“In our 2022 report, we predicted that by the end of 2025, the U.S. would have lost one-third of its print newspapers over the past two decades,” said Zach Metzger, director of the State of Local News Project. “This year, we found that we've already crossed that threshold.”
Currently, around 5,600 newspapers exist, with a staggering 80% categorized as weeklies.
“I think that the local news crisis is deepening, and continuing to grow at an alarming pace,” Metzger told Diverse. “The number of transactions and the rise of some new large chains whenever new chains emerge in that kind of way, then there's always a concern of consolidation of the papers they have acquired.”
According to the report, In the past year 127 community papers have seen their demise and since 2005, more than one in three newspapers have folded. Today, nearly 55 million Americans live in places that could accurately be labeled as "news deserts." News deserts are counties without any locally based source of news.
The U.S. has also lost more than one-third of its newspapers since 2005. The Medill team calculated that since that year, the U.S. has seen a decline of 3,200 newspapers. Experts say that each closure adds to the void felt by communities deprived of local reporting. The impact of these closures is stark with the number of these news desert counties rising from 204 in 2023 to 208 this year.
