by James A. Bacon

The “news desert” is expanding in Virginia, as it is across the country. Twelve Virginia counties have no local news sources, and 81 counties have only one, according to a study by the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University.

There is a shred of consolation. As traditional newspapers continue to lose circulation, digital media are popping up all over. But even that good news comes with a caveat: digital publications are found mostly in urban areas, not rural counties where the news drought is most pronounced.

Nationally, the United States has lost more than one-third of its newspapers since 2005, and the survivors have cut back their news operations.

“This research shows that the crisis in local news is deepening, and fewer Americans have access to news they need about their communities to be informed citizens,” said Tim Franklin, director of the Medill Local News Initiative.

In Virginia, the number of daily newspapers held steady between 2023 and 2024 but the number of weeklies fell from 109 to 102, according to the study.

The number of digital sites tallied by Medill now stands at 22. Seventeen are for-profit and five are nonprofit.

Take those last numbers for what they’re worth. There are more digital publications than Medill is counting. The journalism school does not include Bacon’s Rebellion, for instance. (No one from Medill has contacted us for purposes of verification. Our content is not considered “news,” I suppose, so we don’t count.)

As marvelous as blogs are, we can’t begin to fill the news void created by shrinking newsrooms. I was shocked to read in Axios‘ coverage of the Medill study that the Richmond Times-Dispatch, the paper of record for Virginia’s capital city, plummeted from 37,000 print subscribers in 2022 to 23,000 in August of this year, while digital subscriptions have crept up from 22,000 to a mere 23,900. As readership retreats, subscriber and advertising dollars do, too. Management copes with shrinking revenue by cutting staff. Smaller staffs mean less news… which feeds the decline in readership.

When the cat’s away, the mice will play. When nobody’s paying attention to public deliberations of state and local bodies, there will be no one to hold government officials accountable. The quality of governance can only get worse.

There is one ray of hope for traditional Virginia journalism. In a move that set off a news-side furor, Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos nixed the newspaper from endorsing a presidential candidate this year.

Said Bezos: “No undecided voters in Pennsylvania are going to say, ‘I’m going with Newspaper A’s endorsement.’ None. What presidential endorsements actually do is create a perception of bias. A perception of non-independence. Ending them is a principled decision, and it’s the right one.”

An unintended benefit of Bezos’ decision is that three enraged editorial page writers resigned in protest. Good riddance. Although there are some traditional-minded reporters left on the Post’s staff — traditional-minded in the sense that they make honest efforts to report different sides to a story — news coverage is increasingly narrative driven and the difference between “news” and “commentary” is almost impossible to distinguish.

What happens at the Post matters to Virginia. Thanks to Bezos’ deep pockets, the Post has more resources than any other news outlet in the Old Dominion. The best thing that could happen is for enraged progressives to resign en masse from the newspaper and for a new regime to replace them with journalists dedicated to reporting news, not supporting partisan narratives.

Otherwise, citizens will have to fill the void. Citizens like Laura Mollo in Tazewell County, who submitted over 1,000 public records requests over three and a half years, racking up roughly $5,000 in fees, in her effort to hold the Richlands Town Council accountable for everything from unpaved streets to a broken 911 system. The Virginia Center for Investigative Journalism has the story here.