The United States has seen a staggering 75% decline in local journalists since 2002, according to a report released on Thursday by Rebuild Local News and Muck Rack.
In their research that creates the Local Journalist Index, they found that more than 1,000 (of the 3,141) U.S. counties do not have even one full-time local journalist, and the shortage isn’t limited to rural areas. Even in densely populated cities like Los Angeles, there are very few local journalists, proportional to the city’s population.
The decline is such that less than 25 years ago, there were roughly 40 local journalists per 100,000 residents. Now, that ratio is just 8.2 per 100,000. Only 4% of counties in the United States have about the same ratio of local journalists relative to population as they did in the early 2000s, according to the report.
These findings generally track with Medill’s State of Local News Report that’s also measured a precipitous decline in local newspapers and newspaper jobs over the last two decades.
“The basic finding is that this is more widespread and severe than we thought,” Rebuild Local News founder Steve Waldman said. “I think the big thing is that, when you look at the reporters per population, you see in really vivid terms the effect of the gutting of newsrooms in the suburbs and cities. We kind of have a vivid sense of, OK, if there’s a county that doesn’t have an outlet, that’s really bad. But what about the counties where they do have outlets, but the newsrooms are a shadow of their former selves? This really captures that. When you look at this over time, it’s a really scary picture.”
Rebuild Local News is a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization that works to find public policy solutions to address the collapse of local news across the country. Muck Rack is a technology platform that gathers data on journalists and media outlets.
They developed a new metric, Local Journalist Equivalents (LTEs), to measure the decline.
Using this information, the report found that several counties with more than two million residents have very few LJEs, including Phoenix’s Maricopa County, Ariz. (2.9 LJEs per 100,000 residents), Los Angeles County (3.6 LJEs) and Houston’s Harris County, Texas (3.9 LJEs).
But the report also highlights some bright spots, including in Lee County, Miss. Jerauld County, South Dakota and Hooker County, Neb., where there’s a high percentage of journalists relative to the population.
Among the 50 states, Vermont (27.5 LJEs per 100,000 residents), Wyoming (19.6), Montana (18.3), North Dakota (18.2) and South Dakota (17.2) rank as the top five in highest LJEs per 100,000 residents. Georgia (5.8), Maryland (5.7), Delaware (5.1), New Jersey (5.1) and Nevada (4.8) sit at the bottom of the list.
In their calculations, the report does not include small outlets that are still print-only, or outlets that use social media as their only online presence. The full methodology is explained here.
Rebuild Local News and Muck Rack plan to update the report annually and view it as a tool to help funders better understand where to invest financial resources, entrepreneurs to understand where the best opportunities lie and other local stakeholders to push for policy changes. The latter is a key focus for Waldman’s organization.
“It reminded us to keep our focus on reporters,” Waldman said of working on this report. “We’re mostly working on the state level now, and this will help us decide where to put our emphasis, but also as a practical tool that we can go to politicians or stakeholders and say, ‘Your state’s not doing so well. Look at this problem in your community.’ And it makes it much less abstract and something that they are more likely to care about.”
