strongest ones have become indispensable local-news institutions, sometimes the dominant local-news provider in their markets.

Public-broadcasting funding combines listener donations, corporate underwriting, foundation grants, and a smaller but politically significant slice of federal funding through the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. The federal share is small in dollar terms but particularly important for stations in smaller and rural markets where private donations cannot fully support operations. Periodic political controversies about CPB funding have largely been navigated, but the funding stream remains contested, and reductions would have outsized effects on the rural-coverage function that public broadcasting performs in many regions.

Strengths and limits of the nonprofit model

The nonprofit model has real strengths. It aligns incentives toward journalism that serves the public rather than journalism that maximizes profit. It can sustain unprofitable but valuable work — long-running investigations, coverage of underserved communities, beats that have no obvious advertising market — in ways that for-profit operations struggle to. It opens revenue sources — charitable giving — that the for-profit press cannot access. And it produces, in many cases, journalism of remarkable quality, free from the cost-cutting pressures that have hollowed out so much of the commercial press.

It also has real limits. Nonprofit news depends heavily on philanthropy, which can be unstable, ideologically motivated, or geographically uneven. The vast majority of philanthropic support for journalism flows to large metropolitan operations and prestige investigative outlets; rural communities, low-income communities, and communities of color receive a much smaller share, sometimes inadequate. Nonprofit organizations face their own institutional challenges — fundraising fatigue, donor influence concerns, capacity constraints — and many small operations remain perpetually undercapitalized. And the total scale of nonprofit news, even after fifteen years of growth, is a small fraction of the for-profit local-press capacity that has been lost. Nonprofits are filling some gaps; they have not come close to filling all of them.

The bottom line

Nonprofit journalism has emerged as one of the most important responses to the collapse of the commercial local-news business. Hundreds of nonprofit news organizations now operate across the country, ranging from large state-level outlets like the Texas Tribune to small local startups, supported by a mix of philanthropy, member donations, and grants. Major intermediaries like ProPublica, the American Journalism Project, and the Institute for Nonprofit News provide infrastructure that helps the sector grow. Public broadcasting represents a parallel and often complementary nonprofit ecosystem with deep roots and broad reach. The sector’s strengths are real — mission alignment, access to philanthropic capital, capacity to fund unprofitable but valuable work — but its scale remains a fraction of what the commercial press once provided, and its geographic distribution skews toward already-resourced communities.

What to read or watch next

• Institute for Nonprofit News (INN), annual INN Index reports. The trade association’s comprehensive annual survey of the U.S. nonprofit-news ecosystem, with current data on revenue, staffing, and reach.
• American Journalism Project, publications and grantee reports (theajp.org). Documentation of the venture-philanthropy approach to nonprofit news, including detailed case studies of grantee performance.
• ProPublica, Local Reporting Network case studies (propublica.org/local-reporting-network). Examples of local accountability journalism funded through the embedded-reporter program.
• Evan Smith, talks and writings on the Texas Tribune model. The co-founder’s accessible accounts of how the most influential state-level nonprofit news operation was built and sustained.

CHAPTER 11

Local Digital Startups and Networks

Alongside the nonprofit growth, a parallel ecosystem of for-profit and hybrid local digital news operations has emerged in the past decade. These range from one-person newsletter operations to mid-sized digital newsrooms covering a city or region, to nationally networked publishers operating dozens or hundreds of local sites. Together, the digital startup ecosystem now represents the most active source of new local-news supply, particularly in metropolitan areas. It has its own logic, strengths, and limitations.

The newsletter wave

One of the most visible digital-news developments has been the rise of the email newsletter as a journalism format. Substack, Beehiiv, Ghost, and other newsletter platforms have made it relatively easy for individual journalists to launch paid publications that go directly to subscribers’ inboxes, with built-in payment processing, audience analytics, and modest hosting costs. Several locally-focused newsletters have built substantial paid audiences: 6AM City’s network of city-specific morning newsletters, the Seattle Emerald, Big Town Bulletin in Wichita, and many others have demonstrated that direct-to-reader payment models can support meaningful local journalism.

The newsletter format has particular strengths. It is intimate — readers feel a direct connection to the writer. It is cheap to produce — a single journalist with a laptop can publish to a substantial audience. It bypasses platform algorithms — once someone subscribes, the publisher reaches them directly without intermediation by Facebook or Google. It supports a clear payment model — monthly or annual subscriptions are familiar and easy to administer. And it scales gradually with audience growth in a way that is more forgiving of slow starts than ad-supported models.

The format also has limits. Newsletters work well for analysis, commentary, and brief news roundups, but less well for the kind of resource-intensive investigative reporting that requires teams of journalists and months of work. The economics of one-person operations are fragile; when the journalist gets sick, takes vacation, or experiences a life change, the publication suffers. Aggregating multiple newsletters into a sustainable operation — paying multiple journalists, supporting editorial infrastructure, building advertising or sponsorship revenue alongside subscriptions — has proven difficult, and many promising newsletter operations have plateaued at sustainability levels too modest to support a real local newsroom.

Local digital news sites

Beyond newsletters, hundreds of dedicated local digital news websites now operate across the United States. The Medill State of Local News Report counts more than three hundred local digital startups launched in the past five years alone, with more than six hundred and thirty currently active. These vary widely: some are deeply reported neighborhood sites like Block Club Chicago and BillyPenn (Philadelphia, before its acquisition); some are city-wide operations like the Texas Tribune mentioned earlier or the Tucson Sentinel; some are policy-focused outlets like Mississippi Today or the Hechinger Report. Some are explicitly nonprofit; some are for-profit; some are hybrid models that combine commercial revenue with philanthropic support.

The strongest local digital startups share several features. They typically focus tightly on a defined geography or topic. They often combine multiple revenue streams — subscriptions, advertising, events, sponsored content, philanthropy. They invest in audience-development infrastructure: newsletters, social media, partnerships with other publishers, sometimes physical events. They work hard to identify gaps in coverage that established outlets are not filling and to position themselves where readers experience their work as essential rather than optional.

National networks of local sites

A distinct development has been the rise of national networks of local digital news sites. These are operations that produce many local sites across the country, often using shared editorial infrastructure, common technology, and centralized advertising sales. Patch was an early example, launched by AOL in 2009 and now operating across thousands of communities. Axios Local, launched in 2020, produces morning newsletters in dozens of metropolitan areas, supported by Axios’s broader business. States Newsroom is a nonprofit network of state-government-focused outlets; by 2024, it operated bureaus in all fifty states. The 2024 Medill State of Local News Report counted 740 networked local sites; the 2025 report counted 849 across 54 networks.

Networked local sites have particular advantages. The shared infrastructure reduces per-site costs. Centralized fundraising or advertising sales reach scale that individual local sites cannot. Editorial standards can be maintained across the network. And growth can be rapid, as a successful model is replicated across new geographies. The disadvantages mirror those of traditional newspaper chains. The local journalism produced through networked operations can feel less rooted than work from genuinely community-based outlets, and the local employees can sometimes feel more like contributors to a national platform than members of a local newsroom. Network operations can fold or pivot rapidly when their corporate parents decide to shift strategy, leaving local communities with sudden gaps in coverage.

Civil journalism and the membership model

A particular variant within the digital ecosystem is the membership model, distinguished from the traditional subscription model in subtle but meaningful ways. A subscriber pays for access to content; a member pays to support the institution and its mission, often regardless of how much content they personally consume. The Texas Tribune, the Voice of San Diego, the Connecticut Mirror, and many other nonprofit outlets have built strong membership programs that combine recurring small donations with reader engagement, events, and a sense of belonging to the project. Some for-profit outlets have adopted hybrid models in which membership tiers offer enhanced experiences alongside the core journalism.

The membership model can be resilient because it ties revenue to a community of supporters rather than to advertising or pageviews. It rewards journalism that builds trust over time. And it allows readers to feel like stakeholders rather than just consumers. It also has limits: membership programs require sustained relationship-building and engagement work, and they generally do not scale to the population sizes that mass advertising once reached. A substantial newsroom funded by membership alone needs either many small members or a smaller number of more committed supporters, and the math of sustaining it requires deliberate attention.

The metro concentration

Across the digital startup landscape, one consistent pattern emerges: the new outlets are overwhelmingly concentrated in metropolitan areas and in relatively prosperous communities within them. The Medill data show that approximately ninety percent of new local digital news sites launched in recent years are based in metro regions, and they tend to cluster in places where readers are educated, advertisers are present, and philanthropic support is available. Rural areas, smaller cities, lower-income communities, and communities of color are all substantially underrepresented in the new ecosystem.

This pattern is not accidental. Digital news startups face the same structural realities as the rest of the journalism economy: their viability depends on reaching an audience that has both the means and the inclination to support them, whether through subscriptions, donations, or attendance at advertiser-friendly events. Those audiences are concentrated in places that already had access to multiple journalism options. The digital revolution has produced extraordinary new local-news outlets in Seattle, Boston, Chicago, the Bay Area, and a handful of similar markets; it has produced relatively little for the rural Midwest, the Mississippi Delta, the Texas border, and other places where the journalism crisis is most acute.

The bottom line

A diverse ecosystem of digital local-news startups has emerged in the past decade, including individual newsletters, dedicated city sites, networked local operations across multiple geographies, and outlets organized around membership models. Together they represent the most active source of new local-news supply, with several hundred new outlets launched in recent years and more launching steadily. The sector includes excellent journalism in many of the places where it operates. Its central limitation is geographic and demographic: new digital outlets cluster in metropolitan areas and in already-resourced communities, leaving the rural, poor, and demographically marginal places where the crisis is sharpest with relatively little of the new supply. The digital ecosystem is part of the answer to local journalism’s collapse but not, by itself, a complete one.

What to read or watch next

• LION Publishers, annual reports on local independent online news. The trade association for independent local digital publishers, with surveys, case studies, and resources for new operators.
• Anika Anand and Tony Elkins, writings on local newsletter economics. Practitioner-focused analysis of how local newsletter operations have grown and what makes them sustainable.
• Block Club Chicago and Voice of San Diego, transparency reports and revenue disclosures. Two influential local digital outlets that have published detailed accounts of how their funding, staffing, and editorial work fit together.
• Medill State of Local News Report (annual), digital startup chapters. Current data on the launch rate, geographic distribution, and characteristics of new local digital news outlets.

CHAPTER 12

Report for America, Local Reporting Networks, and Reinforcement Models

Beyond the founding of new outlets, an important set of efforts in recent years has aimed to reinforce existing local newsrooms by adding journalists, providing training, supporting investigative projects, and otherwise increasing the capacity of operations that already exist but are too thinly staffed to do their work fully. These reinforcement programs do not replace the structural problem of insufficient revenue, but they have produced demonstrable improvements in local coverage in hundreds of communities, and they offer a model that policy-makers and philanthropists have increasingly emphasized.

Report for America

Report for America (RFA), launched in 2017 by the GroundTruth Project, is modeled loosely on the Peace Corps and Teach for America. Selected emerging journalists are placed in local newsrooms across the country to work on assigned beats — often beats that the host newsroom would not otherwise cover — with a portion of their salary covered by Report for America and the remainder split between the host newsroom and local fundraising. Initial commitments are typically two years, sometimes extendable. By the early 2020s, Report for America had placed several hundred journalists in newsrooms ranging from large metropolitan papers to small rural weeklies.

The model has several notable features. It identifies coverage gaps in collaboration with host newsrooms and funds reporters specifically to fill them — rural-issue beats, environment and climate, criminal justice, immigrant communities, education, statehouses, indigenous-affairs reporting. It includes structured training and mentorship for the placed reporters, who are often early-career. It develops local fundraising capacity by requiring host newsrooms to raise their share of the cost from local sources, which builds donor relationships that persist beyond the placement. And it tracks impact — the journalism produced, the policy changes triggered, the audiences reached — in ways that support the broader case for journalism’s civic value.

Report for America has had real impact in many of the communities where it has placed journalists. RFA reporters have produced investigative work on issues from environmental violations to public corruption to inadequate disaster response. They have established beats that newsrooms would otherwise have left empty. They have built relationships with sources and communities that have outlasted their two-year commitments, sometimes leading to permanent positions. The program is not a complete answer to the funding crisis — it cannot, by itself, scale to replace the journalism capacity that has been lost — but it has demonstrably added capacity at the margin, and the journalists who have been through the program represent a growing cohort of mid-career reporters trained for local work.

ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network

Mentioned briefly in Chapter 10, ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network deserves fuller treatment here as a distinct reinforcement model. Unlike Report for America, which places early-career reporters into general beat coverage, the Local Reporting Network funds experienced investigative journalists, embedded at local newsrooms, working on specific defined investigations for one to two years. ProPublica covers the salary; the host newsroom contributes editorial support and publishes the work jointly with ProPublica.

The model has produced extraordinary results. Local Reporting Network projects have led to significant policy changes, criminal investigations, and accountability outcomes in cities and states across the country. The work tends to be high-impact precisely because it is high-resource: a reporter able to spend a year or two on a single investigation, with editorial support from one of the country’s most experienced investigative organizations, can do work that no normally-staffed newsroom could undertake. The collaboration model also amplifies the work’s reach: ProPublica’s national audience and the local newsroom’s community audience both engage with the journalism.

State and regional reinforcement initiatives

Beyond the national programs, a growing number of state and regional initiatives have emerged. Press Forward, a coalition of major foundations and individual donors launched in 2023, committed at least $500 million over five years to local-news support nationally, with significant portions flowing to state-level granting initiatives. Several states now have local-news funds: Press Forward affiliates in California, New Jersey, Illinois, and elsewhere; the Pennsylvania Local Journalism Initiative; the Massachusetts Civic Information Consortium; the New Jersey Civic Information Consortium (the first state-funded civic-information initiative). Many of these provide grants to existing local outlets to add reporters or develop new beats.

State and regional programs have advantages over purely national efforts. They can identify priorities specific to their geographies. They can build relationships with state policymakers and donors. They can support smaller, more local operations that national programs might overlook. And they can pilot models that, if successful, can be replicated elsewhere. The first experiments — New Jersey’s Civic Information Consortium especially — have provided concrete evidence that public funding for journalism can be administered with editorial independence and political viability.

Foundation collaboratives

A particularly active form of reinforcement has been collaborative foundation funding through entities like the Knight-Lenfest Local News Transformation Fund, the Local Media Association, and the various foundation collaboratives operating under Press Forward. These pool resources from multiple foundations, set joint priorities, and distribute funds either directly or through intermediary programs. The collaborative approach addresses one of the chronic problems of journalism philanthropy: foundations historically have made small grants to many recipients, requiring grantees to spend disproportionate effort on fundraising and reporting. Pooling and consolidating reduces this transaction cost and produces more concentrated support for promising operations.

University-based and academic reinforcement

Academic institutions have also become more active reinforcers. Many journalism schools now operate teaching newsrooms that produce real local journalism while training students. The Stabile Center for Investigative Journalism at Columbia, the News21 program (originally at the Carnegie Corporation’s sponsored partner schools), the Investigative Reporting Workshop at American University, and many others combine educational missions with substantive local-coverage output. Some university operations have grown into significant local-news producers in their own right — the City Bureau in Chicago, originally educational in focus, has become an important community-information institution; the Ohio Newsroom, a partnership among Ohio universities, has become a meaningful state-coverage operation.

University reinforcement has natural strengths. It is institutionally durable in ways that for-profit newsrooms are not. It combines journalism with research, education, and community engagement in ways that produce broader civic impact. And it can attract donors who care about education and journalism alike. It also has limits: student-produced journalism, however good, is by definition constrained by educational schedules and the developmental stage of the journalists involved; and university institutional politics can constrain editorial independence in ways the public is sometimes unaware of.

What reinforcement does and doesn’t do

Reinforcement programs share an important common feature: they make existing newsrooms better rather than creating new ones. This is both a strength and a limit. A strength because existing newsrooms have community relationships, distribution infrastructure, and editorial cultures that take years or decades to build; adding capacity to a working newsroom typically produces more journalism per dollar than building a new one from scratch. A limit because reinforcement cannot help in places where there is no newsroom left to reinforce. A county that has lost its only newspaper cannot be reinforced; it can only be rebuilt, and rebuilding is harder, slower, and more expensive.

This is part of the broader picture of the local-news response. Some efforts focus on creating new outlets where none exist (Chapter 11). Some focus on building nonprofit alternatives to commercial journalism (Chapter 10). Some focus on reinforcing what remains. Each strategy has strengths and limits, and the overall response will likely require all three working together — plus continued attention to the underlying business and policy questions that the next part of this guide takes up.

The bottom line

A growing set of programs aims to reinforce existing local newsrooms by adding journalists, supporting investigative projects, and building organizational capacity. Report for America places early-career reporters in local newsrooms covering otherwise-uncovered beats; ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network funds investigative journalism in collaboration with local hosts; state and regional initiatives provide grant support to outlets in their geographies; foundation collaboratives like Press Forward pool resources from multiple donors. Reinforcement is most effective in places where some journalism still exists — it improves what is there rather than building from nothing — and it cannot, by itself, address the underlying business problem. Combined with new-outlet creation and nonprofit alternatives, reinforcement is one of the most concrete responses available to the crisis.

What to read or watch next

• Report for America, annual impact reports (reportforamerica.org). Documentation of placements, host newsrooms, journalism produced, and outcomes.
• Press Forward, publications and state affiliate reports (pressforward.news). The major national funding coalition’s public materials on its strategy and grantee outcomes.
• Steven Waldman, writings on the political economy of local news. The co-founder of Report for America has written extensively on what reinforcement programs can and cannot do, and on the broader policy environment they operate in.
• Knight Foundation, publications on local news investments (knightfoundation.org). Detailed accounts of one of the largest single funders of local journalism reinforcement, including evaluations of grant outcomes.

PART FIVE

How Citizens Can Help

Practical action for readers, donors, advocates, and members of communities that need their journalism back.

CHAPTER 13

As a Reader and Subscriber

The most direct thing an individual citizen can do for local journalism is to pay for it. This is not a glamorous answer, and it does not solve the structural problems described earlier in this guide. But the math of supporting a local newsroom is straightforward: subscribers and members provide revenue, revenue funds journalism, and the marginal subscriber genuinely matters at most local outlets in a way that the marginal subscriber to a national publication generally does not. Local journalism is one of the few places in modern American life where individual consumer decisions can make a visible institutional difference.

What to subscribe to

Most communities have at least one local-news subscription option, and many have several. The most useful starting question is: where do I currently get information about my immediate community — my city, my county, my school district, my neighborhood — and is the source of that information a sustainable journalism operation that I am supporting financially? If you read a local paper online without paying, you are using its work without contributing to its continuation. If you rely on a free local newsletter, you may or may not be supporting it depending on whether the newsletter has a paid tier or accepts donations.

Practical priorities for subscriptions tend to follow a rough hierarchy. Highest priority is the operation doing the most original reporting in your immediate community. Second priority is the next-best source covering issues you care about (a state-level outlet, an investigative-focused operation, a beat-specialized publication). Third priority can be a national publication that you find genuinely useful. The order matters because the marginal value of your subscription is greatest where the recipient is most local and most fragile.

Print or digital

For most readers, digital subscriptions are now the practical default — they are cheaper, more current, easier to access, and easier to share with family. Print subscriptions remain meaningful for two reasons: print revenue per subscriber is still substantially higher than digital revenue per subscriber at most newspapers, so a print subscription is worth more financially to the publisher; and many older readers, including those without reliable internet access, depend on print as their primary form. If you can afford print and your local paper still publishes one, supporting print supports a revenue stream the publisher would otherwise find very hard to replace.

That said, many local outlets no longer publish print, and others have so reduced their print frequency that the digital edition is the substantive product. The 2024 Medill report noted that of roughly one thousand U.S. daily newspapers still classified as such, only about a third still print every day of the week; the rest have moved to reduced print schedules. Decisions about print versus digital should reflect what the publisher is actually producing, not nostalgia about how newspapers used to work.

Subscriptions, memberships, and donations

The legal and emotional structure of paying for journalism varies. A subscription is a transaction: you pay a fee, you receive content, the relationship ends if you stop paying. A membership is a relationship: you contribute to support a mission, you receive some benefits and content, and the institution is implicitly accountable to you as a stakeholder. A donation is a gift: you contribute because the work matters to you, you receive a tax deduction if the recipient is a 501(c)(3), and you do not necessarily expect direct content benefits in return.

Different outlets are organized around different models. Most for-profit newspapers offer subscriptions. Many nonprofit news outlets offer memberships, often with multiple tiers. Some accept ongoing donations or one-time gifts. The categories overlap and can be combined: many people now subscribe to one or two outlets, are members of one or two more, and make occasional donations to several others. The cost of supporting a meaningful set of local-news operations — say, two or three subscriptions or memberships at $5–15 per month each — is comparable to the cost of streaming services or a few coffees per month, and the public-interest value is much higher.

Sharing and using the journalism well

Beyond paying, how readers use journalism matters. Local outlets generally appreciate when subscribers share their work with others, comment thoughtfully, write letters to the editor, attend events, refer new subscribers, and otherwise participate as engaged members of the publication’s community. These behaviors strengthen the publication’s reach, generate organic distribution that does not depend on social-media algorithms, and signal to other potential supporters that the work is valued.

Readers can also help by being thoughtful about how they share work. Posting a paywalled article in a way that suggests evading the paywall (rather than encouraging others to subscribe) undermines the operation. Sharing only the headline or a partial summary on social media often backfires — people read the headline, form an opinion, and never engage with the actual reporting. Quoting the journalists by name, linking directly to the source, and making clear that the work came from a specific publication that is worth supporting all help.

Pushing back on bad press behavior

Readers also have legitimate roles in shaping what journalism looks like. Letters to the editor, feedback to ombudsmen or public editors (where they exist), and direct emails to journalists or editors all carry some weight. Most journalists genuinely want to know when they have made errors, when they have missed important context, or when their coverage has consequences they did not anticipate. Local outlets in particular often have small enough staffs that an email or a thoughtful letter actually reaches the people responsible for the work.

This is not a license for harassment or for relentless complaint about coverage one disagrees with on partisan grounds. Journalists who feel besieged tend to retreat into defensive postures that produce worse journalism, not better. But a citizen who reads carefully, identifies actual errors or omissions, and communicates them respectfully is providing a service to both the publication and the broader community. The accountability of journalism to the public is partly performed through this kind of citizen engagement.

The bottom line

The most direct citizen action for local journalism is to subscribe to or otherwise pay for it. The marginal subscriber matters at most local outlets in ways that the marginal national-publication subscriber does not. Practical priorities run from the most local and original-reporting operation outward. Most readers can support meaningful local-news ecosystems for the cost of a few streaming services, and the marginal civic value of doing so is high. Beyond paying, sharing journalism thoughtfully, engaging with the publication as an interested community member, and providing constructive feedback all matter. The ecosystem strengthens when readers behave like stakeholders rather than free riders.

What to read or watch next

• American Press Institute, research on subscription and membership patterns at local news organizations. Useful reader-side research on what motivates people to pay for local news and what makes those payments durable.
• Membership Puzzle Project, publications on the practice of building membership in journalism (membershippuzzle.org archive). The most influential body of work on the membership model and how it differs from traditional subscription approaches.
• Local Independent Online News (LION) Publishers, guidance for readers and supporters. Practical advice for readers who want to identify and support quality local digital news.

CHAPTER 14

As a Donor and Advocate

Beyond paying for journalism as a consumer, citizens with the resources and inclination to do so can support local journalism more substantially — through larger donations, through advocacy for journalism-supportive policy, and through participation in the institutions that connect philanthropy to local news. The opportunities are wider than many citizens realize, and the impact of donor support at well-chosen recipients can be substantial.

Direct donations to nonprofit outlets

The most straightforward form of donor support is a direct gift to a nonprofit local-news organization. Most nonprofit outlets accept tax-deductible donations of any size, with several tiers of recognition for larger contributions. The Texas Tribune, Mississippi Today, the Voice of San Diego, the Baltimore Banner, and hundreds of smaller operations all maintain donor programs. Some have endowments or campaigns aimed at building long-term sustainability; others rely primarily on annual giving. Donations to these operations, like other charitable contributions, can be deductible from federal income taxes for donors who itemize, and they often qualify for state-level tax benefits as well.

For donors who can give $1,000 or more, the direct relationship with a nonprofit newsroom can be particularly valuable. Mid-sized nonprofit outlets often offer thoughtful donor stewardship: site visits to newsrooms, briefings on coming projects, opportunities to engage with editors and reporters about coverage areas. This is not influence over editorial decisions — reputable nonprofits maintain firm separations between funding sources and editorial choices — but it is genuine engagement with the journalism and the institution producing it. Donors at this level often discover that their support is more impactful, dollar for dollar, than equivalent contributions to larger and better-funded national institutions.

Foundation-level giving

For donors with larger philanthropic resources, family foundations, donor-advised funds, and direct giving programs are options. Several intermediary organizations now exist specifically to channel philanthropic capital into local news: the American Journalism Project (mentioned in Chapter 10) provides venture-philanthropy support to local nonprofits; Press Forward (Chapter 12) coordinates major-donor commitments to the field; the Local Independent Online News (LION) Publishers organization helps direct support to independent operations. Working through these intermediaries allows donors to identify high-quality recipients without having to do the due-diligence work themselves.

Direct foundation giving has been one of the major sources of new resources for local news in recent years. The Knight Foundation has been the largest single funder of journalism over the past two decades. The MacArthur Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the Lenfest Institute, the Bezos Family Foundation, and many others have made significant commitments. Press Forward, launched in 2023, brings together more than two dozen major foundations under a coordinated strategy committing at least $500 million over five years. Individual major donors — including some who have made signature philanthropic commitments to journalism — have also been important.

Advocacy and policy

Donors and engaged citizens can also support local journalism through advocacy. The policy landscape affecting local news is more active than it has been in decades, with a mix of federal and state proposals, regulatory reviews of platform-publisher relationships, public-broadcasting funding fights, and discussions of tax credits or other supports for journalism. Citizens with views on these questions can communicate them to elected representatives, support advocacy organizations working on the issues, and participate in public comment processes when relevant. Some of these policy proposals are discussed in Chapter 16; the case for citizen engagement is that the policy environment will substantially shape what is possible for local journalism in the coming decade, and that environment will be shaped by the citizens who pay attention to it.

Advocacy works at multiple levels. Federal-level advocacy concerns programs like the Corporation for Public Broadcasting funding, possible tax credits or grant programs for local news, antitrust enforcement against platforms, and various regulatory questions about the relationship between platforms and publishers. State-level advocacy concerns initiatives like New Jersey’s Civic Information Consortium, similar consortia in other states, state-level grant programs, and laws affecting local-government transparency that supports journalism’s work. Local advocacy concerns school-district transparency, county-government open records, the budget choices that fund or starve civic institutions including local journalism. All of these are areas where citizen engagement can matter.

Volunteer and in-kind support

Citizens who lack large financial resources but have time, skills, or other resources can still support local journalism in concrete ways. Many local-news operations welcome volunteers for events, distribution, fundraising, technical support, and other functions. Lawyers can provide pro bono legal support — essential for operations that face freedom-of-information disputes, defamation claims, or contract negotiations. Accountants and finance professionals can help small operations navigate the business side of nonprofit management. Marketers, developers, and designers can contribute pro bono technical expertise. Local employers can advertise with neighborhood news outlets even when bigger platforms might offer cheaper rates.

Newsroom advisory boards and reader councils have become increasingly common as ways to integrate community input into journalism without compromising editorial independence. Citizens with relevant expertise — in education, health, criminal justice, business — can serve on these bodies and help inform coverage. The relationship is again not editorial control; it is the kind of expert advice that working journalists genuinely benefit from when covering complex local subjects.

Supporting the next generation

A particularly important form of support is investment in the people who will produce future journalism. Scholarships for journalism students from underrepresented backgrounds, internship stipends at local newsrooms, training programs for mid-career journalists, and support for journalism schools all contribute to the pipeline of local journalists. The Ida B. Wells Society for Investigative Reporting, the National Association of Black Journalists, the Asian American Journalists Association, the National Association of Hispanic Journalists, and Indigenous-focused journalism organizations all maintain training and support programs that strengthen the diversity and capacity of the field.

Beyond programs for individual journalists, broader institutional supports matter: journalism schools at public universities; community-college journalism programs; high-school media programs that develop early skills and interest. The pipeline of competent local journalists depends on these institutions, many of which themselves face funding pressures. Supporting journalism education, particularly at institutions serving diverse student populations, is an investment in local-news capacity ten and twenty years out.

The bottom line

Citizens with resources to give beyond their subscriptions have many ways to support local journalism: direct donations to nonprofit news organizations, foundation-level giving through intermediaries like the American Journalism Project and Press Forward, policy advocacy at multiple levels, volunteer and in-kind support, and investments in the journalism pipeline through scholarships and training programs. Each of these is a different kind of support and reaches different parts of the ecosystem. The coordinated philanthropic response of the past five years has been one of the most important developments in American journalism in decades; engaged citizens with means to contribute have unusual leverage in shaping how that response continues.

What to read or watch next

• Press Forward, donor-facing materials and grant data (pressforward.news). The largest current philanthropic coalition’s public materials and aggregated grant data.
• American Journalism Project, donor briefings and grantee reports. Detailed materials for individuals and foundations considering significant journalism investments.
• Knight Foundation, knightfoundation.org/journalism. The largest individual journalism funder’s public publications, including evaluations and case studies.
• Free Press, freepress.net. One of the major advocacy organizations on media-policy questions affecting local journalism, with current campaign materials and policy briefs.

CHAPTER 15

How to Evaluate a Local News Source

Not all things calling themselves local news are equally good, and in the era of ghost newspapers, partisan front operations, AI-generated content farms, and well-meaning but inadequate volunteer efforts, an engaged citizen needs basic skills for evaluating which local outlets are worth supporting and trusting. The evaluation is not always easy — some operations are quite skilled at appearing more substantial than they are — but a few practical questions can usually distinguish working journalism from its substitutes.

Question 1: Who is doing the reporting

The first question is whether actual journalists are producing actual original reporting. A good local-news outlet has named reporters whose bylines appear regularly on stories that include original interviews, observations, document review, and reporting from the community. You can usually find a staff page on the website. Look for: a list of journalists with names, photos, and brief biographies; a mix of beats represented (city hall, education, business, sports, courts, public safety); evidence that the reporters are based in or near the community they cover.

Warning signs include: stories without bylines, or bylined only generically (“Staff”); the same byline on every story across many topics; bylines on stories about places the reporter clearly does not know well; stories that turn out to be lightly rewritten press releases or reposted content from elsewhere. The presence of obvious AI-generated text — generic phrasing, factual confusion, suspicious uniformity of voice — is increasingly a problem and a major warning sign about the operation’s quality.

Question 2: What kind of reporting

The second question is what the reporting is. Working local journalism includes coverage of governmental bodies (city council, county commission, school board, planning commission), specific accountability work (investigations of public agencies, businesses, or institutions), routine community coverage (high-school events, business openings, obituaries, weather events), and analysis of local issues. The mix varies, and not every story is investigative — most aren’t — but a working operation will produce a range across these categories over time.

Warning signs include: operations that publish only commentary or opinion, with no original reporting; operations that recycle content from other sources without clear attribution; operations whose coverage is unusually uniform in its political slant or ideological framing; operations whose stories are mostly press-release-driven rather than independently developed.

Question 3: Who funds the operation

Most legitimate local-news outlets are reasonably transparent about their funding model. A nonprofit will usually publish its major funders, its annual report, and its Form 990 (the IRS filing required of public charities). A for-profit will be less detailed but should disclose ownership, particularly if owned by a hedge fund or private equity firm whose name might surprise readers. Subscriptions, advertising, philanthropy, and sponsorships are the legitimate funding categories; these can be combined in various proportions.

Warning signs include: operations that obscure their funding entirely; operations whose funders include political candidates, partisan organizations, or businesses with direct interests in the coverage being produced; operations that are unusually well-funded for their apparent staff size, suggesting the operation might be a front for something else. The latter has become increasingly common with the rise of “pink slime” operations — partisan-funded sites that look like local news but are actually political-influence operations. The Tow Center for Digital Journalism, NewsGuard, and others have documented hundreds of such sites in recent years.

Question 4: Editorial independence

Legitimate journalism organizations maintain firewalls between business and editorial functions: the people raising money do not direct the people doing reporting, advertisers and sponsors do not get favorable coverage in exchange for their support, and editorial decisions are made by editors based on news judgment. This separation is not always perfect, but it is observable in practice over time. A working operation will sometimes publish stories critical of its largest funders, its biggest advertisers, or political figures friendly to its ownership. An operation that conspicuously avoids any criticism of the people who fund it is exhibiting a problem.

Most legitimate outlets publish ethics policies, corrections procedures, and information about how they handle conflicts of interest. The Society of Professional Journalists Code of Ethics, the American Society of News Editors statement of principles, and similar professional standards inform the practices of most reputable operations. Membership in associations like the Online News Association, the Investigative Reporters and Editors organization, or the Local Independent Online News Publishers is also a positive signal.

Question 5: How errors are handled

All journalism makes errors; the question is what an outlet does about them. Working operations correct factual mistakes promptly, transparently, and conspicuously. They publish a corrections page or feed. They label updated stories with notes about what changed and when. They sometimes write retraction notes for stories whose central claims turn out to be wrong. The willingness to acknowledge error is, paradoxically, one of the strongest signals of journalism that can be trusted: an outlet that never publishes corrections is either making no mistakes (extremely unlikely) or hiding them (probable).

Look for the corrections page on the website. Check social media for examples of corrections being announced. Notice whether updated stories carry explanatory notes. Operations that handle errors openly are operations that are likely doing journalism honestly even when the errors are not visible.

Question 6: The community fit

Beyond these formal criteria, an underrated test is whether the journalism actually reflects the community it claims to cover. A local outlet should know the place: the names of local figures, the recent history, the quirks and divisions and concerns of the residents. The reporting should engage with the community on its own terms rather than parachuting into prefabricated national-political frames. The opinion pages should reflect a range of local voices rather than only nationally syndicated columnists. The events covered should be the events that actually matter to the community, including events that are unglamorous or specific.

If the local-news outlet you are evaluating reads like it could have been produced anywhere, by anyone, that is a warning sign. Real local journalism has texture; it sounds different from generic content because it knows things only locals know. Conversely, an outlet that is intensely locally rooted, even if smaller and rougher than a polished national publication, is often doing the work that matters most.

Putting it together

Few local outlets will score perfectly on every dimension, and a strong outlet may be weaker in some areas than others. The point of these questions is not to construct a checklist that filters out flawed operations but to develop a working sense of what good local journalism looks like and what its substitutes look like. With practice, the evaluation becomes intuitive: a citizen who has spent some time looking at local-news operations starts to recognize the patterns that distinguish working journalism from various forms of mimicry.

This evaluative skill matters because supporting the wrong operations — ghost newspapers running on shoestring staffs, partisan fronts pretending to be neutral, AI-generated content farms with local-sounding names — does not strengthen the local information ecosystem. It can actively weaken it, by directing reader attention and money away from working alternatives. The single most important skill for a citizen who wants to help local journalism is the ability to distinguish journalism that is working from journalism that has stopped working or never was.

The bottom line

Evaluating local-news sources is a learnable skill. The basic questions concern who is doing the reporting (named, accountable journalists), what kind of reporting is happening (original, varied, including governmental coverage and accountability work), how the operation is funded (transparently, with appropriate firewalls), how editorial independence is maintained, how errors are handled (openly), and whether the journalism actually fits the community. Working operations score well across these dimensions; ghost newspapers, partisan fronts, and AI-generated content farms typically fail one or several. Citizens who develop this evaluative skill direct their support — attention, subscriptions, donations, advocacy — toward operations that strengthen rather than substitute for real local journalism.

What to read or watch next

• Tow Center for Digital Journalism, research on “pink slime” and partisan local-news operations. The systematic mapping of partisan-funded sites that present themselves as neutral local news, with criteria for identifying them.
• NewsGuard, newsguardtech.com. Independent rating service that evaluates news websites against transparency and credibility criteria; useful as a reference even where one disagrees with specific ratings.
• Society of Professional Journalists, Code of Ethics (spj.org/ethicscode.asp). The widely-used framework that informs professional standards at most reputable journalism operations.
• Trust Project, thetrustproject.org. An international consortium of news organizations developing transparency indicators for journalism; useful for understanding what reputable operations disclose and why.

PART SIX

What Comes Next

The policy debate, the limits of substitutes, and the case for self-government with eyes open.

CHAPTER 16

Policy Options and Their Trade-offs

Beyond what individuals and philanthropies can do, the broader response to the local-journalism crisis will depend in significant part on policy: the laws, regulations, and government programs that shape what is possible for news organizations. The policy debate has intensified in recent years, with proposals at the federal, state, and local levels and a wide range of approaches. Each proposal has potential benefits and potential costs, and citizens deserve to evaluate them on their merits rather than dismiss the policy question entirely or accept any particular proposal uncritically.

The First Amendment baseline

Any discussion of policy and journalism must begin with the First Amendment. American constitutional law treats the press as a uniquely protected institution; government may not restrain publication, may not impose licensing, may not penalize publishers for reporting truthfully on matters of public concern. These protections are foundational to American journalism and to the broader system of free expression. Any policy proposal that would compromise them — by giving government licensing power over news organizations, by tying funding to government approval of editorial choices, by creating mechanisms for political officials to influence what is reported — should be regarded with deep suspicion.

This principle does not mean that government cannot support journalism at all; it means that the support must operate without the strings that would compromise editorial independence. The model of public broadcasting, in which federal funding flows through the Corporation for Public Broadcasting under structural arrangements designed to insulate editorial decisions from political control, illustrates how government support can coexist with editorial independence. Most serious policy proposals for local-journalism support attempt to preserve similar firewalls.

Postal subsidies and historical precedents

It is worth noting that government support for journalism is not a new American practice. The Postal Service Act of 1792, signed by George Washington, established preferential mail rates for newspapers — in effect, a major federal subsidy to the press, justified explicitly by the importance of an informed citizenry to self-government. These postal subsidies persisted in various forms for two centuries and were a substantial component of the American newspaper economy through much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The Newspaper Preservation Act of 1970, mentioned in Chapter 4, similarly represented a deliberate policy choice to protect newspaper journalism through targeted antitrust exemption.

The historical precedents matter because they undermine the claim that any government support for journalism would be unprecedented or constitutionally suspect. The American tradition is one of careful, structurally-bounded support for the press as a civic institution, alongside robust First Amendment protections against government interference with content. The current policy debate is, in significant respects, about whether and how to update those traditional supports for the digital era.

Federal proposals: tax credits and direct support

Several federal proposals have been seriously discussed in recent years. The Local Journalism Sustainability Act, introduced multiple times in Congress, proposed a package of tax credits: a credit for subscribers to local newspapers, a credit for small businesses advertising in local outlets, and a payroll-tax credit for hiring journalists. The Journalism Competition and Preservation Act would permit small news publishers to negotiate collectively with technology platforms over the use of their content, an antitrust exemption modeled loosely on the Newspaper Preservation Act. Various proposals have considered direct grant programs administered through entities modeled on the National Endowment for the Arts.

Each proposal has distinct trade-offs. Tax credits are administratively simple and operate at scale but provide limited per-recipient support and tend to favor existing operations over new ones. Antitrust exemptions for collective bargaining could meaningfully shift platform-publisher relationships but raise concerns about how to define eligibility (which publishers count?) and about the long-term sustainability of the bargaining outcomes. Direct grant programs can be targeted at the highest-need cases but raise the most acute First Amendment concerns about how funding decisions are made.

State-level experiments

Several states have moved more decisively than the federal government. The New Jersey Civic Information Consortium, established by state law in 2018, was the first state-government-funded entity dedicated to local-civic-information support; it administers grants to local news, civic-engagement, and information-access projects through a structure designed to prevent direct political influence. California enacted a series of measures including a journalism-payroll tax credit and exploratory grants. Illinois passed legislation supporting local-news employment through tax incentives. Other states have considered similar approaches.

The state-level experiments have shown that public support for journalism can be administered with reasonable independence and that targeted programs can produce concrete benefits to local-news operations. They have also shown that political controversy is unavoidable: every program faces scrutiny over which outlets qualify, how funding decisions are made, and whether particular ideological orientations are being favored or disfavored. The programs that have survived this scrutiny have done so by adopting clear, neutral eligibility criteria and by maintaining structural separations between government and editorial decisions.

Public broadcasting funding

As noted earlier, federal funding for public broadcasting through the Corporation for Public Broadcasting has been one of the most consistent forms of government support for journalism, particularly local journalism in rural areas. The CPB receives a federal appropriation, which it then distributes to public-radio and public-television stations under formulas designed to support smaller-market operations disproportionately. The total federal contribution is small compared to the total budget of public broadcasting (most revenue comes from listener support, foundation grants, and corporate underwriting), but it is particularly important for stations in rural and lower-income markets where private fundraising cannot fully support operations.

Periodic political controversies about CPB funding have been a recurring feature of American media policy for decades. Proposals to eliminate or sharply reduce federal funding have come from multiple administrations and Congresses; defenders have generally prevailed in preserving the program, sometimes with reduced appropriations. The 2025 debate over public-broadcasting funding has been particularly intense, with proposals for substantial cuts that would, if enacted, have significant effects on local-news capacity in many smaller markets. The Medill State of Local News Report 2025 specifically discussed this scenario as a meaningful risk factor for the news-desert problem in coming years.

Platform regulation and antitrust

A separate set of policy questions involves the technology platforms that have captured most of the digital advertising market. Antitrust enforcement against Google’s advertising-technology business, which the U.S. Department of Justice prevailed in a 2025 federal court ruling that found Google had monopolized parts of the digital ad-tech stack, could over time alter the share of digital advertising revenue captured by intermediaries versus publishers. Various regulatory proposals have addressed how platforms display, monetize, and compensate for journalism content. The Australian News Media Bargaining Code, enacted in 2021, required platforms to negotiate with publishers over compensation; the model has been studied as a possible template elsewhere, though its actual effects on publisher revenue have been mixed.

Platform regulation is contested terrain. Critics from across the political spectrum worry about government determining what counts as journalism for purposes of regulatory benefits, about the structural advantages such regulations might give to large incumbents over new entrants, and about possible First Amendment problems with content-based requirements. Supporters argue that the current platform-publisher relationship has produced systematic underpayment of journalism’s actual economic contribution and that some form of corrective intervention is necessary. The debate is unlikely to be resolved soon, but it has intensified and produced concrete policy actions at home and abroad.

The honest trade-offs

All of these policy options involve real trade-offs that engaged citizens should understand rather than dismiss. Government support for journalism, however structured, creates dependencies that could be exploited politically; the best designs reduce but cannot eliminate this risk. Targeted programs benefit some outlets and not others; the eligibility criteria embed substantive judgments. Tax credits cost revenue and benefit those who already itemize or who already pay taxes. Platform regulations alter the structure of important markets and can have unintended consequences. There is no policy option that is purely beneficial without costs.

That said, the alternative — doing nothing while the existing local-journalism ecosystem continues to collapse — is not a neutral default. It is a choice with its own consequences: more news deserts, more municipal corruption, more polarization, more space for misinformation, more attenuated democratic engagement in the affected communities. Citizens evaluating the policy debate should weigh proposed interventions not against an idealized free-press status quo but against the trajectory the country is actually on if the policy environment does not change.

The bottom line

Policy responses to the local-journalism crisis face real First Amendment constraints but also real American precedents for government support of the press, from the postal subsidies of 1792 forward. Current proposals include tax credits for subscribers and journalism employment, antitrust modifications for platform-publisher bargaining, direct grant programs, and continued public-broadcasting funding. Several states have moved ahead with experiments. Each option involves genuine trade-offs around editorial independence, eligibility criteria, sustainability, and unintended consequences. The choice is not between government action and a neutral status quo; it is between alternative policy paths each of which will shape what kind of local-news ecosystem the country has a decade from now.

What to read or watch next

• Steven Waldman, The Information Needs of Communities (FCC, 2011) and subsequent writings. The most influential framework for thinking about journalism policy in the digital era.
• Paul Starr, The Creation of the Media (Basic Books, 2004). Comprehensive history of how American media policy from the founding era through the twentieth century shaped journalism’s development.
• Free Press, policy reports and proposals (freepress.net). One of the leading advocacy organizations on media policy, with detailed proposals and analysis of pending legislation.
• Brookings Institution and the German Marshall Fund, research on platform-publisher policy. Sober analytical work on the trade-offs involved in platform regulation and the lessons from international experiences like the Australian News Media Bargaining Code.

CHAPTER 17

The Limits of Substitutes

As local journalism has declined, various other information sources have stepped in to fill some of the void. Social media groups, nextdoor-style platforms, podcasts, individual newsletter writers, citizen-journalism efforts, AI-summarized civic information, and old-fashioned word of mouth have all expanded their roles in many communities. These are not always bad substitutes, and some genuinely do useful work. But they are not equivalent to professional local journalism, and the differences matter. Honest acknowledgment of what substitutes can and cannot do is part of an accurate understanding of the situation.

Social media as local information

In many communities that have lost their local newspapers, neighborhood Facebook groups, Nextdoor, and similar platforms have become the dominant local-information source. People post about what they have seen, share photos of incidents, ask questions about local issues, recommend businesses, and report on events that the now-closed paper would once have covered. The volume of activity in these forums is real, and they reach community members in ways that even working newspapers sometimes did not. They are accessible, free, current, and fundamentally democratic in that anyone can post.

They are also, in important ways, not journalism. The information that circulates is not verified before posting; it is not produced by people whose professional duty is accuracy; it is not subject to editorial standards or correction processes; it is not produced with consideration of its civic implications. Posts that turn out to be wrong, misleading, or based on misunderstanding can spread widely before any correction reaches the same audience. Decisions about what topics receive attention are made by whoever feels like posting, in ways that can systematically miss issues that affect community members who are not active on the platform. The information environment is participatory but not journalistic, and the differences are real even when the participation is well-intentioned.

Citizen journalism

A more deliberate substitute is what is sometimes called citizen journalism: nonprofessional residents who deliberately take on journalistic roles, attending meetings, filing public-records requests, writing reports for blogs or community newsletters, sometimes producing video. The best citizen journalists have done genuinely important work, particularly in communities where professional journalism has disappeared. They know their communities deeply, they care about getting things right, and they often have time and persistence that professionals on tight schedules cannot match.

Citizen journalism is also, in most cases, sharply limited in what it can accomplish. The work is unpaid or poorly paid, which constrains how much time can be devoted to it; few residents can take a year to investigate a public corruption case as a true vocation. The legal infrastructure of journalism — First Amendment protections in court, libel insurance, contract templates, public-records expertise — is generally not available to individual citizen reporters in the way it is to staff of established outlets. Editorial expertise — the discipline of fact-checking, sourcing, framing, and follow-up — develops over time in professional contexts and is harder to acquire as a sometime hobby. Citizen journalism complements but does not substitute for professional reporting.

Network and AI substitutes

In recent years, two newer substitute categories have emerged. National networks of local-content sites — Patch, Axios Local, the various states-newsrooms entities — produce content with local focus from often-distant editorial offices. As discussed in Chapter 11, these networks are doing real work, but their local rootedness is variable; a network site staffed by one writer covering a metropolitan region cannot match the depth that a fully-staffed local newsroom once provided.

More recently, AI-generated local content has begun appearing in significant volumes. Some operations now produce automated summaries of local sports events, real-estate transactions, or government meetings using language models trained on broader data. The quality varies wildly: a well-designed AI summary of a school-board agenda can be useful and accurate; a sloppy AI rewrite of a press release can produce confident misinformation. The Federal Trade Commission and various journalism organizations have raised concerns about AI-generated content posing as human reporting, particularly when that content is presented to readers without disclosure. The field is evolving rapidly, and the appropriate role for AI in local-news production is one of the most active questions in journalism today. What is clear is that AI cannot substitute for the human accountability work that defines journalism in its traditional sense; whatever role AI plays, it must be embedded in a human editorial structure that can verify, contextualize, and correct.

The friend-of-a-friend network

In many communities, the substitution that fills the largest gap is simply word of mouth: people learn about local affairs from friends, neighbors, coworkers, family members. This has always been one source of community information, and it is in many ways durable and resilient. People know things they have heard from people they know; they pass them on; the information circulates. In communities with thick social networks, this kind of information transmission can be remarkably effective for many purposes.

It is also, however, structurally limited. Word-of-mouth networks reach the people who are connected and miss the people who are not; they tend to spread quickly through some social groups and slowly through others; they are vulnerable to systematic distortion as information passes through chains of retelling; they reflect the perspectives of the speakers more than the underlying reality. Some communities are well-served by their networks; others, particularly newcomers, immigrants, and those outside the dominant social circles, are not. And no word-of-mouth network can produce the kind of coverage that requires sustained attention to bureaucratic detail — reading the budget documents, tracking the procurement contracts, attending the unglamorous meetings where decisions are made.

Why the substitutes don’t fully replace journalism

Across all of these substitutes, common limitations recur. The substitutes do not have the institutional accountability that distinguishes journalism: no editor, no corrections process, no professional norms about distinguishing reporting from opinion, no commitment to coverage that the audience would not have asked for but needs. The substitutes do not have the institutional persistence that allows long stories to be followed across years, beats to be developed slowly, and source relationships to deepen over time. The substitutes do not have the legal infrastructure that supports investigative work, including First Amendment protections, public-records litigation, and libel defense. And the substitutes do not have the trained professional judgment that distinguishes journalism from other forms of communication — the discipline of asking who is harmed by a story, who is helped, what the public interest is, what the alternative explanations are, what the responsible person has to say.

None of this is to say that substitutes are valueless. Many of them do real work, often in communities where nothing else is happening. But it is to say that the substitutes have not, despite a decade of optimistic predictions, replaced the journalism that has been lost. The loss is real, the substitutes are partial, and the gap that remains is the gap that the rest of this guide has been trying to characterize.

The bottom line

When local journalism disappears, various substitutes step in: social media groups, citizen journalists, networked-content sites, AI-generated content, and word-of-mouth networks. Each does some useful work in some communities. None replaces what working local journalism provided. The substitutes lack the institutional accountability, persistence, legal infrastructure, and professional judgment that distinguish journalism as a civic institution. Honest discussion of the local-news crisis acknowledges both that the substitutes exist and matter and that they have not closed the gap. The aspiration to a working civic information ecosystem requires substitutes plus journalism, not substitutes instead of journalism.

What to read or watch next

• danah boyd, It’s Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens (Yale, 2014). The most influential analysis of how social-media networks function as information environments and what they do and don’t accomplish.
• Jay Rosen, PressThink (pressthink.org). Long-running blog by the NYU professor of journalism, with extensive analysis of how citizen journalism, AI tools, and other substitutes interact with professional press functions.
• Joshua Benton, Nieman Lab, ongoing reporting on AI in journalism. The most consistent coverage of how AI-generated content is appearing in local news, what is working, and what is going wrong.

CHAPTER 18

Why It Matters for Self-Government

This guide has been substantially descriptive: what local journalism is, how it has been funded, how it is collapsing, what is being built to replace it, what citizens can do. The descriptive work is necessary because the situation is poorly understood by most Americans, including many who care about civic life. But the underlying reason any of this matters is normative: self-government depends on an informed citizenry, and an informed citizenry depends on institutions that produce accurate information about public affairs at the level of government people interact with most directly. When those institutions disappear, self-government does not disappear with them — the elections still happen, the meetings still meet — but it becomes substantially harder for citizens to do the work that self-government requires.

What self-government requires

Self-government, in the American constitutional tradition, is the practice of citizens directing their own communities through elected representatives, juries, town meetings, ballot measures, and the broader fabric of civic engagement that surrounds these formal mechanisms. It requires several things from its participants. It requires that citizens have access to accurate information about public affairs. It requires that citizens have ways to communicate with one another about that information. It requires that citizens have time, energy, and inclination to engage. And it requires institutions that connect public deliberation to public decision-making.

Most of these requirements concern things other than journalism. Citizens need education, leisure time, social networks, civic associations, schools, religious institutions, and the broader infrastructure of community life. But journalism plays a particular role: it is the institution that produces, on a regular and accountable basis, the factual record of what is happening in public affairs. Without that record, the other components of self-government function less well. Citizens can be educated, energetic, and well-meaning, but if they do not know what their school board did last week or what their state legislature passed last month, their participation in self-government is operating on the basis of less information than it could.

The asymmetry of decline

One of the troubling features of the local-journalism collapse is that it has unequal effects on different kinds of citizens and different kinds of issues. Citizens who are well-resourced, highly educated, and connected to professional networks tend to retain more access to high-quality information even as the broader ecosystem deteriorates: they read national publications, they know people who follow specific issues, they pay for premium subscriptions, they have time to seek out reliable sources. Citizens who are less resourced — working multiple jobs, less connected to professional networks, more dependent on whatever local information is freely available — are more affected when local journalism disappears.

Issues are similarly differentially affected. National political controversies receive abundant coverage; local accountability questions, particularly those affecting marginal communities, receive less. The decisions that affect daily life — zoning, public works, school district policy, county budgets, local police practice, environmental compliance — are precisely the decisions that local journalism historically covered and that suffer most when local journalism disappears. The result is an information environment in which national political conflict is hyperdocumented while local public affairs go increasingly unreported. Citizens reading widely about national politics may have the impression that they are well-informed; they may, simultaneously, know less about their own communities than their parents or grandparents did at comparable life stages.

Local journalism and federalism

The American constitutional system is deliberately federalist: significant authority resides at the state and local levels, and many of the most important decisions affecting daily life are made by state and local officials. This design assumes that citizens can hold their state and local governments accountable, which in turn assumes that information about state and local government is available. The collapse of local journalism does not change the formal structure of federalism, but it changes the practical reality: federalism without local accountability journalism becomes an arrangement in which substantial public decisions are made with diminished public oversight.

The implications for federalism go deeper than mere accountability. American politics has nationalized substantially over the past several decades, partly because national-level information is widely available while local information is not. Voters increasingly cast their votes for state and local offices on the basis of national party affiliation rather than local issues; split-ticket voting has declined; local elections track national patterns more tightly than they once did. Some of this nationalization reflects deeper changes in American political culture, but the research summarized in earlier chapters indicates that the loss of local journalism has been a measurable contributor. The federalist assumption that local elections turn on local considerations becomes harder to sustain when there is no local journalism producing information about local considerations.

Local journalism and trust

Trust in journalism, as measured by various surveys, has declined substantially in recent decades, particularly among certain political and demographic groups. Some of this decline reflects genuine problems with journalism’s practice; some reflects changes in how citizens consume information; some reflects active efforts to delegitimize journalism as an institution. The complexity of the trust picture is real.

One consistent finding across polling, however, is that trust in local journalism remains substantially higher than trust in national journalism, across nearly all political and demographic groups. Pew Research Center data from recent years has repeatedly shown that Americans report higher trust in their local news outlets than in national outlets, and that this differential persists across the political spectrum. The implication is that local journalism, even in its diminished state, retains a kind of civic legitimacy that national journalism has partly lost. This is both an opportunity and a vulnerability: the opportunity is that local journalism may be uniquely positioned to address the broader trust crisis facing the press; the vulnerability is that the institution best positioned to do so is the one most rapidly disappearing.

The longer view

The American system of self-government has survived many shocks, and the local-journalism crisis, however serious, will not in itself be the end of American democracy. But the longer view of the relationship between journalism and self-government is sobering. The institutions that have historically produced accurate, locally-rooted public information are being depleted faster than they are being replaced. The substitutes that are emerging are inadequate in measurable ways. The policy environment is contested. The philanthropic response is meaningful but partial. The trajectory is not encouraging, and it is not self-correcting.

Citizens who have read this far have a better-than-average understanding of what is happening and why. The hope of this guide is that better understanding will support better citizen action: more informed subscriptions and donations, more engaged advocacy, more thoughtful policy debate, more willingness to recognize the substitutes for what they are and what they are not. American self-government has always required active citizens. It now requires active citizens who understand that the information environment they take for granted is not stable, that what made it work is breaking down, and that what comes next will reflect what citizens choose to support and demand. Local journalism is not someone else’s problem; it is a piece of the public infrastructure that self-government runs on, and it is in our hands to repair, replace, or watch erode.

The bottom line

Self-government depends on accurate information about public affairs at the level of government people most directly interact with. Local journalism is the institution that historically produced this information on a regular, accountable basis. Its collapse has unequal effects, hitting less-resourced citizens and local issues harder than well-resourced citizens and national issues. Federalism without local accountability journalism is a different arrangement than the constitutional design assumed. Trust in local journalism remains higher than trust in most other institutions, including national journalism, providing both opportunity and vulnerability. The trajectory is not self-correcting; what comes next will depend on what citizens choose to support and demand. Local journalism is a piece of the public infrastructure of self-government, and it is in our hands to repair, replace, or let erode.

What to read or watch next

• Robert Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (Simon & Schuster, 2000) and Our Kids (2015). The broader institutional context within which local journalism is one of several civic institutions in decline.
• Yuval Levin, A Time to Build: From Family and Community to Congress and the Campus (Basic Books, 2020). A compelling argument about institutions and self-government from a different political vantage point, with implications for how to think about journalism’s civic role.
• Pew Research Center, Americans’ Views of the News Media (recurring report). Annual polling on trust in national versus local journalism, with detailed demographic and political breakdowns.
• Daniel J. Moskowitz, research on local news and the nationalization of American politics. The empirical literature on how local-journalism availability shapes the relationship between local and national political behavior.

Appendix A: Glossary

The following terms appear throughout this guide and in the broader local-journalism literature.

• News desert: A U.S. county with no locally-based source of original news. The Medill Local News Initiative maintains the standard mapping; current count is 213 counties.
• Single-source county: A U.S. county with only one news source remaining. There are currently 1,524 such counties in the United States.
• Ghost newspaper: A newspaper that continues to publish under its familiar masthead but has been so reduced in staff and original reporting that it produces little substantive local journalism.
• Pink slime: Operations that present themselves as local news outlets but are actually partisan-funded political-influence operations. Documented by the Tow Center for Digital Journalism and others.
• Daily newspaper: Historically, a paper that printed and distributed every day of the week. Today, most operations classified as dailies print fewer than seven days; only about a third of U.S. “dailies” still print all seven.
• Joint Operating Agreement (JOA): An arrangement under the Newspaper Preservation Act of 1970 in which two papers in a city share business operations while keeping editorial staffs separate. Most have ended.
• Programmatic advertising: Automated, algorithm-driven auction systems for selling digital advertising space in real time as users load web pages. Has substantially reduced the share of advertising revenue captured by publishers.
• Display advertising: Traditional advertisements with images, placed on specific pages — the bulk of newspaper advertising historically, distinct from classifieds.
• Classified advertising: Small line-rate ads organized by category (jobs, real estate, automobiles, etc.); the most profitable single category for newspapers historically, now largely lost to digital substitutes.
• Nonprofit news (501(c)(3)): News organization legally organized as a charitable corporation; donations are tax-deductible; no profits distributed to owners; mission-driven.
• Membership: A revenue model in which readers contribute to support a publication’s mission rather than paying for content access; emphasizes ongoing community relationship.
• Subscription: Traditional model in which readers pay a recurring fee for content access.
• Paywall: Technical mechanism limiting access to digital content to paying subscribers; varies from hard (no access without payment) to metered (limited free articles per month).
• Local Reporting Network: ProPublica program that funds experienced investigative reporters embedded at local newsrooms to pursue defined accountability projects.
• Report for America: National service program that places early-career journalists at local newsrooms to cover defined beats, with shared salary funding.
• Press Forward: Major philanthropic coalition launched in 2023, committing over $500 million over five years to local journalism support.
• Civic Information Consortium: State-funded entities, pioneered in New Jersey, that administer public grants to local news and civic-information projects under structures designed to preserve editorial independence.
• Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB): Federally-chartered nonprofit that distributes federal appropriations to public-radio and public-television stations under formulas favoring smaller markets.
• Hedge-fund-owned newspaper: A newspaper acquired by an investment fund (most prominently Alden Global Capital) and operated for cash flow extraction; typically associated with severe staff cuts and reduced editorial ambition.
• News-Media Bargaining Code: Australian law requiring digital platforms to negotiate with news publishers over the use of their content; has been studied as a possible template for similar laws elsewhere.
• Patch and similar networks: National operations producing local-content sites across many communities; central editorial infrastructure with locally-focused publication.
• Watch List county: Counties identified by the Medill State of Local News Project as at high risk of becoming news deserts within the next decade. There are currently 250 such counties.

Appendix B: Quick-Reference Resources

Tracking the local-news landscape

• Medill Local News Initiative: localnewsinitiative.northwestern.edu — the leading research project on the U.S. local-news landscape; annual State of Local News Reports; county-by-county maps.
• Pew Research Center, Newspaper Fact Sheet: pewresearch.org — long-running data series on U.S. newspaper industry trends, circulation, employment, and revenue.
• Nieman Lab: niemanlab.org — the leading professional publication covering the future of journalism, with extensive coverage of local-news developments.
• Poynter: poynter.org — nonprofit journalism institute with regular coverage of industry trends, business models, and ethical questions.

Major nonprofit news organizations and intermediaries

• ProPublica: propublica.org — leading investigative nonprofit newsroom; Local Reporting Network embeds journalists at local outlets.
• American Journalism Project: theajp.org — venture-philanthropy intermediary funding local nonprofit newsrooms; case studies and grantee reports.
• Press Forward: pressforward.news — major philanthropic coalition with state affiliates; current-grants information.
• Institute for Nonprofit News (INN): inn.org — trade association for nonprofit news organizations; member directory; annual INN Index.
• Local Independent Online News (LION) Publishers: lionpublishers.com — trade association for independent local digital publishers.
• Report for America: reportforamerica.org — national service program placing journalists in local newsrooms; current placements; annual impact reports.

Foundations active in journalism funding

• Knight Foundation: knightfoundation.org/journalism — the largest individual journalism funder in the United States; extensive publications and grant data.
• MacArthur Foundation: macfound.org — major journalism funder, particularly for nonprofit news and accountability journalism.
• Lenfest Institute: lenfestinstitute.org — Philadelphia-based foundation focused on local journalism transformation; runs the Knight-Lenfest Local News Transformation Fund.
• Joyce Foundation: joycefdn.org — supports journalism and civic-engagement work, particularly in the Great Lakes region.

Advocacy and policy organizations

• Free Press: freepress.net — advocacy organization on media-policy questions; campaigns; policy briefs.
• Public Knowledge: publicknowledge.org — policy organization focused on technology and media; analysis of platform-publisher questions.
• PEN America: pen.org — free-expression organization with significant work on local-journalism issues.

For evaluating individual outlets

• NewsGuard: newsguardtech.com — independent rating service for news websites against transparency and credibility criteria.
• Trust Project: thetrustproject.org — international consortium developing transparency indicators for journalism.
• Tow Center for Digital Journalism: towcenter.columbia.edu — academic research, including on partisan-funded local-news operations.
• Society of Professional Journalists Code of Ethics: spj.org/ethicscode.asp — widely-used framework informing professional standards.

Research and data

• State of Local News Report (annual, Medill): localnewsinitiative.northwestern.edu/projects/state-of-local-news/ — the most comprehensive annual data on the U.S. local-news landscape.
• UNC Hussman School earlier news-desert work: Penny Abernathy’s original mapping reports; available through the UNC Hussman School archives.
• Pew “State of the News Media” archive: pewresearch.org/journalism — historical reports through 2016; subsequent fact sheets.

Appendix C: References

Citations follow Chicago Notes-Bibliography style. The following are works directly drawn upon in this guide; works mentioned only as suggested further reading are listed in the chapter “What to read or watch next” sections rather than repeated here.

Books

Abernathy, Penelope Muse. The Expanding News Desert. Chapel Hill: Center for Innovation and Sustainability in Local Media, UNC Hussman School of Journalism and Media, 2018.

Conte, Andrew. Death of the Daily News: How Citizen Gatekeepers Can Save Local Journalism. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2022.

Hamilton, James T. All the News That’s Fit to Sell: How the Market Transforms Information into News. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004.

Jones, Alex S. Losing the News: The Future of the News That Feeds Democracy. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009.

McChesney, Robert, and John Nichols. The Death and Life of American Journalism: The Media Revolution That Will Begin the World Again. New York: Nation Books, 2010.

Putnam, Robert D. Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000.

Starr, Paul. The Creation of the Media: Political Origins of Modern Communications. New York: Basic Books, 2004.

Sullivan, Margaret. Ghosting the News: Local Journalism and the Crisis of American Democracy. New York: Columbia Global Reports, 2020.

Taplin, Jonathan. Move Fast and Break Things: How Facebook, Google, and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy. New York: Little, Brown, 2017.

Wu, Tim. The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads. New York: Knopf, 2016.

Articles and academic studies

Coppins, McKay. “A Secretive Hedge Fund Is Gutting Newsrooms.” The Atlantic, October 14, 2021.

Gao, Pengjie, Chang Lee, and Dermot Murphy. “Financing Dies in Darkness? The Impact of Newspaper Closures on Public Finance.” Journal of Financial Economics 135, no. 2 (2020): 445–467.

Hayes, Danny, and Jennifer L. Lawless. “The Decline of Local News and Its Effects: New Evidence from Longitudinal Data.” Journal of Politics 80, no. 1 (2018): 332–336.

Moskowitz, Daniel J. “Local News, Information, and the Nationalization of U.S. Elections.” American Political Science Review 115, no. 1 (2021): 114–129.

Seamans, Robert, and Feng Zhu. “Responses to Entry in Multi-Sided Markets: The Impact of Craigslist on Local Newspapers.” Management Science 60, no. 2 (2014): 476–493.

Shaker, Lee. “Dead Newspapers and Citizens’ Civic Engagement.” Political Communication 31, no. 1 (2014): 131–148.

Reports

ISBA and PricewaterhouseCoopers. Programmatic Supply Chain Transparency Study. London: Incorporated Society of British Advertisers, 2020.

Medill Local News Initiative. The State of Local News 2024 Report. Evanston, IL: Medill School of Journalism, Northwestern University, October 23, 2024.

Medill Local News Initiative. The State of Local News 2025 Report. Evanston, IL: Medill School of Journalism, Northwestern University, October 20, 2025.

Pew Research Center. “Newspaper Fact Sheet.” Annual update. Washington, DC: Pew Research Center.

Waldman, Steven. The Information Needs of Communities: The Changing Media Landscape in a Broadband Age. Washington, DC: Federal Communications Commission, 2011.

Online and trade sources

American Journalism Project. theajp.org.

Institute for Nonprofit News. inn.org.

Knight Foundation Journalism Program. knightfoundation.org/journalism.

Local Independent Online News (LION) Publishers. lionpublishers.com.

Nieman Journalism Lab. niemanlab.org.

Poynter Institute. poynter.org.

Press Forward. pressforward.news.

ProPublica. propublica.org.

Report for America. reportforamerica.org.

— End of Guide —

The Citizen’s Fact Guide to Local Journalism

2026 Edition