A good newspaper is an anchor in a community. It reminds a community every day of its collective identity, the stake we have in one another, and the lessons of its history.
Ron Heifetz, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University
Two decades ago, few of us envisioned how quickly and decisively the internet would demolish the economic model that had supported local news in this country for almost two centuries. In 2004, newspaper stocks were still the darling of Wall Street investors, trading at a premium and delivering consistently above-average returns to shareholders. And many of the nation’s 9,000 newspapers — especially those in small and mid-sized markets — were posting profit margins that exceeded 20%. The best of those community papers aspired to the ideals articulated by Ron Heifetz, author, professor and founder of Harvard University’s Center for Public Leadership, in the epigraph to my first book on local news, “Saving Community Journalism: The Path to Profitability.”
In early 2024, the nation will reach a milestone that illustrates what’s been lost since 2004: One-third of the papers that existed then will be gone. Once a vast news and information network that knitted together this diverse country encompassing almost 3.8 million square miles, newspapers are vanishing at a rate of more than two a week. Most of the 6,000 surviving newspapers today get by with slim profit margins in the single digits, and despite the optimism of many in 2004, digital alternatives have failed to fill the void.
After working for more than three decades as a journalist and senior business executive at some of the nation’s smallest and largest news organizations, I became a professor at the University of North Carolina in 2008, at the very moment that the Great Recession was exposing the fragility of the last remaining vestiges of the business model that had supported local news for so long. It was all the motivation I needed to commit to reviving and reimagining local news for the digital age, tapping the knowledge and expertise gained from a professional journey that had begun in my teen years, when I snagged a summer reporting job with my local hometown weekly in rural North Carolina and culminated with stints at the New York Times and Wall Street Journal.
In two books — “Saving Community Journalism” and “The Strategic Digital Media Entrepreneur” — and six major reports on the State of Local News published in the last decade, I’ve documented the relentless expansion of “news deserts” and “ghost newspapers,” the rise of hedge-fund and private equity ownership, and the persistence and resilience of entrepreneurs who have sought to develop new business models to replace the old one. I’ve been joined in this pursuit by industry and academic researchers in multiple disciplines — including political science, economics, law, business, history and communication — who are tracking how the loss of local journalism affects our society.
Through it all, I’ve come to appreciate that the largest news organizations in the country are only as vibrant and reliable as the smallest — and that the health of our democracy depends ultimately on the health of the thousands of weekly and daily newspapers, digital outlets, ethnic media publications and public radio stations that inform the nation’s 330 million residents about what is happening in their own backyards.
As the 2023 State of Local News report makes abundantly clear, this is a pivotal time for local news, as a growing number of policymakers, philanthropists, educators and even ordinary citizens are coming forward with new proposals and funding aimed at reversing the trend. The actions we collectively take over the next couple of years will determine whether we can revitalize and refurbish our local news ecosystem so that it serves us even better in the digital age than it has in the past two centuries.
Given the many questions that need to be probed and answered, now seems the right time to entrust the ongoing research to an expanded team at the Local News Initiative at the Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing Communication, which will have the ability to take the inquiries in new directions.
This means the 2023 State of Local News report will serve as a sort of coda to this phase of my involvement with local news, as I find other ways to support the many entrepreneurs and stakeholders committed to reviving local news.
One of those entrepreneurs, an Oregon newspaper publisher, recently reminded me of the “three epiphanies” or insights in the concluding chapter of “Saving Community Journalism.” Revisiting those epiphanies I was pleased to discover they had withstood the test of time and offer an excellent framework for looking back at lessons learned since 2004, as well as providing guidance for actions we should consider in the months and years ahead.
Epiphany #1: Healthy community news organizations support both our democratic and capitalist way of life at the most basic level — in our villages, towns, city blocks and counties where we work, play, spend our incomes and elect our public officials.
What We Now Know: The decline of local newspapers has been relentless over the past two decades, resulting in a loss of 2,900 newspapers — mostly weeklies and small dailies — that were often the sole source of reliable local news in many small and mid-sized communities.
But not all communities have suffered equally. Residents in affluent communities with widespread access to high-speed internet often have multiple digital, print and broadcast local news alternatives that can fill the gap. However, many economically struggling, traditionally underserved communities — both rural and urban — lack both the commercial and philanthropic funds to support local news organizations. These are the very communities most likely to lose a newspaper and the ones least likely to attract an entrepreneur or philanthropist willing to invest in starting a print or digital alternative or to purchase a struggling local newspaper.
There’s a lot more to learn, sometimes, in rural America than there is in urban America.
Chuck Todd, former moderator, “Meet the Press”
This disparity between communities that have journalism and those that don’t is a crisis for our democracy. Recent research has shown that in communities without a local news outlet, the lack of journalistic oversight and transparency leads to a lack of accountability in government and business, which causes residents to pay more in taxes and for the goods and services they need. Voter participation — especially in local and state elections — also decreases. Into this news void creeps misinformation and disinformation, which leads to political polarization around national — not local — issues, and a crippling inability of residents to understand the problems confronting them and to come together to chart a new path forward.
Speaking at a 2020 awards ceremony at the University of Kentucky honoring community newspaper publishers and editors who had overcome significant obstacles, Chuck Todd, then moderator of NBC’s “Meet the Press,” observed, “I wish a lot more of my colleagues in D.C. and New York would hear these stories. I know we need to do a better job of covering America.…There’s a lot more to learn, sometimes, in rural America than there is in urban America.”
As Todd notes, the loss of local newspapers leaves all of us poorer and less informed. It creates a gap in knowledge that affects not only the ability of national news organizations to cover major issues confronting the country but also the ability of our democratically elected and appointed officials to address those issues.
What We Can Do: Eliminating this disparity between communities with local news and those without involves using both public and philanthropic funds to entice entrepreneurs either to establish news outlets in news deserts or to encourage existing news organizations — print and digital, for-profit and nonprofit — to expand their news coverage to reach residents in these news-deprived communities.
Fortunately, there are both philanthropic and policy proposals that could begin the process of reviving local news in these areas. To date, most philanthropic funding has gone to digital startups in cities. Press Forward, a national coalition of more than 20 major donors led by the MacArthur and Knight Foundations will distribute half a billion dollars to news organizations over the next five years. It offers an immediate opportunity for philanthropic organizations to focus also on news deserts and at-risk areas outside the city limits by prioritizing grants and other donations to existing for-profit and nonprofit news organizations who aim to expand coverage of those communities. Longer term, several pieces of legislation being considered in Congress and in more than a dozen state legislatures would provide either indirect funding — tax subsidies to hire new reporters — or direct grants to existing news organizations that support expanded news coverage of at-risk communities.
Epiphany #2: Good journalism alone is not sufficient to save local news organizations. (The commercial business model that supported local journalism for two centuries has collapsed); therefore, news organizations must develop a “forward-looking” business plan that addresses the needs of both its readers and business owners.
What We Now Know: A Dec. 29 column in the Washington Post optimistically predicted “local news in 2024 would stage a comeback as communities across the United States support high-quality online local news sites.” However, the reality is we are a very long way from realizing that prediction in 2024, or even in the next few years. In a typical year, the number of new sites is matched by the number that go dark. Only half of the approximately 550 local digital-only news sites active in 2023 have survived more than five years, and 90% are in cities, where there is more access to philanthropic and investor funds and to broadband. Residents in many areas of the country — including not only rural areas but also inner-city neighborhoods and less affluent suburbs — lack high-speed internet connections in their homes, as well as the community funding to support a digital enterprise.
Funders and entrepreneurs of for-profit and nonprofit ventures have consistently failed to consider how difficult it is to establish and sustain a new business, especially one relying exclusively on attracting sufficient numbers of digital readers and advertisers to fund robust news coverage once the initial capital is depleted. The difficulty in attracting sufficient digital subscriber and advertising revenue to compensate for the loss of print advertising dollars has also hindered the ability of newspapers to transition to a new business model. About two-thirds of the revenue that sustains many smaller weeklies and dailies still comes from the print edition, though at much reduced margins.
In addition to broadband access, three characteristics tend to determine whether a newspaper or digital news site can craft a sustainable business model. News organizations that have made the most progress tend to be in larger, more affluent communities, be locally owned and operated, and have access to funds that allow them to reach scale quickly and then to continue investing in growth once they’ve achieved profitability.
What We Can Do: In 2024, we are a long way from being “all digital, all the time.” Most of us consume our local news in multiple ways on multiple platforms — print, broadcast and digital — and that is likely to be the case for some years to come, especially in smaller and mid-sized communities. A $45 billion investment by the federal government is designed to make broadband widely available by the end of this decade, but that does not ensure a steady flow of reliable local news to communities that are currently “broadband deserts.” There is simply not enough potential digital revenue in many of these poorer or sparsely populated communities to sustain a commercial model. That means policymakers and philanthropists will need to come up with new incentives to encourage both existing and start-up news organizations to provide news to the residents of broadband deserts.
We can also do more — through public policy and community philanthropy — to support local ownership of surviving newspapers. While many of the large daily newspapers are part of chains owned or indebted to hedge funds and private equity groups, roughly half of the 6,000 papers still published in 2023 are locally owned and operated. Most are weeklies and smaller dailies; many have survived for more than a century and have been owned by the same family for three or more generations. They have deep roots in the community and retain very loyal readers and advertisers. However, their slim profit margins in most years leave them vulnerable to unforeseen increases in expenses or sudden decreases in revenue that could force them to close shop or to sell their enterprise to a large national chain owned by a hedge fund. Either way, the community loses an important local institution.
Epiphany #3: The expectations of both readers and advertisers have changed dramatically. This requires news organizations to adopt a new way of thinking about community — and nurturing it.
What We Now Know: When “Saving Community Journalism” was published in 2014, I was often asked by other journalists why I did not instead title my book “Saving Local Journalism.” The clear implication seemed to be that “community journalism” was somehow inferior. But as I have realized since my earliest days working for the hometown weekly, community journalism is not an inferior subset of local journalism. It is, instead, a more expansive way of viewing the vital role of news organizations in building and nurturing community.
With many fewer journalists, surviving newspapers, as well as digital start-ups, have been forced to focus on covering only the big stories.
Like all reporters, community journalists are watchdogs of our local institutions, covering routine government meetings and courthouse proceedings. But they are also chroniclers of everyday life, connecting people to one another through their reporting on the comings and goings of their neighbors — their births, deaths and major celebrations — as well as the community events, such local festivals and the establishment of local businesses, that nurture a shared culture. Strong community journalism engenders identity and engagement with others who live in the same vicinity.
We’ve lost almost two-thirds of the journalists employed at newspapers two decades ago. The large metro dailies that once employed hundreds today employ only a few dozen, while the vast majority of local digital sites employ fewer than a dozen full-time staffers. With many fewer journalists, surviving newspapers, as well as digital start-ups, have been forced to focus on covering only the big stories. As a result our local news feed is missing the stories that once inspired us to engage with others and to solve small problems before they became big ones. We also lack the features that introduced us to interesting characters who lived just around the block, down the road or across the tracks.
The internet has vastly expanded our concept of community to include groups bound together digitally by their interests and affinities or by their affiliations and ideologies. Yet even in a digital age, where we physically live determines so much: the candidates we vote for in local and statewide elections, our career and lifestyle options and the quality of our healthcare, to name but a few examples. Historically, the best newspapers have helped people in a geographic area understand how their actions affect others and how they can band together to solve community-wide problems, improving the quality of their own lives and of their neighbors.
What We Can Do: As we go forward, there will be many business models for local news. The business models that sustain national and stateside news organizations will be very different from those that sustain small local ones, just as the models for many newspapers will — at least for the time being — be different from those for digital-only sites. Much more research is needed to understand which models will work in what circumstances and in what markets.
Seminal research in the latter half of the 20th century found that in the healthiest communities, the local newspaper was a vital institution, nurturing both grassroots democracy and a sense of connection with others. Its advertising encouraged economic growth by connecting local residents with local businesses, while its journalism helped set the agenda around debate of issues large and small and engaged individuals in the everyday activities that define a community. Or, as a plain-spoken newspaper publisher recently put it, “A good newspaper holds up a mirror to its community. A great newspaper is not afraid to love its community.”
The digital age has provided news organizations with new ways to reach out and engage residents in communities that historically have been deliberately ignored or unintentionally overlooked. It is the responsibility of today’s generation of journalists and business leaders to use those new tools, as well as old-fashioned journalistic techniques, to engage and connect the many communities in the digital space to the neighborhoods, towns and cities where we live, work, play and vote. Reinvigorating local news in the 21st century requires rethinking and modifying journalistic and business strategies to engender a sense of accountability to one another. Nurturing a sense of belonging to a larger community is both the challenge — and the opportunity — for all local news organizations, whether legacy or start-up, for-profit or nonprofit.
In 2024, thanks to the collective efforts of many — industry leaders, philanthropists, policymakers, researchers, educators and even ordinary citizens — we’ve begun to chart a path forward. Research often poses as many questions as it answers and can take us in unexpected directions. So we don’t yet know where the path will lead in the days ahead and whether we face increasingly difficult terrain. But we now know our ultimate destination: not only to save community journalism but also to reimagine and reinvigorate it, ensuring the health of our democracy and society in the digital age.
Article image by Markus Spiske used under Unsplash license (Unsplash)
