The weekly Carriage Town News will cease publication on Feb. 1 after more than 40 years of informing readers in six southeastern New Hampshire towns and putting them in the same boat as some 70 million other Americans who already live in what are known as “news deserts.”

Across the country, digital alternatives, rising printing costs, plummeting advertising revenues and consolidation have led to the downfall of publications small and large.

The concept of a news desert is well known in the news industry which has been scrambling to find relevance and economic survival since the dawn of the digital age since the mid-1990s. But to the general public, it’s a reflection of the changing times. The news business competes for eyes and has found itself fighting against disinformation spread widely – and easily – via the Wild West of a mostly unregulated social media. This has become clearer in the past two decades: The industry’s traditional economic infrastructure is often at odds with quality journalism and keeping citizens informed in a democracy.

Newspapers folding and merging due to economic pressures is nothing new. The sudden demise of the once formidable New York Herald Tribune in 1966 sent shock waves throughout the industry. It was the same with the equally esteemed Washington (D.C.) Star, which went bankrupt in 1981. And in a significant foreshadowing of the economic decline of the industry, The New York Times bought The Boston Globe for an estimated $1.1 billion in 1993. In 2013, it resold the newspaper for $70 million.

The pace of volatility in the industry has increased dramatically, and it reverberates across the country.

According to a 2022 report by the Local News Initiative — a project of Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism — an estimated 2,500 local news operations have closed since 2005, with more than 350 of them closing since the beginning of the Covid pandemic in early 2020. “More than a fifth of the nation’s citizens live in news deserts – with very limited access to local news – or in communities at risk of becoming news deserts,” the report said. “Seventy million people live in the more than 200 counties without a newspaper, or in the 1,630 counties with only one paper – usually a weekly – covering multiple communities spread over a vast area.”

The consequences are real, according to the Local News Initiative report: “The loss of local journalism has been accompanied by the malignant spread of misinformation and disinformation, political polarization, eroding trust in media, and a yawning digital and economic divide among citizens. In communities without a credible source of local news, voter participation declines, corruption in both government and business increases, and local residents end up paying more in taxes” often without understanding why.

“A professional news staff for a city or town matters,” said Tom Haines, a journalism professor at the University of New Hampshire in Durham. “A good newsroom is an independent forum for the community. They are the watchdog for a community, going to and reporting meetings that the general citizenry doesn’t have time to attend. They ask fact-based questions for the benefit of the community and document and record the history of a town. That can’t be replaced easily.”

The changing landscape

The industry has shed between 60 percent and 70 percent of newsroom jobs since 2005, and New Hampshire hasn’t been spared. Many publications have closed, merged, or are purchased by larger chains, which often employ cost-cutting strategies to get a return on investment.

■The original Claremont Eagle Times, which traced its roots back to 1834, went out of business in 2009. Its latest incarnation was financed by a local entrepreneur and is a thrice-weekly print paper with a daily website and what its owner says is an enhanced focus on local news. In 2022, the weekly digital E-Ticker News of Claremont closed after more than 13 years covering local news and happenings.

■In 2016, The daily Citizen of Laconia closed after serving the community for more than 90 years.

■The Portsmouth Herald and Foster’s Daily Democrat in Dover, two of the oldest newspapers in the state, merged in 2014, bringing together two of the state’s oldest newspaper under the Seacoast Media Group flag (which also includes four weeklies). As a local example of industry turmoil, Seacoast Media Group has been bought and sold multiple times in the past two decades. Last March, its latest owner, Gannett, shut down the printing press in Portsmouth as part of a cost-cutting and consolidation measure affecting its more than 100 dailies nationwide.

The Telegraph in Nashua has undergone one of most striking transformations since its purchase by West Virginia-based Ogden Newspapers in 2013. The current incarnation is a shell of its historical self. It has a much smaller newsroom and publishes a weekly print version for weekend distribution along with daily updates on the website.

Nashua is the state’s second-largest city with a population of more than 90,000 with a large immigrant and refugee population. Founded in the 1860s as the New Hampshire Telegraph, the newspaper’s modern version gained national recognition in 1980 when it hosted a contentious Republican presidential debate during the New Hampshire primary.

At its peak, The Telegraph had bureaus in suburban towns like Milford and a statehouse reporter. “We had two assistant editors and three reporters for the Sunday paper,” said David Brooks, who was a reporter and editor at the Telegraph for 28 years and also served for a time as Milford bureau chief. (Brooks is now a reporter for the Monitor.) He said it was important for the paper to play its role as watchdog for the public and to hold those in power accountable.

But being vibrant and competent in its duties didn’t make the Telegraph any less of a target. “One of our roles was to be yelled at (by the community). We were criticized for everything, but because we were part of the personality of the city, like a church. When someone was new to the city, they looked to us to figure out what was going on.”

When the presence of a vibrant newspaper is gone, Brooks said, “it’s like a hole in the soul of the city.”

The new normal

The loss of newsroom jobs amid constant cost-cutting measures has become the norm across the country and will likely continue — the number of communities in the country without a local news outlet is 1,800 and growing. But new models are emerging – not-for-profit newsrooms that depend mostly on donations, grants, philanthropy and out-of-the-box thinking.

“The decline of local news is a sad truth across the country, and this represents a massive market failure for an industry that was dependent on advertising revenue,” said Patty Slutsky, the chief advancement officer for the American Journalism Project (AJP). The organization is working in communities across the country to launch new news organizations through grants to nonprofit news organizations and to coach leaders.

Professional and citizen journalists unite

As newsrooms shrink and news deserts spread in New Hampshire, there has been no shortage of out-of-the-box initiatives.

Nancy West, a former longtime reporter for the Union Leader, founded InDepth NH in 2015 to begin filling in the investigative and local news gaps throughout the state – and sharing it with news organizations across the state for free. Founded in 2019, the Granite State News Collaborative is a collective of more than 20 media, education and community partners to produce and share news stories on the issues important to New Hampshire. (This article is being produced under its umbrella.) And in 2021, New Hampshire Bulletin, another online initiative, was founded through States Newsroom, a national nonprofit supported by grants and other donors..

There are also local news entrepreneurs like Anthony Payton, founder of Nashua Digital. Payton, a partner of and a contributor to the the Granite State News Collaborative, is putting his initiative’s focus on local news and important issues, such as the opioid crisis, homelessness, local school projects and the contributions of Nashua area nonprofits to the health of the community.

“There are too many untold stories that matter, but we are beginning to tell them,” Payton said. He is interested in solutions-based stories that capture the good and the problematic in the city. “We want to bring the community together by telling people what they want to and need to hear. If you walk down the streets in Nashua, you see such an incredible diversity of people. There are a lot of heroes in Nashua, and we want to share their stories.”