The Local Journalism Crisis Is Bad News for the Planet

For Laurie Ezzell Brown, local news has always been a family affair. Her dad was the longtime owner and publisher of The Canadian Record, a weekly paper serving the small Texas Panhandle town of Canadian since 1893. She spent much of her childhood in the newsroom, placing ads and setting type. “You’re in the business whether you like it or not,” Brown says. She liked it, so when her father died in 1993, she stepped up as editor.

Brown was proud to dig deep on environmental issues her neighbors cared about, such as groundwater depletion and pollution from industrial hog farming. But over the years, keeping a newspaper afloat became grueling. She tried to sell but couldn’t find the right buyer. Finally, in March 2023, she made the heartbreaking decision to stop printing the Record, leaving the county without a news outlet. “The community wanted the newspaper—valued it, respected it, trusted it,” Brown says. “And here we were, pulling the rug out from underneath them.”

Across the country, local institutions like the Record are flickering out with alarming speed. Since 2005 the United States has lost nearly one-third of its newspapers; last year an average of 2.5 shut down each week. The die-off is leaving communities less informed about crucial topics, including environmental issues. “I’ve never felt like local journalism was more essential than it is today,” says Frank Mungeam, chief innovation officer at the Local Media Association, an industry group. “And in my lifetime, I can’t recall an environment where it was more challenging for local news.”

Though the journalism business has struggled since the rise of the internet, its tailspin has accelerated in recent years. Digital and social platforms have snapped up more ad dollars, and hedge funds have bought up local outlets and slashed their staffs. Major publications haven’t been immune: the Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post have both announced staff cuts in the past year.

But the growth of local “news deserts” is of special concern, says Kim Kleman, executive director of the nonprofit Report for America. More than half of U.S. counties today have no news outlet at all or only one survivor, typically a weekly paper. Research suggests that without reporters on the ground, governments are more likely to get away with corruption, and industries are able to pump out more toxic emissions. And without a trusted information hub tying their community together, people become less engaged as citizens and more polarized in their politics.

Environment reporters have often been among the first to go when outlets scale back—even as more people feel the impacts of the unfolding climate and biodiversity crises. “There is no more local story than the environment,” says Meaghan Parker, former executive director for the Society of Environmental Journalists. “It is the air we breathe. It’s the food we eat. It’s the water we drink.” 

Despite their smaller audiences, local publications have an outsize impact, Parker says. The trust readers put in them helps cut through the politics and misinformation that swirl around environmental topics. When the Fountain Valley News shut down last year, it marked the end of more than 60 years of storytelling in and around Fountain, Colorado. “We were part of the connectedness of the community,” says former editor Karin Hill. Without another outlet in town, she frets over how her neighbors will stay informed on issues the paper covered for years, like the health impacts of toxic “forever chemicals” found in the water supply.

Though local news is in crisis, creative approaches are emerging to help fill the gaps, as nonprofit newsrooms and alternative funding models gain steam. Report for America, which launched in 2017 and has shared the cost of placing reporters in nearly 400 newsrooms, continues to expand. A coalition of funders called Press Forward plans to distribute more than $500 million in local news grants over the next five years. Several states are testing the use of public funds to bolster journalism, while a bill introduced in Congress last year would offer tax incentives for supporting local outlets. “There’s no one formula for saving local news,” Kleman says, “but there are a lot of great experiments going on.”

In Texas, Brown is holding out hope that a civic-minded buyer will come along to revive the Record. As the largest wildfire in state history swept across her region in March, she doggedly shared emergency updates to the paper’s Facebook group. But it weighed on her that, as neighbors lost everything in the fires, she didn’t have the resources to gather and share their stories like she used to. “What I’ve seen, and what the community has seen also, is: God, we need our newspaper.”

This story originally ran in the Summer 2024 issue as “Extinction Crisis.” To receive our print magazine, become a member by making a donation today.