A man sips coffee while reading something on his tablet in Little Italy.
Tyler LaRiviere/Sun-Times file
Is local news readily available in your town?
If you answered yes, you are likely wealthier than the average American, and you live in or near a metro area.
The latest report from The State of Local News Project at Northwestern University shows that where you live and how much money you make affect whether you live in a news desert or a news oasis. This divide relates to other factors affecting the health of our democracy, as analysis of our data by the nonprofit Rebuild Local News showed.
For more than a decade, I’ve worked in organizations that study and support local journalism, and I’m intimately familiar with both the challenges and the solutions for the local journalism landscape.
One of the most vexing problems is the persistence of inequity between communities that are local journalism haves and have-nots.
The have-nots are news deserts with few, if any, journalists to do the daily reporting that people require to participate meaningfully in their local communities and democratic institutions.
The main challenge for news outlets in have-not communities is the migration of advertising money from the printed page — where it once made up roughly 80% of news organizations’ income — to the screen, where it now makes up less than 20%. This decline in ad revenue, a trend for more than the last decade, has forced many outlets to rely on audience funding, philanthropy, cost-cutting or some combination of the three to survive.
In communities with little disposable income and no local philanthropies, cost-cutting becomes the only option. This creates a self-reinforcing spiral of lower quality and declining readership and, ultimately, closure.
In 2023, the country lost more than 130 print newspapers, the newsrooms most likely to produce original local content that other outlets circulate.
Since 2005, the U.S. has lost almost 2,900 papers.
New digital outlets are not being created fast enough to fill that huge void. The number of digital outlets has held steady at roughly 550 in recent years, with about 20 new outlets opening each year, and roughly the same number closing.
All told, 1,558 of the nation’s 3,143 counties have only one news outlet, while 203 are news deserts with zero.
Illinois currently has 403 active news outlets — the third most in the U.S., behind California and Texas. New York is fourth. However, these outlets are not spread evenly throughout the state. Cook County has 127 news outlets reporting on its communities. But 33 of Illinois’ 103 counties have only one local news source. Four — Alexander, Edwards, Hamilton and Pulaski — have none. And four of the counties with only one outlet appear on our Watch List, meaning they share characteristics with places that are already news deserts.
Demographics for thriving news
Wealthier communities do better sustaining local news organizations.
Our data shows that counties with an average household income over $80,000 can support a robust local journalism ecosystem, meaning 10 or more outlets. Those with an average household income of $54,000 or less are more likely to be news deserts. By the same token, the percentage of the population below the poverty line in news deserts averages more than 16%, versus 12% in counties with robust markets.
Population density also correlates to the number of outlets serving a local community. In our data, counties with 10 or more outlets are overwhelmingly urban or dense suburbia, while news deserts are usually rural — though news deserts also occur in low-income pockets of metro areas. Densely populated communities tend to include higher-income households and have network effects that come from the ability of businesses to reach a larger number of people in a relatively small footprint.
This phenomenon leads to the third factor related to number of outlets in a county: gross domestic product per capita. In any town, city or country, the GDP represents the amount of money netted from sales of services and merchandise, divided by population. For the news oases in our study, the average GDP per capita is $75,140. For the news deserts, it is just $8,964.
The final factor that contributes to a community being a journalism have or have-not is access to high-quality broadband. Emerging metrics show that this near-necessity of contemporary life is not yet reliably available to rural Americans.
What’s working
Despite these seemingly intractable problems, solutions to local journalism inequality are becoming clearer.
One is collaboration. For example, in Colorado, the national nonprofit news outlet The Daily Yonder has hired a reporter based in a rural community to write stories about life there and share them out with both local and national organizations.
Another is philanthropy. The new Press Forward initiative has begun local chapters across the country, with at least one planning to serve rural communities.
Public policy should also play a role. At the state level, policies to support local news have seen success in New Jersey, California and elsewhere, and more bills are working their way through state legislatures. People seem to be realizing that having quality local news is just as vital as having public education and access to health care. With any luck, every community will have the opportunity to be a journalism “have.”
Sarah Stonbely is director of The State of Local News Project at Northwestern University.
This article was originally published on theconversation.com
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