How closely do you follow the news? And where do you get your news? It’s pretty easy to follow big breaking national or international stories—on cable or broadcast news, via social media, and in a number of other ways. But what about local news? Depending on where you live, that can be much harder than it used to be.

The Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing Communications at Northwestern University has had an ongoing project tracking the state of newspapers and local news. Its latest update was just published on June 29, 2022, and contains a number of alarming statistics as well as drawing conclusions about the effect of those statistics on society. The report notes that newspapers are continuing to vanish at a rapid rate, stating, “An average of more than two a week are disappearing. Since 2005, the country has lost more than a fourth of its newspapers (2,500) and is on track to lose a third by 2025. Even though the pandemic was not the catastrophic ‘extinction-level event’ some feared, the country lost more than 360 newspapers between the waning pre-pandemic months of late 2019 and the end of May 2022. All but 24 of those papers were weeklies, serving communities ranging in size from a few hundred people to tens of thousands. Most communities that lose a newspaper do not get a digital or print replacement. The country has 6,377 surviving papers: 1,230 dailies and 5,147 weeklies.”

While one might think this happened mostly as a result of the pandemic, it is actually a decline that’s been going on for years, as pointed out in the report and other sources. A few years back, I was following a website called Newspaper Deathwatch. The site no longer appears to be available, but these predictions from 2012 can still be found online: