Digital startups are a bright spot in the latest ‘State of Local News’ report, but rural areas are lagging

Finding news in the annual State of Local News report from Northwestern University’ Medill School can be a challenge because, frankly, it’s always the same depressing thing: newspapers keep closing; digital startups are rising, but not by enough to fill the gap; and be sure to tune in again next year, when the situation is likely to be even worse.

Still, there are a few interesting nuggets in the latest update, which was released Monday. In particular, I was drawn to some observations in the report about rural areas, which is where news deserts tend to be concentrated. News deserts, as defined by the project’s now-retired founder, Penny Abernathy, are counties without any locally based news organizations.

As newspapers continue to close, independent startups are filling the gap. But it’s uneven at best, with most startups concentrated in urban and suburban areas. The report puts it this way:

Over the past five years, we have tracked more than 300 startups that have emerged across the country. Support for both these new startups, which have opened in almost every state, as well as existing legacy outlets has come from a surge in philanthropic investment as well as public policy initiatives. Over the past year, such efforts have boosted a wide variety of news outlets. Overall, however, philanthropic grants remain highly centralized in urban areas, and state legislation has not been widely adopted throughout the nation, leaving many outlets in more rural or less affluent areas still vulnerable.

The report also finds that fewer than 10% of digital-only news organizations are in rural counties, and that the demographics of counties that do support digital projects “tend to be more affluent, with lower rates of poverty and higher rates of educational attainment.” Of course, internet connectivity tends to lag in rural areas as well.

Given those realities, the authors observe that public broadcasting is uniquely positioned to help fill the news gap in rural America. Researchers found that primary public stations (that is, not counting repeaters) are on the air in 46% of news-desert counties and 53% of counties with only one news source.

“What’s needed is to increase that reporting network to match that distribution network,” said Zachary Metzger, director of the Medill State of Local News Project, at a webinar introducing this year’s findings. But we all know that public media are in no position bolster their journalism — not with Donald Trump and the Republican Congress cutting all federal support for public broadcasting for the next two years, a blow that adds up to $1.1 billion.

Philanthropy, too, is unevenly distributed. During the webinar I asked Metzger about the challenge posed by suddenly bereft public broadcasters seeking funds from the same pool of foundation grants that hyperlocal news projects have relied on. He replied that the real challenge will come two to five years down the line, when public broadcasters are competing with other nonprofits. (Perhaps we can hope that federal support will be restored after Trump is no longer in the White House.)

In addition, philanthropy tends to be nationally concentrated, while local philanthropy is strongest in affluent areas — no doubt a factor in why most startups are launched in those areas. The 10,000 largest national grants went to just 1,000 recipients, and 90% were in urban and metro areas, Metzger said.

In paging through the report, I found one other significant data point. Web traffic to the 100 largest newspapers has fallen by more than 45% over the past four years, according to Comscore. Only 11 experienced any growth. The report puts it this way:

This drop has coincided with technological changes that threaten to upend how readers interact with news sites. The widespread integration of generative AI into search engines, for example, has led to users seeing search results with headlines and content in summary form, without actually going to the underlying sources (which are pushed down further in search results). Already, this has particularly affected some of the largest revenue generators in an outlet’s portfolio, such as product reviews and “evergreen” journalism. Additionally, traditional news outlets are facing competition from new, emerging sources. In Medill’s poll of Chicago news consumers, nearly a third of respondents said that they received news from content creators.

During the news conference, Medill Professor Tim Franklin said the dropoff began in 2022 because of changes that Facebook made to its algorithm that played down news, compounded more recently by AI search, much of it via Google, which is now keeping traffic on its own site rather than handing it off to news publishers. The response by community journalists, Franklin said, has been “an increasing emphasis on building loyalty, not necessarily page views,” through newsletters, alerts and in-person events.

Finally, a longstanding complaint. If you look at the map above, you’ll see that Massachusetts is a veritable news oasis, with no counties that would qualify as news deserts. But we have just the barest vestiges of county government in Massachusetts. Instead, we have 351 cities and towns, each with its own city council or select board, school committee, police department and the like. Every one of those communities needs accountability journalism. Unfortunately, we are a state where one small town may have a strong local news outlet and another, bordering town has nothing. Medill’s methodology may work for much of the country, but it doesn’t work here.

Sara Fisher has a good summary of the topline findings at Axios. Those findings are also contained in a press release sent out by Medill, which I’m reproducing in full below.

News deserts hit new high and 50 million have limited access to local news, study finds

Federal funding cuts to public broadcasting may accelerate local news crisis

EVANSTON, Ill. — The number of local news deserts in the U.S. jumped to record levels this year as newspaper closures continued unabated, and funding cuts to public radio could worsen the problem in coming months, according to the Medill State of Local News Report 2025 released today.

While the local news crisis deepened overall, Medill researchers found cause for optimism — more than 300 local news startups have launched over the past five years, 80% of which were digital-only outlets.

For the fourth consecutive year, the Medill Local News Initiative at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing Communications conducted a months-long, county-by-county survey of local news organizations to identify trends in the rapidly morphing local media landscape. Researchers looked at local newspapers, digital-only sites, ethnic media and public broadcasters.

This year’s report also includes an analysis of a timely issue: the potential impact of the federal defunding of public broadcasting on local news deserts. And for the first time, Medill researchers examined the decline in digital readership at newspapers.

Key findings from the Medill study:

• • The number of news desert counties rose to 213 in 2025, a jump from 206 in last year’s report. In another 1,524 counties, there’s only one remaining news source. Taken together, some 50 million Americans have limited to no access to local news. Twenty years ago, there were about 150 news desert counties, with about 37 million Americans at the time living in news deserts.
  • The rise in news deserts was accompanied by an increase in newspaper closures, which ticked up to 136 this past year, a rate of more than two per week. Medill tracked 130 in last year’s report.
  • In a marked departure, most of this year’s closures came at smaller, independently owned newspapers — not those controlled by large chains — signaling that an increasing number of long-time family publishers are surrendering to economic pressures.
  • Total jobs at newspapers slumped 7% in the past year. The industry has now lost more than three-quarters of its jobs since 2005.
  • More than 200 newspapers changed hands in the past year, down from the number of transactions last year but still a torrid pace by historical standards.
  • Nearly 300 public radio stations and more than 100 public television stations are producing local reporting. In nine counties, public radio is the sole news source, making those areas especially vulnerable to becoming news deserts in coming months.
  • Utilizing predictive modeling created by the school’s Spiegel Research Center, the Medill team found 250 counties at high risk of becoming news deserts over the next decade.
  • Web traffic to 100 of the largest newspapers has plummeted more than 45% in the past four years, according to a Medill analysis of data tracked by the media analytics company Comscore.
  • The report counted more than 300 local news startups in the past five years across virtually every state, demonstrating a surge of entrepreneurship that has come along with a wave of philanthropic support. The vast majority of those startups, however, are in metro areas, leaving rural and less affluent areas further behind.
  • The number of local news sites that are part of larger national networks is continuing to multiply. This year, there are 849 sites across 54 separate networks, up 14% from the 742 individual sites across 23 networks. This growth illustrates the increasingly prominent role of digital network sites on the local news landscape.

“This report highlights the historic transformation in local news,” said Tim Franklin, professor and John M. Mutz Chair in Local News at Medill. “On one hand, news deserts are expanding, and closures are continuing apace. On the other, hundreds of startups are emerging. The questions are what will the local news ecosystem look like in a few years, and will parts of the U.S. be left behind?”

Zach Metzger, director of the Medill State of Local News Project, said, “Over the past two decades, we’ve seen a dramatic reshaping in local news. Unlike in previous years, however, the majority of papers shutting down now are smaller, family-owned enterprises. These are often the most trusted active local news sources, and their loss creates new challenges for local news access in many communities.”

The Medill State of Local News Project is funded by grants and gifts from the Knight Foundation, MacArthur Foundation, Joyce Foundation, Microsoft, the Southern Newspaper Publishers Foundation, the Myrta J. Pulliam Charitable Trust and Medill alumni John M. Mutz and Mark Ferguson.