The health of local news has been in freefall for decades. Ad revenue plummeted, private equity gutted once-profitable newsrooms and Facebook and Craigslist stripped newspaper classified pages of crucial traffic. News organizations have been forced to shrink their staffs, reduce their content and shift their focus. And in many communities, traditional outlets are disappearing altogether.
Despite the struggles, most Americans believe that local news is important and that their community’s journalists are doing good work, according to this year’s State of Local News project. The report serves as an MRI of local journalism, diagnosing its current condition and providing journalists, media leaders, policy makers and philanthropists with much-needed data and context.
As in 2018, the top local news topic follows the weather, with nine in ten Americans who follow this type of local news reporting doing so often or sometimes. But other topics receive significantly lower levels of engagement, and fewer than half of those who get news about different subjects say they are extremely or very satisfied with what they see. This is particularly true for news about the local economy and about government and politics.
Most Americans still think that their local news outlets are doing well financially, though the share who give this assessment has slipped since 2022. This may reflect the broader concern about the economic challenges facing the industry and the declining trust in the media and institutions overall. A substantial number of Americans also say that they do not pay for local news, and the most common reason they give relates to free alternatives.
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