Local newspapers are quickly going extinct in the United States. In 2022, two local newspapers closed down each week, according to the Northwestern University School of Journalism (Illinois). In 2023, the average rose to 2.5 weekly closures, according to the annual report published in November by the university. More than 130 newspapers have closed or merged, a phenomenon many experts believe is linked to the current wounds in American democracy: misinformation, corruption and polarization.
In less than 20 years, a quarter of America's newspapers have gone out of business. More than 200 of the country's 3,143 counties are now considered "news deserts:" they no longer have a single local newspaper. In more than 1,500 others, there is only one regional news source, usually a weekly publication. One in five Americans lives in one of these news deserts.
"The loss of these outlets puts communities in a downward spiral of misinformation, division and polarization," said Steven Waldman, founder of Rebuild Local News, a coalition of some 3,000 news organizations and associations whose aim is to restore local media. "When you consume news that is very partisan or national in nature is that you tend to think of your opponents as your enemies, whereas, when you have local news, you still have disagreements, but you might actually see that person at the little league game or at the supermarket the next day, and you know they're a human being."
More than a thousand news organizations are now considered "ghost newspapers," meaning they have lost more than half their employees and are produced by a reduced number of journalists, sometimes stationed far from the terrain they are supposed to cover. The report cites the example of the mistake made on September 5, 2023, by Hutchinson News, a Kansas newspaper and former Pulitzer Prize winner, which was bought in 2016 by the Gannett Group. On its "front page," the paper described – with a photo to back it up – a group of "dynamic and happy" residents of a local retirement home kayaking on a tree-lined lake. Readers were stunned: they'd never seen such a lake close to home. The article was actually about the activities offered in a town of the same name but located in Minnesota. The article had been written by a freelancer from outside Hutchinson and commissioned by an Oklahoma-based publisher.
As a result of the decline in advertising and competition from the internet, the US has lost more than 2,500 newspapers since 2005 and 43,000 journalists – nearly two-thirds of all editorial staff. Northwestern University estimates that a third of local newspapers will probably have closed by the end of 2024. The 6,000 or so surviving newspapers are mostly weeklies owned by investment firms looking to cut costs.
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