Editor’s note: This piece first published on the blog for Heartland Forward, a nonprofit, policy think-and-do tank that turns ideas into action for states and local communities.
Across the Heartland, a critical community-building tool is quietly slipping away. Since 2005, the United States has lost more than one-third of its newspapers, according to “The State of Local News 2025,” a product of the Local News Initiative at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism.
“Over the past two decades, the number of news desert counties – areas that lack consistent local reporting – has grown steadily,” the 2025 report states. “This past year was no exception: in this report, we are tracking 212 U.S. counties without any local news source, up from 206 last year. In another 1,525 counties, there is only one news source remaining, typically a weekly newspaper. Taken together, in these counties some 50 million Americans live with limited or no access to local news.”
Nearly 60% of the counties with one or fewer news sources – 1,055 in total – are in the heartland, a region comprising 20 states in the middle of the country that together would be the third-largest economy in the world. That means more than half of heartland counties are news deserts or at risk of becoming one.
But here’s what the statistics don’t show: Every newspaper closure means more than lost information. It means communities lose valuable tools to tackle their biggest challenges, whether in workforce development, affordable housing or healthcare access. Without reliable sources of information, people lack the shared facts they need to work together and secure the support their communities require.
For those of us in the nonprofit journalism space, and especially at Deep South Today where we serve under-resourced communities in the heartland, the question isn’t simply how to keep local news alive. It’s how to sustain and enhance high-quality reporting that can help communities more effectively address the challenges they face.
From information gaps to real solutions
Consider what happened in Jackson, Mississippi, during the 2022 water crisis when the city’s aging water system failed. Approximately 150,000 residents were without safe drinking water. Our newsroom Mississippi Today didn’t just report on the crisis. Journalism became an essential infrastructure. The newsroom provided daily updates on water distribution sites, boil-water notices and steps residents could take to protect their health. By delivering practical information people could use, Mississippi Today built trust and showed how journalism can partner with communities to solve urgent problems.
The heartland needs a model of journalism that goes beyond documenting problems to helping communities find solutions. By reporting in depth on complex issues such as maternal health, workforce shortages and infrastructure gaps, nonprofit news provides the information that policymakers, business leaders and residents need to make informed decisions.
Members of the Mississippi National Guard distribute bottled water to Jackson residents at the Mississippi Trade Mart in Jackson on Thursday, Sept. 1, 2022. Credit: Eric Shelton/Mississippi TodayAnother example of that is our recent partnership with the Fuller Project to examine Mississippi’s high rate of cesarean births. The reporting didn’t just point out problems. It also highlighted hospitals that were successfully turning things around. By showing both challenges and what’s working, the coverage gave healthcare leaders concrete examples to learn from. This is information that leads to action.
Building a stronger news ecosystem
We are encouraged to see more nonprofit newsrooms embracing collaboration instead of competition as the way forward. These organizations produce in-depth reporting on important issues and make that content free for other news outlets (both nonprofit and commercial) to publish, ensuring it reaches as many people as possible.
This approach addresses a real problem: As traditional news organizations have cut back on reporting, gaps have opened up in coverage of complex policy issues, government accountability and solutions-focused stories. Nonprofit newsrooms step in to fill these gaps, providing essential information that individual outlets, particularly smaller ones, can no longer afford to generate on their own.
The result is a system where different types of news organizations play different roles. Commercial outlets continue to provide daily coverage while nonprofit newsrooms contribute investigative projects and deep reporting that help the entire region. When this content gets republished across multiple platforms, from small-town newspapers to statewide networks, it reaches people who might otherwise lack access to quality journalism.
Bright spots: innovation despite the crisis
While news deserts continue to grow, there’s a promising trend. More than 300 local news startups have launched across the U.S. in the past five years. Northwestern University’s Medill Local News Initiative tracks these developments and identifies “Bright Spots,” news organizations that build innovative and sustainable approaches to serving their communities.
These Bright Spots share common traits: funding that combines foundation support with reader contributions, deep community relationships, editorial independence and a commitment to working together.
Yet a big challenge remains: 90% of new startups are in cities. Rural and less wealthy communities, the very places where news deserts are most endemic, continue to fall further behind. This growing divide between news haves and have-nots threatens to deepen existing inequalities across the region.
Deep South Today was one of 12 Bright Spots featured in 2025. Covering Louisiana and Mississippi with plans to expand across the region, our newsrooms produce solutions-focused reporting on issues critical to the communities we serve. From economic development, education, healthcare and civic engagement, the content reaches millions through partnerships with commercial news outlets across the South, creating impact far beyond what any single organization could achieve alone.
Journalism as community infrastructure
Communities with strong local news see clear benefits. Things like higher voter turnout, more competitive elections, better-informed policy debates and greater accountability for public officials. On the flip side, research shows that news deserts experience more corruption, less civic engagement and more polarized voting.
Forward-thinking leaders across the country have come to view journalism support not as charity but as a smart investment in their community’s ability to solve problems. Whether through corporate partnerships, foundation grants or individual donations, they’re helping build sustainable models for quality journalism that serve everyone.
The path forward
The wave of new local news startups, backed by growing foundation support, is encouraging. This trend shows both the demand for quality journalism and the emergence of new ways to sustain it.
Yet the gap between news haves and have-nots continues to grow. Closing it requires purposeful investment in news infrastructure across the heartland. It means supporting newsrooms rooted in their communities. It means treating quality journalism not as a luxury but as essential infrastructure for making good decisions, building effective policy, and growing the economy.
The heartland’s challenges are real and urgent, spanning economic transition, workforce development and health care access. But its potential is even greater. Together, the 20 states of the heartland have an economic output of almost $7.5 trillion and should not be overlooked.
Communities achieve progress through pragmatic collaboration among business, government, charitable groups and their citizens. Informed communities, fueled by quality journalism, not only make this work possible but also speed it up. Heartland communities are too essential to our nation’s well-being to be without trusted local information sources.
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Warwick Sabin is the founding President and CEO of Deep South Today, a nonprofit newsroom network serving Louisiana and Mississippi.
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