The State of Local News Project |

The State of Local News

The 2026 Report

by Zach Metzger and John Volk

Executive Summary

For more than two decades, the American local news industry has been in a state of contraction. Seismic shifts in publishing business models, combined with aggressive consolidation by large chains, have led many news media outlets to merge or shut down entirely. These losses, happening in lockstep with a dramatic shrinkage of journalism jobs, have left communities across the country without access to a reliable source of local news. Alarmingly, these trends have shown no signs of slowing. In fact, they’ve been accelerating.

In the past year, 170 newspapers have closed or merged, at a rate of nearly three a week, and many of these were the last remaining source of original news in their communities. As a result, the number of counties that are news deserts – places where there is no locally based source of professional local news remaining – has risen by 26, the largest single year increase during Medill’s research of the local news ecosystem. Yet it could have been even worse. Timely interventions helped prevent a bellwether year from being even more extreme, and new avenues of support are allowing news outlets to respond to a growing litany of challenges.

Nearly 8,400 news outlets make up the American local news ecosystem, our research shows. More than 5,400 newspapers form the bedrock of this landscape, including close to 900 dailies, papers that are published more than three times a week. This foundation is bolstered by nearly 1,900 digital-only news sites and more than 300 public broadcasters. And in a major update, this report for the first time tracks the landscape of commercial local television news. There are 678 television newsrooms providing coverage across the country, though the pending mega-merger of Nexstar and Tegna along with overhauls to government regulations could further concentrate local TV news in the hands of just a few companies.

In compiling this year’s report, researchers at the Medill Local News Initiative have gathered data from a wide range of sources, including state press associations, industry groups and federal agencies. As part of this process, we also manually reviewed the news outlets in our database to ensure that they consistently publish original, locally focused content that meets their community’s critical information needs. For more information about our research and how we assembled this data, please review our methodology.

News Deserts

In 2026, 238 counties are news deserts, lacking any source of reliable local news based within the community. This number has risen steadily over the past two decades but jumped significantly over the past year -- 26 new news deserts were created, largely as a result of smaller rural papers closing in the Midwest. For comparison, only six new deserts emerged in the previous year. In more than another 1,400 counties, just one source of local news remains; taken together, nearly 47 million Americans live with limited or no access to local news.

The Local Television Landscape

As part of this year’s update, Medill researchers examined local television news outlets and ownership in the United States. Nearly 680 television newsrooms are providing original local news content, in an ecosystem that is heavily consolidated under the largest operators.

Ownership

Alongside closures, this has also been a dizzying year for changes in newspaper ownership. In the past year, more than 425 papers have changed hands across more than 150 transactions. In 2025, roughly 250 papers were bought or sold.

Employment

In a year when the American labor market grew overall, newspaper employment continued to shrink, according to data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Between 2024 and 2025, the newspaper industry lost more than 7,500 jobs, a contraction of more than 8%, similar to the rate of loss seen in 2023-2024.

Readership and Revenue

Over the past several years, readership of local news outlets, especially online readership, has dropped precipitously. Since 2022, internet traffic to the largest local news sites has decreased by 50%, according to data from the media analytics firm Comscore.

Startups and Sustainability

Nearly 300 new news outlets have emerged in the last five years. Since the beginning of 2025 alone, 75 startups began operating, most of them digital, including a continued growth in networks. And despite the losses felt in the past year, a series of timely interventions and acquisitions have helped save many papers from closing and provided much needed time to pursue new pathways to sustainability. Public broadcasting stations have so far survived a federal defunding through a surge in philanthropic giving, and some of the leading nonprofit newsrooms are posting significant revenue increases.

The 2026 Local News Landscape

There are nearly 8,500 professional outlets that make up the landscape of local news in the United States.

Print newspapers remain the foundation of this ecosystem. In 2026, nearly 65% of local news outlets in the U.S. are newspapers. The vast majority of those– 84% - are weeklies, publishing once or twice a week. This share of weeklies is growing steadily as more and more daily newspapers reduce their print schedules or stop printing altogether. In the past year, more than 100 papers cut their publication frequency. There are now fewer than 900 daily print newspapers remaining in the U.S. Of these, less than 15% still print seven days a week.

The frequency at which American newspapers have been vanishing has been ticking gradually upwards for several years. Over the last year, 170 newspapers disappeared as a result of closures or mergers, at a rate of nearly three every week. In past years, the nation was losing about two newspapers per week.

In our 2025 report, we found that the majority of recent closures were not driven by the mass consolidations that characterized newspaper losses in the 2010s. Instead, smaller independent papers and small to mid-size private chains were largely the source of declines. This trend has continued over the past year. Although there were a few examples from the largest owners, such as the closure of three Alden-owned papers in the suburbs of Detroit toward the end of 2025, these were comparatively rare; less than 10% of the newspaper losses from the past year came from one of the top 10 largest owners. Rather, more than 40% were from private, midsize chains, while a separate third came from smaller independent owners.

Newspapers in these categories occupy a precarious position between the more secure financial runway of the larger chains and the lean agility of hyperlocal startups. This makes them more susceptible to sudden economic headwinds or the loss of key staff. For example, the four California publications owned by Highway 29 shuttered abruptly in May after their CEO left the company. Earlier in the year, the longstanding Onawa Sentinel in western Iowa was merged into its competing publication, the Onawa Democrat, after the Sentinel’s former owner died. In June, the Anaconda Leader in Montana shut down amid rising costs and inflation. And in February, the Gallup Independent closed down in rural New Mexico after a rapid downturn in the community’s economy.

Despite these losses, print newspapers remain the source of news that Americans are most likely to encounter in their hometowns. Newspapers are distributed widely across the country; some 95% of the people in the United States live in a county with at least one newspaper. For smaller and rural communities, newspapers, generally independent weeklies, are often the sole source of local news.

On the other hand, digital-only news sites have been growing at a slow but steady rate, yet remain heavily concentrated in urban and affluent areas, and are not being created nearly fast enough to replace the newspapers that are being lost. In 2026, there are a little more than 1,900 digital-only local news outlets. Of those, roughly 900 are standalone independent sites, while the remaining 1,000 are members of 108 separate national networks. Just 9% of these sites are in counties classified as rural, and very few are positioned to fill news deserts. In fact, there are less than 50 counties in the U.S. that lack a newspaper but feature an alternative digital or broadcast outlet.

Much of the nominal growth in digital-only news outlets has been due to reclassifications as newspapers scale back or cease printing, in some cases by moving the entirety of their print operations to a digital publishing model. Among the most notable of these was the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, which ceased its print edition with the new year, though smaller outlets like the Big Bend Sentinel or the Randolph Leader also followed suit. At the same time, there were some completely new startups, such as the Issaquah Spotlight which launched in Washington state in June, or the Pittsburgh Progress, which formed earlier in the year. Meanwhile, the Palisadian-Post came back to life as a digital site in May after its print predecessor closed during the 2025 Palisades Fire.

News networks, which are comprised of multiple sites sharing a common owner, such as States Newsroom or TAPinto, have also continued to slowly grow. In the past year for example, Axios has launched nine new local sites, including three in Colorado and another two in Florida, and it has plans to expand to 100 from its current lineup of 43. Of course, as with previous years, the sites actually doing original reporting within a network may represent just a small percentage of its ostensible size. Patch operates 529 news sites, more than all other networks combined, yet at the time of writing, it boasts a grand total of more than 16,500 community sites, most of which are aggregate newsletters.

While there has been a slight natural uptick in digital sites, the medium remains susceptible to a high churn rate. Over the past year, nearly 25 digital-only sites have shut down. Several of these closures are similar to the losses of smaller independent newspapers; many standalone digital sites are tiny operations run with limited staff and are vulnerable if key personnel exit. In April, for example, BikePortland dramatically scaled back operations after 21 years when the owner stepped away, citing the work-life toll of running a news site. Many digital news sites also operate on razor-thin margins, and challenges in securing additional earned revenue or funding led to multiple site closures over the course of the past year, such as the Charlotte Queen City Nerve, which shut down in August, or the solutions journalism outlets Atlanta Civic Circle, which went dark in June.

An increasing part of the digital news ecosystem is the delivery and consumption of news via content creators, typically hosted on platforms such as TikTok, YouTube or Instagram. In Medill’s September 2026 Chicago news consumer survey, researchers found that close to half of younger consumers report getting local news from content creators on a daily basis. But while the creator economy is large, very few creators are originators of local news in particular. As part of this report, Medill researchers examined a list of close to 1,500 creators across a variety of platforms, sourced from the Independent Journalism Atlas developed by Project C. While the systematic discovery of influencers, especially small operations in hyperlocal niches, presents challenges, including the inaccessibility of data from the major platforms they publish on, the Independent Journalism Atlas showed that less than 10% of this sample is covering local issues about their community. Of these, we found that only two-thirds feature original reporting. Instead, the vast majority of creators cover national issues, or general topics such as technology, entertainment, lifestyle or sports.

While digital news sites remain heavily concentrated in urban areas, public broadcasting continues to be an important source for rural communities across the country. In the wake of the recissions of government funding last year, many industry experts predicted that the sudden loss of support could herald a wave of closures of public broadcasting stations. Instead, this wave hasn’t materialized in the immediate aftermath, due in large part to a surge in private donations, as well as major investment from large philanthropies, including through the Public Media Bridge Fund, which has raised over $86 million as of September (Note: The Knight Foundation and the MacArthur Foundation, among initial donors to the fund, also fund this report). NJ PBS, one of the first stations to announce its impending closure, has managed to continue operating after transferring its ownership to Montclair State University in July.

It is important to note that the numbers tracked in this year’s report are affected by a methodological change in how we organize and update our data. In previous years, we have treated ethnic and foreign language media as an entirely separate category: for example, a Spanish-language newspaper like the Chicago-based La Raza would not have appeared in our primary counts of newspapers. In this year’s update, we included these previously separate outlets in the lists of their respective media types both to give due credit and attention to these outlets and to simplify our update process. For more information on this change and its impact, please review our methodology.

News Deserts

As newspapers have disappeared across the country over the past 20 years, many communities have become “news deserts” – areas without a locally based source of professional news reporting. In 2005, there were just over 150 news desert counties, and that number has grown steadily in the years since. In the past year, however, the number of news deserts has surged by 26, bringing the total number of counties without any source of local news to 238. In more than 1,400 other counties, only one source of local news remains, usually a weekly newspaper. Taken together, this means that more than half of all U.S. counties, in which 47 million people live, have limited access to reliable local news.

In many ways, this alarming rise in news deserts can be attributed to the shifting nature of newspaper losses. For much of the past two decades, the predominant type of paper to disappear was an urban or suburban outlet, usually a smaller community weekly that was subsumed into a larger metro paper nearby. Indeed, over the past 20 years, about 70% of newspaper losses occurred in counties categorized as urban.

But as mass suburban consolidations have waned, it has given way in the past couple of years to a greater share of newspaper closures in smaller, rural and poorer communities. This presents two acute challenges: in these areas, there are generally few alternative news sources available, and these communities often lack the financial and broadband resources needed to support a viable replacement. In effect, when the news disappears in these counties, it stays gone.

Two events in particular drove this most recent sharp rise in deserts. In February, six papers in northwest Kansas owned by the Lloyd Mullen merged into the regional High Plains News. And in June, Paddock Publications closed 13 papers in Illinois, many in the rural, southern tip of the state, creating a large, contiguous news desert stretching from Alexander to Edwards County. A variety of smaller, one-off closures and mergers contributed to the increase, such as the July shut-down of the Stone County Republican in Missouri, or the January closure of 170-year old Catahoula News Booster in Louisiana.

In 2026, the common characteristics of news deserts paint a familiar portrait. On average, the residents of news desert counties are poorer, older and have less educational attainment than the rest of the country. The counties themselves also tend to be more rural and less developed.

These commonalities lend themselves well to larger scale analyses. Starting in 2023, researchers at Medill’s Local News Initiative and Spiegel Research Center began developing predictive models in order to better understand the local news landscape and which communities were at risk of losing their news. This model has been updated each year to include the latest landscape and demographic data. In 2026, more than 260 counties appear on Medill’s Local News Watch List – the counties which the model found to be at the highest risk of becoming news deserts in the near future. Already, several predictions from this model have materialized: in this most recent group of news deserts, nine were previously listed on the Watch List.

In the absence of local news, people often turn to other, non-journalistic forms of information. In a survey of news desert counties published by Medill earlier this year, researchers found that 42% of respondents reported getting news from social media at least once a day. People also reported that these alternate sources helped them to feel as if they weren’t living in an information deprived area per se; however, in the absence of local news, the likelihood of stories from that community reaching the larger country is greatly diminished, leading to those voices being cut off from the national conversation.

The Landscape of Local Television News

To understand where commercial television sits in the American local news ecosystem, we traced back to its roots eight decades ago.

On June 17, 1948, a commercial jet flying from Chicago to New York crashed in central Pennsylvania. All 43 people aboard, 39 passengers and four crew members, were killed.

One day earlier, WPIX, a Manhattan-based TV station owned by the New York Daily News, had debuted the Telepix Newsreel, a pioneering local newscast. WPIX sent a crew to the crash site and, less than 10 hours later, aired updates on and footage of the wreck. Its competitors, all owned by major national networks, spent the night’s newscast on week-old international news, Craig Allen recounts in “News Is People: The History of Local TV News.”

The episode is a watershed moment in the history of local news. With the late 1940s, television emerged as a new pillar of the information ecosystem.

Rapid technological adoption brought the proportion of households with a TV set from less than 1% in 1946 to 87% in 1960 and 97% by 1975. Local news innovation kept pace. The Eyewitness News and Action News formats, trailblazed at stations across the Midwest, made news accessible, kept it short and put viewers right at the scene in ways they had never been before. During the 1960s, the influential consultants at McHugh & Hoffman declared local news immune from cancelation, according to Allen’s book. The Pew Research Center tracked local TV news outperforming newspapers by nearly 20 percentage points in respondents’ information consumption habits by the early 1990s.

US adults still rely on TV for local news more than any other source. In 2025, 65% reported they sometimes or often got local news from TV stations, Pew found. The latest Medill survey of news consumption habits in the Chicago area found two-thirds of respondents relying on television stations for local news at least weekly. In each of the three years Medill has conducted the survey, TV has ranked as either the second- or third-most used weekly source of local news, competing with search engines and word of mouth for the top spot. But local TV news sits on a precipice. Consolidation and cutbacks, coinciding with fracturing audiences and the evolution of new technology, make local television’s future uncertain.

New for this report, the Local News Initiative identified 678 local commercial TV newsrooms across the United States. Medill researchers assembled this database through the Federal Communications Commission’s Licensing and Management System and Online Public Inspection Files. Information was verified via stations’ websites wherever possible. The full methodology can be found here.

By focusing on newsrooms rather than stations, we sought to strip out the influence of consolidation and content duplication, whereby multiple stations broadcast the same news reports. Researchers at the University of Delaware drilled into this phenomenon in a 2025 report that found 39% of US media markets had experienced content duplication in 2019. To account for this, we compared stations’ quarterly programming reports submitted to the FCC, as well as their websites, and grouped stations into newsrooms based on significant overlapping content in either. For example, we counted Honolulu’s CBS and NBC affiliates owned by Gray Media as one newsroom, Hawaii News Now. Other examples include the combined newsroom of the Nexstar-owned Fox and CBS affiliates in Indianapolis and the joint operation of Sinclair and Cunningham Broadcasting in Charleston, West Virginia.

Of the 210 U.S. television markets identified by Nielsen, all but two maintain at least one commercial TV newsroom. Glendive, Montana, the country’s smallest market, hasn’t carried a regular commercial local newscast since around 2015. Juneau, Alaska, the fourth smallest market despite containing a state capital, receives regional newscasts produced by stations in Anchorage: Alaska’s News Source and Your Alaska Link.

Gainesville, Florida, home of the University of Florida and local news on ABC affiliate WCJB, is the largest of 26 markets with a single local commercial TV newsroom. The competing newscast on Sinclair-owned WGFL ceased in 2023 after Sinclair laid off the entire newsroom and replaced local reporting with its national news program, The National Desk.

Adding commercial television to the LNI database made little impact on which counties we identify as news deserts. Just one county that we classified as a news desert last year has been removed from our list of deserts based on the inclusion of TV. Columbia County, Georgia contains the northwest suburbs of Augusta and is also the home of WFXG FOX 54, whose studios sit just across the county line from the more populous Richmond County.

More than 95% of commercial newsrooms fall in counties designated metropolitan by the USDA. This result is unsurprising; Newsrooms have for decades been based in the urban hearts of their markets. While local TV typically has a coverage area wider than a single county, we placed newsrooms into one county each based on the locations of their main studios to maintain consistency with the other media types we track. Doing so also helps identify newsrooms that buck the trend of clustering in major cities, like WMFD in Mansfield, Ohio, which covers the more rural area between Cleveland and Columbus.

The New York metro area carries the largest number of local commercial TV newsrooms with nine; it is followed by eight each in Boston, Houston, Philadelphia and San Francisco. Nine markets have seven, including Chicago and Los Angeles.

Despite its position of strength relative to other types of legacy media, local television is contracting. The count of stations producing local news, the total hours of local TV news and the number of people employed by local TV news all decreased in 2026 as part of multi-year slides, according to the Annual News Survey published by the Radio Television Digital News Association and S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University. In particular, the survey highlights the decline in daily news hours as stretching back to 2001.

This contraction comes in the context of ownership consolidation and federal deregulation. Modern television giants like Nexstar, Sinclair and Gray began buying up TV stations in the 1990s. Since then, a parade of mega-mergers worth billions of dollars, as well as steady purchases of smaller groups, has produced extreme ownership consolidation. In just the last decade: Nexstar bought Media General for $4.6 billion in 2017 and Tribune Media for $7.2 billion in 2019; Gray acquired Raycom Media for $3.6 billion in 2019; and Scripps bought ION Media for $2.7 billion in 2021.

Today, the five largest owners control more than half of local commercial TV newsrooms. The 10 largest control 75%.

By comparison, the 10 largest newspaper owners control less than a quarter of all local papers and about two-thirds of local dailies.

Looming over this is Nexstar’s planned $6.2 billion acquisition of Tegna, which would merge the second- and fourth-largest owners of local commercial TV newsrooms. The deal, first announced in August 2025, gained FCC approval in March before a federal judge blocked it in April. Its status remains in flux. A federal court in August found Nexstar in violation of the April ruling and ordered it to remove its employees from Tegna’s board of directors. Nexstar’s website already claims Tegna as a subsidiary, and many of its local stations carry website banners linking to a page supporting the merger.

If the transaction goes through, Nexstar would take ownership of Tegna’s 48 newsrooms. The fate of those newsrooms, however, is unclear. Thirty-three of them operate in areas covered by current Nexstar newsrooms, making them prime candidates for consolidation.

While Nexstar-Tegna has captured headlines, at least 10 local TV newsrooms have disappeared across the country this year in other mergers. Such cases have been facilitated in part by the roll back of federal TV ownership regulations. A federal appeals court ruling in last year in Zimmer Radio of Mid-Missouri v. FCC struck down the federal prohibition on one company owning the top two stations in a market. Late this summer, the FCC voted to repeal the national cap on TV ownership.

In Indianapolis, WRTV’s newsroom was slashed and incorporated into Circle City Broadcasting's operations when Scripps sold WRTV in March. To allow the acquisition, the FCC waived the rule preventing one company owning more than two stations in a market. After Gray’s $171 million deal to acquire stations from Allen Media Group across the Midwest and South closed in May, newsrooms combined in five different markets, including Huntsville, Alabama; Evansville, Indiana; and Lansing, Michigan. Sinclair further supplanted its dominance in Eugene, Oregon by absorbing KMTR from Roberts Media in February.

Ownership

Capping off an already striking year for newspapers has been a huge wave of transactions. In the past year, more than 425 newspapers have changed hands across more than 150 separate transactions. As with the previous year, the majority of these transactions did not involve mass acquisitions from the largest owners. Instead, most of the papers that changed hands were members of smaller chains. When the large owners did buy or sell papers, they were typically in one-off deals, such as USA Today Co’s acquisition of the Detroit News from Alden in January.

The one major exception to this trend happened around the new year, when Florida-based billionaire David Hoffmann took a controlling stake in the Lee Enterprises chain of papers. Hoffmann, who has also taken over as chair of the board for Lee, has spoken publicly about his long-standing interest in local journalism and his desire to be a major newspaper publisher. Prior to his investment in Lee, Hoffmann owned a handful of papers, mostly weeklies, spread across the country. If this acquisition of a controlling stake were treated as a traditional transaction (Lee Enterprises remains a publicly traded company), it would be by far the largest in the U.S. since GateHouse joined with Gannett (now USA Today Co.) in 2019, with more than 100 papers involved, and immediately catapulting Hoffmann into the top ten largest owners. Aside from this deal, the largest single transaction of the past year was the acquisition of Moser Community Media in Texas by Arizona-based Times Media Group, involving roughly 30 papers.

Because many of the papers that changed hands were from smaller chains, the overall breakdown of ownership consolidation in the newspaper industry remains similar to what it was last year: in the U.S., nearly a quarter of all newspapers are owned by just 10 companies, as are more than half of all dailies. In other types of media, ownership is more heavily concentrated: in network sites, for example, more than 75% of individual outlets are controlled by the 10 largest networks.

Employment

Between 2024 and 2025, the labor market in the United States added more than a million jobs. Over the same period, however, employment in the newspaper industry continued its sharp downward slide, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. By May of 2025, there were just under 84,000 newspaper employees left in the country, down more than 7,500 from the previous year, for a loss of about 8%.

These declines include a loss of about 1,300 newsroom jobs (such as editors and journalists), but many of the harsher losses occurred in other occupations, especially those related to material production of papers, as more and more printing facilities shut down due to rising costs. Nearly 1,200 printing plant jobs disappeared from 2024 to 2025, a decline of more than 20%. Since 2006, close to 80% of these positions have vanished. Over the same time period, more than 44,000 transportation workers employed by the newspaper industry also have lost their jobs, a decline of more than 90%, as papers move away from the large in-house fleets of delivery trucks and toward regular postal distribution. From 2024 to 2025, another 10% of these jobs were lost.

Broader employment for journalists specifically fared slightly better over the same period, but only just. In 2025, there were a little more than 39,000 journalists employed across all industries in the U.S., down more than 5% over the previous year. But in both terms of actual losses and percentage losses, journalism within the digital publishing industry fell at an even steeper amount than newspapers: between 2024 and 2025, more than 1,300 journalists disappeared from digital platforms, a loss of more than 12%, and leaving fewer than 10,000 journalists remaining within the field.

These sobering losses occurred prior to May 2025, reflecting the one-year lag in publicly released BLS data sets. Yet developments in the past year have indicated that the pace of job losses in the local news industry is not slowing down. At the end of last year, the Minnesota Star Tribune closed its printing plant, cutting 125 jobs and moving its printing to Des Moines (plans to turn the Minneapolis building into a data center have sputtered). More recently, a wave of layoffs have occurred across several major publishers, including McClatchy and USA Today Co., previously Gannett. Papers owned by Lee Enterprises have also suffered layoffs in the wake of David Hoffmann acquiring his majority stake in the company.

Readership and Revenue

One of the key drivers behind newspaper losses over the past two decades was the collapse of the traditional business ad-based model of the industry. The ubiquity of cheap internet advertising in the early 2000’s forced newspapers to shift to a model based around reader revenue. Yet maintaining subscriber and viewer numbers in enough volume to remain sustainable has been a persistent challenge for many news outlets, and this has only been exacerbated due to declines in readership.

Of course, the majority of local news readers no longer consume printed papers, instead electing to read content digitally. In fact, according to the 2026 Medill Chicago news consumer survey, just 12% of respondents in the Chicagoland area say that they often consume print news. Instead, people overwhelmingly consume local news via a laptop, smartphone or TV set.

Yet digital readership is also in precipitous decline for many outlets. As part of this report, Medill researchers examined the web traffic for more than 700 local news sites, across all media types, using numbers from the web analytics provider Comscore. Taken together, these sites have seen their monthly traffic drop by an average of nearly two million pageviews, for an average percentage loss of nearly 30%. As a separate category, newspapers fared even worse. Out of 100 of the largest local newspapers examined, just two exhibited statistically significant growth in monthly page views compared to 71 in decline. The majority of these sites also showed evidence of downward trends in unique visitors and time spent on site. Taken together, web traffic to these sites declined nearly 50%.

The increased ubiquity of AI, and the redesign of large portions of web infrastructure to accommodate it, may help to explain some of this traffic decline. As more web services, including traditional search engines, move toward the “answer machine” model of AI chatbots, audiences are increasingly presented with summaries of local news content, and have less incentive to actually visit the news sites. Indeed, this is a concern that AI developers themselves have raised, describing their products as an “existential threat” to publishers, according to recently unsealed documents in a multi-publisher lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft.

Startups and Sustainability

This spring, thousands of people across Iowa woke up to discover that their local news outlet would soon disappear. Mid-America Publishing, a regional chain that owned roughly 20 papers, many of them in small towns and rural communities, declared in March that it would cease operations within a week, and close all the papers under its umbrella. The announcement came as a surprise even to the papers themselves: one of the first outlets to break the news was the 140-year-old Eagle Grove Eagle, which ran the story of its own imminent demise on its front page.

The move was set to devastate the Iowa media ecosystem. It would've been among the largest mass closures of newspapers in recent memory and left multiple counties without a reliable source of professional local news. For a moment, it appeared as if Iowa would be another state in 2026 to suffer a sudden growth in rural news deserts, alongside Kansas and, later, Illinois.

Instead, a series of interventions played out to help preserve the brunt of the vulnerable newspapers. One of the challenges in responding to newspaper closures is the speed with which they often occur, leaving very little time to muster support. “When rural papers close, they close very fast,” according to Debbie Anselm, executive director of the Iowa Newspaper Association. In this case, new owners were able to mobilize quickly to take control of several of the papers that were on the chopping block. Some of the papers, like the Eagle, even changed hands a few times efforts were made to find more permanent homes for them: in the case of the Eagle, it was originally taken over by Stateline Publications, before being transferred to Nelson Media Company, both small chains, where it would be combined into a new publication.

One novel solution that emerged was a bridge program developed by the INA. The concept behind the program was to provide more time to papers facing closure so that potential buyers could put together the funding and planning necessary to acquire them. In the meantime, the papers would be able to sustain their license to print legal notices for the county, allowing them to maintain that source of revenue. The closures announced by Mid-America publishing proved a sudden trial by fire for the program; it had only been finalized in November of last year, according to Anselm. Yet the program did manage to provide the time gap necessary for some of the counties – in the case of the News-Review, in Keokuk County for example, the paper was kept on life support for more than six months until a new owner could be found.

While Iowa proved to be a particularly dramatic case, there were other examples in the past year of new owners emerging to keep papers afloat after they had been slated for closure. In February, the 116-year-old West Carroll Gazette in Oak Grove, Louisiana was able to continue publishing after being bought by the local chamber of commerce. In July, Carrie Pitzer purchased the Grant County News in Nebraska, after, in an echo of closures seen elsewhere around the country, the previous owner passed away. And in April, Tyler Hook of the Ulysses News in Kansas bought the Elkhart Tri-State News, writing, “[this] is about making sure stories of our towns are told by people who understand them, that local voices are not replaced by distant ones, and history being written today is captured with care and intention.”

There also has been increased activity in recent months to shore up existing local newspapers and convert them to nonprofits. The National Trust for Local News, a venture philanthropy, acquired five newspapers in Vermont in September and two in Georgia in July. And in a particularly high profile instance, the Venetoulis Institute for Local Journalism, nonprofit owner of the Baltimore Banner, acquired the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette in May, after the paper announced it would close.

Alongside these efforts, some startups have emerged to help fill the gaps. These startups have appeared in almost every state yet largely have formed in cities. Of the 287 news outlets that have started in the last five years, nearly 80% are found in urban areas. These startups also tend to be concentrated in relatively affluent areas; in fact, the average demographics of the communities where news startups have emerged are almost polar opposites to news deserts.

That is not to say that viable startups can’t emerge in rural areas, as has been demonstrated by examples like the Seward Folly, a digital site in Alaska’s Kenai Peninsula, or the Southern Reveille, a newspaper situated on the banks of the Mississippi River. Yet the rarity of such startups points to the importance of effective interventions and support for outlets in rural areas.

Adding to the sustainability challenge has been the overwhelming concentration of philanthropic capital. In a survey of the nearly 8,000 largest grants to journalism made in the last five years, more than 95% have been directed to recipients in urban areas. Despite this concentration, a growing number of news organizations are moving over to a nonprofit model, and seeing success in doing so. The American Journalism Project’s 2026 Impact Report, for example, reported a 28% increase in the revenue of the more than 50 news organizations across 38 states it has invested in.

In the past year, some new statewide public policy initiatives have emerged. Building on the legislative models pioneered by Illinois and New York, New Mexico this year passed SB151 into law, providing tax credits aimed at supporting local news infrastructure, including printing operations. And in Vermont, the governor signed an executive order directing that local news outlets would be prioritized in state advertising, the first such order in the country. At the same time, a tax credit proposal in New Hampshire failed along party lines, while in Kansas, a tax credit bill aimed at small business advertising stalled.

As in previous years, mounting a successful response to the ongoing crisis of vanishing local news requires attacking the problem from several different angles, including philanthropy, public policy, access to capital, and community support. Yet as this crisis accelerates in rural communities, fueled by the challenges facing small chains and independent owners, new interventions, especially those that can be deployed rapidly, are increasingly essential. As Anselm noted, regarding the role of press associations: “we, like the industry, have had to adapt and think differently.” Within the highly dynamic ecosystem of local news, sustainability requires a willingness to change and explore innovative ideas, while remaining true to the essential mission of keeping local voices alive.