Some states consider ways to fund local news, but critics worry it could undermine the news media's watchdog role

U.S. news deserts (University of North Carolina map; click it to enlarge it or click here for the interactive version.)

As newspaper numbers decline, rural areas have been and are more likely to lose local coverage than their suburban and urban counterparts, April Simpson reports for Stateline, a publication of The Pew Charitable Trusts. "More than 500 of the 1,800 newspapers that have closed or merged since 2004 were in rural communities," she writes, citing the 2018 report, "The Expanding News Desert," by Penelope Muse Abernathy of the University of North Carolina's Center for Innovation and Sustainability in Local Media."

The loss of local coverage often makes it difficult for rural residents to find out about local news or relevant state issues. It also means less accountability for local officials and less-informed voters, Abernathy said in her report. On top of that, for more than a decade rural areas have been losing coverage by metropolitan media, as newspapers close their regional news bureaus.

Some states are considering funding efforts to support local news, but critics worry that doing so might undermine the press’s role as a government watchdog. Al Cross, director of the Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues and publisher of The Rural Blog, told Simpson: "There’s this adversarial relationship that exists and needs to exist."

In Massachusetts, one proposal "would establish a commission to study journalism in under-served communities and make public policy recommendations. Similar conversations are happening among advocates and legislators across the country, including in New Jersey, New York and Ohio," Simpson reports. "Potential solutions include more money for public broadcasting, providing tax incentives to persuade media outlets to close local news gaps and following the path of New Jersey, which in 2018 created a fund to bring news and information to under-served communities."

At the federal level, one proposal would amend the federal tax code to make it easier for news organizations to achieve nonprofit status, which could be important to smaller news outlets, and another (more important for large companies) would allow them to collectively negotiate content distribution with news aggregators like Google and Facebook, Simpson reports.

Some caution against allowing the government to have so much input in the news. New Jersey established an independent nonprofit in 2017 meant to strengthen local news coverage, but has barely funded it since then. The fact that the New Jersey Civic Information Consortium's "ruling body is top-heavy with government leaders and employees should give us pause," media writer Jack Shafer writes for Politico. "How can a nonprofit news organization directed by people in the government even pretend to be independent?"

"Nevertheless," Simpson writes, "the Colorado Media Project earlier this month pointed to New Jersey as a model in a report that proposes four strategies to close local news gaps: increasing government transparency, increasing support for libraries and higher education, empowering communities to raise taxes to pay for local news, and helping commercial media outlets convert to a nonprofit model."

Though Cross said the CMP report had good ideas, it goes too far, he told Simpson: "It’s highly unlikely that the public policymakers in Colorado or any other states are going to adopt these types of recommendations because they’re too far-reaching for a lot of policymakers to swallow." (Cross believes that any news organization getting taxpayer money needs a strong structure to gather taxpayers' opinions about how their money is being used; he also thinks preservation of public-notice advertising laws has become as important to small newspapers as it was in their early days.)

Other possible solutions for rural news deserts include expanding public broadcasting or leaning more on philanthropic funding of nonprofit news organizations, Simpson reports.

UPDATE: New York legislators are pushing a bill that would require cable TV companies in the state to provide independently produced news and public-affairs programming, The New York Times reports.