There's a ‘severe shortage' of local news across the US, new report reveals
'Stunningly, more than 1,000 counties — one out of three — do not have the equivalent of even one full-time local journalist,' states the report, published Thursday by Rebuild Local News and Muck Rack. 'And the 'better off' parts of the country are in lousy shape, too.'
Overall, even as the US population continues to grow, the pool of journalists is shrinking, leaving local communities without relevant news coverage.
Areas with few or no local news outlets are often referred to as 'news deserts,' and the new report highlights that these exist not just in rural areas, but also in highly populated parts of the country.
The report uses data from Muck Rack, a PR software firm, to count journalists at the county level across the US. The researchers found that 'less than a quarter-century ago, the United States had about 40 journalists per 100,000 residents on average. Now, the number is 8.2, according to our new calculations.'
The sharp decline translates to fewer stories being told at the local level.
'Thousands of rural, urban and suburban communities are being left without the basic reporting they need to stay informed, connected and civically engaged,' said Steven Waldman, the president of Rebuild Local News, who has led the charge on this issue for years.
Waldman said he hoped the new data 'will help philanthropists target their funding; entrepreneurs spot opportunities; and local stakeholders better argue for public policy changes to help sustain local news.'
Those policy changes include tax incentives, government advertising, consumer subsidies and investment funds.
Many of the trend lines for local news are discouraging. In an advertising marketplace dominated by Big Tech and an attention economy with endless distractions, traditional print newspapers and other forms of old-fashioned news media are struggling to survive.
Report Local News and Muck Rack found that only 111 counties in the US — 4% of the total — 'currently have at least as many local journalists as the national average from a generation ago.'
Some states, however, are doing significantly better than others, the researchers observed. On the high end of the scale, Vermont has five times as many local journalists per capita as Nevada, according to the report.
Vermont ranks highly in part 'because major new publications such as the nonprofit Vermont Digger and Seven Days have helped fill some of the gaps and in part because few of the newspapers have been bought by private equity firms,' the researchers concluded.
Both Seven Days and VTDigger rely heavily on reader donations and other forms of direct support from residents.
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Trump's new China tariff hits another crypto mining firm in $185 dispute
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The Dred Scott Dissent Lincoln Loved
A few weeks ago, I wrote a column that included a brief discussion of the Supreme Court's decision in Dred Scott v. Sandford, the 1857 case that both invalidated the Missouri Compromise and closed the door to Black citizenship in the United States — until it was effectively overturned by the outcome of the Civil War and officially overturned by the 14th Amendment to the Constitution. To write about Dred Scott meant I had to read — that is, reread — Chief Justice Roger Taney's infamous opinion for the court, in which he tried to root his anti-Black constitutional vision in the nation's history. And while I did not write about it in the column, I also read the major dissent in the case, written by Justice Benjamin Curtis. Curtis had a tumultuous time on the court. Nominated by President Millard Fillmore in 1851 to replace Levi Woodbury, the 41-year-old Curtis was the first and only Whig appointee to the court. A Boston-based litigator and one-time state legislator, Curtis came to Washington with a stamp of approval from none other than Daniel Webster. Curtis made an immediate mark on the court with his majority opinion in Cooley v. Board of Wardens, in which he charted a middle course between two opposing views of the Commerce Clause. The case, which concerned a Pennsylvania law that levied a fine on vessels entering the Philadelphia harbor without a local pilot, asked whether the Commerce Clause gave Congress exclusive authority over interstate commerce — precluding any state action whatsoever — or whether states could pass laws affecting interstate commerce as long as they did not conflict with existing federal statutes. Curtis's solution was to split the difference. 'Whatever subjects of this power are in their nature national, or admit only of one uniform system or plan of regulation, may justly be said to be of such a nature as to require exclusive legislation by Congress,' he wrote. But when the subject is 'local and not national' regulation, it 'should be left to the legislation of the states' until 'Congress should find it necessary to exert its power.' Although, as the legal scholar Alison LaCroix notes in 'The Interbellum Constitution,' it would prove difficult to draw the line between the local and the national on questions of commerce, Curtis's opinion would stand with John Marshall's in Gibbons v. Ogden (1824) as one of the defining Commerce Clause decisions of the 19th century. It was with this success to his name that Curtis leaped into the dispute over Dred Scott's status as a free man and citizen. He was one of two justices, along with John McLean of Ohio, who wanted to resolve the case in favor of Scott's claim to citizenship and in support of the idea that Congress had the power to regulate slavery in the territories. The majority of the court joined Taney's opinion rejecting Scott's claim to freedom, writing Black Americans out of the national community and invalidating the Missouri Compromise of 1820 because of its attempt to limit the introduction of slavery to the territories. But Curtis's dissent was not some stray afterthought. Just the opposite: It was a comprehensive attack on Taney's theory of the case, and it moved the public debate in the wake of its publication. Both the Republican Party and the antislavery press seized on Curtis's opinion in its attacks on Taney, and Abraham Lincoln, in a speech that summer in Springfield, Ill., relied on the dissent to rebuff Stephen Douglas's view that the Declaration of Independence 'referred to the white race alone.' Curtis begins by taking aim at Taney's decision to rule on Scott's claim to citizenship and the question of the Missouri Compromise. Neither issue, he argued, was 'legitimately' before the court and neither was 'within the scope of the judicial power of the majority of the court' to decide. In Curtis's view, the sole judgment of the court was that 'the case is to be dismissed for want of jurisdiction' because Scott was not a citizen of Missouri. Everything beyond this was not relevant to the case itself and, in Curtis's view, not binding law. You'll note that other political actors picked up on this move. Lincoln, for instance, insisted that the court had not actually settled the question. 'We think the Dred Scott decision is erroneous,' he said in Springfield. 'We know the court that made it has often overruled its own decisions, and we shall do what we can to have it to overrule this.' Having criticized Taney and the majority's decision to decide extraneous questions of constitutional law, Curtis makes the most important argument of his dissent: that Taney is wrong on the facts of citizenship. Asking 'whether any person of African descent, whose ancestors were sold as slaves in the United States, can be a citizen of the United States,' Curtis answered in the affirmative. He pointed out that five states — New Hampshire, Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey and North Carolina — recognized free Black Americans as citizens under the Articles of Confederation. He noted that these states also permitted free Blacks to vote, which he viewed as 'decisive evidence of citizenship.' Curtis then asks whether the federal Constitution, which superseded the Articles, deprived either those free Blacks or their descendants of citizenship. He notes that the language, 'a citizen of the United States at the time of the adoption of the Constitution,' would appear to be inclusive of free Backs. And so, he concludes, I can find nothing in the Constitution which, proprio vigore [on its own], deprives of their citizenship any class of persons who were citizens of the United States at the time of its adoption, or who should be native-born citizens of any State after its adoption, nor any power enabling Congress to disfranchise persons born on the soil of any State, and entitled to citizenship of such State by its Constitution and laws. And my opinion is that, under the Constitution of the United States, every free person born on the soil of a State, who is a citizen of that State by force of its Constitution or laws, is also a citizen of the United States. The idea that the Constitution was somehow made 'exclusively for the white race,' Curtis writes, was 'not only an assumption not warranted by anything in the Constitution, but contradicted by its opening declaration, that it was ordained and established by the people of the United States, for themselves and their posterity.' As for Taney's claim that the founders did not mean to include Black Americans in the Declaration of Independence, Curtis thought this was wrong as well. My own opinion is that a calm comparison of these assertions of universal abstract truths, and of their own individual opinions and acts, would not leave these men under any reproach of inconsistency; that the great truths they asserted on that solemn occasion, they were ready and anxious to make effectual, wherever a necessary regard to circumstances, which no statesman can disregard without producing more evil than good, would allow; and that it would not be just to them, nor true in itself, to allege that they intended to say that the Creator of all men had endowed the white race, exclusively, with the great natural rights which the Declaration of Independence asserts. Now, Curtis did not hold the expansive view of American citizenship that Republicans would codify into the Constitution after the Civil War with the 14th Amendment. 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