Who's watching city hall? Nobody - and that should scare you

Where are the journalists?

Empty newsroom photo generated by Substack

If it seems like the local news you read and watch doesn’t cover the breadth of issues, and doesn’t cover them as well as they used to, you’re not imagining it.

A new study this week details a shocking decline in the number of journalists covering local news today, compared to 20 years ago.

In 2002, there were an average of 40 local journalists per 100,000 U.S. residents. In 2025, that number fell to 8.2 local journalists per 100,000 residents. That huge drop off means we aren’t getting the coverage of school boards, city councils and boards of supervisors that we used to.

The study is a collaboration between two organizations, Muck Rack and Rebuild Local News. Muck Rack is a company that connects public relations professionals with journalists. Rebuild Local News is a non-profit advocating for public policies to strengthen local news coverage around the country.

The study, which you can find here, has some stunning conclusions.

· There are 1,000 counties in the United States, fully one-third of all counties, that don’t have one local journalist.

· The decline doesn’t affect only rural areas. There are significant declines in some of America’s biggest cities, too. The study shows Iowa, although suffering a huge decline in numbers of journalists, is not nearly as bad as many other states.

· Some of the least-covered areas are fast-growing counties adjacent to big metro areas. That’s true in Iowa, too, which I’ll show below.

We’ve been reading for years about layoffs in the news industry, but the study concludes “the data shows that the nation has a shortage of local journalists that is more severe and more widespread than previously thought."

Some interesting Iowa numbers:

· Statewide in 2002, there were 44 journalists per 100,000 residents. Today, that number is 14, less than one-third the number two decades ago. That won’t come as a surprise to anyone running a local newsroom, and it won’t come as a surprise to you, either. We simply don’t get the sustained coverage of local decision-makers like we used to. There are no longer “beat” reporters covering city hall, the school board and the board of supervisors. That results in citizens who aren’t as well-informed as they used to be, particularly when they go to vote. IF they go to vote.

· Still, Iowa’s 14 journalists per 100,000 residents is enough to rank us tenth best out of the 50 states and the District of Columbia. It’s not good here, but it’s worse most other places.

· The Iowa county with the most journalists for its population is Fayette County, up in northeast Iowa with the towns of West Union and Oelwein.

· The Iowa county in last place with the fewest journalists per residents is Pocahantas County in north-central Iowa.

· Iowa’s largest county, Polk, which 20 years ago had 297 journalists per 100,000 residents, now has 35 per 100,000.

· As I mentioned above, fast-growing counties near metro areas have some of the most deficient local news coverage. That’s true for Dallas County, one of the fastest growing counties in the country. It has only 2.9 local journalists per 100,000 residents. Des Moines-based reporters might get to Dallas County, but only for certain kinds of stories. As the study says about these counties in general, “Murders might get covered; school board meetings, don’t hold your breath.”

What’s it mean for you, for journalism, and for America?

What’s it all mean for you, the discerning news consumer? It means you’re not as informed as you used to be. You’re simply not getting the depth of coverage that you used to. It means you must work a little harder to find out what’s really going on in your community. Subscribe to the local paper if you can, watch the news, but also read digital news products like Iowa Capital Dispatch, Axios Des Moines and Substack columns that meet your needs.

For an old-school journalist like me, these numbers are depressing. It means there are fewer genuine content providers knocking on doors and digging into documents at city hall. There is way too much repackaging of news that comes from other sources – like those TV news stories I see in Des Moines all the time that come from Cedar Rapids or Sioux City. Those are time-fillers, but don’t really affect the lives of central Iowa viewers.

What’s it all mean for society? To fill the information vacuum, people are forced to get information from social media, where conspiracy theories thrive and misinformation abounds. In my view, this is a major reason why we have too many Americans voting for the truly incompetent people running our country right now. If Americans were better armed with facts, they wouldn’t buy the lies the Trump administration spews 24 hours a day.

Want to make America great again? We need to hire some real reporters and fix American journalism.

Data for this story: The Local Journalist Index, a collaboration between Muck Rack and Rebuild Local News (2025).

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