The four articles preceding this one have established the factual foundation: local news has collapsed at scale, leaving 50 million Americans with limited or no access to local journalism; ownership by hedge funds and broadcasting conglomerates has accelerated the collapse; the civic accountability functions that local journalism performed have not been replaced; and the advertising revenue destruction caused by platform concentration is structural rather than the result of industry failure to adapt. This article surveys the main approaches currently being debated for addressing those structural conditions.
It does not recommend any of them. Each has a rationale, proponents, an evidence base, and serious criticisms. The deliberative work of this hub is designed to work through those tradeoffs — grounded in the experience of people who have lived with the consequences — not to arrive at a predetermined conclusion.
Public Funding Models
Public funding approaches treat local journalism as a public good — like libraries, public schools, or public broadcasting — that markets will systematically underprovide because its benefits accrue broadly to the community rather than narrowly to paying subscribers. The market failure argument is that local accountability journalism produces civic benefits — reduced corruption, better-informed voters, more accountable government — that cannot be fully captured in subscription or advertising revenue. If the full social value of local journalism cannot be monetized, markets will produce less of it than a well-functioning democracy requires.
Corporation for Public Broadcasting expansion. The CPB currently funds public radio and television. Proposals to expand its mandate and appropriation to include local digital and print journalism would extend the public media model to news organizations that are not broadcast-based. Proponents argue that public broadcasting has produced durable, credible news institutions — NPR, PBS affiliates — that have maintained quality through the commercial disruption that destroyed private local news. Critics argue that government funding of journalism creates dependency relationships that compromise editorial independence, that CPB funding has historically faced political attacks that make it an unreliable long-term foundation, and that the public broadcasting model may not translate to the local print and digital journalism that has collapsed most severely.
News vouchers. News voucher proposals would give individuals a small public subsidy — typically $50 to $100 per year — to direct to any qualifying local news organization of their choice. The subsidy follows reader choice rather than government selection, which proponents argue preserves editorial independence and market responsiveness. The Rebuild Local News coalition and some academic economists have proposed variants of this model. Critics argue that vouchers would flow disproportionately to outlets serving higher-income, more civically engaged readers — reproducing rather than correcting the geographic inequality in news coverage — and that the administrative complexity of qualifying organizations and processing individual voucher allocations is substantial.
Platform advertising taxes. Proposals to tax the digital advertising revenue of large platforms — Google, Meta, and others — and direct the proceeds to local journalism address the value gap described in the previous article: platforms benefit from news content without bearing its cost. The Media Power Collaborative has proposed a 1 percent tax on Big Tech advertising revenue for this purpose. Canada’s Online News Act (2023) and Australia’s News Media Bargaining Code (2021) use different mechanisms — mandatory negotiation and payment rather than taxation — to address the same dynamic. Proponents argue this approach makes the platforms that destroyed local journalism revenue pay for its rebuilding. Critics argue that advertising taxes could be passed through to advertisers and ultimately consumers, that the revenue estimates are uncertain, and that directing platform tax revenue to journalism raises the same editorial independence questions as direct government funding. Platforms have argued that the mechanism mischaracterizes the value relationship between platforms and news publishers.
Mandatory negotiation and revenue sharing. Australia’s News Media Bargaining Code and Canada’s Online News Act require digital platforms to negotiate payment agreements with news publishers for content used in their services. Australia’s approach produced significant licensing agreements; Canada’s implementation has been more contentious, with Meta blocking news content on Facebook and Instagram in Canada following the law’s passage. Proponents argue that mandatory negotiation without content blocking penalties provides a model for addressing the value gap through market negotiation rather than taxation. Critics argue that the Australian outcome depended on specific regulatory threat credibility that may not translate to other jurisdictions, and that Meta’s response in Canada illustrates the leverage platforms retain even under mandatory negotiation frameworks.
Structural and Antitrust Approaches
Structural approaches focus on the ownership and market concentration dynamics that have allowed hedge funds to extract value from local papers and platforms to capture advertising revenue. Rather than subsidizing journalism within the existing structure, structural approaches attempt to change the structure itself.
Broadcast ownership rules and merger blocking. The FCC’s ownership rules determine how many stations a single entity can own in a given market and nationally. As those rules have been progressively weakened, broadcasting companies have consolidated local TV and radio stations at scale. Proposals to strengthen and enforce ownership rules — and to block mergers like Nexstar/Tegna — would limit further consolidation and preserve more local ownership of broadcast media. Proponents argue that local ownership produces better local journalism and that the FCC has the existing authority to enforce localism principles more aggressively. Critics argue that ownership rules designed for spectrum scarcity are ill-suited to the current media environment, that economies of scale in broadcasting require some consolidation to remain viable, and that ownership rules without content requirements do not guarantee that locally owned stations will produce more local journalism.
Restrictions on investment firm acquisition of local news. Proposals to restrict or prohibit hedge fund and private equity acquisition of local newspapers would address the extraction model directly. Some proposals would require that local newspapers be sold to local or community owners rather than investment firms, or would create right-of-first-refusal provisions for nonprofit and community buyers when papers come up for sale. The Local Journalism Sustainability Act included tax credits designed to support local news employment and community ownership. Proponents argue that the extraction model has been the proximate cause of the most severe newsroom cuts and that restricting it would preserve the journalism that remains. Critics argue that ownership restrictions interfere with property rights, that investment firms are sometimes the only buyers available for financially distressed papers, and that restricting sales does not address the underlying economic conditions that make local papers targets for extraction in the first place.
Antitrust action against digital advertising concentration. The Department of Justice filed an antitrust suit against Google’s dominance of the digital advertising market in 2023, alleging that Google had illegally monopolized multiple layers of the ad tech stack — the tools that publishers use to sell ads, the tools that advertisers use to buy them, and the exchange through which transactions clear. A federal court found in August 2024 that Google had illegally maintained its monopoly in search and search advertising. Proponents of antitrust action argue that breaking up Google’s ad tech dominance or requiring interoperability would allow local publishers to compete more effectively for digital advertising revenue. Critics argue that antitrust remedies operate on long timelines, that structural separation of ad tech tools would not by itself restore local news economics, and that the advertising revenue that once sustained local journalism may not return even in a less concentrated market.
Local Ownership and Market-Based Approaches
A third set of approaches focuses on preserving and strengthening local ownership — keeping editorial control in the hands of people with community ties — while limiting government involvement in journalism funding and content.
Community and nonprofit ownership models. Community foundations, nonprofit news organizations, and local ownership trusts represent ownership models that align incentives with local journalism rather than financial extraction. The Philadelphia Inquirer’s transition to nonprofit ownership in 2016, the Salt Lake Tribune’s nonprofit conversion in 2019, and the growth of nonprofit local news organizations through the Institute for Nonprofit News network demonstrate that the model can work in specific contexts. Proponents argue that nonprofit and community ownership removes the extraction incentive, aligns the organization’s mission with public service, and enables philanthropic and reader revenue models. Critics argue that the nonprofit model depends on philanthropic funding that is geographically concentrated in wealthy metropolitan areas — the same places where local news is least depleted — and that scaling it to rural and lower-income communities where the collapse has been deepest has not been demonstrated.
Tax incentives for local ownership and journalism employment. The Local Journalism Sustainability Act proposed tax credits for local news subscribers, tax credits for small businesses that advertise in local news outlets, and tax credits for local news organizations that employ local journalists. These market-based interventions would reduce the cost of local journalism without directly funding it, preserving market structure while addressing some of the economic pressures that have driven closures. Proponents argue this approach avoids the editorial independence concerns of direct government funding while providing meaningful economic support. Critics argue that tax credits are less targeted than direct funding, that they benefit outlets that already exist rather than rebuilding coverage in communities that have lost it, and that the subsidy levels in current proposals are insufficient to meaningfully offset the structural economic pressures on local news.
Localism requirements in broadcast licensing. The FCC licenses broadcast stations and has historically conditioned those licenses on serving the public interest, convenience, and necessity — a standard that has been interpreted to include local programming and local news. Proposals to strengthen localism requirements — requiring broadcasters to demonstrate local news production as a condition of license renewal — would use existing regulatory authority to increase the quantity of local journalism without direct funding. Proponents argue that the public airwaves carry a public interest obligation that the FCC has failed to enforce adequately. Critics argue that content requirements in broadcast licensing raise First Amendment concerns, that the FCC has repeatedly declined to impose specific programming requirements, and that broadcast news is a diminishing share of where people get local information.
What the Survey Establishes
The three approaches described here — public funding, structural/antitrust, and local ownership/market-based — address different aspects of the same structural problem. Public funding addresses the market failure in producing local journalism as a public good. Structural approaches address the ownership and market concentration dynamics that destroyed existing local journalism economics. Local ownership approaches address the governance and incentive structure of news organizations without relying on government funding or antitrust intervention.
Most serious policy proposals in this space combine elements from more than one category. The Australian model combined mandatory negotiation with platform accountability. The Local Journalism Sustainability Act combined tax credits with employment incentives. The nonprofit conversion model is often combined with public broadcasting partnership and philanthropic funding. No single approach addresses all dimensions of the problem, and the combination that makes sense in a given community or regulatory context depends on local conditions, political constraints, and which dimensions of the problem are most acute.
What combination of approaches is appropriate — and what affected communities in news deserts and journalism-depleted areas identify as the most urgent priorities — is the question this hub’s deliberative process is designed to work through. The survey here is a starting point. The forum is where the work continues.
- Getting Started
- The Local News Collapse: What It Looks Like on the Ground
- The Issue Pipeline
- What Is Deliberation?
This article was researched and drafted with AI assistance under human review. See our full AI and editorial practices.