“We are living through a historic transformation in how news is consumed, produced, distributed and paid for,” Tim Franklin said.
This year alone, 127 newspapers closed in the United States, an average of nearly two per week, according to Northwestern University’s Medill State of Local News Report 2024. So-called “news deserts” rose to 206 this year from 204 in 2023.
Despite the demand for local news, news deserts “are counties with no newspaper, no digital-only news site, no ethic media, and no public radio,” Franklin said.
Nearly 54 million Americans now live in counties that have limited or no access to local news, Medill finds. Some 1,561 U.S. counties have just one news source.
Local news has lost 60% of its advertising revenue in the past decade, and 80% over the last 20 years. “The business model for local news has imploded,” Franklin said. “We’re seeing a rapid acceleration in the loss of local newspapers around the country, and it’s leading to an expansion of news deserts.”
Franklin, director of the Local News Initiative at Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism, Media, and Integrated Marketing Communications, was PRSA’s guest on Nov. 19 for Strategies & Tactics Live on LinkedIn.
The consequences of news deserts “are profound for communities and ultimately for democracy,” Franklin said. Without the watchdog of journalism to inform the citizenry in news deserts, government spending tends to increase, as do borrowing costs and corruption, he said.
“Research has also shown that there’s less civic engagement and participation” when communities lack local news sources, Franklin said. “We see lower turnout in local elections, fewer candidates running for local office and more straight-ticket balloting.”
News haves and have-nots
Across the country, an emerging issue “not just in society but in local news, is the gap between the news haves and the news have-nots,” Franklin said. In news deserts and counties vulnerable to the trend, populations are less educated, “tend to skew older and are suffering from a higher poverty rate,” he said.
John Elsasser, editor-in-chief of PRSA’s award-winning Strategies & Tactics publication and host of S&T Live, asked Franklin what bright spots appear in Medill’s report.
“At the same time that we’re seeing the loss of newspapers, for the first time since we began keeping statistics in 2021, we’ve seen a net increase in digital-only local news sites,” Franklin said. “It’s a very encouraging sign, but we need to wait another year or two to see if it’s an emerging trend.”
According to Medill’s report, 258 local news sites were created in the United States during the last five years. There’s been a net increase of 81 stand-alone, local digital news sites, the biggest one-year gain in recent years. That gain, however, includes 30 newspapers that converted from print to digital. Nearly 90% of these news sites are in metro areas, not in hard-hit rural counties.
“When we lack vetted, verified local news and information,” Franklin said, “misinformation fills the void.”
Here, Franklin discusses what gives him optimism about the future of local news:
Illustration credit: sasa visual
