Navigating a News Desert: How Fewer Reporters Keep Journalism Alive
- Sep 29
- 6 min read
Hello, Goodbyes
By Audrey Korte
Sept. 29, 2025
In June of 2022, I arrived in a little city of about 15,000 residents called Chippewa Falls. The western Wisconsin locale sits in the Chippewa Valley and is located about 90 miles east of Minneapolis. Chippewa County has about 65,000 residents and is dotted with small towns, some of which have more cows than humans.
It's a charming, beautiful heartland of America — and like many rural areas, greatly at risk of seeing the extinction of small news outlets and hyperlocal coverage as news deserts grow seemingly exponentially.
News deserts are counties without any locally based source of local news and they continue to grow unchecked.
I had only been to Wisconsin twice before. My aunt and uncle and their kids lived in La Crosse when I was younger, and I recall visiting.
Then in my first of three rounds of college, I rowed against UW-Madison in 2001 when I was an athlete for the University of Kansas. I recall experiencing my first frozen custard on that trip — worth noting simply because it was so tasty.
Otherwise, I was uninitiated with the great state of Wisconsin, and that was fine with me. I like going to new places and meeting new people.
Hired by an editor who was based out of La Crosse, I was told I would be the only news reporter at the paper.
I was to put my content together in Chippewa Falls — written articles with photos and occasional videos — and then send it to editors at the La Crosse Tribune. They would make suggestions and edits and ensure everything went where it needed to.
When I arrived, we had four news editors in La Crosse covering a handful of small papers in the region, including the Herald. By the time I left three years later, there were just two editors — definitely not enough people for that amount of work.
In 2022 the paper was printing six days a week. Within a year, we reduced that to printing three days a week, but we were still producing a digital paper on the days we were no longer printing. The print papers came out Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday.
While that makes more sense for a staff so small it doesn’t do us any favors with locals who still prefer a meaty, daily print paper. And there are still some.
But the writing was on the wall when I took the position. I was warned ahead of arrival in Chippewa Falls that the building would be under construction for renovations within a short time as the newspaper gave up much of its previously prized real estate.
The office only needed to accommodate two of us journalists, after all. The rest of the space went to other businesses.
Empty Desks
The day I arrived, I walked into a large office building — a one-story newsroom with dusty, empty desks long abandoned by previous journalists. Stacks of old newspapers dotted the corners and doorways like confetti after a party.
Dozens of empty desks sat defeated in the dim glow of one light, visible in the far back left corner of the dark room. A shadow moved in front of the lamp, and before I knew it, a hand emerged as my eyes adjusted to the light.
"Hi, I'm Brandon," the person attached to the hand said — the sports editor there to hold down the fort.
And that was it. I was off and running.
Together we reported local news and sports. It was grueling, fulfilling work with far too little support and far too meager pay.
I wish I had photographed that room that day. It was a strong and striking visual for the state of newsrooms — what I saw was alive but felt like a forgotten outpost in some forgotten war. Not quite defunct, but not living the glory days either.
I was hired to be the only news reporter there, and the sports editor and I would share a small office. But first, the office space that Lee Enterprises had been using for the Chippewa Herald needed to be reconfigured. It had been created to serve a large newspaper, and apparently at one point it was just that.
Long before I arrived.
I never experienced American news in its heyday. I don't know if that's a blessing or a curse.
The Numbers Don't Lie
What I was walking into wasn't unique. My experience in Chippewa Falls was part of a much larger collapse happening across rural America.
Since 2005, the nation has lost more than one-third of its newspapers, with 127 newspapers closing in 2024 — nearly two and a half per week — according to Northwestern University's Medill State of Local News Report 2024. This left nearly 55 million Americans with limited to no access to local news. As a result of those losses, the number of news desert counties rose to 208 in 2024, the report says.
The statistics are staggering, but they don't capture the human cost.
Newspaper newsroom employment fell 57% between 2008 and 2020, from roughly 71,000 jobs to about 31,000, according to Pew Research Center.
“At the same time, the number of digital-native newsroom employees rose 144%, from 7,400 workers in 2008 to about 18,000 in 2020,” according to the 2021 Pew Research reporting by Mason Walker. “Despite this sharp increase, the number of newsroom employees in the digital-native sector remained about 13,000 below the number in the newspaper sector in 2020.”
That means even with the increase in digital reporting we still don’t have as many people working on news and information as we did two decades ago.
Even in 2025, the bleeding continues.
The first months of 2025 were brutal for journalism, with more than 900 jobs cut in the journalism industry in the U.K. and U.S. in January 2025 alone, according to Editor and Publisher's tracking.
The Reality on the Ground
Those numbers spoke to my daily reality.
When I started in Chippewa Falls, our small operation was already lean. And there were times when it took its toll.
I recall trying to go on vacation and needing overtime to get the papers ready ahead of my departure. I needed six A1 cover stories with photos to hold down the print papers in my absence.
I worked all the time. If there was an emergency or breaking news, I did what journalists do — grabbed my gear and hit the road to report on what was happening.
The impending shutdowns of hospitals, a roof collapse, a plane crash, the deaths of local officers, national and local political campaign events, referendums — if it was newsworthy I did my best to be at the head of the pack with the reporting.
I covered whatever was needed, whenever I could and it was a great experiment in how much one person can manage. I thought I did it quite well but I left because I wanted to be somewhere with more support — others to help shoulder the workload.
But even what I faced in Chippewa Falls felt luxurious compared to what was happening elsewhere. Rural and poorer areas are most in danger of turning into news deserts, and I could see it happening all around.
With just two of us on location covering an entire community and its surrounding areas, every story became a sprint. Every vacation or sick day meant gaps in coverage that wouldn't be filled or were filled at the cost of something or someone.
When our editing staff in La Crosse was cut the workload didn't shrink — it just got distributed among fewer people, all of whom were already stretched thin.
This is the new math of rural journalism: Do more with less, cover everything with no one, and somehow maintain the quality and accountability that communities deserve. But it comes at a great cost. Mistakes happen when people are overworked and undersupported. Burnout is the name of the game for many.
What We're Losing
In Chippewa Falls, I was sometimes the only journalist in the room at city council meetings, school board discussions, and county board sessions.
When local papers disappear, so does that oversight.
The ripple effects extend beyond just missing news. Without local coverage, civic engagement declines. Misinformation and corruption goes unchecked. Community connections weaken. The fabric that holds small towns together begins to fray.
Standing in that dimly lit newsroom on my first day, surrounded by empty desks that once held the hopes and bylines of journalists who came before me, I understood I wasn't just taking a job — I was becoming part of a dying breed.
But I also knew that as long as papers like the Chippewa Herald still existed, someone needed to turn on that lamp and get to work.
I never experienced American journalism in its heyday. I know I missed out on that but I was alright with being on the clean-up crew of modern American reporting.
But with the leadership and resource limitations of newspapers today, the question is whether there will be anyone left to turn on the lights tomorrow.
Sources:
Comments