The Rise of a New Media Baron and the Emerging Threat of News Deserts

By Penelope Muse Abernathy

The Rise of a New Media Baron and the Emerging Threat of News Deserts

86 pp., 8.5 x 11, 12 maps, 7 graphs, 16 tables

  • Paperback ISBN: 978-1-4696-3402-9
    Published: October 2016

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Distributed for the Center for Innovation and Sustainability in Local Media, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Over the past decade, a new media baron has emerged that is very different from the publishers that preceded it. The rise of this new media baron coincides with immense disruption in the newspaper industry. With profits and readership declining dramatically, newspaper publishers are grappling with an uncertain future, and many worry about their paper’s long-term survival. As a result, many smaller cities and towns could lose their local newspapers and with them the reliable news and information essential to a community’s quality of life and democratic institutions. This report, published by the Center for Innovation and Sustainability in Local Media, considers the significant political, social, and economic consequences of the emergence of “news deserts” across entire regions of the country. An open access version of this publication is available as a PDF download here: http://newspaperownership.com/.

About the Author

Penelope Muse Abernathy, formerly an executive with the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, is Knight Chair in Journalism and Digital Media Economics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s School of Media and Journalism. She is the author of Saving Community Journalism: The Path to Profitability.
For more information about Penelope Muse Abernathy, visit the Author Page.