Less than 25 years ago, the United States had approximately 40 journalists per 100,000 residents, on average. Now, that number has fallen to 8.2, about a 75% decline, a new Muck Ruck study finds.
According to research that the PR-software company conducted with Rebuild Local News, a nonpartisan, public-policy organization that seeks to strengthen community news, more than 1,000 U.S. counties — one out of three — lack the equivalent of even one full-time local journalist.
Local reporters have traditionally covered school board decisions and small business openings and closures. They’ve rooted out corruption at city hall, warned commuters about road work and covered high school sports teams, among other news. Today, most of those journalists are gone, the report finds.
The local news crisis is not limited to rural areas. Local reporting has declined in small towns, big cities, suburbs and rural areas. Americans who live in a county of 10,000 people might not have a single full-time reporter to cover local news. Most American governments and neighborhoods are being covered poorly or not at all, the study finds.
The research reveals the extent to which newsroom closures and journalist layoffs have resulted in acute reporting shortages in many urban and suburban areas. Although rural counties tend to have the worst scarcity of local news, some have zero local journalists or news outlets. Suburban and many urban counties are also severely limited in local reporting when the number of journalists working in those counties is compared to their populations.
For instance, Bronx County — a borough of New York City across the river from Manhattan, the media capital of America — has the equivalent of only 2.9 local journalists per 100,000 people. That puts the Bronx just below Falls County, Texas (population 17,000) in terms of its number of local reporters.
In a big city like Los Angeles, which has the equivalent of just 3.6 full-time local journalists per 100,000 people, journalists might cover a neighborhood if a serious crime occurs there, but otherwise, they barely cover it at all. In many of LA County’s cities, residents receive scant, reliable information on local candidates and little coverage of local schools and hospitals.
Of the 3,141 counties in the U.S., more than 1,000 have fewer than one full-time local journalist, leaving some 20.6 million people without local reporting, the study finds.
For further reading on PRsay: Local News Deserts Leave Residents Uninformed, Encourage Misinformation
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