The decline of local journalism has accelerated across the United States, leaving millions of people with limited access to professionally reported community news even as surveys show Americans continue to place substantial value on information about where they live.
The trend gives new relevance to questions raised years ago by Julie Depenbrock, then a University of Maryland journalism student writing for Capital News Service. Depenbrock examined the connection between shrinking local newsrooms, public trust and civic involvement, drawing on academic research, polling and interviews with working journalists. Her piece ultimately argued from a personal perspective that journalists embedded in communities can provide something national organizations often cannot.
The underlying issue she explored has since become more measurable.
Northwestern University’s Medill Local News Initiative reported in 2025 that 213 U.S. counties had no locally based news source, while another 1,524 counties had only one. Together, those communities were home to about 50 million Americans with limited or no access to local news. The study found 136 newspapers had closed during the preceding year, while newspaper employment fell another 7%.
Those losses have not meant Americans stopped caring about local information.
Pew Research Center reported in April 2026 that 65% of Americans sometimes or often get news from a local television station, while 36% use a local daily newspaper at least sometimes. At the same time, 42% now get local information from online-only sources, up sharply from 15% in 2018. Local online forums such as neighborhood Facebook groups and Nextdoor are also used by 52% of adults.
The findings illustrate a distinction that was less developed when Depenbrock wrote her original piece: The decline of newspapers does not necessarily mean the disappearance of local information. Instead, the sources providing that information are changing.
That shift presents both opportunities and challenges.
Medill found more than 300 local news startups had launched nationwide during the five years leading to its 2025 report, with about 80% operating exclusively online. Those organizations have added reporting capacity in some places, but the growth has occurred alongside continued newspaper closures and sharp declines in employment at established outlets.
Meanwhile, Americans are paying less attention to local news overall.
Pew found 21% of adults said in 2025 that they followed local news very closely, compared with 37% in 2016. Local daily newspaper use also declined over that period, while digital sources gained ground.
Public attitudes toward journalism present a more complicated picture.
A Pew Research Center survey conducted in December 2025 found 57% of U.S. adults had either little or no confidence that journalists would act in the public’s best interests, compared with 43% who expressed a great deal or fair amount of confidence. The results also showed a substantial partisan divide in confidence in journalists, making broad claims about “public trust” difficult to separate from Americans’ wider political attitudes toward the media.
Local news, however, has generally received stronger assessments than journalism as an institution.
In Pew’s 2024 survey, 85% of adults said local news organizations were at least somewhat important to the well-being of their communities. Seventy-one percent said local journalists generally did a good job reporting accurately, 68% said they covered important stories well and 61% said they did a good job monitoring local political leaders.
That distinction complicates a central premise in Depenbrock’s earlier essay: that reduced local coverage and declining media trust necessarily move together.
The available evidence supports a relationship between local journalism and civic information, but it does not establish that newsroom contraction is the sole, or even dominant, cause of declining trust in journalism. Political polarization, changes in technology, social media, differences between national and local coverage and changing patterns of news consumption all affect how Americans view the press.
Academic research does, however, show measurable consequences when local reporting disappears.
A 2015 study by political scientists Danny Hayes and Jennifer Lawless examined newspaper coverage of congressional elections and found that people exposed to less local political reporting were less able to evaluate candidates, less likely to express opinions about congressional races and less likely to vote. The researchers concluded that a diminished local news environment was associated with lower political knowledge and engagement.
That study was one of the academic sources Depenbrock used in her original examination of the issue.
Other research has since expanded the picture.
A 2018 study published in the Journal of Communication compared similar U.S. counties with and without newspaper closures. Researchers found newspaper closures were associated with a 1.9-percentage-point reduction in split-ticket voting in presidential and U.S. Senate elections. The authors argued that with less local reporting available, political behavior can become more closely tied to national partisan politics.
Another study, later published in the Journal of Financial Economics, examined the financial consequences of newspaper closures for local governments. Researchers found municipal borrowing costs increased by 5 to 11 basis points following a newspaper closure, which they estimated added an average of about $650,000 in borrowing costs per bond issue. They also reported increases in government wages and deficits after local newspaper closures.
The findings do not mean every newspaper closure will produce the same outcome, nor do they establish that newspapers alone cause effective local government. They do provide evidence that independent local reporting can have effects extending beyond readership numbers.
Depenbrock’s original piece also highlighted Report for America, which was then a new effort intended to place journalists in underserved communities. She described it as one potential response to the erosion of local reporting.
The program has since grown considerably.
Report for America said in August that it had supported more than 800 journalists since launching with three reporters in Appalachia in 2018. Nearly 200 corps members representing 161 newsrooms attended its 2026 national gathering, according to the organization. Earlier this year, it placed 78 new journalists in 73 newsrooms, bringing its active corps to about 200.
That growth reflects one of the countertrends in the industry: Newspapers continue to disappear, but nonprofit organizations, digital startups, university programs and other emerging models are attempting to replace at least some of the reporting capacity being lost.
Whether those newer organizations can do so at sufficient scale remains unsettled.
The economics remain difficult. Only 15% of Americans told Pew in its 2024 survey that they had paid for or donated to a local news source during the previous year. At the same time, 63% believed their local news organizations were doing at least somewhat well financially, despite continued newsroom reductions and newspaper closures nationally.
Depenbrock’s article ended not with statistics but with her experience as a student reporter covering government in Annapolis. She wrote about attending meetings where she was sometimes the only journalist present and about gradually learning the institutions and people she covered. Her conclusion was explicitly personal: repeated presence helped her understand a beat and develop relationships with sources.
Nearly a decade later, current research does not prove that students, newspapers, nonprofits or digital outlets alone can reverse the decline of local journalism.
What the data does show is that local news has become scarcer in many American communities, audiences are moving rapidly toward digital sources, public confidence in journalism remains strained and researchers have documented measurable civic and financial effects when independent local reporting disappears.
The industry has changed substantially since Depenbrock examined those questions as a student journalist.
The questions themselves remain.
