Once upon a time, local media had a pretty simple shape.
The newspaper landed on the porch.
The radio station had a morning show with someone who knew how to pronounce the town names.
The local TV anchor told you if school was closed, who got arrested, and whether the storm was headed your way.
The classified ads were in the paper. The grocery store bought a full-page ad. The furniture store bought a radio remote. The car dealer sponsored the weather.
It wasn’t perfect. Local media never was. There were blind spots, biases, lazy stories, owners with opinions, advertisers with influence, and plenty of newsroom arguments about what mattered.
But there was also a structure. There were people whose job was to go to meetings, read court records, check names, call officials, sit through zoning hearings, ask follow-up questions, and separate “I heard on Facebook” from “here’s what the document says.”
Then digital came along and changed everything.
Actually, let’s be honest. Digital didn’t just kill the radio star. It backed over the newspaper, ate the classifieds, stole the TV audience’s remote, handed everyone a podcast microphone, and then told local websites, “Good news! You can have all the page views you want. Bad news! We’ll decide what those views are worth.”
And that may be the heart of it.
Local media didn’t just lose readers, listeners, and viewers. It lost the old way of getting paid.
The Numbers Are Not Pretty
This is not just nostalgia from people who miss the smell of newsprint and the sound of a live radio DJ laughing too hard at his own joke.
The local news business has taken a hard hit.
Medill’s 2025 State of Local News report says close to 3,500 newspapers have vanished since 2005, and 148 newspapers disappeared in the past year alone through closures or mergers. The same report says 212 U.S. counties now have no local news source, while another 1,525 counties have only one local news source left, usually a weekly newspaper. That leaves about 50 million Americans with limited or no access to local news.
The circulation numbers show the same story. Medill says print newspaper circulation has dropped by about 80 million, a 70% decline from 2005 levels, and that in 2025 fewer than one-fifth of U.S. daily newspapers are still printed and delivered seven days a week. It also found that monthly unique page views for the websites of 100 of the largest newspapers have dropped by more than 40% over the past four years.
And the job losses matter because journalism is labor. Stories do not report themselves, no matter how many people in the comments section seem to think they do.
Pew Research Center found that U.S. newsroom employment dropped from about 114,000 jobs in 2008 to about 85,000 in 2020, a loss of around 30,000 jobs. Newspaper newsroom employment fell 57% during that period, from about 71,000 jobs to about 31,000. Radio newsroom employment also dropped 26%, from about 4,600 workers to about 3,400.
That means fewer people covering city council, courts, county commissions, school boards, local sports, business openings, public records, arrests, fires, floods, scandals, and the slow-moving government weirdness that never fits neatly into a press release.
The Audience Moved, Too
People did not stop wanting information. They changed where they got it.
Pew’s local news fact sheet shows that television is still the top preferred source for local news, but its lead has shrunk. In 2018, 41% of U.S. adults said they preferred television for local news. By 2025, that was 34%. Print newspapers fell from 13% to 8%. Meanwhile, news websites and apps rose from 23% to 28%, and social media rose from 15% to 20%.
Even when people still follow traditional outlets, they often do it digitally. Pew found that among adults who get news from local TV, only 56% primarily get it from the station on television in 2025, compared with 76% in 2018. For local daily newspapers, the shift is even sharper: 68% of those readers primarily get newspaper news online in 2025, compared with 43% in 2018.
So the local TV station may still matter. The newspaper may still matter. The radio station may still matter.
But the audience is no longer gathered neatly around the same delivery system.
Everybody is scattered across phones, apps, Facebook groups, YouTube, TikTok, newsletters, podcasts, streaming services, websites, alerts, and whatever app their cousin sent them a link to at 11:43 p.m.
That makes reaching people harder. And paying for the work harder still.
Radio and TV Didn’t Disappear. They Got Thinner.
In a lot of places, the local radio station is still on the air. The call letters still exist. The tower still stands. The commercials still say “right here in your community.”
But that does not always mean there is a full local staff sitting in the building.
Radio has seen years of consolidation, automation, syndicated programming, voice tracking, and shared operations. After the Telecommunications Act of 1996, national ownership limits changed, and a 2006 Future of Music Coalition report included in a Senate hearing record described dramatic ownership consolidation, including the finding that holdings by the ten largest radio companies increased almost fifteenfold from 1985 to 2005. The report argued that this reduced competition, diversity, and localism.
Local TV has had its own version of this. Stations can share news operations, centralize production, run similar stories across multiple stations, or operate under larger ownership groups. Pew noted in a 2014 report that consolidation-driven news sharing can sometimes keep news on the air, but critics argue it can reduce competition and diversity in local content. Pew also cited examples where shared operations led to layoffs or repeated content across stations.
That is the tricky part. Consolidation is not always cartoon-villain evil. Sometimes it keeps a struggling station alive. Sometimes it gives a small station access to better equipment or more resources.
But it can also mean fewer independent local voices.
And there is a difference between a station that is located in your community and one that is deeply of your community.
A satellite-fed show can tell you the hits. A voice-tracked announcer can sound polished. A regional news hub can fill a broadcast. But the old local magic was knowing which road floods first, which official never returns calls, which school rivalry still matters, and why everyone in town is mad about the stoplight by the Dairy Queen.
That knowledge comes from people on the ground.
Digital Advertising Changed the Whole Deal
Here is the part a lot of readers do not see.
In the old days, a local business bought an ad from a local media outlet because that outlet controlled access to a local audience.
Want to reach people in town? Buy the newspaper.
Want to reach morning commuters? Buy radio.
Want to reach families watching the evening news? Buy TV.
The advertiser knew what they were buying. The media company knew what it would be paid. There was a contract, a rate card, a schedule, and a human being named Linda calling to make sure the ad copy was approved by noon.
Digital advertising changed that.
Now advertisers can target people instead of places. A business can say, “Show this ad to women within 20 miles who are interested in furniture,” and the ad may follow those people across social media, apps, search, video, and random websites. The local news site may still have local readers, but it no longer has the same lock on the local advertising audience.
And the money is different.
Direct local ad sales usually pay better because the advertiser is buying a specific relationship with a specific local outlet. Programmatic ads — the automated ads that fill many website ad slots — usually pay much less. Google’s own News Initiative training says direct ads generally sell for $10 to $20 CPM, while programmatic ads range from $1 to $5 CPM. It also says direct ads typically earn two to three times more revenue than programmatic ads.
That’s the difference between a local business saying, “I want to support this site and reach this audience,” and an automated system saying, “Here is one available eyeball. Who bids a dollar?”
It also makes income unpredictable. A newspaper, radio station, or TV station used to know what a contract was worth. A website living on programmatic ads may not know what it will earn until after the traffic happens.
That is a terrible way to pay for labor-intensive reporting.
You cannot assign a reporter to spend three days digging through court records if the business plan is, “Maybe the ad robots will feel generous Thursday.”
We Trained People Not to Pay
For years, the internet taught people that information should be free.
Free email.
Free search.
Free social media.
Free news links.
Free videos.
Free recipes after scrolling past the author’s entire emotional relationship with soup.
But nothing is really free.
If you are not paying with money, you are often paying with attention, data, tracking, ads, or all of the above.
That does not mean every free site is bad. Free access matters. Not everybody can afford six subscriptions just to find out whether the boil advisory is still in effect.
But the “everything should be free” habit has consequences. Reporters still need paychecks. Photographers still need equipment. Editors still need time. Servers cost money. Public records cost money. Legal review costs money. Insurance costs money. Even the person posting the breaking news alert needs a chair, a computer, and probably too much coffee.
People sometimes say, “Why is local news so bad now?”
Well, because we took away the revenue, cut the staff, expected everything instantly, refused to pay for it, yelled at the people who did it, and then wondered why the building got quiet.
Maybe we do get what we pay for.
Or what we refuse to pay for.
The Rise of Local Creators Is Both Good and Complicated
Digital did not only destroy. It also opened doors.
A person with a phone can livestream a school board meeting. A local podcaster can interview candidates. A Facebook group can warn neighbors about a missing dog, a road closure, or a scam. A Substack writer can cover a niche no traditional outlet ever cared about. A TikTok creator can explain a local issue in two minutes and reach more people than a front-page story ever did.
That is real power.
Pew found that about 21% of U.S. adults regularly get news from social media news influencers, and local news consumption increasingly includes online forums, Facebook groups, blogs, local aggregators, and social media accounts.
That can be wonderful. It lets people tell their own stories. It gives communities a voice when legacy media misses them. It makes it harder for institutions to control the whole narrative.
But it also has risks.
An individual creator may not have an editor. Or a lawyer. Or a records researcher. Or someone saying, “Are we sure that’s the right John Smith?” Or someone reminding them that screenshots are not always the whole story. Or someone making them call the person they are about to criticize.
Traditional media can be biased, careless, arrogant, or flat-out wrong. Let’s not pretend otherwise. But at its best, it at least tries to have a process: verification, attribution, correction, separation of opinion from reporting, and some attempt at neutrality.
Online creators may have those standards. Some do. Some are excellent. Some work harder than newsrooms with ten times the budget.
Others are just one angry person with a ring light and a theory.
That is not the same thing.
Local News Also Held Communities Together
This is the part that gets missed in the business discussion.
Local media was not just headlines. It was connective tissue.
Birth announcements.
Obituaries.
Little League photos.
Honor rolls.
Court news.
Police logs.
Church dinners.
High school football.
Ribbon cuttings.
Election letters.
Storm coverage.
Council meetings.
Public notices.
The county fair.
That photo of a 102-year-old woman holding a birthday cake bigger than her head.
A lot of that was small news. But small news is how a community knows itself.
When local media shrinks, people do not just lose investigative reporting. They lose the everyday record of who they are.
The school board still meets.
The commissioners still vote.
The court cases still happen.
The zoning change still affects your road.
The factory still lays people off.
The grant still gets approved.
The lawsuit still gets filed.
But fewer people may know about it.
That creates a vacuum. And vacuums get filled.
Sometimes by good local creators.
Sometimes by rumor.
Sometimes by political pages.
Sometimes by police press releases with no follow-up.
Sometimes by gossip groups where the facts arrive wearing one shoe and carrying a casserole.
Sports Shows Where This Is Heading
Sports may seem separate from local news, but it shows the same larger shift.
For decades, TV bundled sports into cable and broadcast packages. Now more games are carved up among streaming platforms, league apps, cable channels, broadcast networks, and special sports subscriptions. AP-NORC found that many sports fans are stuck juggling multiple platforms, and about half of people who follow sports at least somewhat closely say they are dissatisfied with the cost of streaming and cable services they use.
That is the same pattern: content that used to feel broadly available becomes fragmented, targeted, and paywalled.
The fan gets more choice, but also more confusion.
The viewer can watch from anywhere, but only if they can figure out which app has the game, whether they need a subscription, whether the local blackout rules apply, and whether their smart TV app has decided to update itself into a coma.
Again, maybe we get what we pay for.
And sometimes we pay more just to find the thing.
So What Do We Do?
This is not a call to go back to 1987.
We are not bringing back the old classified section exactly as it was. We are not making everybody watch the 6 p.m. news at 6 p.m. We are not forcing teenagers to subscribe to the print edition so they can clip coupons and read the ag report.
Digital is here. And digital has done good things.
But we need to be honest about what is being lost.
If we want serious local coverage, somebody has to pay for it.
That might mean subscriptions.
Memberships.
Donations.
Local advertising.
Sponsorships.
Foundation support.
Public notices.
Events.
Merchandise.
Partnerships.
A little of everything.
And readers have to understand that sharing, liking, and commenting help, but they do not pay the electric bill by themselves.
Local businesses also have to understand something important: buying ads from local media is not the same as buying cheap impressions from a giant platform. When you buy local, you are not just renting eyeballs. You are helping support the information system your community depends on.
That sounds lofty, but it is also practical.
When the roads close, when the school levy is on the ballot, when the sheriff resigns, when the county budget gets ugly, when the plant opens or closes, when the water is unsafe, when a scam hits town, when a family loses everything in a fire — people look around and ask:
“Why isn’t somebody covering this?”
Somebody can.
But somebody has to still be there.
Digital didn’t kill local media because people stopped caring about local news.
People still care.
They care about crime. Weather. Schools. Roads. Taxes. Sports. Restaurants. Obituaries. Jobs. Rumors. Elections. Emergencies. Their neighbors. Their kids. Their town.
Digital killed the old bargain.
The old bargain was: local businesses paid local media to reach local people, and that money helped pay for local information.
The new bargain is murkier: people get information for free, platforms collect attention and data, advertisers chase individuals across the internet, and local outlets fight for scraps from systems they do not control.
We gained voices. We gained speed. We gained access.
We also lost reporters. We lost editors. We lost local ownership. We lost institutional memory. We lost some of the boring, necessary coverage that keeps communities from being run entirely by press releases, rumors, and whoever yells loudest online.
So maybe the question is not whether digital killed the radio star.
Maybe the question is this:
When the local media star is gone, who’s left to tell us what happened?