Study looks at news deserts

A study released last week from the University of North Carolina’s School of Media and Journalism illustrates the growing issue of news deserts in the U.S. 

The study follows the school’s 2016 report “The Rise of a New Media Baron and The Emerging Threat of News Deserts.” That study and the new study, “The Expanding News Desert,” relied on the school’s proprietary database of more than 9,000 newspapers. 

Some details from the 2018 report include:

• The U.S. has lost almost 1,800 papers since 2004, including more than 60 dailies and 1,700 weeklies. Around half of the remaining 7,112 in the country, 1,283 dailies and 5,829 weeklies, are in small and rural communities. Most have a circulation of less than 15,000. 

• Nearly 200 of the 3,143 counties in the U.S. have no paper.

• Seventy percent (1,300) of the papers that closed or merged were in metro areas. All but 50 were weeklies, most with circulation below 10,000. 

• Over the past 15 years, total weekday circulation, which includes both dailies and weeklies, went from 122 million to 73 million. 

• California lost the most dailies of any state. New York, Illinois and Texas lost the most weeklies. 

• The residents of America’s emerging news deserts are often its most 

vulnerable citizens. They are generally poorer, older and less educated than the average American. 

The report says thousands of dailies and weeklies have become shells, or “ghosts,” of their old selves. They still publish, “but the quality, quantity and scope of their editorial content are significantly diminished,” the report says.

The school has produced a website, usnewsdeserts.com, with details on the news landscape in each of the 50 states and other data.

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