No News is Bad News

This excerpt is from the fourth chapter of Urban Policy 2018 published by the Manhattan Institute:

Rarely in U.S. history has there been a greater need for quality, objective, fact-based news. Yet America’s daily and weekly newspapers — the traditional lifeblood of local reporting since before the country’s founding — are buckling under extraordinary financial and structural pressures. An increasing number of urban and rural communities — at least 1,000, according to a recent University of North Carolina study — are without a single outlet for reporting local news. The crisis in local news that has developed over the past few decades poses a far-reaching danger to civic engagement, the accountability of government, and, many analysts argue, democracy itself. While a number of promising experiments to fill the void are under way throughout the nation, none has emerged as a viable alternative to the industry’s traditional for-profit business model.