Overview
- Northwestern’s Medill School counted 136 newspaper closures over the past year, with most shuttered titles owned by small chains or longtime independent proprietors and the majority being weeklies.
- For the first time, fewer than 1,000 daily newspapers remain in the U.S., and more than 80% of those dailies now print fewer than seven days a week, with some major metros shifting away from print entirely.
- Roughly 50 million people live in areas with little or no local news; 213 counties now have no locally based news source and 1,524 have only one, with closures concentrated in states including Maryland, New Jersey, Maine, Hawaii and Ohio.
- Traffic to the top 100 newspaper websites has fallen about 45% in four years, a drop tied in part to platform changes that de-emphasize local news and the rise of generative AI in search, according to the report’s researchers.
- Digital startups and networked sites are growing but remain concentrated in metro areas and philanthropy largely follows suit, while a recent federal funding clawback threatens public broadcasters that often serve rural news deserts.