In ‘Deserted,’ Nick Mathews explains how the local news crisis is devastating rural communities

Local news is in crisis everywhere, but the challenge is more daunting in rural areas than it is in cities or affluent suburbs.

Consider the Storm Lake Times Pilot, which serves a farming community in Iowa. As co-founder Art Cullen explains in the 2021 documentary “Storm Lake,” the rise of agribusiness wiped out much of the local advertising that had once sustained the paper while the spreading tentacles of social media grabbed another large chunk. When Cullen appeared that same year on the podcast that Ellen Clegg and I host, “What Works: The Future of Local News,” he told us that both he and his brother, John Cullen, were living on Social Security rather than take a salary out of their precarious newspaper revenues.

The Storm Lake Times Pilot is emblematic of a national phenomenon. In 2025, the Local News Initiative at Northwestern’s Medill School found that 213 U.S. counties lacked a local news outlet, and that nearly 80% of those counties were in rural areas.

This depressing state of affairs is the focus of Nick Mathews’ new book, “Deserted: Life Without Local News in Rural America.”

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