Wealthier, urban Americans have access to more local news – while roughly half of US counties have only one outlet or less

Adobe Stock Photo by Sarah Stonbely, Northwestern University Is local news readily available in your town? Do reporters still cover your school board and other municipal meetings? If you answered yes, you are likely wealthier than the average American, and you live in or near a metro area. The State of Local News Project at Northwestern University documents the changing local news landscape across the country. Our latest report shows that where you live and how much money you make affect whether you live in a news desert or a news oasis. This divide is related to other factors affecting the health of our democracy, as analysis of our data by the nonprofit Rebuild Local News showed. For more than a decade, I have worked in organizations that study and support local journalism, and I’m intimately familiar with both the challenges and the solutions for the local journalism landscape. New York City could be described as a news oasis – the city’s density and wealth mean there are many news outlets competing. Gary Hershorn/via Getty Images & Inequity in local news One of the most vexing problems, as our report shows, is the persistence of inequity between communities that are...