By Sanjana Mishra
The United States has a local journalism crisis, one that is only worsening. Almost 40% of all local newspapers have shut down since 2005, leaving around 50 million Americans with severely diminished access to news and civic information, according to the Medill School’s State of Local News Report 2025.
At the core of this crisis is the rise of ownership by private-equity firms and corporate chain owners, which are gutting local newspapers. While other factors, like the collapse of print advertising and the proliferation of digital platforms, have contributed to this crisis, those have been compounded by ownership that places profits above public service. Alden Global Capital and Gannett, in particular, are infamous for their predatory business behaviors, pushing and accelerating the destruction of local journalism.
This has very real consequences and demands urgent policy shifts. From declining voter participation rates and increased political corruption to the rise of so-called pink-slime websites, the challenge can seem hopeless. But there are a number of solutions we must work toward: nonprofit models, tax credits and investments in sustainable futures for local news.
The “Denver rebellion”
In April 2018, journalists and staff members at The Denver Post protested to express frustration with Alden Global Capital, the New York City-based private-equity firm that owns the publication. After mass cuts, a crisis steadily began to emerge — not just in the newsroom, but also within the communities they serve. The paper’s editorial board criticized Alden’s leaders for sucking the outlet dry and accused them of being “vulture capitalists.” The journalists’ protest became known as the “Denver rebellion” and led to the founding of The Colorado Sun, an independent digital news project, by 10 top Post editors and reporters.
To put it simply, when Google and Facebook began to soak up a large proportion of digital advertising revenues, newspapers started struggling. Large financial investors saw an opportunity for acquisition. Local papers, an essential pillar of American democracy, became cheap and easy targets — and that means there are now fewer people investigating wrongdoing, chasing down leads and exposing misconduct and corruption.
According to Medill’s 2025 report, the number of counties with no local news outlet has risen to 212. Meanwhile, another 1,525 counties have only a single remaining news outlet, typically a weekly paper. Roughly 50 million people have limited access to reliable local journalism. Since 2005, more than 250,000 newspaper jobs have vanished in the U.S., and more than a third of its papers have shuttered — and that means thousands of publications across the nation.
This crisis has a far more extensive scope than previously thought. Private equity has rapidly worsened the crisis. The death of local journalism is a result of the profit-seeking model that these firms use. Of course, all for-profit news outlets need to make money to survive, but chain owners demand a level of profitability that is incompatible with strong local news coverage. When these firms treat news outlets as targets to leech off, they lose their civic vitality and put democracy at risk.
What went wrong
Local newspapers have served as the connecting joints of civic engagement since Colonial times. For much of the 20th century, local daily and weekly papers operated within their specific markets as highly profitable operations. With a steady stream of revenue from classified ads and display advertising from department stores, banks and the like, papers operated comfortably. This model began to erode slowly in the 1990s due to the rise of cable television, then rapidly accelerated after 2000 with the emergence of the internet.
The most devastating blow came in the form of a breakdown in advertising. Craiglist, which launched in 1995, destroyed the classified ad market, which had previously provided a steady stream of revenue for newspapers. At the same time, major platforms like Google and Facebook dominated much of the digital advertising market, monopolizing what news outlets had hoped would be a future base of revenue. Newspaper ad revenue has dropped significantly, by around $40 billion over the past two decades, according to Rebuild Local News, with local digital ads going to Facebook and Google amounting to $42 billion.
The Medill Local News Initiative found in its 2024 report that 130 newspapers had closed in just the previous year, which brought the net loss of local newspapers since 2005 to more than 3,200; a year later, that estimate had risen to 3,500. At a rate of almost two and a half per week, this decay shows no signs of slowing.
These losses aren’t just happening at random — there’s an underlying pattern across different geographic areas and demographic groups. According to Medill’s reports, the populations in news deserts tend to skew disproportionately poor, rural and older. The median household income in a news-desert county is just over $57,000, as compared to the national average of $74,580. In addition, about 16% of the population in news-desert counties is below the poverty line, and only about 18% have a bachelor’s degree or higher.
In 2024, the media scholar Abby Youran Qin used spatial panel regressions to reveal that news media “follow the money and often move away from places where they are needed most — those with more racial-ethnic diversity and growing populations.” These communities stand to lose the most from the collapse of local news, and thus, we must take special care to work toward preservation.
Web traffic has also declined, according to Medill’s analysis of data from media analytics firm Comscore. This revealed that monthly page viewership and readership for the 100 largest newspapers decreased by more than 45% over the last four years. Google’s embrace of AI search has further dented web traffic to news outlets, as users are more likely to stay on Google than click through to the underlying source. Total newspaper employment fell by more than 70% from 2005 to 2024, and more than 270,000 newspaper jobs (a loss of over 75%) have disappeared.
Vulture capital moves in
When advertising revenue collapsed for print papers, that provided the perfect window for private-equity firms to slink into the news industry. These firms began acquiring struggling media groups at low prices. Their goal? Not to build those newsrooms back up, but to maximize short-term profits and extract every tiny droplet that they possibly could before shutting them down. The entire business model is predatory and gross, and two guilty parties stand out above the rest: Alden Global Capital and Gannett, which recently rebranded itself as USA Today Co., after its flagship newspaper.
Alden Global Capital is a Manhattan-based private-equity firm that owns more than 160 American papers, including the Chicago Tribune, The Denver Post, the Boston Herald, the Daily News of New York, and many more. After acquiring Tribune Publishing in 2021, Alden Global Capital has become the second-largest newspaper owner in the country by circulation. McKay Coppins described this predatory pattern in a 2021 investigative piece for The Atlantic. The reason that Alden’s business model is often described as “vulture capitalism” is that it focuses specifically on distressed newsrooms and extracts value by aggressively cutting costs, selling off real estate and moving savings into their own pockets rather than reinvesting funds into reporters or digital solutions.
From the Vallejo Times-Herald in the San Francisco Bay area (where staff was reduced to just one reporter covering the entire city of 120,000 people) to the Chicago Tribune (which lost a quarter of its staff to buyouts after Alden’s acquisition), the costs are not only immense, they’re absurd, as NPR reported in 2021. A 2018 study by researchers at the University of North Carolina found that Alden-owned newspapers cut staff at double the rate of their competitors. According to a 2023 study by the media scholars Erik Peterson and Johanna Dunaway, owners like Alden are “distinguished from others by their stated emphasis on maximizing profits without an accompanying commitment to journalism and the communities they are located in.”
The issue goes beyond just staffing cuts, though. After acquiring Tribune Publishing, Alden reportedly failed to pay rent for several of its leased buildings. Though it managed to negotiate 13 agreements, four newsrooms permanently closed: The Morning Call in Allentown, Pennsylvania; the Capital Gazette, of Annapolis, Maryland; the Orlando Sentinel; and the Daily News, a legendary tabloid in New York City. (Alden spun off the Daily News from Tribune and now operates it as a separate entity.) It wasn’t that Randall Smith, cofounder of Alden Global Capital, “couldn’t afford to pay — as noted, he has millions in personal assets — but he simply chose not to pay,” according to Julie Reynolds, a former Alden journalist who has been doggedly reporting for a number of years on how the firm has harmed the news business.
Despite its notoriety, Alden falls behind Gannett in terms of circulation. Owning hundreds of dailies and weeklies, including USA Today and the Detroit Free Press as well as multiple dailies in New England such as The Providence Journal and the Telegram & Gazette of Worcester, Gannett is the largest newspaper publisher in the U.S. In 2019, Gannett was merged into GateHouse Media, which took the Gannett (and now the USA Today Co.) name; with that acquisition, Gannett became the colossal publisher it is today. According to a 2023 NPR article, hundreds of journalists at two dozen Gannett-owned newspapers across seven states walked off the job to protest working conditions, low compensation and CEO Mike Reed’s generous compensation package of $11 million over the previous two years.
Gannett’s ownership structure differs from that of Alden and the two newspaper chains it owns, Tribune Publishing and MediaNews Group. Gannett is a publicly traded corportion with stock that is bought and sold on the New York Stock Exchange. But some of Gannett’s largest shareholders are private-equity firms or hedge funds such as Apollo Management Holdings, Two Seas Capital and Alta Fundamental Advisers, which means that it is very much affected by the private-equity ills that afflict local news.
When private equity and hedge funds take over, newsrooms decline faster than they do under family, local or publicly traded ownership. Peterson and Dunaway’s research shows that investment owners tend to eliminate hard-news roles, like general assignment and political reporters, first — the very same roles that are vital to holding local officials accountable.
Both Alden and Gannett got to this point by sticking to the same predatory pattern time and time again: cutting staff, hiking subscription prices and selling off real estate. These are all aimed at maximizing short-term cash grabs rather than building lasting solutions for local newsrooms.
Digital distress
Private-equity firms have only acted upon an already flawed system of distressed newspapers. As discussed earlier, the collapse of print advertising has been devastating. For a long time, papers operated in what is called a “two-sided market,” in which readers would flock to a paper for the news and advertisers would gain access to those readers’ eyeballs and attention. As scholars Simon P. Anderson Jean J. Gabszewicz wrote in 2006, “viewers are attracted by programming” and “advertising finances the programming.”
Then the internet permanently altered the media’s two-sided market, with social media and search engines scooping up much of the advertising revenues that had once gone to newspapers.
A decline in circulation has also made matters worse. The Pew Research Center reveals that attention to local news has significantly declined over the past decade, with just 21% of Americans in 2025 saying they follow it very closely, a major fall from 37% of Americans in 2016. Audiences’ reading habits are ever-shifting, especially younger consumers, and many have gotten used to accessing the news online for free. This has brought about new challenges related to audience engagement and retention, and it requires new and innovative solutions too.
These hurdles, while pressing, still don’t fully explain the extent to which local news is in danger. Peterson and Dunaway’s research showed that newspapers under family or community ownership declined at much slower rates than those that were bought by private equity firms. Typically, family-owned papers that face shrinking revenue slowly and thoughtfully reduce costs where needed while upholding their main values and mission to journalism. On the other hand, an investment fund that owns a newsroom often sees it as a short-term cash grab. The main deciding factor in a newsroom’s survival is whether its owner remains committed to journalism and serving the community.
Democracy matters
The consequences that private equity has on local news go beyond staffing cuts. Researchers led by Tess Haddock found a consistent link earlier this year between the decline of local papers and reduced civic engagement, which includes lower voter turnout and increased political polarization. As newsrooms close their doors, community members lose crucial access to information about their local government, eroding accountability from schools to law enforcement to health care. This only gives rise to a breeding ground for government corruption and inaction as well as the spread of misinformation on all ends of the political spectrum.
With reporters spread thin, that means reduced coverage of local politics, schools, municipal government and the like. In turn, fewer Americans know who their elected officials are, and election turnout has dropped. In 2009, scholars Sam Schulhofer-Wohl and Miguel Garrido found that following the Cincinnati Post’s closure at the end of 2007, fewer candidates ran for office, incumbents were more likely to win reelection, and voter turnout and campaign spending both fell. (The city continues to be served by a daily newspaper, The Cincinnati Enquirer, owned by USA Today Co.)
The Medill 2024 report discussed an increase in political polarization, a decrease in voter turnout, and a rise in incumbency advantage, all as a result of news deserts.
Government accountability has a direct relation to the survival of local journalism. A 2018 study from the University of Notre Dame found that government borrowing and spending increase when left unchecked, due to a “lack of scrutiny” from a paper’s “watchdog function.”
Another consequence of local news losses is the rise of what are called “pink slime” websites. Researchers at Columbia University’s Tow Center for Digital Journalism have identified networks of more than 400 partisan websites that are made to look like independent news sources. In actuality, these are political tools designed to spread disinformation and “manipulate public opinion by exploiting faith in local media” and gaping information vacuums.
These pink-slime sites typically post content that is generated through automation, not real reporting. While readership remains low, there is still cause for concern, should this type of content be used as propaganda, particularly around election periods.
What can we do?
Though our news-desert crisis seems daunting, we can still work toward potential solutions with actual results.
Medill’s reports spotlight an increase of more than 300 new startups across the U.S. within the past five years. These organizations take special care to focus on innovation and a commitment to their local communities. Another hurdle, though, is that most of these startup efforts are within urban and affluent suburban areas, which are least likely to be news deserts, leaving rural and low-income communities behind.
Many of the newer outlets have embraced the nonprofit model. The Baltimore Banner, with its revenue coming from a mix of subscriptions, advertising, events and philanthropy, is a prime example of how to do it right, especially in a metropolitan area. Outlets like ProPublica, whose Local Reporting Network supports and places investigative reporters, and Report for America, which sends journalists to report on underserved issues and communities for two- or three-year stints, offer innovative models that show how to build sustainable modern organizations.
In terms of policy, a significant proposal has been the federal Local Journalism Sustainability Act, a bipartisan bill that narrowly failed to pass Congress. The bill would have provided support for local news over the course of five years through a number of tax credits. And though help at the federal level seems unlikely in the current political climate, a number of states are embracing measures such as tax credits, reporting corps for underserved communities, and advertising by government agencies in local news outlets.
Throughout all the chaos, we cannot forget the communities that journalists serve. There is still much uncertainty about what the future of local news looks like, but efforts to tackle news deserts seem promising. Whether we take definitive action before irreversible damage is done remains to be seen.
Sanjana Mishra is a 2026 graduate of Northeastern University who majored in journalism and criminal justice.
