In the 10th episode of the State of Local News Podcast, host Tim Franklin—Professor, John M. Mutz Chair in Local News and founding director of the Medill Local News Initiative—speaks with the researchers and editor behind Medill’s 2026 State of Local News Report.
The report, Medill’s fifth annual assessment of the local news ecosystem, has expanded to include commercial local TV news for the first time, alongside a sharp rise in news deserts, continued declines in newspaper employment and readership and a wave of closures, mergers and ownership changes across the industry. Franklin is joined by Zach Metzger, director of the State of Local News Project; researcher John Volk, who led the report’s first deep dive into local commercial TV newsrooms; researcher Srishti Bose, who tracks and writes about local news startups; and Jennifer Kho, editor of the Local News Bright Spots feature. In this episode, the team discusses the report’s finding that 238 U.S. counties have no source of professional locally based news, an increase of 26 from the previous year. Metzger examines the forces behind the rise in news deserts, while Volk explains the implications of concentrated ownership in local television and the potential effects of further consolidation. Bose shares findings on 287 local news startups identified between 2022 and 2026, including where they are emerging and how they compare with communities in news deserts. Kho discusses the Bright Spots project and the outlets experimenting with new approaches to revenue, audience engagement and sustainability. The conversation also explores the closures and mergers reshaping local news, the interventions helping some outlets survive, and what the findings reveal about the future of local journalism.
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Tim Franklin Hello everyone, and welcome to the Medill State of Local News podcast, where we discuss the business of local news with the nation's top news executives, entrepreneurs, and thought leaders. I'm your host, Tim Franklin, the John M. Mutz Chair in Local News at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University, home of the Local News Initiative.
If you've been following this podcast, you know that I typically interview local news executives and industry leaders from outside Medill. Today, I'm mixing it up. I didn't have to go far to find today's guests because they're all my valued colleagues and teammates researching and writing for Medill's annual State of Local News Report. They're joining me because, by the time you watch or listen to this podcast, we will have just published our 2026 State of Local News Report.
And let me interject a teaser: This year's report, as we say here in the Midwest, is a real barn burner. Here to talk about it are Zach Metzger, director of the State of Local News Project and a Ph.D. He's now in his sixth year of working on this local news research. John Volk, a researcher now completing work on his third report. John, good to have you. Srishti Bose is another of our full-time researchers and a four-year veteran of the State of Local News Project. Srishti, good to have you. Jennifer Kho is a new member of our team this year and an editor and writer of our Local News Bright Spots feature. She's the former executive editor of the Chicago Sun-Times and managing editor of HuffPost and Guardian US. Jen, good to have you.
These four have been working diligently on this report for many months. Thank you for your dedication to this project. This state-by-state, county-by-county project tracking local news outlets is incredibly labor-intensive. It also includes a team of other faculty, staff, and students who aren't with us on this podcast, but whose contributions make this report possible.
This marks the fifth consecutive year Medill has published a State of Local News report. We began shortly after the original architect of this research, Penny Abernathy, came to Medill from the University of North Carolina in January 2021. Penny retired in spring 2024.
We do this work so news leaders, journalists, philanthropists, policymakers, and scholars can better understand what's happening in local news during this time of transformational change, as well as the trends reshaping the local news ecosystem.
This is the most comprehensive report we've ever produced at Medill. Our MRI of the local news ecosystem now includes newspapers, digital-only sites, ethnic media, local news networks, public broadcasting, and, for the first time, commercial local TV news. We also began exploring the impact of content creators this year.
We can't cover the breadth of this report in a short podcast, so we're going to hit a few key points. I encourage everyone to check out the full report on our Medill Local News Initiative website.
Zach Metzger, you've been researching local news for quite a while. What's different about this year's report?
Tim Franklin -
Zach Metzger There are a couple of things. Some relate to the report and others relate to the ecosystem and the industry and what's happened over the past year.
In terms of the report, as you mentioned, we've added commercial television news for the first time. John can speak to that in a bit, but it has broadened our conception of what the ecosystem is and how it works, including how all these different types of media work together.
In terms of the industry and ecosystem, this has been a really dramatic year. As you mentioned, it's been a real barn-busting—
Zach Metzger -
Tim Franklin Barn burner, Zach! Barn burner. You’re not up with my Midwest lingo.
Tim Franklin -
Zach Metzger I was trying, though.
Zach Metzger -
Tim Franklin We'll give you some grace.
Tim Franklin -
Zach Metzger It's been a significant year in terms of developments within the industry and ecosystem. Probably the most striking headline in this year's report is the intense surge in the number of news deserts.
There are now 238 news desert counties across the United States. These are counties without any source of professional, locally based news. That's up 26 from last year, a significant jump.
There are a lot of potential reasons for that, which we can get into, but contributing to it has been a huge number of closures and mergers. One hundred and seventy newspapers have disappeared through closures and mergers in the past year. We've also seen a lot of transactions, with more than 400 newspapers changing hands. We're seeing continued declines in newspaper employment, readership, and circulation. All these factors are coming together to make this a dramatic year.
At the same time, we've seen successful innovations and interventions that have prevented the situation from being even worse than it already is. Press associations, philanthropy groups and community leaders have preserved some news outlets and helped others find pathways to sustainability.
That gives us some encouragement, but it's happening within the context of all the challenges the ecosystem has faced over the past year.
Zach Metzger -
Tim Franklin To put that in context, the increase in news deserts this year was the largest single-year increase we've seen, at least since we began this research at Medill five years ago. So it was a pretty significant jump.
Why do you think we're seeing a spike in news deserts over the past year? What's going on?
Tim Franklin -
Zach Metzger Yeah, it’s interesting. One thing we discovered in this year's report is a continuation of a trend we began observing last year. When we look at the narrative of what has happened to local news and newspapers over the past two decades, there's a common narrative that many closures in the 2010s and early 2020s were driven by large corporate chains and investment-backed groups, such as Gannett, now USA Today Co., Alden and companies like that.
This year, we're not seeing as much activity driven by those companies. Instead, we're seeing many closures, transactions, mergers and the rise in news deserts coming from smaller independent chains and family-run papers.
There are many reasons those papers are facing challenges. Some are unique to family-run enterprises. If a longtime paper owner passes away or retires, there's a succession question about who will take on the paper. We've seen a few closures of that nature.
Also, a lot of these smaller, rural, independent papers also operate on razor-thin margins. They're on such a level of precarity that any changes to their ability to earn revenue—whether from inflation, tariffs, or other factors affecting small businesses in the United States in 2026—can have an outsized effect on newspapers.
We're seeing papers that are struggling to weather these challenges facing small businesses. In many cases, these are small rural papers that are the only papers in their communities.
Zach Metzger -
Tim Franklin So you mentioned briefly before that there were an extraordinary number of transactions among newspapers this year, more than 400 newspapers changed hands. Do you think this is another sign of the volatility that's going on in the industry right now?
Tim Franklin -
Zach Metzger There's an important caveat with that number: More than a quarter of those transactions involve David Hoffman's acquisition of majority ownership in Lee Enterprises. That accounts for quite a large chunk, but even setting that aside, there are still a lot of papers changing hands.
I think that indicates volatility. If chains are struggling to make their balance sheets work, they might be more inclined to shed papers, while other outlets might see an opportunity there.
Not all these transactions and ownership shifts are necessarily a sign of bad things. We've also seen papers change hands and go to nonprofit groups that are turning them into nonprofits. The National Trust (for Local News), for example, bought up a lot of papers in Vermont and Georgia this past year.
In many cases, new owners can help papers find pathways to sustainability. But it does indicate the sheer number of papers changing hands, across so many transactions.
Zach Metzger -
Tim Franklin You raise a good point. It could also show there's still a market for publications that have sold themselves to others.
We're seeing more than an acceleration of closures. Digital traffic to local news sites is also falling precipitously. What did you find, and why do you think it's happening?
Tim Franklin -
Zach Metzger In this year's report, we looked at web traffic data from the media analytics firm Comscore and found some interesting things.
There's a lot of noise in web traffic data and a lot of month-to-month variability. Different articles can go viral for any number of reasons. If a paper writes about Caitlin Clark, for example, it might see a huge spike in readership that month.
But when we look at the larger trends over four years, we see a significant decline that is a marked pattern. In fact, at 100 of the largest newspapers tracked by Comscore, web traffic has declined roughly 50% over the past four years. That excludes The New York Times, whose web traffic is so huge that it dwarfs that of the other papers.
There are several possible reasons for this decline. One that people have pointed to is the potential impact of AI on web traffic.
The way that a lot of people have started to shift their interactions with search and the way that search providers like Google are shifting how they are providing search is to make it more of an AI answer machine. If you search for the news in Chicago, for example, you'll now get an AI summary drawing from the Sun-Times or the Chicago Tribune. It summarizes the information for readers and gives them less incentive to visit the website and read the articles themselves.
That could be having an impact. Certainly, we also saw an impact when Facebook changed its algorithm in 2022 and how that affected local news readership. Different technological factors can play a role, but it's an ominous sign that web traffic is falling so precipitously because it's a major source of reader revenue for many newspapers.
Zach Metzger -
Tim Franklin It's also how they fill the top of the funnel and in many cases, generate subscriptions from people visiting their sites.
John, turning to you, you conducted much of the state-by-state newspaper research for the report. Talk about some of the regional trends you discovered. Which parts of the country were hardest hit and what did you see in ownership and transactions? What are those trends telling us?
Tim Franklin -
John Volk Thank you again for having me, Tim. Zach mentioned that this has been a significant year in terms of the surge in news deserts. Much of the driving force behind that was two mass-desert events, as we're calling them, in Southern Illinois and Northwest Kansas.
While the scale and impact of those two events are unusual, they represent many of the closures we've seen around the country this year. Seventy-five percent of closures came in rural communities and small towns. Almost half were in the Midwest. Illinois and Iowa alone accounted for about a quarter of all the newspaper losses from closures and mergers this year.
In addition, many of the papers that are closing, as Zach mentioned, were owned by small operators and midsized chains. Eighty percent fell into those categories.
I think it's becoming clear that the face of the local news crisis is changing. We're moving away from the major corporate titans consolidating newspapers and toward small papers in small communities that are feeling the pinch the most.
John Volk -
Tim Franklin And those are the kinds of owners that we want to keep. Those are the ones that many of them are rooted in their community. They go back a long way and those are some of the owners that we're beginning to lose, which is unfortunate.
John, it's not just newspapers and digital sites feeling the effects of this transformation. You also conducted our first deep-dive research into local commercial TV newsrooms. What did you find?
Tim Franklin -
John Volk This is an interesting time to start incorporating TV into our research. For a long time, TV has avoided the major collapse we've seen with newspapers, and in many ways it still maintains a fairly steady foothold.
Many studies measuring the American local news diet show that TV news is still at the top, far ahead of other legacy media types. But that share has been slipping.
Back in the 1960s and 1970s, innovators spread the idea that local TV news was essentially immune from cancellation. We know that's no longer the case.
In the report, we point to Gainesville, Florida. Despite having one of the largest public universities in the United States, it's down to a single commercial TV newsroom after the competing newsroom owned by Sinclair, WGFL, laid off its local news staff and replaced it with a nationally syndicated newscast.
Probably the most striking data to come out of this work, Tim, is that the 10 largest owners of local commercial TV newsrooms own about 75% of those. It's an extreme degree of ownership consolidation, far more so than newspapers even, and that's going to be made even more noteworthy as we look to the future. There's this pending merger of Nexstar and Tegna, which are two of the top four largest owners. If that were going to go through, it could have really major implications for markets across the country.
John Volk -
Tim Franklin That level of consolidation is noteworthy. Some people may be asking, so what? What does consolidation in the TV news industry mean for consumers in practical terms?
Could you talk about a market where there's been a lot of consolidation? You mentioned Gainesville, but maybe there's another market. What happened and how did it affect coverage?
Tim Franklin -
John Volk When you talk about ownership consolidation in the media, it's similar to any other industry with a high degree of consolidation, whether that's soft drinks, airlines, or search engines.
Proponents argue that consolidation gives companies financial strength and security to make larger investments in improving their products or services. Opponents argue that it reduces consumer choice, leaving people with fewer options and worse options. That's the debate playing out in TV news.
One market I find interesting is Indianapolis, from your neck of the woods, Tim. It's gone through a considerable degree of consolidation. One company, Nexstar, owns both the CBS and Fox affiliates in that market. It presents itself as having a strong combined newsroom that can cover more stories and be in more places than if we were at just one.
ou can also look at the ABC station. Earlier this year, Scripps sold it to a smaller broadcaster in the community, which immediately slashed the staff and folded it into its existing newsroom.
John Volk -
Tim Franklin Circle City Broadcasting, right?
Tim Franklin -
John Volk That's right, Circle City Broadcasting. The result is fewer reporters in the community.
And Indianapolis could face even more consolidation. I mentioned Nexstar and Tegna earlier. If that merger goes through, one of the largest markets in the Midwest could have a single company owning the CBS, Fox and NBC affiliates. That's substantial.
As for the impact on coverage, researchers at the University of Delaware published a great study last year about content duplication in TV markets. We also tried to account for this in our work. The study found that, in 2019, 39% of TV markets experienced duplication, meaning viewers could switch between channels and see the same newscast.
With the consolidation we've seen, I wouldn't be surprised if that duplication is much higher now. It could continue to grow if more of these mega-mergers go through.
John Volk -
Tim Franklin Taken in totality, what this means is that we're losing broadcast journalists in many markets, but we've also seen a substantial drop in newspaper employment over the past couple of decades.
That’s a real hit to the number of local journalists doing original, on-the-ground reporting in many markets, right?
Tim Franklin -
John Volk Absolutely.
John Volk -
Tim Franklin Let's move on to some happier news, or at least better news.
Srishti, a few years ago we added a feature to the report called Local News Bright Spots. We plot every local news startup in the United States from the last five years on a map. How many startups have there been during that time and how many started in the last year specifically? Most of these are digital startups, right? There are still a few print startups, but most are digital.
Tim Franklin -
Srishti Bose We've tracked data from 2022 to 2026 and so far, have identified 287 local news startups across the country. They've emerged in almost every state. About 80% are in urban areas. Most are nonprofit and digital.
These startups tend to be concentrated in relatively affluent areas, rather than news deserts. For example, in the last year, Hamilton County, Ohio – where Cincinnati is located – has had two new digital network sites: Signal and Axios Cincinnati. About 41% of adults in the county have a bachelor's degree.
Compare that with Highland County, which is a news desert. Only 16% of people there have a bachelor's degree. We see a big difference in the average demographics of news deserts and communities where startups emerge.
Most startups are digital, but not all. About 78% are standalone or network digital sites. The other 22% are newspapers, such as the Sand Mountain Leader, a weekly print paper that started in Alabama last year.
There's still some new investment in the newspaper model, even as digital is clearly the dominant form. Fewer newspapers are emerging each year. We had 21 newspapers when we started tracking this data in 2022, but we've had only three so far in 2026. Granted, we still have a few months left in the year.
Overall, we've identified 56 startups in 2025 and another 20 so far this year, including newspapers and digital outlets. Looking at the past five years, we've seen a slowdown in the number of startups this year.
There are a few reasons for that. One is a slowdown in funding. The Institute for Nonprofit News' 2026 Index also reported a slowdown in nonprofit news sites.
Funding cuts, growing uncertainty in the political environment, threats to 501(c)(3) status and on-the-ground safety for reporters are all issues. Some of our Bright Spots address these challenges.
Last year, Medill found that, of the nearly 10,000 largest grants, most of them—about 95%, —go to urban areas. That also helps explain why these startups cluster around urban areas. Studies also show that newsrooms applying for grants cite high newsroom costs – the high cost of launching and retaining business and leadership talent.
There are funding challenges, business-model challenges and a concentration of philanthropic capital.
Srishti Bose -
Tim Franklin As John and Zach pointed out, many of the news deserts and closures are in rural areas. We love to see these startups, but they're not keeping up with the pace of losses in the newspaper industry, correct?
And secondly, as you point out, many are starting in metro areas or wealthier areas around metros, rather than in news desert areas. Is that right?
Tim Franklin -
Srishti Bose Yes, that's correct. The average demographics differ a lot.
Srishti Bose -
Tim Franklin Srishti, in addition to the map, we profile about a dozen local news organizations that are innovating and whose work could be replicated elsewhere.
What was the process for soliciting Bright Spots nominations this year, and how did we narrow the list down to the dozen or so organizations we profiled?
Tim Franklin -
Srishti Bose Our goal in this year's selection process was to make sure we weren't telling just one kind of success story. We looked for geographic diversity, different organizational and revenue models, and different newsroom sizes. I think you'll see that reflected in the final group.
We've got the Fort Worth Report, MLK50, and Cardinal News in the South. We've got the Baltimore Banner and the Connecticut Mirror in the Northeast and one close to home in the Midwest, the Record North Shore.
We have a mix of legacy newsrooms, such as the Santa Fe New Mexican, the San Francisco Chronicle, and The Columbian, alongside newer, smaller nonprofits such as Decaturish and the Record North Shore.
We also have digital-only organizations, as most of them are, but there are print publications in the mix as well, including the San Francisco Chronicle, the Philadelphia Inquirer and Volume One Magazine.
Most are nonprofits, but there are for-profits in the mix, too, such as Volume One and Decaturish. Their coverage ranges from city and county news to suburban, regional, and statewide coverage.
The idea was to show a range of approaches that other local news organizations can learn from or adapt in their communities, or at least use as a reference point in developing their own formula for success.
In terms of the process, we put out a form and received about 40 nominations. We also sought nominations from organizations that have a pulse on the local news industry, including Poynter, Lenfest, INN and AJP. In total, we had 75 nominations over the year.
We evaluated them for innovation, coverage and business models, and narrowed the list down to 12 profiles.
We also have an additional profile of the Philadelphia Inquirer, which we covered in 2023. This year, it recorded its first year-over-year revenue growth and essentially turned profitability for the first time in more than two decades. We thought it would be valuable to understand what CEO Lisa Hughes has done and changed in terms of strategy.
Srishti Bose -
Tim Franklin Jenn, you had what would have been one of my favorite jobs. Both you and Srishti spoke with publishers, editors, and leaders of these innovative news organizations. I'm sure our audience would be interested in your take on the common threads across the dozen organizations you talked to. What did you see that's working?
Tim Franklin -
Jennifer Kho Call it a baker's dozen. We saw a lot of interesting things. We loved having these conversations and hearing about the challenges, but also about what is working and the commonalities across these organizations.
One of my favorite things was hearing about the different types of community engagement people are doing. That includes in-person events, but also unique approaches.
The Columbian in Washington, for example, has a stage event where the editor leads a panel about a particular topic and essentially creates an article onstage. The editor walks through the questions they would ask and the information they need to know.
The audience can participate and ask questions. It's a media-literacy event that also informs people about the topic, and it eventually turns into an article. I thought that was really cool.
Other organizations have different approaches. Volume One has a trolley tour. They have about 30 different trolley tours, each researched around the community and focused on different points of history or current events in different places.
They really see the tours as an immersive way of doing the storytelling that they want to do anyway in the publication. There's other people that are more old school. They're like, "Well, I just answer all the phone all the time. I'm just constantly in touch," things like that.
I loved hearing those stories. I also found the move toward civic engagement interesting. People are thinking more about what would benefit their communities and help people feel they can engage in different ways—not always just through politics, but by becoming more involved in public life.
It's an evolution from simply providing information and hoping people want it to making sure they have more reasons to get involved.
Another thing I loved was hearing how organizations create a distinctive identity based on place. What's good in one place isn't necessarily what's good in another. The organizations that really leaned into that distinctiveness reminded me of local-news terroir. They used it to define their voice and the stories they chose.
I thought that was interesting, too: finding ways to reflect community pride and what makes a place special.
Then there's revenue. These organizations were trying some interesting approaches. Some nonprofits were starting to pursue earned revenue that would traditionally be associated with for-profits. Meanwhile, many for-profits were exploring nonprofit forms of revenue.
Organizations were combining donations with subscriptions, or, in the case of the Baltimore Banner, having a nonprofit structure alongside a paywall. Everyone is trying to maximize revenue.
Even small organizations have to pursue a wider range of revenue streams and learn much more about them.
As a result, we're seeing a lot of interesting experiments. I was really interested in hearing about all of them.
Jennifer Kho -
Tim Franklin In the little time we have left, Jenn and Srishti, I'm going to ask you not to pick your favorite children from the Bright Spots work, but to talk about one Bright Spot in our report that stood out to you for its innovation or entrepreneurship.
Tim Franklin -
Srishti Bose Cardinal News in Virginia really stood out to me because of the size and nature of the community it set out to serve. It's rural, nonprofit and growing. It emerged in reaction to chain ownership in the community.
Its founder, Luanne Rife, took early retirement from the Roanoke Times. In 2021, there had been a lot of cuts at the legacy newspaper in the region, creating news gaps in the community. Some communities no longer had a daily or weekly paper and that created real problems.
For example, Cardinal News published a story this year about how local law enforcement agencies are using public surveillance to gather information about private individuals without a warrant. That's important news and the story won an award from the Virginia Press Association.
Going back to 2021, that was the year Rife started this small digital newsroom. It now has about 30 full-time employees, 19 of whom are in the newsroom.
In terms of coverage, Cardinal News focuses on a large area of Southwest and Southside Virginia. It's a rural region of about 1.1 million people spread across roughly one-third of the state.
Because the area is so large, they've divided it into zones based on the rural and/or urban communities they serve.
In terms of revenue, they had about $2.5 million in earned revenue this year, up about 25% from last year. Their revenue is diversified across philanthropy, sponsorships, corporate gifts, and public notices. Virginia allows online digital sites to publish public notices, which provides another source of revenue.
They also have a substantial audience, with about 40,000 daily newsletter subscribers. Membership revenue has grown by about 28% since last year.
They're providing a lot of value to communities across the state.
What Cardinal News has built in just five years is impressive, especially in a state like Virginia, where 80 of the 95 counties are down to their last source of news or have no news sources left.
They understand the geographic and economic diversity of the state and know that a one-size-fits-all approach isn't possible. I hope people find their profile interesting.
Srishti Bose -
Tim Franklin I agree. I was blown away when I read the Cardinal News profile. Starting from scratch and building both the revenue and the strong editorial product they've developed in such a short period is very impressive.
Jenn, what about you?
Tim Franklin -
Jennifer Kho There's a lot to choose from. I was inspired by all these organizations.
The first that comes to mind is Volume One. I mentioned its trolley tours, but it also launched a local store where people in the community could buy locally made products because there wasn't another place to do that.
The organization also published a series of solutions-focused, future-focused stories about its communities that had a real impact. It covered neighborhood clubs and what people were doing to improve their neighborhoods and encourage people to move from their backyards to their front porches.
Those stories resulted in new neighborhood clubs because people were inspired to try similar projects. Other projects focused on making streets more walkable and doing different things with the river.
I know you asked for one, but I also wanted to mention the San Francisco Chronicle. I was interested in its approach to food.
It had a Top 100 Restaurants list, but instead of focusing only on the best restaurants—which can also mean the most expensive restaurants—it considered how the list could become an event for the restaurant industry.
It's difficult to work in the restaurant industry. Often, when there's a party that's supposed to celebrate the industry, the people working in restaurants are the ones doing the work.
The Chronicle took a different approach and thought about what would bring people back throughout the year. I thought that was smart. It has since expanded into an event focused on longevity and aging as well. The organization was also open about some of the challenges involved in selling these offerings as add-ons or one-off events. And then there's what it's doing with AI and its voter guide, using AI to cover more of the ballot and provide more information to its communities.
That's just a teaser. There's a lot more to read in the profiles, but these are a few things that stood out to me.
Jennifer Kho -
Tim Franklin That's a good segue to say that I hope everyone listening or watching checks out the full report on the Medill Local News Initiative website.
I want to thank all our guests today—Zach, John, Srishti, and Jenn—for joining us and talking about the report.
I also want to thank the MacArthur Foundation, the Knight Foundation and the Joyce Foundation. They not only support this research but also make this podcast possible.
You can find the podcast every month on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube, and the Medill Local News Initiative website.
Tim Franklin
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