We’re losing the race against time

It’s not an accident that 11 of the 12 news organizations that Medill considered ‘bright spots’ were independently or locally owned. Although the percentage of papers that are independently owned remains substantial, it is dropping, from 54% percent in 2005 to 47% now.”

Steven Waldman, president, Rebuild Local News

The core news out of Medill’s extraordinary State of Local News 2025 report is: there are positive developments in local news but they’re being swamped by the negative trends.  We’re losing the race against time. Let’s dive in.

The scale of the collapse remains mind-boggling, not only in terms of the number of news outlets but also the number of journalists.  

 More than 3,500 newspapers have closed since 2005, almost 40% of the total. Some 130 newspapers shut last year, an average of more than two per week. 

We can kid ourselves into thinking this is just a loss of “print.” But when newspapers close, they’re usually not just closing the print operation but the website, and laying off the reporters.  Indeed, the Medill report says that news employment has dropped by more than 75% since 2005 (in keeping with the Local Journalist Index by Muck Rack and Rebuild Local News which used a different methodology).  Even when we consider job growth in TV and some parts of the digital world, the overall job count dropped 7% last year. “Over that same time frame, journalist jobs fared worse than 85% of all occupations tracked by the BLS.”

Newspaper digital audience is declining 

Sure, print circulation is down but that wouldn’t be inherently bad if the audience were shifting happily to digital products (#NYT.com).  So, for me, this was one of the most alarming findings: “On average, these [top 100] papers’ monthly pageviews declined by more than 45% over the past four years. Of those 100, only 11 experienced any growth in readership over the same period.”  

Possible explanations: During this time, Facebook deemphasized news. Even before AI, Google had put more emphasis on providing answers on their search results rather than click throughs. AI is accentuating the trend many-fold. (Medill noted that the “before” stats from four years ago reflects some traffic boosts from COVID.)

Hopefully, some of this decline in page views reflects news organizations  emphasizing loyalty and conversion to subscribers, rather than raw traffic. Wishful thinking?

On the to do list: find out what those 11 with growing audiences did!

We need to spend more time on the plight of independent newspapers and the importance of ownership structure.  

It’s not an accident that 11 of the 12 news organizations that Medill considered “bright spots” were independently or locally owned.

Although the percentage of papers that are independently owned remains substantial, it is dropping, from 54% percent in 2005 to 47% now.  While the spread of news deserts had previously been driven largely by the behavior of large corporate chains and dailies, “much of the growth in news deserts over the past year can be attributed to the closures of several smaller papers that were independently owned or were controlled by small chains.”

We need a more concerted strategy — including public policy, new forms of financing and philanthropy — to support their survival and transformation to sustainable and future-friendly outlets. That means especially helping those local owners that are nearing a succession moment to find solutions that keep local news in local hands.

Public radio has a long way to go before it transforms local coverage, but the seeds are there. 

Medill said they tracked 300 public radio stations that produced local programming. The bad news: that’s just 300 out of 1,400 stations. The encouraging news:  These stations already beam into 45% of the news desert areas.

Then Medill looked at “repeaters” — stations that have no original programming but extend the reach of a primary public radio station, using their programming. “When repeaters are included, this reach jumps dramatically, with signals extending into 82% of news deserts and 90% of single-source counties.”

In other words, public radio is not a dominant source of local news in under-covered areas yet, but it’s well positioned to become one. 

Of course, the economics of doing that just went from tough to brutal with the elimination of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. NPR has been trying to create networks to reach these nooks and crannies; it seems like there should be a big effort to turn more repeaters into community programming hubs.

Philanthropy has an urban tilt.  

Wow.  Medill reviewed “10,000 largest journalism grants,” totaling $1.1 billion, and found, “95% of these grants, and 98% of grant dollars, went to organizations in urban areas.”

Foundations tend to be concentrated in cities, and often care deeply about the problems of those areas — which also have severe shortages of local reporting. There’s also an interest in ensuring that national philanthropic money gets “matched” by local funding but there again, this tends to be in bigger cities. 

It may also reflect a structural issue: it’s hard for large foundations to do large numbers of small grants in small towns. Philanthropists often want ideas that “scale”; what may be needed is a wave of microgrants to help single-person newsletters get started or become sustainable. That’s less sexy but more likely to succeed in rural and suburban areas. 

This helps explain why only 10% of the 300 startups that have sprouted in the past five years are in rural areas.  “The demographic characteristics of counties supporting digital sites are nearly the polar opposite to news deserts: These counties tend to be more affluent, with lower rates of poverty and higher rates of educational attainment.” Zach Metzger, the leader researcher, says that to counter the decline, we’d need to double the number of startups.

Public policy needs to play a key role in distributing dollars more equitably. The employment credit instituted in Illinois is distributing the majority of the dollars outside of Chicago.  “State legislation has not been widely adopted throughout the nation, leaving many outlets in more rural or less affluent areas still vulnerable.”

The rise of digital local news ‘networks.’

We tend to think of startups as spunky solo-operators but Medill reports that there are now 849 local sites run as part of 54 different networks. We’ve seen some really hopeful ones, like TapInto in New Jersey.  

But Medill offers cautionary notes too. “The number of network sites doing original reporting specific to their local community is a small — a fraction of the larger landscape of networks. For example, our 2025 database tracks 535 Patch sites that offer original local reporting. As a larger organization, however, Patch boasts more than 11,000 sites, a massive jump from just under 2,000 in 2024. In our review of these sites, we found that almost all of them fall into the category of Patch AM, the network’s ‘news brief’  collection of aggregated newsletters.”  Axios too relies heavily (though not entirely) on the reporting of others. 

These are still net positive but we shouldn't mistake them for a huge increase in reporting capacity at the local level.

Where would we be without this report?  

It’s hard to think of an academic report that has been more helpful to an entire sector of society than the State of Local News report, started by Penny Abernathy at the University of North Carolina and continued and grown by the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University led by Tim Franklin and Zach Metzger. We are all grateful for their work, which helps guide public understanding, philanthropic strategy, entrepreneurial strategy and public policy development.

Steven Waldman is president of Rebuild Local News, which advances public policies to strengthen community news, and cofounder of Report for America.