Medill Counted Every Local TV Newsroom. The News-Desert Map Barely Moved.

Last Tuesday, Northwestern's Medill Local News Initiative published The State of Local News 2026, and the headline is grim. There are now 238 U.S. counties with no locally based source of professional news, up 26 in a year — "the largest single year increase during Medill's research of the local news ecosystem." In more than 1,400 other counties a single source is left, usually a weekly paper, and the report puts the number of people living with limited or no access to local news at 47 million. Most of the coverage stopped there. The more interesting finding is a number that barely moved. For the first time, Medill counted commercial local television newsrooms, 678 of them, and then checked how many news deserts they filled.

The answer was one. "Adding commercial television to the LNI database made little impact on which counties we identify as news deserts," the report says. The single county that came off the list was Columbia County, Georgia, the northwest suburbs of Augusta, because WFXG's studios sit just across the line from Richmond County. Everywhere else, the deserts stayed deserts, for a reason the report states in one line: "More than 95% of commercial newsrooms fall in counties designated metropolitan by the USDA." That matters because television is not a niche source. Medill cites Pew's finding that 65% of U.S. adults sometimes or often got local news from TV stations in 2025. The source most Americans use for local news is almost never based in the places losing it.

Medill is careful to say that a station's coverage area is wider than the county its studio sits in, and it placed each newsroom by its main studio for consistency. I think that choice is the right one, and anyone who has worked a television market knows why. A station serves the whole market, but how it serves a county depends on mileage. A town two hours from the studio is a four-hour round trip before anyone shoots a frame, so it gets a crew when something is big enough to justify the drive: the fire, the flood, the plant closing, the trial. The county commission, the school board budget and the zoning fight usually do not make it onto the road. That is not a knock on the people doing the work. It is what a dayside crew with a five o'clock slot can do. A station can cover a county without being of it, and Medill's definition of a news desert is built around exactly that difference — a locally based source.

At the edges of the map the gap is not subtle. Glendive, Montana, the country's smallest market, has not had a regular commercial local newscast since around 2015, by Medill's count. Juneau, a state capital, gets regional newscasts produced in Anchorage. Gainesville, Florida is the largest of 26 markets left with a single commercial newsroom, after Sinclair laid off WGFL's newsroom in 2023 and replaced its local reporting with The National Desk. The broader trend runs the same way: the 10 largest owners now control 75% of commercial TV newsrooms, at least 10 newsrooms disappeared in mergers this year outside the Nexstar–Tegna fight, and the RTDNA/Newhouse survey the report cites found the number of stations producing local news, total news hours and local TV news employment all fell in 2026. Nor is the new money heading to the empty counties. Of 287 news outlets started in the last five years, nearly 80% are in urban areas; just 9% of digital-only local sites are in rural counties; and of the nearly 8,000 largest journalism grants in the last five years, more than 95% went to urban recipients.

So the useful question for anyone in television news is not whether TV counts as local news. It plainly does, for most of the country. It is what it costs to cover a county you are not in, and who is willing to pay it. The answers are unglamorous: a reporter who actually lives in the county seat, a working relationship with the last weekly paper, or gear and workflow that let one person shoot, edit and file from a courthouse parking lot instead of driving the story back to the station first. I have written here about what a slow upload costs a newsroom; in a rural county, it decides whether the story gets made at all. The report even names a station that bucks the pattern, WMFD in Mansfield, Ohio, which covers the more rural stretch between Cleveland and Columbus. Counting TV newsrooms did not make the map look better. It made one thing clearer: local news is not a signal strength. It is a newsroom in the place.