Rebuild Local News’ research director parsed the Local Journalism Index they created with Muck Rack to map which American Nations regions have had the most acute collapse in local journalism
By Colin Woodard
Local journalism has in an ongoing state of collapse for nearly a generation now, with once proud statewide and metropolitan daily newspapers like the Des Moines Register, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Providence Journal and Denver Post reduced to ghosts, lacking the staff to even provide cursory coverage of their regions, and smaller weeklies shuttered or transformed into wire service repeaters and advertising circulars. Local television stations have consolidated under a handful of corporate owners, with the hundreds of Sinclair-controlled affiliates often forced to carry centrally-produced political propaganda that has damaged their credibility and reduced air time for local coverage. Scrappy digital outlets and public radio stations have tried to step into the breach, but great swaths of the country are now local news deserts, with nobody watchdogging area officials.
In an effort to quantify and track this problem, Rebuild Local News and Muck Rack created a Local Journalist Index, an impressively comprehensive effort to determine just how many full-time journalist equivalents are still covering local news in each of the United States’s 3143 counties. Tapping on Muck Rack’s dataset of more than one million U.S. journalists, they identified 90,000 journalists who produced a web-accessible article in the first quarter of 2026 for one of 56,000 news outlets. They then used AI-assisted analysis to identify which of 4.2 million articles those journalists produced were covering events local to the publication (excluding wire service copy). This allowed them to determine how many journalists were actually writing about local phenomena and how active each was.
On a national-level, the results are sobering: since 2002, there has been an 81% decline in the number of local journalists per capita, from 40 per 100,000 to just 7.8 today. In more than three-quarters of U.S. counties, not a single article on local education or health was produced in the first three months of the year, as depleted publications focused on the cheap “sugar highs” of journalism: crime and sports.
We wondered if there regional differences in the state of the crisis, and it turns out so did Matthew Baker, director of research at Rebuild Local News, which advocates for policies to reverse the collapse of community journalism. He took the index’s data and ran it through the American Nations model to create the map at the top of this post, which shows local journalist equivalents per 100,000 in each of the regional cultures.
You can see there’s roughly a two-fold difference between some regions, with the aggressively communitarian regions (save Hawaii) retaining the most local journalism capacity. The aggressively individualistic Deep South and Greater Appalachia and the Spanish founded El Norte and Spanish Caribbean regions – both passively communitarian – at the bottom. (For a primer on these distinctions, start here.)
Baker, who posted his findings on LinkedIn, also looked at Northwestern–Medill’s county-level State of Local News data for 2026, which identifies local news deserts, and found a similar pattern. He writes:
“While news deserts show up in nearly every region they vary a lot in concentration. The Spanish Caribbean (2 of 12 counties, 17%), El Norte (14 of 89, 16%), Far West (66 of 444, 15%), and Tidewater (19 of 131, 15%) have the highest shares of desert counties, while Greater Polynesia (1 of 5, 20%) and First Nation (1 of 8, 13%) also post high percentages, though from very small bases. Greater Appalachia has the largest raw count by far (66 counties, 7% of its 937), followed by Far West (66), Deep South (40, 8%), and Tidewater (19). The lowest shares are in Left Coast (2 of 61, 3%), Midlands (14 of 466, 3%), and Yankeedom (13 of 440, 3%).“
Baker was also curious if the pattern would hold for public policy initiatives that help fund local news:
“Looking back over a 20-year period, Yankeedom accounts for the largest share on public policy bills targeting local news: Connecticut (7), Illinois (6, though partly Midlands), Wisconsin (4), Vermont (4), Minnesota (3), New York State (3), New Hampshire (2), and Maine (1), roughly 30 of the 73 bills. The Left Coast is next, with California (9, though it spans several nations), Oregon (4), Washington (2), and San Francisco (1). The mid-Atlantic and Midlands tier adds Maryland (5), Pennsylvania (3), New Jersey (2), Kansas (2), and New York City (1), with Virginia and DC touching Tidewater. A smaller Far West/El Norte group is led by New Mexico (5), plus Colorado (2) and Nevada (1).
The Deep South and Greater Appalachia have no bills at all. Those two nations hold 106 of the 238 news desert counties (about 45%). So policy is concentrated where journalist density is already middling to high, and absent where need looks greatest.”
Why the gaps? I’d hypothesize that people in regions that emphasize the common good, including investments in public goods and taxes required to fund them, also place a higher priority on local news coverage and, thus, are more likely to be readers and supporters of local outlets, be it the legacy newspaper or the scrappy upstart digital news site. Those same regions, not coincidently, had far higher literacy rates in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries, fostering the creation of printing presses, newspapers, books, libraries, colleges and universities at earlier junctures and higher densities than was the case in the Dixie and Spanish legacy regions. And our research has shown the large communitarian regions almost always outperform their individualistic rivals in everything from economic mobility and creditworthiness to life expectancy and healthcare. That means more people are healthy and economically secure, which likely correlates to civic engagement and the ability to subscribe to local news.
Thanks to Baker for taking up this analysis, which ultimately shows the importance of local media initiatives like Deep South Today, MinnPost, Seven Days Vermont, Midcoast Villager, and the Storm Lake Times.
— Colin Woodard, author of Nations Apart, American Nations, Union, American Character and other books, is the director of Nationhood Lab.