ANNA, Illinois —Many years ago, reporters swarmed southern Illinois during a pivotal election, sharing every word of a promising young politician’s debates with an incumbent U.S. senator.
That news coverage advanced America’s reckoning with slavery and helped elevate Abraham Lincoln to the presidency.
But the media landscape in the Land of Lincoln is far different today. During this year’s election cycle, reporters and news outlets are scarce across its vast, southern region.
A surge of newspaper closures this year left a 130-mile stretch in southern Illinois with essentially no local journalism across five counties, from Alexander County in the west to Edwards County in the east.
Since 2005, Illinois has lost more journalists than any other state. Over the past year, it was hit particularly hard as newspaper closures accelerated, according to this year’s State of Local News report by Northwestern University’s Medill School.
Nearly three newspapers closed per week nationally, on average, creating “news deserts” in 26 additional counties, mostly in the Midwest. That’s the largest single-year increase in records dating back at least five years and it brings to 238 the number of U.S. counties with no locally based source of news.
Illinois symbolizes that wrenching contraction in the local news industry across the country. It has experienced far more newspaper closures than any other state in the nation, according to Medill data. Thirty newspapers closed in Illinois between July 2025 and August 2026, all small to medium-size outlets. The next-closest state in newspaper losses was neighboring Iowa, with 15. This means that Illinois alone accounts for about 18% of all 170 newspaper closures in the U.S. during that time span.
After decades of steady declines in the newspaper industry, this past year will go down as the moment that a stream of closures morphed into a raging river. What happened?
Independent owners of small to midsize newspapers especially were already operating on a knife’s edge. This past year, their slim margins were squeezed by shrinking revenues and steeply escalating prices for newsprint, fuel and other materials.
Industry analysts project that newspaper revenue is dropping about 5% this year, largely the result of slumping print advertising and slowing growth in digital income. Newspapers increasingly depend on subscriptions, yet fewer than one in five Americans subscribes or otherwise pays for news, according to Pew Research Center surveys.
Meanwhile, the price of newsprint soared nearly 18% over the past year, about five times the national rate of inflation, partly because U.S. mills either closed or stopped making newsprint. As of April, the country had just one remaining newsprint producer.
Since 2005, Medill has tracked the loss of local newspapers, which traditionally provide most local reporting in the U.S. and remain a strong indicator of the health of local news ecosystems.
Its new report found that 65% of local news outlets are newspapers, mostly weeklies. Some 300 new outlets — most of them digital — have emerged over the past five years, including 75 startups over the last year, Medill found.
Altogether, around 5,400 newspapers remain in the United States, including nearly 900 dailies that publish three or more times per week, Medill researchers found. That’s down 40% from the nearly 9,000 papers counted in 2004.
Closures in recent years have mostly been small papers, including papers that were consolidated or closed when owners retired and were unable to find buyers.
But recent downsizings raise warning signs about larger newspapers. In late summer, chain-owned newspapers experienced severe layoffs, including dailies owned by McClatchy, Lee Enterprises and USA Today Co. (formerly Gannett).
“I do think that the metro newspapers that are in the hands of the financial firms are headed out of business, because I think that the way they are being run offers no real prospect of their long-term profitability,” said Dick Tofel, an industry consultant and former Dow Jones executive who co-founded the investigative outlet ProPublica.
The economy will determine the rate of closures going forward, Tofel said.
“If we had a recession, I think you will see an enormous number of failures very soon thereafter,” he said. “Absent that, I think you’re going to see a continued, slow bleed, which is what you’ve been seeing so far, and the pace of it is going to vary a little bit from community to community.”
Losses in Southern Illinois
The effects are clear in Illinois communities that became news deserts, especially in a statewide election year when local reporting is especially needed to inform people about candidates and a range of pressing issues such as affordable housing, tax burdens, unfunded pensions and data centers. If another potential president emerges from these smaller towns and rural areas, far from cities that still have substantial news coverage, will they have a chance to succeed?
Big dailies, including the precursor to the Chicago Tribune, followed Lincoln around the state in the 1800s, creating a record still pored over by historians. After years of cutbacks, however, regional dailies no longer have staff to extensively cover campaigns far beyond their core circulation areas.
Even the Southern Illinoisan, a regional paper in Marion, is hard-pressed to cover a sprawling geographic area the size of Massachusetts and New Jersey combined with just three news reporters on its staff (though two others cover sports). The Southern Illinoisan publishes daily online and prints three editions a week.
“The folks that are still there are doing the best they can, and they’re doing great work. They just can’t cover much, you know?” said Molly Parker, an investigative reporter who used to work at the paper. “Especially in these far-flung counties, like Alexander County, where Cairo is, it’s just no one’s getting there routinely.”
Parker now teaches at Southern Illinois University and writes for Capitol News Illinois, a nonprofit news service operated by the Illinois Press Foundation.
Parker and other SIU faculty members are trying to increase local coverage in the region. She and Julia Rendleman, a photography professor, started a local reporting lab to give students field experience and report stories in Downstate news deserts.
In late summer they received a $100,000 grant to launch Southern Illinois Source, a nonprofit that aims to employ students, freelancers and others to help cover the area’s news deserts. It launched in October and will operate as an affiliate of the Illinois Press Foundation’s Capitol News Illinois, producing regional accountability and feature stories that are shared with outlets across the state and published on a standalone website.
“We don’t have a ton of people, obviously, but it’s to just cover more and more of the region,” Parker said.
SIU’s student newspaper, The Daily Egyptian, also receives state funding and does regional reporting. Its faculty managing editor, Alee Quick, and news editor Jackson Brandhorst are veterans of the Southern Illinoisan.
Despite these efforts and the commitment of the journalists who remain, the decline and loss of local newspapers across southern Illinois is severe.
In Shawneetown, the seat of Gallatin County, along the Kentucky border, there hasn’t been a single newspaper in the library since The Gallatin Democrat closed in June.
“That was the last of it,” library director Julie Robbins said in a September interview.
The Gallatin Democrat was one of 13 papers abruptly closed in June by Paddock Publications, a chain based in the Chicago area. A decade ago, Paddock had expanded by acquiring Downstate papers.
That’s made it much harder for people to learn about political candidates, Robbins said.
“You have to go online and look for stuff now, or ask somebody and hope they’re telling you, you know, what’s right, that it’s correct, not just hearsay,” she said.
Even before the closure, fewer people read The Gallatin Democrat, Robbins said, because its quality had deteriorated and it “hardly covered anything around here.”
Shawneetown’s gas station had “quit carrying it a long time ago,” she said. “And a lot of people dropped their subscriptions as well so we were really the only place that you could look at one. But like I said, there was rarely anything in there locally.”
For local news, people in the area now turn to a free, weekly shopper that runs school sports photos and lists graduates, Robbins said.
Interventions’ mixed results
The growth of news deserts in Illinois this year is especially striking because the state enacted policies in 2024 to preserve and grow newsroom jobs, including refundable tax credits worth up to $150,000 per newsroom.
The state is also home to the Chicago-based MacArthur Foundation, which helped spearhead Press Forward, a $500 million philanthropic campaign launched in 2023 to help sustain local journalism.
Those interventions did not prevent the Paddock closures and layoffs at papers like McClatchy’s Belleville (Ill.) News-Democrat. But without government support and philanthropy, the local news landscape in the state would undoubtedly be even worse.
The tax credits have made a difference, according to Scott Hoskins, an Illinois Press Association board member and publisher at Mascoutah-based Better Newspapers Inc.
“I’m going to be honest, that has more than saved us,” he said in an interview. “I think without that, we would really, really be struggling.”
Last year the company received credits totaling $150,000, which helped pay bills, reporters and other expenses. Hoskins is hoping to receive the same amount this year.
Tofel said the Illinois funding, which is limited to $5 million a year over five years, isn’t enough. He believes that California’s plan for tax credits worth up to $40 million a year is closer to the scale of what’s needed but that it would have to be replicated around the country to stop the industry’s current slide.
Philanthropic support and nonprofit models are part of the answer, he said. There will also be exceptions, including successful metro papers “that are run by more enlightened owners.”
“But I think the norm are the papers controlled by the financial firms, and I don’t see anything that is going to arrest that slide,” Tofel said.
Hoskins, the Better Newspapers Inc. publisher, has made big changes since he began leading the family-owned company after his father, Greg Hoskins, died in 2024. It publishes 11 papers, down from a peak of around 50 newspapers.
“This kind of media, it’s a tough world,” Hoskins said. “We’ve had to scale back and kind of become creative with a lot of things.”
One of his newspapers now serves five counties, across which there’s just one other publication left.
“There was a time where all these small towns of 3,000 population had a newspaper,” Hoskins said. “Well that just, honestly, it’s not possible anymore. And so what we’ve had to do is combine a lot of those newspapers.”
Better Newspapers runs lean, with just a few reporters trying to cover multiple counties. They “don’t get to everything,” Hoskins said, but supplement the staff by inviting readers to share photos and information about events.
“I know that’s not the quality of journalism that people are probably hoping for but it does help,” he said, “because I think with a lot of our communities, they want to see their kids, their grandkids, their pictures, their local organization that they work for, the local Jaycees or Lions Club.”
That’s still far more service than what’s provided in half of Illinois’ 102 counties. The state has 15 news desert counties, up from just five two years ago, and 36 with only one remaining professional news source, according to Medill data.
“We don’t have a paper that does any news,” said Erica Daugherty, a deputy clerk at the Saline County Courthouse in Harrisburg who handles elections.
Until this summer, the county was served by the Harrisburg Register, another Paddock paper that closed in June. All that’s left, Daugherty said, is the Dollar Saver shopper.
That does little to help voters decide on scores of candidates on the ballot, such as the crowded primary race this year for Illinois’ next U.S. senator. Saline County voters also had to choose seven of the 13 candidates for the county board. Where do these politicians stand on issues of local concern?
Residents sometimes ask Daugherty about political candidates and campaigns, but she tells them she can’t weigh in.
“That’s upon the voter to seek out the information, whether it be on Facebook — or Google them,” she said. “I mean, it’s hard in a small county when you don’t have any newspaper.”
In September, there was one remaining copy of the Harrisburg Register in a box outside its former office — an April 22 edition.
Paddock continues to distribute a weekly in south Illinois. It bears the masthead of The Gazette Democrat, a newspaper published since 1849 in Anna, near the Jonesboro fairgrounds where Lincoln famously debated Sen. Stephen Douglas in 1858.
The Gazette Democrat’s Anna offices are closed, however. It is now produced 20 miles away in Carbondale, by two designers and a lone editor who also produce The Carbondale Times weekly, with freelance and community contributions.
Anna’s last truly local news outlet is a radio station, operating from inside a tuxedo rental shop.
WIBH used to be music station, but three years ago it became a talk station that’s now affiliated with Fox.
Moury Bass, co-owner and news director at the two-person company, said they do five local newscasts a day. They include state news and “local news when we can get it — we do funeral announcements, we do local sports, weather, that kind of stuff.”
When The Gazette Democrat was owned by Anna resident Jerry Reppert, “they really did a nice job of covering a lot of local stuff and sports and the whole thing,” Bass said. “But once he sold it, it’s kind of gone downhill.”
Reppert Publications sold that paper and four others to Paddock in 2023. One was a free weekly called Monday’s Pub distributed in several counties.
A September edition of The Gazette Democrat had zero bylined stories on the cover.
Yet people still subscribe to what’s now the only community paper between Carbondale and Cairo, at the southern tip of Illinois, according to Travis Stewart, who distributes the paper for Paddock.
On a recent Tuesday, Stewart brought bundles of The Gazette Democrat to The Vienna Times in Johnson County.
Paddock closed the Times in June, and its office is now a vacation rental listed on Airbnb. But parked in front, there’s still an old white Ford Escape SUV with The Vienna Times painted on the door and a PRESS sticker on the windshield.
Stewart drives bundles of The Gazette Democrat from Carbondale and leaves them in the unlocked Ford. They are picked up by a carrier who distributes them to six or so small towns in the area.
“We’re still chugging along,” he said outside the office, a block from the county’s historic courthouse.
But there are no longer any reporters, much less a newsroom, in the area.
“No,” he said outside the darkened newspaper office, “there’s nobody here anymore.”
