The U.S. has lost 75% of its local journalists in the past two decades, according to a recent analysis of the local journalism landscape by Rebuild Local News.
The nonpartisan nonprofit partnered with public relations software company Muck Rack to evaluate the number of journalists in every U.S. county. It found Ohio, and the rest of the United States, has been hemorrhaging local journalists since 2002.
At that time, there were a national average of 40 journalists per 100,000 people. Today, that number has lowered to just 8.1. In Ohio, the ratio is even slightly lower, with just around 7.9 journalists per 100,000 residents.
“There’s not enough people telling their neighbors what’s going on. There’s not enough people holding the government on every level accountable,” said Muck Rack’s data journalist, Matt Albasi.
The Local Journalist Equivalent
It’s difficult to capture in real-time how many journalists are working on the ground to cover their communities, Albasi said. To estimate this, the organization evaluated consistent bylines from local sources, counted up part-time freelancers and factored in a community's distance to a major metro with a news team.
“If you live nearby a city, it's pretty likely that – even though you might not have a reporter in your county – if something happens in your county, somebody from that nearby city is gonna come and cover major events,” he said.
The end result is what Albasi calls the “Local Journalist Equivalent”, or LJE, which ranged from low as 0.1 in Gallia County to as high as 76 in Athens County.
“It’s sort of a measure of the reporting power of an individual in a county.”
Ohio’s local journalism landscape
Thirteen of Ohio’s counties had less than one full-time reporter covering the area. Many of which, including Gallia, Vinton and Noble, are located in rural southeast Ohio.
But, Athens County, which is in the same region, defied those struggles. Albasi attributes that to the area’s small population having a robust amount of local news options: from The Post, Ohio University’s student journalist paper to The Athens County Independent.
“Athens County is really a bright spot when you look at it on the map,” he said.
None of the state’s counties with major metro areas topped the Local Journalist Index. Cuyahoga and Hamilton counties averaged around 8 local journalists per capita, while Franklin and Montgomery counties sat under the national average at 4.5 and 4.8, respectively.
Across the country, counties with populations between 5,000 and 500,000 tended to fare better than both smaller and larger counties.
“The more people you have, the more governmental institutions, the more school boards, the more things that happen in the world,” Albasi said. “And so you're gonna need more journalists on the ground to cover that. And for whatever reason, once you get into these major urban areas, the economies for local journalism just don't support it.”
Why it matters
Ohio is a good representation of what’s happening across the country, Albasi said. It falls in the middle of the pack nationally, ranking 31st.
It has lots of rural and urban counties, both of which are experiencing dwindling local news coverage options. Like the rest of the country, Albasi predicts that Ohioans will feel the impact of the decline.
He said it’s impossible for one individual to go to every city council, school board or zoning meeting to understand what’s happening in their community. And, without local journalists to dedicate their time to doing so, Ohioans will be less a part of the decision-making that’s vital to democracy.
“If you don't know what's going on in those meetings, you're not participating in them,” Albasi said. “That means somebody else is shaping your world.”
