The U.S. has seen 127 newspaper closings in the last year, adding to the more than 1,500 counties with a combined 55 million residents that have no or only one source of local news.

The striking finding is one of many fresh statistics in the annual State of Local News Report, released Wednesday by the Medill School at Northwestern University. The report chronicles positive developments, too, such as the addition of 81 digital news startups (net after closings) and increasingly robust public media local news efforts.

It also identified, in a new measurement, 740 nationally networked local sites like Patch, Axios Local and States Newsroom. States Newsroom has 39 offices and has hit a goal of providing coverage in all 50 states.

Senior associate dean Tim Franklin, who oversees Medill’s local news initiatives, cautioned in an interview that the numbers don’t really suggest gains will outpace losses any time soon. The 81 startups included 30 newspapers converting to digital only, Franklin said, and a high churn rate of failure in new ventures drags down the impact.

The project maintains a “watch list,” which has grown to 279 counties this year, of areas likely to lose their few remaining news resources and become news deserts.

“I particularly worry about rural counties,” Franklin said. “There is not the capital to support local news, and advertising and audience are weak. … So we increasingly separate into news haves (in cities and suburbs) and news have-nots.”

While the financial challenges of newspapers have been well-chronicled, the report draws on Bureau of Labor Statistics data for an eye-popping estimate that 7,000 newspaper jobs — about a third of them in newsrooms — were lost in calendar year 2023.

Why was last year so punishing? Medill research associate Zach Metzger, who directed the report for the first time after its originator, Penny Abernathy, retired, offered several explanations:

• Federal pandemic subsidies of employment in 2021 and 2022 kept job numbers high at the many newspapers that received the aid. After that help expired, it became easier to save on expenses by letting people go.
• Paid digital subscriptions grew during the pandemic due to intense demand for local information. Papers had hoped to hold that audience, but retention fell short of their goals.
• Economizing has frequently included outsourcing printing and closing pressrooms. More recently, papers have been shutting down their distribution departments, outsourcing delivery to the U.S. Postal Service. Both trends cut away large numbers of non-news jobs.
• Audience building has been especially challenging for several years as the big digital players, led by Meta/Facebook, reduce story referrals.

Beginning with Abernathy 15 years ago, when she was at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, the report has been especially valuable in the painstaking task of gathering data that had been reported piecemeal, if at all.

Among other noteworthy findings this year:

• The local news sector does have 7,900 outlets tracked in the project’s database. Those include 630 standalone digital sites, 224 public broadcasting stations and 680 ethnic media outlets. There are still roughly 1,000 newspapers classified as dailies, but only a third of those print all seven days of the week.
• Despite the difficulties of the newspaper business, there is a strong group of buyers — as well as those looking to get out. Mergers and acquisitions were up 43% year to year. The mix has changed, though. with little-known Carpenter Media Group as the biggest buyer, and little-known CherryRoad Media as another. The era of Gannett or Alden Global Capital gobbling up independent or small chain papers appears to be over. Gannett is now a net seller, the report found.
• The report points to the importance of an expanding philanthropic sector, with the qualifier that 97% of grants and 99% of the overall money goes to metropolitan areas. While proposals for federal assistance are stalled, a positive is that more states are implementing government subsidies on their own.

The final part of the 31-page report highlights “bright spots” at established and newer outlets, positioned for success in the news economy of the 21st century, along with encouraging launches. Among the latter is The Plumas Sun, serving a small county in the Sierra Nevada region of northeastern California. When the established Plumas News shut down in the summer of 2023 after the pandemic and wildfires, a citizen group got the digital-only Sun up and running within a month.

The report doesn’t offer a sweeping conclusion. Mine would be a version of futurist Clay Shirky’s thesis that the old order of things in the news business declines precipitously well before a new order of things emerges. He had the decline part right, as in this 2012 essay; and an encouraging set of alternative news outlets is emerging — but it’s slow getting here.

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• We are becoming a nation of local news haves and have nots