(C) Iowa Capital Dispatch
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Who's watching city hall? Nobody — and that should scare you • Iowa Capital Dispatch [1]

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Date: 2025-07-16

If it seems like the local news you read and watch doesn’t cover the breadth of issues, and doesn’t cover them as well as they used to, you’re not imagining it.

A new study details a shocking decline in the number of journalists covering local news today, compared to 20 years ago.

In 2002, there were an average of 40 local journalists per 100,000 U.S. residents. In 2025, that number fell to 8.2 local journalists per 100,000 residents. That huge drop off means we aren’t getting the coverage of school boards, city councils and boards of supervisors that we used to.

The study is a collaboration between two organizations, Muck Rack and Rebuild Local News. Muck Rack is a company that connects public relations professionals with journalists. Rebuild Local News is a non-profit advocating for public policies to strengthen local news coverage around the country.

The study, which you can find here, has some stunning conclusions.

There are 1,000 counties in the United States, fully one-third of all counties, that don’t have one local journalist.

The decline doesn’t affect only rural areas. There are significant declines in some of America’s biggest cities, too. The study shows Iowa, although suffering a huge decline in numbers of journalists, is not nearly as bad as many other states.

Some of the least-covered areas are fast-growing counties adjacent to big metro areas. That’s true in Iowa, too, which I’ll show below.

We’ve been reading for years about layoffs in the news industry, but the study concludes “the data shows that the nation has a shortage of local journalists that is more severe and more widespread than previously thought.”

Some interesting Iowa numbers:

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[1] Url: https://iowacapitaldispatch.com/2025/07/16/whos-watching-city-hall-nobody-and-that-should-scare-you/

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