The State of Local News 2026

Growing Deserts, Urgent Challenges, and Promising Support

2026 State of Local News Report: A Super El Niño Year for Local News

An introduction to the 2026 State of Local News Report by Tim Franklin, Professor and John M. Mutz Chair in Local News

In this report last year, I described a “steady, unrelenting decline” of local newspapers. This year, that creeping erosion has mushroomed into a full-blown Super El Niño-like event for local news, leaving widespread and long-lasting displacement in its wake.

This will be remembered as a seminal year for local news.

The number of news desert counties in the U.S. ballooned by 26, the largest single-year rise by far since Medill began keeping records five years ago. There are now 238 news desert counties. Newspapers closed at an escalating rate of nearly three every week. More than 425 newspapers changed hands, 75% more than in the prior year. The newspaper industry lost more than 8% of its workforce between 2024 and 2025. On top of that, several major local news publishers implemented large-scale layoffs in 2026.

Amid the debris field of local newspapers, however, there are green shoots of hope. There were 75 local news startups in the past year, most of them digital-only outlets. National local news networks -- like Axios, TAPinto and States Newsroom -- continued to flourish. And there’s an ever-expanding number of news content creators helping to fill the void. Indeed, consumers in some metros have more choices for local news.

Still, the exhaustive research of the Medill Local News Initiative team this year paints a portrait of a local news ecosystem in a state of precarity.

More than two newspapers are lost for every startup created. Virtually all the new news sources are in urban areas, while rural America is increasingly arid news and information territory. And virtually all the philanthropic support for local news is in metro regions.

For the first time, this year’s report includes an in-depth count of commercial local television newsrooms. We also began quantifying content creators doing original local journalism. As a result, what began years ago as a study of local newspapers has now expanded in recent years to also include digital-only sites, ethnic media, local news networks, public broadcasting, commercial TV and content creators, thereby opening the aperture to get a wider view of the landscape.

We’re grateful for our philanthropic supporters who make this research possible, including the Knight, MacArthur and Joyce Foundations, as well as the Myrta J., Pulliam Charitable Trust, Southern Newspaper Publishers Association and Medill alumni Mark Ferguson and John Mutz.

Watch a special edition of the State of Local News podcast where the team discusses this year's report. Transcript available here.

Contents

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Research Faculty and Staff

This research was overseen by Senior Associate Dean Tim Franklin, John M. Mutz Chair in Local News and director of the Local News Initiative, and Zach Metzger, project director and primary author of the report.

Tim Franklin

Professor and John M. Mutz Chair in Local News

Franklin was the founding director of the Medill Local News initiative, a research and development project designed to bolster the sustainability of local news. Before joining Medill, Franklin was President of The Poynter Institute. He's been the top editor of The Indianapolis Star, Orlando Sentinel and Baltimore Sun. He was a Washington Managing Editor of Bloomberg News. He was an associate managing editor and reporter for the Chicago Tribune. He was appointed to the bipartisan Illinois Local Journalism Task Force. He’s been named a distinguished alumnus of the Indiana University Media School. Tim is the vice chair of the Local Media Foundation board of directors, and is in line to become chair in January 2027. He also serves on the Standards Advisory Panel of The Associated Press and the board of the Alliance for Trust in Media.

Zach Metzger

Director – State of Local News Project

Metzger leads the State of Local News Project at Medill, overseeing the data collection, analysis and reporting on the landscape of local news. He previously researched local news at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, where he completed his PhD in 2024. Before joining the State of Local News Project, Metzger worked as a data analyst in the environmental industry.

John Volk

Research Associate, Database Manager

Volk is a data scientist, researcher and journalist who co-authors the annual State of Local News report. He serves as the Local News Initiative's database administrator and developer, leading the collection, analysis and maintenance of Medill's nationwide local news data across all media types. Before joining the project in 2024, he held journalism, research and communications roles with the Minnesota Star Tribune, the Local News Accelerator and Northwestern Athletics. He is a two-time Northwestern graduate.

Srishti Bose

Research Associate, Data, communications & editorial

Bose is a Research Associate at the Local News Initiative, where she has worked across research, data, audience engagement and digital communications since 2023. She contributed to the Bright Spots project this year, as well as managing and analyzing the digital, creator, and ethnic media databases as well as digital outreach for LNI’s research, events and podcast. Bose is a Medill School of Journalism graduate with a degree in Media Innovation and Content Strategy. Before joining Medill, she worked as a corporate lawyer in India, specializing in FinTech, B2B, and retail mergers.

Jennifer Kho

Bright Spots editor

Jennifer Kho is a fractional leader, researcher and consultant specializing in newsroom innovation and transformation. She was most recently the executive editor of the Chicago Sun-Times. She previously served as managing editor and senior director of strategic innovation for HuffPost; managing editor for the Guardian US; and president of the Journalism & Women Symposium (JAWS).

Autumn Brewington

Project Editor

Brewington is a contributing editor to the State of Local News report and oversaw Bright Spots in 2024 and 2025. A longtime editor at The Washington Post, she was editor of the paper’s op-ed page from 2007 to 2014 and also launched and wrote The Post’s royal newsletter. She has worked for The Wall Street Journal and the national security affairs website Lawfare and is an opinion editor for MS NOW.

Brier Dudley

Project Contributor

Brier Dudley is editor of The Seattle Times Save the Free Press public service initiative, which reports on the local journalism crisis and advocates for solutions. Dudley has been with the Times since 1998 and was a member of its editorial board for five years. He spent 14 years covering Microsoft and the technology industry, including nine years writing a tech column, and has won numerous regional and national journalism awards.

Paul Farhi

Project Contributor

Farhi is the Washington Post's former media reporter. He left the paper at the end of 2023 after nearly 36 years as a staff writer, during which he also covered business, politics and general assignment features. He has also been a senior contributing editor to the American Journalism Review and now contributes to the Atlantic, the Athletic, the Daily Beast, and Columbia Journalism Review. He has been a frequent commentator on TV and radio about the media industry.

Eric Rynston-Lobel

Coach, consultant, researcher and reporter

Eric Rynston-Lobel contributes to the Local News Initiative in a variety of roles, coaching newsrooms in the Local News Accelerator to grow their businesses, conducting and analyzing research and working with newsrooms on audience strategy. He’s also reported numerous stories on developments in the local news industry for the LNI’s website. He received his BSJ from Medill in 2022 and previously worked as a reporter covering sports and politics for the Concord Monitor in New Hampshire.

Jackie Spinner

Project Contributor

Jackie Spinner is a professor of journalism at Columbia College Chicago, where she is faculty advisor to the Columbia Chronicle. She was a staff writer for The Washington Post for 14 years and covered the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. She is the editor of Gateway Journalism Review and the director and producer of two documentary films, Don't Forget Me and Morocco, Morocco. Morocco, Morocco aired on PBS in Chicago in 2022.

Neal St. Anthony

Project Contributor

Neal St. Anthony retired as a business columnist from the Minnesota Star Tribune in 2023 after nearly 40 years, bisected by two years in the securities industry. He is a freelance writer, youth volunteer, and slow swimmer at the Blaisdell YMCA in south Minneapolis.

Ed Malthouse

Research Director

Malthouse is the Erastus Otis Haven Professor of Integrated Marketing Communications at Medill. He also has an appointment in the McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Sciences' Department of Industrial Engineering and Management Sciences. Malthouse is an expert in applied statistics, market research and media marketing.

Joe Germuska

Chief Nerd

Germuska runs Knight Lab’s technology, professional staff and extracurricular activity. Immediately before joining the lab, he was a founding member of the Chicago Tribune’s News Apps team. He is the founder and project lead of the Census Reporter project, a website designed to make Census data easy for journalists. He also serves on the board of City Bureau, a Chicago-based civic journalism lab. His technology background is balanced by his BA in African History and MS in Product Design and Development Management, both earned from Northwestern.

Mitra Nourbakhsh

Research Assistant

Mitra is pursuing a double major in journalism and international studies, with a minor in data science. Mitra’s skills in data analysis and technical knowledge of research methods have been invaluable to the team, and she has been integrally involved in a content analysis survey as well as our updates of digital news sites. Mitra has also been extensively involved with nonprofit fundraising work.

Asher Joseph

Research Assistant

Asher Joseph is a sophomore at Northwestern University studying journalism and political science. At the Local News Initiative, he supports research for the State of Local News Project and its social media and communications.

Natalie Gordon

Research Assistant

Natalie is a junior at Northwestern University studying journalism and political science. She has experience in data journalism through the Knight Lab’s AI Analysis of Journalism’s Network Structure project. Outside of her work with the State of Local News Project, she writes for The Daily Northwestern and is currently participating in the Fall 2026 Medill on the Hill program.

Grace Gormley

Research Assistant

Grace Gormley is a third year student studying journalism and data science. She works on several projects alongside the State of Local News Report, including Environmental Impact Survey research through the Northwestern Libraries and communications for the School of Education and Social Policy. She is especially excited about data-driven investigative journalism, and in her free time, she plays water polo and serves as a Northwestern Kesem camp counselor.

The web presentation was designed by Medill Associate Professor Zach Wise and Knight Lab Executive Director Joe Germuska.