Democracy in the Desert

A small town Wyoming editor has been running the local 120-year-old weekly newspaper by herself.

Bills in New York and California include things like tax credits for employing local journalists and taxes on Meta and Google.

And those attitudes about local information ecosystems may provide insight into solutions for news deserts.

Legacy news outlets are changing revenue models, for-profit outfits are switching to nonprofit and startups are finding opportunities.

They say all politics is local. So where’s the local news coverage this election year? Welcome to a Marketplace Morning Report special we’re calling “Democracy in the Desert. We’ve been traveling to what are called “news deserts” in Super Tuesday states to hear about the business models that are failing or informing voters as they make their choices. We visit a border town in Texas, North Carolina and a Virginia county that’s just about an hour south of Washington, D.C., for more.

Keith Stickley had to pull the plug on the local newspaper he founded when he just couldn’t make the economics work any longer.

We hear from Keith Stickley, who started — and shuttered — a newspaper in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley.

In King George County, Virginia, the closure of local newspapers and struggles of area outlets to cover the community have left residents with few sources of reliable news.

And experts are finding links between voter apathy and a lack of reputable local news outlets.

Today, we’ll head to North Carolina to learn about a 2018 election fraud controversy in a place with little local news coverage.