By Bill Bernardoni
Papers, radio stations, and TV newsrooms keep thinning local coverage to save money, and Medill’s new numbers show where that ends. People will still pay for local news. They won’t pay for a version written from somewhere else.
Back in April, I wrote about my hometown paper, The Times in Ottawa, Illinois. Ottawa’s a decent-sized town about an hour outside Chicago, and the paper used to be strong. Several years ago it was bought out and folded into a regional model under Shaw Media. Today, as far as I’m aware, there isn’t one full-time reporter covering Ottawa. What’s left still looks like local news. It just doesn’t feel like it.
That gap is the whole story.
People Buy What Feels Like Theirs
My argument in that April piece was that the industry was answering the wrong question. CBS News Radio had just announced it was shutting down, and most people read it as one more legacy model dying. I didn’t buy that. Syndication still works. Local news still works. What was breaking was the structure around them.
Here’s the plain version. People don’t subscribe to a paper out of charity, or keep a local station on just because it’s on the dial. They pay attention, and pay money, for something they can’t get anywhere else: what happened in their town, from somebody who was actually there that they trusted.
That means a reporter at the school board meeting, the Friday night game, the zoning fight. A news voice on the radio who knows how to pronounce the street names. Someone everyone knows. That presence is the product.
A regional hub can’t deliver that. A desk in suburban Chicago, or some other distant metro, can rewrite a press release and fill the page or the newscast. But readers and listeners can tell the difference. When coverage stops sounding like their town, they stop buying. Subscriptions lapse. The station gets switched off. Advertisers follow the audience out.
Then the owner decides local coverage doesn’t pay and cuts more. But those cuts are why people have stopped buying.
Quality and local presence aren’t a nice extra on top of the business. They are the entire business.
Then CBS News Radio went dark for good on May 22. The numbers since show where that road ends.
What the Numbers Say Now
In October, Northwestern’s Medill School put national numbers on it. Its State of Local News report, as Poynter summarized it, counted 170 newspapers closed or merged in the past year, up from 136 the year before. The number of news-desert counties jumped by 26, the biggest one-year increase in at least five years. Nearly 47 million Americans now live in a news desert or in a county with just one local source left.
The report named two main drivers: a merger of six small papers in Kansas, and the Paddock closures here in Illinois. In early June, with little warning, Paddock stopped printing at least 13 of its 20 Illinois newspapers, including the Girard Gazette, which had been publishing since 1879. Five counties were left with no locally based professional news. Readers got a final letter.
Those two were big enough to move a national number. The same thing happens one paper and one station at a time almost everywhere.
I’ll Own What I Missed
I have to be honest. In April I put most of the blame on consolidation. Medill’s researchers say this year’s closures mostly came from elsewhere.
The papers most at risk, they found, are the small independents, the family-owned papers, and midsize private chains like Paddock. The big chains have cash to experiment, and hyperlocal startups are lean enough to change course. “But the smaller regional papers in the middle,” said Zachary Metzger, who leads the project, “they’re at this really razor-thin level of precarity financially.”
Newsprint went up roughly 18% in a year, about five times inflation, according to Northwestern’s Tim Franklin. Paddock’s letter to subscribers cited “rising prices for gas, paper, and other important raw materials.” Metzger also noted that when an owner retires or dies without a successor, those papers tend to close fast, before the community can organize to save them.
So no, consolidation didn’t kill the Girard Gazette. Nobody wanted it badly enough to consolidate it.
That still doesn’t let the industry off the hook. The regional model I wrote about in April and this year’s closures are one story at two stages. Cut the local reporters, and the paper or station is worth less. Cut again, and eventually the only decision left is whether to keep the presses running or the transmitter on.
Washington’s Answer Is Still Scale
Meanwhile, Washington’s answer is more consolidation. In March the FCC waived the 39% national household cap so it could approve Nexstar–Tegna. In August it voted to get rid of the cap entirely, and it released the order on Oct. 1. Cable and public-interest groups have asked for a stay and say they’ll go to court.
I’ll give the owners their due. I’ve been in the building when these decisions get made. Newsrooms are expensive. A bigger group can spread equipment, talent, and technology across more markets. Sometimes that’s what keeps a newsroom open.
But look at where those newsrooms are. Medill’s first count of local TV found that three-quarters of the country’s 678 TV newsrooms are owned by 10 companies, and 95% of them sit in metro areas. Exactly one county that started out classified as a news desert had a TV newsroom. Franklin put it plainly: “Are people in news deserts watching TV news from cities? Yes. Do they see their communities covered? By and large, no.”
On Oct. 22, Scripps CEO Adam Symson defended layoffs and a newsroom restructuring built around inter-station sharing and AI, saying viewing hours on its 24-hour local streams are up 23%, a figure TheDesk couldn’t verify. At some stations, it reported, local leaders and anchors were cut, and recorded packages are strung together into 30-minute newscasts. Symson called the cuts “wrenching.”
I believe the decisions are hard. But you can grow streaming minutes and still lose the thing that made local news local: a familiar person who lives there and knows which questions to ask. Scale works when the product should be the same everywhere. News shouldn’t. Radio has run the same play for years: one voice reading news for towns it never visits. A bigger group, TV or radio, isn’t sending anybody to the county board meeting.
Anger Saved Some Stations. It Won’t Keep Them.
The other recent answer is emergency money. After Congress pulled federal funding from public broadcasting in 2025, listeners did what the industry started calling “rage giving.” Per Medill reporting published by Poynter, revenue rose an average of 44% at 170 stations surveyed. Good.
But the same reporting counted about 550 public-media layoffs and a 16% drop in new donors in July, the first decline since the cuts. One analyst called the crisis “just delayed.”
People will rescue a station once. They’ll keep paying for it only if it’s part of their week, and it’s only part of their week if it sounds like home.
Illinois Requires Notice Before a Paper Is Sold. Not Before It Closes.
Springfield tried to get ahead of this. The Strengthening Community Media Act, in effect since Jan. 1, 2025, says a local news organization can’t be sold without 120 days’ written notice to its employees, the state, the county, and Illinois nonprofits that buy news outlets. Paddock filed that notice when it agreed to sell the Daily Herald to Alden-owned Tribune Publishing.
The law says nothing about closures, as Medill’s Local News Initiative pointed out. So the suburban flagship got a 120-day window, and century-old weeklies downstate got a goodbye on the front page.
I’m not for forcing anybody to keep a money-losing paper open. But a closure notice costs almost nothing and gives a town a few months to find a buyer or a nonprofit. Given how fast Medill says these papers fold, those months matter. Lawmakers from both parties ought to agree on that.
Working Together Isn’t the Same as Consolidating
On Oct. 21, the New York Times described how Alaska’s journalists are joining forces to cover this year’s midterms. The state is huge, staffs are small, and nobody can afford duplicate work.
That’s the opposite of a regional hub ordered from a corporate office. Each newsroom keeps its own identity and audience, and the local outlets chose to cooperate. I’ve seen it in syndication: a show can travel to dozens of markets and still sound like it belongs to each station, as long as somebody local decides what that community hears.
Any region could copy that tomorrow. The surviving weeklies, local radio stations, and independent newsletters in downstate Illinois don’t need a merger. They need a reason to talk to each other.
Who Rebuilds It
In April I said the way forward looked leaner: fewer layers between reporters and their audience, and direct distribution through a website, a podcast, or a newsletter people actually open. In a growing number of counties there’s no structure left to fix. Somebody has to start over.
Look at last week. On Oct. 23, Toledo’s Blade, founded in 1835, told the state of Ohio it will stop publishing Dec. 31 and lay off 116 people unless a buyer turns up. The day before, Oregon’s Cottage Grove Sentinel set its final issue for Oct. 28, after 137 years. Cindy Weeldreyer, who has reported there since 1990, blamed the ownership churn: “I can’t even count how many media companies bought the Sentinel and sold it again.” She’s already restarting a weekly community e-newsletter and recruiting for a successor paper in early 2027. The plan for what comes next came from someone who lives there, not a company.
I also said in April that rebuilding is harder than scaling. Consolidation looks like action. Rebuilding one town at a time doesn’t make much of a press release. It’s still the only version I’ve seen work.
The Bottom Line
In April, I said CBS News Radio was the signal. This year was the result: 170 papers gone or merged, 26 more news-desert counties, and TV newsrooms clustered in the cities.
The model still works. People still want to know what their county board did last night, and they’ll pay for a paper or keep a station on to find out, as long as somebody local was in the room.
But nobody from Chicago or Washington is coming to rebuild it for them. It’s going to be somebody who lives there.
Bill Bernardoni is the founder of Bernardoni Media & Marketing in Ottawa, Illinois, and co-host of America at 250: Due Diligence with former Voice of America White House bureau chief Steve Herman.
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