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Since 2005, the United States has lost more than 2,900 newspapers. That number comes from Northwestern University’s Medill Local News Initiative, and every time I cite it, the figure has gone up from the last time I checked. A third of the country’s newspapers — gone in less than two decades. The communities they served didn’t disappear. The school boards still meet. The city councils still vote. The local hospitals still operate. But now, many of these institutions function without anyone watching, without anyone asking uncomfortable questions, and without anyone telling residents what their government is doing with their money.
The term researchers use is “news desert” — a community without any local news source. By Northwestern’s count, more than 200 counties in the US now qualify as news deserts, and an additional 1,600 counties have only a single surviving news source, usually a weekly paper running on a skeleton staff. Half the country lives in a place where local journalism is either dead or on life support.
But the picture is not uniformly bleak. Something else is happening alongside the collapse — a slow, uneven, sometimes messy rebuilding. New models of local journalism are emerging, and some of them are working. Not all of them will survive, and the ones that do won’t fully replace what was lost. But they represent a genuine response to a genuine crisis, and they deserve attention.
Understanding What Killed Local News
The common explanation is that the internet killed newspapers. That’s roughly correct but misleadingly incomplete. What specifically happened is a three-stage economic collapse.
Stage one was classified advertising. From the 1950s through the early 2000s, classified ads were the single largest revenue category for most American newspapers — often representing 30-40% of total revenue. Craigslist, launched in 1995 and expanded nationally by 2005, offered the same service for free. Between 2000 and 2012, newspaper classified revenue fell from $19.6 billion to $4.6 billion. That’s not a decline. That’s an extinction event for a revenue category.
Stage two was display advertising migration. As readership moved online, advertisers followed — but they didn’t move their budgets to newspaper websites. They moved to Google and Facebook, which offered vastly superior targeting, measurement, and return on investment. Between 2008 and 2020, total newspaper advertising revenue (print plus digital combined) fell from $37.8 billion to $8.8 billion. Even the digital gains couldn’t offset the print losses. For every dollar newspapers gained in digital advertising, they lost roughly ten dollars in print revenue.
Stage three was private equity. As newspapers became distressed assets, hedge funds and private equity firms bought them at fire-sale prices — not to invest in journalism, but to extract remaining value through cost cuts, layoffs, real estate sales, and debt leveraging. Alden Global Capital, the most aggressive of these operators, acquired Tribune Publishing in 2021 and proceeded to cut newsrooms that were already operating below minimum viable staffing levels. Pew Research Center data shows that total newsroom employment in the US fell from roughly 71,000 in 2008 to 31,000 by 2020 — a 56% reduction in the workforce responsible for informing the public about their own communities.
This wasn’t a natural market correction. It was the result of a specific economic shock (digital classified platforms destroying a revenue category), compounded by platform monopolization of digital advertising, compounded by financial extraction by owners with no interest in the public service function of journalism.
The Real Cost of News Deserts
The consequences of losing local journalism are measurable, and the research is damning.
A 2018 study published in the Journal of Financial Economics found that when a local newspaper closes, municipal borrowing costs increase by 5-11 basis points, which amounts to an average of $650,000 per bond issue. The mechanism is straightforward: without press scrutiny, local governments engage in more wasteful spending, and bond markets price in the reduced oversight as higher risk. Taxpayers literally pay more when no one is watching.
Research from Duke University found that voter participation in local elections drops measurably when local news coverage disappears. Not by a little — by enough to change election outcomes. Communities without local news sources see lower engagement in city council races, school board elections, and ballot measures. The people making decisions about your property taxes, your children’s schools, and your local zoning laws operate with less democratic accountability when no one reports on what they do.
Public health research has found correlations between news desert status and worse health outcomes. During COVID-19, communities without local news sources had lower vaccination rates and higher susceptibility to health misinformation — a dynamic explored in detail in our breakdown of how misinformation spreads online. A local newspaper might have published information about vaccination sites, debunked circulating myths, and provided context specific to the community’s situation. Without that, residents were left with national cable news and whatever showed up on their social media feeds — neither of which served them well.
Corruption thrives in the dark. Civic participation requires information. Public health depends on trusted local messengers. These are not abstract arguments. They are documented consequences of losing the institutions that provided these functions for over a century.
Nonprofit Newsrooms: The Most Promising Model
Among the new approaches to local journalism, nonprofit newsrooms have shown the most consistent success. The model is simple in concept: remove the profit motive, fund the operation through grants, donations, and memberships, and focus exclusively on public-interest reporting. It is, in many ways, an application of sustainable business practices to an industry that desperately needs them.
The Institute for Nonprofit News (INN) reports that its member organizations have grown from roughly 30 in 2009 to over 425 by 2024. Collectively, these newsrooms employ thousands of journalists and generate hundreds of millions of dollars in annual revenue. The growth has been steady and accelerating.
Some of the standout examples tell the story better than aggregate numbers. The Texas Tribune, founded in 2009, now operates with a budget exceeding $20 million annually, employs more than 100 people, and has become the state’s largest source of original political reporting. It offers all its content free online, generates roughly a third of its revenue from events and sponsorships, another third from major donations and grants, and the remainder from memberships and corporate underwriting. The model works because it was designed from the ground up as a digital-first, nonprofit operation — not as a failing newspaper trying to reinvent itself.
Mississippi Today, launched in 2016, has broken multiple major stories about state government corruption that legacy outlets missed — including investigative series on the state’s welfare scandal that led to criminal charges against public officials. The newsroom operates with a fraction of the budget that legacy outlets had, but it punches far above its weight on accountability journalism because it can direct 100% of its editorial resources toward public-interest reporting rather than trying to fill a daily print newspaper with lifestyle content and wire copy.
The Knight Foundation has been one of the most significant funders of this transition, directing hundreds of millions of dollars toward local news innovation, community information needs research, and nonprofit newsroom sustainability. Their investment thesis is straightforward: local news is essential public infrastructure, and when the market fails to provide it, philanthropic capital should fill the gap.
The Limits of Philanthropy
The nonprofit model has real vulnerabilities. Philanthropic funding is uneven — concentrated in certain regions and issue areas. National foundations tend to fund state-level operations in politically important states, while smaller rural communities remain underserved. There’s also the sustainability question: grants are time-limited, and building a donor base large enough to sustain ongoing operations requires skills that journalists don’t traditionally possess.
The biggest concern is independence. When a newsroom depends on a small number of large donors, those donors have implicit influence — even if they never exercise it directly. A newsroom funded primarily by a foundation with specific policy interests faces different pressures than a newspaper funded by thousands of small subscribers, but it still faces pressures. The best nonprofit newsrooms manage this by diversifying their revenue sources and maintaining strict editorial independence policies. But the tension is real and ongoing.
Email Newsletters: Small, Sustainable, and Surprisingly Effective
The most interesting development in local journalism might be the simplest: email newsletters. Individual journalists and small teams are building audiences by sending regular email dispatches covering local government, development, business, and community events. No printing presses, no content management systems, no sales teams. Just a reporter, a subscriber list, and a send button.
The economics are compelling. A solo local journalist using a platform like Substack, Beehiiv, or Ghost can reach profitability at remarkably low subscriber counts. With 2,000 paying subscribers at $5-8 per month, a newsletter generates $120,000-$192,000 in annual revenue — enough to support a journalist full-time with money left for freelance contributions, legal coverage, and basic operational costs. The overhead is almost nothing compared to a traditional newsroom.
The Charlotte Ledger in North Carolina is one frequently cited success story. Tony Mecia, a former Charlotte Observer reporter, launched the newsletter in 2019 and built it into a sustainable operation covering local business and development — a path that mirrors the broader trend of journalists building independent freelance careers on their own terms. The key insight was focus: rather than trying to compete with remaining local outlets on breaking news, the Ledger covers a specific beat (business and economic development) in depth that no one else does. Subscribers pay because they get information that directly affects their decisions — whether they’re business owners, real estate investors, or residents trying to understand what’s happening to their neighborhood.
6AM City operates a different model — a network of local email newsletters across multiple cities, each with a distinctive voice and local editorial team. They’ve raised venture capital, which introduces its own tensions, but the format has demonstrated that local email audiences are large enough and engaged enough to support advertising revenue alongside subscriptions.
The newsletter model has limitations. A single journalist can’t replicate the coverage breadth of even a small newspaper. Beat reporting — the sustained, daily attention to specific institutions like courts, school boards, or police departments — requires consistent staffing that a solo operator can’t provide. And newsletters, by definition, reach only people who have actively subscribed. They don’t serve the ambient information function that a community newspaper provided — the copy sitting on the coffee shop counter that someone picks up and scans even if they didn’t seek it out.
Membership and Reader-Funded Models
The membership model sits between traditional subscriptions and nonprofit philanthropy. Members don’t just pay for access to content — they support a mission. The distinction matters psychologically and economically. A subscriber cancels when they feel they’re not getting enough content for the price. A member renews because they believe the work matters for their community, even if they don’t read every article.
De Correspondent in the Netherlands pioneered this approach for journalism, raising over $1.7 million in a 2013 crowdfunding campaign and building a membership-supported newsroom that has operated sustainably for over a decade. Their model emphasizes transparency — members see how editorial decisions are made, contribute expertise to stories, and participate in the journalism rather than passively consuming it.
In the US, The Beacon in Kansas City and VTDigger in Vermont operate membership models adapted to local contexts. VTDigger covers Vermont state government and politics with a depth that the state’s surviving commercial outlets can’t match, funded by a combination of memberships, grants, and major donations. The newsroom has broken stories that led to policy changes, criminal investigations, and public official resignations — demonstrating that the accountability function of journalism doesn’t require a commercial business model.
Research from the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism shows that willingness to pay for local news is increasing, particularly among readers who have experienced losing a local news source. People don’t value what they have until it’s gone — and communities that have lost newspapers are more willing to pay for alternatives. That’s a grim marketing insight, but it’s a real one.
Public Media Filling the Gap
Public radio stations across the country have been expanding their local news operations as commercial outlets contract. Stations in the NPR network have hired hundreds of local reporters in the past five years, often using grants specifically designated for local news coverage.
Report for America, a program that places emerging journalists in local newsrooms (including both commercial and nonprofit outlets), has deployed more than 600 reporters since its launch in 2018. The program covers a portion of each journalist’s salary for up to three years, with the host newsroom and local fundraising covering the remainder. The model is explicitly designed as a bridge — providing newsrooms with additional capacity while they develop sustainable funding for the positions.
The Corporation for Public Broadcasting has also directed funding toward local journalism, though the amounts remain modest relative to the scale of the crisis. The US spends roughly $1.40 per capita on public media — compared to over $80 per capita in many European countries. The systemic underfunding of public media in the United States left communities more vulnerable when commercial models collapsed, and the gap has not been closed.
What’s Not Working
Honesty requires acknowledging the approaches that haven’t delivered on their promises.
Hyperlocal digital startups funded by venture capital have had a poor track record. Patch, launched by AOL in 2009 with massive investment, was supposed to create a network of hyperlocal news sites covering every community in America. It went through multiple rounds of layoffs, was sold, restructured, and survives in a diminished form. The lesson: local journalism generates local-scale revenue. Venture capital expects venture-scale returns. The two are fundamentally incompatible.
AI-generated local news has been tried and has mostly produced garbage. Several companies have attempted to use large language models to automatically generate local news stories from public records, press releases, and data feeds. The output is technically readable but journalistically worthless — it lacks the context, sourcing, and editorial judgment that makes reporting useful. Worse, some AI-generated local news sites have published fabricated information presented as fact. The technology may improve, but right now it’s not journalism. It’s automated content production.
Platform-funded journalism initiatives have been inconsistent. Google’s News Initiative and Meta’s journalism partnerships have provided real funding to some newsrooms, but the programs are structured at the platforms’ discretion and can be reduced or eliminated at any time. Meta shut down its news tab and reduced news distribution in 2023-2024, demonstrating the risk of depending on platform goodwill for journalism funding. Building a journalism operation on the financial support of a company that views news as a liability is not a sustainable strategy.
The Policy Questions We’re Not Asking
Most of the energy in the “save local news” conversation focuses on new business models. That’s important, but it avoids the harder question: should a functioning democracy leave the provision of public-interest journalism entirely to market forces?
Most democracies don’t. The BBC, CBC, ABC (Australia), and NHK (Japan) all operate government-funded but editorially independent news operations. They aren’t perfect, but they ensure that every citizen has access to basic news coverage regardless of whether their local market can support a commercial newsroom.
In the US, several policy proposals have been floated: tax credits for local news subscriptions, payroll tax credits for newsrooms that employ local journalists, antitrust action against the platform duopoly that captured most advertising revenue, and direct public funding modeled on the Corporation for Public Broadcasting but at dramatically larger scale. The Medill Local News Initiative has documented the policy options extensively. None have been enacted at the federal level, though some states — California, Washington, and New York among them — have begun experimenting with state-level support for local journalism.
My view, after years of watching this unfold: the market alone will not solve this. New business models are necessary and valuable, but they will not reach every community, and they will not replace the institutional capacity that has been destroyed. Some form of public investment in local journalism infrastructure is probably inevitable — the question is whether it happens proactively or only after the consequences of inaction become too severe to ignore.
Where This Goes From Here
The local journalism crisis is not over. More newspapers will close. More communities will lose their last news source. The private equity extraction will continue until there’s nothing left to extract.
But the rebuilding is real. Nonprofit newsrooms are growing. Newsletter journalists are proving that small operations can be sustainable. Membership models are demonstrating that readers will pay for accountability journalism when they understand what’s at stake. Public media is expanding its local footprint. None of these, individually, replace what was lost. Together, they represent the foundation of something new — a local news ecosystem that is more diverse in its funding, more focused in its mission, and more resilient to the economic shocks that destroyed its predecessor.
If you live in a community that still has a local newspaper, subscribe to it. I’m serious. Even if the coverage isn’t what it used to be, your subscription is a vote for the continued existence of local accountability journalism. If your community has a nonprofit newsroom or a local newsletter, support it financially. If it has neither, that’s worth paying attention to — because the decisions being made in your community right now are being made without anyone watching.
The infrastructure of informed self-governance doesn’t rebuild itself. Someone has to do the work and someone has to pay for it. Whether that happens through subscriptions, memberships, philanthropy, public funding, or some combination of all of them — the alternative is a country where the majority of communities have no one asking questions on their behalf. We’re already uncomfortably close to that reality.
