The decline of local news in the United States isn’t news to me. For years I’ve been following the long-term downward trends in the quantity, quality, and viability of news organizations, employment, and output as a journalist, and more recently in my academic research. In a detailed report, News Deserts and Ghost Newspapers: Will Local News Survive?, Penelope Muse Abernathy, presents abundant evidence that local news in the U.S. is in crisis.
Ambitious in its scope, the report begins with key facts about the decline of the local news landscape since 2004, derived from extensive research and a large database of news organizations created and updated by the Hussman School at the University of North Carolina. For example:
- Since 2004 about one-fourth of all U.S. daily and weekly newspapers have closed (some 2,100).
- About one-half of local journalists lost their jobs.
- Most of the shuttered daily newspapers served minority and/or impoverished communities.
- Many of the surviving local news organizations are “ghosts” of their former selves, employing fewer and fewer reporters and editorial staff.
- Between 2018 and 2020 alone, print circulation declined by some 5 million, 300 newspapers closed, and 6,000 reporters lost their jobs.
- 1,800 communities became part of America’s expanding news deserts, with no sources for local news.
Economic disruption from the pandemic further worsened conditions for news organizations, but the factors driving their decline have been obvious for some time. We know the standard narrative, and it’s represented in this report: The internet is the culprit. As the audience increasingly turned their quests for news to the web and social media, local news organizations were slow to adapt to the new digital world. Craig’s List siphoned off all the dollars newspapers got from classified ads. Google and Facebook came to dominate digital display advertising, leaving legacy newspapers with the digital scraps” (p.28). As a result, advertising revenue for U.S. newspapers dropped from $50 billion in 2005 to less than $15 billion in 2018, resulting in many thousands of layoffs from newspaper newsrooms (p.41).
In my view the standard narrative is both true and false. It’s true that newspapers who relied strictly on advertising revenue no longer have a viable business model. But the narrative is false in assuming that advertising revenue was ever a viable business model. Like so much of American newspaper culture, advertising was a historical anomaly, and was never a sustainable foundation for funding quality journalism. It just took the emergence of the internet to make this reality obvious.
The report does reflect that reality today, and documents the various ways legacy news organizations have tried to adapt:
- Eliminating print runs and publishing exclusively online, hoping that reduced costs and digital advertising will balance their budgets.
- Implementing digital subscriptions and paywalls to generate subscriber revenue.
- Sponsoring events and selling marketing services.
- Creating podcasts, newsletters, and lifestyle magazines.
- Reincorporating to non-profit status.
- Seeking deep pocket-donors and foundation grants.
A few news organizations have been successful with these strategies, including ProPublica and The Texas Tribune, which continue to produce award-winning investigative reporting. In Bend, Oregon, residents bought the Bend Bulletin and Redmond Spokesman during bankruptcy proceedings to keep the paper in local hands, with support from the Bend Foundation. National news powerhouses like The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal have leveraged their massive (and affluent) subscriber base to build successful online news platforms supported by both print and digital subscriptions, and advertising. But as Abernathy notes, “that the Times still depends on the print edition for half of its revenue illustrates how difficult it can be for legacy papers to make the digital transition” (p.28).
Smaller newspapers who have eliminated their print editions in favor of online-only publishing have not fared as well. Most have either “withered in terms of impact and reach, or they have been absorbed into the website of a surviving paper” (p.14). For example, the Fort Wayne, Indiana paper, The News Sentinel, stopped printing in 2017 and became a digital-only news website. Seven of eight remaining employees were laid off in 2018.
Conglomerates, hedge funds, and private equity, oh my!
Often missed in the “internet destroys news” narrative is the devastating takeover of newspapers by private investors and large news conglomerates, which the report details effectively. Following the 2008 recession, hedge funds and private equity firms viewed distressed newspapers and chains as targets for acquisition, often financed with debt. They then instituted severe cost-cutting measures including layoffs, wages freezes, reduced benefits, and pension restructuring. As they acquired more news “assets,” they moved editorial and business functions to regional centers removed from communities the newspapers served. Profits from these measures were used to pay down loans, and for shareholder dividends and management fees (p.31). These moves by private equity firms were destructive to local newsrooms, but they often failed to generate profits for the investors, who faced the same loss of print and advertising revenue as the industry overall.
Meanwhile, newspaper chains have expanded by buying small regional chains and independent newspapers. The top three newspaper conglomerates, Gannett/Gatehouse, Digital First/Tribune, and Lee/BH Media, now own 15 percent of U.S. newspapers, including one-third of all daily newspapers. The holdings of just three corporations now account for more than half of all newspaper circulation in the U.S. (p.34).
The Future of News?
The balance of Abernathy’s work describes efforts to reinvent local news for the 21st century, including business models to keep local newsrooms viable. These range from locally-owned for-profit models using a range of tactics, such as marketing video and web design services, in addition to the current near-ubiquitous digital subscriptions and paywalls.
UNC’s database shows a growing number of independent news organizations serving specific ethnic communities, who are underserved (i.e. unserved) by other media outlets. More than half of these are newspapers, and many are attempting to adapt to digital publishing as they look to younger audiences who gravitate to social media. Alas, many ethnic and minority communities are also underserved in access to broadband internet. The report notes that “many ethnic news organizations remain overwhelmingly reliant on advertising” (45). They face the same challenges as other “traditional” advertising-supported media: Print ad revenue is drying up, and digital ads don’t come close to matching lost revenues.
While the report is somewhat comprehensive in outlining current ideas and experiments for alternatives to reliance on advertising, in some sections I notice an undercurrent of the impact advertising has made on news media. An unnamed professor from a Texas university asserts that the challenge for ethic media is “to keep the momentum going in a way that allows them to monetize their audience” (45). I would argue this framing perpetuates the narrative that news organizations are fundamentally capitalist enterprises. This is not to say that all advertising is nefarious, or that a news organization should not seek financial support from their audiences and communities. I am saying that the phrase “monetize their audience” reflects 1) an imperative to view audience members as objects, and not subjects; and 2) a framing of the revenue problem that excludes possibilities that don’t involve monetizing the audience.
To Abernathy’s credit the report includes news models and perspectives counter to the current dominant narrative that free markets and capitalist structures are the only way to save journalism. The section on public broadcasting is current and comprehensive, and is presented as an alternative path to sustainable local and regional news despite relatively paltry public funding. The report depicts public radio in particular as an important and growing source of local news, in addition to national NPR broadcasts that reach 37 million people each week, and millions more online (pp.67,70).
Abernathy also quotes University of Pennsylvania media scholar Victor Pickard, an advocate for vastly increased government funding of public media “as a core democratic infrastructure” (p.70). I understand from my own professional experience in public media that at present, market and audience revenue considerations continue to influence decisions by public broadcasting executives about what programs will draw donations from listeners and viewers, and how much news and other public service programming they can afford to produce. The report notes that local NPR stations added some 1,000 full- or part-time editorial jobs between 2011 and 2018, raising the total to about 3,000 journalists at NPR stations nationwide. But this pales in comparison to the 36,000 editorial job losses at U.S. newspapers during the same period (p.69). In an alternate universe, the public media model, greatly expanded and sustainably funded by tax dollars, could create news oases in place of news deserts. Meanwhile, the crisis in local news plays out in an American context in which free market ideology and neoliberal theory largely set the terms for what kind of innovations are possible to even consider.
Social Media is not Journalism
Much has been written about the epistemological dysfunctions of contemporary social media. We know the standard outline: Social media platforms republished news stories and siphoned off audiences from the originating new sources. They monetized their growing user base to sell targeted advertising, drawing those dollars away from news organizations. They designed their algorithms to maximize “engagement,” which turns out to favor content that elicits emotional reactions from users, resulting in increasing outrage and polarization. Bad actors took advantage of the algorithm to “flood the zone” with disinformation and divisive messages, which became fodder for major news media coverage that further spread falsehoods and conflict. A breakdown in rational, informed, and productive political discourse followed.
I think we need much more research into the particulars of this account, and the parts of history the narrative leaves out. But Abernathy does highlight important examples of the problem social media poses for journalism, and the divergence of interests between news organizations and social media platforms. I suggest that this divergence is ripe for further exploration and theorizing.
Paths forward for Local News
A section of the report, written by Capitol Hill staffer and former 60 Minutes and Nightline reporter Dana Miller Ervin, outlines concerns among lawmakers about the future of news, and a variety of legislation pending before the U.S. Congress. During the COVID crisis there was bi-partisan support for short-term assistance to local newsrooms and public broadcasting, resulting in multimillion dollar subsidies from the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act. The Paycheck Protection Program also provided relief funding for news organizations. A number of bills have been introduced to address longer-term threats to journalism, described in some detail by Ervin. But none of the pending legislation addresses systematic issues. For example, thus far there are no proposals to require the tech giants who republish news stories to pay licensing fees to the originating news organization, as has been done in Australia. Of the other pending bills, none are expected to advance during this year, as the midterm elections consume most of the political oxygen.
Abernathy concludes with a call to reinvent local news, focusing on “the critical need for reliable information that guides decisions we make every day”, and that builds strong communities and trust in democratic institutions (p.89). It suggest three areas in need of intervention:
- Developing a business model that supports news as a public good, “building out the journalists model already established by NPR and PBS” (90).
- Supporting technological capabilities to increase traction for quality news on the internet, while reducing the dominance of big tech corporations (e.g. Google and Facebook). The report also calls for expansion of broadband and wireless availability in areas underserved by providers of high-speed internet.
- Instituting policies and regulations that “address the interconnectedness of journalist mission to the business model and technological capabilities” (91). The report identifies massive consolidation in both newsroom ownership and the tech industry as an imbalance of power that stymies independent and community-responsive journalism, and suggests policies to correct the imbalance in favor of democratic principles.
The final section offers a “rate your local news” exercise to help readers assess the health of critical and local news in the readers’ geographic location. The metrics provided seem to me a reasonable rubric for identifying where local news continues to provide crucial service to communities, and tracking the extent of our expanding news deserts.
The Hussman School of Journalism and Media has been reporting on the expansion of news deserts since 2016, and this report, published in 2020, is a rich resource for understanding the nature and extent of the crisis in local news as of 2020. It identifies key issues regarding consolidation of the news industry by media conglomerates and hedge funds, and the collapse of news business models based on advertising. And it offers potentially powerful ideas for reinventing local news and renewing a focus on issues that inform citizens on crucial community issues and support democratic institutions and practices. Aside from the report itself, the UNC news database represents a unique and important resource for further research. It will be interesting to see if and how this work informs the discussion about the future of news, especially the urgent need to reinvent business models not dependent on advertising.
Adventures in Information Science 