About 1,300 U.S. communities have totally lost news coverage

It’s  hardly  a  secret  that  news  deserts  are  spreading,  but  just how bad is it? A comprehensive new study released by the University of North Carolina’s School of Media and Journalism shows that  far  more  U.S.  communities  have  totally  lost  news  coverage—more than 1,300—than previously known.
TOP FINDINGS:
About  20  percent  of  all  metro  and  community  newspapers in the United States—about 1,800—have gone out of business or merged since 2004, when about 9,000 were being published.
Hundreds more have scaled back coverage so much that they’ve become what the researchers call “ghost newspapers.” Almost all other newspapers still publishing have also scaled back, just less drastically.
Online  news  sites,  as  well  as  some  TV  newsrooms  and cable access channels, are working hard to keep local reporting alive, but these are taking root far more slowly than newspapers are dying. Hence the 1,300 communities that have lost all local coverage.
“The stakes are high,” the researchers say in their report. “Our sense of community and our trust in democracy at all levels suffer when journalism is lost or diminished. In an age of fake news and divisive politics, the fate of communities across the country—and of grassroots democracy itself—is linked to the vitality of local journalism.”
EXTENT OF THE DESICCATION
About  70  percent  of  the  newspapers  that  have  died since 2004 were in suburban areas of metropolitan areas that  historically  offered  many  news  choices,  the  researchers  say,  but  counties  with  no  coverage  at  all  tend to be rural.
State  and  regional  papers  have  also  pulled  back  dramatically,  and  this  “has  dealt  a  double  blow  to  residents  of  outlying  rural  counties  as  well  as  close-in  suburban areas.”
Compounding  this,  most  emerging  online  news  sites are clustered in affluent metro areas, and only two are in counties that have no newspaper.
Further,  the  people  who  live  in  news  desert  communities tend to be poorer, older and less educated than the average American—often its most vulnerable citizens, the researchers say.
“If journalism and access to information are pillars of self-government,” said Rutgers University professor Philip M. Napoli after leading a separate study of three demographically disparate communities in New Jersey, “these tools of democracy are not being distributed evenly, and that should be cause for concern.”
When the UNC researchers finished their database, it  showed  that  of  the  3,143  counties  in  the  United  States, more than 2,000 now have no daily newspaper, 1,449  have  but  one  newspaper  of  any  kind,  and  171  counties, with 3.2 million residents in aggregate, have no newspaper at all.
And  the  database  may  overstate  the  number  of  surviving standalone papers. The researchers estimate that 10 to 20 percent of the papers in it are geographically zoned weekly editions published by metro dailies. Papers owned by Digital First Media number 158 in the database, for example, but Digital First’s website lists fewer than 100. Different industry databases list zoned editions in different ways, making them difficult to count accurately.
As  print  publishing  continues  to  wither,  the  researchers  predict,  many  zoned  editions  will  become  ads-only  shoppers  or  specialty  publications,  or  be  eliminated entirely.
GHOSTS STALK NEWS DESERTS
The  NewsGuild-CWA  credits  Abernathy  with  coining  what  it  calls  the  bleak  metaphor  of  ghost  newspapers. In an article in March, the union describes these ghosts as “pared-down-to-nothing papers (or even single-page inserts) that are the remnants of once-robust local publications.”
“The quality, quantity and scope of their editorial content  is  significantly  diminished,”  the  UNC  report  says of the ghosts. “Routine government meetings are not  covered,  for  example,  leaving  citizens  with  little  information about proposed tax hikes, local candidates for office or important policy issues that must be decided.”
The  researchers  identify  two  common  ways  newspapers become ghosts:
1. A larger paper buys a smaller one in a nearby community and the smaller one slowly fades away as the titles merge their coverage efforts. The  researchers  discovered  that  almost  600  once-standalone  newspapers—or  one  third  of the 1,800 papers that the country has lost—had became advertising supplements, free distribution  shoppers  or  lifestyle  specialty  publications.  “In  its  final  stages  of  life,”  the  report says, “there is no breaking news or public service journalism.”
2. Owners  cut  their  news  staffs  so  drastically,  that a newspaper cannot adequately cover its community.  The  researchers  say  this  tends  to  happen  at  dailies  and  larger  weeklies  and  estimate  that  1,000  to  1,500  of  the  7,100  newspapers  still  publishing  have  cut  more  than half of their newsroom staffs since 2004.
The researchers say the ghosts include metro papers such as The Denver Post and state and regional dailies such  as  The  Wichita  Eagle;  both  have  cut  staffs  and  pulled back their coverage dramatically.
Six hundred weeklies that evolved into advertising supplements were removed from the UNC database, but researchers kept the 1,000 to 1,500 titles with drastically reduced editorial missions that still provide some value.
“The  sheer  size  of  this  contingent,”  the  report  says,  “speaks to the magnitude of the diminishment of local news in recent years.”
This article was originally published Oct. 15, 2018 by Poynter.
Tom Stites is founder and president of the Banyan Project, which is pioneering a co-op model for community journalism.

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