This week in community building — Issue 88

The local news crisis will be solved one community at a time

By Ellen Clegg & Dan Kennedy, NiemanLab
Local journalism is in crisis. “America’s local news has reached its death spiral phase” proclaimed the Columbia Journalism Review in 2018. Two years later, an oft-cited study out of the University of North Carolina found that some 2,100 community newspapers had ceased publishing since 2004, leaving the country with large swaths of “news deserts” — areas that are unserved by any local news source.