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. This report, authored by Penelope Muse Abernathy, and published in 2020 by the Hussman School of Journalism and Media at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, presents abundant evidence that those long-term trends have accelerated since 2004. And the author states that economic and social disruption from the COVID-19 pandemic, beginning in 2020, have “greatly accelerated” the crisis of local news.