There are 213 counties in the United States with no local news source at all. There are 1,524 more with only one. Taken together, 50 million Americans live with limited or no access to local news. The number went up again in 2025.
What 20 Years of Collapse Looks Like
The Medill State of Local News Report tracks the local news ecosystem county by county. The 2025 edition, released October 20, found that news desert counties rose to 213, up from 206 the year before. Newspaper closures hit 136 in the past year, more than two per week. Total newspaper jobs fell another 7 percent in 2024-25, and the industry has now lost more than three quarters of its workforce since 2005.
Twenty years ago there were about 150 news desert counties, with roughly 37 million Americans living in them. The crisis is 42 percent worse by county count and more than 35 percent worse by population. Print newspaper circulation has fallen by 80 million in two decades, a 70 percent drop. Web traffic to the 100 largest newspapers is down more than 45 percent in the last four years alone.
The closures are now hitting the smallest, most trusted papers. For the first time, most of the closures this year happened at independently owned, family-run papers rather than large chains. Long-time local publishers are giving up.
Who Owns What Is Left
Roughly half the daily newspapers still publishing are owned by either Gannett or by Alden Global Capital, a Manhattan hedge fund that has spent fifteen years buying local papers, firing reporters, selling off real estate, and operating what remains as ghost publications. Alden tried to buy The Dallas Morning News for $88 million in 2025 after Hearst had bid $75 million. Alden is the second largest U.S. newspaper owner by daily circulation, after Gannett.
What expands while traditional newspapers shrink is digital networks. There are now 849 local news sites across 54 national networks, up 14 percent in a year. Some are legitimate startups. Others are political operations dressed as journalism, what the press calls pink slime, optimized for partisan content and Google traffic. Medill researchers counted 300 genuine local news startups in the past five years, an encouraging surge funded by philanthropy. The catch is that 80 percent of them are digital only and most are in metro areas. Rural and poor counties are getting digital networks and pink slime, not reporters.
The Balanced Middle: Public Investment Without State Media
Most developed democracies solved this decades ago by treating local journalism as public infrastructure. The BBC operates regional newsrooms across the United Kingdom under an independent charter. Germany, France, and the Nordic countries fund public broadcasters at five to twenty times the U.S. per-capita rate, with editorial independence written into statute. Canada created the Local Journalism Initiative in 2019, a federal grant program that has funded thousands of reporters in underserved communities.
The United States goes the other direction. The federal funding cut to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting in 2025 puts the last reporter in nine U.S. counties at risk, the public radio stations identified by Medill as the sole news source in their service area. An American balanced middle would fund public media at developed-world levels, expand postal subsidies for local journalism, and create a refundable tax credit for local newsroom payrolls. None of those steps puts the government inside the newsroom. They keep the newsroom open.
When the local paper closes, voter turnout drops, municipal borrowing costs rise, and corruption rises with them. Twenty years of academic research has confirmed each of those effects.
What fills the gap left by a closed newsroom is social media feeds, neighborhood Facebook groups, influencers, gossip, and partisan content shops dressed up as news. The Medill survey of residents in news deserts found exactly that pattern. The cost of the swap, in elections decided on misinformation and local governments operating without scrutiny, is hard to measure but easy to feel. 50 million Americans already live with it.
Sources
- Medill (Northwestern): News Deserts Hit New High, 50 Million Have Limited Access to Local News
- Medill Local News Initiative: State of Local News 2025
- Poynter: Independent Publishers and Small Chains Closed Papers Last Year, Medill Study Finds
- Alden Global Capital (background)
- WTTW: Local News Deserts Rose to Record Levels as Federal Funding Cuts Threaten Public Broadcasting
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