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ARCHIVE - Newspapers on display in a newsagent's in New York. Photo: Soeren Stache
Keystone
In May 2025, the local newspaper Malheur Enterprise in the eastern US state of Oregon came to an end after 115 years. Despite a solid reputation for investigative research that uncovered corruption and mismanagement, the paper was published for the last time. The search for a successor had failed and so the retiring publishers Les Zaitz and Scotta Callister had little choice but to discontinue the weekly newspaper.
The Malheuse Enterprise is one of thousands of local newspapers that have been discontinued over the past two decades. According to a state report by the Local News Initiative at Northwestern University, nearly 40 percent of all local U.S. newspapers have disappeared. In more than 1,500 communities, people are also left with only one traditional news source, typically a weekly newspaper, according to the report. As a result, 50 million Americans have limited or no access to a reliable journalistic source of local news.
Areas without significant news sources that receive little coverage are referred to as "news deserts". This applied to around 200 of around 3,200 communities in the USA in 2025. Although there are digital alternatives, they can neither replace the jobs lost due to the discontinuation of print editions nor the number of newspapers, according to the initiative. What's more, they are mostly created in urban areas.
The ownership structure has also changed drastically: The vast majority of daily newspapers belong to larger and medium-sized chains. Less than 15 percent are still independent.
The reason for the disappearance is often that the business model of local media is collapsing. For decades, revenue from advertising financed the business in a broader sense. Over time, this money has migrated to digital platforms. As a result, many newspapers lost their most important source of income without being able to build a similarly sustainable model online.
This has fatal consequences, as Steven Waldman warns: "There is ample evidence that where local news is absent, voter turnout decreases, alienation increases, polarization grows, people become more irreconcilable and misinformation spreads more widely. It's extremely harmful for communities not to have local journalism," said the founder of an organization that fights the decline of local news.
But people don't stop reading the news - or what they think it is. According to the Local News Initiative, people in regions with poor local news coverage rely heavily on social media and other non-journalistic sources to keep up to date. What is declining, however, is trust in news outlets.
"You may feel part of a tight-knit community that knows about everything, but places with a lack of journalism are missing an outside source of information and a system of accountability from those in power," says Zach Metzger, director of the initiative.
A negative example of how the spread of misinformation and the lack of a trustworthy news source can have an impact is shown by an incident investigated by the New York Times in Oakdale, California, in 2020, when armed men suddenly began patrolling the sidewalks. A bar owner in the town of 20,000 inhabitants had hired an armed militia after news circulated in a Facebook group that a large demonstration by the civil rights movement "Black Lives Matter" was going to invade the town. This did not happen. According to the report, Facebook groups had taken over the role of local newspapers in the town.
The crisis in local journalism also has a political color: According to an analysis by the initiative, Donald Trump won the presidential election in 91 percent of news deserts against his Democratic challenger Kamala Harris - by an average of 54 percentage points.
An additional burden on the local media landscape in the US is the elimination of federal funding for public broadcasters initiated by Trump, which has dealt a heavy blow to many local stations in particular. PBS North Carolina and others have announced redundancies as a result of the cuts.
There are a number of proposals to counteract the current trend, such as tax incentives for local media, redirecting state advertising funds or state funding for scholarships in the field. According to the journalism magazine Nieman Reports from Harvard University, however, only very few of these initiatives have been successful to date. The author writes that it sometimes simply takes time for new initiatives to gain acceptance. However, media policy signals from Washington do not currently indicate this.
01.05.2026, 09:03
