States with less local news have higher rates of loneliness

The 2026 Local Journalist Index, this week by Muck Rack and the Rebuild Local News Coalition, contains a fair bit of bad news that may not surprise you: The number of working local journalists has plummeted over the last 25 years (and continued to decline last year), and the little coverage that’s left tends to focus more on topics like crime and sports than on health, education, or other civic issues.

But as local news declines, there are a few negative consequences that you might not have heard about, too. (Sorry.) One of them: The loss of local news appears to make people lonelier. From the report:

A remarkable recent working paper by Danny Hayes and Anusha Trivedi extends the evidence on local news’ decline into less-charted territory. Using state-level data and a nationally representative survey, the authors found that loneliness is higher in states with weaker local news environments, even after factoring in how rural those states were. (Rural communities tend to have higher loneliness, so the authors tried to make sure the higher levels of loneliness resulted from the news shortage rather than just from low population density.) In addition, they found that people who rarely consume local journalism report greater loneliness than those who regularly do. The authors suggest that local news fosters attachment to community and a sense of belonging that acts as a buffer against social isolation.

The Local Journalist Index data reinforces their conclusion. Using the same data used by Hayes and Trivedi from the U.S. Census 2024 Bureau’s Household Pulse Survey and the 2026 LJE measure, we identified pairs of states with similar rural population shares but sharply different concentrations of local journalists. In each pair, the state with a higher concentration of local journalists had a lower level of loneliness — 3 to 8 percentage points lower.

Writing in Washington Monthly, Steven Waldman, the founder of Rebuild Local News, offers a few ideas on why this might be:

[blockquote]The mechanism may be the same as why we have more polarization: With less local news, people are more likely to turn to social media and their phones, which has, by itself, been shown to increase loneliness.

But Hayes and Trivedi suggest two other possibilities.

First, local news, when done well, provides information about events and places that draw people together. If you don’t know about the crafts fair or the community theater’s latest production of The Crucible, you’re more likely to stay home.

Though not as romantic, even information about political or civic conflicts can help. You go out to protest the new prison, you’re bonding with fellow NIMBYs.

Second, on a more psychological level, local news “may also encourage people to identify as a member of their community and feel connected to the people in it,” as Hayes and Trivedi put it.

So, while fancy journalists used to disparage the mere “human interest stories” they had to write when they first started, it turns out that those may be among the most important. Stories about other people — whether a puff piece or an obituary — help create more nuanced bonds.[/blockquote]

You can see the full 2026 Local News Index here and get a spreadsheet of all the data here.