Our first State of Local News report, published in 2016, examined the local news landscape across America over the previous 10 years, taking data from 2005 as its starting point. Now, in the project’s 10th year, we are able to look back through the past two decades and see dramatic transformations in the ecosystem of local news. Almost 40% of all local U.S. newspapers have vanished, leaving 50 million Americans with limited or no access to a reliable source of local news. This trend continues to impact the media industry and audiences nationwide. Newspapers are disappearing at the same rate as in 2024; more than 130 papers shut down in the past year alone. Newspaper employment is sliding steadily downward. And although there has been some growth in stand-alone and network digital sites, these startups remain heavily centralized in urban areas, and they have not been appearing fast enough to offset the losses elsewhere. As a result, news deserts – areas with extremely limited access to local news – continue to grow. In 2005, just over 150 counties lacked a source of local news; today, there are more than 210. Meanwhile, the journalism industry faces new and intensified challenges including: shrinking circulation and steep losses of revenue from changes to search and the adoption of AI technologies, while political attacks against public broadcasters threaten to leave large swaths of rural America without local news.
Key findings from the Medill study:
The number of news desert counties rose to 213 in 2025, a jump from 206 in last year’s report. In another 1,524 counties, there’s only one remaining news source. Taken together, some 50 million Americans have limited to no access to local news. Twenty years ago, there were about 150 news desert counties, with about 37 million Americans at the time living in news deserts.
The rise in news deserts was accompanied by an increase in newspaper closures, which ticked up to 136 this past year, a rate of more than two per week. Medill tracked 130 in last year’s report.
In a marked departure, most of this year’s closures came at smaller, independently owned newspapers — not those controlled by large chains — signaling that an increasing number of long-time family publishers are surrendering to economic pressures.
Total jobs at newspapers slumped 7% in the past year. The industry has now lost more than three-quarters of its jobs since 2005.
More than 200 newspapers changed hands in the past year, down from the number of transactions last year but still a torrid pace by historical standards.
Nearly 300 public radio stations and more than 100 public television stations are producing local reporting. In nine counties, public radio is the sole news source, making those areas especially vulnerable to becoming news deserts in coming months.
Utilizing predictive modeling created by the school’s Spiegel Research Center, the Medill team found 250 counties at high risk of becoming news deserts over the next decade.
Web traffic to 100 of the largest newspapers has plummeted more than 45% in the past four years, according to a Medill analysis of data tracked by the media analytics company Comscore.
The report counted more than 300 local news startups in the past five years across virtually every state, demonstrating a surge of entrepreneurship that has come along with a wave of philanthropic support. The vast majority of those startups, however, are in metro areas, leaving rural and less affluent areas further behind.
The number of local news sites that are part of larger national networks is continuing to multiply. This year, there are 849 sites across 54 separate networks, up 14% from the 742 individual sites across 23 networks. This growth illustrates the increasingly prominent role of digital network sites on the local news landscape.