00:00A new report from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University found the local news market continues to decline.
00:09We're at a critical moment in time for local news and the media industry in general is transforming rapidly.
00:16And so we think it's critical to look at how the local news landscape is changing.
00:21One of those changes is that local newspapers continue to fold at a rapid pace.
00:26More than 130 have closed in the last year and 40 percent have gone under since 2005.
00:32That's created more news deserts, a term for when an area where people in 1,700 counties have either zero or one source of local news.
00:42That's 50 million Americans who have either no or very limited access to local news.
00:47And I think the implications of that for communities and for the country are profound.
00:54The research also found digital readership for local newspapers is declining along with print.
01:01Of the 100 largest newspapers, monthly page views have declined by more than 45 percent over the last four years.
01:08Part of it was about three years ago, Meta or Facebook de-emphasized news in its feeds, which resulted in a drop in traffic from social.
01:18And especially over the last year, we're seeing people go directly to AI platforms, chat GPT or Claude or Perplexity or Pick Your Platform.
01:28And so news organizations are not getting the same search traffic that they used to get from, say, Google.
01:36The report also pointed to concerns about President Trump defunding public broadcasting.
01:40What we found is that there are nine counties where public radio is the only remaining news source.
01:47So if those stations go away and they're now under considerable financial pressure, this news desert problem is going to get worse.
01:55Franklin points out there's a lot of concerns over declining local news markets and how it impacts communities.
02:01So there's research that shows that in news desert or low information communities that civic participation declines.
02:09So turnout in local elections goes down.
02:12The number of candidates seeking local office goes down.
02:16In some cases, it also leads to higher government spending and higher government borrowing costs because there's no journalist minding the store or monitoring what's happening in those communities.
02:27It also leads to more corruption.
02:32Franklin said part of fixing the problem is having more new startups and continuing to fund public broadcasting.
02:39For Straight Arrow News, I'm Lauren Keenan.
02:41If you want more on this story, download the Straight Arrow News app or visit san.com.
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