Q&A with Zach Metzger, State of Local News Project director

Zach Metzger is the Director of the State of Local News Project at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University. Metzger worked at the UNC Center for Innovation and Sustainability under Knight Chair Emerita Penelope Abernathy on the research before Abernathy moved to Medill in 2021. Metzger earned his PhD from UNC Chapel Hill earlier this year.

The latest State of Local News Project was released Oct. 23, 2024 and highlights the widening of news deserts across the country, as well as industry issues like low employment, decreased circulation and ownership changes. 

As part of our series on local news researchers, CISLM Student Employee Kathryn DeHart interviewed Zach Metzger via Zoom. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Center for Innovation and Sustainability in Local Media: What’s a recent research project you’ve done that has helped us understand the challenges facing local news?

Zach Metzger: The State of Local News Project began with research at UNC in 2016. The idea behind the project was to try to get a sense at the national level about what’s happening within the local news landscape. Where are news outlets located? Where are they not located? Who are they serving? Who are they not serving? Who’s being left out of the local news equation? What’s happening within the local news industry? What are the trends in terms of ownership, in terms of closures, of news outlets, in terms of startups, and what are the effects of those trends to the people within these communities? What are the effects on democracy, on the economy, on people’s lives, and how does the effects of all of this, this local news translate to impacts on the ground?

When this project started, it primarily focused on newspapers. Since then, it has expanded and broadened its scope to include other forms of news besides newspapers, including (independent) digital news sites, public broadcasters, ethnic and foreign language media. This year, we added in network digital news sites like Patch, Axios and TAPinto and those sorts of groups that are filling in some of these gaps within the local news space.

The project is perhaps best known for (highlighting) news deserts — regions of the country with very limited access to original local news serving that community. There are, as of this most recent report, 208 counties in the United States without a local news source, and over 1,500 counties in the United States with only one news source. Altogether, there are around 50 million people living in the US with limited or no access to local news. The local news industry since some of the earliest data we have from 2005 has been generally contracting and shrinking. Since 2005, around 3,300 newspapers, or one in every three newspapers, have closed.

The cause of the decline is attributable to a lot of factors, but it is largely impacted by the change in the business model in particular. Newspapers and other news outlets used to be heavily dependent upon advertising revenue, and that business model collapsed with the rise of the internet. At the same time, a lot of news outlets also consolidated and shrunk because of massive ownership chains. A lot of large owners started buying up newspapers en masse and consolidating them together.

[RELATED: Explore how one news organization in central Virginia is growing revenue and helping local businesses through a partnership with the Economic Development Authority.]

Employment within the newspaper industry has also declined. Since 2005, the newspaper industry has lost 70% of its jobs. To put that into context, that is roughly similar to those same losses within textile and apparel manufacturers and CD, DVD and cassette tape manufacturers. So it’s been a really staggering loss both in the number of papers and the number of jobs.

CISLM: What should non-academics — local journalists or civically engaged community members — learn from that research?

ZM: I think that they should take away, in many cases, the importance of local news. Here’s an argument that you see sometimes: “Well, newspapers are dying. They’re relics, they’re dinosaurs. Really, we should be looking at social media to be solving people’s information needs.” But news outlets, whether they’re in print, or whether they’re a strong digital outlet provide really important services to a community.

Without a source of reliable and original local news, voter participation goes down, incumbents tend to be elected more often, split-ticket voting rates decrease, corruption increases. Newspapers, digital news outlets and other forms of news media are really important for providing those essential services and keeping people informed about what’s happening in their communities.

I think people take news outlets for granted until they disappear. I think what’s really important about this research, that a lot of civic-minded people in particular should be thinking about, is just how important a source of local news is for their community. I think people are increasingly more aware of that. The pandemic in particular, helped solidify the importance of local news for people in their community because their local paper was often the place where people were going to hear about closures of town centers or to hear about testing and vaccination sites.

We also saw the importance of local news just recently during Hurricane Helene, out in the Western North Carolina, where local news really played a huge role in keeping people informed and keeping people safe. Hopefully, people understand local news has value outside of crises and can be important throughout people’s daily lives. The importance of local news and the service it provides, I think, is one of the most important things to take away from this.

CISLM: Why does local news research matter?

ZM: I think local news research can vividly show where these problems are most acutely felt and try to give data so that philanthropists or policymakers can experiment with and pursue new courses of action to try to help these news organizations survive. Our hope is that our research can help to direct funds to where they’re needed the most and can help legislators craft legislative proposals that will be the most effective and have the most impact. Research is important to establishing the major trends and identifying them for lawmakers and philanthropists, as well as business leaders.

CISLM: What policy interventions have been introduced and how do they work?

ZM: There’s a lot of different ones in the works. At the moment, many of them involve various forms of tax incentives. There have been interesting policies that have been proposed. In Washington D.C., for example, one policy proposal has been to give residents a newspaper credit, essentially where people can use it to subscribe to news organizations themselves, with money from the government. There have been other efforts to essentially also hold some of the large tech giants like Google and Facebook accountable for a lot of the ad dollars they’ve siphoned away from local news to various extents.

[RELATED: Dive into the Center for Innovation and Sustainability in Local Media’s Local News Policy Trackers, which lists all state and national efforts introduced since 2017.]

Then there (are) other ways that that policy can try and play a role. In Illinois, for example, one of the pieces of legislation that was passed this year requires a three-month notice before a paper is sold or closed. The idea being that, in theory, community members might be able to rally together to make an offer for the paper themselves, as opposed to a large chain buying it up, with that time. A lot of perhaps more old-school newspaper people are wary of government funding because they think that it can lessen their independence. I think the trick is figuring out ways to spread out that government funding so it’s not directly tied to newspaper operations.

CISLM: What excites you about the future of local news?

ZM: This is a pretty interesting time (in) local news. I think that again people are aware of the crisis of local news disappearing, and now the efforts are focused on some ways that we can try to increase the sustainability of local news.

We’ve seen a lot of nonprofit news models emerge within the past few years. The idea being that as a nonprofit, you’re more insulated from market conditions and you can explore other forms of funding. I don’t know that moving towards nonprofit models will be enough to solve the entire local news crisis. I think it’s limited in some ways, in that it is most effective in relatively urban, affluent areas, which are not the places where local news is needed the most.

I think that there’s a few different avenues forward, and I’m interested to see how they can come together. We’ve seen partnerships between for-profit and nonprofit models emerging in the past year. We’ve also seen efforts to take, traditionally for-profit news organizations and turn them into nonprofit ones. I’m interested in seeing how the different areas of philanthropy, exploring new revenue streams, public policy and just the sheer desire for local news from a lot of community members, come together in the future and what they can lead to.

CISLM: What helps you get through a long day of work?

ZM: Making elaborate meals at the end of each week to help me stay sane usually helps. I did a big chicken parm this weekend.