A few sobering notes from a report called “The State of Local News 2025” by the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University: Since 2025, the number of daily newspapers in the United States has declined by 40 percent. News deserts, defined as a county in which there is no local news outlet, increased from 150 in 2005 to 210 in 2025.
Well, I don’t live in a news desert, but it is getting dry out there.
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| Map of news deserts--there are still a lot of local news sources in U.S., but many local outlets like The Gazette are far less robust than they recently were. Map from: https://localnewsinitiative.northwestern.edu/projects/state-of-local-news/2025/report/ |
In November, The Gazette, my local newspaper, announced that it was being sold—going from an employee-owned local company to the property of something called Adams Multimedia.
And the change comes with cuts to the shrinking Gazette news staff. For example, long-time sports journalists Mike Hlas and JR Ogden wrote farewell columns. I’ll miss then both, but JR in particular, since he was very kind to many students of mine over the years.
As an old news man, of course that makes me a bit sad. Four decades ago, I was working hard as a local journalist in a small town in Missouri. Those were difficult, busy days, but rewarding ones, too. I later became a business journalist covering banking and then a professor at a small university teaching media writing and editing skills. Because of my background, I can’t claim to be neutral about news nor the decline in the newspaper industry.
But I also firmly believe we, the larger “we,” are suffering due to the loss of local news. It does feel like we’re living in a time and culture that celebrates ignorance and doesn’t discern well between fact and nonsense. Our “marketplace of ideas” is too often a cacophony of competing “realities” where everyone is shouting and nobody is listening nor watching the watcher.
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| Dec. 8 front page of The Gazette. |
As the Gazette continues, it feels like it’s a shadow of its old self, an army on a long death march that sadly seems to have the end in sight.
The world turns and changes. Back when I was a reporter for The Boonville Daily News, there wasn’t an internet. Communication scholars were aware of a growing online world and anticipated something that they called the “information appliance,” without necessarily understanding it would be our phones that would come untethered from our desks and walls and start accompanying us everywhere and seducing us with their siren call of social media—and, these days, AI deep fakes.
When our attention shifted to the online world and ad revenue followed our ears and eyeballs, the demise of the local newspaper became an almost inevitable byproduct. But the shift of my local newspaper from local ownership to a Minnesota based regional media chain still hurts. In the 1980s, the newspaper I worked for went from being owned by a small chain to a larger regional company, and the shift was catastrophic—the paper became un-tethered from serving its audience and entered a deep decline.
I would wish that a similar fate doesn’t await The Gazette. The loss of many respected and experienced staff members doesn’t bode well. Then again, yet that doesn’t mean that The Gazette could have continued operating the way it had been. The meta forces at work in the media world are inevitably going to reshape who informs or misinforms us and how.
Nothing is as it was—that’s life. The world turns. We hope that the long arc of history is bending towards a better future, but that is clearly not always the case.
I can’t help the feeling that part of our current cultural, political mess is an extension of The Washington Post’s tagline: “Democracy Dies in Darkness.” Maybe there are glimmers of light in new online media yet to emerge but it’s feeling very twilight out there, and that makes me melancholy.
Cue Joni:
