Local Newspapers Are Dying, And Some Are Being Used on the Way Out

By MoCo's Voice | April 2026

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Across America, local newspapers are disappearing at a rate that should alarm anyone who cares about self-governance. According to the 2025 State of Local News report from Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism, nearly 40 percent of all local U.S. newspapers have vanished since 2005.¹ In the past year alone, 148 newspapers closed or merged out of existence. Today, 212 counties have no local news source at all, and another 1,525 counties have only one remaining outlet, typically a weekly paper. Taken together, roughly 50 million Americans live in those counties with limited or no access to reliable local news. Broaden the lens further, and the number climbs to more than 88 million Americans, one in four, who have limited access to a local newspaper of any kind.¹

This is not a story about the internet killing journalism. It is a story about what happens to communities, and to power, when the watchdog goes silent.

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The Corruption Connection

The consequences of losing local journalism are not abstract. They are measurable, and they are serious.

A landmark study published in MIS Quarterly by Brad Greenwood of George Mason University and Ted Matherly of Tulane University examined what happened in federal judicial districts that lost a major daily newspaper between 1996 and 2019. The findings were unambiguous: the disappearance of a local newspaper produced a 6.9 percent increase in corruption charges, a 6.8 percent increase in the number of indicted defendants, and a 7.4 percent increase in cases filed.² These were not minor infractions. they included bribery, embezzlement, and fraud by public officials.

The researchers also examined whether digital-era substitutes, citizen journalism websites, nonprofit news organizations, partisan blogs, could replace what the papers had provided. They tracked 352 such websites. The result: no measurable impact on corruption rates.²

"In an age of misinformation, the solution is not rejecting the professional press, it is embracing it, and ensuring that well-trained and hard-working men and women have both the ability and venue to hold those in power to account."

— Brad Greenwood, George Mason University

A separate 2025 study from the Brechner Center for the Advancement of the First Amendment at the University of Florida found that the loss of local news is also directly tied to increased government secrecy. Researchers requested the same seven public records from 44 state governments and found that states with fewer newspapers per capita were significantly more likely to deny or ignore those requests. "Where there are no newspapers and weakened newspaper systems, government secrecy is flourishing," said study author David Cuillier. "Government officials see that journalists are hurting, and they're taking advantage of that."³

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The Ghost Newspaper Problem

Not every paper that survives is doing journalism. Researchers at the University of North Carolina's Center for Innovation and Sustainability in Local Media have documented the rise of what they call the "ghost newspaper", an outlet that continues to publish under a local name, but whose newsroom has been so dramatically reduced that it can no longer adequately cover its community.⁴

Ghost papers come in two forms. In the first, a weekly or small daily is purchased by a larger chain and slowly fades into an advertising supplement with no original reporting. In the second, the paper technically survives but with staffing so reduced that routine government meetings go uncovered, public officials go unquestioned, and the community is left without the information it needs to make decisions. The UNC researchers estimated that between 1,000 and 1,500 papers currently fall into this second category, papers that are counted as "surviving" but that have lost more than half their newsroom staff and have effectively abandoned their accountability function.⁴

The danger of a ghost newspaper is not just that it fails to report the news. It is that it continues to occupy the space where journalism should be, giving the appearance of a free press while providing none of its protections.

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When Papers Become Tools

There is a third category that researchers are only beginning to document: the paper that does not merely fail to cover power, but actively serves it.

The mechanism is not always intentional. It often begins with financial dependency. As advertising revenue collapses and papers struggle to survive, they become increasingly reliant on a narrow base of local benefactors, businesses, government agencies, and institutions that have an interest in favorable coverage. A paper that depends on county government legal notices for revenue, or that occupies county-owned property at below-market rates, or that relies on local officials for access and goodwill, is a paper that has a structural incentive to avoid stories that might offend those benefactors.

This is not a conspiracy theory. It is a documented pattern in the economics of captured media. A 2022 study published in the Journal of Financial Economics by Jonas Heese, Gerardo Pérez-Cavazos, and Caspar David Peter found that local newspaper closures were associated with a 15.2 percent increase in corporate misconduct penalties at firms in the paper's former coverage area, because no one was watching.⁵ The pattern is straightforward: when a paper needs something from the people it is supposed to cover, it stops covering them honestly.

The Society of Professional Journalists Code of Ethics is explicit on this point: journalists must "avoid conflicts of interest, real or perceived," and must "refuse gifts, favors, fees, free travel and special treatment" that could compromise integrity or impartiality.⁶ A paper operating under financial arrangements with the government it is supposed to cover, is a paper operating under a conflict of interest that its readers deserve to know about.

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What MoCo's Voice Has Learned About the Montgomery Herald

The Montgomery Herald is owned by Womack Publishing Company, a privately held, family-owned media company headquartered in Chatham, Virginia, that operates 16 newspapers in Virginia and North Carolina.⁷ The Herald serves Montgomery County, North Carolina, a rural county of roughly 27,000 people with a limited advertising base and limited resources. These are precisely the conditions under which financial dependencies form.

MoCo's Voice has obtained, through a public records request, a copy of the lease agreement between Montgomery County and Womack Publishing Company, Inc., the Herald's parent company. The document reveals that since February 1, 2021, Womack Publishing has been leasing two floors of a county-owned building at 341 North Main Street in Troy for $500 per month.

The terms of that arrangement go well beyond the monthly rent. Under the lease, Montgomery County agreed to cover the building's electricity, water and sewer, and structural insurance, costs the county absorbs on top of the $500 monthly payment. The original four-year lease ran through January 31, 2024, and was signed by then-County Manager Matthew Woodard on behalf of the county.

When MoCo's Voice asked about the current status of the Herald's occupancy following the lease's expiration, Montgomery County Manager Frankie Maness confirmed by email that the arrangement is now month-to-month, with terms remaining consistent with the original lease. Maness noted that the building is part of a county facilities divestment plan, but confirmed there is currently no identified buyer and no disclosed timeline for the building's transfer.

As of April 2026, Womack Publishing has been occupying county-owned property at $500 per month, with county-covered utilities, for more than five years, with no current signed lease and no end date in sight.

Maness offered a reasonable operational explanation for the utility arrangement, noting that the building's systems make it impractical to segregate utility costs by tenant, and that the county would carry building insurance regardless of who occupies it. Those clarifications are noted. But they do not change the underlying reality: the Herald's parent company has been the beneficiary of a below-market occupancy arrangement with the county government it covers, and that arrangement has continued without interruption or public disclosure for more than five years.

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The Question Montgomery County Deserves to Ask

None of this means the Montgomery Herald's reporters are acting in bad faith. Many of them are likely doing the best they can with limited resources in a difficult environment. What it means is that the institutional conditions for independent journalism, financial independence, editorial autonomy, freedom from the goodwill of the people being covered, are structurally compromised.

The national research is clear: communities without independent local journalism pay a price. They pay it in corruption they never find out about. They pay it in government decisions made without scrutiny. They pay it in public officials who know no one is watching.

The question for Montgomery County is not whether the Herald is a bad newspaper. The question is whether a newspaper operating under these financial conditions can cover county government with the independence that accountability journalism requires.

Based on the public record, those conditions do not exist.

MoCo's Voice is publishing this information because the people of Montgomery County deserve to know who is watching their government, and who is not.

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References

Footnotes

1. Metzger, Zach. "The State of Local News 2025." Northwestern University Medill Local News Initiative, October 20, 2025. https://localnewsinitiative.northwestern.edu/projects/state-of-local-news/2025/report/ ↩ ↩²

2. George Mason University. "Are U.S. 'news deserts' hothouses of corruption?" November 26, 2024. https://www.gmu.edu/news/2024-11/are-us-news-deserts-hothouses-corruption (Summarizing: Greenwood, Brad, and Ted Matherly. "No News Is Bad News." MIS Quarterly.) ↩ ↩²

3. Volk, John. "Lack of Local News Tied to Government Secrecy, New Report Says." Northwestern University Medill Local News Initiative, August 27, 2025. https://localnewsinitiative.northwestern.edu/posts/2025/08/27/government-secrecy-local-news-study/ (Summarizing: Cuillier, David, and Brett Posner-Ferdman. Brechner Center for the Advancement of the First Amendment, University of Florida, 2025.) ↩

4. UNC Center for Innovation and Sustainability in Local Media. "The Rise of the Ghost Newspaper." The Expanding News Desert report. https://www.usnewsdeserts.com/reports/expanding-news-desert/loss-of-local-news/the-rise-of-the-ghost-newspaper/ ↩ ↩²

5. Heese, Jonas, Gerardo Pérez-Cavazos, and Caspar David Peter. "When the local newspaper leaves town: The effects of local newspaper closures on corporate misconduct." Journal of Financial Economics, Volume 145, Issue 2, Part B, August 2022. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jfineco.2021.08.015 ↩

6. Society of Professional Journalists. "SPJ Code of Ethics." https://www.spj.org/ethicscode.asp ↩

7. Womack Publishing Company. "About Us." https://www.womackpublishing.com/site/about.html ↩