As proposals to help save local journalism gathered dust in Congress and mostly fizzled in state legislatures over the last year, 136 more newspapers closed, according to a new report.

More than half of U.S. counties are now news deserts, leaving 50 million Americans with little to no local reporting on their communities, according to the State of Local News 2025 report by Northwestern University’s Medill School.

It found 213 counties now have no local news outlet and 1,524 have only one, usually a weekly newspaper.

The periodic report raised national alarm when it first documented the severity of America’s local-news crisis in 2016, when the project was at the University of North Carolina.

Although it’s not perfect and draws barbs from some quarters, the news desert report continues t

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