Majority of newspapers in the United States are small-market newspapers. A new Tow Center for Digital Journalism report by Christopher Ali, of University of Virginia and Damian Radcliffe, University of Oregon, focuses on these local newspapers. The authors conducted an online survey among local journalists to explore what is it like to work at these small-market newspapers.

The respondents of the survey identified some key challenges local newspapers are facing: (1) Newsrooms are shrinking, (2) Recruiting young journalistic talent is difficult (3) A long-hours culture (4) Just over half of journalists feel secure in their positions.

However, most of respondents were positive about the future of small-market newspapers. The optimism might come as a surprise considering the level of cuts, job losses etc but there are some benefits of being small and local: small-market newspapers are often close to their communities, and sometimes they are the only source of original reporting in a community.

The report is available on Tow Center website here.

Picture: lecture by abstrkt.ch, licence: CC BY 2.0