THE TOLL FOR TRUTH · PART 3 OF 7
The last post looked at who pays for news. This one looks at a harder case: places where there’s barely any local news left to pay for.
Researchers call these places “news deserts.” These are communities without a reliable, human-verified source of local information. No reporter at the county commission meeting, nobody reading the school board budget, nobody asking why the water rates went up.
The map is getting bigger
Northwestern University’s Medill Local News Initiative tracks this every year in its State of Local News report, and the 2025 edition set a record. 213 U.S. counties now have no local news source at all, up from roughly 150 in 2005. More than 1,500 additional counties are down to a single source, usually a weekly newspaper.
The growth of U.S. news deserts, and who lives in them. Data: Medill Local News Initiative (2025).
Put those together and roughly 50 million Americans have limited or no access to local news. The deserts aren’t randomly scattered, either. Nearly 80% are in counties the USDA classifies as predominantly rural, and they tend to be poorer counties.
To be fair about cause
I want to be careful here, because it would be easy to overstate the argument. Paywalls didn’t cause news deserts. The collapse of local advertising did most of that work over two decades. Classified ads went to the internet, display ads went to the platforms, and a lot of small papers simply ran out of money.
The paywall’s role is narrower but still important. Reader revenue is the industry’s main plan for rebuilding local journalism. So the real question is where that plan works.
The fix lands in the wrong place
The same Medill report answers that question, and the answer is uncomfortable. New digital-only local news sites are launching. But they’re appearing in counties whose demographics are nearly the opposite of news deserts: more affluent, with lower poverty and higher educational attainment.
Where the market is regenerating local news isn’t where local news disappeared.
That isn’t anyone’s bad intent. It’s just what a reader-revenue model does. It regenerates journalism where residents can afford to support it. In the places that need it most, the subscriber base doesn’t exist, so the model doesn’t get built. That’s the income gradient from the last post, mapped onto geography.
Vacuums don’t stay empty
A community without a local paper doesn’t stop wanting to know what’s happening. It gets its information from whatever is free and nearby: Facebook groups, forwarded screenshots, corporate press releases, partisan sites, and increasingly, sites that look like local news but aren’t.
That last category has a name, “pink slime.” These are outlets with folksy local-sounding mastheads and the visual design of a hometown paper, backed by partisan groups or, in some documented cases, foreign governments. They’re free, they’re optimized to look credible, and they’re filling exactly the gaps that real local reporting left behind.
In a news desert, the problem isn’t only that verified information is missing. It’s that something else moves into the space it left.
That’s a big enough topic to deserve its own post, and it’s coming in Part 5. First, though, I want to look at a corner of the information world where the paywall isn’t a recent adaptation at all. In academic publishing, the gate is the business model, and it shows what a fully matured paywalled system looks like.
Up next: Paying Twice (Part 4 of 7)
Read the full paper: This series is adapted from Konderla, J. (2026). The Toll for Truth: Paywalls, Information Deserts, and the Asymmetric Web (Version 1.0) [White paper]. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23131192 The paper includes the complete argument and full bibliography.
Sources
Medill Local News Initiative. (2025). The state of local news 2025. Northwestern University. https://localnewsinitiative.northwestern.edu/projects/state-of-local-news/2025/report/
NewsGuard. (2024, June 11). Sad milestone: Fake local news sites now outnumber real local newspaper sites in U.S. https://www.newsguardtech.com/press/sad-milestone-fake-local-news-sites-now-outnumber-real-local-newspaper-sites-in-u-s/