Reports of declining local news have become all too familiar. The crises in the news ecosystem are numerous: The funding model for local news has collapsed as advertising and eyeballs have migrated to online social media platforms. Digital platforms and partisan media outlets are enabling (not halting) the rise in misinformation and disinformation. Private equity companies, committed only to short-term profits, are purchasing and strip-mining even profitable local news outlets. As a result, the public’s trust in conventional (and rapidly disappearing) news outlets is declining rapidly. Meanwhile, these patterns of consumption and distrust of information sources are reflecting and contributing to our social and political divisions as digital platforms continue to expose people to disinformation and misinformation, with little progress in redressing these problems.

Since I published on the issues a few years ago, these trends have only continued and, indeed, accelerated. I argued then, and still believe, that the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment—including the Speech and Press Clauses—recognizes the functions of newsgathering and circulation as fundamental to the projects of self-government.

Practices that once sustained vibrant news gathering and distribution ecosystems have now been disrupted and are in jeopardy in the wake of the practices of social media platforms, the behaviors of private equity investors, and the choices made by media entities themselves. With a particular focus on local news, this chapter first sketches federal constitutional and governmental support of news gathering and circulation; then turns to current sources of disruption and potential constructive reforms; and finally identifies some promising developments and further questions that they present.

Affirmative Governmental Support

Many of the Constitution’s framers recognized the importance of free speech and the press to self-government and freedom from tyranny. In their writings and in their actions, James Madison, John Adams, Thomas Paine, George Washington, and Thomas Jefferson emphasized the vital importance of the freedoms of speech and of the press to democracy and freedom. The First Amendment’s freedoms provide a distinct bulwark against autocracy and a foundation for self-government by the people, which are key rationales for their protection.

The federal Constitution’s guarantees of free speech and press curb governmental restrictions, but do they also entail positive duties? Courts may not be well-positioned to articulate or enforce governmental duties affirmatively to assist free speech and press, but the Constitution is not only directed to courts. Those who swear allegiance to the Constitution and all who take seriously the survival of the government it established should understand constitutional commitments as obliging actions that respect and support both speech and the press. These duties could include taking steps to strengthen the viability and reliability of newsgathering and distribution, as demonstrated by the actions of the federal government from the start and through time.

The Press Clause is the only provision in the Constitution that explicitly protects a private industry. But in practice, the federal government throughout history has done more than simply shield the press from governmental restrictions. Congress established discounted postal rates for newspapers and the free exchange of newspapers between news printers and publishers. Subsequent governmental support shaped communication, including the sharing of news, through the telegraph, telephone, computer, and the internet. And the government constructed the system of broadcast licenses, the regulation of cable, the antitrust laws molding the communications industry, the Newspaper Preservation Act of 1970, the Freedom of Information Act, the Public Broadcasting System, and other federal policies. State and local governments have also supported news gathering and circulation.

The constitutional guarantees of free speech and free press are primarily justified by their support of democratic self-governance, yet a nonviable press poses a grave threat to Americans’ ability to engage in self-governance. The goal of safeguarding democracy through the existence of countervailing powers underlies both the separation of powers among the three federal branches and the division of power between the federal government and the states. The press and the private sector serve as yet another countervailing power. Moreover, state constitutions, many of which were drafted before the federal Constitution, embrace positive duties on government to support the press. The duty to take action to safeguard the press hence has roots in this constitutional rationale, as well as in the longstanding history of governmental support for and involvement in news technologies and practices. A variety of policies and laws that undergird the circulation of news (and the human enterprises making it possible) are therefore both consonant with, and even bolster, these constitutional principles.

Some may view the federal Constitution solely as a set of restrictions on federal governmental power, but that misunderstands the commitment, which was motivated by the failure of the limited-government conception of the Articles of Confederation, to create and maintain an effective government. How can there be effective self-government without access to news? And how can public and private power be held to account without workable journalism? These are the questions that the now undeniable crisis in the news world, especially in local news, urgently raises.

Causes and Results of the Declines in Local News Production

Since 2005, the United States has lost more than 2,900 newspapers, and as of 2023, it is losing them at an average of 2.5 a week. Related trends have left 200 communities with no local news coverage, while half of all local communities in the United States now have only one newspaper, and most of these are published just once a week. As local news rapidly loses audiences, newspapers and broadcasters in small cities and towns are merging or being sold to chains or private equity investors. These new owners pursue economic returns through cost reductions and restructuring.

Advertising revenues have followed people to digital platforms, whose owners and managers often choose not to invest in news production. This means they do not pay even for copyrighted news reports posted by users. It also means that they do not participate in what once was a virtuous circle where publishers used revenue from subscriptions and advertisements to support additional reporting. These trends especially decimate what might be called “local government accountability reporting,” such as reporting on the excessive reliance on fines and fees by Ferguson, Missouri, where the police shooting of Michael Brown, an unarmed Black man, triggered racial riots across the country. It turns out that the city of Ferguson had no daily newspaper, no news blog focused on local government, no community radio station, and no local public-access television. After the identification of lead in the water supply of Flint, Michigan, whistle-blower and public health expert Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha said to me, “Actually, we were lucky.” When I asked why, considering that the discovery of lead represented a major crisis of public health, law, and politics, her reply was unforgettable: “We have good local news. There are hundreds of Flint, Michigans out there without local news, so we don’t know about them.”

The news ecosystems in this country were never perfect. Many communities had little coverage and faced biases affecting what was covered and how stories were reported or missed. News outlets often have neglected covering politics and abuses of power in their reporting and too frequently only reflect the interests of certain segments of the community. In the 19th century, political parties sponsored local news, and it was not until the turn of the 20th century that journalists claimed to be objective. Yet the loss of local journalism has palpable costs to democracy and community well-being. Communities lacking local news have higher rates of public and private corruption, as well as lower voter turnout than those with a steady supply of local news.

There is a certain irony that it is local journalism facing the starkest challenges, because it has been among the most trusted sources of news—far more than national outlets. Indeed, regions that lose local news become more partisan. Perhaps the lower partisan divisions in local communities reflect how local politics and local issues tend to be less partisan and divisive than national politics. News organizations not only reflect but also help to constitute a “public,” a community of interest. Journalists invite people to identify with a community and also stand in for the polity in holding those in power accountable. When the press loses its viability, when it disappears, or when trust in it fades, then social trust and the sense of participation in a shared community also dissipate. Understanding why local news providers are disappearing thus matters for larger issues of social trust and democracy’s future, and the following discussion explores contributing factors.

Actions by owners

Some owners of media, such as the Koch brothers and the Murdoch family, have used their position to advance particular ideologies affecting the journalistic pursuits of facts and truth. Consolidation of ownership in broadcasting—Sinclair, as of 2024, owns 185 stations—has produced reductions in local coverage and perhaps diminished diversity in viewpoints. Private equity companies buy local news outlets and typically proceed to cut reporters, original stories, and local coverage.

Often, the entities are actually in the black, but the new owners strip-mine them, squeezing profits from subscriptions and sales while destroying their ongoing viability.

A few notable news enterprises have found wealthy investors who treat the enterprises in part as philanthropies, with commitments to editorial independence, but still seek to make them financially going concerns even if that means lay-offs. The chief examples are Jeff Bezos and The Washington Post and Patrick Soon-Shiong and the L.A. Times, who both pursued a civic mission but, over time, appear to be losing the willingness to foot the bills.

Migration of advertising dollars to social media

The elephant in the room is the devastation to the business model of private news enterprises posed by social media platforms. It probably started with Craigslist: The reliable revenue source of local advertising shifted from local media to online networks. Social media sites have, over time, drawn the lion’s share of advertising revenues while taking advantage of the technology to collect detailed data about the consumers and to target ads based on that data. The platforms also offer unlimited space, permitting videos and copy, along with metrics available to the sponsoring companies at any time. The data platforms—including Amazon, Google, Netflix, YouTube, Facebook (Meta), and TikTok—assemble audiences far larger than any local news outlet ever could. Even local retailers send their advertising to the platforms to follow the attention of consumers.

Digital technologies accelerate trends pursued by broadcasting and cable businesses: “narrowcasting,” which focuses only on specific segments of potential viewers and users. Following advice from Roger Ailes, Rupert Murdoch created Fox Media as an enterprise that unabashedly serves as the cheerleader and propaganda machine for one political party rather than seeking to serve diverse audiences. Digital media has further refined narrowcasting and unbundled content. Rather than combining political news with sports, recipes, weather, and crossword puzzles, digital media allows consumers to bypass human editors, which disintegrates traditional media enterprises. Legacy media companies were slow to adapt, and when they did, they too often gave their content away, which contributed to the expectation that content could be found online for free. Advertising dollars shifted from newspapers and magazines to social media and digital search platforms. These platforms target people based on the data about their prior uses, which reveals their interests. This shift has decimated cross-subsidies and serendipity as features of the information ecosystem.

Legal treatment and practices of digital media

Online interactive networks invite people to participate in peer-to-peer communications and to access businesses, entertainment, and news sources with no fee other than sharing their personal data. Through these platforms, users can connect with friends and family, build larger social and professional networks, and find information. These platforms offer users the ability to post and exchange information, photographs, and videos, as well as to become active producers, not just consumers, in the sharing networks.

Individuals regularly embed copyrighted materials (and, perhaps with more legal safety, post links to the digital materials they find online), including copyrighted journalism. In practice, the platform companies do little to enforce copyrights held by the original creators of the materials, and the burden falls on the creators who are not well-situated to monitor global social media networks. In addition, copyright laws have complex exceptions, and the rules vary across jurisdictions. In the United States, a further complication is the shield from liability Congress created for social media companies through Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. That provision also protects social media companies from liability for falsehoods, defamation, and other legal vulnerabilities faced by conventional media companies.

At the same time, social media platforms work with algorithms designed to maximize people’s “engagement,” which boosts material that elicits outrage and polarization, including misinformation and disinformation. The algorithms select and amplify materials while seeking to optimize the time people spend online and, hence, the number of ads they see. And outrage fuels “virality,” or massive spread, which in turn increases profits. But the casualties are public trust in news, individual thought, the health of the polity, and even individuals’ health (due to misinformation and distrust related to health news).

Potential Responses

Policymakers can pursue several kinds of responses. The first approach would tackle the forces undermining the viability of local news by holding social media platform companies to the standards applied to responsible actors and by protecting the companies’ readers and users. The second would bolster existing local news gatherers and providers, as well as nurture potential ones, while also cultivating the public’s demands and taste for their efforts. The third approach would promote innovations in business models for local news, in newsgathering and dissemination, and in the institutional arrangements affecting the news ecosystem.

Responsibilities of social media companies

Amazon, Alphabet, and Meta, which operate social media activities, are among the companies with the largest market valuations in history. They can and should be held to the same duties that apply to other companies, including paying for the use of copyrighted materials and meeting consumer protection responsibilities, such as guarding against fraud and defamation. Efforts to ensure such payments are already underway in other countries. For example, Canada’s Online News Act, adopted in 2022, and Australia’s News Media Bargaining Code, passed in 2021, are policies keyed to the negotiations between journalism entities and tech platforms. These laws aim to establish a bargaining code that requires social media companies to compensate news organizations for the use of content that they produce.

Tech companies resist efforts to hold them accountable, and in the United States, they successfully lobbied for and retained legal insulation from liability on their side. That legal insulation—provided in Section 230 of the Communication Decency Act—once could be justified as protection for fledging enterprises in the early days of the internet. That justification no longer makes sense, given the enormous success of large platform companies. Hence, Congress should amend the statutory immunity of platforms from legal liability. If individual litigation to enforce laws imposing liability are inadequate or inefficient, legislative reform should make such duties clear and enforceable or condition the immunity on their fulfillment. Alternatively, Congress could tax digital ads to support local journalism, which would place responsibility on critical activities underlying the financial challenges faced by local news outlets. Currently, tech companies externalize the effects of their activities, but the government could use taxation to place the responsibilities on the shoulders of the internet companies as opposed to the community at large.

Protect users and consumers

In addition to enforcing terms of service agreements and consumer protection laws, new laws could protect digital media users from some of the platform companies’ detrimental effects on local news without jeopardizing free speech. Other potential reforms could shift power to users of digital media by requiring transparency and explanations of the algorithms companies use to select content or by putting content curation in the hands of users. A thoughtful proposal along these lines would demand that internet companies permit users to install “middleware,” or software that gives users more control over content selection and moderation, thus unbundling editorial control and the other functions of the social media platforms.

Congress has required broadcast and cable companies to carry local news, so might social media companies have similar duties? The immediate objection to this proposal is that the scarcity of the airwaves justified such regulations of broadcasting. Yet the Supreme Court also upheld “must-carry” requirements on cable companies, despite the lack of scarcity, because it recognized the government’s compelling interest in ensuring state and local content and public media options. If governments lack the ability to impose similar duties on social media companies, perhaps some inducements—such as conditioning Section 230 immunity on such duties—could be enacted.

Increasing support for local news by amplifying both supply and demand

Financial support for local news can be increased through philanthropy. This is the strategy adopted by a coalition of foundations forming the “Press Forward” initiative. Committing $500 million nationwide with a plan to raise another $500 million for local and regional efforts, Press Forward is devoted to strengthening trusted local newsrooms, improving the infrastructure for producing and disseminating local news, redressing inequities in coverage and practices, and developing policies to expand access to local news and information. Converting for-profit news organizations to nonprofit status can open avenues for support by encouraging donations by individuals in addition to large-scale support from philanthropies. In addition, for-profit news organizations can establish affiliated foundations for support.

The government can also support the news ecosystem through tax exemptions for nonprofit organizations and favorable tax treatment for donations. Tax exemptions for philanthropic aid already support nonprofit news operations, including ProPublica and other media watchdogs that often engage in reporting that involves expensive big-data analyses. The government should preserve and expand tax deductions for such contributions. The Local News Sustainability Act, which is currently pending in Congress, would go further and allow tax deductions for individuals who take out subscriptions to local media outlets and for businesses that take out ads in local media outlets. It would also exempt local media hires of journalists from payroll taxes. In these ways, government support works through intermediary organizations and individuals, which helps to insulate the editorial judgments from government influence. Similarly, the government can impose requirements on the delivery systems, remote from decisions about what to cover and how. The United States government, for example, has required telecommunications companies to provide universal service, and the government itself has subsidized broadband where individuals and communities cannot afford it.

Strengthening local news through direct government support provides a parallel avenue, although this raises risks of government control and influence. For example, Native Nations have long provided direct aid to their local news outlets. Government licenses for broadcasting are also a form of subsidy, given that the government only charges nominal fees for the rights to use the scarce good of public airway frequencies. To strengthen local news coverage, the Federal Communications Commission has proposed a rule that would give priority and expedited license renewals to local stations that provide at a minimum three hours of local programming. (One advocacy organization endorses the proposal but wants the minimum raised to ten hours.) In the past, licenses predicated on the scarcity of airwaves included conditions that the broadcasters had a duty of public interest coverage. Yet, with the advent of digital delivery systems, that predicate is gone. Instead, the scarcity to justify government regulation today may be the limitations of human attention.

Although it should never entirely crowd out privately funded media, public media created for public purposes helps meet crucial needs for an “information commons” and for competition with private companies, which are incentivized by profit maximization. Surveys have rated public media as the most or among the most trustworthy news organizations for many years. Public media—including websites, podcasts, documentaries, and daily news reports—can make particular differences in addressing holes created by private actors, such as local news deserts. Further bolstering of public media would involve adjustment of rules regarding underwriting by private sources and revision of the Copyright Act’s treatment of public media to reflect new distribution platforms.

Growing the public demand for reliable news is also important. Media education can equip people to become informed and aware consumers of media of all sorts, including the risks and practices of digital media. Digital media literacy is associated with greater political engagement and with exposure to diverse viewpoints. Teaching members of the public how to distinguish user-generated content or stories exchanged by friends from professionally created or vetted material would help users identify and assess the source and reliability of the information they encounter online.

Problems with subsidies by the government and by philanthropy

Some federal and state initiatives propose incentivizing financial support for local outlets that hire new journalists, as well as incentives for individuals to subscribe to, and businesses to advertise with, local news entities. For instance, New York State has committed $90 million to support local news. Yet both private philanthropies and governments seeking to boost local news through financial support face two immediate challenges. First, they must determine who or what should be eligible. For example, should a solo blogger qualify? And how can they exclude fake or entirely partisan entities? Second, they must ensure that the news enterprise can maintain its editorial independence and avoid the risks of “capture” or of editorial bias in favor of the funding sources.

These questions expose serious problems with giving the government the power to identify who is and who is not a journalist for purposes of funding; in fact, giving this task to philanthropy is also a problematic grant of power and potential curtailment of free speech. Indeed, the very fact of governmental subsidies can undermine the perception and reality of press independence and presents a frustrating paradox: With public funding, the perception of independence, and thus the public’s trust, in the news would be further ruptured; yet without public funding, the crucial function of the press holding the government accountable is vitiated.

Potentially promising solutions to identifying who should count as a journalist for purposes of eligibility for funding could come from shifting the selection process to peers or independent private entities. Peer-operated accreditation processes already operate in the academic sphere; the European Union hosts a press council to strengthen self-regulation and journalistic ethics; and guidelines can commit to plural and diverse ownership, management, and editorial judgments. These examples suggest that the methods for identifying who should be eligible for public or private support can be separated from the funder while simultaneously strengthening journalistic norms.

To guard against the danger of the government controlling the media it funds, the United States, Great Britain, and other nations have established mechanisms to minimize government influence on public media outlets. A royal charter in Britain established the BBC as an independent entity, making it a quasi-autonomous non-governmental entity. Criticisms of bias in the BBC’s coverage arise but interestingly, the critiques themselves reflect contrasting and conflicting viewpoints. Because its level of financial support was fixed from the start and tied to license feeds attached to television and radio sets, the BBC has been spared the difficulties of needing to seek renewed government support through the politicized legislative process. Yet, as new generations rely on digital devices, this insulation is under pressure, and new funding models are under review.

To support its public media, the United States created an intermediary entity, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which distributes federal dollars to local public media, including more than 1,000 locally managed radio stations and 360 locally managed television broadcasters. Those entities, in turn, seek and receive funding from varied sources, including local donors and philanthropies, state and local governments, and business sponsorships. But technological and economic changes are also threatening this funding model. If this chapter’s analysis of the risks from losing journalism is correct, the nation must pursue new funding approaches and creative ways to guard against distortion.

These funding issues affect the supply of public media, but efforts to boost the demand for quality local news are no less important.

Further innovations to address the local news crisis

By definition, local news does not scale large enough to generate national advertising support, so further innovations are needed. Students in colleges and even high schools already provide valuable coverage of local issues and events. Schools could support these efforts through their own resources, philanthropy, and government subsidies to their institutions. For example, Miami University decided to dedicate part of its student newspaper to local news after a local outlet went out of business. Another potential solution is to deploy artificial intelligence tools to issue reports of local government meetings, which would leave more time for the remaining journalists to do investigative work. Such efforts, however, are controversial due to questions about the reliability of the tools and concerns about threatening the employment of human journalists.

Some press advocates propose constructing shared infrastructures for civic news functions and shared “back office” operations for diverse local enterprises. Experiments using short message services (SMS) can supply local information based on people’s indicated interests. However, several questions remain: What durable sources of funding can we secure, and how can we ensure diverse sources of news? What measures can we implement to guard against floods of disinformation and misinformation or the increasing proliferation of different information worlds? Focusing on the local news problem may offer a more tractable approach and allow us to build on the sources of trust that remain in this era of distrust.

Reflections

Alarm about diminishing local news operations has begun to stimulate responses. Philanthropies, governments, and innovators in business and technology are taking action, but it is too soon to tell whether the results will sustainably strengthen reliable and abundant sources of local news in the United States. Failure, however, risks democratic governance and trust, increased public and private corruption, and jeopardy to the health of individuals and communities.

Longstanding traditions of governmental and private investments in newsgathering and reporting offer legal and practical foundations for new reforms, but the challenges to local news in an age of large-scale digital communications require innovation, persistence, and care.