Disappearing local news creates economic development challenges and prompts community-led solutions
There is a national conversation underway about the decline of local news outlets across the country, led by First Amendment advocates, news organizations, journalism associations and academics. The numbers are stark: according to Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, the U.S. has lost roughly 40% of its newspapers since 2005, more than 3,500 papers in total and continues to lose about 2.5 each week. The consequences are real. When a community loses its local paper, voter turnout drops, government transparency declines and accountability suffers. Heartland Forward is working with communities across the middle of the country to identify places working to flip this narrative. Through innovation and collaboration, solutions-oriented leaders are working to give residents better access to information and stories about their communities.
A June 2026 report from Rebuild Local News and the University of Illinois Chicago found that the local news shortage costs American communities roughly $1.1 billion a year in higher municipal borrowing costs alone. As Matthew Baker, research director at Rebuild Local News and the report’s lead author, put it, “The national price tag is striking, but the state-by-state numbers make the impact unmistakable. They show that news deserts aren’t just a civic concern; they carry real financial costs for communities across the country.”
If the impact is economic, the conversation should include the voices best positioned to speak to it: economic developers, local officials, chambers of commerce and local employers, the people working day in and day out to build and strengthen their local economies.
The Center for Investment Readiness‘s (CIR) ongoing conversations with local economic development professionals are surfacing an aligned but closer-to-the-ground perspective: local news and information is vital civic infrastructure that heartland communities rely on to build and strengthen their local economies.
To set the table on the data: communities can only fill gaps or address challenges they can see clearly, and seeing clearly is largely the work of trusted local news. According to Ad Fontes Media, which has rated thousands of news outlets for reliability and bias, local news is less biased and more trusted than any other class of news in America. It is also, conversely, the kind of news disappearing the fastest. Northwestern’s Medill State of Local News project tracks those closures county by county, and when the CIR team ran an analysis on top of those numbers, they found that more than 60% of America’s news deserts are in the heartland.
What we kept hearing across our cohort communities was a version of the same challenge. When the local newsroom thins out, the direct line of communication on local development or supporting the business community becomes frayed. Anonymous Facebook groups and self-styled “social influencers” become the loudest voices on civic issues. Audiences sort themselves into tighter information silos. And the people working to grow a local economy find themselves competing with rumor and speculation to explain a tax referendum, a new development project or a manufacturing investment to the very job seekers hoping for future employment opportunities.
To work around it, CIR community leaders described stitching together whatever trusted channels they still have. In addition to business attraction and retention, organizations are building their own social media accounts and email lists. Local radio, which remains a real force in many heartland communities, especially for older audiences. Direct relationships with major employers, who can put information in front of large numbers of working-age residents through internal newsletters and all-staff meetings. Recurring chamber columns reprinted in the weekly paper or read on-air. Longtime trusted community voices: the bankers, longtime business owners, agriculture leaders and faith leaders who can vouch for a project in conversations the chamber can’t reach on its own. Each of these channels does part of the job. None of them, on its own, replaces what a strong local newsroom did at scale.
Amy Kauffman, executive director of the MoKan Partnership in Southwest Missouri, offered a different angle on what’s still working. Most local information in her region now moves through Facebook, she says, with weather and sports drawing the most engagement. Beyond local news outlets, the pull is also toward the person, not the outlet. When the region’s longtime television meteorologist began posting weather on his own social accounts, his audience followed him there. During recent tornado warnings, Kauffman says, residents turned to his Facebook page and website rather than traditional news sources.
That last observation turned into a thread we kept pulling, because it’s also where we found some of the most promising community-built solutions. Across the heartland, when a local news thins out or disappears, residents are building something to fill the space.
In Lawrence County, Tennessee, a same need for hyper-local information began with the weather. Ben Luna launched Tennessee Valley Weather after his home was impacted by a pair of EF-1 tornados without warning in February of 2020.
“Being in a more rural area should never mean settling for less in quality, presentation or capability,” Luna said. “From the beginning, our goal has been to serve our communities with excellence and to provide coverage that is trusted, timely and professional.”
Since then the team has won multiple awards, including two national and launched 43 TV to cover local sports and news. They also produce original podcasts distributed on Roku and Apple. Tennessee Valley Weather is also a founding affiliate of the National Weather Network. The network includes 16-affiliate digital weather channels across twelve states.
“Local says it all,” Luna said. “People are more likely to trust someone they see at the grocery store, at church or at a local high school ballgame. On the other side of the screen, being local means we understand this region because we live here, work here, worship here and serve here.”
And in Hutchinson, Kansas, then sixteen-year-old Michael Glenn “saved his town from becoming a news desert,” according to Editor & Publisher, a news source that tracks trends in journalism. Coverage from the city’s once-Pulitzer-winning local paper was thinning out. So Glenn started The Hutchinson Tribune from his laptop, recruited a small team of reporters and began publishing up to five local stories a day.
These are each stories of innovation, of local community members meeting their community’s need for trusted local information and there are more like them across the heartland. When communities have access to trusted local information, they can problem-solve, collaborate and build their communities.