Throughout the country, local journalism is being defunded and dismantled. A recent report by Northwestern University’s Medill Local News Initiative shows that the newspaper industry—still the primary source of original reporting for our entire news media system—has lost more than a quarter of its newspapers and almost 60 percent of its newsroom employees since 2005. More than one-fifth of the U.S. population—approximately 70 million Americans—now live in an area with little or no access to local news.
We’ve come to call these media wastelands “news deserts,” though this metaphor can be misleading. People living in such areas still consume copious amounts of media—from unsubstantiated rumors swirling in Facebook groups to sensationalized fluff aired by cable news networks. Worse still, all manner of disinformation and conspiracy-peddling are rushing into the vacuum created by the collapse of local journalism, including rightwing propaganda operations made to look like authentic news reporting—so-called pink-slime journalism.
Meanwhile, the cuts to actual journalism are relentless. Gannett, the country’s largest newspaper publisher, recently executed yet another round of downsizing, laying off 3 percent of its workforce. The only for-profit entities that remain interested in buying newspapers are private-equity firms and hedge funds like Alden Global Capital. These vulture capitalists swoop in to shred what is left of distressed newspapers, liquidating jobs and selling off the real estate for financial spoils.
Why is this happening? Even now, much confusion persists about what is driving the local journalism crisis. Throughout most of the twentieth century, local newspapers were one of the few ways for advertisers to reach audiences. Many local newspapers formed a monopoly or duopoly over advertising space in their geographic area and were thus able to charge advertisers inflated rates. As readers moved online and advertisers could better target them, newspaper publishers lost their monopoly position. Digital ads yield pennies to the dollar compared to traditional print ads, and most of that revenue goes to Facebook (Meta) and Google.
For well over a decade, market diehards have doggedly searched for new business models and technological fixes for sustaining journalism in the digital age, but no commercial formula has emerged to replace the 125-year-old dominant advertising revenue model. The problem is that this business model is irreparably broken. Revenue from subscriptions and paywalls may be a viable alternative to advertising for a handful of large national papers, but it’s rarely enough to sustain even large metro dailies. A recent Gallup/Knight Foundation survey shows that only wealthier audiences are likely to pay for news.
The bottom line is that local journalism is no longer profitable. The market is abandoning it at the very moment when we need local media the most.
The bottom line is that local journalism is no longer profitable. The market is abandoning it at the very moment when we need local media the most, to provide critical information on everything from voting to vaccines. Any hope for a semblance of democracy necessitates reliable reporting, regardless of its commercial value. Profit was never meant to be the sole criterion for the value of journalism; we must treat news and information as the public goods they always were.
A dwindling number of newspapers failing to produce even the bare minimum of news that society requires isn’t just a journalism crisis—it’s a democracy crisis. While journalism isn’t a silver bullet for solving the many challenges facing us—from climate change to racial injustice to the soaring rate of income inequality—we cannot begin to confront these wicked problems without a functional fourth estate.
It seems that each month a new study demonstrates the detrimental effects of losing local news—from reduced voting and civic engagement to increased extremism and corruption. Yet, the United States has done little to confront what is clearly a national crisis. Americans have been slow to respond to the crisis in part because they misunderstand its structural nature. As late as 2019, a Pew Research Center survey indicated that shockingly few Americans were aware that local journalism was under financial duress.
Thus far, the depth of the journalism crisis has outpaced any concerted policy response—especially at the level necessary for reconstructing the entire news media ecosystem. After a modest newspaper subsidy program died with the demise of President Joe Biden’s Build Back Better legislation, the only policy intervention to emerge at the federal level is the dubiously named Journalism Competition and Preservation Act (JCPA), which would allow media firms to essentially collude and present a united front to negotiate better terms and extract more revenue from platforms like Facebook and Google.
Despite much hype, the JCPA amounts to a corporate giveaway to big broadcasters and publishers—many of whom have been complicit in exacerbating the journalism crisis—instead of directly supporting journalists or creating new outlets. Indeed, the likes of Sinclair Broadcast Group, Gannett, and Alden stand to benefit from the JCPA. This trickle-down approach to funding journalism attests to the paucity of the American social imagination and the lack of political will to devise nonmarket support for a vital public service. A straightforward alternative to the JCPA would be taxing Facebook and Google to create a dedicated fund (perhaps combined with revenue streams from philanthropists, public subsidies, and other sources) to support nonprofit reporting in news deserts and other underserved areas.
We need systemic projects that guarantee a baseline level of news and information for all members of society, not just the privileged few who live in affluent neighborhoods.
This dismal outlook notwithstanding, glimmers of an alternative news media system are flickering from the wreckage. One example is the growing number of progressive initiatives at the state and local levels. In New Jersey and California, for example, state governments are directly subsidizing local journalism initiatives, and New York City is deploying local government advertising to help support ethnic media and other small publishers.
The nonprofit sector also lends hope, ushering in a golden era for noncommercial experimentation. In addition to respected mainstays such as ProPublica and The Texas Tribune, exciting new endeavors have emerged such as Outlier Media in Detroit and City Bureau in Chicago. These newsrooms aim to empower historically marginalized communities to tell their own stories through their own media, demonstrating the potential for radically democratized media outlets that are public not just in name but in ownership and control.
At the same time, legacy newspapers in Salt Lake City and Philadelphia are experimenting with new ownership models, and Baltimore has launched a nonprofit newspaper, The Baltimore Banner, to compete with the Alden-owned Baltimore Sun. And in recent years, an increasing number of public broadcasting stations have acquired local print news outlets to bolster the public media sector. The recent merger between public radio station WBEZ and the daily newspaper Chicago Sun-Times is one of the more significant partnerships of this kind.
Finally, the explosion of newsroom unionization efforts across the country offers hope as well. The past decade has witnessed nearly 200 successful union drives at news publications. The wave of successful unionizing in recent years attests to the growing sense of solidarity and commitment to social justice among news workers. We might even envision future newsrooms owned and controlled by media workers themselves, such as the employee-owned Defector, which was established by former Deadspin staffers.
What brings these various efforts together is a shared vision of journalism that centers people’s civic needs rather than a commodity whose value is determined solely by its profitability in the marketplace. They treat journalism as an essential public service whose primary purpose is to facilitate participatory democracy, not merely as a vehicle for a handful of rich, white men to make gobs of money. And there’s good reason to believe that these efforts to transform journalism’s social purpose will only continue.
Despite these hopeful signs, much more must be done. We need systemic projects that guarantee a baseline level of news and information for all members of society, not just the privileged few who live in affluent neighborhoods.
One option is to restructure and expand existing public media outlets to focus more on providing local news to every community. For all of its flaws and imperfections, public broadcasting is the only news media system that’s dedicated to a universal service mission. This public infrastructure—along with post offices and libraries—could serve as a key building block for creating an alternative media system. Like public schools, we could fund new anchor institutions—“public media centers”—in every community across the country.
Or instead of building on what already exists, we could work to create something entirely new from the ground up. A compelling proposal by Robert McChesney and John Nichols (a contributing writer to The Progressive) is the Local Journalism Initiative, which would allow people to vote on allocating ample funds toward local news institutions of their choice, thus ensuring competition between multiple newsrooms in every county of the United States.
These forward-thinking proposals for structurally reforming journalism are slowly moving from the margins to the mainstream. Recently, Washington Post columnist Perry Bacon Jr. advocated for spending $10 billion per year to support about 200 new journalists in each Congressional district throughout the country.
Before any such project is possible, we must first shift the “common sense” of how we see markets, public goods, and journalism. If there is any silver lining to the current crisis, it’s a budding realization that the commercial era for local news media is over, giving us the opportunity to reinvent journalism so that it may finally serve people over profit.