1. Many communities have fewer local reporters, fewer newspapers, and fewer reliable sources of local civic information than they did a generation ago. At the same time, new nonprofit outlets, digital startups, public broadcasters, local-policy experiments, and community information networks are trying to fill the gaps. Communities must decide whether local news is mainly a private business, a civic resource, or a public problem that deserves organized support.

Carefully read the following six sources, including the introductory information for each source. Write an essay that synthesizes material from at least three of the sources and develops your position on how communities should respond to the decline of local news.

Metzger, Zach. "The State of Local News." Local News Initiative, Northwestern University, 20 Oct. 2025, localnewsinitiative.northwestern.edu/projects/state-of-local-news/2025/report/.

Our first State of Local News report, published in 2016, examined the local news landscape across America over the previous 10 years, taking data from 2005 as its starting point. Now, in the project’s 10th year, we are able to look back through the past two decades and see dramatic transformations in the ecosystem of local news. Almost 40% of all local U.S. newspapers have vanished, leaving 50 million Americans with limited or no access to a reliable source of local news. This trend continues to impact the media industry and audiences nationwide. Newspapers are disappearing at the same rate as in 2024; more than 130 papers shut down in the past year alone. Newspaper employment is sliding steadily downward. And although there has been some growth in stand-alone and network digital sites, these startups remain heavily centralized in urban areas, and they have not been appearing fast enough to offset the losses elsewhere. As a result, news deserts – areas with extremely limited access to local news – continue to grow. In 2005, just over 150 counties lacked a source of local news; today, there are more than 210. Meanwhile, the journalism industry faces new and intensified challenges including: shrinking circulation and steep losses of revenue from changes to search and the adoption of AI technologies, while political attacks against public broadcasters threaten to leave large swaths of rural America without local news.

. . .

In July, Republicans in the U.S. Congress voted to rescind more than $1 billion that a previous Congress had allocated to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. As a direct result, all federal funding to local NPR and PBS member stations vanished. This leaves hundreds of public media stations at risk of having to reduce or suspend operations – at a time when their services are increasingly vital to Americans with limited alternatives for local news, especially in rural areas. In this report, we track 342 public media stations across the country. Collectively, the signals from these stations reach into more than 90% of all U.S. counties, including 82% of news deserts, making them a crucial piece of information infrastructure within the local news ecosystem.

Over the past two decades, print newspaper circulation across the United States has dropped by an estimated 80 million, a loss of 70% from 2005 levels. While print readership continues to decline, online visits to news organizations have also been in freefall; in the past four years, monthly unique page views of the websites of 100 of the largest papers have decreased, on average, by more than 40%. The model of the traditional daily newspaper is transforming with all these declines: in 2025, less than a fifth of U.S. dailies are still printed and delivered seven days a week.

Baker-Jordan, Skylar. "Commentary: Why I Left National Media to Run a Small Town Newspaper." The Daily Yonder, 15 Apr. 2026, dailyyonder.com/commentary-why-i-left-national-media-to-run-a-small-town-newspaper/2026/04/15/.

Within my first few hours of being in Valley County, I learned people are hungry for local news. A new face in Glasgow, a town of 3,202 people, folks immediately asked what brought me, a born and bred Appalachian, to the high plains of Montana. When answering, “I’m the new editor of the Courier ,” the local newspaper, I am inundated with stories – of alleged crime, alleged corruption, alleged affairs – residents eagerly want covered.

That thirst for local news is not unique to Glasgow, but it is increasingly difficult to quench. In its 2025 report on the state of local news , the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University found that over the past two decades, 40% of local newspapers have closed. More than 130 local papers ceased publication in the past year alone.

This isn’t the case in Glasgow, a unique and charming place where the benefits of the 21 st century have not replaced the robust local civic life of the mid-20 th century. Unofficially designated “the middle of nowhere,” a 2017 study found it to be the most remote town in the continental United States . Hundreds of miles from the nearest metropolitan area or even the nearest interstate, Glasgow sits just over 60 miles from the Canadian border, surrounded by sparse rolling prairies and semi-arid ranchland.

This isolation may account for why the Courier remains a cornerstone of public life here. The region is chronically under-covered by state and national press, not out of neglect so much as out of sheer inaccessibility. Getting here is an arduous trek, and the region itself is so unique from the more populous western Montana that its rhythms, needs, and priorities can be overlooked or misunderstood.

Having a local newspaper with local reporters thus enables a community’s needs to be recorded not just for posterity, but in our digital age, for the wider public to take notice and find out what some of the most overlooked Americans think and need. I moved to “the middle of nowhere” to do just that. Taking this job was not just a professional decision, but a personal one.

Though my career began in the national and international press, I have become a passionate proponent of local journalism and the importance of having robust reporting in local newspapers. Last year, the Columbia Journalism Review reported that “[s]mall-town newspapers shutting down due to the lack of a succession plan is a growing problem in nearly a dozen states.” As editors retire, finding qualified journalists willing to relocate to small, often isolated, towns is a challenge. Moving here was my chance to use my talents in the service of a community that needed an editor to help its local paper avoid this fate.

Local News Initiative, Northwestern University. "The State of Local News." 20 Oct. 2025, localnewsinitiative.northwestern.edu/projects/state-of-local-news/2025/report/.

Press Forward. "Press Forward: A National Initiative to Support the Revitalization of Local News." MacArthur Foundation, 25 Sept. 2023, macfound.org/press/article/press-forward-a-national-initiative-to-support-the-revitalization-of-local-news.

Press Forward, a coalition of 20 donors, form a national initiative to strengthen communities and democracy by supporting local news and information with an infusion of more than a half-billion dollars over the next five years. Press Forward will enhance local journalism at an unprecedented level to re-center local news as a force for community cohesion; support new models and solutions that are ready to scale; and close longstanding inequities in journalism coverage and practice.

The goal of Press Forward is to catalyze a local news renaissance that will reshape the local news landscape and re-center local journalism as a force for community cohesion, civic participation, and government accountability.

We seek to fund programs and organizations that will bolster democracy at the local level, support greater diversity in staff and coverage, be digital in orientation, develop long term sustainable models, and help drive demand for high quality local news and information necessary for every member of every community to thrive.

Simply put, our ambition is to raise significant new resources for local news, and significantly lower the transaction costs to both funders and grant seekers in the process.

We propose this ambitious, collaborative undertaking during a time of enormous volatility in the nation and the media. We expect to learn and adapt along the way. At the same time, this initiative will be grounded in a set of shared goals and values:

Prioritize Transformation – We will invest in ideas that will have profound and lasting impact on the American media landscape and society. Both in what and how we fund, we will look for transformational opportunities and ways of working to shift past practices and outcomes.

Center Community Needs – We will invest in the production and distribution of news and information that meets the information needs of local communities, getting as proximate as we can to listen and understand the unique needs of communities and strengthening the outlets that are closest to the ground and representative and trusted by the communities they serve.

Ensure Equity and Access – We will close longstanding inequities in media ownership, practice, and philanthropy, and strive to provide reliable, fact-based journalism to the widest population regardless of economic, technological, language, literacy, and other barriers.

Protect Independence – We will firmly promote and protect press freedom and editorial independence. Even as we push more philanthropic resources into news production, we will insist on editorial integrity, independence, and non-partisanship. This initiative will be independent of political ideology. It will, however, be grounded in respect for a shared set of facts in communities and will fund active pushback against mis-and disinformation in the media ecosystem.

While a handful of funders are getting ready to bring a few exemplary grants forward this summer and fall, we expect that most partners will be ready to fund organizations in Q4 of 2023 or Q1 of 2024. Grants from the pooled fund will likely come in early 2024.

Masnick, Mike. "Google's California Hush Money Won't Fix Journalism's Woes." Techdirt, 9 Sept. 2024, techdirt.com/2024/09/09/googles-california-hush-money-wont-fix-journalisms-woes/.

Link taxes are bad, m’kay? They harm the public . They harm the open internet . And they harm the news orgs themselves . There is no reason to support them at all. But, many (thankfully not all!) media organizations and politicians love them. Media orgs like them because they think it will bring them free money (though, often enough, it just brings them less traffic and no money ).

This year, California brought back an old proposal for a link tax from state Rep. Buffy Wicks, along with a separate proposal from state Senator Steve Glazer to just tax the digital advertising business , claiming that it’s a form of pollution, and proposed using that tax to fund journalism.

While getting more funding for journalism is obviously a good idea, the plan to tax internet companies is tremendously problematic for all the reasons we discussed above. On top of everything else, it also takes away the incentive for media orgs to come up with sustainable, working business models for themselves, encouraging them, instead, to wait until the legislature deigns to force tech companies to funnel money in their direction.

As almost always happens whenever these kinds of bills get close to passing, Meta promises to stop links to news (and mostly seems to follow through). Meanwhile, Google says it will do so, but then blinks and cuts a deal to pay off everyone, such that even if the law passes, they have already paid the vig. Google did it in Australia, and it did it in Canada. Both times it agreed to cough up a bunch of money. And even though in both countries a link tax came into effect, both payments were made outside of the link tax, and basically acted as a “here, take this money, don’t try to enforce the link tax on us” move.

This time, it looks like Google made the payoff earlier, to stop the law in California. A few weeks back, Wicks announced that her office and Google had come to an agreement to fund a bunch of journalism orgs with money from both Google and the state, and that she wouldn’t continue pushing her link tax bill.

Today, Assemblymember Buffy Wicks announced the establishment of a first-in-the-nation partnership with the State, news publishers, major tech companies and philanthropy, unveiling a pair of multi-year initiatives to provide ongoing financial support to newsrooms across California and launch a National AI Accelerator.

Together, these new partnerships will provide nearly $250 million in public and private funding over the next five years, with the majority of funding going to newsrooms. The goal is to front-load $100 million in the first year to kick-start the efforts. The total investment could increase over the next several years if additional funding from private or state sources becomes available.

That link has a lot of people coming out in support of the deal, including some smaller publishers, claiming that this is “a win” for everyone. However, I doubt that very much.

Eddy, Kirsten, and Elisa Shearer. "How Americans' Trust in Information From News Organizations and Social Media Sites Has Changed Over Time." Pew Research Center, 29 Oct. 2025, pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/10/29/how-americans-trust-in-information-from-news-organizations-and-social-media-sites-has-changed-over-time/.