Marc Caro at Poynter writes about “ghost newspapers” — publications that nominally continue to exist but have lost most or all local news reporting.
While the nation’s ever-widening news deserts have drawn much attention, the ghost papers represent another dire threat to a well-informed citizenry. Many areas don’t meet the definition of a news desert, but residents have been left with newspapers so hollowed out that they’re bereft of original local news reporting.
Newspapers increasingly have fewer and fewer reporters to cover local stories; since 2005, more than 60% of newsroom jobs have vanished. In the suburbs of large cities like Boston, mass consolidations from newspaper chains can exacerbate this problem. As part of the 2024 State of Local News Report, Medill researchers reviewed 500 papers owned by the five largest newspaper chains and found that, on average, more than a third of front-page content originated from a nonlocal source.
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[Starups] have been emerging to fill the gaps left by the ghost papers. Many of these outlets aim not only to replace their faded predecessors but to improve upon their coverage and to be more relevant for current readers. But not every community has the luxury of banishing the ghosts. “You can’t go 20 feet without running into a new startup, which is great,” said Dan Kennedy, a Northeastern University journalism professor who writes the Media Nation blog and co-authored the 2024 book “What Works in Community News.” “The problem is they tend to be located in the more affluent areas. You can have a community that has something really good, and right next door is a community that has nothing.”