(Roughly) Daily

Of course, we don’t have to choose… but, if only by default, we are choosing. Local news is collapsing– and that’s a problem of just the sort that Thomas Jefferson (author of the quote above) feared. A recent report from Muck Rack and Rebuild Local News unpacks the scary details…

In 2000, many Americans lived in a community with journalists — people whose job it was to cover school board decisions, announce small business openings and closures, root out corruption at city hall, warn commuters about road work and trumpet the exploits of the high school teams. Today, most of those journalists are gone. The evaporation of local news coverage has hit small towns and big cities, suburbs and rural areas. Even as the country has grown, we’ve lost journalists.

Using data that’s never been tapped before, we now know just how severe this local journalist shortage has become. Less than a quarter-century ago, the United States had about 40 journalists per 100,000 residents on average. Now, the equivalent number is 8.2 Local Journalist Equivalents, about a 75% decline. (Local Journalist Equivalent is a new measure we’re introducing, akin to a Full Time Equivalent or FTE).

This means that big chunks of the country have severe shortages. Stunningly, more than 1,000 counties — one out of three — do not have the equivalent of even one full-time local journalist. And the “better off” parts of the country are in lousy shape, too. About two-thirds of the counties — home to 217 million people — are below even that already-catastrophic national average of 8.2 Local Journalist Equivalents.

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. 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.

We also cannot assume the local news crisis is largely a rural phenomenon. The new data shows the extent to which the layoffs of journalists over time have left acute reporting shortages in many urban and suburban areas. If you’re in a big city like Los Angeles, which has a mere 3.6 Local Journalist Equivalents per 100,000 people, your neighborhood might be covered if there’s a serious crime but not much else. You may get little reliable information on local candidates in many of L.A. County’s cities, whether the schools in your neighborhood are improving, whether the hospital nearby has a bad mortality rate, or how inspiring people might be working to repair your playground.

The crisis is more severe and widespread than previously thought…

A map of how many local journalists cover each U.S. county reveals in stark detail the stunning collapse in local reporting: “Local Journalist Index 2025,” from @muckrack.com‬ and @rebuildlocalnews.bsky.social‬. Eminently worth reading in full.

And note that many of the journalists who have survived are toiling under private equity ownership… which is effectively managing further decline.

Please consider supporting your local, non-profit public media organizations. They face threats from the Trump Administration (and several states, e.g.), and beyond those, face the challenges of continuing to adapt to a changing media environment. Despite that, they continue to do the work sessential to an effective democracy.

* Thomas Jefferson

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As read all about it, we might recall that it was on this date in 2003 that Robert Novak violated journalistic ethics when he used his column in the Washingtom Post to “out” Valerie Plame as a CIA operative…

Plame was the wife of Ambassador Joseph Wilson, a career diplomat that had been the US Ambassador to a few minor countries and had served other diplomatic roles.  Plame, who was already a CIA agent when she married Wilson, was used to good advantage by the CIA with her husband providing diplomatic cover.

All that changed when Wilson angered the administration of George W. Bush by publicly opposing the expected invasion of Iraq, explaining that on a fact finding mission to Africa he had discovered the alleged attempt by Iraq to acquire uranium was false.

Information was leaked to [conservative columnist] Robert Novak of the Washington Post about Plame’s job as a CIA agent, and he dutifully published the information.  Plame’s position as a CIA agent was compromised, and having been outed made her useless to the CIA, resulting in her resignation and the end of her 18 year career in the CIA.  This vindictive act of political dirty tricks undermined the security of the United States, but apparently the perpetrators cared more about their own politics than the good of the country.  Plame was clearly sacrificed to get at Wilson for having the gall to (honestly) undermine the false case for invading Iraq.

Lewis “Scooter” Libby, a high ranking Bush administration official was not charged with illegally revealing Plame’s position with the CIA or with also revealing secret intelligence estimate information to the New York Times.  Libby was indicted, however,  for various counts of lying and obstructing justice.  He was convicted of 4 of those counts and received a 30 month prison sentence.  President George W. Bush commuted the sentence, removing the jail time but leaving the fine and probation and allowing the conviction to stand.  It was later revealed that Richard Armitage, a deputy secretary of state, was the actual source of the leak to Novak.

After the trial, baffled jurors wondered to the press why Karl Rove and vice-president Dick Cheney had not been on trial.  Many observers wondered the same thing.  Wilson and Plame found federal courts to be unsympathetic to their lawsuits and the Obama administration was also unsupportive.

Plame had a book published about the incident titled Fair Game in 2007, and in 2010 a movie by the same name was released…

– source [and more]