Local News is Disappearing. Here’s How State Lawmakers Can Help in 2027

This week’s U.S. midterm elections will send hundreds of new lawmakers into state and federal government, each bringing fresh eyes to the challenges facing our communities. One of the most urgent is the steep decline of high-quality local news. As the leading nonpartisan, nonprofit coalition developing policies to strengthen community news and information, Rebuild Local News can point these aspiring changemakers to solutions that are ready to go.

The Problem

Since 2002, the U.S. has lost more than 80% of its local journalists. In many places, they were the only independent sources of quality information about local governments, school boards, political candidates and Main Street businesses. Social media and AI have not been filling the gap, as a growing body of research links the loss of local news to a wide range of harms including:

• • Weaker civic knowledge: Voters who don’t hear what their elected leaders are doing are less likely to know who those leaders even are.
  • Higher borrowing costs: With fewer watchdogs scrutinizing public spending, local bond prices rise.
  • Greater loneliness: Local news outlets help knit communities together, and when they disappear, so does some of that connection.

When a community loses its local news, it loses more than a trusted source of information. The damage is civic, economic, even emotional.

The Causes

Data-mining Big Tech platforms have extracted the lion’s share of local advertising dollars that once supported local journalist jobs. Those dollars were part of a positive feedback loop: What was good for local economic growth was good for providing high-quality community information, and vice versa. When the ad dollars disappeared, so did local journalists. Outlets that lost their journalists also lost their local audiences, setting off a downward spiral that is difficult to escape in today’s extremely competitive digital attention economy.

Now local news providers face an even newer threat. AI companies scrape local news without compensation to generate their own AI summaries, which draw audiences away from local news providers.

The bottom line: Local news providers in every medium have dwindling economic incentives to invest in high-quality community news, leaving partisans, conspiracy theorists and inaccurate AI chatbots to fill our civic information gaps.

The Solutions

Rebuild Local News is working alongside policymakers, local news advocates and other civic champions to develop and advance public policy solutions to revitalize our local news ecosystems. The momentum is real: In the last couple of years, there has been an explosion in the number of bills proposing some form of economic intervention to support local news, with enacted policies in six U.S. states directing more than $80 million in public dollars to local news outlets in 2026 alone. These policies fall into a few emerging frameworks, for which Rebuild Local News has created model legislation:

• • Local journalist employment credits: These are refundable employment tax credits that help news outlets hire and employ local journalists. Versions of this emerging policy have already been enacted in Illinois, New Mexico, New York and, most recently, California.
  • Government advertising set-asides and transparency: Many government agencies opt to send taxpayer dollars to out-of-state Big Tech firms instead of to deserving community news outlets. New York City, Vermont, Maryland, Colorado and California have enacted “buy local” policies to prioritize local news providers in ad contracting. As a first step, governments like Illinois and Connecticut have enacted ad transparency policies to study whether public dollars are being spent wisely.
  • Community news fellowships: States can support early-career journalists and supply immediate local coverage to underserved communities by funding public universities or other expert parties, like Report for America, to place journalists in local newsrooms. This policy has been enacted in New Mexico, California and Washington state.
  • Small business advertising tax credits: These credits would give a break to Main Street businesses that advertise with local news outlets, driving dollars to local news outlets and strengthening local commercial relationships while taking a bite out of rising business costs.

Want to bring one of these policies to your state? Contact Matt Pearce, our policy director (mattpearce@rebuildlocalnews.org), and Nathaniel Erb, our government affairs and partnerships director (nathanielerb@rebuildlocalnews.org), to learn more.