Media Reform: Issue Overview

The scale of the problem

The decline of local news in the United States is not a recent development, but its pace has accelerated. According to the Medill State of Local News Report 2025, the number of news desert counties — counties with no remaining local news source — rose to 213 in 2025, up from roughly 150 twenty years ago. Approximately 50 million Americans now have limited to no access to local news. Closures are running at more than two papers per week. The newspaper industry has lost more than three-quarters of its jobs since 2005.

The Statista and Medill data document approximately 3,200 local newspapers that have closed or merged since 2005. Notably, the most recent wave of closures is hitting smaller, independently owned newspapers — not just the chain-owned papers that shed staff in earlier rounds. Long-time family publishers are surrendering to economic pressures. Web traffic to 100 of the largest remaining newspapers has fallen more than 45% in four years.

There is a countertrend worth noting: more than 300 local news startups have launched in the past five years, 80% of them digital-only. But the Medill report finds that the vast majority of these startups are in metropolitan areas. Rural and less affluent communities — the places where the collapse has been deepest — are not where the entrepreneurial rebuilding is happening.

The civic consequences

The loss of local news is not primarily an industry story. It is a civic accountability story.

Local government — city councils, school boards, zoning commissions, county health departments — is where most of the decisions that directly affect people’s daily lives get made. It is also where coverage has collapsed most completely. A paper that once had a reporter at every city council meeting now has no reporter, or publishes an agenda summary with no follow-up.

Research by Ozean Media analyzed 110 newspaper closures and found a 1.9% drop in split-ticket voting in counties that lost a local paper — an increase in partisan alignment and a measurable reduction in the kind of civic differentiation that local coverage supports. Voters who have less information about what their local officials actually do tend to vote along national partisan lines rather than on local performance.

Local news is also more trusted than national news. When it disappears, research suggests audiences may disengage from news entirely rather than shift to national sources they find less credible.

Structural causes

Describing the collapse as simply “newspapers failed to adapt” or “the internet happened” is too coarse to be useful for anyone trying to think about what interventions might actually help. The forces producing the collapse are specific.

Advertising revenue collapse. Local newspapers were historically funded by classified advertising — job listings, real estate, automotive. Craigslist effectively destroyed classified ad revenue in the early 2000s. Display advertising followed digital audiences to national platforms. The papers’ economic model was not destroyed by a failure of journalism quality; it was destroyed by a structural shift in where advertising markets clear. Once that happened, many papers were unable to fund the reporting operations that had made them valuable in the first place.

Platform concentration of advertising revenue. Google and Meta now capture the dominant share of digital advertising. Local news organizations cannot compete for those dollars because they cannot offer the audience targeting that platform-level data enables. The platforms benefit significantly from news content — it drives traffic and engagement — without bearing the cost of producing it. The asymmetry is structural, not incidental.

Hedge fund ownership and extraction. Many local papers that survived the initial internet disruption were purchased by private equity firms and hedge funds. The business model in those cases was not to find a sustainable path for local journalism but to extract value from the remaining asset: cutting staff, consolidating operations, stripping local coverage to reduce costs. This accelerated the collapse of papers that might otherwise have had time to develop new models.

Broadcast consolidation. The FCC’s ownership rules were designed for an era of spectrum scarcity. As those rules have been progressively weakened, large broadcasting companies have consolidated local television and radio stations, reducing editorial independence and the quantity of genuinely local coverage even where local broadcast news nominally exists. In March 2026, the FCC approved the merger of Tegna and Nexstar, producing a broadcasting company that the Committee to Protect Journalists reported will reach 80% of US households. Eight states filed suit to block the merger. Dozens of journalists were already laid off by Nexstar in New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago in anticipation of the deal closing.

Public media underfunding. The United States spends far less per capita on public media than comparable democracies. Public radio and television fill some of the gaps left by commercial collapse — in nine counties, public radio is currently the sole remaining news source — but they are vulnerable to federal funding cuts and do not replicate the investigative and accountability function of local print journalism at its best.

The policy landscape

Media reform is a genuinely contested policy space. There are real disagreements — including across the political spectrum — about what interventions would help and what risks different approaches carry. Three broad positions exist in current policy debate.

Public funding and public goods models. The argument here is that local news should be treated as a public good, like libraries or public schools, and funded accordingly. Specific proposals include independent grantmaking bodies funded by public appropriations, news vouchers that let individuals direct public subsidies to their preferred outlets, and — most ambitiously — a tax on the digital advertising revenues of large platforms, with proceeds directed to local journalism. The Media Power Collaborative has proposed a 1% tax on Big Tech ad revenue for this purpose. Proponents include Free Press, journalism nonprofits, and a range of press freedom organizations. The principal risks named by critics are government-media dependency and the difficulty of designing funding mechanisms that preserve genuine editorial independence.

Structural and antitrust approaches. A second set of proposals focuses on breaking up or constraining the platform and broadcasting monopolies that have concentrated both advertising revenue and editorial control. This includes stricter enforcement of existing broadcast ownership rules, blocking future consolidation like the Tegna/Nexstar merger, and antitrust action against the platforms’ dominance of digital advertising. The CPJ’s coverage of the Nexstar merger frames it explicitly as a structural threat to local civic information. Proponents include press freedom organizations, state attorneys general, and some media economists.

Local ownership and market-based approaches. A third position holds that the priority should be preserving and strengthening local ownership — keeping editorial control in the hands of people with actual community ties — while avoiding prescriptive federal funding mechanisms that risk entangling government with editorial decisions. CPAC’s Center for Regulatory Freedom has argued at the FCC for localism principles and local ownership rules while opposing content mandates and broad federal intervention. The argument is that well-enforced local ownership rules can preserve civic accountability journalism without creating the dependency risks that public funding models carry.

There is an area of genuine cross-partisan agreement worth naming: concentration of editorial control — whether by hedge funds, tech platforms, or broadcasting conglomerates — is bad for civic information. Local ownership and independence matter. The disagreement is primarily about mechanisms: what regulatory tools are appropriate, who should fund the transition, and how to protect editorial independence from both market capture and government influence.

What this hub is trying to do

This is currently the only active issue hub on America’s Plan, and it began as a testbed for working out how issue hubs function. That history is being replaced with substantive work, but the hub is still early-stage.

The issue pipeline moves from Sentiment through Plan, Pressure, and Accountability. For this hub, the Sentiment stage is far from complete. The most valuable contributions at this point are not national policy proposals — it is too early for that, and the policy landscape is contested enough that proposing solutions before the group has a shared picture of the problem tends to produce debate rather than deliberation.

What the Sentiment stage needs: specific, grounded accounts of what local news decline looks like in particular places. What coverage has disappeared. What accountability gaps that has created — what happened at a city council meeting, a school board vote, a zoning hearing that went unreported. What people tried to do to fill those gaps, and whether it worked. What alternatives people have found and what limitations those alternatives have.

That kind of testimony is what the Analysis stage will need to work from. The structural causes outlined in this overview are a starting framework, not a finished analysis. Some of them may be more relevant in some communities than others; local conditions vary in ways that a national overview cannot capture.

If you are reading this and have direct experience with the collapse of local news coverage in your community — as a reader, a former journalist, a local official who used to have press coverage and no longer does, or anyone else who has navigated the actual consequences — that experience is what this hub is designed to surface. The forum is where that conversation takes place. What Is Public Sentiment, and Why Does It Matter More Than Polls? explains why that kind of testimony matters and what it is meant to produce.

Start Here covers the basics of how to participate. What Is Deliberation, and How Does It Work Here? explains the process the forum uses.

Why this matters beyond the industry

The media reform issue is sometimes framed as a question about the journalism industry — about reporters’ jobs and newspapers’ business models. That framing misses what is actually at stake.

The collapse of local news is a collapse of civic infrastructure. Local government operates largely without scrutiny when there is no local reporter to attend meetings, file public records requests, and ask why a contract was awarded or a zoning variance granted. The documented relationship between local news decline and increased partisan polarization is not surprising: when people have less information about how their local institutions actually perform, they make political choices based on national identities rather than local accountability.