The US News Desert Map

Submitted by:  Andrew Olsen, Senior Project Manager
https://growresolve.com/us-news-desert-map/

The US Desert Map
Where local news has thinned out — and where earned media is hardest to come by. Switch between state and county views below.

A shrinking local press, mapped
The United States has lost roughly a third of its newspapers since 2005, and the decline hasn’t slowed. According to Northwestern’s 2025 State of Local News report, 213 counties now have no local news source at all, another 1,524 rely on a single outlet, and about 50 million Americans live with limited or no access to local news.

We built the interactive map below to make that shift tangible. Toggle between the state view and the county view to see where local coverage still exists — and where it has all but disappeared.

Two things to know as you read the map above. Darker areas have the fewest local outlets — those are the coverage gaps. And be honest about the data: it’s shaded from a research dataset that captures roughly 60% of U.S. local outlets, so a county showing zero means “none in this dataset,” not a guaranteed desert. That caveat isn’t a weakness to hide — it’s exactly the kind of source-literacy habit this guide wants you to build. Every dataset has a boundary; good journalists name it.