What's Actually Killing Local News?

Guerrilla Reads, June 2025

Returning friends: Hello again and thank you for joining us for the fifth book in our series of not-exactly-cozies. Courageous readers, I salute you!

New friends: In this read-along group, we are meeting writers who challenge what we think we know about the world we live in. This kind of reading is often uncomfortable, painful, and the writers don’t leave us with happy endings. But we need to know what this world is like (really like) before we can figure out how to recalibrate and move forward. Understanding how things work can leave us both grateful and hopeful, even as we grope through the noisy dark.

Everybody: I am currently reading Martin Baron’s Collision of Power: Trump, Bezos, and the Washington Post. Next Monday (June 16), I’ll open a general discussion on the book and the many important issues it raises about journalism’s role in our American democracy.

For the next several weeks, then, we’re digging into the crisis in American journalism—not just the headlines about collapsing empires or billionaire tantrums, aimed to capture our attention, but the deeper, wider, quieter spoiling of our information commons. We need to see the the Washington Post against the backdrop of what’s happening all across America.

So this week, we take a hard look at the structural issues facing newspapers. And it isn’t just the internet. The damage is older, deeper, and more systemic than that. Below are five core problems—intertwined, long-building, and corrosive—that have made it increasingly difficult for local newspapers to do the job every good journalist wants to do: inform the public, watchdog the powerful, and help their community see itself.

This isn’t about nostalgia, or returning to a past that never was. It’s about democracy. An endangered democracy.

News Deserts Are Spreading

Across the country, newspapers are disappearing. Since 2005, the United States has lost more than 3,300 newspapers. Some have merged or vanished entirely. Others become “ghost papers”—they still publish, but they’ve fired their reporters, closed their offices, and do no original reporting. A shell of a paper with no soul.

The University of North Carolina’s Center for Innovation and Sustainability in Local Media tracks this phenomenon—with a map that allows you to see the situation in your home area. As of 2023, more than half of U.S. counties had no daily paper, and over 200 counties had no newspaper at all. The losses are especially felt in rural counties, communities of color, and small post-industrial cities. In these places, there’s no one to report on public meetings, development decisions, school board changes, or public health crises. No coverage of corruption. No obituaries. No wedding announcements. No sense of place.

The vacuum doesn’t stay empty, of course. People turn to social media, conspiracy blogs, or national cable news—none of which understand or care about local context. Misinformation floods in. Civic knowledge shrinks. Voter turnout drops. Cronyism and corruption thrive.

This is how democracy dies. Not with a bang but a whimper. Not with censorship, but with neglect.

Trust Has Been Torched—and the Audience is Gone

There’s no way around it: readership has collapsed. There are more options. There is less time to read. Fewer people subscribe, fewer read regularly, and fewer still believe what they read. Where newspapers were once daily habits—waiting on doorsteps or opened at breakfast—they’re now seen as optional or obsolete.

Some of that collapse is cultural. Younger readers came of age in an attention economy where news competes with streaming, TikTok, memes, and micro-drama. Older readers, watching their local paper shrink to a pamphlet with no real reporting, often cancel in frustration.

But the erosion of trust isn’t accidental—it has been deliberately stoked. Beginning in the 1990s and weaponized aggressively since 2016, the term “fake news” has been hurled at journalists doing basic accountability reporting. This doesn’t just damage national outlets—it infects attitudes toward all media. Many Americans now assume bias or manipulation even in school board coverage.

And when trust dies, the public contract between a newspaper and its community breaks. People no longer believe the paper is “on our side.”

The Newsroom Has Been Hollowed Out

Local reporting has become a skeleton operation. Where once there were beat reporters covering the courts, the city council, the school board, the cops, and the environment—now there may be just one generalist. Or none at all.

The average U.S. newsroom has lost more than half its staff since 2008. Some have just one or two people left. The biggest casualty? Investigative journalism—expensive, time-consuming, and high-risk. It’s much cheaper to run a wire story from the AP, rewrite a press release, or publish sponsored content than to spend weeks digging into a shady land deal or police misconduct.

The result is a weird thinning: you’ll still find lots of local sports coverage (because readers demand it), but little about how the county is spending your tax dollars.

And now? Some papers have begun quietly using AI tools to write simple stories—election results, crime reports, weather, and box scores. These stories are grammatically fine but narratively empty—no context, no questions, no hard calls. It’s not difficult to imagine a near-future where your “local” news site is 80% AI-generated filler with no reporter in sight.

It’s not just a loss of jobs. It’s the loss of experienced, insightful journalists who care about what’s happening in their communities.

The Business Model Is Broken

For most of the 20th century, newspapers made their money from ads—classifieds, car lots, department stores, real estate, local services. Subscriptions were cheap because ads paid the bills.

Then Craigslist came along and gutted the classifieds. Facebook and Google hoovered up the rest. And as big-box stores replaced the neighborhood hardware and drug stores, they stopped advertising locally. Why buy a quarter-page ad in the small local paper when you can target your customer on social media?

The result? Newspapers lost their lifeline, and no real substitute emerged. A few national outlets (like The New York Times or The Washington Post) have succeeded with digital subscriptions. But most smaller papers, especially in rural or low-income areas, lose subscribers when they install a paywall—yet they can’t live without one.

Some have experimented with events, merchandise, even community memberships. Others have turned to sponsored content and clickbait. But these are band-aids on an open wound. In most places, the local news economy is on life support.

The Talent Is Leaving—and Not Coming Back

Young journalists enter the field with energy and ideals. But many burn out within a few years. The pay isn’t impressive (the median salary is only around $57,500) the hours can be long, the benefits minimal. For what? To get laid off next time the publisher misses a quarterly target?

Many move on—to PR, to marketing, to nonprofits, or to big national platforms. Some join the new media independents—Substack newsletters, podcasts, YouTube journalism, or niche investigative collectives. It may not be local journalism, but it’s journalism. It might even pay better, support more professional freedom, and offer more security.

Those who stay behind do their best. But without support, mentorship, or job security, it’s not a career. It’s a sacrifice. The sense of mission that once kept journalists in place is no longer matched by a sustainable system. And when institutional memory dies, so does accountability.

So What’s at Stake?

Local newspapers aren’t just about the news. They’re mirrors and memory. They’re where you see your community reflected, where the powerful are scrutinized and power is held to account. When our local papers are lost, the consequences aren’t just informational. They’re civic. They’re moral.

We lose the habit of shared facts. We forget how to tell stories about ourselves. We become easier to divide, manipulate, and ignore. That’s why this issue matters—and why it’s worth our attention.

More on this important topic: Ghosting the News: Local Journalism and the Crisis of American Democracy, by Margaret Sullivan. "An excellent introduction to the essential problem of our republic. With a wake-up call like this one, we still have a chance." ―Timothy Snyder, author of On Tyranny

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Coming Up Next: Who Owns the News?

Next week, we’ll take a close look at Martin Baron’s Collision of Power, a case study in what happens when one of the world’s richest men owns a flagship institution of American journalism and is confronted by the world’s most powerful man, the president of the United States. I hope you’re reading along!

In the meantime, were you able to see Good Night, and Good Luck, George Clooney’s Broadway play about Edward R. Murrow’s confrontation with Senator Joseph McCarthy? If you missed it, you can stream or purchase a DVD the acclaimed 2005 movie (by the same name) from which the play was adapted. In the film, David Strathairn plays Murrow and Clooney plays Fred Friendly, Murrow’s producer.

On YouTube, you can also see a clip of Anderson Cooper’s important post-show interview with Scott Pelley, anchor of CBS’s Sixty Minutes. CBS is the target of a $20 billion lawsuit brought by Donald Trump. So far, both the executive producer and the president of CBS News have resigned amid indications that CBS’s controlling owner intends to settle, perhaps as a way to guarantee approval from the Trump administration for a planned corporate merger.

Your Turn

What’s the state of your local newspaper? Still alive and kicking? Hanging by a thread? Faded into ghosthood? I’d love to hear what’s going on—or isn’t—in your town. Drop a note in the comments and let us know

Look for me in your inbox next Monday with the Cancer issue of Growing Green with the Zodiac and later in the week with a post on my AI adventures.

I wrote today’s post with the help of Silas, my go-to AI assistant who suggests ideas, searches for sources, and compiles facts and checks them. You can read more about Silas and my other AI assistants here. Questions about this? Ask me—I’m always interested in talking about AI.