In 2004, 21 out of the 88 counties in Ohio had only one newspaper in the whole county. By 2019, that number rose to 41 counties...nearly 47%. Out of the 104 newspapers that closed in this 15 year time period in Ohio, 77 were in metro counties while 27 were in non-metro. For instance, Cuyahoga County where Cleveland is located had 26 newspapers in 2004 and merely 5 by 2019.

These patterns in Ohio are similar to those of the overall United States. According to Professor Penelope Muse Abernathy, a professor at the UNC Hussman School of Journalism and Media, the US has lost nearly 1800 papers since 2004. There are almost 2000 counties without local papers--Abernathy describes such counties as news deserts. Many of these counties also have poverty rates above the national average.

What is causing this decline in local journalism? Though there is an obvious change in reader behavior with many people now accessing the news online, the significant decreases in newspaper circulation also stem from changing ownership patterns. Many metro and regional papers are decreasing circulation to surrounding rural and suburban areas. Additionally, fewer and fewer newspapers are independently-owned. The top 25 companies owning the most newspapers now control nearly a third of all papers, up from 20% in 2004. For instance, New Media/GateHouse owns 451 papers 34 states.

Ohio presents a staggering case study in which 30% of its newspapers have changed ownership since 2014. Let's explore how newspapers have consolidated over time in Ohio.

In 2004, there were 8 owners with more than 10 papers. The largest of this group was the Brown Publishing Company with 33 papers. In 2019, the largest owner is Gannett/GateHouse with 54 papers. Furthermore, there are now 3 groups in Ohio owning more than 10 papers.

According to Abernathy's research, these media barons pose a threat to local communities. First, there is a stronger willingness to close or sell papers that are underperforming. For instance, Civitas closed 8 suburban weekly papers in Ohio and North Carolina. "The suburban newspaper isn't a fit in our business model," Civitas CEO Michael Bush explained. Second, there is an aggressive emphasis on cost-cutting strategies even when it means compromising newsroom staffing or operations. Third, consolidation by media barons contributes to operations being outsourced to remote locations not necessarily in the community. For instance, over 200 of GateHouse's papers across the US are operated from a center in Austin, Texas. This results in weaker community ties to the paper.

Methodology: The data was obtained from the University of North Carolina's Center for Innovation and Sustainability in Local Media's Database of Newspapers. Due to errors in duplicate primary keys for various states, I decided to focus on my home state of Ohio because the data was accurate for this subset. I cleaned the data using python and pandas. Data was used for the years 2004, 2014, 2016, and 2019 since those were the years available from the database. The code for this webpage and the Jupyter notebook used to clean the data can be found in this github repository.