How to Bring Back Local News
This study was originally published in the Fall 2026 edition of National Affairs.
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Introduction
On April 30, 1995, the internet slipped its academic confines. The National Science Foundation opened it up to commercial use, setting off a transformation that would reshape how the world trades, talks, and thinks. But in Elmira, New York — a faded industrial city in the Southern Tier — the Star-Gazette rolled off the presses that Sunday as it always had.
That day’s paper ran 107 broadsheet pages, not counting department-store circulars and grocery coupons. Its stories were granular and local: a pancake breakfast, the community college’s new president, lighting upgrades for the minor-league ballpark. There was a front-page item on a local murder, a wire story about the Oklahoma City bombing, and not a single mention of the tectonic shift unfolding in cyberspace. The world was changing, but the civic infrastructure of places like Elmira had not yet begun to unravel.
The founding link in the national empire of the USA Today Company, the Star-Gazette was a fully realized civic product of its time, tightly woven into the life of its town. Like so many local papers of the late 20th century, it was both mirror and glue. Today, the Star-Gazette prints just six days a week and lists only two reporters on its website. Its daily print circulation is under 7,000 copies. A 100-page edition is unthinkable. And its decline is hardly unique.
More than 3,500 American newspapers, including more than 500 dailies, have closed since 2005. Weekday newspaper readership has fallen by half since 1940, even as the population has nearly tripled. Newspaper newsroom employment has dropped by more than 50% since 2008. And the digital outlets that have made the most money — from Fox News to major Substacks like The Bulwark and The Free Press — focus overwhelmingly on national and ideological content. From 2024 onward, traffic to many traditional news sites declined sharply even as independent publishing platforms and other newsletter services expanded rapidly. This does not mean Americans are less informed about the wider world: National and international news is now covered more richly and in greater detail than at any point in history. What has eroded is knowledge of what is happening in city hall.
The near collapse of local journalism signals the unwinding of a historically contingent structure. A restorationist approach — focused on reviving legacy institutions — risks reinforcing the very dynamics that produced the collapse. What the nation needs instead is a structural realignment: one that treats journalism as a civic function and enables pluralistic, decentralized, legally protected experimentation.
Read the full study here.