If Penny Abernathy’s sole accomplishment had been identifying and raising awareness of “news deserts” across the country, her legacy in the local news world would have been secure.
But she has done much more than that in a career that has spanned decades and culminated in her oversight of the State of Local News Project at the University of North Carolina and, over the past three years, at the Medill School of Journalism, Media and Integrated Marketing Communications. This comprehensive annual report has become a must-read across the local news industry as it chronicles, in painstaking detail, the loss of local news outlets and journalism jobs, warns of communities in danger of losing local news and the implications for our democracy, and spotlights outlets that are innovating solutions that may offer brighter paths forward.
On the occasion of her retirement, Tim Franklin, director of the Medill Local News Initiative and the John M. Mutz Chair in Local News at Northwestern University, sat down with Abernathy for a program last month titled “Celebrating a News Pioneer.” Before an in-studio and online audience, they discussed her impactful career and assessed the state of local news then, now and moving forward.
This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.
Penny, you’ve served as a senior vice president at the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, and you were a publisher at Harvard Business Review. After those prestigious roles, you were appointed Knight Chair at the University of North Carolina, where you turned your attention to local news. After working at major national publications like that, why did you make the pivot to local news?
I became a Knight Chair after more than three decades in this profession, first as a journalist and then as a business executive. And it really hit me that this is a vast country. You can look at the stats, it’s 3.8 million square miles, stretches all the way from Hawaii, up to Maine, down into the Caribbean, 330 million residents, 3,100 counties. We have depended from the very beginning on a vibrant press to cover those issues. So for me, being at the pinnacle of a national news organization, even international, you understood that you’re only as good at the top as you are at the foundation.
I had been fortunate to be at the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal and the Harvard Business Review as they really geared up to make the transition into the digital age. So I came here wanting to help local news, understanding that, as a professor, I had a unique ability, and as Knight Chairs do, to take those years of professional experience and apply them to research and to teaching, so that you’re not only researching but in your best situation serving the industry and also bringing students there.
It’s been15-plus years. Did you have the feeling then that the nation was headed toward a full-blown crisis in local news? And if so, what were the trends that you saw that led you to that belief? In other words, how did we get here?
Actually, I became a Knight Chair about two months before the great crash and the Great Recession of 2008. So I came in thinking it was just a matter of helping local news organizations make the transition. The Great Recession changed all that. I like to say that when Wall Street caught a cold, Main Street caught pneumonia, and all the advertisers, local advertisers, who had been supporting local news operations, most especially community newspapers, were suddenly decimated. That meant that advertising fell just tremendously.
The other thing that happened was that the cost of buying a newspaper fell from 13 times annual earnings to about three times annual earnings. So many of the traditional chains we had grown up with had taken on huge debt, and they were like the people who had houses where their mortgages were under water. And into that market came the private equity hedge-fund groups buying them out of bankruptcy. The problem is, if you are buying a newspaper at only three times earnings, you can go in and manage it just like you would a widget factory. You go in, you cut costs, and at the end of three to five years, you just say, “I either continue to harvest it, or I sell it and flip it and start the process all over again.”
So we had an economic assault, we had a transition going on anyway to digital, and you overlay that with the emergence of a new type of media baron, the private equity and hedge funds who didn’t have the traditional journalism ethics you and I grew up with that said that journalism is a civic mission—and there is a commitment to a community to provide the information we need to make this a democracy.. So it was a matter of not just shifting to developing new business models but also figuring out who had been hit the worst.
One of the things you’re famous for is the phrase “news deserts.” Can you talk a little bit about how you landed on that phrase? Every conference I go to, news deserts is constantly a topic.
Well, I’d like to take credit for having coined the phrase. I actually did some research, and I think it was in a Chicago newspaper article that it was first used in about 2011. We talk about food deserts; we talk about media deserts; we talk about news deserts. I’ve always liked the term “desert” because things grow in a desert. It’s just that they don’t grow as abundantly as they do in a more temperate zone.
People have said, “Why didn’t you say ‘news vacuum’?” Well, there’s news; it’s just not necessarily the quality and the quantity of what you would find elsewhere. So I’ve been real careful to say I define a news desert as a community—either rural, urban or suburban—with very limited access to the kind of comprehensive, incredible news that feeds democracy and nurtures community. You can have lack of access because there is not the type of news you need. You can [lack] access because you don’t have the technology to acquire it, or you can’t afford to pay for the technology or the subscription required. But it’s vitally important, I think, for our democracy and for our sense of belonging to have local news.
You’ve chronicled so well, in your research at UNC now Medill for the past three years, there are now more than 200 counties that have no source of local news, no newspaper, no digital site, no ethnic media, no public radio. There are 1,562 counties with only one local news source. Of those, 228 counties are on Medill’s “Watch List,” which we just started last year. In other words, they’re at high risk of becoming news deserts in the near future. What are the implications for communities and for our democracy, especially in an election year, when local news goes away?
I’m very worried that just as we are a politically divided and economically divided community, we’re turning into a nation that’s also journalistically divided. You tend to have an abundance of some sorts of journalism—national, state and local in more affluent areas—and the ones that are economically struggling and the traditionally underserved communities have a real deficit of that. That has huge implications for our democracy. There’s also been recent research that has shown that it also is contributing to the polarization here, because into this desert seeps all sorts of information that isn’t necessarily credible or comprehensive at all.
Right, and I’m concerned with AI that we’re going to see even more misinformation.
Absolutely.
You follow local news more closely than then than just about anyone. Is it your assessment that the local news industry has bottomed? Or do you think that this crisis is going to deepen a bit more before maybe it turns?
I wish I could answer the glass was half full or half empty. Every time I think it’s bottomed, there’s yet another assault. And every time someone predicts this is going to be the catastrophic year, something has come in to keep it from that. I think the thing that bothers me is that my research on development of business models shows that if you want to establish a sustainable business model, either for-profit or nonprofit or some hybrid, it’s largely determined by the demographics of the community, the ownership structure and whether you have enough capital to invest to innovate. So if you’re in an affluent or rapidly growing community, you usually have people who are either willing to pay to subscribe, or you have advertisers who want to reach them. Local ownership is always better because you’re locally accountable. But the real key becomes: Can you generate enough revenue or have enough set aside that you can keep investing to innovate? Because as you know, innovation is never a smooth ride up. You try things, things don’t work, you have to adjust the strategy, and that takes time and money.
You’ve written in reports for us and previously that one of the problems with this era is we have the news haves and the news have-nots. And if you live in one of those news have-nots areas, not only are you not getting a lot of local news and information, but the ability to innovate and to be an entrepreneur is more limited.
Right. Even if we say we want businesses to be sustainable, the business environment is constantly changing. All the work that has been done on creative destruction—and that’s really what we’re living through—shows that there’s no safe bet. You can be in good shape one year and five years down the road be in a very different place. So you’ve got to stay on your toes and have that money to invest.
Do you have thoughts on how we can fix this? Is there a model for local news that you see that gives you hope? Do you have any specific examples of local news outlets that you think are getting it right?
People would say, “When are you going to discover the business model that’s going to save us?” And my answer from day one has been there’s not going to be one business model as there was in the past. There are going to be many. I’m very inspired by all the publishers out there of legacy newspapers. There are about 3,000 that are independently owned, and by and large, they have been much more innovative in terms of trying things. Because they’re close to the audience, they figure out what the audience wants. We shouldn’t give up on the for-profit model; it is working in many hundreds of markets right now, and it will work depending on, as I said, demographics, ownership and ability to invest. We need the nonprofit, and I am thrilled for the Press Forward initiative going forward. And I think we’re going to need public policy of some sort to address those areas where you don’t have the demographics, the ownership structure or the investment capital that you need.
Many people these days are touting nonprofit digital news startups as being our future. They argue these news organizations can operate independently from big private equity-controlled chains, which is true, that they’re unburdened from quarterly profit pressures, which is true, and that they can be supported by philanthropy and community members. But you’re not completely sold on that as being the solution.
I think we’re going to need a mix of that. As you know we track not only newspapers. We track digital sites, we track ethnic media, and we track public broadcasting. One of the things, unfortunately, we found with many of the digital sites is they don’t make it. Of the ones that we track now, we have about 560, and fewer than 40% of them are older than five years old. So it’s very hard to make it through that first five years.
I think that’s one of the things all of us vastly underestimated. Digital sites often need scale, and if you’re starting something from scratch, it’s much harder to build an audience than it is even if you have a legacy operation where the audience is declining or plateaued. You can at least build off something, whereas starting it is an immensely time-consuming and personal commitment from people that are there.
I worry about the fact that you’ve got to be very focused on digital sites. I think only a little bit more than 10% of the local and state news sites we track have more than 10 people on staff. So you’ve got to say, “What is my area of expertise?” and “What am I going to really do?” So that leaves a lot that’s not being covered, because we’ve lost 60% of journalists since 2005 on the newspaper side and not been able to fill that void with what we’ve added on the digital side.
The second thing that worries me is there was a lot of research done back in the ’70s that showed that local news operations could be immensely important in helping communities solve problems. And they did it in three ways. One was, what are the stories they’re covering? What kind of intensive coverage do they continue to give it? But third and most importantly, what are the editorials they write afterwards to help with solutions? So often within the nonprofit charters, you’re limited in what you can endorse. You’re certainly limited in terms of candidates. And that is one of the things I notice right now, that we’ve lost that vetting function that editorial departments at newspapers used to do for us for some of the down-ticket offices on both the state and the local levels that are not being done anymore.
Two words: George Santos. That happened in part because of a lack of vetting by news organizations in New York. The other point that you’ve made often on digital news sites is that they’re concentrated on the coasts, the Acela corridor on the East Coast; California and the Silicon Valley, in particular, on the West Coast. But in the middle of the country, we really haven’t seen that growth in digital.
Well, the other problem that we don’t think about a lot of times is broadband is very limited.
Good point.
One of my favorite comments came from the founder of Carolina Public Press in the mountains of North Carolina. She evolved from a very local site into a very statewide investigative site, and she said she went to sleep every night worrying about whether the story that she had written had been read by the people most affected by it, whether it had gotten across that last mile of technology into the hands of people who were there. I think that’s a legitimate thing we need to think about with the infrastructure bill right now. You know, if we get broadband into these areas that are lacking, what is going to fill that? What’s going to fill the broadband service, the streaming that goes into that?
That’s a fantastic point. You can build a great digital news site, but if nobody can access it, that’s a problem. Do you think public policy could play a major role in addressing the crisis now? There are 14 states that have either passed legislation or are considering legislation to help local news. There’s federal legislation pending in Congress. I don’t think anybody thinks that’s probably going to pass at least this calendar year. What role do you think public policy can play in addressing the solution? And should the public be concerned about the independence of journalism if government is helping to support it?
I think one of the things we first need to state is that if you look at the U.S. and compare it to other technologically savvy, technologically advanced Western-style democracies, we contribute about that [small amount] to our public broadcasting effort. So when I look at democracies in Europe, when I look at a Canada, I look at an Australia, they actually have good strong regional public broadcasting,. We have invested in PBS, mainly through entertainment, and then we depend on NPR to pick up the slack from that.
And a fraction of its funding is from the government.
A very, very small fraction. They depend on nonprofit contributions to do that. So I think first we need to say, okay, others have made it work without undue influence on that. But the other thing we need to acknowledge, too, is that our founders believed so strongly that we needed some kind of public support for local news, one of the very first pieces of legislation passed in 1792 by the first Congress was a postal subsidy for newspapers. And it’s an indirect subsidy.
What I’m so encouraged about is both at the national level and at the state level, and to a degree in some local communities, we’re finding people thinking about indirect ways to support it: tax subsidies for hiring reporters, tax subsidies for businesses that advertise with local news organizations, subsidies for people who subscribe. The interesting thing is Canada has had something which was a subsidy for subscribers, a subsidy for advertising and a subsidy for reporters, and they found that especially the subsidy for reporters, even the smallest news organizations, benefited. [They] said that their bottom line had increased by 10%, and 10%, is exactly what you need.
I’m haunted by a comment made to me by a publisher whose grandfather had won a Pulitzer public service [prize] on a very small weekly back in 1953 for taking on the Ku Klux Klan. It was a life and death situation for him for a number of years, so he was very committed to doing it. It took two years to finally get the Klan under control in that southern community. But he said to me the difference between operating at a profit margin of 15 to 20% and operating at 5 to 10% is “I have to self censor. I have to worry every time I get ready to print a story, can I afford the legal bills that will come from this?” So getting it up into 10% profit margin is the cushion that reliable news organizations rely on to be able to afford the liable cost to be able to go after a Freedom of Information request and pay the money that you need to get those public records.
You make a good point about public policy. That is consumer choice. It’s not the government picking winners and losers. It’s a way to provide indirect support for those organizations, and if someone wants to subscribe, it’s their choice. And if they do, then they get a bit of a tax break, for doing that. So I think that’s an interesting way to do it.
Can I put you on the spot with a question? There’s legislation pending in California that would require Big Tech, primarily Google and Meta, to basically reimburse local news organizations for use of their content. It has been a hugely controversial issue. Google announced on Friday that it was going to pull local news off its platform in California while this legislation was pending. There was an agreement in Canada; Google’s paying $100 million in Canadian dollars to support local news. What do you think of that? And where do you think that might be headed?
There’s no doubt that the large tech companies have siphoned off—research has shown over and over again—around 75% of the digital dollars that are in any market. So that means you have startups, you have broadcast, you have newspapers, you have any legacy media competing for what I call the digital scraps. And that’s not enough to sustain vibrant local news at the local level. I guess the thing that worries me most about taking that route is that the large tech firms have big lobbyists that earn a lot of money for keeping things exactly as they are. So those kinds of things, just like lawsuits, tend to take a long time to work through. The second thing that concerns me is that while they have damaged most news organizations, what people tend to look at on their own— what tends to travel, what tends to hit the algorithms—is the national news. So I worry about how much of that really trickles down to the small news organizations.
That’s a good point.
If you’re trying to save local news, what are you trying to save? Of the 6,000 newspapers we have today, I’d say about 5,700 are what I would call small dailies and weeklies, not the metros and certainly not the national newspapers. I’ll have to be shown that they will not benefit more than the smaller ones, because I just don’t know how you divvy it up in a way that’s meaningful for the smaller ones.
You’re right. It gets complicated really fast. At least in part because of this local news desert research, major foundations are stepping up. The MacArthur Foundation announced last September a coalition of more than 20 foundations—I think that number is now up to 57—have formed this Press Forward consortium, a campaign to inject what’s going to be well north of half a billion dollars into local news over the next five years. MacArthur is continuing to add partners, continuing to raise money for this. That initiative may grow to a billion dollars here before too long. What impact do you see Press Forward having on the local news situation?
I think it has two benefits. One is symbolic. We have needed for a long time someone to step forward and say, “This is vitally important for democracy,” and to bring others along. You need the heft of a MacArthur, you need the heft of a Knight to say this is vitally important, to democracy and to the welfare of any country as well as a community going forward.
I also look at it as stage two, point 2.0. Hopefully, it engenders 3.0, 4.0, because you need to bring a lot more people into that. My hope for this is that in 2.0, we can get beyond just the digital startups but to also look broadly.
If you look at newspapers, they have lost an estimated $40 billion a year in revenue. So a billion dollars over five years (the goal for Press Forward organizations) is a small drop in the bucket. But, again, as I say, symbolically, it can begin to start the process. You do need momentum, and that’s momentum.
Those are massive losses. This could be a bridge for a lot of local news organizations while they figure out a new model to get forward, so I think that’s encouraging.
I like the fact too that there’s a notion on looking at what communities have been underserved and are underserved now. Because that gets us away from the Acela corridor and the West Coast dominance of those digital outlets and gets you thinking about, if you can’t reach somebody digitally, what are the numerous ways we can get the news to people? How can we innovate to do it logically?
As I mentioned earlier, Medill is going to be continuing the State of Local News Report after you step away. In fact, local news research is kind of booming. Nationally, some of us were just at a local news researchers conference a few weeks ago, and the room was packed. I think it was record attendance. A number of major universities are now researching different aspects of the local news situation. What other aspects of local news would you like to see us or others researching?
I’m just so heartened by the number of young scholars, the next generation of scholars, who really feel even more passionately than I do about this. When I first became Knight Chair, and I showed up at a couple of local news conferences, I thought I was maybe the youngest person in the room. I did a recent article for a journal, and I said there are really three areas that I think that we could see. One, Medill is going to look at the whole issue around ghost newspapers this coming year.
Can you define a ghost newspaper?
Well, it is interesting. I initially had defined a ghost newspaper as a paper that had lost more than three-fourths of his staff. We now have located in the last year or so quite a few newspapers with no one on the staff. And I’m hoping that will be rectified or at least called out.
I’m also very heartened by the number of universities that have stepped forward, and League of Women Voters, organizations in various states who have said, “We’re going to do our own state of local news in Oregon or New York….” Those are really important because we can only provide a national look. We do go down to the county level in all of the 50 states, but there’s still data. There’s no substitute for on the ground [research].
The other thing that is also very heartening are all the universities that are trying to figure out how they can use students. As a professor and an educator, one of the most encouraging things for me was I would link up projects with local newspapers, and the number of students who had never considered a job in local news who then, instead of dreaming of saying, “I’ve got to get to NBC” or “I’ve got to get to the New York Times as quickly as possible,” started understanding there’s no greater feeling than what you can provide as a local journalist immediately. And you know the people you’re writing about. It’s not like you drop into town, and you’re gone.
For sure. We’ve tracked loss of outlets. I think tracking loss of coverage, local news coverage, if we can get our arms around that, would be very informative and I think would also help foundations and others that are working on this problem. Then I also wonder what comes in behind news deserts, in news desert communities, with disinformation and misinformation and that sort of thing. So a lot to research, for sure.
Penny, I want to give you the last word here. When you look back at all the work you’ve done on local news over your time at UNC and now at Medill, how would you assess the impact that you’ve had during that time on the industry, on academia, on public policy, on philanthropy, on public understanding of the crisis?
I don’t think about those things. I started out being inspired by the publishers I saw and the editors I saw trying their dead level best, often without anybody recognizing it, and that’s what motivated me basically from 2008. till about 2016, when I published the first report. I had done the book “Saving Community Journalism” three years before, and that told me that there was hope there. But [with] that 2016 report—it was called “The Rise of a New Media Baron and the Emerging Threat of News Deserts”—honestly, like most researchers, I felt like a tree fell in the forest, and maybe two people heard it. Fortunately, a couple of journalists who were business reporters heard it, picked up on it.
What was interesting is each time a new report was published, first journalists came on board by 2018, and then by 2020 what was most encouraging were the number of scholars outside of communications—those in political science, those in history, those in sociology, those in economics, those in business—who were saying this is a critical issue for democracy, for capitalism, for our society.
What I would say to any researcher is it’s very hard to look back and see what your impact is. It’s also very hard sometimes to get up in the morning and do it again when you feel like nobody’s listening. But, in fact, continuing to do that and providing information where there is none is vitally important in solving this. That’s why I’m very grateful to the foundations that have supported this research through thick and thin, because it would have been much easier to say, “I’m going to support experimentation or this, that and the other.” But this kind of research is really important, and I’m just so inspired by the young generation that wants to take it in lots of new and different directions.
You’re taking a step back from the State of Local News Project after all these years. What lies ahead now? Is it a book? Is it consulting? Is it writing? Is it some combination?
Well, there is a book I had been wanting to do for at least six years, and that book is about what I call the homesteaders. I feel really lucky to have gone into this profession at the point I did. When I was in journalism school, less than 20% [of students] were women. Within 20 years more than half were women. Today, as you know, in most communication schools, it’s about 80%. We see lots of books on trailblazers, but I think what I owe so much to are the women who came just two or three or four years ahead of me, who said, “I’m gonna make this a profession.”
What else? Playing with a dog? How else are you going to spend your time?
(laughs) I haven’t really thought about it before. I mean, I was really lucky with many of the positions that I had before becoming a Knight Chair, where I got to travel the world. I feel really lucky to have traveled the world in the ‘90s and the aughts. It’s a very different world now. I feel very lucky to have been in Hong Kong when I was, to have been in Berlin when I was, to have been in Beijing when I was, to have been in St. Petersburg and Moscow when I was. Being Knight Chair I made it a point to say I was going to talk to a press association in every one of the 48 contiguous states.
Wow. Did you make it?
Yes, I’ve been to all 48 contiguous states. So part of it is just being able to appreciate where it is and then decide what else you want to do too for all of that. And, you know, I’m not going away. I care very much about local news, and I’m always available to those that have inspired me to, to offer advice, even if they’re not paying for it. And it’s worth exactly what they’re getting from all of that, Tim. And, of course, I will be rooting from the sidelines for you, [State of Local News Project Director] Zach [Metzger] and the team to take this in new and really wonderful directions that even I can’t predict. And you can’t either at this point,
Well, we will do our best to uphold the tradition.
I’m sure you will.