Extra, Extra - You’re losing places to read all about it: Report

A new report from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University found the local news market continues to decline

We're at a critical moment in time for local news and the media industry in general is transforming rapidly

And so we think it's critical to look at how the local news landscape is changing

One of those changes is that local newspapers continue to fold at a rapid pace

More than 130 have closed in the last year, and 40 percent have gone under since 2005

That's created more news deserts, a term for when an area where people in 1,700 counties have either zero or one source of local news

That's 50 million Americans who have either no or very limited access to local news

And I think the implications of that for communities and for the country are profound

The research also found digital readership for local newspapers is declining along with print

Of the 100 largest newspapers, monthly page views have declined by more than 45 percent over the last four years

Part of it was about three years ago, Meta or Facebook de-emphasized news in its feeds, which resulted in a drop in traffic from social

and especially over the last year we seeing people go directly to AI platforms chat GPT or Claude or Perplexity or pick your platform And so news organizations are not getting the same search traffic

that they used to get from, say, Google. The report also pointed to concerns about

President Trump defunding public broadcasting. What we found is that there are nine counties

where public radio is the only remaining news source. So if those stations go away and they're now under considerable financial pressure

this news desert problem is going to get worse. Franklin points out there's a lot of concerns over declining local news markets

and how it impacts communities. So there's research that shows that in news desert or low information communities

that civic participation declines. So turnout in local elections goes down, The number of candidates seeking local office goes down

In some cases, it also leads to higher government spending and higher government borrowing costs

because there's no journalist minding the store or monitoring what's happening in those communities

It also leads to more corruption. Franklin said part of fixing the problem is having more new startups and continuing to fund public broadcasting

For Straight Arrow News, I'm Lauren Keenan. If you want more on this story, download the Straight Arrow News app or visit san.com