Since 2004, 1800 newspapers have closed in the US, 1700 are weeklies.
There are hundreds — if not thousands — of communities at risk of becoming isolated news deserts. There are almost 200 of the 3,143 counties in the United States without any paper. An additional 1,449 counties, ranging in size from several hundred residents to more than a million, have only one newspaper, usually a weekly. More than 2,000 have no daily paper. The residents of America’s emerging news deserts are often its most vulnerable citizens. They are generally poorer, older and less educated than the average American.
“And when you lose a small daily or a weekly, you lose the journalist who was gonna show up at your school board meeting, your planning board meeting, your county commissioner meeting”. Penny Abernathy, The Expanding News Desert