In rural Nebraska towns, newspapers chronicle the community’s history. As Dennis DeRossett, executive director of the Nebraska Press Association, puts it, they are the “thread in the community that ties everything together.”
With society’s turn toward the digital age, newspaper owners are battling to keep local journalism in small-town communities.
“Media is evolving and changing,” DeRossett said. “I don’t think we can predict, you know, ‘Will newspapers be here in five years, 10 years, 20 years?’ There are so many factors that come into play.”
Nebraska’s news environment
Local journalists are taking steps to understand those factors.
To get a clearer picture of Nebraska’s news environment and find coverage gaps, a team at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln produced an interactive map and ecosystem report. The Nebraska News Map documents all media outlets across the state.
According to the 2024 report, there are no local news organizations in nine counties, and 42,492 Nebraskans are living in a county that has no full-time or part-time journalists.
Jessica Walsh, assistant professor at UNL and producer of the Nebraska News Map, said local news availability is dependent on urban versus rural locations and the state’s east versus west divide.
“Some of the things that make me nervous or worried or concerned is there are big parts of the state, like multiple counties, that don’t have any local news organizations based there and don’t have any local journalists,” Walsh said.
According to UNL and History Nebraska’s “Nebraska Newspapers” website, there were 623 newspapers in 1920, Nebraska’s peak year for production. The ecosystem report, which conducted research in 2024, found that the state is down to just over 180 local news organizations. This includes radio and TV stations, newspapers and digital websites.
DeRossett said he has seen three main changes in the newspaper business during his time: the business model, ownership and how platforms deliver their content.
Change in business model
According to DeRossett, the newspaper’s business model was always advertising-based.
“Probably 75% of your income or revenue came from advertising, and maybe 20% from circulation, and then five or 10% from other things, even small printing,” DeRossett said.
As big-box stores came into towns, small businesses closed.
“Those small businesses were no longer there to advertise,” DeRossett said. “They were the support of the local newspaper, and that revenue went away. That revenue stream was gone.”
According to Pew Research, projections of circulation revenue surpassed advertising revenue in 2020, the first time since at least 1956, the first year the data was available.
The number of businesses supporting newspapers through advertising is dropping in towns with decreasing populations.
“You’re not going to have this influx of small businesses back into the rural communities,” DeRossett said. “The population is not going back into the rural communities, and the businesses are only going to be in those communities if there’s a population there to support them in their product and their business.”
Change in ownership
Newspaper numbers have dropped partly due to consolidation and the merging of papers. DeRossett saw ownership changes starting in the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s.
“Those were the big times when there were a lot of locally owned newspapers that sold to larger groups of newspapers,” DeRossett said. “That started a whole series of changes, some of it the consolidation of departments. (With) non-local ownership, sometimes (you) didn’t notice a change, but there were some companies that with non-local owners, the local community didn’t feel like maybe the new newspaper was as connected to the community as it used to be.”
Despite the changes, Walsh felt inspired by those working in the field while collecting data for the Nebraska News Map.
“Just in putting this together, I talked to a lot of publishers and journalists and was really just kind of moved by how dedicated they are to serving their communities,” Walsh said. “They don’t get paid a lot, they don’t really get a lot of accolades or attention, and so they’re doing it just because they believe it’s important.”
Walsh said one positive finding from the Nebraska News Map is that there are younger people getting into local news.
One of those people is Alana Kellen, a UNK graduate who took over her hometown newspaper, the Madison Star-Mail, a few years after college.
“They always say newspapers are dying, which we can all kind of see,” Kellen said. “A lot of them are getting sold and consolidated and stuff. For me, just growing up here, being born and raised here, I’m proud of the town that I live in, so I wanted to make sure that someone was gonna stick around and keep covering all the things that we should be proud of.”
Kellen said that small-town newspapers are important, otherwise, mergers can lead to newspapers becoming so large they feel like a “book” or small towns getting “lost in the wind.”
Evolution of news distribution
With society’s ever-increasing turn toward all things digital, news outlets have had to adapt. Newspapers no longer distribute their content solely in print, as many look to grow their audience through social media platforms and websites.
Some news outlets are expanding their services by getting creative, hoping to fill other holes in their communities.
“I think that some of the positives include local news organizations that are trying to innovate a little bit,” Walsh said. “So there’s one of the examples in the report where there’s a newspaper that has started to branch out to do non-news-related stuff. They have a little liquor store or bar in the back of the newspaper. Other local newspapers, there’s at least two of them (that) are at least every month reproducing some of their local news in Spanish because there’s a lack of Spanish-speaking local news options in the state.”
Local journalism’s role in a community
In rural Nebraska towns, newspapers take on several roles. Through them, communities get more localized coverage that isn’t reported by larger news outlets, such as high school athletics and county board meeting minutes.
Studies have also found a correlation between newspapers and voting. Civic engagement drops when a community loses its newspaper.
“Newspapers spur civic engagement in the community as a basis for our whole democracy,” DeRossett said. “And if the newspapers go away, that has an impact on everybody’s life.”
Importance of community support
While these factors make it hard to predict the future of newspapers, many are pointing toward the importance of community support as the key to their longevity.
“We just have to make sure that there are younger people and other people that want to keep this going and find more creative ways to get people to want to support this business,” Kellen said. “Because, I mean, without their support, we’re not going to be able to do it. And I’m not saying that this job isn’t rewarding or anything, but we need their support. Otherwise, we can’t do it. But you also want to make sure that there’s something there to support them back.”
Rising postage costs are leaving newspaper owners with one question when it comes to getting their communities’ support: Is the community willing to pay a higher price for news?
DeRossett said that most rural newspapers are delivered through the mail, and the higher price is “dictated by the cost of goods it takes to publish it and produce it.”
“If the local individuals, the local community, will support the newspaper, it will be there even with those higher costs,” DeRossett said. “It really, really boils down to each person individually. What does local news mean to them, and will they be willing to pay for it?”
