Medill's County Count: What 'No News Outlet' Means in Practice
The Medill School's annual audit of local news has become the standard citation for newsroom closures — but the number only makes sense if you understand what gets counted.
Medill counts outlets, not reporters.
Photo: Ivan S / Pexels
How the Count Works
The Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University has published its State of Local News report annually since 2022, tracking how many of the roughly 3,143 US counties contain at least one outlet that covers local civic affairs. An outlet qualifies only if it produces original, reported local news on a regular basis — a Facebook community page or a hyperlocal aggregator that reposts wire copy does not meet the bar. The research team, which has included Penny Muse Abernathy, one of the leading scholars of news-desert geography, combines public databases, newsroom self-reporting, and direct verification to build the count.
The resulting figure — the number of counties with no qualifying outlet — is what researchers call a news desert. It is a hard threshold: a county either has coverage or it does not. That binary obscures gradations, but it also makes the scale of absence legible in a way that partial-coverage maps cannot.
The masthead stays on the door after the newsroom goes.
Photo: Ekaterina Belinskaya / Pexels
What the 2023 and 2024 Reports Found
The 2023 State of Local News report found more than 200 counties with no local news outlet at all, and identified a further large share of counties served by only one outlet, leaving them a single closure away from desert status. By the 2024 edition, the number of papers published less than three times a week had grown — a pattern consistent with the ghost-newspaper trajectory documented in earlier Medill research.
The reports have also tracked the shift in who owns surviving papers. Hedge-fund ownership — funds that prioritise cost reduction over editorial investment — had expanded its footprint, while nonprofit and public-media outlets remained too few in number to offset commercial closures at scale.
The Medill figures are widely cited in congressional testimony and FCC proceedings precisely because they attach a verifiable methodology to a problem that is otherwise hard to quantify.
