The Local News Crisis Is Coming For Television

Local newspapers have spent years contending with consolidation, disappearing outlets and increasingly large news deserts. Now, some of those same warning signs are emerging in local television.

In the latest episode of In the Vicinity, Tim Hanlon sits down with Medill Local News Initiative Leader Tim Franklin and Medill Local News Initiative Research Associate John Volk to break down the findings of the Local News Initiative’s latest State of Local News Report. They discuss how consolidation is reshaping local TV newsrooms, why fewer owners can mean fewer reporters and less consumer choice, and what broadcasters can learn from newspapers’ difficult digital transition.

Listen to the full In the Vicinity podcast above or get it on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

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Tim Hanlon: You. Do you know where you are? You're In the Vicinity. How you doing? Welcome. My name is Tim Hanlon. I'm the founder and the CEO of the Vertere Group here in Chicago, where we consultatively advise and counsel various companies, both big and small, and very much in between in the media and technology spaces.

Welcome along for the ride. This is our little weekly journey into all things local media. Thank you for finding us and telling your friends, and having them tell two friends, and so on. Probably no bigger story in local media this week than the latest stunning findings from the reporting team at the Local News Initiative at Northwestern's Medill School, who, as you probably know, and if you haven't, what are you waiting for?

Localnewsinitiative.northwestern.edu is the place to go online to check it out. They've been putting out something called the State of Local News for a number of years now. Two of the members of that organization, that team, Tim Franklin and John Volk, are here to kinda go through some of the findings of the most recently released report, which came out a couple of days ago as we record this.

And a lot of the work that the initiative has done and inclusive of this report that just came out, has been an analysis an in-depth data-driven one at that of the decline of local news coverage, dissemination, quality, et cetera, especially in the more traditional realms, that being newspaper and more recently digital expressions of newspaper or digital native local news production and distribution.

Unfortunately, this report continues to document the news desertization, if you will, on those fronts. It's only seemingly increasing now at the decidedly more mid-size and smaller market and rural kind of community levels, where it was first more pronounced at the bigger city consolidated levels.

But for the first time, this version of the report starts to ask the same questions and begin the diligence around that of local television news, its production, its distribution, its consumption. And the numbers are not optimistic, let's put it that way. Probably not a surprise to anybody who listens to this show and follows or is part of this space.

But it is very much the beginning of the journey for the folks at the Local News Initiative to now kinda get into the weeds, and we'll talk about that with our guests in a second. But the notion of consolidation of TV stations and groups, the idea of bringing more economies to the business allowing essentially or ostensibly to bring more resources to commit to local journalism.

We're gonna start to kinda dig into that and see if that's a truth or a potential fallacy in thinking. And the initial read on what's going on at the local station level television news on a local level. It's not starting out from a great position, and sounds a little distant as it might be, very similar to what's been transpiring in the newspaper industry over the last 15 or 20 years.

Now, that said, let's get into some of those specifics. Let's get into the data, how Jon and Tim and their team approach this kind of stuff, how they are bringing that logic and that methodology to television news, where it's going, and I think you're gonna learn a whole bunch. But again, make sure that you bookmark and check out localnewsinitiative.northwestern.edu to make sure that you get not only this copy of the current State of Local News 2026 report, State of Local News project, but also all the other stuff that this organization puts out because this is important work and is documenting what is unavoidable now, right now, in the in the journalism and the local media spaces.

Let's get to our conversation with Tim and John. Here's our chat. Please, as always, enjoy.

Maybe Tim and John, you can both explain your roles and what the institute is, how it evolved, what its mission is, for those who are uninitiated from this important work. 

Tim Franklin: Sure. The Local News Initiative was something that was founded here in April of 2018 as a research and development project to provide insights into what was happening with the local news industry in the way of research.

And then also to take that research and apply it directly to news organizations to help them navigate through this period of what is truly transformational change in local news. So we're now supported by many of the nation's largest foundations who are concerned about the loss of local news and what's happening in the industry and want kind of reliable, accurate information about the industry out there.

As well as some individual donors who are supporting the work. And of course, it's great to have the backing of the Medill School at Northwestern on this project as well. Anyway, we founded it in 2018. I was the founding director of the Local News Initiative. I've been at Medill for about nine years. And this really is a passion project for me. 

Tim Hanlon: And your background, Tim, and we'll get to you in a second, John is what? Where did you come from before getting enmeshed in academia and Northwestern and Medill? 

Tim Franklin: I was a reporter and editor at the Chicago Tribune for 17 years coming right out of college.

And then went off and ran newsrooms in Indianapolis and Orlando and at the Baltimore Sun. Was the managing editor of the Washington Bureau for Bloomberg News for three years, then went to be the president of the Poynter Institute, which is a school for journalists and media think tank based in Florida. And then I came to Medill in 2017. 

Tim Hanlon: And John, how long have you been with the project? And your background is a lot more focused on the nuts and bolts of the data that drives all of this stuff, right? 

John Volk: Very much and thank you, Tim, for having me on. It’s a real treat to speak with you today.

I'm one of the researchers on our State of Local News project, which takes this national look at local news organizations across the country and the increasingly shifting local news landscape we live in. I have an educational background in statistics and journalism. I came up through a really exciting student journalism experience at Northwestern, which led to an internship at the Minnesota StarTribune, a major metro in Minneapolis.

And while I was there, there was this huge story in St. Cloud, Minnesota which is a pretty sizable city to the northwest of Minneapolis, which had a long-standing legacy paper at its peak with 40 journalists dwindle down to one journalist, and briefly no journalists at this newspaper, creating what we call a ghost newspaper.

And at that time it really kinda hit me, the real-world implications of what was going on in local journalism, and I felt I really wanted to be part of the solution. So it's been a real honor to be part of this project and keep track of where things are going in this industry.

Tim Hanlon: Okay. Just for quick background, you're talking to a 1983 National High School Institute journalism cherub from the Medill program. So I have a special place in my heart for all things Northwestern and Medill, so this is doubly interesting and happy to have this conversation.

And the alumni association I'm sure will be listening intently to ask where is your check for this year? So guys, tell me, you have been doing this, your entire team have been doing this for a number of years now. And I think really the thing that strikes me is that a lot of what seems to have been part of the findings has been this story of the decline of local news, especially on the print/newspaper side of things, whatever that used to be.

But also in this report and maybe this is to me one of the things that made me stand up a little bit more so than normal, is you're kinda now also putting it out there that the local television side of things is perhaps not immune to what's going on from the print side as well.

Tim Franklin: Yeah. Absolutely. We've been studying newspapers and digital-only outlets, ethnic media, and public broadcasting. But local television news is still the way that many people consume local news. And so we wanted to add that component to our annual State of Local News Report.

Thanks to John and Zach Metzger, and Tristi Boaz, our team here, we were able to do that this year. But this is really an ideal time to be looking at local television news for a couple of reasons. One is, as you suggest, the business model for local TV news is changing rapidly, and in many ways what happened to newspapers 10, 15 years ago I think is beginning to happen to local TV news in terms of the fragmentation of the ad market for local television news, as well as the pressure now on retransmission fees to local stations, which have really helped prop them up in recent years.

But with more people cutting the cord and more people turning to streaming, I think it is having a big effect. And then, of course, the other factor is just this massive consolidation of the local TV news business, which has a huge implication not only for television journalism in many markets across the country, but also for consumers in how they consume news, the depth of the news they get, and the choice that they have in choosing different outlets.

And John has really been spending months and months diving into this and can go into even greater detail. 

Tim Hanlon: Yeah, and John, as you do so, maybe a little bit of sort of the methodology that you've been using for these last number of reports on the the print/newsroom, quote unquote, side of things, and how that's applied now perhaps newly to the TV station part of that mix.

John Volk: Yeah, absolutely. As Tim said, this is a really interesting time for us to start incorporating TV into our work. If you think about the 2010s, what that was for newspapers when you look at the Gannett-GateHouse merger and all these corporate titans coming in and gobbling up newspapers, hollowing them out.

I really had my antennas go off with the Nexstar-Tegna storyline that's played out over the course of this year as, oh, man is something similar gonna start happening in TV? And if so, we wanna be in a position to tell that story, whatever it ends up being. So I've been really fortunate to have Tim and Zach's support on diving into this and see where it will go over the next couple of years.

As far as the methodological side of things, the print side and the digital side as well, there's no national registry of newspapers that you can draw from. So we have assembled this patchwork of relationships we've had with state press associations across the country who maintain lists of members, and we work with them to acquire their lists and go through a verification process, make sure that they're publishing at a frequent cadence, they're covering local communities, they're meeting critical information needs.

With television, we are very fortunate that we have a federal agency whose job is to monitor local television or television in general, I should say, broadcast television. So I spent a lot of time deep in the depths of the FCC's licensing databases and federal reports that stations have to submit to the agency.

And through pulling together all those bits of data from here and there we kinda were able to drill down on the places that are putting local news out on the airwaves. I was very fortunate to see that it was actually a sustainable model that I think we'll be able to reproduce on a yearly basis in a comprehensive way.

Tim Hanlon: So before we dive into the TV station side of it, I do wanna kinda pull out a couple of the findings that, among many that I think is maybe instructive for this conversation. One of the things that you guys pull out here is that the small and mid-size owners of newspapers, if you will, rather than just the large chains, seem to be disproportionately dwindling or getting smaller or being eliminated.

Which may be a little bit of a shift in the original narrative of the Gannetts and the Aldens of the world, from a national perspective kinda gobbling up stuff. It seems like there is, shall I say, some hollowing out and worse in now more mid-size and/or smaller communities, to the point where some of these smaller rural and small towns are frankly losing all of their coverage altogether, no?

Tim Franklin: That's absolutely correct, Tim. And, if you look at the closures in the early 2020s and the late teens, many of them were the large companies that were closing their least profitable and smallest outlets. But what's happened, and we started seeing this last year and it accelerated this year, is we're seeing these smaller and mid-sized independent, in some cases family-run operations, that are closing down.

In some cases, the owners are seniors, and they were looking to sell or get out, and they couldn't because they couldn't find a buyer or there was no one in their family who wanted to pick up the baton. So that's part of it. The other thing, though, Tim is that many of these owners are operating on a knife's edge. 

They're operating with thin margins, and in the past few months, we've seen the continued decline in ad revenue to those newspapers. We've also seen just a massive increase in newsprint prices. And in many smaller communities, the local weekly print newspaper is still the primary vessel by which people get their local news.

So the newsprint prices are up something like 18% this year, which is five times the rate of inflation. And then we've also, as part of this triple whammy, we've seen a decline in digital traffic to local news sites which I think is in part, maybe large part, due to AI and more people going to AI platforms.

There are some other reasons. Facebook de-emphasized news in its algorithm and some other things. But you combine those three things, and so you have owners that were operating with very small room for error that just simply couldn't make it in this environment and have thrown up their hands.

And of course the really unfortunate part about this is that these are the very owners that you don't wanna lose. These are owners who are committed to their communities. They know their communities. They have the institutional history. And you've put your finger on what I think is one of the more significant trends that we've seen in this report.

And the result is more news deserts. More people without access to local news and information and all the implications that go with that. 

Tim Hanlon: Methodologically, John maybe help our audience who is not as attuned to this data and this reporting that you guys have been doing the last number of years.

How do you quantify what a news desert, quote unquote, is? And how are you measuring the sources? Because there are some sources that are 20 reporters deep and others that are maybe one-person bands, to Tim's point, which is the aging solo owner/reporter in a small town, yet they're equated as being equal, if you will, sources.

And I think there's another term you throw out there, is also this new shallowness of, maybe it's not a desert per se, but there's a hiving out, so to speak. So I guess I'm asking you to answer the difficult question of taking those terms and giving us a little bit of understanding of how those are quantified, if that's possible.

John Volk: Yeah. So we take a look at things on an outlet-by-outlet basis and a county-by-county basis. We maintain a really simple definition of a news desert, and it's simply this is a county that has no locally based source of original professional reporting. Tim mentioned it's been a really troubling year, and that the number of counties meeting that definition has gone up by 26.

That's the largest one-year jump since we've been tracking this over five years. Mostly in the Midwest and attributed to closing of small weekly papers owned by private independents or midsize chains. And this is a storyline that, as Tim mentioned, we saw start coming through last year and has been showing no signs of slowing.

So we developed with the help of a data scientist on our team, Ed Malthouse, a predictive model of what are the counties that are most likely at risk of moving from we've got one outlet to we've got no outlets over the next insert number of years. And consistently what we see is that the counties that are at risk are poorer, older, aging counties in the rural Midwest.

If you were to pick a given newspaper that has closed, one of the 170 newspapers that's closed over the last year, odds are pretty good that it's gonna be in one of those places. And we're continuing to monitor those types of zones. 

Tim Hanlon: And it wasn't too long ago where the Lees of the world and the McClatchys of the world, the owners that over-indexed in some of those smaller and mid-size markets and stuff were I don't know, almost defying the seemingly doom and gloom predictions of news decline.

And yet now we're starting to see perhaps, that it's happening and coming for them now too. One thing that's worth noting in this conversation about small independent owners versus the chains, several of which are controlled by private equity or hedge funds, is that those larger chains do have some room for error, unlike the smaller independent players.

Tim Franklin: If there's a dramatic rise in newsprint, if there's an economic downturn, they have the capacity to withstand that in a way that the smaller players maybe don't. Now so in some ways they're better able to keep a paper operating than a smaller owner is. That said, we're also seeing this trend of ghost newspapers in some cases in those companies, where it's effectively a newspaper with a nameplate and a masthead but there's very little original local reporting happening in those communities.

But it's still a vessel for advertising and maybe community events and a few other things. As bad as the local news crisis is with publications closing, it's actually worse when you look at the diminution of local coverage in communities, and some of that is being driven by the larger chains.

Tim Hanlon: Having worked in television news way back when I didn't know any better, I certainly remember both on the national and the local levels, newspapers driving a lot of the editorial considerations, usually in the morning, as the broadcasts were thought through for the rest of the day. So it strikes me as being a natural pivot point now in this conversation.

If, and I'm sure this is a little bit different on the sort of major metro area dynamic. But in these smaller, mid-sized markets, if indeed what you're saying is true, that these smaller papers, either independent or small chain-owned, are being made smaller and/or hollowed out, isn't that, in effect, also starting to perhaps aid and abet the diminution, your word, great word, of what local television news production starts to look like?

John Volk: One of the things that we've been talking about increasingly when we think of news deserts, I think a lot of the conversation around that as a concept is, now the people that live in news desert counties are uninformed. And that is certainly true to an extent. The part of that that has been less talked about is, now the people that live in news desert counties are having their stories told less and less.

So if you talk about a regional TV newscast, it's gonna have a lot harder job telling the stories of someone in the rural outstretches of its coverage area than it would have if there was a robust local news presence in those areas to tell those stories, and work their way up the news ladder to the desks of the famous nightly newscast in the area.

So I think there's certainly a domino effect we're starting to see here between newspapers and television. 

Tim Franklin: Yeah and Tim, just to add to that very, very good point John made. Newspapers were the agenda setters in many ways, and drove the news cycle of a given day. And when that goes away, and it's beginning to go away, and I think you see it in TV newscasts as well.

They become more focused on the city center. In many cases, they become more focused on crime because it's easier to cover. You know there's a story there. You know you're gonna get 30 seconds or 60 seconds or 90 seconds on the air with that particular thing. And then the newscast I think has become more homogenized in some ways without that geographic diversity John was talking about from across the suburbs or the exurbs in a metro region.

Tim Hanlon: This is the conundrum, right? And I guess I'd love to hear your opinions on it. The broadcaster's logic is that we need to scale because the big, bad tech companies have hollowed out our competitiveness in terms of ad support and all that kinda stuff. And how else are we gonna be able to nourish newsrooms across our ownerships, or in our ownership group, to cover the news most appropriately with all the resources necessary to be in all of these courtrooms and streets and neighborhoods and that kinda stuff.

Yet, I think what you guys have just outlined and frankly hinted at from the newspaper side is it's actually the reverse, right? Because there is a starving of those resources, and economically it's easier and perhaps more remunerative to not have as many resources out there because it can be better processed, if you will, in a more centralized way, in a more, I don't know, zone defense kind of thing versus a man-to-man offense, if you will.

Bad analogy for basketball, but I guess the point is it seems almost that the idea of consolidation is actually not nourishing and reinforcing of resources. It's almost the antithesis.

Tim Franklin: Yeah, I think that as a basketball fan, I appreciate the analogy, Tim. But I think with consolidation, and John's got the consolidation data, we're seeing more metro areas where there's duplication of newscasts across multiple channels, which means there are fewer journalists on the street in those areas, and also that consumers have fewer choices when it comes to picking a newscast.

And it also means that the newsrooms that are left are getting to fewer homes and fewer places. And then you combine that with the secular changes that are happening in the industry, sort of the YouTube-ification of local TV news where people are just watching three-minute clips on YouTube as opposed to the appointment viewing of an entire newscast in the evening.

And newscasts themselves are becoming more fragmented. Audiences are becoming more splintered. And the news is becoming, I think, less comprehensive as a result of all that. I don't know. John, do you wanna add to that? 

John Volk: Yeah I'd say you hit the nail on the head. I think one of the big striking findings from our first look at TV news this year was that we measured things on a TV newsroom level rather than at a station level to really try and keep the focus on where local news is being produced and by who.

And we found that when you look at the roughly 680 local television commercial newsrooms across the country, the 10 largest owners control about 75% of those. And certainly you will talk to owners in certain markets and say that this consolidation has given us greater financial strength, maybe we can send reporters to places we couldn't have otherwise, and that's probably true in some markets, that's been a good thing.

There are also many examples of this consolidation, as Tim laid out excellently, we're gonna slash reporters, and we're gonna put out the same news reports on one channel, and then you flip to the other channel and keep watching the same news report, that fewer choices and less competition usually does not mean the consumer's getting a better deal.

Tim Hanlon: How about on the form factor, though, and the distribution side of things, right? The idea of newspapers, if you will, becoming digital news properties. Okay, some have succeeded at that, and many more have not. Television seems to even be slower in that transition, and okay, they're now finally putting clips on YouTube, and they've got a nominal digital FAST channel that at least repurposes a broadcast newscast. And in some cases is seen as an original reporting tool or perhaps even, in the case of a Scripps, they're trying to think of that first and then taking the best of that and putting it on television. I guess the question in there is how does that affect your methodology going forward, and do you see a real I don't know a turn in what, quote unquote, "a local newspaper," or a local television newsroom is really putting out there in the manner or the splintered manner that it's going out there versus the previous receptacles of a physical newspaper or a television linear broadcast.

Tim Franklin: Yeah, what's interesting is we did a poll of news consumers. We published it in September. It was before we did the State of Local News Report. One of the things that I thought was really fascinating is that consumers, many of them are going to newspaper websites or digital social media sites or other digital operations and they're going to those places to a much greater degree than they are TV websites or TV digital offerings.

And so I think in many ways, newspapers have done a better job making the digital transition than local television news has. And from a financial standpoint, the one thing that worries me is that in newspapers there's this long historic tradition of subscriptions whether it's print or digital.

On television, it just gloriously shows up on your 65-inch flat screen TV. You're actually paying for it through some kind of a subscription, but you're not paying that station directly. My point is there's no history of a transactional benefit to a station of having that news consumer like there is in newspapers.

So I think that's yet another kind of financial pressure that we're seeing on local TV news stations. 

Tim Hanlon: I think to your point, Tim, it reduces the urgency it seems, because there's that sort of protective indirect business model to the consumer, right? What you're hinting at is that maybe it's gonna be frayed and/or be more direct going forward, and that shakes the economic model of television to the core.

They've never really been in that business of being a subscriber-generated thing or responding to consumers in a way that will directly affect their bottom lines and stuff, right? So I think it's a huge distinction and probably worth tracking from a data perspective going forward, because I'm not sure consolidated or consolidating TV station groups are gonna get religion on that front anytime soon, because they're still kinda trying to milk the the current retrans and advertising model in a scaled way as long as they can.

That's almost the inverse of what's necessary, which is learning the skill set of going DTC, if you will.

Tim Franklin: Yeah. And Tim, that's exactly what the newspaper industry did for years. They milked the print advertising revenue for as long as they could as well as print subscriptions for as long as they could, and now we're seeing the result of that over time.

And I would hate to see television news repeat the mistakes that were made by the newspaper industry during that same period. But one other thing we saw in the survey that we did was that only about 14% of people who live in the Chicago metro area said they paid for news.

Only 14%. And people, I think, have subscription fatigue. They have Netflix and YouTube and Hulu, and pick your streaming service. And so getting folks to pay for news is hard in this environment. 

John Volk: Yeah. Just to piggyback on that point that Tim's making I just feel like this is yet another instance.

We talked earlier about consolidation of newspapers, now consolidation of TV, where it feels like we're starting to hear the echoes of what happened 10, 20 years ago in newspapers starting to creep up and knock on the door of television. They've had this head start, and it's really something I hope that they can learn from those mistakes that the television industry made, or the newspaper industry made rather and avoid them for themselves.

Tim Hanlon: All right. One last question, and then I'm gonna let you unabashedly promote, and then we'll have you back for more stuff because there's just so much more that I can't even get close to talking about. You do though have some bright spots in this. The nonprofit side of things there's been almost a wellspring of that, at least on the local journalism front.

It doesn't even say newspaper or TV or digital per se. It's local news. Describe some of those solutions that are showing up and/or getting more traction and stuff. And how much green are these shoots, if you will, or are these just mere crack filling, so to speak, in a more crumbling foundation that is just ultimately a matter of when, not if?

Tim Franklin: There are definitely green shoots. I wish there were more, and I wish the shoots were higher. And I wish they were getting more rain, more nutrition. But the report showed that in the last year we had 75 local news startups around the country, most of them digital, a few print.

Most of them nonprofit, not all, but most of them nonprofit. Over the last five years we've had nearly 300 local news startups around the country. Every year we gain startups, we also lose some. There tends to be a lot of churn on that side. But we are seeing entrepreneurship. We're also seeing some metro news organizations reinvent themselves in very successful ways.

We've seen it with the Minnesota StarTribune that John mentioned, which is doing very well. The Boston Globe, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Seattle Times. I could name some others that have really effectively made a pivot to digital and to earned revenue through digital. So that's heartening.

We're also seeing a growth in these national local news networks. I'm talking about Axios Local Tapinto, Patch. Even The New York Times is starting to set up these local network sites around the country, their first one being in the Twin Cities. I think we're gonna see more of those as time goes on because you have the centralized shared resources of a big organization.

You can put reporters into communities in a less expensive way of doing that. 

Tim Hanlon: Do you guys see that mostly coming from the top down, like these brands The New York Times, going downstream? Or going from the ground up, so to speak, where it's independence showing some stability and then maybe partnering and then maybe getting the attention of those big entities and then going upstream?

Tim Franklin: It's a great question. Right now I think it's mostly top-down. We are seeing some bottom-up. There's an organization called Village Media, which is based in Canada, that is now moving into Illinois and Wisconsin, and I think one other Midwestern state. John, is that right? And so they're setting up, I think it's 15 local news sites, and it is very much a community-oriented kinda bottom-up organization.

So it'll be interesting to follow them and see if that model works.

Tim Hanlon: Guys, this has been great. We wanna encourage people to not only get the report, but subscribe to what you guys put out. Become more involved if there are resources that can be brought to the table, that kinda stuff.

How can people find out more and do more with what you are all doing? 

Tim Franklin: Thank you. The Medill Local News Initiative website. Just do a search for the Medill Local News Initiative. We have stories about trends in the industry there. We have our research there, the State of Local News Report is there as well.

We also earlier this year started our own podcast, the State of Local News podcast, which is a monthly podcast, which you can also find on that site or on your favorite streaming service. Lots of ways to find us and to learn about our work.

Tim Hanlon: John, how about on the data side?

I assume that you're also open to data partnerships from original source material that helps aid and abet your knowledge of counties and news dynamism in those places, no? 

John Volk: Yeah, absolutely. We try to maintain our data as open source for practicing journalists and researchers around the country.

If you wanna reach out, we'll get it to you. We also have a pretty extensive corner of the website, which Tim just mentioned, where you can click around all kinds of maps of the U.S. counties, anywhere you can find them. And explore, see what's around you, see what places are lacking news.

I would invite anybody who's curious to click around and see what they can find. 

Tim Hanlon: Okay. And last question. What is the cadence of stuff coming in the next couple of months? What could people be looking for? What other areas are you gonna be tackling that will make headlines and/or encourage us to perhaps talk again on a more specific level?

Tim Franklin: Sure. In the next two to three weeks we're gonna be launching a trust index. So we're partnering with NORC at the University of Chicago. Trust is a huge issue in media and in local news as well. So we wanna track what's happening with the feelings about trust of news and local news.

So we're launching that in partnership with the Alliance for Trust in Media, which is a nonpartisan nonprofit organization. Those will be quarterly polls that we're going to be rolling out. We're also gonna be rolling out in the next few weeks these expansive stories that are related to the report.

We posted one this week looking at Land of Lincoln, Land of Loss. Illinois led the nation in closure of newspapers in the last year, unfortunately. So we went down to Southern Illinois and looked at how that happened. We're also gonna have a piece in the next few days on what's happened with public broadcasting since the rescission by the federal government of funding of CPB.

We're also gonna be doing a breakout story on the consolidation of local TV news. We're focusing on Indianapolis which is one of the largest, 15 largest, 16 largest cities in the country. It's down to two TV new news owners in that market. So we'll have a series of these stories rolling out over the next few weeks.

Tim Hanlon: Many thanks to Tim and to John, and you can be sure that we will have both of these gentlemen back, as well as perhaps some of their colleagues as they delve more deeply into the local television component of this state of local news reportage that they've been doing over the months and years.

And you can find out more about this and the Local News Initiative generally at Northwestern Medill at this website, all one word localnewsinitiative.northwestern.edu. Just search up the State of Local News tab there, and you'll see all the stuff, the maps, the data, the various reports that have come out of this both in the past, the present report, as well as what they've got planned in the months ahead.

We look forward to having them back and talking about more of the television side of these kinds of things as we grapple with the decline, it seems, sadly, of local news and what can possibly replace it. Our thanks, of course, to the great Jerry Payne for his audio excellence this week, as always, and the good folks at TVREV, whose resources we rely upon each and every week to get this show out to you.

You may know who they are, but I'm gonna tell you their names anyway. Melissa Hourigan and Jessika Walsten and Mike Gasbara, and of course, the inimitable Jason Damata and all of the team there at TVREV. I thank them, as well as our friends at Madhive for their financial support of the show as well.

And we thank you, of course, for listening and telling your pals and friends and colleagues, your friends, your enemies. Just tell 'em we've got some good stuff going on here around the local media space each and every week. We look forward to sharing more important and illuminating conversations in the weeks ahead.

Thank you for listening, and we'll see you soon here again In the Vicinity.