Here's how many journalists cover your town | Muckrack data

The report from Rebuild Local News and Muck Rack finds that more than 1,000 counties — one out of three in the nation — do not have the equivalent of even one full-time local journalist.

About two-thirds of U.S. counties have a below-average number of local journalists, per an ambitious new project aiming to illustrate "the stunning collapse in local reporting" as old business models falter and newsrooms scramble for sustainability.  --- Axios

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New report maps a “severe” shortage of local journalists in the U.S.

The report from Rebuild Local News and Muck Rack finds that more than 1,000 counties — one out of three in the nation — do not have the equivalent of even one full-time local journalist.

By Corey Hutchins July 10, 2025, 9:53 a.m

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A group of journalism advocates from the nonprofit Rebuild Local News and the tech platform Muck Rack say they have counted — for the first time — how many journalists remain in the United States. 

The numbers, as might be expected, aren’t particularly sunny.

By using data never before tapped for this purpose, “we now know just how severe this local journalist shortage has become,” they write in a report released Thursday titled “Local Journalist Index.”

• Researchers from Rebuild Local News and Muck Rack used the tech platform’s proprietary media database to get to their numbers. 
• They filtered information, analyzed local journalism content from around the country, and deployed algorithms to create what they call a “Local Journalist Equivalent” for each U.S. county.

What they found when they landed on their final figures was a nosedive in the number of working American journalists since researchers sought to gauge that number, though by different means, more than two decades ago.

“The shortages of reporters are more severe, and I would say more widespread, than we thought,” Steven Waldman, the founder and president of Rebuild Local News, told me. 

“We knew there were really egregious pockets, but this shows it’s everywhere. It can be a big city or a suburb or a small town and you could have a real shortage of reporters.”

From the Bronx to Dallas: “Severely undercovered”

1. The report found that more than 1,000 counties — one out of three in the nation — do not have the equivalent of even one full-time local journalist.
2. “And the ‘better off’ parts of the country are in lousy shape, too,” the report states. 
3. “More than 2,000 counties have less than the national average,” which is an 8.2 Local Journalist Equivalent.

Moreover, the new data indicates that journalists haven’t just been fading from rural areas or communities suffering from population decline. The Bronx in New York City, for example, has fewer Local Journalist Equivalents per 100,000 people than Falls County, Texas with its population of 17,000.

Notably, fast-growing areas like Fort Bend County near Houston, or the Washington County suburb of Portland, have about five Local Journalist Equivalents — a low number, the report states.

The authors offer a potential reason for why that might be. 

• “Before the advent of online news, more residents meant more paid subscribers and more advertising revenue,” the report reads. 
• “Now, more residents means more news but no extra resources to cover that news.” 

The data found other counties with large populations are also “severely undercovered,” including Los Angeles, Phoenix, Dallas, San Bernardino, and Las Vegas.  

• Journalist erosion has been particularly acute in the Southwest. 

• Some smaller places have a higher concentration of local journalists.

In Nebraska, for instance, “one intrepid journalist” in Hooker County prevents it from joining the dozens of Nebraska counties “with no local news coverage,” the report states. “The key: She covers her community so deeply that, in a county of 769 people, the Hooker County Tribune has 726 paying subscribers.”

Gerri Peterson, who runs the Tribune, told me she had recently learned of her distinction as a bright spot in the report.

• “As someone with more of a glass half-full than glass half-empty mindset, I’m thrilled to be a positive statistic in the work that I’m passionate about,” she said in an email. “I’m proud to be able to provide this service to my hometown community.”

Notably, the county with the highest Local Journalist Equivalent is Jerauld County, South Dakota, where about 1,600 people live. The county shows 4.3 Local Journalist Equivalents, or 256.8 per 100,000 residents.

Matt Albasi, a data journalist at Muck Rack, acknowledged in an interview that the methodology they used to calculate the Local Journalist Equivalent for the report might mean smaller areas put up better numbers if they have just a few journalists working there.

• “When you normalize by population, in places with low populations a little effort goes a long way,” he said.

Still, the numbers surprised Kristi Hine, who owns the True Dakotan newspaper, which she said is the only source of local news in Jerauld County. There are not 4.3 journalists on her staff, she said, and the number felt high, unless it was capturing contributing columnists who write opinion pieces.

“I don’t really feel that ‘journalist’ is an accurate description, though,” she said.

As Rebuild Local News and Muck Rack worked on their landmark report, the question of who is a journalist “loomed very big,” Waldman said.

They wanted to make sure the methodology was “future-friendly” and inclusive — not just assessing journalists the way they might have been in the past. In their content analysis of coverage for the report, they say they sought to find stories online in a place that looked like a legitimate news source that focused on communities where the author was located.

Here’s how the Local Journalist Index describes its methodology:

Muck Rack collects hundreds of millions of data points on journalists and media outlets across digital, broadcast, print, podcasts, newsletters and social media. Data collected in the first quarter of 2025 was used to create an initial list of journalists. Rebuild Local News and Muck Rack then applied various filters to winnow down the list to those most likely covering local communities. For instance, we filtered to appropriately count part-time journalists, and then made another adjustment to reflect the reality that some journalists might be employed by an outlet in a major city but sometimes cover outlying suburbs.

When these sorts of large-scale national studies come out, inevitably people living and working in communities will point to disparities. The team behind the Local Journalist Index is aware of that.

Scott Yates, a former journalist and startup founder who initially came up with the idea and did much of the leg work on it, said they wanted to use tools that could be applied across the country. So they counted anyone who published a minimum amount of content online with an outlet that had been identified as local. An author’s work had to include a properly formatted byline and not be widely published elsewhere.

• “We didn’t analyze the type of content, whether it was hard news or sports, for example,” he said.
•  “We focused on whether it served a local audience.”

Yates noted their final set of numbers might not always look exactly the same as it does to someone on the ground in a particular county, and he acknowledged there are some inherent limitations.

Newspapers that don’t have a website, for example, aren’t getting counted in the report, nor are TV or radio stations that don’t publish online, he said. If a local news or opinion writer on Substack only published once or twice in a three-month period, the work wouldn’t have gotten fully captured. 

“We applied universal filters and then compared the results against real-life situations,” Yates said. “We went through three major versions and a million smaller iterations to get it as accurate as possible. No method is perfect, but this approach works across every county in the U.S., and gives a new and clear picture of how many journalists we have publishing today.”

The report’s authors are soliciting feedback from those on the ground to send in via its website.

“A consistent national standard”

The release of this first-of-its-kind report is another example of the ways in which advocates for local news are seeking to identify gaps in reporting and bring more public attention to a national crisis facing local news. 

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Across the country in recent years, journalists, academics, and researchers have been mapping their individual states to show the reality of their local news and information landscapes. At the national level, the Medill School at Northwestern’s State of Local News project offers a map of the country’s news deserts.

The people behind the Local Journalist Index want to issue a new report each year in order to track progress.

The nation’s local media industry is rapidly changing. 

Newspapers blink out.

startups emerge.

And with experiments in different business models, public policy, AI, and more, it can be hard to get a sense about the extent to which innovations are moving the needle.

“There are some great individual studies of particular communities and states — so you can get at it partly that way — but it’s a big gap to not have a consistent national standard,” Waldman said. 

“So, we do hope that over time, in addition to giving the snapshot in the first year to where the gaps are, it will also [give] all those stakeholders — journalists, entrepreneurs, people who run newsrooms, philanthropists, policymakers — the tools to judge whether their experiments are working.”

1. For Waldman, the hope is that this new research will lead to help where it’s needed most. 
2.  Entrepreneurs could see where opportunities might be, philanthropists might rely on it to target donations. 
3.  Advocates could look to it to help make the case for public policy to strengthen local news.

“Part of me really hopes that people see this and go ‘Oh crap, there isn’t any local news in my neighborhood — in my community,’” said the Muck Rack data journalist Albasi. 

“I do hope that people will look at this and say ‘Maybe I can contribute.'”

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