In 'news deserts,' small towns can struggle to tell their stories
Newsy
In rural America, small communities are often reliant on large outside news outlets, and miss opportunities to tell their own stories.
In the U.S., according to Northwestern University, more than half of all counties only have one newspaper, which usually does not publish daily.
This is the case in the town of Springfield, Colorado, with a population of about 1,400. It's in Baca County, about as far southeast in Colorado as you can get without drifting into Oklahoma or Kansas.
There is no daily news outlet in Baca County. They do have one newspaper, but it only publishes once a week.
They do have a Web site. But as of Monday, the latest article on that home page was posted 10 days ago.
Scripps News talked with the mayor of Springfield, Tyler Gibson. We asked him without a reliable daily local news outlet, where were people getting their news? Unsurprisingly, like most of us, they go online — where news can have the same problems no matter the size of the community reading.
