What is your local city council doing this month? Are they changing zoning? Raising taxes? What is your school district doing? Chances are increasingly good that you don't know and you won't know.
Since 2005, about one-third of local newspapers have disappeared, creating new deserts where politicians and bureaucrats operate without any oversight. An average of 2.5 newspapers closed each week in 2023.
According to Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, part of the reason is commerce. Since online shopping became mainstream, local retail stores, large and small, have disappeared, leaving no commercial advertising base that once supported newspapers.
What happens is that local governments become less accountable, as lack of scrutiny declines or even disappears.
In fact, the smaller the community the more likely that citizens get their news from Facebook or other social media, suggesting an opportunity for citizen journalists. According to Pew Research, 52 percent of U.S. adults say they get local news from social media or radio stations. A third of Americans say they sometimes get local news from a daily newspaper.****
