Media Matters: Local news and state support
“The quality of democracy and the quality of journalism are deeply entwined.” –Bill Moyers
A new study from Rebuild Local News and Muck Rack “found no education articles mentioning a community by name in 77% of [all U.S.] counties in the first quarter of 2026.” The same study, conducted in our nation’s 3,144 counties and boroughs, also found that in 76% of all counties there was no evidence of any local health coverage during this same time period.
I reported last year on the Local Journalist Index 2025 and its new measure – Local Journalist Equivalents (LJE) – to track the “collapse of local reporting.” The benchmark year in the study was 2002 when the U.S. had “about 40 journalists per 100,000 residents.” The number last year was 8.2 LJEs – a 75% decline.
About 27,000 local reporters now cover (or are too stretched to cover) “97,000 cities, towns, counties and other units of government.” Those states with fewer local reporters, the study reports, “face estimated municipal borrowing costs roughly 17% higher than average, part of what new research estimates as at least $1.1 billion in annual financial harm to communities nationwide.” To run most effectively and thrive, towns need reporters showing up at meetings and watching over local governments and public institutions.
About one-third of all U.S. counties now have fewer than one local reporter to serve them. With the recent hiring of a sports editor, who will start in the fall, the Oxford Free Press has three. Our county’s largest paper, Cox Media’s Journal-News, has a senior editor, two full-time reporters, plus four freelancers who cover Hamilton, Middletown and Fairfield – a much larger area than Oxford and its rural townships. So, Oxford is doing well. Ohio, by the way, ranks 31st with an LJE of 7.9. Vermont is first (19.1) and Nevada last (5.2)
The 2026 Local News Index report has found the national average has fallen to “7.8 LJEs per 100,000 residents.” Roughly 70% of U.S. counties, “home to an estimated 209 million people,” fall below the national average.
Intriguingly, where fewer journalists work, “the portion of coverage devoted to crime actually goes up. In counties with fewer than five LJEs per 100,000 residents, nearly one in five local articles are about crime and justice, roughly 50% more than in counties with higher journalist density.”
The study also reports that “where local journalism is stronger, civic participation is higher” and that “states with fewer local journalists have higher rates of loneliness.”
Although our founders in the 18th century singled out “the press” as the one profession protected in the Constitution, they did not foresee the internet or the business model for newspapers collapsing in the 21st century. While many philanthropic organizations and individual donors support local journalism (thank you!), don’t count on the federal government for help for at least a couple more years.
The 2026 national study finds the shortage of local journalists persists, and that a widening collapse in coverage has left more than 209 million people in communities where essential local reporting has all but disappeared.
So what are individual states doing? Not very much. But at least 20 states have legislation in place or active initiatives to address the decline of local news – Ohio is not one of them.
In California, a pending bill – the “Community NEWS Act” – is co-sponsored by Rebuild Local News. It would enact “a refundable employment credit to help local news organizations cover wages for full-time and part-time local journalists.” In addition, the state’s budget includes “$15 million to continue funding the California Local News Fellowship hosted by UC Berkeley.” In June, the legislature also “approved a state budget with $10 million in public funds for the California Civic Media Program, which is expected to trigger a matching $10 million contribution from Google.”
In Illinois, last February marked “the second year of its Local Journalism Sustainability Tax Incentive Program, which provides refundable employment tax credits to help newsrooms retain and hire reporters.” Last year, the state “awarded $4 million in credits, supporting more than 260 journalist jobs across over 120 outlets statewide, with most funding going to organizations outside the Chicago metro area and 30 percent to nonprofit outlets.”
In New Mexico, legislators passed a law that “includes $4 million annually for five years in refundable employment tax credits to help newsrooms retain and hire reporters – a model long championed by Rebuild Local News – along with $1 million per year to offset wages at local news printers.”
“In my view, there's not any one ‘best’ policy to support local news, since the different public policies under consideration do different things, and the best approach to my mind is to have several different approaches working in tandem,” Director of Policy for Rebuild Local News Matt Pearce wrote to me in an email.
“Illinois, New Mexico, New York and California have all implemented employment subsidies that make it more affordable to hire and retain local journalists at all sorts of local news outlets. Several cities and states have pursued policies to either direct more government advertising toward local news outlets, or to at least make government advertising more transparent.
“It's possible to build effective public policies that don't compromise press independence,” Pearce said, “but it's also going to take some experimentation to see which approaches are most effective at building strong, independent coverage that communities currently lack. That's exactly what you're seeing happen right now.”
Finally, it would help if national news media reported regularly on state initiatives and the loss of local news – not as an isolated problem here and there, but as a national crisis. The national media, preoccupied by the Trump administration, do a poor job covering its local counterparts.
As Joseph Pulitzer once said, “Our Republic and its press will rise or fall together.”
Richard Campbell is a professor emeritus and founding chair of the Department of Media, Journalism & Film at Miami University. He is also a co-founder of the Oxford Free Press
