Center for Innovation & Sustainability in Local Media
UNC School of Media and Journalism
The pace of newspaper closures, mergers and bankruptcies appears to be accelerating as both chains and independent newspaper owners face unrelenting economic challenges, and the largest companies shed underperforming assets. Since publication of the 2018 report, The Expanding News Desert, UNC researchers have uncovered an additional 200 shuttered papers. Almost…
Honolulu Civil Beat, a news site focused on public life in Hawaii, came to life in 2010 through the support of a major philanthropist. Both he and the staff of this startup believed it was destined to be a for-profit venture.…
Japanese telecommunications conglomerate SoftBank, which last year purchased the $70 billion investment firm that manages the largest newspaper chain in the US—GateHouse—may be considering the addition of another large newspaper chain to its portfolio. Tronc, one of the 10 largest…
Closures and mergers of hundreds of newspapers in recent years are leaving city and county communicators across the country without a reliable news platform to reach residents. This is not only creating an information vacuum for residents, but also leaving…
Did declining newspaper circulation give president Donald Trump a boost in the 2016 election? A Politico special report found a clear correlation between low subscription rates at the county level and Trump’s success in the 2016 election, both against Democratic…
What’s Happening in Newspaper Ownership: January-March 2018 This is one of a series of quarterly updates about changes in newspaper ownership, based on the research conducted by Knight Chair in Journalism and Digital Media Economics Penelope Muse Abernathy and the…