School board and city council meetings are going uncovered. Overstretched reporters receive promising tips about stories but have no time to follow up. Newspapers publish fewer pages or less frequently or, in hundreds of cases across the country, are shuttered completely.
The scope of the problem is far worse than most people realize. In the U.S., 200 counties do not have a local newspaper, nearly 50% of counties only have one newspaper, usually a weekly, and more than 6% of counties have no dedicated news coverage at all. Other media sources have been unable so far to fill the gap. Digital startups are focused on population-dense communities rather than the rural areas most often abandoned by local newspapers, while many subsidized public media outlets rely primarily on non-original content. The result is that local news coverage in the United States many Americans woefully uninformed about local developments.
One of the major reasons for this situation is that the economic dynamics capable of sustaining a profitable model for local journalism have changed. Technological and economic assaults have destroyed the for-profit business model that sustained local journalism in this country for two centuries. While the advertising-based model for local news has been under threat for many years, the COVID-19 pandemic and recession have created what some describe as an “extinction level” threat for local newspapers and other struggling news outlets.
Suggestions:
Policymakers should intervene and ensure a sustainable future for local journalism in every community in the U.S. by pursuing the strategies outlined below.
1) Provide public funding for local journalism
- A tax deduction for personal subscriptions to eligible local news organizations might incentivize more individuals to pay for local journalism and boost the revenues of local outlets.
- Tax offsets for eligible production expenditures incurred by newsrooms could help defray the costs associated with original reporting.
- The tax code could encourage more newspapers to operate as nonprofits by treating newspapers’ advertising and subscription revenue as tax exempt and contributions as tax deductible.
- A public fund for local journalism could provide grants to local newsrooms to experiment with new models and fund local reporting fellowships.
2) Address the ways large online platforms undercut the business model for local news
- Antitrust investigation into Facebook and Google’s conduct in digital advertising could determine whether the companies’ dominance in the market is due to anti-competitive behavior and address practices in the digital advertising market that unfairly disadvantage news publishers.
- A tax on large online platforms for displaying publishers’ content would force companies that aggregate and distribute publishers’ content to share their profits with content creators.
- A temporary exemption from antitrust laws would give news publishers the ability to collectively negotiate with large online platforms and create a fairer, more balanced relationship between publishers and platforms.
3) Other regulatory and policy suggestions include:
- Educating the public to explain the work of journalists and the value of local news. This means helping people to better understand the harms associated with the collapse of local news, and to develop strategies for evaluating the information sources they currently use.
- Rebuilding local news begins with ensuring that local news organizations have the resources to hire enough reporting staff and giving them the tools and training they need to succeed. This support can range from direct government funding to indirect support in the form of regulatory, tax, and other legal changes that strengthen journalism and allow local news organizations to thrive.