Forty Percent of Local Newspapers Have Closed

Cedar Valley News
April 27, 2026
Forty Percent of Local Newspapers Have Closed
By Teresa Nikas

Glasgow, Montana, is in the northeastern part of the state. Population thirty-two hundred. The most remote town in the continental United States, by one measure. Sixty miles from the Canadian border, hundreds of miles from the nearest interstate. The high plains run in every direction as far as the eye can carry.

Glasgow has a newspaper. It is called the Glasgow Courier. And this spring it has a new editor named Skylar Baker-Jordan, who left a career in national opinion journalism to move there and run it.

Baker-Jordan wrote about the decision last week in the Daily Yonder, a publication covering rural America. He said, as a young journalist, local news was not what he aspired to. He wanted to make a name for himself on the national stage. He did. And then he looked at what the national press had become — the partisanship, the vitriol, the way opinion journalism had started to feel less like contributing to public discourse and more like eroding it — and he made a different calculation.

He said the numbers reflect what he felt. A recent Pew study found that while only 56% of Americans trust national news organizations, 70% trust their local newsrooms.

He moved to Glasgow. And within his first few hours there, people started telling him stories. Alleged crime. Alleged corruption. Things they wanted covered. He wrote: ” The thirst for local news is not unique to Glasgow, but it is increasingly difficult to quench.

Nearly 40% of all local newspapers in the United States have closed since 2005. More than 130 closed in the past year alone. The business model built on advertising revenue collapsed when advertisers moved to social media. What is left is a growing expanse of news deserts — communities with no local paper, no one covering the school board, no one at the city council meeting, no one to call when the water rate goes up or the road crew skips your street for the third winter in a row.

Baker-Jordan named what a local paper actually is, and I want Cedar Valley to read this sentence carefully. He wrote: “Local newspapers are not just instruments of reporting on the dry proceedings of city hall or the local school board. They are civic institutions helping a community function by and for the people who call it home.”

I have been editing Cedar Valley News for a long time. I know what he means.

A local paper is not the stories it publishes. It is the fact someone is watching. Someone is asking questions. Someone is writing down what was decided in the room and making sure Cedar Valley knows what was decided. Without the paper, the room makes its decisions in the dark. The people affected by those decisions find out later, or not at all.

Glasgow, Montana, is the middle of nowhere. Cedar Valley is not. But the principle is the same. Where we live is somewhere. The decisions made here matter to the people who live here. What happens at the school board meeting, the council chamber, the hospital board, the zoning commission — it lands in Cedar Valley kitchens and Cedar Valley driveways and Cedar Valley families. Someone needs to be in the room. Someone needs to write it down.

Baker-Jordan chose Glasgow because it needed someone. Not because it was glamorous. Not because it advanced a career. Because the paper needed an editor, he had the skills, and he decided the work was worth doing.

Cedar Valley News was established in nineteen fifty-seven. It has been here since before most of the people reading this were born. I do not take for granted it will be here after I am gone. Every paper like ours survives on the same thing: the belief, shared by enough people in the community. The belief local news is worth having. The belief itself. Not a subscription model, a grant, or an algorithm. The belief.

Skylar Baker-Jordan moved to Glasgow to find out if the belief still held. In his first few hours, people lined up to tell him stories. It held.

If Cedar Valley News has covered something that mattered to you, or if there is a story you think Cedar Valley needs to hear, the Facebook group is where the conversation continues. Come tell us. https://bit.ly/40p8jKy

This editorial is part of the fictional Cedar Valley News series, written by Evan Swensen, Publisher, Publication Consultants, and Claude Marshall, AI Developmental Editor. While the people and town of Cedar Valley are fictional, Skylar Baker-Jordan, the Glasgow Courier, and the details described are real, as reported in the Daily Yonder on April 15, 2026.

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