Anne Fadiman lives in Western Massachusetts, where each morning she reads the print edition of The New York Times, purchased from the gas station by her husband, and The Daily Hampshire Gazette, which waits for her at the end of the driveway.
“I could not live without either,” Fadiman, the Yale Francis Writer in Residence, wrote in an email to The Politic. “The Times has better writing and fewer typos, but the Gazette, which has been published since 1786, is an essential part of life around here. It keeps local politicians accountable, reports on schools, town budgets, the police department, and the LGBTQ community, and publishes letters on a wide variety of local matters. Our part of the world would be incomplete without it,” she said.
According to Northwestern’s Local News Initiative, as of 2023, “more than half of all the country’s 3,100 counties either do not have a local news outlet or have only a single surviving outlet.” Just as Fadiman’s community would be “incomplete” without The Daily Hampshire Gazette, residents of these “news deserts” lack a reliable source of information about their community. 204 counties — home to over three million people — do not have a single news outlet at all.
Data from the Local News Initiative shows that the United States lost a third of its newspapers between 2005 and 2023. As of November 16, 2023, 6,005 papers remained—the overwhelming majority of which are weekly or other nondaily editions.
By 2023, newspapers were closing at a rate of more than two papers per week. Since 2005, the industry has lost about 60 percent of its newspaper journalists—more than 43,000 people.
The decline can be largely attributed to shifts in the news industry. Before the 21st century, newspapers relied on print advertising, which raised more than enough money to support operations and often allowed newspapers to be quite prosperous. As the 21st century ushered in the digital age, the newspaper industry lost gargantuan sums of advertising revenue to platforms such as Craigslist, Google, EBay, and Facebook. But independent from this inevitable transition, publication owners also made a series of tragic mistakes when deciding how their newspapers were going to exist in this new era.
According to Walter Shapiro, a Yale professor of political science and award-winning journalist, most newspapers did not believe the Internet was a serious competitor, so they were slow to adapt to the new medium. Furthermore, newspapers assumed that having an online presence—which often produced free content—would increase their print circulation, when, in fact, it did the opposite.
“As a result, there was an expectation that was built out that news should be free. And the problem is advertising on the web brings in about 1/10 as much money as print advertising,” Shapiro said, “So the combination of all these factors led to venerable newspapers closing or suddenly publishing in print two days a week.”
According to the Pew Research Center, newspapers generated $49.4 billion in advertising revenue in 2005, compared to $8.8 billion in 2020—an 82 percent decrease. Although advertisements are not the only way for newspapers to bring in revenue, the sharp decline in revenue has made it difficult for many newspapers to stay afloat.
Regardless of the revenue loss, the ways young audiences consume media has fundamentally changed: many modern audiences prefer to read less and consume more audible and visual mediums.
Another factor exacerbating the loss of small papers is the intervention of private equity and hedge funds in the newspaper market.
Margot Susca, author of Hedged: How Private Investment Funds Helped Destroy American Newspapers and Undermine Democracy, explained that, in 2003, there was a turning point in the industry when two private equity firms invested in a controlling stake of Freedom Communications, which operated a chain of daily and weekly newspapers. Although private equity firms had previously existed in the industry, this marked the turning point when firms began to hold majority shares of newspaper chains. With their influence as stakeholders, these investors pressured newspapers to make decisions that would maximize profits, but not benefit the wellbeing of the greater journalism industry. Strategies included for example, increasing subscription fees and shrinking reporter workforces. The 2008 recession intensified this trend: newspapers became distressed debt properties, and different private equity investors bought control of the distressed debt. Afterwards, hedge funds became the owners of many newspaper chains.
Alden Global Capital, for instance, owns the MediaNews and Tribune papers—a network of more than 200 newspapers in the United States—and operates a business model that lays off significant portions of newsroom staff, sells the newspapers’ real estate, and raises subscription fees to make a quick profit until the papers are unable to operate. Rather than creating long-term investments with sustainable cash flow, Alden looks to wring as much money out of a newspaper as it can and then quickly moves on to its next conquest.
“The [newspaper] chains that have been influenced by these funds have had more layoffs; at some chains, the layoffs were double those of family owned chains, which also went through the same great recession and the same swings of advertising losses,” Susca said, “They sell off buildings, printing plants, they just totally liquidate a company.”
Even major national outlets that have managed to create sustainable business models in today’s digital newspaper market have faced significant losses. Last October, The Washington Post announced a staff reduction of 240 individuals. National outlets, although not facing problems with private equity or hedge funds, have had to reconcile with the digital upheaval to the news industry in the same way local outlets have.
The loss of local news production has had significant consequences for the functioning of democracy at its most fundamental level.
In News Hole: The Demise of Local Journalism and Political Engagement, the authors found a direct correlation between a decrease in the number of local news stories in daily newspapers and a decline in voter participation. Interestingly, this lack of civic participation often gives incumbents an advantage or leads to straight-ticket voting along partisan lines. In fact, the Nieman Journalism Foundation’s Nieman Lab at Harvard has found that the loss of local news directly leads to political polarization.
Joanne Lipman, acclaimed journalist and Yale lecturer on Media and Democracy, agreed a lack of local news leads to greater political polarization: “People end up just being swayed by whatever they’re seeing on cable news, as opposed to when you have strong local news.”
Lipman explained that local news is valuable not only because it holds local officials accountable, but also because it unites communities around things like sports, the local play, or school board decisions. Local news bolsters community ties and prevents people from becoming engrossed with national news and politics.
Beyond rising polarization, Walter Shapiro explained that corruption flourishes in the absence of press monitoring, citing examples of decreased coverage of state governments.
“Extremists flourish in this environment because no one is calling them out,” he said, “Also, communities of color or immigrant communities can be neglected by either the city or state in which they reside without the press to call attention to the plight of these communities.” Such plights, either willfully or accidentally ignored, will continue unheeded to a worse degree without local news, Shapiro continued.
Given these conditions, it is no surprise that countless publications describe journalism as “dying,” “cratering,” or “in turmoil.” Although many publications have reckoned with the changes to the industry or been forced to close their doors, the analysis that journalism is “dying” is misguided. Newspapers have been forced to adapt to the largest change in media the industry has ever seen. This digital revolution, however, does not change the fundamental principle that when people want to know something, they turn to the news. This principle will keep the industry alive indefinitely.
“It took a generation to unravel the industry. It will take another to bring it back,” Graciela Mochkofsky, the dean of the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York, said on a panel at the Nieman Foundation’s 20th Georges Conference on College Journalism.
Susca said that journalism is not dying, but it would never return to its original form. Scholars like Susca have traveled the United States researching possible solutions to the problems digital advertising and hedge funds have brought to newspapers.
“There will be something that emerges, and it will not look anything like the system that we used to have,” Susca said, “And I think that for marginalized communities, that is a positive.” Susca explained that even in print newspapers’ heyday, the coverage was far from perfect. Newspapers tended to care only about the audiences their advertisers wanted to reach—often white suburban ones.
Moving forward, Joanne Lipman emphasized the importance of creating a new business model for journalism that can support itself without relying on advertising, which traditionally sustained the industry. According to Lipman, many new publications are experimenting with different models, particularly with the nonprofit model, “but no one has figured out a self-sustaining business model that doesn’t require infusions of philanthropic dollars at this point.”
Nevertheless, philanthropic initiatives have made significant contributions to journalism, especially at the local scale, in recent times.
Dale Anglin, the director of Press Forward—an initiative to invest in and expand access to local news explained the ways in which philanthropy can make meaningful and lasting contributions to the local newspaper industry.
Press Forward relies on donations to lobby for policy that supports local journalism, with an idea that the government should support local news. They also create local chapters to spread awareness about the necessity of local journalism, build infrastructure to support small newsrooms, and promote equity within the industry. Press Forward aims to create long-term pillars that will support local journalism far into the future.
Press Forward is not the only organization collecting philanthropic donations to invest in local news sources. The Lenfest Institute is an organization based in Philadelphia seeking to develop small newsrooms. Joseph Lichterman, Head of Communications and Editorials for the Lenfest Institute, said Lenfest is “building solutions for the next era of local news.” The Lenfest Institute invests in the formulation of sustainable business models for the journalism community in Philadelphia, with hopes that the models can be repeated nationwide. For newspapers in the Philadelphia area, the Lenfest Institute offers grants to support investigative reporting, upgraded technology, and marketing.
“Not every solution is going to work for every community, and it’s going to take a diversified mix of revenue. There still is a place for advertising in some capacity,” Lichterman said, “But I think [newsrooms are] going to have to lean into reader revenue.” He also noted that local newspapers should be looking to increase efficiencies and reduce production costs. Lichterman predicts that philanthropy will continue to occupy a major role in support of journalism as a public service, similar to its historical significance to support education and the arts.
Although the print advertising model of journalism may be gone, people turn to the news when they lose trust in other institutions or need to find information. Despite the growing pains local news outlets have faced in the 21st century, journalism continues to evolve, and this ensures its survival.