The Hutchinson News in central Kansas greeted its subscribers Sept. 5 with a front-page feature about the Hutchinson Senior Center that included a big photo of seniors kayaking – on a lake with a thickly forested shore.
That’s not the landscape of Hutchinson, some 50 miles northwest of Wichita. And that’s not the name of its senior center.
The “local” centerpiece instead told baffled readers all about activities offered by the senior center in Hutchinson, Minn., more than 500 miles away as the crow flies. The Hutchinson News, serving a city of 40,000, no longer had a single reporter or editor on staff, so the story was written by a confused freelancer who, though based in Kansas, failed to notice that her online search had yielded the phone number of a faraway senior citizen center. She got the assignment from a Gannett editor based 185 miles to the southwest, in Bartlesville, Okla.
What Gannett’s corporate relations staff called an “oversight,” while declining to be interviewed, provides a vivid picture of what has happened to hundreds of newspapers that once covered small cities, towns and rural areas across America. They’ve become “ghost papers” with either no local journalists remaining on staff or so few that the paper’s ability to provide critical news and information to residents in that community has been severely curtailed.
In the U.S. there are more than 3,100 counties in 50 states. Almost three-fourths of those counties – 2,259 – are located more than 50 miles from the closest city. Over the past two decades, the 46 million residents who live in these more rural counties have experienced a dual loss.
First came the loss of hundreds of weekly newspapers, which were often the prime, if not sole, source of critical news and information about important events and issues. Amid that came the loss of hundreds of local reporters and editors, as the newsrooms of the surviving weeklies and small dailies were hollowed out.
The loss of local print advertising to digital platforms such as Google and Facebook came later to news outlets in towns and rural areas than it did to large metropolitan newspapers. But it arrived with force after 2012 and accelerated during the pandemic. This shift has led to many sudden newspaper closures and mergers, as well as news outlets’ sales to distant chains that cut local staff, customer service and quality of coverage. In many of these counties, ghost newspapers publish print or electronic editions but employ no professional journalists and instead rely on freelancers, syndicated material and stories from other chain properties.
Since 2005, 875 of the 2,900 newspapers that have been permanently shuttered were in these smaller counties. Today 195 of those mostly rural counties have no local newspaper or any other source of local news. An additional 1,387 counties have only one local news source – invariably a weekly or small daily. Based on the higher-than-average poverty rates and the population size of those counties, the State of Local News project determined that 228 are at elevated risk of losing their sole remaining news source.
There is no similar detailed accounting of the number of ghost newspapers, largely because owners are reluctant to share staffing numbers. However, a recent review by the Local News Initiative of the 70 smallest newspapers owned by two of the largest newspaper chains, Lee and Gannett, found that three dozen had no listing for any local journalists on staff.
Since 2005, the number of journalists employed by newspapers has declined by 60%, a loss of 43,000 reporters and editors. In recent years large chains have severed the most journalists, leading to dozens of ghost newspapers.
Alarmed by the lack of local news in the Gannett-owned Hutchinson News, Michael Glenn, a 16- year-old high school debater, started the Hutchinson Tribune on Substack on July 4. Glenn says the Tribune is currently publishing about five times as many local news articles as the Hutchinson News, and that he and his partner, a local librarian, are starting to sell advertising to their growing audience.
Unfortunately, very few rural communities have an energetic entrepreneur like Glenn willing to devote the time and effort to start an alternative replacement for either a shuttered newspaper or a ghost publication.
However, research shows that people still need and want local news, and in some small cities, towns and rural communities, new sustainable business models are beginning to emerge.
Most American communities served by weekly papers
Even today, the weekly newspaper is often the sole source of news and information about what is happening in most communities of fewer than 10,000 people. It is a record of the births and deaths, the comings and goings of residents, the openings and closings of local businesses and the decisions of the school board and local governments. Of the 6,000 newspapers still published in 2023, 4,792 are weeklies or non-dailies, published fewer than four times a week. Eighty-five percent – 2,599 – of the 3,052 papers published in rural counties are weeklies. Outside metropolitan areas publishers of surviving newspapers and entrepreneurs seeking to establish news outlets face three unique challenges: the demographics of the community, a lack of capital and technological limitations.
Most rural communities have poverty rates much higher than the national average. Also, many parts of rural America are stagnant or shrinking in population, so are not the kind of places that attract investment. Rural counties still have fewer jobs than they had before the Great Recession 14 years ago. Growth that has occurred is limited primarily to bedroom communities within commuting distance of a city. My research has shown that the longer a worker’s commute, the less likely they are to subscribe to their local newspaper or to buy single copies of it regularly.
Added to all that, many rural communities lack affordable and reliable access to high-speed internet, and more than 90% of all digital news outlets are in metro areas.
About two-thirds of America’s weeklies are now owned by chains. Gone are the days in these towns when residents could drop into their local newspaper office to place a classified ad or news item while chatting with a reporter or editor about a news tip or other topics of interest.
That is the case even at some daily papers in rural counties, such as the Kentucky New Era in Hopkinsville and, 70 miles west, at The Paducah Sun, the flagship of Paxton Media Group, one of the largest owners of non-metropolitan papers. In these towns of 31,000 and 26,000, respectively, an appointment is required to enter the otherwise shuttered newspaper office.
In January 2023, 20 months after buying the Landmark Community Newspapers chain, Paxton sent those papers’ managers a memo saying, “We’ve decided it’s best to eliminate our open office hours to the public completely, for the remaining publications in our group.” Paxton did not respond to interview requests.
Paducah is also home to Paxton’s only television station, WPSD-TV, which now oversees the Sun and provides much of its news content. (Hopkinsville has no TV station but a successful online startup, Hoptown Chronicle, run by former New Era editor Jennifer P Brown.)
Paxton recently bought five more newspapers from Gannett Co., which has been shedding its smaller papers – largely by selling them to CherryRoad Media, a New Jersey firm created three years ago by information-technology entrepreneur Jeremy Gulban. CherryRoad now owns more than 80 papers, 60 bought from Gannett, some of which Gulban says he is struggling to revive.
“They eliminated all the local publishers, so there is no one you can call to talk about the paper,” Gulban said at the National Summit on Journalism in Rural America on July 7. “Everything flows up in these vertical silos, which leads to a lack of integration, a lack of working together, . . . If people want to place an ad, they’ll call an 800 number, and they’ll go online and do it. And we all know in small towns that won’t happen.”
Gulban said the loss of local news, ads and customer service left most of the papers with two types of subscribers and single-copy buyers: “people who just like the ritual of getting the paper and really don’t care what’s in it . . . and people who hold a position in town where they feel like they need to get the paper. People who were truly looking for news had just given up and kind of moved on.”
Retail advertising largely disappeared, he said, “so really, what you have is, you got a ghost newspaper, right? It really has no relevance in the community. And you know that’s a vicious cycle.”
Gulban said he has invested in editorial and ad staff, most often by hiring former employees who had been let go in downsizings. No longer locally owned or controlled, the CherryRoad papers still depend on their local leadership, he said. Gulban intends printed newspapers to remain a core element of CherryRoad’s business model; to that end he recently bought the Hutchinson News printing plant from Gannett.
While Gannett has sold sets of small-town papers to Gulban, many local publishers have not been able to find buyers – at least those that they found acceptable – and have simply shut down.
One of the nation’s most celebrated weeklies, the Canadian (Texas) Record, stopped printing in March after a second planned sale fell through. The first deal failed when the buyer couldn’t find anyone willing to move to Canadian, a town of 2,300 on the Southern Great Plains, 100 miles northeast of Amarillo. Owner Laurie Ezzell Brown, 70, still reports news and sports on the paper’s Facebook page as she searches for a new owner.
“Things happen” in Hemphill County, population 3,400, she told Judy Woodruff of PBS. “There have been storms here and tornadoes and events like that that you just can’t ignore. They’re happening. We need to cover them. People look to us for information.”
Startups rise in ‘ghost’ towns
Despite the challenges, people are launching community news outlets in places where chains even abandoned papers covering rural county seats.
Consider the Community News in Macomb, Ill., and the Logan-Hocking Times in Logan, Ohio.
Lynne Campbell, a former regional publisher for GateHouse Media (which later bought Gannett), owns the Community News. At June’s National Summit on Journalism in Rural America, Campbell said she has “made it my mission in life to save community newspapers.” After she bought and improved two Illinois papers in communities no longer being covered by GateHouse-owned properties, Campbell responded to calls from people in Macomb to do the same.
The paper started on a copy machine, distributed free three times a week at 40 locations, and “was full of brief bits of local news,” such as events, police logs and death notices but not full obituaries, Campbell said. When the pandemic hit, “we didn’t have events to write about. So we turned to partnering with the health department, the hospital, all of the government agencies, the mayors in all the cities, and we formed a great relationship between everybody, and we became the source for information during the shutdown . . . All the advertisers stayed with us because they knew people were going there to read everything.”
The Community News puts out two paid editions per week and a midweek free edition, “so that everybody could get a little bit of the local news.” It is drawing $40,000 a month in ad revenue, much of it in legal ads that the longstanding Gannett paper lost because it “is down to less than a hundred subscribers” and no longer has a storefront, Campbell said. The county has 27,000 residents, most in Macomb.
The southeast Ohio town of Logan has 7,200 people in a county of 46,000. After the Adams Publishing Group slashed costs at the Logan Daily News, with its office open just nine hours a week, Editor Debra Tobin and several other staffers left and launched the Logan-Hocking Times as an online news source charging subscribers $7.99 a month.
“Within six months we had 700 (subscribers),” she said. “We’re over a thousand. That wasn’t good enough for me, though, because I wanted to do something else, because a lot of people don’t have computers” or good internet access. “So I decided to do a print newspaper,” which is distributed free on Fridays, the day after the digital edition, and is funded by advertisers who sponsor pages.
Tobin is on Social Security and takes no salary, but the Logan-Hocking Times has a part-time reporter, a part-time sports reporter, a full-time paginator and full-time graphics artist, plus two advertising staffers who work on commission.
“We were told that we were nothing but a pipe dream,” Tobin said. “And here we are almost three years later . . . and we’re growing. I encourage people to try it . . . if you have a background in journalism, and you are thinking about starting a paper. It may seem scary at first, but if I can do it, I know anybody can do it.”
Similarly, most rural counties abandoned by Community Newspaper Holdings Inc., an investment- fund subsidiary of the Retirement Systems of Alabama, have not become news deserts. Fewer than a fourth of the 34 counties where CNHI has closed papers since 2005 are news deserts, according to the State of Local News Report. During the pandemic alone, CNHI closed or merged 16 papers.
In Kentucky, for example, CNHI closed four weeklies and a daily, but none of those counties are now news deserts. In two counties, former CNHI editors started their own papers, and in two others, nearby publishers started new papers. The death of the Glasgow Daily Times left a town of 15,000 and a county of 45,000 served by a weekly, the Barren County Progress, the largest paper in a small regional chain. The quality of news coverage declined, and a Glasgow-based chain of radio stations, Commonwealth Broadcasting, hired two former Times staffers and ramped up its online news coverage, with daily email newsletters.
Urgent need to find new business models
Many rural publishers show “a pronounced lack of urgency as they await a clear, proven path to follow” as their industry undergoes transformation, University of Missouri journalism professor Nick Mathews said at the rural-journalism summit in Lexington, Ky.
Mathews, Teri Finneman of the University of Kansas and Patrick Ferrucci of the University of Colorado interviewed rural publishers and newspaper readers in Kansas, Nebraska and the Dakotas about the future of the newspapers and alternative sources of revenue. They found that readers are more willing to support local news outlets with non-subscription revenue than publishers think.
“Our data reveals a profound grip of fear in rural weekly newsrooms, leaving leaders in a paralyzing state of inaction and risk aversion,” Mathews said. “Innovation is undermined as they exhibit a pronounced lack of urgency and passively await the emergence of an industry trailblazer. In other words, some newsroom leaders would rather follow than lead into the future.”
Joey Young, CEO of Kansas Publishing Ventures, has partnered with a research team led by Finneman to test alternative revenue sources in a rare interventional experiment.
Kansas Publishing Ventures owns three weeklies in south-central Kansas and was already experimenting with promotion of concerts and a beer brand. The researchers helped Young apply for and receive grants to jump-start more experiments, such as memberships and an e-mail newsletter.
The email newsletter brought increased circulation, but it hasn’t been enough, Young said. Needing more revenue, he published “The Cost To Print,” a story with graphics explaining to readers why the weeklies needed to raise their annual subscription price above $50 and single-copy price above $1.50.
He wrote about how the newspapers’ costs had increased about 40% in two years, and he laid out alternative paths forward: a large annual subscription price increase to $144 or an all-digital news product.
“Almost all of our readers who contacted me said, ‘We want the print product. Just charge us more,’” Young said. “We have the exact number of renewals that we normally would. It’s a small sample size, but so far everything’s been fine.”
Despite widespread wariness among rural publishers to raise subscription and single-copy newspaper prices, the Recorder in Monterey, Va., has charged $5 a copy since 2017. When the pandemic further slashed its ad revenue, Publisher Anne Adams raised subscription prices and appealed to readers for donations. They kept the Recorder in business.
Great Plains publishers interviewed by the university researchers recoiled from the idea of asking for donations, Finneman said, believing it would be an admission of failure or personal weakness. But other publishers are building member donations into their business model, and some are exploring the option of becoming nonprofits to reduce tax expenses, to qualify for foundation grants and to allow member donors to make tax-deductible contributions.
The National Trust for Local News has bought groups of papers in Colorado and Maine and converted them into nonprofits, believing this statewide bundle to be “the most sustainable path forward for rural newsrooms,” said Ross McDuffie, the trust’s chief portfolio officer.
A former publisher and executive for both Lee Enterprises and McClatchy, McDuffie said a state nonprofit umbrella offers local newspapers economies of scale to save non-newsroom operational costs and to negotiate better prices with suppliers “without trivializing the localness that makes these organizations special and essential to the communities that they serve.”
He said existing legacy publications have more potential than those starting over from the ground up, which most rural communities are unlikely to support. But their long-term success, McDuffie said, will depend not only on support from the communities they serve but “also the greater philanthropic community,” from which the Trust gets its money to buy papers.
“We’ve got to find alternative sources for funding and transformation,” McDuffie said. “There also has to be access to subject-matter expertise . . . without adding additional burden to the expense line.”
Is there enough philanthropic money to attract qualified staff to rural towns and newsrooms?
“The combination of lower cost of living can make rural newsrooms great training grounds for new reporters,” McDuffie said, “as long as those reporters see an opportunity to hone their skills and experiment with new tech and with innovation and local news.”
Al Cross is director emeritus at the Institute for Rural Journalism, University of Kentucky.