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If you thought last year was bleak, Medill’s annual State of Local News Report is here to ring the alarm bell louder.
What was a “creeping erosion” has now “mushroomed into a full-blown Super El Niño-like event for local news, leaving widespread and long-lasting displacement in its wake,” writes Tim Franklin, founding director of the Medill Local News Initiative, in his introduction to this year’s report, released Tuesday. The Northwestern University team’s research “paints a portrait of a local news ecosystem in a state of precarity.”
In the past year, Medill tracked 26 new news deserts, “the largest single-year rise by far since Medill began keeping records five years ago,” Franklin writes. The previous year, only six new news deserts emerged.
Medill’s team says to understand that acceleration, you have to look at where newspapers are disappearing fastest now. While about 70% of the papers that disappeared over the past 20 years were based in urban or suburban communities, in recent years a greater share of newspaper closures have happened in smaller, rural and poorer communities, according to the report.
“When the news disappears in these counties, it stays gone,” the report states.
Many of the new news deserts emerged because of small rural papers shuttering in the Midwest. In fact, the report notes that Illinois lost more newspapers than any other state: 30 newspapers shuttered in the state between July 2025 and August 2026, “all small to medium-size outlets.” That means nearly one in five of the 170 newspapers that shuttered in that year was based in Illinois. The state’s losses are especially notable because it enacted one of the first public policies to preserve and grow local journalism jobs in 2024.
“Independent owners of small to midsize newspapers especially were already operating on a knife’s edge,” Brier Dudley writes in his examination of newspaper losses in Illinois. “This past year, their slim margins were squeezed by shrinking revenues and steeply escalating prices for newsprint, fuel and other materials.”
The price of newsprint rose nearly 18% over the past year, Dudley reported, as U.S. mills closed or stopped production of newsprint. That’s about five times the national rate of inflation, he noted. As of April, the United States has just one newsprint producer left.
A few other highlights from this year’s report:
The extreme urban-rural divide: “Virtually all the new news sources are in urban areas, while rural America is increasingly arid news and information territory,” Franklin writes. “And virtually all the philanthropic support for local news is in metro regions.” The report notes that there are fewer than 50 counties in the U.S. “that lack a newspaper but feature an alternative digital or broadcast outlet.” Of the 287 news outlets to start up in the last five years, nearly 80% are in urban areas.
Traffic declines: Digital readership is in “precipitous decline” for many outlets. According to Comscore data from more than 700 local news sites, monthly traffic has dropped by an average of nearly 2 million pageviews, or almost 30%. Meanwhile, traffic to 100 of the largest local newspapers has declined by almost 50% since 2022.
Local TV news: This year, for the first time, Medill’s report included local TV newsrooms. The team identified 678 local commercial TV news stations across the country. The overwhelming majority are located in metro areas with existing local news outlets. (“Adding commercial television to the LNI database made little impact on which counties we identify as news deserts,” the team notes.) TV news is already highly consolidated — the five largest owners control more than half of newsrooms, and the 10 largest control 75% — and further consolidation could be imminent, if Nexstar’s $6.2 billion acquisition of Tegna survives an antitrust lawsuit. The deal would merge the second- and fourth-largest owners of local commercial TV newsrooms.
Read more in the full report here.
