Where did local journalism go? It’s not just fewer newspapers in US, study finds, but way less reporters, too.

Local news has been on the decline for decades. Between evolving business models, new technology, media conglomeration and fractured attention spans of audiences armed with hand-held supercomputers, it’s been a tough run for coverage of town halls, school board meetings and municipal governments.

Efforts to track this move away from local news mostly focused on the number of outlets across the country that cover local issues and events. That is, until earlier this year, when a study was published determining how many fewer reporters are actually working local beats.

The numbers, while not surprising, are still staggering.

The number of reporters covering local issues has gone down by more than 75% since 2002. At that time, there were roughly 40 reporters per 100,000 community members; today, it’s a mere eight.

“Just think about that. Per 100,000 residents, eight people are telling people what’s going on in their community, what’s going on with their school board, their local government, all of this,” said Matt Albasi, the data reporter at Muck Rack, the journalism PR company, who worked on the project.

“There’re people who aren’t able to know what’s going on in their communities because there’s no one there whose job it is to tell them. And so it’s just this huge national problem.”

The Local Journalism Index 2025 is a joint project between Muck Rack, a PR company that manages a digital database of journalists, and Rebuild Local News, a nonprofit advocacy group for local journalism in America. The idea was to do a “census of local journalists,” Albasi said, in order to get a fuller picture of the health of American journalism.

“Local journalists are the surrogates for their community,” he said. ”They’re the people who get to go out there, watch what’s going on, see whether it’s good for us and tell the public about it. So it really comes down to, do you want to know what’s going on in your neighborhood? If so, you need local journalists."

Muck Rack monitors more than 600,000 media outlets every day, analyzing approximately 3.5 million individual articles. It’s given them ample data from which to determine who was covering what, and where and for whom over the last 22 years.

The project found that there are more than 1,000 counties in the U.S. that do not even have a single journalist covering local issues. That means that more than 20 million Americans are without some form of reporting on the people and institutions that are making decisions closest to their day-to-day lives.

But, unlike any data on the diminishment of local news outlets, what the study found is that local issues are being overlooked in all varieties of communities, cities and states. The whole country has significantly less access to local reporting than it did before the major technological changes of the turn of the last century.

“It’s not like we only see this in rural communities and urban ones are doing great. It’s not like we only see this in communities that are shrinking in population,” Albasi said. “We see it in communities that are growing as well.”

Vermont has the largest ratio of local reporters per 100,000 population with 27, but that is still far fewer than the 40 it used to be.

Utah is ranked in the top 50%, but at 16th is also not doing well with a ratio of 10.1 reporters per 100,000. However, when compared to its Western neighbor Nevada, it’s doing great. That state only has two major news markets, in Reno and Las Vegas, with 4.8 reporters per 100,000 across the state.

What makes Utah’s numbers better than Nevada’s, Albasi said, was its plethora of radio and TV options and wide varieties of smaller markets with their own local media organizations. The general media market of Utah includes more and is therefore conducive to local reporting.

But among large cities there are issues, too. Among some of the largest cities in the country, nine of them — including Los Angeles, Phoenix and Houston — are “severely undercovered.” Some have less than four journalists per 100,000 people, and all have less than five.

There are whole counties like York, South Carolina, and Onslow, North Carolina, which do not have a single journalist for populations of 298,320 and 213,676, respectively.

There are bright spots in this data, Albasi points out, such as Hooker County, Nebraska. That small town has a single reporter at its only outlet, the Hooker County Tribune, which has 726 subscribers for a population of 679 people.

“Basically everyone in town and then some subscribes to that outlet,” Albasi said.

It’s not just the more extreme examples like Hooker County that have lower population density and higher ratios of reporters. For example, Wyoming and Montana rank second and third, respectively, on the list of states. Remote places that have fewer people, Albasi said, often have more direct connections to their local news for a variety of reasons.

“People there are going to rely on local stores and local businesses a lot more for their day-to-day needs,” he said. ”That also means that those local businesses are going to want to advertise and get in front of the local residents a lot more."

Albasi, who bought and managed a local newspaper in his hometown with several friends after college, shared his hope that some people might see the project’s results as an opportunity to stem this tide of fewer local journalists in America. Better yet, they might see it as a call to arms, of sorts, to start covering local events — in writing, audio, video, however.

“I don’t think everyone’s going to pick up the pen and become a local journalist next week,” Abasi said. ”But I do hope that a few people look at this map, and rather than seeing it as something to be defeated by, see it as something that they can change."