Last fall, I set out to see whether news deserts, towns that used to have local coverage but no more, have a counterpart — relatively media-rich communities that continue to draw still more digital-only news sites.
Talking to a dozen well-positioned observers of declines and startups, the consensus was that these news rainforests are an intriguing idea. And probably true, at least to a degree.
But the flow of new investments in news hasn’t really been studied or mapped. I did glean a few things.
There are obvious cases of media-rich places: large cities, where new players are starting or expanding. They include Chicago, San Francisco, New York and a few more. These cities are thick with populous neighborhoods that need hyperlocal coverage now that newspapers have pulled back. Startups have recognized this and served various cultural, ethnic and lifestyle communities.
Elsewhere, rainforest growth comes from a combination of perceived gaps, especially a shrunken city newspaper, dedicated founders with access to startup financing, or funding that comes first with publication details later.
Examples range in size from hotel magnate Stewart Bainum Jr.’s Baltimore Banner to former news analyst and consultant Ken Doctor’s Lookout Santa Cruz.
Regional and statewide digital-only publications have become an important part of the digital startup mix and should not be ignored. I spoke, for instance, to Kyle Villemain, founder of The Assembly in North Carolina, which skips breaking news and soft topics to focus solely on deep dives. There are still plenty of topics to choose from, he said, but the state and Charlotte, in particular, fall in the media-rich category.
Smaller states might have become news deserts were it not for startups and the growth of existing alternatives. Vermont is dominated by VTDigger, a 15-year-old digital site, and Seven Days, a more traditional alternative weekly. The Montana Free Press and Wyoming’s WyoFile provide coverage for the scattered population of those geographically big states.
A complementary trend to the pattern of statewide startups is that a number of stronger print/digital newspaper organizations are taking on expansions. Among them are The Advocate group in Louisiana, in four cities with more to come; The Minnesota Star Tribune, which last year renamed itself and moved beyond the Twin Cities; and The Post and Courier of Charleston, South Carolina, with regional reporting teams in Greenville, Columbia and Myrtle Beach, among other cities.
The Atlanta Journal Constitution has launched an ambitious $150-million recapitalization and growth plan, including, among other things, digital expansion into the rest of Georgia and other parts of the Southeast.
David Grant, formerly a project manager for Facebook’s journalism project and now a consultant with Blue Engine Collaborative, told me that gathering the right combination of conditions for a successful startup is challenging. That, more than a level of news need, will determine where new outlets go.
“Many of the people who can run a great newsroom are already running a newsroom,” he said. On the business side, startups need operating excellence, cost experience and knowledge of product and service — talents that can be developed. “But you can’t turn (an outlet) on a pin.” Visionary leadership and starting from “some level of strength” are critical, Grant added. This is why areas with existing media strength are more likely to foster successful startups. As for a smaller city like Peoria, he said, “I don’t have an answer.”
Jim Friedlich has developed a broad view of the news desert and startup scene in his eight years as executive director of the Lenfest Institute for Journalism in Philadelphia. Lenfest is best known for owning The Philadelphia Inquirer (as Poynter owns the Tampa Bay Times), but the nonprofit does national and local philanthropy, as well.
He and colleagues sometimes use the term “news jungles,” a related idea to rainforests but not the same. Their term suggests a shift that means news consumers need to hack their way through myriad choices to follow the news rather than just stick with the newspaper and a favored broadcast outlet or two.
Friedlich offered a vivid example of how big cities provide rich soil for growing both for-profit and nonprofit local news ventures. In 2023, Lenfest awarded between $100,000 and $150,000 each to 17 Philadelphia-area news organizations, with an 18th joining last week. The two-year grants are earmarked for specific business sustainability initiatives as well as general operating support.
I also spoke with Penny Abernathy, now retired, but who for a decade led the State of Local News Project. Abernathy popularized the “news desert” term. Her work is frequently cited as crystalizing the vanishing newspaper phenomenon, with an estimate that an average of 2.5 (most of them small weeklies) close every week.
Abernathy quickly agreed with my thesis that there is a degree of the rich getting richer in the pattern of where new outlets go. It’s not to news deserts.
Of course, a savvy and motivated founder who knows where to find the initial funding is typically part of the equation. But so is a community with an educated and relatively well-off audience. A growing population also helps. Those localities are more likely to have heavy news consumers and good prospects for memberships or bigger individual donations. Santa Cruz is a good example, as is Doctor’s choice for a second Lookout in Eugene, Oregon.
In short, Abernathy told me, for success in mid-sized and smaller communities, “it all depends on the economics.” And keep in mind, she added, that for many of the news deserts in isolated rural areas she has chronicled, “they don’t have the infrastructure … they might not even have broadband.”
Abernathy’s research, originally at the University of North Carolina, was transferred to Northwestern’s Medill School, where Zach Metzger is project director and Tim Franklin senior Dean. The 2024 edition had a heavy focus on the intractability of the news desert problem with its negative impact on citizen knowledge and participation. But the two agreed that there are pockets of growth.
Running a historical data set from 2005 to 2024, Metzger found that at least a few counties — like those surrounding Cape Cod and Bloomington, Indiana — actually added newspapers. A large group, numbering 1,500, held steady. In a few counties, there was net growth driven by digital sites, even as the number of newspapers fell. Among them were Essex County, New Jersey (Newark); Alameda County, California (Oakland); and Providence County, Rhode Island.
Some rural networks are addressing the news gaps in isolated communities. And for-profit chains like Patch, Town News and Axios Local are a force as well.
Among well-recognized bright spots, Eric Barnes’ digital-only Daily Memphian probably no longer qualifies as a startup, celebrating its sixth anniversary last September. Barnes has grown his newsroom to 36 reporters and editors, double the news staff listed by Gannett’s established Commercial Appeal. But that’s not the full story.
“Memphis is not a news desert by any means,” Barnes told me. There’s a business journal, a city magazine, four TV stations “with varying degrees of serious news,” a long-established Black weekly and Wendy Thomas’ widely admired investigative MLK 50, covering the Black communities from a Memphis base.
As I sought to identify a particularly good case of a rainforest, a consultant pointed me to Indianapolis. The Star is one of the biggest and strongest of Gannett’s 200 papers. Besides its coverage of the Larry Nassar gymnastics scandal, the Star shared a national reporting Pulitzer in 2021 and was a finalist the following year.
Nonetheless, the American Journalism Project chose Indianapolis (with other Indiana cities to come) as the location for the third of its multimillion-dollar digital nonprofit launches. AJP wants strong local philanthropic support when it goes into a community. It had two gifts from the Pulliam family, who sold the Star to Gannett in 2000.
Coincidentally or not, Gannett announced a year ago that Indianapolis would be the site of a pilot program reinvesting in growth to the tune of $2 million over two years. The newspaper and its IndyStar site have added 15 new positions in the last year, Gannett chief communications officer Lark-Marie Antón told me. “Our investment has been pivotal in achieving 15 consecutive months of year-over-year audience growth, while also strengthening our local relationships and partnerships,” executive editor Eric Larsen commented.
Meanwhile, Mirror Indy, which launched in December 2023, lists a news staff of 19 on its website. So that is 34 new local journalists in a little over a year. Maybe that’s an exception that proves the rule — but not bad in the age of news deserts and ghost newspapers.
