Local news reporting has been a shrinking industry in the Northwest. During the last few years, many newspapers have closed or reduced the size of their staffs. Radio and TV stations are doing less local newsgathering.
Last May, we produced two programs about the state of local news in the Northwest. You can hear them here and here.
We learned about a survey done by Washington State University researchers Jennifer Henrichsen and Pawel Popiel. They found more than 350 outlets in Washington do local news gathering. They also found many rural areas are unserved by local media.
This interview has been lightly edited for content and length.
Jennifer Henrichsen: We found five counties that only had one outlet, another five counties that only had two outlets. And we also found that there were certain places in the state that had no qualifying news outlets, which means that there are news deserts.
We found that civic leaders had a lot of concerns about the lack of local news, about how local news is being increasingly hit financially, how there are increasing news deserts. There's also what's called the rise of ghost newspapers, basically when an outlet exists in name, but has to do the same amount of work with dwindling staff and fewer resources to try to reach the communities in which they are located. So it's not just journalists who care about this. It is civic leaders. It's people in the community who are leading foundations. It's policymakers.
It also should concern and I do think it concerns a fair number of everyday individuals who want to see their papers and their outlets provided them information so that they can make decisions about their lives.
DN: What did you find in terms of who owns the local news outlets around the state?
JH: We actually found that a majority of the local news outlets are companies that tend to be private family owned companies or nonprofits or locally or community owned organizations. That's good news because these are ownership types that are most likely to produce locally situated news coverage. But we also found that nearly one third of Washington's news outlets belong to national chains. And that can be troubling because sometimes what happens is when a national chain gets ownership of a local news outlet, it results in staff layoffs. It results in reduced coverage. It results in less local coverage. And that obviously has pretty important implications and consequences for the survival of local news in a state.
Pawel Popiel: I'd like to highlight the fact that nearly 50% of the outlets that we identified in the state have budgets of less than $250,000. This means that they can't afford to hire and retain salaried professional journalists to cover local news in their communities. This means that they are facing resource constraints, and it is unclear how many of them will be able to continue to operate. All of this, our report, our findings, and our analysis point to a desperate need for financial resources for newsrooms to keep operating, especially locally situated ones, for ways to make the talent pipeline more resilient, since we also have learned from our data collection that's still ongoing related to staffing levels at outlets that a lot of news outlets in the state of Washington rely on part-time labor simply because they cannot afford full-time journalists. So making that talent pipeline more resilient and robust should be a priority.
DN: How do local news outlets find the resources they need to hire reporters and editors? Their colleague, Ben Shors, has been working on that. Shors was one of the organizers of the WSU Murrow Fellowship program that has placed 16 early career journalists in local newsrooms for two-year stints. The state pays their salaries, not the news organizations. SPR shares one of those journalists, Monica Carrillo-Casas, with the Spokesman-Review.
WSU says those reporters have created more than three thousand stories, in print, digital, radio and TV. Those are available to all news outlets statewide. But these journalists are approaching the end of their fellowships and the future of the program is unclear.
Shors has another plan in mind. He’s working with Rob Zeaske of Report Local, home of the non-profit Report for America, a privately-funded program that places news reporters at local outlets around the country.
Ben Shors: We're going to put a journalist in every county in Washington State to cover important civic affairs in those communities, and that's local government. It's public health issues. It's their schools. And it's also just life in their communities. We know that there are several counties across Washington that have little to no local news coverage and so we're partnering with Report for America to place 39 journalists across the state.
DN: Rob, what does Report for America bring to the table?
RZ: We built a program over the past seven, eight years that's placed now nearly 800 reporters and 450 newsrooms in every corner of the United States and so I think we believe we're bringing some strong efficiency, some operational support that's going to allow us to help work on the great foundation that Murrow has built in the state, but bring some expertise, efficiency, a huge pipeline of really diverse journalists that will be excited to be in Washington state. And I think a history of training that's allowed us to also make sure we're supporting the journalists. We want to make sure that they have a fantastic experience, but also make sure that we're providing support around editorial, fundraising, business operations of local newsrooms, because we know that that's going to be critical both to good reporting from those very reporters, but also for the ultimate systematic sustainability of the news ecosystem in Washington.
We've got a lot of experience in supporting and wrapping around training around the newsroom side of that work too. In the words of one of the funding conversations that Ben and I had, we had one funder who said, we want you to bring the best of the United States to Washington and make sure we're seeing what good practices are looking like.
In a really tough news environment, there's still organizations that are finding ways to defy gravity and finding new models and new content solutions for readers that are excited to get it. And we want to make sure we're trying to bring the best of those things to Washington state as appropriate.
BS: We're not just trying to parachute journalists into these communities and hope for the best, but in partnership with Report for America, we're providing ongoing training both for the fellows and the newsrooms to help build their fundraising capacity. We're also building networks for collaboration between newsrooms so they can share their content and get it out to as many people as possible. So I think the goal here is not just a temporary band-aid, but actual sustainability in local news, and that's what we want to support.
DN: So for people who are not familiar with this, how do you sell this to them as they say the news industry is biased and why should we care that you're dying and that you need all this money?
RZ: Yeah, it really is a challenge. We know that Americans and people around the world not only don't see the crisis in local news, they feel inundated with information and don't understand how both can necessarily be true.
I think we've been working on making sure that part of our approach is how we're talking about both the value of news. We want to make sure that people understand and we're telling the story that local news remains the most trusted form of news and so kind of leaning into that, that relevance for daily lives and for community has been said.
But I think, finally, our approach is really specific as is Murrow's approach, which is we're trying to bring a human being into a community to be able to cover a human being that you can call and engage with and ask questions of. And in a world that has been, in a media world that's been splintered by social media concerns around AI, we find that a human first approach to this is actually something that's going to be really powerful and driving trust and feels accessible to those that aren't necessarily as familiar with the challenge of local news right now.
DN: The Murrow Fellowship Program is well underway. How would you evaluate how well it's worked here in Washington?
BS: You see their impact in a variety of ways, from impacts on local government, public policy, all the way down to community-level news, whether it's engagement with local events and sports teams.
One of my favorite stories out of the fellowship was produced by our Murrow Fellow in Snohomish County, who reported on the financial distress of a hygiene center for unhoused people. Because of that reporting, one of the readers of that outlet, Rick Steves, saw that story and then went and said, well, I want to help out, and provided more than $2 million to actually purchase the building and support the program.
There's all sorts of different metrics that we can use, and those metrics are really important because I think people need to realize that even if you don't read the news, you can benefit from it. It produces positive change in these communities. We see more informed local voters. We see greater community engagement, higher voter turnout, more people running for office. But then we also see those sort of one-off stories on the saving of a local community center because somebody saw that story.
DN: You talk about putting reporters in each of the 39 counties. Do you want to highlight folks who are from the Northwest, who are from the state of Washington? And how does Report for America figure into the recruitment process for reporters?
BS: We have a 100% retention rate now for our 16 fellows and they're in those communities. They feel like they're part of those communities and even when other job opportunities have come up, they've wanted to stay in those communities.
So we want to look at keeping people in the communities, keeping journalists retained in the program is important. There's lots of different ways you can do that. Are there connections that they have to those communities? We'll certainly look at people from the state, people with interest in the state.
But we also think that Report for America has some phenomenal national talent that could provide a pipeline into Washington as well. So we're going to look at ways that we can talk to local stakeholders, talk to newsrooms, talk to working journalists and community members to try to bring the best local journalism to counties across the state.
RZ: Last year, we recruited for 100 new positions that we put into the field last summer in 2025. And we had nearly 1,400 applications for those, which was enormous. And so I think we're going to be certainly wanting to draw from Washington-based talent.
I think part of what Report for America has gotten good at is building a really powerful funnel of early career journalists that are wildly talented and really diverse, and being able to engage with different communities that we think have been underserved. And so we want to be able to cast a wide net for people who really want to be in Washington.
We're expecting this to be a three-year program for each of these fellows. So we're in it for the longer term. We've got great results. Last year, 55% of our graduates from the RFA program were hired, not just offered, were hired by their host newsrooms, which is a reflection of the good match and the long-term engagement, but also the support of the newsrooms and their ability to be able to afford holding on to those reporters after the program's over.
DN: I want to talk about sort of the long-term funding outlook for local news organizations. Is it going to continue to be, one, subscriptions, two, philanthropic money? Do you see governments, local governments, state governments also as long-term funders of local news.
RZ: I think that's an all of the above. There's no doubt that part of the reason we're here is a massive change in the business models for news. I think that's the assumption. And so I think where we've seen hope is in the ability to be diversifying funds, where once there was an advertising model.
So I think when you say both subscriptions, I think that's right, as we think about philanthropy and knowing that maybe big-dollar philanthropy, I think is going to be helpful in expansion, in scale, in investment, but it's not going to be a day-to-day solution. It's going to be about how do we find smaller-dollar donations from consumers of news? And how do news organizations redesign some of their products to be appealing to a consumer rather than an advertiser, who was expecting a local monopoly at one point in the business model of many news organizations?
I think it will probably get a little bit smaller and more niche over time, but I think there's a lot of exciting examples of how people
are helping us to see how local news can be reborn right now.
BS: Yeah, I would echo that. I think right now, at this moment in time, we need kind of all three legs of that stool that you talked about, because we don't have a single magic bullet to save local
journalism, right? We need that ongoing support from readers, from subscribers, from listeners. Philanthropy is playing a crucial role, but that can't carry everything forever.
And I think public funding, which has really been transformative for us at the Murrow College, needs to work alongside those other revenue streams. And so that's why we entered into this agreement with Report for America. And Rob, correct me if I'm wrong, but when we looked at the numbers, Report for America has helped newsrooms collectively raise more than $60 million in local donations since 2018. So there's a proven track record of economic stewardship, as well as building sustainability into those local newsrooms that I think is really critical and is so needed in those communities.
DN: So let's finish with next steps. What needs to happen for your organizations next to make this happen?
RZ: We need to have the legislature, in the words of our private funders, do its job and make sure that it comes through with funding in a way that's going to be able to be supportive of this. And I think we feel like there is a ton of support. And as Ben has said, a track record of success with the fellowship program already, right? I think that's really important for us to think about and make sure we understand.
We've got private funders who I think are excited about the idea of a match. So being able to show up and make sure we're getting private sector and private philanthropy engaged in this in the long term. And for us, we're really eager to make sure that our Report for America team is showing up with financial sustainability tools to be able to kind of further match that in among all of our local newsrooms.
RZ: We need all those pieces to come together. We need the public funding to be sustained. We need philanthropic support to step up, community support. We need newsrooms to be committed to this. And we need collaboration. We also just need to be learning throughout this process and adapting what works. And if we have things that don't work, we need to address those. We think if we do that, we've got a really clear vision for what can work in the immediate future in Washington state.
We also want to think not just about what can work in Washington state, but can this be a model that other states can follow? Can we build something with real community impact, demonstrated results that we can take back and we can show to public policymakers, we can show to philanthropic foundations. That evidence on the ground is going to be critical to ongoing support and education.
