The collapse of local news

The collapse of local news refers to the closure of local newspapers and the loss of local reporting jobs across the United States since the mid-2000s, which has left many counties with one local news source or none. Northwestern University’s Medill School reported in October 2025 that 213 counties were news deserts, that another 1,524 counties had only one remaining news source, and that the country has lost close to 3,500 newspapers since 2005. Research links these losses to lower turnout, fewer candidates, less split-ticket voting, and higher municipal borrowing costs, though the effects are measured in specific places and are modest in size.

In plain words: many towns no longer have a reporter who covers the city council, the school board, or the county budget. When that happens, fewer people vote in local races, fewer candidates run, and officials face less scrutiny. New websites and nonprofits have started, but mostly in cities, and not fast enough to replace what was lost.

This page sets out the measurements, the evidence on effects, the explanations for the decline, the policies tried, and the limits of what an educational framework like My Vote Forward can do. Related pages: Misinformation, Low turnout in local elections, Polarization, and Published releases.

The problem, defined precisely

The local news problem is the loss of independent, regular reporting about local institutions in a defined geographic area. The definition depends on what counts as “local,” what counts as “news,” and how a community is bounded.

Defined terms.

• News desert. Medill describes news deserts as “areas with extremely limited access to local news” and, in its demographic analysis, as counties that “have no local news source”.⁠¹ Medill measures at the county level using 2010 county definitions.⁠¹
• One-source county (watch list county). A county “at risk of losing their only local news source,” in Medill’s terms.⁠¹
• Local news source. In Medill’s work, a newspaper, digital site, public broadcaster, or ethnic outlet that regularly produces original local reporting. Outlets that only republish content do not count.
• Newsroom employment. Pew Research Center uses Bureau of Labor Statistics Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics data for reporters, editors, photographers, and videographers in news industries.⁠²
• Accountability reporting. Coverage of how public institutions spend money and exercise authority. It is the function most often cited as at risk, and it is the hardest to count.

What the problem is not. It is not a claim that national media are worthless, that every closed newspaper did strong accountability work, or that social media contain no local information. It is a claim about the loss of a specific, professionally produced, locally focused public good.

Scale and evidence of local news loss

The scale of local news loss is measured in newspapers, counties, and jobs, and each measure has a clear denominator.

Newspapers. Medill’s 2025 report states that “Close to 3,500 newspapers have vanished” since 2005, leaving “one in every four Americans with limited access to a local print newspaper,” and that “Almost 40 percent of U.S. newspapers have vanished since 2005”.⁠¹ It reports a net loss of 3,400 papers once new papers are counted, and “In the past year alone 136 newspapers closed, or more than two per week”.⁠¹

Counties. Medill’s October 20, 2025, release says the number of news desert counties “rose to 213 in 2025,” up from 206, with 1,524 counties having one remaining source and “some 50 million Americans” having “limited to no access to local news”.⁠³ The report text itself gives 212 counties in one passage,⁠¹ a small discrepancy readers should note. In 2005, the report says, “just over 150 counties lacked a source of local news”.⁠¹ In 2025, “almost 80% of news deserts were in counties the USDA classifies as predominantly rural”.⁠¹

Jobs. Using Bureau of Labor Statistics data, Medill reports that 91,550 people worked across all occupations in the newspaper industry in 2024, a decline of 7% from 2023, and that “Since 2005, more than 270,000 newspaper jobs have vanished, a loss of more than 75%”.⁠¹ Pew’s narrower measure of newsroom employees found that “Newspaper newsroom employment fell 57% between 2008 and 2020, from roughly 71,000 jobs to about 31,000,” while digital-native newsroom employees “rose 144%, from 7,400 workers in 2008 to about 18,000 in 2020”.⁠² Total U.S. newsroom employment “dropped by 26% since 2008”.⁠²

Replacement. Medill counts “more than 300 local news startups” in the past five years, “80% of which were digital-only outlets”,⁠³ but notes that startups “remain heavily centralized in urban areas” and “have not been appearing fast enough to offset the losses elsewhere”.⁠¹

Audience behavior. In a January 2024 Pew survey of 5,146 U.S. adults, the share who follow local news very closely had “fallen by 15 percentage points since 2016 (from 37% to 22%),” and “Just 15% of Americans say they have paid or given money to any local news source in the past year”.⁠⁴ Meanwhile “63% say they think their local news outlets are doing very or somewhat well,” down from 71% in 2018.⁠⁴ Many people, in other words, do not perceive the financial crisis that the closure data document.

Causes and competing explanations

Explanations for the collapse of local news focus on revenue, ownership, and audience, and they are complementary more than contradictory.

Loss of advertising revenue. The most common explanation is that classified and display advertising, which once subsidized reporting, moved to online platforms. This explanation is widely accepted, though its relative weight against the other factors is debated.

Ownership and consolidation. Medill reports that the papers that remain show “significantly consolidated ownership and reduced print frequencies”.⁠¹ Some analysts argue that financially driven owners accelerated cuts; others respond that consolidation was a survival strategy for papers that would otherwise have closed.

Audience change. Pew’s survey data show declining close attention to local news and low willingness to pay.⁠⁴ One interpretation is that demand fell; another is that demand for local information persists but is met, imperfectly, by free sources.

Geography and economics. Medill finds that news deserts “tend to be poorer counties,” with smaller economic outputs and less educated populations, and that “These factors make it challenging to establish a viable news startup”.⁠¹ This suggests a market failure concentrated in places that cannot support a subscription model.

Who is harmed: evidence on civic effects

The civic effects of local news loss have been studied with natural experiments, panel surveys, and financial data. Each study is limited to its setting, but the findings point in the same direction.

Candidates, incumbents, and turnout. Schulhofer-Wohl and Garrido studied the closure of the Cincinnati Post on New Year’s Eve 2007. In the following year, “fewer candidates ran for municipal office in the Kentucky suburbs most reliant on the Post,” “incumbents became more likely to win reelection, and voter turnout and campaign spending fell”.⁠⁵ Turnout “remained depressed through 2010,” though other effects diminished. The authors caution that their “findings are statistically imprecise”.⁠⁵ The Post had a circulation of just 27,000 when it closed.

Polarized voting. Darr, Hitt, and Dunaway compared matched counties and found “a small but significant causal decrease in split-ticket voting” where newspapers closed, which they attribute to greater reliance on national news and partisan cues.⁠⁶ Their article opens with the claim that changes to the media environment “have increased polarized voting in America through both addition and subtraction”.⁠⁶ See Polarization.

Public borrowing costs. Gao, Lee, and Murphy found that after newspaper closures, municipal bond offering yields rose by “5.5 basis points” and secondary-market yields by “6.4 basis points,” with larger effects for revenue bonds, which they attribute to “increased government inefficiencies and informational frictions”.⁠⁷ A later description of the paper states that “Newspaper closures lead to higher municipal borrowing costs in the long-run through the government inefficiency channel”.⁠⁸ If correct, residents of affected areas pay for the loss of scrutiny through higher public costs.

Rural and lower-income residents. Because news deserts are concentrated in rural and poorer counties,⁠¹ the harms fall disproportionately on people who already have fewer alternative sources.

Public broadcasting dependence. Medill reports that in nine counties public radio is the only news source, and that federal defunding of public broadcasting could make those areas vulnerable to becoming news deserts.⁠³

What has been tried elsewhere

Responses to local news loss include state funding, tax credits, philanthropy, and laws requiring digital platforms to pay publishers. Each has documented results and documented failures.

State consortia. New Jersey created the Civic Information Consortium in 2018 to “support and grow trustworthy, community-based news and information sources,” with funding from the state and several foundations; state law prevents the state and the Consortium “from owning funded projects”.⁠⁹ That last rule is a design choice aimed at editorial independence.

Tax credits. Medill reports that Illinois passed legislation in May 2024, and that tax credits for retaining journalists went to 120 outlets, more than half outside the Chicago area, with no money directed to outlets owned by Gannett or Alden.⁠¹ In New York, legislation added in April 2024 “has stalled, and no money has been distributed to news outlets in the state this year”.⁠¹ A New Mexico fellowship program “failed to get the required votes,” and tax credit measures in Maryland and Massachusetts “also failed to advance”.⁠¹

Philanthropy. Press Forward describes itself as “a nationwide initiative” that has provided “$400 million + since 2023 to support independent, high-quality outlets”.⁠¹⁰ Medill reports that more than 200 news organizations with budgets under $1 million had received grants from its pooled fund.⁠¹ Medill also notes that, across 2021 to 2025, metropolitan areas received 95% of journalism grants and 98% of grant money (data including non-local organizations),⁠¹ which suggests philanthropy has not reached most news deserts.

Platform payment laws. Canada’s Online News Act, assented to June 22, 2023, aims “to regulate digital news intermediaries with a view to enhancing fairness in the Canadian digital news marketplace and contributing to its sustainability,” including “independent local ones”.⁠¹¹ Meta published a notice titled “Changes to News Availability on Our Platforms in Canada,” dated June 1, 2023, with a later update;⁠¹² the body of that notice could not be retrieved for this review, so its terms are not described here. Whether the Act increased or decreased the reach and revenue of Canadian local outlets is treated below as an unresolved question.

What the record suggests. Public and philanthropic money can sustain outlets, but distribution tends to follow existing capacity, which is concentrated in cities. Legislative support is fragile. Platform payment laws can provoke platform withdrawal.

The strongest arguments across the political spectrum

Arguments about local news cut across ideology. The strongest versions are below.

The public-good argument. Accountability reporting benefits everyone, including people who do not pay for it, so markets will underproduce it. The Cincinnati and municipal bond evidence suggests the costs of its absence are real and borne by the public.⁠^5,7 Public or philanthropic support is therefore justified.

The independence argument. A press funded by the government it covers may hesitate to cover it critically. Many conservatives and civil libertarians, and many journalists, are wary of direct state funding. Designs such as New Jersey’s rule that the state cannot own funded projects.⁠⁹ and Illinois’s tax-credit model⁠¹ try to answer this concern, but critics argue that any dependence on appropriations creates leverage.

The market argument. Readers have chosen other sources. Subsidizing a declining format may delay innovation. On this view, the 300-plus startups⁠³ show that the market is adapting, and policy should remove barriers rather than pick winners.

The platform-responsibility argument. Large platforms captured advertising revenue that once paid for local reporting and benefit from news content, so they should pay. Canada’s Act embodies this view⁠¹¹ Critics respond that such laws treat links as a cost, can push platforms to drop news, and mainly benefit large publishers.

The local-control argument. Communities, not national foundations or state agencies, should decide what local information they need. Distribution data showing metropolitan concentration of grants.⁠¹ support the concern that outside funders will reproduce existing inequalities.

The skeptical argument. Some argue that the decline of local newspapers is overstated as a civic cause, because the measured effects are modest and many other forces shape turnout and polarization. The authors of the key studies themselves describe effects as “small” or “statistically imprecise”⁠^5,6

Unresolved questions

• Do digital startups produce the same civic effects (turnout, candidate entry, scrutiny) as the newspapers they replace?
• Are the effects found in Cincinnati and in matched-county studies representative of news deserts that are rural and poorer?
• Can public funding designs protect editorial independence durably, across changes in government?
• What happened to the reach and revenue of Canadian local outlets after the Online News Act took effect?
• How much of the decline in close attention to local news is caused by the loss of outlets, and how much causes it?
• Would structured public data about local government (budgets, agendas, published priorities) measurably increase scrutiny in places without reporters?