As Margaret Sullivan writes in her book, Ghosting the News, journalism on local news is dying and creating a crisis for democracy. Local newspapers are fading away, never to return.
A major study concluded, “As local journalism declines, government officials conduct themselves with less integrity, efficiency, and effectiveness, and corporate malfeasance goes unchecked.”
A healthy democracy needs local news.
The study goes on to say that without local news, “citizens are less likely to vote, less politically informed, and less likely to run for office.” Sullivan adds that democracy loses its foundation without local news.
The evaporation of newspapers from cities and counties across the US has reached a catastrophic tipping point. The term “news desert” has emerged to describe these areas where newspapers or other professional news outlets no longer cover local events.
An AI generated depiction of a “news desert.”
According to research at Northwestern, the “loss of local newspapers [has] accelerated in 2023 to an average of 2.5 per week, leaving more than 200 counties as ‘news deserts‘ and meaning that more than half of all U.S. counties now have limited access to reliable local news and information.”
The numbers are staggering.
- More than 43,000 journalists have lost their jobs, nearly two-thirds of the 2005 level.
- Since 2005, nearly 3,000 newspapers have gone under and thus disappeared.
- More than half of the 3,143 counties in the US have either no local news source or only one remaining weekly newspaper.
A fun website to explore whether or not you live in a “news desert” is through UNC. Link is here.