Report

“I really didn’t realize until I got in the newspaper business that we are tracking and writing our community’s history every single issue. There’s nowhere else that’s going to do that.”

Amy Johnson, publisher, Springview Herald

Local news is in trouble. 

Newspapers and local TV stations are closing and merging. Polarizing political rhetoric common on cable TV news shows has left people divided and contributed to low levels of trust in news that is trickling down to the local level. There are fewer journalists to report the news, leaving topics and communities without a local news source.  In Nebraska in November, four newspapers - all in sparsely populated parts of the state - announced they were ceasing publication. The Lee Enterprises-owned Gering Courier and Hemingford Ledger in western Nebraska ceased publication Dec. 5; the sole newspapers in Ainsworth and Valentine announced they were closing Dec. 25, but both have since found new owners.

We know this is happening all across the country, but not exactly to what extent it’s happening in Nebraska. 

Through interviews and nearly 12 months of data collection and fact-checking, this project aims to provide more detailed information about local news access in Nebraska by mapping not only local news organizations but also full-time and part-time local journalists by county to better understand how news is being covered. 

We aimed to answer the question: Who has access to local news and who does not? 

Funded with a combination of private donations and university research funds, this Nebraska news map project documents every local and statewide news organization in the state. Because absence or presence of a local news organization in a town or county cannot be the only measure of local news health, we also tracked local journalist staffing by county. 

Why do this? 

Across the country, there is growing concern about news deserts (Abernathy, 2020), the downsizing and closing of newsrooms due to corporate ownership (Peterson & Dunaway, 2023) and other factors such as outdated business models (Picard, 2008) and declining local TV news viewership. Half of the counties in the United States don’t have a local news source or only have one local news source (Abernathy, 2023), and when the local news source dries up residents turn to more polarizing national news. The number of local TV news-producing stations dropped below 700 for the first time, according to a 2024 survey by the Radio Television Digital News Association (RTDNA); local TV news directors are having a hard time filling open positions (Heyward, 2021). In addition, the public is less trusting of the media than they used to be (Brenan, 2023). 

Less local news equals a less connected and civil society. That’s why we should all care about the plight of local news. Studies have shown local news is a powerful community connector and provides important social cohesion (Yamamoto, 2011), and the loss of a local news organization can result in more political polarization (Darr et al., 2018). Political polarization and President Donald Trump’s repeated attacks on the press (Carlson et al., 2021) help put the health of local news in a precarious position. 

According to the national news desert mapping project at Northwestern University, the country loses more than two newspapers on average a week; since 2005 nearly 2,900 newspapers have closed or merged. Local TV station newsrooms are shutting down, too. Sinclair Broadcast Group closed 10 local TV stations in 2023 including one in Omaha. In Scottsbluff, for example, the only local TV newsroom closed this yearfollowing an announcement by Gray Media that the sale of the station was pending.  While the Scottsbluff station remains on the air, the Scottsbluff newsroom closure raised questions about how much local news would still be provided.

Losing any local news organization leaves a void, said Jim Timm, president and executive director of the Nebraska Broadcasters Association. 

“Whether it’s severe weather or local sports, or whatever else, that access is suddenly cut off,” Timm said. “(You) feel pretty isolated as a citizen of that community, that is a feeling of loss. What else is not being covered? The loss of access to what those groups are doing raises a lot of risks in any community when there’s not a light being shown on what those people and groups are doing.”

Kendra Cutler, editor of the Stapleton Enterprise, a small weekly north of North Platte, said when a community loses its newspaper, it’s like stripping that area of its identity.

“We are the keepers of history,” Cutler said. “If we lose our little newspaper, I don’t know what will happen. We’re losing so much more that people don’t realize.”

Despite the doom and gloom narratives sometimes associated with local news, there are bright spots in Nebraska to consider. Local newspaper owners are surprising themselves by being able to find buyers. Local TV news viewership continues to remain stable (Pew Research Center, 2023) and remains the most popular way that people get local news, followed by radio stations and newspapers (Pew Research Center, 2019). Nationally, TV news salaries rose by 7.5% in 2023, beating inflation, according to the 2024 RTDNA national survey of non-satellite TV stations and radio stations. Flood Communications operates multiple Spanish-language TV and radio stations in Nebraska with three bilingual journalists based in Omaha - something the state didn't have even seven years ago.  

In Nebraska, nonprofit newsrooms are stepping up to fill in coverage gaps left by shrinking TV and newspaper newsrooms. Two statewide nonprofit newsrooms, the Nebraska Examiner and Flatwater Free Press are providing free access to their reporting including investigatory reporting and political coverage. The Nebraska Journalism Trust is growing and now is the umbrella organization for two nonprofit newsrooms: Flatwater Free Press and Silicon Prairie News. In addition, Nebraska Journalism Trust and Civic Nebraska have partnered to run Omaha’s Documenters program, which trains citizens to cover public meetings. Nebraska Public Media maintains a statewide news staff and is home to The Midwest Newsroom, a regional investigative news team that in 2024 received an additional $5.5 million grant to expand.

Method. The information for the Nebraska News Map was collected and verified over the course of nearly 12 months starting in January 2024 and ending in December 2024. Statewide broadcast and newspaper directories formed the basis for the local news organization data collection but were supported by many hours of work including more than 75 phone calls or emails to news organization leaders and journalists to verify information where information could not be found. Social media pages, staffing pages, and two national journalist databases (Cision and MuckRack) were used to either verify information and assure that organizations and journalists were not left out of the count. We set out to get an estimate of the number of people who work full time or part time covering and producing local news in Nebraska. We acknowledge the enormous role freelancers play in covering local news, but their numbers were too unstandardized and infrequent to comfortably include. Their value and role in local news cannot be underestimated; it’s just difficult to quantify. You can find more on the Method on the FAQ page.

Our analysis of local news sources included newspapers, digital sites, public media, ethnic media, commercial local radio and local television. We know there is a shortage of local news in Nebraska and overall local news is in crisis, but up until now, we really didn’t know what that looked like at the local level in Nebraska.  With this information, we hope that local communities, journalism funders, newsroom leaders, citizens and researchers can better support and understand the challenges facing local news. 

Good News About Local News

Across Nebraska, there are stories to be told about the importance of local news and the personal connection it provides. 

“(They have) a love of the profession and love of the community,” said Dennis DeRossett, executive director of the Nebraska Press Association who can rattle off a dozen examples of local newspapers thriving and surviving in Nebraska. 

In 2024, The Pawnee Republican was in danger of closing when Ron and Bev Puhalla stepped up to buy the newspaper, which they had previously sold about five years prior. 

The Pawnee Republican is the longest continuously published weekly publication in the state. 

Kim and Tony Primavera own the Hayes Center Republican in Hayes Center, a town of about 225 people in Hayes County in southwest Nebraska. They recently found a new owner. Kim Primavera runs the newspaper. Her husband, Tony Primavera, is the school superintendent and writes and covers high school sports. 

The couple was ready to move on but felt an obligation to their community. 

“We’ve been here 10 years,” Kim Primavera said in an interview this summer. “I’d like somebody local to step up and say, ‘Yeah, we want to run it.’ We don’t want it to close down after 140 years. We could have just stopped printing, but you lose a lot there - your whole means of having a newspaper in the town.”

Not everybody is looking to sell - new and seasoned newspaper publishers have made local news work their life’s calling. 

Gerri Peterson, the owner of the Hooker County Tribune, is living her childhood dream of owning a newspaper. She worked at the paper in junior high school and when she was 22 years old and nearing graduation with a journalism degree, the owners asked her if she wanted to buy it.  Even though she grew up in Mullen, she still felt like she had to prove to the community that they could trust her to run the newspaper.

“For people to want to invest in the paper, I need to invest in the community,” she said.

Running the business alone paired with having young children means Peterson can’t make it to everything, so she relies on meeting minutes to help her fill in any gaps.

She’s learned to rely on community members for outside support. Parents send her photographs from school events she isn’t able to make it to, and high school students help write sports stories. And with a subscription base of 725, her reach likely includes the whole county (population 686). 

Amy Johnson was playing golf 13 years ago when the editor of the Springview Herald asked her to consider running the newspaper.

Despite having no journalism background other than her high school English classes, Johnson drove to the Springview Herald newspaper office a week later and bought the business. 

“It was a leap of faith, to say the least,” she said. 

Thirteen years later, the paper’s subscriptions list has stayed steady at around 730. The Springview population was 240 at the time of the 2022 census, and the paper covers Keya Paha County, which had a total population of 787 at the same census.

“We’re tracking and writing our community’s history every single issue, and there’s nowhere else that’s going to do that,” she said. 

Alana Kellen, 26, recently returned to her hometown of Madison to buy and run the Madison Star-Mail. Her reasoning? 

“If I don’t do it, who will?” she said. 

She is the owner, editor and publisher. 

“I write everything, (take) all the photos. I go out and get all the ads, put it all together every week. The stuff that goes on in the community, the heart of it is still the newspaper,” Kellen said.

Nearly 200 miles away in Stapleton, Marcia Hora and Kendra Cutler turned the back of the Stapleton Enterprise newspaper office into Herbie’s Speakeasy - the town’s only liquor store. 

Hora is publisher of The Stapleton Enterprise and Thomas County Herald, and she and her editor were looking for a way to supplement advertising and subscription revenue. With added revenue from alcohol sales and catering and profits up, they can offer free advertising for local churches and organizations.

"It can't be all about money in a small newspaper. You have to be dedicated to your community and want to promote your businesses, school, churches and be a driving force in making it better here for future generations," Hora said.

Hora said local residents appreciate the hometown stories the paper has to offer that gives them a break from national news, but she’s worried about rural newspapers’ future. 

“Most of the people are getting older that are doing this,” she said. “You have to be really dedicated. You can’t miss an issue and continue to be a legal newspaper.”

Another looming problem for rural newspaper longevity is an aging population; older subscribers are more likely to get news via printed products and local TV, according to Pew Research. In addition, there are 30 Nebraska newspapers that don’t have websites. 

While some Nebraska newspapers remain without websites, others have embraced the digital transition. Lee Enterprises, which owns 12 newspapers in Nebraska including the Journal Star and Omaha World-Herald, reported this year that it reached a milestone of 50% of its revenue coming from digital.  Rachel E. Stassen-Berger, executive editor at the Omaha World-Herald, declined to be interviewed for this project, but provided this statement via email: “The Omaha World-Herald has transformed over the years to serve readers in the digital age. We now can deliver breaking news as it happens and throughout the day (and sometimes night). We can reach subscribers through social media, podcasts, video and alerts on the phones.  While these changes and the media landscape have meant hard choices, I still believe in the vital role local media plays in our state and our society.”

Lee Enterprises recently launched a promotional campaign called “Where Your Story Lives” to highlight and support its local journalists and the importance of local news. 

The York News-Times is a Lee Enterprises-owned newspaper that, like other Lee newspapers in Nebraska, has seen downsizing and staff cutbacks over the years. 

Melanie Wilkinson, a former York News-Times editor, said she was one of those people who lost her job due to downsizing.

Wilkinson, who got her start in journalism at the Neligh News and Leader in her 20s, worked for the News-Times for 25 years before leaving in 2023. About four months later, she started Just Melanie W., out of fear that there would not be enough people to cover local news in York - big stories such as contentious bond issues and development, for example. 

“I was super worried about what was going to happen with our local news here in York,” she said. 

She is now one of the few local journalists in Nebraska running a digital-native, hyperlocal news site. Hyperlocal news sites are standalone news sites that cover local news but are not part of a traditional or legacy news organization and typically have no printed product. 

She is the lone editor and reporter, publishing sometimes as many as five stories a day and promoting those stories on social media. The site, which is supported by ad revenue, gets between 90,000 and 130,000 page views a month and has no paywall, Wilkinson said. 

She covers features, crime, courts, government and business, she said, and believes she’s filling a gap in local news coverage. 

“We have a lot of interesting things happening here,” she said. “I don’t know, to me, the news here is so important, a lot of things happen.”

Read more about Nebraskan journalists keeping local news alive at Nebraska Public Media and the Norfolk Daily News.  

Local News for Spanish Speakers

Natalie Saenz, 26, who until recently was the Telemundo news anchor in Omaha, remembers growing up in Scottsbluff, where the language barrier to local news left her family cut off in some regards. 

“There was no local Spanish-language news; my family was not informed of anything. We never knew what was going on in the community. The only thing I knew about Scottsbluff was the neighborhood I lived in,” Saenz said. 

She didn’t go to county fairs or carnivals until she was a teen-ager, and her parents only voted in presidential elections, not local ones. With more Hispanic representation in government and community, there is more awareness now in Scottsbluff, she said. 

Saenz was one of a handful of local news reporters covering local news specifically for Spanish-speaking audiences in Nebraska. It apears all of the coverage for Spanish-language audiences is concentrated in Omaha despite the fact that 12% of Nebraska’s population is of Hispanic or Latino origin or about 235,000 people, according to the 2020 U.S. Census.  In some counties such as Colfax County (home to Schuyler), almost half the population is of Hispanic origin. After English, Spanish is the most common language spoken at home in Nebraska (8.5%), according to the 2020 U.S. Census.

Six years ago, Flood Communications started broadcasting Telemundo Nebraska, which is a local affiliate of the national Telemundo network and employs three bilingual journalists in the Omaha area; until late 2024, they they also had one full-time reporter covering the Tri-Cities. Telemundo appears to be the only professional journalism organization offering consistent local coverage tailored to Spanish-speaking people in Nebraska. 

In a more patch-work way, local newspapers are also stepping up to fill that void. 

Joan von Kampen, the Lee Enterprises regional editor whose responsibilities include overseeing news coverage in Scottsbluff, Gering, Lexington and North Platte, is working to increase access to local news for Spanish speakers in Lexington. She provides copies of four to five local news stories to a woman who lives in central Nebraska who then translates the stories into Spanish. The Lexington Clipper-Herald publishes the Spanish versions every other week in its free People Plus section. 

About a year ago, Timothy Linscott, owner and publisher of The Fairbury Journal-News, had an epiphany. 

“We noticed a lot of the population wasn’t participating in school events. They weren’t participating in community events,” Linscott said. “(In) meeting with leaders of those communities, they were like, ‘We didn’t know about it. We didn’t know about it because we can’t read English. If we knew more about it, we’d be more involved.’”

So, for the last year - every other month - Linscott publishes and distributes 1,100 to 1,800 copies of a Spanish-language version of local news. The publication circulates in eight counties in places such as Fairbury, Crete and Beatrice, areas with sizable Hispanic populations. He works with a local translator who translates local Journal-News stories into Spanish. The publication includes information about voting, meetings and community events as well as features and help wanted ads and is distributed to businesses that serve the Hispanic community, laundromats and stores. 

Ana Ruth Lugo Mejia, a bilingual reporter who previously was the Telemundo Nebraska and local Spanish-language radio station Fiesta 94.5 FM reporter in Grand Island, said her reporting filled a void, and she heard from listeners and viewers about the importance of her reporting. She had recently started a weekly interview show called “Community Connections,” where she talked to people about initiatives that Spanish-speaking community members would benefit from such as information about voter registration. Lugo Mejia is now the Telemundo anchor in Omaha. 

“They tell me what you are doing, it’s great because it allows us to understand in our language and helps us communicate,” she said. “They feel like they have been taken into consideration because you are able to read or at least listen to (news)  in a language that they know.”

Omaha’s Spanish-language newspaper El Perico is closed, but there are plans to revive it. Nebraska Public Media recently purchased El Perico and the Omaha arts publication The Reader. Jay Omar, news director at Nebraska Public Media, said there are no plans to provide a print publication of El Perico. The digital site will feature local news for Spanish-language speakers but the infrastructure isn’t in place yet. 

There are two additional statewide digital Spanish-language media sites in Nebraska - Mundo Latino and Buenos Dias Nebraska, but no journalists or owners for those sites could be reached. Omaha also benefits from another NRG-Media-owned Spanish radio station called KMMQ that has a morning news show hosted by Rolando Lopez.