College newspaper sweeps up 2 small publications in fight against growing news deserts

With hundreds of U.S. newspaper closings leaving legions with little access to local news, a college newspaper in Iowa has stepped up to buy two struggling weekly publications.

The move by The Daily Iowan, a nonprofit student paper at the University of Iowa, is believed to be a first, though other universities are stepping up to fill America’s news void in different ways.

Students will work alongside the papers’ existing one- or two-person reporting staffs and put themselves to work covering the small communities of Mount Vernon, Lisbon and Solon — all within 25 miles of the Iowa campus in Iowa City. The weeklies’ owner proposed the buyout to save the publications, which have a combined circulation of 1,900.

“It’s a really great way to help the problem of news deserts in rural areas,” said Sabine Martin, executive editor of The Daily Iowan. She already oversees editorial operations for a school paper whose most recent tax filings show had more than $2 million in net assets.

Since 2005, the U.S. has lost about 70% of newsroom jobs and one-third of all newspapers, said Zach Metzger, director of the State of Local News Project at Northwestern University. He described the industry’s downfall as a“cliff dive.”

Traditional media has been in that dive since big tech and social media began siphoning off the monster share of advertising dollars.

A handful of college publications already were heavily invested in local news, including the University of Missouri, where professional editors supervise journalism students who have produced a community paper (the Columbia Missourian) for decades.