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Three years after Plumas County, California, was devastated by a massive wildfire in 2021, journalist Jane Braxton Little and a group of neighbors stepped in to head off a smaller disaster: the closure of the Plumas News, the last remaining news source serving the county’s twenty thousand residents.
Just a few days after the paper shut its doors, the group established the Plumas Sun, a digital-only, nonprofit news site dedicated to “unbiased coverage by reputable journalists.” Little, a veteran science writer who has lived in the county for decades, became the new publication’s editor in chief. “We were terrified about becoming a news desert,” she said. “News is vital for this community. That’s what motivated us” to start the Sun.
The Sun’s creation wasn’t unusual in itself; dozens of small news operations got off the ground last year. But after fifteen months in business, the Sun has achieved something rare: it’s among the very few publications to establish itself in a place that had lost its last legacy news operation. Such entrepreneurship almost never happens. Once a news desert becomes a news desert, it tends to stay that way.
As detailed in the Medill School of Journalism’s annual “State of Local News” report, published Wednesday, almost all the startup activity in the news business remains in urban and suburban locales. While a number of these new outfits were created to cover traditionally overlooked or underserved communities, they’re nevertheless operating in places still served by existing news organizations. Not so in communities like rural Alexander County, Illinois. Its only local news source, the weekly Cairo Citizen, closed in 2020; nothing has taken its place since then.
Overall, according to the report, the state of the local news business remains grim. Since 2005, more than 266,000 newspaper jobs have disappeared in the US, including 45,000 journalism jobs—a decline of more than 60 percent. Over the past year, 128 newspapers (most of them weeklies) went out of business, a rate of more than two every week.
Many of the remaining news organizations have only skeletal staffs. Others are “ghost” papers, local in name only and produced by small staffs located many miles from the communities they’re nominally covering.
In all, Medill found that 212 of the nation’s 3,143 counties are news deserts, a slight increase from 2023. The more bracing finding is that more than half of the counties in the US—home to some fifty-five million people—are now down to just one local news source.
Amid this increasingly barren landscape, there were some green shoots. The Medill report tracked fifty-one news startups in the past year or so, including the Plumas Sun. The “vast majority” of these ventures, the report says, were established in counties “where there is already a strong presence of local news sources.” Most are “heavily concentrated in urban and suburban areas,” covering just 182 counties.
The three critical ingredients for any news startup are access to talent, availability of capital, and a detailed strategy, said Sarabeth Berman, chief executive of the philanthropic American Journalism Project, which seeds digital news ventures. Any startup faces hurdles, Berman said, but the odds of survival become forbidding in a news desert. Short of a heroic proprietor willing to take on every task, a news site typically needs ad salespeople, Web designers, and business managers as well as journalists, she said. That kind of “talent” can be prohibitively expensive, especially in a community that has been unable to support a legacy operation.
A new venture faces special difficulties in a news desert because of the high upfront costs of establishing itself, said Meg Little Reilly, the managing director of the Center for Community News at the University of Vermont. A new news outlet has no track record with readers or advertisers, which means “You need a large amount of money upfront to prove your case. It takes longer and is harder in a place that isn’t fertile ground” and where long-established incumbents have already failed.
Berman suggests that the “network” model might be a more sustainable one—that is, local and hyperlocal sites that are part of a larger, centralized operation that handles administrative functions for the entire group of allied sites.
In fact, some of the fastest-growing news operations in the country follow this template. Axios, the Washington-based for-profit news company, has expanded its local newsletter network to thirty cities. Patch Media, based in New York City, operates more than twelve hundred hyperlocal sites around the country, covering places like Brecksville, Ohio, and Gaithersburg, Maryland.
Nonprofits such as the Texas Tribune and Capital B, which focuses on news for Black readers, have begun to expand, too, using this approach. Other network sites produce original reporting, while some aggregate news from within their own network or serve as bulletin boards for community posts. In any case, without the cost savings from shared services, “it’s very difficult to find a way to survive in a community where the advertising base is gutted” and philanthropic resources are limited, said Berman.
The Plumas Sun may have been able to survive in the desert because of its unusual structure. By design, it’s a low-overhead operation. Little says the publication has been powered by volunteer labor, starting with the seven-member community group that launched it last year. It doesn’t maintain an office, saving money on rent. A local philanthropy, the Almanor Foundation, stepped in to handle business operations, including managing its revenue from grants, donations, subscriptions, and ads (one of the Sun’s grants came from Pacific Gas and Electric, the utility whose power line sparked the fire in 2021). The Sun’s major costs are salaries for its small staff and compensation for its freelance reporters.
“I’m coming from a place of trauma and physical destruction,” said Little, whose personal office in Greenville was razed by the inferno three years ago. “One way to get over that trauma, in my mind, is to get involved.”
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