The Hollowing of the Appalachian Press, from Pittsburgh to Birmingham

A Substack piece republished by the Daily Yonder traces the decline of Appalachian local news through the Mountain Eagle in Whitesburg, Kentucky, a paper that survived a 1974 firebombing and a 2022 flood but faces a slower threat in advertising collapse and population loss. Northwestern's Medill School counted nearly 3,500 U.S. newspaper closures since 2005, with 213 counties now having no local news outlet at all.

A separate Local Journalist Index found the number of local journalists per capita nationally fell from about forty per hundred thousand people in 2002 to 7.8 today, an eighty-one percent drop. A 2025 landscape study focused specifically on 249 Appalachian counties across six states to measure the same erosion on the ground.

The mechanism described is a self-reinforcing cycle: advertising revenue left first for big-box retailers, then for online platforms, forcing staff cuts that thinned papers, lost readers, and further shrank revenue. The losses are concentrated overwhelmingly in poorer, rural, nonmetropolitan counties, the same geography Appalachia has long occupied on other hardship maps.

The full dispatch is available from the source below.