The nation’s cities and its suburbs are home to 287 million people, more than 85% of our population, representing a myriad of cultures, affiliations, concerns and interests. To get the news they need to navigate city and suburban life, the residents of these urban areas can turn to a variety of local media outlets: television as well as print and digital media. Yet their options in many inner city neighborhoods and bedroom communities are shrinking.
In the city, the reporting staffs of many large metro dailies that once collected Pulitzer Prizes for the national and international news coverage have been cut by half or more, leaving the remaining journalists stretched thin covering just important news within the city limits.
Feisty alternative weeklies that produced hard-hitting investigative pieces, such as the Phoenix in Boston and the Village Voice in New York, have gone silent. And many ethnic media outlets that have long served immigrant and minority neighborhoods failed to survive the economic hardships inflicted by the pandemic. A quarter of 950 ethnic outlets that existed in early 2020 were closed by 2023.
Yet it is in the suburbs where the loss of local news sources has been most profound. The loss affects both affluent suburban communities and less affluent working-class ones. In the Boston area, for example, 95 percent of newspaper closures since 2005 occurred in surrounding suburban communities such as Brookline, Newton and Watertown. Additionally, many of the suburban dailies have been depleted of staff. The Patriot Ledger of Quincy, Mass., now has four reporters. It once had a couple of hundred, according to Boston Globe columnist (and former Globe Editor) Brian McGrory.
The 2023 State of Local News report found that two thirds – 1,865 – of the 2,900 papers closed or merged since 2005 have been located in metro areas. Not surprisingly, the larger cities tended to lose the most papers. More than 500 of those shuttered papers were in five of the larger metro areas: New York, Chicago, Boston, Washington, D.C. and Minneapolis/St. Paul. Smaller urban areas were also affected, with Columbus, Ohio; Milwaukee and Cincinnati losing the most news outlets per capita.
Nevertheless, several cities – including Chicago, San Francisco, Boston and Washington – have been able to replenish the local news ecosystem by adding dozens of successful digital sites. The Bright Spots section of the 2023 report highlights the promising business models being utilized by, among others, Block Club Chicago, the Outlier in Detroit and the Shawnee Mission Post in Kansas City.
Additionally, Bright Spots offers in-depth profiles of independent owners of metro dailies in cities such as Seattle, Minneapolis, Philadelphia and Boston who are reviving the fortunes of these newspapers by investing in their journalistic missions. These papers tend to have much larger newsroom staffs than those owned by the largest chains.
Here’s a closer look at how news outlets in some of the largest metro areas are faring:
Seeking news in the suburbs
Until recently suburban papers provided residents in the individual communities surrounding a city with news they could use in making everyday decisions. Their reporters covered local events and routine government meetings that the larger city-based news organizations mostly ignored. These stories connected residents not only with their neighbors but also with the concerns and issues confronting the larger metro area.
All but 300 of the 1,865 papers closed in the nation’s 1,166 urban counties since 2005 have been weekly papers located in the suburbs. The pressure on weekly papers has been severe. As print advertising has declined – and local, small businesses close – they often don’t have the funding to keep going.
“In some of the suburban areas in the last five years, we’ve had a lot of community papers consolidated into one, so the communities are still covered, but they don’t have their individual newspapers,” said Lisa Hills, executive director of the Minnesota Newspaper Association.
Most closures have been carried out by big chains and investment groups, such as American Community Newspapers in Minneapolis and Gannett/Gatehouse in Boston. Gatehouse Media, which merged with Gannett in 2019, owned 126 newspapers in the Boston area. All but three of the print editions have been discontinued and the reporting staffs merged under the WickedLocal website, with a focus on state and regional news.
Fredric Rutberg, publisher of the Berkshire Eagle and president of the Massachusetts Newspaper Association, said that often these mergers result in smaller reporting staffs at the cost of local news.
“When the lights go out at the local newspaper, there is almost always no journalist to cover local festivals and personalities in suburban communities or the routine government meetings where important decisions about taxes and funding of local schools are made,” said Penny Muse Abernathy, co-author of the 2023 State of Local News Report.
The Boston Globe announced in September that it will expand coverage of the Boston suburbs “with the goal of meeting our existing readers where many of them are and attracting new eyes from the many surrounding communities.”
While the Globe’s outreach to the suburbs could help provide coverage of areas that have lost community newspapers, “the staffing is minimal enough that the Globe won’t be able to provide granular reporting” in those communities, Northeastern University professor Dan Kennedy wrote in his Media Nation blog.
Most of the suburban weeklies that are still publishing are small, multi-generational family businesses. The Wakefield Daily Item, which covers a suburb north of Boston, publishes a print daily paper five days a week, delivered the old-fashioned way to subscribers’ front doors. The Wakefield Item Company also produces weekly newspapers for nearby towns: the Melrose Weekly News, the North Reading Transcript, and the Lynnfield Villager.
These are small circulation papers that are hyper-local in their news coverage. Maximum print circulation for any one of the papers is 7,500, although all the papers also have websites. Because the towns they serve are relatively affluent, the Item’s editor, Robert Burgess, said the newspapers are largely funded by subscriptions. The daily item Item costs $21 a month, and the weeklies cost no more than $32 a year. But the company is backed by private owners, the Dolbeare family, who have owned the Item for more than 100 years. “They’re just committed to local news coverage and local sports coverage,” he said.
And everybody strives to keep costs down. “You keep your staff small, and you pay them as little as possible,” Burgess said. “That’s the business model. It’s been that way for years. Everybody who works here is committed to community journalism. You don’t go into it to get rich.”
Delivering digital news
Currently, 80% of the nation’s 541 digital-only local news sites are located in metro areas with more than 250,000 residents. New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Boston and Washington have had the most success in establishing successful digital sites, especially in the more affluent suburbs as well as in the core city. These are also some of the most wired cities in the country, according to CNBC.
Although Boston has lost many of its suburban print newspapers, new digital-only news sites are springing up. Launched in January 2023, the Newton Beacon is a free, nonprofit, digital-only publication “rooted in and devoted to covering news and issues in the City of Newton, Massachusetts.” The site, funded initially with donations from 400 local residents and organizations, is governed by a board of directors composed entirely of people who live in Newton.
The free, nonprofit, digital New Bedford Light, started in 2021 with funding from two major backers, now has 1,400 donors. It currently depends on a combination of individual donations, grants from foundations and partnerships with other media outlets to fund a staff of 12 that focuses on providing “in-depth journalism that keeps the public informed and holds the powerful accountable.”
While the New Bedford Light and Newton Beacon are digital-only publications, the Concord Bridge, a nonprofit started in October 2022, provides a free print newspaper to 8,700 homes and businesses in Concord. Doing so has enabled the paper to acquire more advertising revenue from local businesses, according to a member of the board of directors told Poynter.
Across the country, the Shawnee Mission Post, which covers Overland Park and Johnson County outside Kansas City, provides suburban news coverage no longer offered by the Kansas City Star. It and a sister publication have more than 6,000 subscribers who pay $7 a month.
Most recently established digital sites and newspapers operate in relatively affluent suburban communities where they can attract donors and business sponsorships. However, a growing number of nonprofit start-ups are looking to connect with minority and ethnic populations in the core city.
In Atlanta, Capital B is a startup aimed at the Black community, as is Canopy Atlanta. Outlier Media in Detroit, a digital-only nonprofit, serves one of the nation’s poorest cities. Given that a majority of residents lack access to high-speed internet service in their homes, the Outlier uses text messaging to communicate with readers.
Reviving the metro dailies
While many of the large metro papers owned by large chains have experienced round after round of layoffs, some of the dailies with local ownership, featured in the Bright Spots section, have been more fortunate. The publishers have found innovative ways to invest in the journalistic mission and have developed promising business models.
Some, such as the Seattle Times and Charleston Post and Courier in South Carolina, have actively solicited donations and grants from individuals and foundations to supplement their newsroom budgets and to fund aggressive investigative journalism.
Others, such as the Philadelphia Inquirer, have transitioned totally to a nonprofit model and now assist other start-up and legacy news operations in establishing similar models that rely on a combination of philanthropy and sponsorship by local businesses.
In contrast, the Boston Globe and the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette have remained for-profit by relying increasingly on revenue from digital subscribers. The Globe, owned since 2013 by John Henry, the principal owner of the Boston Red Sox, has some 245,000 digital-only subscribers who pay $360 a year. In 2019 it became the first local publication to have more digital than print subscribers.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution is looking to boost its digital circulation to 500,000 from current 60,000 by 2026 and to “super serve” the Atlanta area and the state of Georgia. The paper plans to hire about 100 people in the newsroom. This effort will be funded in part by a $100 million investment from Cox Enterprises, the paper’s family-owned parent company. Also, the newspaper will move its headquarters from suburban Dunwoody to midtown Atlanta next year.
But even with these success stories, the path ahead for metro papers is unpredictable. The Washington Post lost money in 2022 and in October 2023 announced plans to sever 240 workers through buyouts and possible layoffs by the end of 2023. The Los Angeles Times laid off about 13 percent of its newsroom earlier in 2023.
Nonprofits still have to meet payroll and pay other expenses, just like for-profit newspapers. Philanthropic support has not been robust. “More than 70 percent of funders said their contributions to journalism represented less than one-tenth of their overall donations,” according to Nieman Lab. “Just five funders reported investing more than $5 million.”
“Just being nonprofit is not like some magic wand that solves your economic problems,” warns former Washington Post Executive Editor Martin Baron in his new book, “Collision of Power.”
As they scramble to save money, dailies are cutting back on print editions and selling their printing presses as well as their iconic downtown buildings that once housed illustrious newsrooms. Forty of the nation’s 100 largest newspapers now publish a print edition six or fewer days a week, with 11 publishing in print only once or twice a week. Many newspapers aren’t printed in their home city. The Buffalo News is now printed in Cleveland, which means Buffalo readers don’t get late news or sports scores.
A growing number of major city daily newspapers no longer have buildings or physical newsrooms. The Charlotte Observer, owned by the McClatchy chain, operates out of co-op office space near downtown Charlotte, its former white multi-story downtown building, known locally as the “Taz Mahal,” having been demolished in 2016. The Hartford Courant, owned by Alden Global Capital, closed its newsroom in 2020 and has not opened a new one.
The Minneapolis Star Tribune perhaps offers a different path. The paper went bankrupt in 2010 but has produced operating profits every year since then while also winning three Pulitzer Prizes. Owned by billionaire Glen Taylor since 2014, the Star Tribune, in the nation’s 16th largest market, employs about 240 journalists. It has the fourth largest metro print circulation, trailing only the New York Times, Washington Post and Los Angeles Times. But print revenue has declined every year since 2005. Digital subscribers reached 100,000 in 2022, although, like many metro dailies, it encountered slowing digital subscription growth in 2023.
If digital is the future, it still requires convincing people to pay for the news. And income from digital still doesn’t match print. Studies show that most digital subscribers pay only 10-20% of the print rate. Yet tech billionaire Jeff Bezos, owner of the Washington Post, is optimistic that people will pay more for news.
“This industry spent 20 years teaching everyone in the world that news should be free,” he says in Baron’s “Collision of Power.” “The truth is readers are smarter than that. They know that high-quality journalism is expensive to produce, and they are willing to pay for it. But you have to ask them.”
Bill Arthur is a former researcher and writer at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and a former news editor for Bloomberg. He is currently retired and writing about the state of local news in the largest metro areas.
Article image by armin djuhic used under Unsplash license (Unsplash)