A shrinking local press, mapped

The United States has lost roughly a third of its newspapers since 2005, and the decline hasn’t slowed. According to Northwestern’s 2025 State of Local News report, 213 counties now have no local news source at all, another 1,524 rely on a single outlet, and about 50 million Americans live with limited or no access to local news.

We built the interactive map below to make that shift tangible. Toggle between the state view and the county view to see where local coverage still exists — and where it has all but disappeared.

Two things to know as you read the map above. Darker areas have the fewest local outlets — those are the coverage gaps. And be honest about the data: it’s shaded from a research dataset that captures roughly 60% of U.S. local outlets, so a county showing zero means “none in this dataset,” not a guaranteed desert. That caveat isn’t a weakness to hide — it’s exactly the kind of source-literacy habit this guide wants you to build. Every dataset has a boundary; good journalists name it.

What is a news desert?

A news desert is a community with little or no access to credible, comprehensive local news. That’s the short version. The useful version has a few more edges to it.

The term was popularized by media scholar Penelope Muse Abernathy through her research at the University of North Carolina, though the idea traces back to a 2011 essay describing a “communications desert.” Abernathy’s framing stuck because it named something people already felt: the slow disappearance of the paper that used to cover the school board.

Here’s the reframe worth holding onto, because it trips up a lot of first drafts: a news desert is not only a rural, small-town problem, and it’s not only about counties with zero outlets. Coverage can collapse in a mid-size city or a suburb, and a town can technically still have a “newspaper” that no longer does the work. The vocabulary you’ll see in the research maps onto that reality:

• News desert: a community with few or no sources of credible local news.
• Ghost newspaper: a paper that still publishes but has been cut so deeply it no longer meaningfully covers its community. The masthead survives; the reporting doesn’t.
• Single-source county: a county down to one remaining outlet — one bad quarter away from becoming a desert.
• Watchdog gap: the practical result — local government, courts, and business that no one is left to cover.

How we got here

The lazy version of this story is “the internet killed newspapers.” It’s not wrong, but it’s not the useful version either. The business model broke first, and specific choices made the damage worse.

For a century, newspapers ran on advertising — especially classifieds, the little ads for jobs, cars, and apartments that quietly paid for the statehouse bureau. When that inventory moved to Craigslist, Google, and Facebook, the revenue that funded reporting went with it and never came back. Print circulation fell. Digital subscriptions helped some national brands and almost no local ones.

Then came consolidation. As independent papers struggled, chains bought them up, and a wave of hedge-fund and private-equity ownership treated newsrooms as assets to be stripped rather than institutions to be run — Alden Global Capital became the most-cited example of the playbook. Cut reporters, sell the building, harvest the cash flow, repeat. The result is the ghost newspaper: still printing, no longer watching. So when you read that a county “lost its paper,” it’s usually not one clean death — it’s a decade of cuts that hollowed out the coverage long before the final issue.

Why it actually matters

Here’s where a lot of students expect nostalgia — a sentimental case for ink on paper. Skip it. The real argument is civic, and it’s backed by research.

When local coverage disappears, the costs are measurable. In one of the most-cited studies, finance researchers Pengjie Gao, Chang Lee, and Dermot Murphy found that after a local newspaper closes, municipal borrowing costs rise — governments become more expensive to run when no one is watching the books. Nationally, the coalition Rebuild Local News estimates that gap adds roughly $1.1 billion a year in extra borrowing costs. That’s not a metaphor about democracy; that’s your town’s tax bill.

The political effects are just as concrete. Political scientist Daniel Moskowitz has shown that local news helps voters judge down-ballot candidates on their own merits — where it fades, elections “nationalize,” and people vote the party line all the way down because it’s the only signal they have. Danny Hayes and Jennifer Lawless, in their book News Hole, found that as local political coverage shrinks, so does citizen engagement. And a well-known study of the Cincinnati Post’s 2007 closure found that afterward, fewer candidates ran for local office and incumbents grew more entrenched. The through-line is simple: this isn’t about saving newspapers. It’s about who watches city hall when no one’s in the room.

Who’s counting — and how

If you’re going to write about news deserts, know where the numbers come from, because you’ll be asked. Three sources do most of the heavy lifting:

• Medill’s State of Local News (Northwestern) is the annual census — the source of the headline county figures.
• UNC’s news-desert research, led by Penelope Abernathy, built the original database and much of the vocabulary.
• Pew Research Center publishes the clean, citable industry statistics — circulation, revenue, newsroom employment over time.

Read them the way you’d want a source read about you: note the methodology, note the year, and note what each one counts as a “news outlet,” because the definitions differ. That’s not a knock on the research — it’s how you use it responsibly.

What’s being done

It’s an honest crisis, but it isn’t a hopeless one, and a good story includes the people working the problem. A nonprofit and startup news sector is growing to fill gaps left by legacy chains. Report for America places early-career journalists in under-covered newsrooms. A wave of philanthropy — Press Forward, the Knight Foundation, the American Journalism Project — is pouring hundreds of millions into local reporting. And coalitions like Rebuild Local News are pushing policy, from tax credits for local newsrooms to bargaining rights with the platforms. None of it has “solved” the problem — but the accurate read is that local news is being actively rebuilt, and rebuilt work needs people who understand the problem cold.

How to study — or report on — a news desert yourself

This is the part that turns a topic into an assignment. Whether you’re writing a paper, pitching a story, or building a class project, here’s how to actually do the work.

Start with the data. Pull the current numbers from Medill’s State of Local News. For hands-on analysis, the Cornell “sTech Lab” local-news dataset maps thousands of outlets to counties by FIPS code — clean fuel for a spreadsheet or a map. Big Local News (Stanford) hosts collaborative datasets, and MuckRock is your friend for the public-records requests that surface what local government is or isn’t disclosing.

Get the method right. Decide up front what you’re counting. Is a shopper with no reporters a “news outlet”? Does a regional TV station count for a county it barely covers? Define your terms, say them out loud in the piece, and watch for the classic trap — treating “no outlet in my dataset” as “confirmed news desert.” Those are different claims.

Find the human story. The data gets you the map; a person gets you the piece. Profile a ghost newspaper and the lone editor still running it. Interview a reporter who left the beat, or a city councilmember no one covers anymore. Sit through a school-board meeting in a desert county and describe the empty press table.

Story and paper angles that work:

• Map your own state’s coverage and rank its counties, then report out the worst one.
• Track a single local government for a month and count how much of its business gets reported anywhere.
• Follow the money: who owns the papers in your region, and what changed after they were bought?
• Test the “ghost” question — pull five years of a local paper’s archives and measure how much original local reporting remains.

For instructors: “Use the map to identify a news desert or single-source county in your state. Define your terms, verify the coverage gap with a second source, and either (a) write a 1,200-word explainer on what that community loses, or (b) pitch a reported story that would fill part of the gap.”

Frequently asked questions

What is a news desert in simple terms?

A community with little or no access to credible, comprehensive local news — often a county that has lost its newspaper and gained no replacement.

Who coined the term “news desert”?

It was popularized by media scholar Penelope Muse Abernathy through her research at the University of North Carolina, building on an earlier 2011 description of a “communications desert.”

How many news deserts are there in the U.S.?

As of Northwestern Medill’s 2025 report, 213 counties have no local news source and 1,524 have only one — together leaving about 50 million people with limited or no local news.

What causes news deserts?

The collapse of print advertising (especially classifieds), the shift of audiences and ad dollars to digital platforms, industry consolidation, and hedge-fund and private-equity ownership that cut newsrooms to the bone.

Why do news deserts matter for democracy?

Research links the loss of local coverage to higher municipal borrowing costs, lower engagement, more entrenched incumbents, and more nationalized, party-line voting — because no one is left to hold local power to account.

How do I find out if my county is a news desert?

Start with the interactive map above and Medill’s State of Local News, then verify with a second source — and remember that any single dataset only captures part of the picture.

How we built this map

We think a tool like this only earns trust if it’s honest about how it’s made — so here’s the full method: the sources, the scoring, and the limits you should know before you cite it.

What the map actually measures

The county shading is a count of tracked local-news outlets per county — not a quality score and not a circulation figure. Every outlet in the underlying dataset is tagged to the county it serves by its five-digit FIPS code, and we tally how many land in each county. More outlets, lighter shade; fewer outlets, darker shade. That’s the whole engine.

The data behind it

• County-level shading comes from the Cornell “sTech Lab” local-news dataset (Aubin Le Quéré, Chiang & Naaman, published at ICWSM 2022), which identifies and geolocates thousands of U.S. local-news outlets. It captures roughly 60% of the country’s local outlets — more on why that matters below.
• The three headline numbers at the top (213 counties with no source, 1,524 with one, ~50 million people affected) come from Northwestern Medill’s 2025 State of Local News — a separate, more complete national census. We deliberately kept those distinct from the shading data rather than blending two methods into one figure.
• The map boundaries are the U.S. Census Bureau’s cartographic county and state files, rendered from the open-source US Atlas TopoJSON.

How counties are scored

Each county falls into one of five bands based on its tracked-outlet count:

• News desert — 0 tracked outlets (darkest)
• At risk — 1 outlet
• Thin — 2 outlets
• Covered — 3–4 outlets
• Well covered — 5 or more outlets (lightest)

How states are scored

The state view isn’t an average — it’s a concentration measure. For each state we calculate the share of its counties that have one or zero tracked outlets, then bin that percentage into five severity levels: under 15% is “well covered,” 15–29% is “watch,” 30–44% is “at risk,” 45–59% is “high risk,” and 60% or more reads as a “news desert” state. This surfaces states where thin coverage is widespread rather than isolated to a county or two.

Limitations — read this before you cite it

We’d rather name the edges of this data than pretend they don’t exist:

• Coverage is partial. The shading dataset captures ~60% of U.S. local outlets, so a county showing zero means “no outlet in this dataset” — not a confirmed, on-the-ground news desert. Treat dark counties as leads to verify, not verdicts.
• It counts outlets, not output. A one-reporter website and a full daily newsroom each count as “1.” The map measures presence, not the volume or quality of the reporting.
• It’s a snapshot. The dataset reflects a point in time; outlets open and close constantly, so treat it as a recent baseline rather than a live feed.
• Two sources, on purpose. Because the headline national figures and the county shading come from different studies, don’t add them together or expect them to reconcile exactly — they answer related but different questions.

The upside of building on an open, FIPS-coded dataset is that none of this is a black box: the source data is linked below, so anyone can audit our counts or rebuild the map themselves. For a definitive read on any single county, cross-check Medill’s census against local knowledge.

Data sources

• County shading (outlets per county): Cornell sTech Lab Local News Dataset and the ICWSM 2022 paper by Aubin Le Quéré, Chiang & Naaman (~60% outlet coverage).
• National figures: Medill Local News Initiative — State of Local News 2025.
• Map boundaries: US Atlas TopoJSON, built from US Census Bureau cartographic boundary files.

A note from Resolve

We built this map and guide because the local-news gap is exactly the terrain we work in every day. When local coverage thins out, brands and organizations increasingly earn attention through data-driven digital PR — original research and stories that regional and national outlets still want to cover. If that’s work you’re thinking about, say hello.