By: Marty Schladen – July 14, 2025
It’s hardly news that local coverage in Ohio’s cities and towns isn’t what it once was. A new analysis shows that it’s been devastated in most small towns, suburbs and cities in the United States.
The results have implications for the future of democracy and could be useful to those who want to fix the problem.
The analysis was released on Thursday after a collaboration between the media software company Muck Rack and Rebuild Local News, a nonprofit coalition that seeks to revitalize local journalism. It chugged data and determined that when counted on a per-capita basis, the United States has lost a stunning 75% of its local journalists since 2002.
“To put that statistic in perspective, that means that if you live in a county of 10,000 people, there wouldn’t be even one full-time reporter to cover all of the schools, the town councils, the economic development projects, basketball games, environmental decisions, local businesses, and local events,” the report said. “There are 97,000 cities, towns, counties and other units of government. This report shows that there are the equivalent 27,000 local journalists. Most governments, most neighborhoods, and most residents are being covered poorly or not at all.”
One result of such a loss of coverage is the potential for public corruption. Very often it’s the local press that blows the whistle when a county commissioner uses the highway department to pave his driveway, or a sheriff uses official resources against political opponents.
Another consequence is that without the press looking on, local government is able to act in virtual secret, making huge decisions without input from the community whose money it’s spending.
To determine relative losses in the press corps, the team came up with the concept of “local journalist equivalents.”
Muck Rack aggregated county-level reporting across all 3,141 U.S. counties. It identified online bylines for news and sports reporters, photographers, part-timers and freelancers. Reporters with print, online and broadcast outlets were all included.
It identified journalists who are “are responsible for the consistent production and/or distribution of newsworthy content” and it assessed who of them mostly produced local content. Muck Rack also came up with a way to allocate journalists who were based in big cities, but covered local topics in surrounding suburban counties.
The analysis then compared those numbers to a set from 2002 developed by David H. Weaver and a team at Indiana University and came up with a 75% decline in journalists covering local news.
The numbers fell from 40 such reporters per 100,000 residents in 2002 to 8.2 today.
At 7.9 local journalists per 100,000 residents, Ohio ranks 31st among states.
“The basic finding is that it’s even more widespread and severe than we thought,” said Steven Waldman, founder and president of Rebuild Local News.
And the losses haven’t only hammered rural communities.
“When you look at the drop in reporters per population, you see in really vivid terms the effect of the gutting of newsrooms in the suburbs and cities,” Waldman said.
That said, many of the Appalachian counties in Southeast Ohio showed some of the most dismal numbers. But one had the best.
With just 0.1 local reporter per 100,000 people, Gallia County ranks 86th out of Ohio’s 88 counties and 2,962nd out of 3,124 in the U.S.
But Athens County is just 42 miles away and it ranks the best in Ohio, with 76 local reporters per 100,000 people. That makes it the 23rd best-covered county in the U.S.
The report pointed to a likely explanation.
“There are some oddities,” it said, unsurprisingly, of Athens County. “For example, the Ohio county with the most local journalists per resident is Athens County, but it is helped by the presence of Ohio University. That’s the case for a few other counties with big universities, such as Albemarle County, home of the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. Those two universities have great student journalists who show up in strong numbers in the Muck Rack data and therefore in this report.”
The report also acknowledged possible shortcomings in the analysis.
“The data doesn’t show the same phenomenon in every county that’s home to a robust student news outlet, probably for reasons related to the content management system, byline policy or other factors,” it said.
