Ghost papers are increasing, but how to define, count them? Medill's Local News Initiative is working on it; so are we

By Al Cross
Director and professor, Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues, University of Kentucky

There seems to be little doubt that America has an increasing number of ghost newspapers, but it's hard to say how many – not just because there's no widely accepted definition, but because determining whether they fit any sort of definition is very time-consuming.

The Local News Initiative at Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism is working on it, as we learned in the first session of the third National Summit on Journalism in Rural America, held by the Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues on July 7.

Zachary Metzger, the chief researcher and database manager for the initiative's State of Local News Project, said the project hopes to have something to say on the topic in its next report, which it plans to publish this fall. He gave an example of three ghost papers being operated jointly, but said finding such examples "is difficult to do en masse."

"It tends to be kind of difficult to determine whether or not a paper is a ghost newspaper without looking at its content, without looking at the bylines of authors," Metzger said. "There's several kind of web-scraping techniques that could in theory be used to try to determine the size of newsrooms, to try to determine how many articles are being written by individual writers, and then kind of tracking those writers in terms of how many papers they might be writing for."

He said the project is working with "outside consultants and scholars" to develop some prototypes of those research methids, "but they’re still works in progress."

As moderator of the discussion, I said I was glad to hear about that work, "because I think in rural journalism today, we don't have so much a problem of quantity as we have a problem of quality."

I ventured, and Metzger agreed, that another metric for a ghost newspaper is the number of hours its physical office is open to the public. Several newspaper chains have closed most of their offices, and others are keeping them open only a few hours a week.

On a front door in Logan, Ohio

Without mentioning its name or location, I noted one newspaper in southeast Ohio that still has "Daily" in its name but prints only two or three times a week and is open to the public just nine hours a week: on three days, three hours a day. 

Metzger said "That's probably a result of the declining staff numbers," and perhaps because the staff is down to one person, "and they are maybe responsible for even going around multiple counties. Then there might not be a lot of time for them to be in the office. But absolutely, that can be a strong metric."

He said that if a paper's office is open less than 40 hours a week, "You lose the availability of that newspaper to be able to connect with the public, and that is where a lot of the stories and reporting can come from. And when there's only one reporter on staff, there's no administrative staff. There's no office staff to be able to handle those kinds of questions and queries and engage with the public. then that paper does lose that significant resource of of public engagement."

Some sort of survey about newspaper office hours seems to be in order. One represented at the Summit, The Woodford Sun in Versailles, Ky., is open 26 hours a week, mostly seven hours on the main production days and publication day, and closed on the day the staff has to send the pages to the printer at 11 a.m. The weekly is locally owned.

In Mountain City, Tenn.

In the far northeast corner of Tennessee last month, I found that the office of The Tomahawk in Mountain City is open 23 hours a week, with a similar schedule to The Woodford Sun's. As a former weekly newspaper editor and manager, I consider that close to the minimum necessary office schedule. The weekly is owned by Six Rivers Media, a small regional chain.

Metzger said "A ghost newspaper can be thought of as a newspaper with a severely reduced staff. It still exists. There's a masthead for it. You can find it in newsstands or download e-editions online, but because the staff has been so reduced, or because it's so minimal, most of the content that is going to be within that paper is either going to be coming from a single reporter who's covering a wide area. It's going to be reprints from wire services, reprints from adjacent newspapers. almost exclusively opinion articles or some combination of those and it will lack the resources for sustained critical local reporting."

Three newspapers that share a nameplate in central Georgia.

Metzger said ghost newspapers are increasing in rural areas, and briefly presented his 2020 case study of the TimesJournalPost in central Georgia, owned by the Dublin Courier Herald and consolidating papers in three counties with a total of about 30,000 people: The Cochran Journal, The Twiggs Times New Era and The Wilkinson County Post. "These are technically independent mastheads, but they sort of exist under the umbrella of the Times Journal Post, and the Times Journal Post is essentially all three of those. They don't have individual sections within the paper," and the three counties "are largely covered by one person, one writer, who also seems to be the editor."

However, this isn't so much a ghost paper as one of the increasing consolidations of titles across county lines, which have long been the most basic definition of a rural newspaper's market (and is reflected in the lower postal rates for mailing a paper inside the home county).

Metzer said a ghost newspaper in a rural area like this one "tends to focus on crime news, probably because police logs are relatively accessible and relatively easy" to turn into headlines and stories. Another "red flag," he said, is "Special to" bylines, which once indicated work by a frreelancer or correspondent but increasingly indicate that the story is actually a press release.

"The term ghost, in a sense, comes from the fact that many of these newspapers used to be much more robust, but then reduced their staff size, and so they have become a ghost essentially of their former selves," Metzger said.