In our connected age, there is an abundance of news and opinion, coming at us 24/7. The latest terror attack, the presidential debates or the shenanigans of celebrities. It’s all covered in minute detail, and we are free to share it and our opinions on the matter. But missing from that motley collection of trivia and substance is news of what is happening in our own backyards, save the personal videos posted by friends. Local news about a tax increase or a zoning decision is rarely of such interest that it trends, but it has an outsized impact on the everyday lives of residents in small towns, city neighborhoods and suburbia. When local newspapers fail, these communities are often left without any news organization to care about, watch over and report on the actions of the county commission or the local school board.
To better determine the impact that the loss of a local newspaper has on a community, researchers at UNC’s School of Media and Journalism have spent the past two years collecting additional information on the more than 9,000 local papers in our proprietary database. This analysis found an unrelenting loss of newspapers and readers since 2004 with troubling implications for thousands of communities. While there are entrepreneurs who are beginning to fill the void that is left in a community when a newspaper fails, much more needs to be done.
Here are the major findings:
Vanishing Newspapers: The United States has lost almost 1,800 papers since 2004, including more than 60 dailies and 1,700 weeklies. Roughly half of the remaining 7,112 in the country – 1,283 dailies and 5,829 weeklies – are located in small and rural communities. The vast majority – around 5,500 – have a circulation of less than 15,000.
Vanishing Readers: Print readers are disappearing even faster than print newspapers, and the pace appears to be accelerating. Over the past 15 years, total weekday circulation - which includes both dailies and weeklies – declined from 122 million to 73 million. While more and more readers prefer to receive news online, this dramatic loss has been driven not only by changes in reader preference, but also by the business decisions of newspaper owners. The decrease in daily circulation comes primarily from the pullback of metro and regional newspapers from distribution to outlying rural and suburban areas. In contrast, much of the loss in weekly circulation since 2004 comes from the closure of more than 1,700 weeklies. This decrease in print readers raises serious questions about the long-term financial sustainability of both small community and large metro newspapers.
Who Lost The Most?: No state has been spared the death of a newspaper. California lost the most dailies of any state. Some of the most populated states – New York, Illinois and Texas — lost the most weeklies. The loss of newspapers in one state has the potential to affect residents in many other states, since government agencies often rely on local news reports to help identify and contain public health crises and assess the impact of environmental disasters.
Living Without a Newspaper: There are hundreds — if not thousands — of communities at risk of becoming isolated news deserts. There are almost 200 of the 3,143 counties in the United States without any paper. An additional 1,449 counties, ranging in size from several hundred residents to more than a million, have only one newspaper, usually a weekly. More than 2,000 have no daily paper. The residents of America’s emerging news deserts are often its most vulnerable citizens. They are generally poorer, older and less educated than the average American.
Silence in the Suburbs: Seventy percent – 1,300 – of the newspapers that closed or merged were in metro areas. All but 50 were weeklies, most with a circulation under 10,000. Their demise leaves a news vacuum for many of America’s suburbs and urban neighborhoods, where residents have historically relied on community weeklies to keep them informed about the most pressing hyperlocal issues.
The Death of the Rural Hometown Newspaper: More than 500 newspapers have been closed or merged in rural communities since 2004. Most of these counties where newspapers closed have poverty rates significantly above the national average. Because of the isolated nature of these communities, there is little to fill the void when the paper closes.
The Shrinking State and Regional Newspapers: The dramatic pullback in circulation and coverage of state and regional papers has dealt a double blow to residents of outlying rural counties, as well as close-in suburban areas. Many of these communities have also lost their weekly hometown paper and are left without any credible and comprehensive sources of either local or regional political and economic news.
And Then There Was One: Fewer than a dozen cities of any size have two competing dailies. The lack of competition among newspapers in major metro markets often results in less coverage of local and state government, and residents of those cities pay the price. Studies have found that closure of a competing metro daily often leads to governmental inefficiency and higher costs for city residents.
Vanishing Newspapers
Cities and towns ranging in size from Lime Springs, Iowa, with a population of only 500, to Tampa, Florida, a city of 400,000 residents, have lost a hometown newspaper, as about one in five of the country’s local papers has vanished in recent years. In total, the United States has lost almost 1,800 papers since 2004, including more than 60 dailies and 1,700 weeklies. Roughly half of the remaining 7,112 papers in the country – 1,283 dailies and 5,829 weeklies – are located in small and rural communities. The vast majority – around 5,500 – have circulations under 15,000.1
While closures of large dailies like The Tampa Tribune and the Rocky Mountain News in Denver grab headlines, in fact, 53 of the 62 dailies that closed or merged since 2004 had circulations of less than 50,000. Twenty of those shuttered dailies had a circulation of less than 5,000. This includes The Daily Times of Pryor Creek in rural northeastern Oklahoma. Founded in 1919, The Times brought its 3,000 subscribers news “From Your Corner of the World to the World in Your Backyard.” As circulation and advertising declined, the daily paper transitioned in 2013 to publishing only three times a week, in an effort to stave off closure. A small article above the fold of the Times’ weekend edition on April 29, 2017, announcing that this was the last issue, shocked the 10,000 residents of Pryor Creek, the county seat. Almost a fourth of the 40,000 residents of Mayes County, named for a chief of the Cherokee Nation, live in poverty, and a fifth are Native Americans.2 The shuttering of The Times leaves residents of Mayes County without a local newspaper. “You’re going to see more and more papers go away because the advertising dollars are going away,” said Jimmy Tramel, mayor of Pryor Creek.3 “We have a huge communication gap in this country today, and I don’t know what the answer is. It’s a drastic blow to our city because, how do we get information out?” Getting the information out is even more difficult for the 1,749 communities that have lost weeklies over the past 15 years. Weeklies are often the only sources of very local news and information in communities – large and small, rich and poor, urban and rural. These shuttered weeklies ranged in size from the San Francisco Independent, with free distribution of almost 400,000, to the Sudan Beacon News in Texas, with a circulation of only 300. Of these closed or merged weeklies, only 45 had a circulation above 50,000. More than 1,000 had a circulation of less than 5,000. Often these papers are shut with little notice. The staff and community of the 140-year-old, 500-circulation Gridley Herald, serving Gridley (population 6,000) in the central California county of Butte, were notified by their owners, GateHouse, on Aug. 29, 2018, that the final issue of the twice-weekly paper would be published the next day. Gridley, 60 miles from Sacramento, is largely an agricultural community. Half of the residents are Hispanic, in contrast to Butte County, which is predominantly white.4 Gridley is only sparsely covered by the neighboring daily, the Chico Enterprise-Record, located in a city with 90,000 residents, 30 miles away. “You lose a community when you don’t have a newspaper,” said one resident. Final stories in the Herald focused on a recent homicide; the opening of area schools, including the beginning of high school football season; and features on the Butte County Fair. “I’m especially saddened for the work we will not be able to do for you, the events we won’t be covering . . .,” noted the publisher, who had worked for the paper for 26 years, in the final edition.5 While there are more than 7,100 newspapers in still publishing as either weeklies or dailies, this count most likely overstates the number of stand-alone papers in existence today. Based on our analysis of the papers owned by the largest chains in the country, we estimate that between 10 and 20 percent of the papers in our database are geographically zoned weekly editions published by larger metro dailies. For example, the UNC database lists 158 papers owned by Digital First Media, the third-largest chain in the country. However, the website for Digital First lists fewer than 100 papers. Zoned editions are difficult to identify because they are listed separately as stand-alone weekly papers in various industry databases such as those compiled by Editor and Publisher and BIA Kelsey. For our 2018 report, we have supplemented the information in industry databases with data obtained from all 50 state press associations and our own extensive independent online research and interviews with staff at individual papers. As a result, we identified 300 papers that were published in 2004, but were not included in national industry databases. Therefore, our 2004 number has been adjusted upward from our 2016 report to almost 8,900 papers. Simultaneously, we removed from our 2018 number the 600 papers that we identified as evolving from stand-alone newspapers into shoppers or lifestyle and business specialty publications, with little or no public service journalism. However, we left the zoned editions in the total of number of 7,112 papers since, even though they are not stand-alone newspapers, they are still – for the time being – providing a diet of local news that informs their respective communities. Recent history suggests that as the economics of print publishing continue to decline, many zoned editions will either become shoppers and specialty publications, or be eliminated entirely. This decrease in print readers speaks to the declining influence of newspapers, which once set the agenda for debate of important issues in their communities and helped encourage local economic growth and development. It also raises serious questions about the long-term financial sustainability of community newspapers, most of which still rely on print advertising and subscriptions for between 60 and 80 percent of their total revenue, and don’t have the financial reserves that the large national and regional papers do. 6 As circulation declines and news coverage of outlying regions is cut back, print newspapers lose reach and relevance for both local advertisers and readers. This, in turn, drives down profitability and forces publishers to cut costs, instead of investing in ventures that will transform their print business models for the digital age. The decline in daily circulation was driven by the largest dailies shedding existing readers, especially those in outlying areas. In 2018, only 53 dailies have a print circulation greater than 100,000, compared with nearly twice that many – 102 dailies – in 2004. Two-thirds of the 1,283 dailies still publishing have circulations under 15,000. If print circulation continues to drop at current rates, Nicco Mele, director of the Shorenstein Center for Media, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard University, predicts that as many as one-half of the nation’s surviving dailies will no longer be in print by 2021. 7 In contrast, the decline in weekly readership resulted primarily from the shuttering of 1,700 papers. The average circulation of the country’s surviving 5,829 weeklies is 8,000, roughly the same as it was in 2004. However, print readership for both dallies and weeklies is probably much less than what is reported in industry databases. The Alliance for Audited Media (AAM) is the most authoritative source for circulation, but only 13 percent of papers in the UNC database – typically the largest papers – subscribe to AAM audits. More and more smaller newspapers — dailies as well as weeklies — are turning to self-reporting or not reporting their circulation numbers to sources such as Editor and Publisher. Additionally, the reported AAM numbers for the large dailies often lag behind the audit by a couple of years. The dramatic circulation drop over the past 15 years occurred despite new rules and guidelines adopted by the industry after 2004 that allowed newspapers to count print and online readership that had previously been excluded. 8 Circulation statistics in the UNC database represent primarily print distribution, an admittedly imperfect measure since it does not count the increasing number of people who access local news online. However, readership data for most digital editions of the newspapers in this report are not widely available or comparable. Also, according to the Federal Communications Commission, 9 between 40 and 60 percent of residents in rural areas lack reliable access to either broadband or wireless, therefore limiting their media options when a local print newspaper folds.Therefore, print circulation becomes a proxy – albeit imperfect – for the dramatic decline in influence and relevance of local papers in recent years. Since 2004, one-fifth of all U.S. newspapers have been closed or merged. No state has been spared the death of a newspaper. California lost the most dailies, 11, ranging in size from 22,000 to 157,000. This was primarily driven by consolidation in the San Francisco Bay Area. Over the course of five years, the third-largest newspaper chain in the country, Digital First, merged eight dailies into two mastheads: East Bay Times and Mercury News, which together currently reach nearly 300,000 subscribers. 10
The more rural state of Kansas lost seven dailies, all with circulations under 10,000. The communities affected spanned the entire state, from the affluent Kansas City suburb of Overland Park to farmlands in Liberal, Kansas, in the southwest. Some of the most populated states lost the most weeklies. Illinois lost 157, New York lost 155 and Texas lost 146. The weeklies in Illinois and New York were predominantly in the suburbs surrounding the large metro areas. This includes a chain of 35 independent weeklies in Suffolk County on Long Island, which were shuttered in 2008. In contrast, in Texas, nearly half of the weeklies closed were in rural counties. The loss hit some states disproportionately, depending on how many papers they had. In 2004, the number of papers ranged from 14 in Hawaii to 638 in Texas. While Texas lost 146 papers, it still has almost 500 in 2018. The island state of Hawaii, on the other hand, lost five of its 14 papers, including three weeklies and one daily on its most populated island of Oahu. In 2010, the two major dailies in Honolulu, the Honolulu Star-Bulletin and Honolulu Advertiser, merged to become the Star Advertiser, 11 robbing America of one of its last two-daily-newspaper towns. The loss of newspapers in one state has the potential to affect residents in many other states, since government agencies often rely on local news reports to help identify and contain public health crises and assess the impact of natural and man-made disasters. Officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), for example, say that the death of newspapers throughout the country is already hindering their ability to spot and track the spread of disease, which could lead to outbreaks of more epidemics. 12 The CDC relies on the news stories in local papers to provide them with an early warning system,which is critical in containing the spread. So far, social media has been much less reliable. As newspapers vanish and readers drop off, an increasing number of Americans are living without a reliable and comprehensive source of local news. Previously, we defined a “news desert” as a community without a local newspaper. As a result of the dramatic shrinkage in the number of local news outlets in recent years, as well as the decrease in local news coverage by surviving newspapers , we have expanded our designation of news deserts to include communities where residents are facing significantly diminished access to the sort of important news and information that feeds grassroots democracy. There are hundreds — if not thousands – of communities at risk of becoming isolated news deserts. The numbers have grown dramatically in recent years as local newspapers vanish and nothing replaces them. In the U.S., 171 counties do not have a local newspaper. Nearly half of all counties - 1,449 - have only one newspaper, usually a weekly. In many communities, newspapers are often the prime source of local news and information. The residents of America’s emerging news deserts are often its most vulnerable citizens. They are generally poorer, older and less educated than the average American. They are much more likely to live in rural areas of the country. Eighteen percent of residents are living in poverty compared with the national average of 13 percent. 14 Fewer than 20 percent of residents of these counties have any college education, roughly half the nationwide average. Almost half of Americans living in a county without a newspaper also live in a food desert, which the U.S. Department of Agriculture defines as “parts of the country vapid of fresh fruit, vegetables, and other healthful whole foods, usually found in impoverished areas.” 15 Residents of low-income areas tend to be overlooked by advertisers are less likely to purchase subscriptions and have less access to both legacy and digital media, according to Stanford University economist James Hamilton. This has long-term social and economic consequences for rural communities. Since residents in news deserts tend to be less informed about key issues in their community, they are less likely to vote. 16 The South had the most counties without newspapers: 91. 17 Almost every state in the South had at least one news desert. In Georgia, 28 out of 169 counties did not have a newspaper and in Texas 22 out of 254 counties lacked a paper. Kentucky, Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, Florida and Oklahoma all had half a dozen or so counties without newspapers. Counties that recently lost their last surviving newspaper ranged from Jerome County, Idaho, with 22,000 residents, which lost its weekly paper in 2008, to Mayes County in Oklahoma, with 40,000 residents, which lost its once proud daily in 2017. Both counties have poverty rates significantly above the national average. The 1,449 counties with only one newspaper still publishing range from Arthur County, Nebraska, with 500 residents, to Montgomery County, Maryland, with more than a million people. Half of the newspapers that closed or merged were in large metro areas with more than 1 million people — such as Chicago, Washington, D.C., New York and Boston — and another 20 percent were in small and mid-sized metro areas such as Toledo, Ohio, and North Adams, Massachusetts. Of these 1,300 shuttered papers in metro areas, 1,250 were weeklies, most with a circulation under 10,000. Their demise leaves a news vacuum for America’s suburbs and urban neighborhoods, where residents have historically relied on community weeklies to keep them informed about the most pressing issues – from test scores in local schools to proposed tax hikes. Both affluent and low-income suburban and metro areas were affected. The tiny Baldwin City Signal in the college town of Baldwin City, Kansas, outside Kansas City, and the much larger Suffolk County Life, a chain of 35 papers on Long Island, New York, that reached several hundred thousand households, are examples of family-operated enterprises that did not survive. The Signal was started in 1999 by the family-owned Lawrence Journal-World, located 15 miles away in Lawrence, home of the University of Kansas. In 2004, when it merged with another nearby paper, the Signal had a circulation of 1,700. By 2015, when it was shuttered 18 for lack of advertising and subscription revenue, it had fewer than 200 subscribers. Nevertheless, the closure has left community leaders and activists scrambling to find new ways of “getting news out about important events and issues” to residents in Baldwin City, which is home to 4,600 residents and Baker University, the oldest college in Kansas. Despite its small circulation, the Signal served as a megaphone, since it was read by influential residents in Baldwin City who made sure they got out the vote on important issues. “We share one journalist with other communities. . . . There is no way he can be here [covering] the school board, city council and university and high school activities . . . and still cover other communities,” one resident told a Kansas State University researcher. “Now I get news about things that will happen after they have already happened,” said another. 19 The Suffolk County Life papers were started in the 1960s, when Long Island was booming. The idea for the papers was hatched around the kitchen table of publisher and editor David Willmott’s parents. His papers quickly gained journalistic accolades for coverage of the economic and environmental issues associated with a proposal to build a nuclear power plant on the shores of Long Island in the 1970s. 20 The power company ultimately abandoned plans to build the plant, citing public sentiment, which had turned against the plant in part because of the aggressive coverage that Willmott’s papers provided. At their closing, the papers distributed more than 500,000 free copies and 10,700 paid copies. 21 In failing health and unable to find a buyer or a successor, Wilmott shuttered all the papers. His legacy – and that of his papers – was noted in a 2009 obituary that read “[Willmott] remained true to his views, ultimately becoming a weather vane for the electorate each November.” 22 In contrast to the local considerations that determined the demise of the Baldwin City and Suffolk papers, the closures of weeklies in the Chicago, Boston and Washington, D.C., suburbs were driven by the financial and strategic decisions made by corporate owners. In 2009, the Chicago Sun-Times, faced with bankruptcy, shuttered more than a dozen of its weeklies, 23 with a combined circulation of more than 200,000, most in predominantly affluent suburbs. These papers ranged in circulation from 1,000 to 27,000, including the 2,000 circulation Wheeling Countryside, which covered the 124-year-old village of 40,000 residents, 30 miles from downtown Chicago. Wheeling has one of the more diverse populations in the prestigious northern suburbs of Chicago, with a third Hispanic and more than 15 percent Asian residents. 24 When announcing this closing, Larry Green, then publisher of the community weeklies, noted, “The death of any newspaper is a blow to our democracy and to your local economy. . . . But as much as it is a public service, the Wheeling Countryside is also a business. It must be profitable. In the current economy it is not.” 25 Subscribers soon received a letter telling them how to subscribe to the Chicago Sun-Times, a daily covering an area of 3 million people with little specific content on a community like Wheeling. Kirk Davis, CEO of GateHouse chain of papers, used a similar financial rationale in explaining the closure of 10 of its 125 weeklies in the Boston suburbs in 2013. All of the weeklies were in low-income neighborhoods that were not attractive to print advertisers. “Business conditions have become more challenging, and it’s more important to be selective about where you’re putting the greatest amount of resources,” Davis told The Boston Globe. “We’re going to shift resources to the highest potential markets that are most desirable to our advertisers.” 26 Corporate strategy also determined the fate of 20 Maryland papers, known as The Gazette, in the affluent Washington, D.C., suburbs of Montgomery and Prince George counties. The 55-year-old Gazette papers were purchased by The Washington Post in the early 1990s and distributed more than 450,000 free copies in 2014. Almost immediately after buying the Post in 2013, Jeff Bezos, the new owner, made the decision to shutter all the weeklies and instead devote his attention and financial resources to positioning the Washington Post as a national newspaper. “You lose that individual feel that our town matters," a Montgomery County resident said in a 2015 interview about the closing of The Gazette. "There are activities in our town that nobody can really convey to each other anymore when you lose that vehicle for getting the news out." 27 More than 500 newspapers have been closed or merged in rural communities since 2004. The average circulation of the shuttered rural papers was roughly 4,000, highlighting the small size of communities they serve. In many of these communities, the local newspaper is the only reliable source of news and information. Because of the isolated nature of these communities, there is little to fill the void when the paper closes. A 2016 FCC Report found between 40 and 60 percent 28 of rural residents lacked affordable, high-speed access to wireless services that would enable streaming of videos, for example. The economic challenges facing rural newspapers differ from those of their metro counterparts. These papers are often in small markets that are unattractive to advertisers outside of communities where the papers are located. Many of the papers that closed were independently owned and were forced to close when owners faced declining profits or couldn’t find a buyer. Lime Springs, Iowa, with a population of fewer than 500 residents, lost its 139-year-old weekly newspaper in 2015. In its last issue, dated Feb. 11, the Lime Springs Herald recalled the paper’s expansive history, printing vintage ads dating back to 1897 and stories from readers about what the paper meant to them and to their community, located in Howard County in northeast Iowa, 200 miles from both Minneapolis and Des Moines. Carl Cassidy left an indelible mark on the paper, purchasing it when he was 19 and then serving as publisher, editor and community historian for 61 years. 30 In 1992, he sold it to the Evans family, who decided in 2015 to absorb it into their nearby 8,000-circulation weekly, the Cresco Times Plain Dealer. At the time of its closing, the Herald had a print circulation of 600. The last story published on its website was the Howard-Winneshiek School Board’s 4-1 decision to close the Lime Springs elementary school. 31 “Small newspapers can’t keep up,” said Herald editor Marcie Klomp in a 2015 interview. “There is a place for a small newspaper, but I guess there isn’t room for this one.”32 In Missouri, the 104-year-old daily Macon Chronicle-Herald closed in 2014 when the neighboring family-owned newspaper, the Lewis County Press, purchased its assets from the GateHouse chain. For nearly 50 years, from 1926 to 1973, the paper was owned and edited by Frank P. Briggs, who served first as mayor of Macon and then as a state senator. When Harry Truman resigned his U.S. Senate seat in 1945, Briggs was appointed to serve out his term. In 1958, the University of Missouri, his alma mater, honored him and his long-running column, “It Seems to B,” with a distinguished journalism award saying he had “achieved the nearly impossible feat of keeping his newspaper and his public responsibilities entirely divorced from one another.”33 Macon native Judy Baughman lamented the closure of the 1,700-circulation paper. “My wedding was in there; my engagement was in there,” Baughman said. “At various times, my then-husband and my son were featured. . . . So it really breaks my heart that it’s no longer in business.” 34 The dramatic pullback in circulation and coverage of state and regional papers has dealt a double blow to residents of outlying rural counties, as well as close-in suburban areas. Many of these communities have also lost their weekly hometown paper and are left without any credible and comprehensive sources of either local or regional political, economic and environmental news that can affect the quality of everyday life today and in the future. In the latter half of the 20th century, when circulation and newsroom staffing were at their highest levels ever, major metro and state papers routinely received Pulitzer Prizes, the most coveted award in journalism, for their aggressive investigative reporting. The Philadelphia Inquirer, Los Angeles Times and Boston Globe, for example, had a cadre of reporters, stationed in Washington and abroad, who often scooped The New York Times and Washington Post on foreign and national news. But it was at the state and regional level where these large papers had their biggest impact on the quality of life for residents in the communities where they circulated. In North Carolina, for example, The News & Observer of Raleigh received the Pulitzer Public Service Award in 1996 for exposing the long-term environmental consequences of large-scale industrial hog farming on the state’s rural counties, 35 many of which were struggling economically. By devoting a team of investigative reporters to the task of sifting through government records, analyzing data and then translating what they had found into lucid prose and compelling articles that consumed tons of newsprint, these large papers were able to set the agenda for debate of important policy issues that ultimately affected all residents in the state and region. On a day-to-day basis, the nation’s large regional papers also had scores of reporters assigned to bureaus in the suburbs and outlying counties, who were responsible for staying on top of news at the grassroots level by covering the often mundane and routine government meetings that rarely made headlines outside the communities they were covering. While editors at these papers believed they had a journalistic duty to cover regional issues, there was, no business model to support their expansive coverage. The vast majority of their financial support came from advertisers in their home city who had little desire or reason to reach consumers in these remote communities. Therefore, publishers began to take a hard look at the return on the investment from circulating print copies outside their metro area. Over the past two decades, this has led to dramatic cutbacks in both the circulation and staffing of the state and regional papers, the majority of them owned by the large newspaper chains, such as Gannett, McClatchy, Lee Enterprises and GateHouse. Since 2004, circulation for the large dailies has decreased by more than 40 percent and newsroom staffing by a similar amount. 36 A majority of the decline in daily circulation has resulted from the pullback of the large metros from rural areas. Recent research has shown that when metro papers pull back circulation and coverage in outlying areas, participation and voting, especially in midterm state and local elections, goes down.37 Additionally, there is evidence that the journalistic competition between metro papers and smaller community publications may spur more aggressive coverage of issues in these outlying communities since local reporters don’t want to be scooped by the big-city journalists. This is especially true when metro papers assign reporters to cover routine governmental meetings in outlying areas. The Wichita Eagle, the largest paper in Kansas, is representative of this decline in circulation, staffing and, ultimately, impact on the communities these papers covered. In the 1990s, The Eagle, then part of the Knight Ridder newspaper chain, gained national recognition for pioneering a new type of local reporting, called “civic journalism,” which sought to engage readers in determining coverage of important issues in a community. Editors surveyed residents to get their input and then aggressively covered those issues – ranging from environmental concerns to tax increases – holding public officials accountable for resolving them. In the mid-1990s, the Eagle had a circulation of 122,000 and more than 100 journalists in its newsroom (including both a dedicated Washington reporter and a team of state and regional reporters). It was distributed in 73 of the state’s 105 counties.38 Today, the paper, which is now part of the McClatchy newspaper chain, has a print circulation of 30,000 and a newsroom of fewer than three dozen journalists. It circulates in only 10 counties).39 The prominent three-story building in downtown Wichita that The Eagle once occupied has been sold to Cargill, and the newspaper has moved into a much smaller second-floor space in the restaurant and nightclub district. The Wichita paper is printed by The Kansas City Star, also a McClatchy paper, 200 miles away. Early printing deadlines make it difficult to offer timely coverage of both night sporting events and government meetings, and therefore lessens the relevance to readers and impact of the paper on the communities where it still circulates. Wichita Eagle Distribution 1992-2018 The Wichita Eagle circulates in just 10 counties in Kansas, compared to more than 70 counties in 1992. The story is the same across the country. The Portland Oregonian, which received the Pulitzer Public Service award in 2001 for its “detailed and unflinching examination” of immigration issues,40 has 158,000 circulation in 2018, but distributes to 15 fewer counties in Oregon and Washington than it did in 2004, when it had a circulation of 338,000. All but one of these counties no longer served by the Oregonian are rural, and all have poverty rates higher than the national average. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, the flagship of the Pulitzer chain until it was purchased by Lee Enterprises in 2005, has a current circulation of 150,000 and distributes to 30 fewer counties (17 fewer counties in Missouri and 13 fewer in the adjacent suburban counties of Illinois) than it did in 2004 when it had a circulation of almost 300,000. All of these counties have high poverty rates, and all but two are rural. The News & Observer, which had a circulation of 150,000 in the mid-1990s when it received the Pulitzer Prize for its nine-part series on commercial hog farming, has only 95,000 subscribers today and has pulled out of six counties in eastern North Carolina featured in the prize-winning articles.41 The death of the two-newspaper town is yesterday’s news. Nevertheless, as recently as a decade ago, there were still a dozen or so large cities with competing daily publications. However, the recession of 2008, coupled with the simultaneous shift in readership away from print newspapers to online news sources, has led to the demise of half of the remaining stalwarts. Only four of the 62 dailies lost since 2004 had circulations of more than 100,000. All four were in two-newspaper towns – Denver, Seattle, Honolulu and the Tampa/St Petersburg region. In 2016, Florida’s largest newspaper, the Tampa Bay Times in St. Petersburg (with a circulation of 200,000), purchased the competing daily Tampa Tribune in neighboring Hillsborough County (with 137,000 circulation), and quickly shut it down, leaving the Tampa Bay area of 3 million residents with only one newspaper. "The continued competition between the newspapers was threatening to both," Times chairman and CEO Paul Tash said in a statement. “There are very few cities that are able to sustain more than one daily newspaper, and the Tampa Bay region is not among them.”42 The demise of the Tampa paper was preceded in 2009 and 2010 by the closure of three other large dailies. In 2010 the two remaining dailies in Honolulu merged to become the Honolulu Star-Advertiser (with a circulation of 153,000 in 2018). In 2009, the Rocky Mountain News in Denver, which had a circulation of 200,000, shut down,43 and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer (with circulation 120,000) transitioned to an online-only news site, leaving The Seattle Times (with circulation of 172,00 in 2018) as the primary news source for Washington’s largest city.44 The lack of competition among newspapers in major metro markets often results in less coverage of local and state government. A report by the FCC on “The Information Needs of Communities” found that even in metro markets, with multiple media options including regional television stations and online outlets, the daily newspaper tended to provide most of the in-depth “watchdog” journalism.45 This is because the metro paper typically had more reporters than the digital and broadcast news organizations and did not have the “on-air time constraints” imposed on morning and evening television newscasts, which typically devote more time to coverage of weather and sports than local policy issues.46 In a similar vein, research from the University of Notre Dame and University of Chicago found that the closure of a competing metro daily often leads to governmental inefficiency and higher costs for city residents. It specifically cited the journalism of the Rocky Mountain News, which had served as a vigilant watchdog for residents of Denver, providing them with information on how their tax dollars were spent. The stories covered by the News “included an audit of questionable federal funds allocated to the sheriff’s department, a handshake deal between city government and Lufthansa Airlines, which may have violated federal law, lack of oversight for 390 ‘special taxing districts’ established in the Denver metropolitan area, and an ‘under-the-table’ scheme at Denver International Airport that paid employees undeserved wages.”47 Even if the metro paper transitions to online delivery – as the Seattle Post-Intelligencer did in 2009 – research suggests there is still a diminishment in both the quantity and quality of government news stories in the online versions.48 As a result, residents in a community are likely to be less aware of the issues and less likely to vote in local elections.49 
Vanishing Readers
Print readers are disappearing at an even faster rate than print newspapers, and the pace appears to be accelerating. Over the past 15 years, total weekday circulation — which includes both dailies and weeklies – declined 40 percent, from 122 million to 73 million, for a loss of 49 million. In the last four years alone, newspapers shed 20 million in circulation, an indication that the pace of the downward slide may be increasing.
Who Lost the Most?
Living Without a Newspaper
Silence in the Suburbs
A number of factors drove the loss of the suburban papers. In many cases, as circulation declined and advertisers moved dollars from newspapers to broadcast and digital outlets, independent and family-run enterprises made the decision to cut their losses. In other cases, the corporate owner made either a strategic or financial decision to shutter the weeklies and invest elsewhere.The Death of the Rural Hometown Newspaper
In rural counties where papers have closed or merged, the average poverty rate is nearly 4 percentage points higher than the national average of 12.7 percent. Sixty-two percent of voters in these rural counties voted for Trump in the 2016 election, compared with 46 percent nationwide. 29The Shrinking Metro and State Papers
And Then There Was One
Next: The Rise of the Ghost Newspaper