For more on this topic, join us for the next Strategies & Tactics Live for a conversation about news deserts and the changing local media landscape with Editor-in-Chief John Elsasser and Tim Franklin, the John M. Mutz Chair in Local News at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, Media, and Integrated Marketing Communications. Tune in on LinkedIn on Nov. 19 at 1 p.m. ET.
“News deserts,” or counties that lack a locally based source of local news, grew in number this year as 127 newspapers shut down, the latest “Medill State of Local News Report” from Northwestern University finds.
Since 2005, the nation has lost more than one-third of its newspapers, some 3,300 in all. During the past 12 months, U.S. newspapers closed at a rate of nearly two and a half per week. As a result, the number of news-desert counties rose to 208 this year from 204 in 2023.
The number of counties with only one news source increased to 1,563. More than half of the nation’s 3,143 counties have little to no local news, and the Medill report finds that nearly 55 million people in those counties have limited or no access to local news.
Researchers also found a net increase of 81 stand-alone, local digital news sites in the last 12 months, the biggest gain in recent years. However, that gain includes 30 newspapers that converted from print to digital. Nearly 90% of those digital sites that offer local news reporting are in metro areas, not in hard-hit, rural counties.
“This research shows that the crisis in local news is deepening, and fewer Americans have access to news they need about their communities to be informed citizens,” said Tim Franklin, director of the Medill Local News Initiative. But the report sees “glimmers of hope in the growing number of local, digital news sites across the country.”
[Photo credit: TGEN]
