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.