Survey shows 360 more US newspapers closed since 2019

Recently the fifth edition of Penny Abernathy’s report on local news in the US reveals that 360 more newspapers, almost all of them weeklies, have closed since 2019.

That is on top of the 2,500 closures since 2004 which was documented in earlier reports. The result is even more ‘news deserts’ in poorer and rural communities and a growing split between haves and have-nots in access to local news. The report, The State of Local News 2022, in collaboration with the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University, painstakingly assembles a fact base on the local news landscape. But it also ranges more widely into an analysis of what it deems ‘a crisis for our democracy and our society’ and an exploration of promising solutions.