Twenty years back, noting change, a US university’s journalism school started gathering data on local news outlets. A new report resulting from those months of work is “simultaneously sobering and inspiring”.

The Medill Local News Initiative has been led by Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing Communications.

In an introduction to the 2025 State of Local News Report, professor Tim Franklin and ‘chair in local news’ John Mutz say the “historic reshaping of local news” has come into clearer focus.

“With 20 years of data, one overarching headline: transformation,” they say.

News deserts are widening. Newspaper closures continue unabated. Independent publishers are calling it quits at an alarming rate. Yet local digital-only news sites are multiplying. Many are even thriving.

The Medill Local News Initiative researchers updated and expanded a database of local newspapers, digital-only news sites, networks, ethnic media outlets and public radio broadcasters. It also utilised a predictive model to identify counties at high risk of losing local news, and a team of editors and reporters were deployed to highlight innovators in local news and to canvass the country to report on vital issues in the industry.

“The result of all that months-long work is simultaneously sobering and inspiring. The steady, unrelenting decline of local newspapers – still the primary news source in most areas – is leading to an ever-rising number of news deserts, now 213 counties.

“This has huge implications for communities and our society.”

Researchers found that at the same time, digital-only local news sources were growing, “providing pathways for new journalism entrepreneurs and giving consumers even more information choices”.

But “the festering, 20-year-old problem” is that those digital news sites don’t come close to replacing the number of newspapers and journalism jobs being lost. And the digital news providers are almost entirely concentrated in metro areas, leaving vast swathes of the country with little to no access to local news.

In the mass of research, 12 local news outlets have been identified that “stand out in the quest for sustainable business models”.

The report says almost 40 per cent of US local newspapers have vanished in the 20 years, “leaving 50 million Americans with limited or no access to a reliable source of local news”.

Nor has the growth in standalone and network digital sites – mostly in urban areas – been fast enough to offset the losses elsewhere. As a result, ‘news deserts’ (areas with extremely limited access to local news) continue to grow; some 213 counties lacked a source of local news, compared to just over 150 in 2005, while in another 1,524, there is only one news source remaining, typically a weekly newspaper. “Taken together, in these counties some 50 million Americans live with limited or no access to local news.

“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 swathes of rural America without local news.”

Franklin and Mutz say close to 3,500 newspapers have vanished, “leaving one in every four Americans with limited access to a local print newspaper.

“These disappearances have occurred across the country but are especially pronounced in the suburbs of large cities, where hundreds of papers have merged together. The papers that remain look profoundly different than just a few decades ago, with significantly consolidated ownership and reduced print frequencies”.

Franklin, who came to the initiative as founding director, was previously president of the Poynter Institute, and previously editor of newspapers including the Indianapolis Star, Orlando Sentinel and Baltimore Sun, a Washington managing editor of Bloomberg News, and associate managing editor and reporter for the Chicago Tribune.

Medill is supported by philanthropic contributions including those of the Knight Foundation, MacArthur Foundation, Joyce Foundation, Southern Newspaper Publishers Foundation, Microsoft, Myrta J. Pulliam Charitable Trust and Medill alumni Mark Ferguson and John Mutz.