The State of Local News: 2024 Report

Executive Summary

Since 2005, more than 3,200 print newspapers have vanished. Newspapers continue to disappear at a rate of more than two per week; in the past year alone, 130 newspapers have shut their doors. In addition to these closures and mergers, papers are reducing their print coverage, including shifting from dailies to weeklies or ending print publishing altogether.

In our 2022 report, the State of Local News Project predicted that by the end of 2025, the United States would have lost one-third of its print newspapers over the past two decades. In this year’s report, we found that the country has already exceeded that mark. A little fewer than 5,600 newspapers remain, 80% of which are weeklies.

Beyond newspapers, this report also tracks more than 660 stand-alone digital news sites, 227 public broadcasters and more than 700 ethnic media outlets. Compared with last year, we saw a net increase of more than 105 stand-alone digital sites (including 30 newspapers moving online after ending their weekly print editions) and a net decrease of 10 ethnic media outlets. Our list of public broadcasters remained static. As part of this report, we also expanded our database to include more than 700 network news sites. These networks, such as Patch, Axios Local, States Newsroom and TAPinto, have grown rapidly over the past five years and provide local news content to millions of readers. But as with stand-alone digital news-sites, the coverage of these networks is heavily concentrated in urban and suburban areas, with more than 95% located in 179 metropolitan counties.

In preparing this report, we combined data from a variety of sources, including state press associations, industry groups and government resources. We also manually reviewed the different news outlets included in our database to ensure that they are consistently publishing original local news content that meets the critical information needs of the communities they cover. For more details about our research, please review our methodology.

Deserts

As news organizations continue to contract, news deserts – areas that lack consistent local reporting that fills critical information needs – continue to expand. In this report we found that there are 206 counties across the country without any news source, up from 204 last year, and 1,561 counties with only one source. Altogether, this means that almost 55 million people in the United States have limited to no access to local news. Ten of these zero-source counties were previously listed on Medill’s 2023 news desert Watch List. As part of this year’s report, we have updated the Watch List with current demographic data to continue looking ahead to the coming years.

Employment

Newspaper employment has continued to decline. From 2022 to 2023, newsroom jobs – mostly reporters and editors – decreased by almost 2,000 positions while newspaper employment overall shrank by more than 7,000 jobs, compared to the few hundred lost in the previous year. There are now fewer than 100,000 people employed in the newspaper publishing industry overall, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In 20 U.S. states, there are fewer than 1,000 newspaper employees remaining. While declining journalist employment attracts much attention, newsroom jobs account for only a third of newspaper positions. Many of the losses in the remaining positions occur largely unseen as newspapers reduce delivery schedules and consolidate printing operations.

Circulation

Print and digital readers have declined dramatically over the past two decades and continue to shrink at an alarming rate. In the past year alone, 500 of the largest daily and weekly newspapers in the United States have lost an estimated two million print and digital readers, according to data from the Alliance for Audited Media. Since 2005, overall circulation has decreased by more than 75 million, or more than 60%.

Frequency changes

As part of this update, we identified more than 180 formerly daily newspapers that now print fewer than three days a week. We also recategorized more than 30 newspapers as digital sites, as they have dropped their print frequency to less than once a week or suspended their print edition altogether. As of 2024, only a third of the more than 1,000 daily newspapers still print seven days a week.

Content

As a result of shrinking newsroom staff, many news organizations have scaled back the diversity of content that they print. In these cases, articles, stories and headlines are often recirculated from other outlets within a larger chain. In this report, we reviewed 500 outlets from the five largest chain owners and found that, on average, a third of home-page content originates from an outside source, such as an adjacent metro publication or a national wire service.

Chains and Ownership

As the mergers and acquisitions firm Dirks, Van Essen & April wrote in its 2023 year-end report, “Gone are the days of a few conglomerates snapping up every newspaper for sale.” While large chains continue to control the largest share of newspapers, the past three years have been marked by increased activity from medium-size and small owners. At the same time, new chains, such as privately-held Carpenter Media Group, have grown at a meteoric pace through acquisitions, as owners both large and small have sold some of their properties. In this year’s report, we tracked close to 270 papers that changed hands across 77 different transactions.

Startups, Policy and Sustainability

While many of these statistics paint a bleak picture for the local news landscape, there are some encouraging signs from startups, policymakers and legacy media organizations pursuing new strategies. In several cases, startups have been formed with the explicit purpose of filling the void created by the disappearance of a long-standing news outlet. As with our previous report, this year we have built a “Bright Spots” visualization to bring attention to startups and to profile sustainable initiatives within the industry of local news.

The Landscape of Local News

Our database consists of 7,945 news outlets, including newspapers, stand-alone digital sites, network news sites, public broadcasters and ethnic media. The vast majority of these outlets are print newspapers, more than 80% of which are weeklies.

The newspaper industry has shrunk dramatically since 2005; over the past two decades, more than 3,300 newspapers have ceased printing. A small number of these have successfully transitioned to digital-only operations, but this is a rare pivot, and most of the losses have been caused by closures and consolidations.

In the past year alone, 130 newspapers have shut down at a rate of almost two-and-a-half per week, similar to the 131 papers lost from 2022 to 2023. Many of the closures in our past reports were driven by large-scale shutdowns, such as the shuttering of 16 community newspapers surrounding Columbus, Ohio, by Gannett. One notable case was similar this year: In April, eight Minnesota papers owned by Alden Global Capital’s MediaNews Group shut their doors, including the Chaska Herald, which had been publishing since 1862. Unlike in 2023, however, these mass reductions were more of a rarity. Instead, the majority of the losses occurred among smaller chains or independent, family-run publications.

Over the past year, multiple family-owned community papers were also lost. The Hinton Times, in northwestern Iowa, closed after more than 28 years in print when its owners retired in January. Also in January, the Northland Press, a small weekly outside of Brainerd, Minn., ended publication after the death of the paper’s publisher. And late last year, Tioga, North Dakota bade farewell to the Tioga Tribune following the departure of the paper’s editor. Midsize chains also have been closing some papers: CherryRoad Media, which has made headlines for its rapid growth since 2020, shut down The Gardner News in Kansas in July after struggling to reach a sustainable audience. In a letter announcing the closing, CEO Jeremy Gulban wrote: “Since the purchase of our 1st paper in late 2020 to today, we have prided ourselves on our ability to fight the difficult battle that newspapers face in today’s digital society. Unfortunately, that battle cannot always be won.”

The numbers alone indicate that the 2,350 non-print news outlets in our database have been unable to overcome the deficit caused by the staggering losses in print news. At the same time, many of these newsrooms provide valuable sources of information for communities that might be underserved by a traditional newspaper. In this report, we track 662 stand-alone digital sites, 742 network digital sites, 719 ethnic media outlets and 225 public broadcasters that carry local news. These additional sources follow similar patterns in how they grow and shrink from year to year. For stand-alone digital sites, there is a high churn rate of outlets starting up and shutting down. In a given year, the number of startups typically outpaces the number of losses; in this update our database of stand-alone sites saw a net increase of 105 outlets. Many of these sites are relatively young: Close to one-third have existed for less than five years. Fewer than half are older than 10 years.

While this overall net change may appear encouraging, it includes more than 30 newspapers that are now exclusively digital, having dropped their print distribution entirely or reduced their print frequency to less than once a week. As printing expenses increase and printers themselves shut down operations, more and more print outlets are making the switch to a digital model. Last summer, the 122-year-old East Texas Banner suspended its print edition due to difficulties in sourcing paper. Likewise, the County Courier in northern Vermont ended its print edition, citing rising printing costs. Indeed, the physical nature of a printed newspaper can make it especially susceptible to environmental calamities. The Lahaina News in Hawaii, for example, switched to a digital format following the devastating 2023 Maui wildfires, as did the Wynne Progress in Arkansas after suffering tornado damage in March of last year. Some papers argue that the pivot away from print allows for more efficient and effective allocations of resources and staff. Montana’s Flathead Beacon, launched in 2007 by television personality Maury Povich, switched to a digital-only presence last year, with an announcement that “editorial staff will have more ability to focus on refining its online offerings, including a daily newsletter that continues to recruit new subscribers as well as an expanding podcast network.”

The extent of local news coverage can vary greatly depending on where one lives. Some of the most populous states, such as California, New York, Texas and Illinois, are home to more than 400 news outlets each. Yet the large populations of these states mean they can have some of the fewest news outlets per capita. Florida, for example, has more than 22 million residents, yet is home to just one news outlet for every 100,000 people. More than 20 states have fewer than 100 news outlets remaining.

Rural areas are particularly underserved by outlets other than print newspapers: Of the 662 stand-alone digital sites in our database, 87% are located in metro areas, and 96% are located in counties with a median household income of $50,000 or more. The same dynamic holds true for ethnic media outlets, only 5% of which are in rural counties. The exception is public broadcasting, which has more reach in rural parts of the country. For example, three counties in southwestern Alaska, specifically the Aleutian Islands, are served by only public radio stations.

The Continued Growth of News Deserts

In 206 counties, where more than 3.5 million people live, there is no local news outlet consistently producing original content. News deserts share many common characteristics. The people within these counties tend to be poorer, older and less well educated than the national averages. The populations are typically smaller and less dense than in many other parts of the country. Three-quarters of news deserts are located in counties which the USDA characterizes as being predominantly rural.

It is these shared characteristics that allowed Medill to develop our Local News Watch List as part of our 2023 report. In our review of the 228 counties on that Watch List, we found that 10 are now deserts, such as Jefferson County, Okla., which lost its paper the Ringling Eagle earlier this year. While these examples starkly illustrate the conditions that can allow news deserts to grow, there is also reason to hope that the same conditions can help to encourage investment and support in local news outlets. The National Trust for Local News, an organization focused on purchasing newspapers and converting them to nonprofit business models, acquired papers across Georgia earlier this year, including in several Watch List counties such as Dooly and Wheeler.

As part of our 2024 report, we are updating our Watch List with the latest demographic characteristics. Building from the models we developed to help predict news deserts, our Watch List identifies counties with only one news source that are at an elevated risk of losing that source. Currently, we are tracking 279 counties across 32 states that are in danger of losing their news. These counties are significantly poorer than the rest of the country and even existing news deserts, with an average poverty rate of 23.2% and a median household income of just $41,400.

At the same time, news deserts are far from all the same. Even outside of Watch List counties, news deserts can emerge suddenly and without warning, like when the Geneva County Reaper closed this year in Alabama after 100 years of operation, leaving behind an information void. Counties with different characteristics are also not immune from the disappearance of local news. Chesterfield County in Virginia is a populous, affluent suburb just south of Richmond that has supported several newspapers throughout the past century, yet it too became a desert when the Chesterfield Observer closed in early 2023. Campbell County in Kentucky, a suburb of Cincinnati, suffered the same fate when Gannett shut down the Campbell County Recorder as part of a series of closures in 2022.

News deserts also are culturally diverse. Some 15% of deserts are part of what the American Communities Project calls “Graying America,” or counties with large numbers of mostly white retirees. Meanwhile, 13% are part of “Hispanic Centers,” with the same percentage in the “African American South.” Other categories with high numbers of news deserts include “Aging Farmlands” (14% of deserts), “Evangelical Hubs” (12%), “Rural Middle America” (11%), “Working Class Country” (8%) and “Native American Lands” (4%).

Although deserts have expanded overall, in this update we also tracked several deserts that have been filled as a result of new startups taking the place of recent closures. McNairy County and Marion County, both in Tennessee, lost their papers in the past year, for example, but they swiftly found replacements in the McNairy County News and the Marion Tribune.

A Landmark Year for Ownership Changes

In this update, we tracked 268 papers that changed ownership across 77 separate transactions with 60 unique buyers. Those numbers are up significantly from last year, when 180 papers were bought as part of 55 transactions.

Some of those deals attracted widespread attention, such as Alden’s sale of the Baltimore Sun Media Group to Sinclair Broadcast Group’s executive chairman, David Smith. But most of the transactions were smaller in scope. Around the same time that the Sun was changing hands, longtime managing editor David Maxwell was purchasing the Donalsonville News in southwestern Georgia. In Kentucky, local couple Steven and Jessica Thomas purchased The McCreary County Voice and The Wayne Weekly. And in eastern Iowa, Sycamore Media purchased the Monticello Express in May.

There are exceptions to this trend. This year also saw the meteoric growth of privately held Carpenter Media Group. Since spinning off from Boone Newsmedia, Carpenter has rapidly expanded through multiple major acquisitions, growing to 138 papers in the United States and becoming the fourth-largest owner within the span of a year. Carpenter’s acquisitions drove the most significant transactions in terms of numbers of papers sold; its March purchase of Black Press Media was by far the largest from the past year, which expanded Carpenter’s portfolio by more than 30 U.S. papers and more than a hundred in Canada. In addition to this deal, Carpenter also bought Oregon based Pamplin Media Group in June, 10 titles from CNHI in May, and The Daily Iberian in Louisiana in April. Most recently, Carpenter purchased 16 papers from Phillips Media Group in August and eight papers from EO Media Group in October.

On a much smaller scale, several other growing chains expanded this year. After being founded in July, family-owned Reaves & Williams Publishing Group has grown to 10 papers across five states and has stated a commitment to preserving community journalism. Paddock Publications, the employee-owned parent of the Daily Herald in Arlington Heights, Ill., expanded into the southern part of the state with its purchase of five papers late last year. Meanwhile, after buying eight papers last summer, the Mullen family, led by young entrepreneur J. Louie Mullen and his brothers Jesse and Lloyd, has grown to nearly 50 newspapers across the country.

Despite all this activity, the broader characteristics of how newspapers are owned have not shifted dramatically. In 2024, just 10 companies control a quarter of all U.S. newspapers and more than half of all dailies, roughly the same shares as last year. Three of these large chains—Alden, Lee Enterprises and CNHI—are partially or fully owned by private equity groups or hedge funds. The largest owner of U.S. newspapers, Gannett, is a publicly traded company; following the 2020 termination of their management deal with Fortress Investment Group, the company's top shareholders are now the investment funds Alta Fundamental Advisors and Apollo Management Holdings. In some states, chain control is the norm; in Indiana, for example, only 16 papers are independently owned out of more than 123 total.

While large chains are still dominant within the industry, this year also saw several papers leave corporate control and return to local ownership. In the spring, Gannett put four New Mexico papers up for sale. One of them, the Farmington Daily Times, was bought by Colorado-based Ballantine Communications and merged into the Farmington Tri-City Record. The other three – the Alamogordo Daily News, the Ruidoso News and the Carlsbad Current-Argus, all in the southern part of the state – were purchased by El Rito Media, a small chain now in control of five New Mexico newspapers. El Rito was established in 2022 with its purchase of the Rio Grande Sun, another Gannett paper with a long history.

For El Rito, the goal was “to see if a small community newspaper can be saved,” Richard Connor, editor and publisher, said in an interview with Medill. While Gannett operated these three papers in many ways as a group, Connor says that El Rito’s focus is on covering “each place as a unique city and town.” With the papers back in local hands, the ambition for El Rito is to “move these papers towards financial stability and at the same time improve the content.”

Buying a newspaper in 2024 can come with a unique set of challenges, especially if that purchase involves moving a paper away from a large national chain to local control. Large companies like Gannett are able to centralize their properties’ technical infrastructure, such as back-end security, payment processing and content-management systems, which a new owner would need to re-create. As Connor said, “20 to 30 people would have been needed to match the corporate infrastructure.” In El Rito’s case, CherryRoad Media, which itself began as a technology company, provided operational and technical support to help get the systems off the ground.

With this support, El Rito has been able to concentrate on the perennial mission of every news outlet: “getting the paper printed on time.”

The Role of Digital News Networks

For our 2024 update, we expanded our database to include 23 digital news networks. These networks range dramatically in size, from small regional owners operating two or three sites to massive organizations operating more than 500. Together, the 23 networks account for 742 individual sites spread across the U.S. These networks have grown rapidly, becoming one of the largest categories of news media in the country.

The sites making up digital news networks vary widely in the types of content they produce. Some provide original, locally focused reporting, while others aggregate content from elsewhere in the network or simply serve as hubs for community members to post events and announcements. In preparing our list of 742 sites, we reviewed each site from a given network and included those that regularly posted original local content. For more details on how we produced our networks dataset, please review our methodology.

Network sites are widely distributed across the United States. Every state except for Vermont and Wyoming features at least one. New Jersey is home to the most individual network sites, followed by California, New York and Connecticut. Together, ten states account for almost 80% of all network sites. As with stand-alone digital sites, network sites are heavily concentrated in urban and suburban areas and are located in just 190 counties. Almost all of these counties feature multiple other news sources; only 13 counties have a network alongside just one other news source, in all cases a newspaper. There are no network sites in our database that fill a news desert.

In terms of number of sites, by far the largest digital network in our database is Patch, which has 523 sites regularly producing original news content, according to our review. These sites have wide reach, based on the numbers reported by Patch itself, with monthly visits averaging more than 80,000 each (for the 442 sites that publicly advertise this figure). Some individual sites reach even greater audiences: Patch Joliet, for example, reports close to a million visits each month. Some of these sites are managed by dedicated Patch employees while others are operated by independent reporters through the Patch Labs service. In this latter category, local reporters have free access to the Patch platform to publish local articles, though Patch retains at least 10% of the site’s revenue.

Other networks have expanded with specific growth objectives. States Newsroom, for example, launched with the goal of having a coverage presence in each of the 50 U.S. state capitals and, with the establishment of the Utah News Dispatch earlier this year, has now achieved this milestone. States Newsroom has 39 sites, with the remaining states covered by affiliate partnerships with independent news organizations such as the Texas Tribune and CalMatters.

Networks can achieve some profitability from their scale. In 2019, Patch reported it had passed a third year in the black, with annual ad revenue reaching $20 million. Yet news networks are vulnerable to the same challenges that other, more traditional models of news media face. Earlier this year, Axios announced layoffs for about 10% of the company, or about 50 employees, including within its newsrooms.

As newspaper circulation, frequency and staffing continue to contract, news networks can provide valuable additional sources of information for communities across the country. At the same time, the network model could be especially fertile ground for algorithmically (or “AI”) generated content. Patch, for example, has been experimenting with developing machine-generated news briefs under the banner of Patch.am, which provides custom aggregation of local stories and events.

Circulation Declines and Frequency Reductions

In terms of both the number of newspapers and the ad revenue they generated, the early 2000’s represented the peak of the newspaper industry in the U.S. In 2005, shortly before the 2007-08 financial crisis would mark the precipitous decline of print journalism, 500 of the largest U.S. news outlets had a combined print and digital circulation of more than 50 million, enough for nearly half of all households in the country at the time. Today, those same outlets, or at least the ones that still exist, have a combined circulation of just 10 million, according to data from the Alliance for Audited Media. Overall, U.S. newspaper circulation is down to just more than 40 million in the most recent update, compared to more than 115 million in 2005, a 65% decline. In the past year alone, print and digital circulation has dropped by more than 2 million subscribers, a loss of nearly 5%.

With the decline in circulation and the resulting drop in revenue, many papers have made cuts to their publication frequencies as a cost-saving measure. That includes some major metro dailies. The Salt Lake Tribune made headlines when it switched to a weekly print schedule in 2021 following the end of their joint printing agreement with the Deseret News, which also shifted to a weekly model. More recently, Lee Enterprises announced in the summer of 2023 that it would reduce the publishing frequency of many of its Montana dailies from seven days a week to three, a move that leaves the Billings Gazette as the state’s only seven-day-a-week paper. Many papers reduce their frequencies less dramatically, slowly cutting back editions over time. The Craig Press, owned by Ogden, is the only news outlet remaining in Moffat County, Colo.; In April of this year it switched to a weekly publishing cadence, seven years after it previously dropped from four days a week to two.

As papers contract, journalism jobs vanish, and as large chains continue to control wide swaths of the newspaper landscape, news and information are increasingly recirculated across multiple papers within a given network. As part of this review, we examined the home pages of 500 news sites owned by the five largest chains. We found that, on average, more than a third of the stories appearing on those pages originated from a non-local source, such as an adjacent metro paper, a national aggregator or a wire service. Furthermore, we found that these papers had widely diverging staff counts, with some, like the Thibodaux, La.-based Daily Comet, having seemingly no full-time reporters on staff. On average, we found that these 500 papers had just four identifiable staffers.

Duplication of content is not limited to large conglomerate owners. Among smaller chains, the same papers may be distributed within an area under separate, ostensibly distinct mastheads. In our 2024 review, we eliminated several papers printing identical copies under different names, such as four weeklies in central Wisconsin. The content of a paper can shift quite suddenly when it changes hands. The Riverfront Times had been a trusted alt-weekly in St. Louis since the late 1970’s – until it was sold to an undisclosed buyer in May of this year. Following layoffs of the entire staff, the site now almost exclusively publishes stories about the adult entertainment website OnlyFans.

Newspaper Jobs Continue to Vanish

Since 2005, more than 266,000 newspaper jobs have been lost in the U.S., a decline of 73%. Over that same period, newsroom positions – editors and reporters – saw a loss of more than 45,000 jobs, a decline of more than 60%. For the first time in the past two decades, newspaper employment has dropped below 100,000 positions; the industry currently employs just 98,960 people, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. From 2022 through 2023, more than 7,000 newspaper jobs vanished.

Taken in context, this is one of the most significant declines in employment across any sector over the past two decades. In raw numbers, the loss of jobs in newspapers is the single largest drop in all industries tracked by the Bureau of Labor Statistics Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics survey. Percentage wise, the newspaper industry’s losses are the fourth greatest among OEWS sectors, on par with manufacturers of cassette tapes and DVDs.

Employment losses have also been felt at a state level. In all but seven states, job declines within newspaper publishing have been greater than 50%, with the highest-percentage losses in the newspaper industry occurring in Kentucky, Utah and Louisiana. Twenty U.S. states have fewer than 1,000 employees remaining in the newspaper industry.

Newsroom positions make up the greatest share of newspaper jobs, with just under a third of people employed in the industry working as a reporter or an editor in some capacity. Of course, newspapers are more than their reporters, and many workers managing a paper’s ancillary operations are in equally, if not more precarious, positions. Sales departments, once a hallmark of major news operations, have shrunk by almost 75% since 2005. Most staggering are the reductions in production and distribution, categories in which almost 90,000 jobs have been lost since 2005, a decline of 90%. Many of these losses have come as papers have consolidated their operations and looked for ways to cut operating costs. As part of its recent print-frequency reductions in Montana, for example, Lee Enterprises announced it would also be halting its own in-house distribution, instead circulating papers through the U.S. Postal Service.

Six printing plants have closed across the country since the beginning of this year alone, affecting at least 300 workers. In May, the Chicago Freedom Center Printing Plant - which had employed 200 people - closed after more than 40 years of operation. Two of the largest North Carolina dailies, the Greensboro News & Record and the Winston-Salem Journal, are no longer printed in the state at all and are instead produced at plants in Virginia or Tennessee after Lee Enterprises closed down its Winston-Salem plant in June. And the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette signaled it would close its Clinton plant amidst a labor dispute with the paper’s production unions. These closures follow a troubling trend that is leaving many communities, and some entire states, without good printing options; in Vermont, for example, many papers are forced to print in New Hampshire or even in Canada.

Bright Spots: Startups and Sustainability

In the summer of 2023, the Plumas News – the online home of four newspapers in Plumas County, Calif. – announced that it would be shutting down. The papers had held on through the dual tragedies of the COVID-19 pandemic and the 2021 Dixie wildfire, but events and time had taken their toll, and after first discontinuing the print edition in April 2020, the papers closed their doors entirely three years later. The disappearance would have left the county – home to nearly 20,000 people – as a news desert.

Shortly after the announcement about The Plumas News’ closure, however, a group of community members across the county started trying to come up with a solution. By the end of the same month, The Plumas Sun, a digital nonprofit news website, was ready for launch. The pace of the Sun’s establishment, from conception to development to release, was so breakneck that “four days before we launched, we didn’t even have a name,” according to Jane Little, the new publication’s editor in chief.

Motivating this rapid movement was “the sheer horror” of losing a primary source of local news, said Lindsay Morton, the secretary of The Plumas Sun’s board. Even when The Plumas News was publishing, she said, many people in the county got much of their day-to-day information from Facebook. Morton saw firsthand “how much misinformation quickly bubbles up” and how easy it was for the community to “spiral into gossip.”

Since those early days, the Plumas Sun has built a strong core of readers and newsletter subscribers by focusing on local government coverage. The support of the “tightly knit community” has enabled the Sun’s nonprofit approach to be sustainable, Little said. Now more than a year old, the Sun is looking for ways to expand its reach and to grow its coverage. It is also considering new avenues for collaboration, such as partnering with the local high school to provide journalism experience to students.

New local news outlets are rarities but not unheard of. In this update, we tracked 61 new outlets emerging over the past year. Nearly 90% of these startups are, like The Plumas Sun, digital-only operations. Unlike the Sun however, most have started in counties where there is already a strong presence of local news sources, although there are exceptions. The Owen News, founded earlier this year in southern Indiana, is now the only news source in the county. The Morgan County Correspondent is a print and digital startup, also in Indiana, that was established in a county where the only other news source is a Gannett-owned paper with an average circulation of less than 4,500. Yet in most cases, new sources of local news are established in counties that are the opposite of typical news deserts: 89% of the startups we tracked over the past year were located in counties that were urban or suburban.

In our accompanying Bright Spots feature, we track the startups that have emerged over the past five years. We are also profiling a group of 12 news outlets – including traditional print papers, longstanding digital sites, nonprofit innovators and alternative publications – that are exploring new avenues toward sustainability. This cohort includes outlets such as Conecta Arizona, which began as a WhatsApp-based platform in 2020, and the Times-Picayune in New Orleans, which recently expanded with a new digital newsroom in Shreveport, La.

In addition to individual startups, larger organizations have also been looking for ways to broaden the reach and capabilities of their newsrooms. NPR, for example, has established collaborative networks in five regions across the country, with more on the way. These networks allow member stations to share reporters and bolster their infrastructures. When Hurricane Helene impacted eastern Tennessee, WUOT, the local Knoxville NPR station, was able to draw support from the larger regional hub. Jody Evans Hamblett, general manager of WUOT, said, "Our news department is in its infancy, and we honestly did not stand a chance of covering this well without the regional newsroom’s help. We're a prime example of the need for this type of regional collaboration."

A huge surge in philanthropic initiatives has supported these efforts.. Announced in 2023, the Press Forward campaign has pledged more than half a billion dollars to support local newsrooms. Over the past six years, grants to U.S. journalism organizations and outlets have totaled more than $1.23 billion, according to data from the Candid Foundation Directory. Yet even with such robust support, philanthropic donations for news organizations remain heavily concentrated. In a review of the top 7,500 largest grants for journalism made in the last six years, we found that they were dispersed to just 1,100 recipients and that more than 95% of donated dollars go to organizations in urban areas.

Philanthropy and community support are only parts of a potential solution for the local news crisis. Policy initiatives are also needed in many areas. Following stalled progress on federal legislation, such as the Journalism Competition and Preservation Act or the Community News and Small Business Support Act, several states have pursued legislative support for news organizations over the past few years. In April, New York included the Newspaper and Broadcast Media Jobs Program as part of its upcoming state budget, providing $90 million over the next three years. In May, Illinois passed the Strengthening Community Media Act, which provides tax credits to local news organizations and mandates a 120-day prior notice before a paper can be sold. Legislative proposals are being discussed in 10 other states as well as the District of Columbia.

For the journalists behind The Plumas Sun, working on creating an outlet that can provide news coverage and be sustainable has been a “thrilling” experience, Little said. Of course, news is not made for journalists; As Richard Connor at El Rito Media sees it, they are merely “stewards” of the paper, and it is the people of the community who “want them to succeed.” "Little echoes this sentiment, saying the public's response to the Sun's emergence as a local news source has been “overwhelming.”

The industry of local news faces many challenges in 2024. “It used to be profitable to do this work,” Tasneem Raja, editor-in-chief of Oaklandside, said in an interview with Medill. “It’s no longer profitable in the same ways.”

However, the public’s demand - and need - for high-quality local journalism remains strong. Finishing the thought, Raja told Medill: “That doesn’t mean that this public good, this public service, is no longer needed. It’s needed more than ever.”