Bob Gough has worked in local news nearly his entire life, and he knows this: Everybody wants to see their kid or grandkid in the paper.
The trouble is that truly local news in his western Illinois town of Quincy is getting harder to find. Starting this year, radio listeners no longer can catch the Quincy Senior High School football games on Friday nights. The legacy newspaper, the Herald-Whig, has changed hands two times since 2021 after being family-owned for nearly 100 years. It now has just three news reporters to cover the community of roughly 38,000, and it’s part of a chain of papers that share content.
Quincy, a county seat on the Mississippi River, is not a news desert, but Gough’s Muddy River News, which he started in April 2021, has found a niche delivering the kind of hyperlocal news the Quincy Journal used to cover when he was there. “People want to know what’s going on in their town,” Gough said. “They don’t want their papers filled with crap about what’s happening in other places.”
The all-digital Muddy River News gives readers stories about police department license-plate readers, an open house at the senior center and two staples of local news: police blotters and obits. It also has podcasts, a live-streamed morning talk show and live sports content through Muddy River TV+. (Gough’s undergraduate degree from the University of Missouri was in broadcast journalism.)
“Quincy is still an older community, but on our video side, that’s where we see the younger number tick up,” Gough said. Muddy River News already has locked in $20,000 in sponsorship for a news sports program. “We’re kind of figuring out the live streaming and making it idiot proof on our end. We want new dollars and not just to shift old dollars.”
The vast majority of local news startups, nearly 85%, are digital-only operations like Muddy River News, the 2024 State of Local News Project found. Overwhelmingly, these new organizations are concentrated in metropolitan areas and counties where there are already other local news sources, like Adams in western Illinois. The report tracks 17 counties where the only existing local news outlets were founded in 2019 or later; however, those outlets represent a small minority, about 5%, of startups. Their rate of appearance has yet to catch up to the expansion of news deserts, a number that grew to 208 counties in 2024.
The 2024 State of Local News Project did not identify any startups from the past year in Iowa, Idaho, Hawaii, New Hampshire and Wyoming. There isn’t necessarily a coastal vs. in-land difference; the key distinction is urban vs. rural, with large clusters around several major non-coastal cities — for example, Denver, Minneapolis and Indianapolis.
Many of the new entrepreneurs are former journalists like Gough, who, now in his 50s, knows his community and knows journalism. They are in it because they care but also because they believe they can make money. That makes them outliers. Of the startups included in the 2024 State of Local News Project, 53% are nonprofits. Among just the digital startups, that number rises to 60%.
“The people who are engaging in those startups are all journalists, either press or broadcast, who may have lost their jobs with previous employers or got fed up with previous employers,” said Don Craven, president and chief executive officer of the Illinois Press Association. “They’re all folks who can’t get ink out of their veins.”
Or, as Chris Krewson, executive director of LION Publishers, put it: “The only people crazy enough to launch these damn things in the first place are journalists.”
LION, an association that helps digital news startups develop sustainable business operations, saw 17 members launch new products in 2024. That number contrasts with a spike of 81 in 2021. “Access to capital in 2024 is very different than two years or three years ago,” Krewson said.
The only people crazy enough to launch these damn things in the first place are journalists.
Chris Krewson, Executive Director, LION Publishers
Nancy Lane, co-chief executive of the non-profit Local News Association and Local Media Foundation, said startups have all the same challenges as legacy media but often have more runway due to significant funding at launch.
“Many have a false sense of security in the early days and spend too much of the funding on the wrong things,” she said. “Developing a sustainable business model must be the top priority from day one, even while building audience and brand identity.”
‘Dogs and ice cream’
In early 2023, faced with having to cut his staff, Bill Sullivan laid himself off from Gold Country Media, where he was publisher of the Folsom Telegraph in northern California.
As local media around Sacramento retrenched, business leaders and even the mayor came to Sullivan asking for help to fill the gap in coverage.
A few months later, he and business partner Adam Frick, a software developer and digital media specialist, started the Folson Times, a digital-only outlet that provides local news coverage to the affluent community’s 80,000 residents about 20 miles northeast of the California capital.
“We started it without advertising and hoped [the advertising] would come, and it did,” Sullivan said.
The founders bypassed print entirely to deliver community news online. “Dogs and ice cream,” Sullivan said, describing their brand of journalism. “The bad news or the concerning news will find you. It’s the feel-good and community stories we find. That’s what we specialize in.”
That doesn’t mean they avoid hard news altogether. As Frick noted, fire danger is real in northern California, and fire coverage drives web traffic. “People want to know if they are in danger.”
The Folsom Times also covers crime, with recent stories about two men who allegedly tried to make off with an ATM and the arrest of a man accused of stealing dozens of pairs of new shoes. But they bypass coverage of the city council or the planning board, Sullivan said.
“We do feature a dog from the local shelter once a week,” he said. “That gets a lot of clicks.”
The clicks are important because, although the Times started bringing in money after three months with very little in the way of startup costs other than his and Frick’s time, Sullivan said they eventually want to earn enough from advertising to pay their own salaries, which they haven’t been able to do yet.
But Frick, a software specialist who was new to journalism, also has learned a fundamental lesson about community news.
“I know that content is king, and to drive traffic to a website you need good content,” Frick said. “News is excellent content. I did not know just how important it is.”
He used to look at content strictly for the traffic it could generate. Now after nearly two years, Frick said he realizes how important local news is to a community. “My focus has changed. At first I didn’t want to do articles on businesses. I thought they need to pay for that. And now I understand. I realize that you have to support the community whether you make money or not. The money will come.”
Seeking funds amid low-income population
For Kenneth Miles, founder and publisher of the Trenton Journal across the country in New Jersey, the money must come if his Black-owned news outlet is going to survive.
Miles started the Trenton Journal in 2021 in a community close to the size of Folsom but vastly different. Trenton’s population is much poorer, with nearly 20 percent of residents living below the poverty line, according to the 2023 U.S. Census. The community, about 30 miles north of Philadelphia and 55 miles south of New York City, has an unemployment rate of nearly 60 percent.
It’s an urban area, not a news desert, with a daily newspaper that is part of a chain owned by the hedge fund Alden Global Capital.
But Miles recalled a news conference in July 2023 when the mayor and several city council members announced the demolition of 28 homes on Sanford Street in a blighted area known for crime. Miles and an editor from the daily paper were the only journalists who attended.
“The mayor was so quick to get the press conference over with because he didn’t expect any questions from anyone,” Miles said. “There wasn’t anyone from the community there to ask the mayor or council people any questions involving the homes being demolished. I felt it was part of our responsibility to represent the people who couldn’t be there. Did anyone in the community get any notice? Stories like that make me realize there is a need for me to do what I do.”
There’s a need for it, but how do I sustain myself and not become a non-profit?
Kenneth Miles, Founder/Publisher, Trenton Journal
Although it cost him only several thousand dollars to get up and running, Miles, who had a long career as a media consultant before he founded the Journal, is the only full-time employee. He makes enough through ad dollars to pay himself some and his freelancers, but he worries about the future.
“There’s a need for it, but how do I sustain myself and not become a non-profit?” he asked. “I do want to make money off of this, but I just need to figure out how.”
Quincy and Trenton have similar median incomes, but the poverty rate is lower in the western Illinois community, and when Gough started Muddy River News the same year as Miles started the Trenton Journal, he had investors: a lawyer and a banker who gave him $250,000.
Gough now brings in enough advertising revenue to pay six full-time employees and six to 10 part-timers. By next year, he said he hopes to turn a profit. “We came really close last year,” Gough said. “I’m really very hopeful. We have a good shot.”
He has no interest in print, and Krewson, the LION executive director, agrees with that approach. “We are never going to see hundreds of new newspapers launch,” Krewson said. “And as often as not when they do, they collapse. Print is not relevant.”
Saturation mail circulation
In Bushnell, a small central Illinois city of several thousand residents, a group of five young Gen Z friends isn’t ready yet to give up on print.
They started The Forgottonia Times in July 2024 to cover four counties, including the one where most of them grew up. The five-person staff includes two married couples.
The paper is printed locally, and 61,000 copies are delivered monthly as saturation mail to every household in the readership area. That means ads are relatively expensive because they are presumably reaching more people than a subscription paper would. “There’s been a little bit of a sticker shock for a lot of the businesses,” Editor Josiah Chatterton said. “We’re starting to get them used to that.”
Although the Forgottonia Times isn’t yet bringing in enough to cover all their salaries — only the ad manager is paid — after just a few months, it is close to turning a profit, said Josiah Chatterton, whose wife, Hannah Chatterton, is one of two reporters at the paper. Both worked at Gatehouse before it merged with Gannett in 2019. Hannah Chatterton was briefly a remote writer. Josiah Chatterton started out in data with a third party vendor and was then recruited to manage a newspaper. “I found myself the head of a dying newspaper in Ohio that I was managing remotely from Illinois,” he said. His job was really to “clear staff and replace them with remote writers and to get as much advertising revenue as possible.”
It was a rough position to be in, but something about print news nonetheless appealed to him.
“To us as the younger generation, print newspapers are completely novel,” Josiah Chatterton said. “I don’t think anyone from our generation received them when we were growing up. We felt that digital was an area that was pretty well saturated.”
They also didn’t want to worry about clicks. “We felt like a lot of the other mediums pushed news to become more and more sensational,” he said. “Our goal was to deliver news that wasn’t just sensational.”
The Times offers stories about local history, local businesses and gardening. The team started with seed money from its graphic designer, Matthew Rauschert. In the first month of operation, it covered about half of the $24,000 operating costs from ad revenue. By the second month, ad revenue was covering about 65%. The founders learned some lessons along the way. The paper has gone from 28 pages to 16 to cut costs.
“We wouldn’t be where we were if we hadn’t gone saturation,” Josiah Chatterton said. “We’re planning to stay there if we can.”
The group is committed to delivering local news.
“It’s our home, and this area in particular has really been affected by news deserts,” Chatterton said. “There’s one town in all four counties which has a newspaper that is robust.”
Most of their friends they grew up with have left the area, Chatterton said.
“We’ve been staying intentionally out of City Council meetings and politics and focusing on events and park improvements and school contests, trying to focus on more upbeat news and highlighting the good things,” Chatterton said.
Lane, the Local Media Association executive, said that isn’t easy.
“Local news startups are hard work,” she said. “Some of the most well-funded startups in the country struggle to grow audience despite producing strong journalism. Just because you build it does not mean they will come. Business leaders, local foundations and the overall community must be behind these new ventures, no matter the size. And the founders must have a solid business plan that goes well beyond a passion for journalism.”