Residents in more than half of America’s counties now have little to no local news coverage, and the situation is worsening because so many newspapers are failing, according to a benchmark report released today.

The State of Local News 2023, produced by researchers at Northwestern University’s Medill School, is the definitive tally of the country’s growing “news deserts.” It also documents efforts to save what’s left of the independent press system that’s essential to local knowledge, civic engagement and democracy.

Among the latest findings: The rate of newspaper failures increased over the last year, from two to 2.5 failing a week on average. The country lost nearly a third of its newspapers, 2,972, since 2005, including 131 over the past year.

The report should add urgency to efforts to help, including bills in Congress that would enable news outlets to collectively bargain fair compensation from tech giants, and provide temporary tax credits to save newsroom jobs.

But Congress has yet to provide this CPR as the industry gasps and clutches its chest. That’s despite bipartisan support for these temporary measures, growing public alarm at the situation and previous reports documenting the losses and harm, especially in rural, suburban and more conservative areas.

“What concerns me the most is that the loss has even begun to accelerate with local newspapers,” said co-author Penelope Muse Abernathy, a visiting professor at Medill who began quantifying news deserts in 2016.

Losing these papers is concerning because “in most mid- and small-sized communities, those have been the primary if not the sole source” of local news, she said.

It’s not all bad news. The report details 17 promising business models for both legacy and startup news outlets, including The Seattle Times.

“All but one of these are locally owned and accountable, suggesting that local news operations with entrepreneurial owners and community support have a much better chance of developing sustainable news models,” it said.

Three dozen new papers were started over the past five years.

“Even so, most communities that lose a newspaper do not get a replacement — either print, digital or broadcast,” the report said. “Exacerbating the situation, 60% of newspaper journalists — 43,140 — have left the business since 2005 — retired, laid off or severed by corporate owners”

Also new in this year’s report is a watch list of 228 counties at high risk of losing their last local news outlet. Currently 204 counties have no local news source and 1,562 have just one, “invariably a weekly newspaper,” the report said.

Good luck filling out ballots in those counties, if people bother. Other research found that when local papers die, fewer people vote, run for office or participate in civic affairs.

Even where newspapers remain, the amount of local coverage is often declining.

“As bad as the news desert problem is, the local news crisis is actually worse — this doesn’t take into account a full accounting of ghost newspapers,” said Tim Franklin, Medill’s local news chair and head of its Local News Initiative that produced the report.

Ghost newspapers are those with no remaining local journalists “or so few that the paper’s ability to provide critical news and information to residents in that community has been severely curtailed,” the report said.

Consolidation is a “significant driver” of the loss of local papers and journalists who worked there, it said. More than half of dailies and a fourth of all remaining papers are owned by 10 large chains, four of which are owned by or indebted to hedge funds or private equity groups.

“In recent years, these large chains have severed the most journalists and been very aggressive in shuttering and merging many smaller dailies and weeklies,

especially those in suburban markets, or weeklies located in a county adjacent to a regional daily newspaper,” it said.

Looking at the 70 smallest papers owned by mega-chains Gannett and Lee Enterprises, the Local News Initiative found three dozen had zero local journalists listed on their staff.

Growth of digital news startups remains plateaued at around 550 outlets, nearly all in metro areas, the report said. Ethnic and public media are also seeing cuts, so none are close to filling the void created by disappearing newspapers.

The report describes a newspaper ecosystem with four layers. At the top are four national papers focused heavily on national topics. Below that are around 150 major, metro dailies that until recently employed hundreds of journalists to cover statewide beats like education, business, politics and investigations. Now most dailies owned by chains have only a few dozen journalists, and many are cutting circulation outside metro areas, the report said.

Below that are 1,063 small dailies and 4,792 weeklies “which often employ only a handful of reporters.”

“With fewer journalists covering city halls and state government, the average citizen knows less and less about what their local government officials are doing,” the report said.

It said the country and society are increasingly divided between the “journalism-haves” — in more affluent cities and areas — and “journalism have-nots” in economically struggling and underserved metro, suburban and rural communities.

“This partitioning of our citizenry poses a far-reaching crisis for our democracy as it simultaneously struggles with political polarization, a lack of civic engagement and the proliferation of misinformation and information online,” the report said.

For sure, this is more than a business problem.

The report documents a growing crisis for democracy, as much of the citizenry is left with no reporting on its community and local government, much less the performance and accountability of representatives they elect.

The Founding Fathers would be horrified by these findings, and today’s leaders should be, too.

Seattle Times’ Brier Dudley is the editor of the Free Press Initiative, which aims to inform the public about issues facing newspapers, local news coverage, and a free press. You can learn more about the Free Press Initiative, or sign up for a newsletter, at company.seattletimes.com/save-the-free-press.