Recently, The Spokesman-Review announced it will be donated to a nonprofit organization known as the Comma Community Journalism Laboratory. In doing so, the long-time family-owned paper seeks to preserve its importance to the local community, while keeping it out of corporate hands.

The decision arrives amidst ongoing challenges and concerns about the sustainability of local news in Washington and beyond.

A new report, produced by scholars at the Murrow College of Communication at Washington State University, titled “From News Deserts to Nonprofit Resilience: Assessing the Health of Washington’s Local News Ecosystem,” shows a news ecosystem in crisis. The report reveals news deserts in Washington and intensifying precarity that forces news outlets to do more with less, with dire implications for civic health and democracy.

For more than a year, the Murrow research team surveyed local news organizations and conducted interviews with journalists, civic leaders, and scholars to identify the challenges facing local news and proffer solutions to mitigate its demise.

Murrow’s report represents the most comprehensive effort to map the local news ecosystem in Washington state. It builds on other such efforts, including notably Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism’s national news ecosystem report, which broke ground in mapping news deserts across the country.

However, the Medill report, which has set the agenda for discussions about news deserts, only tackled newspapers at first. Murrow’s report identified newspapers, television, radio stations, magazines, and online sites that provided regularly published, original, and journalistic content oriented to a local community.

Out of more than 1,000 outlets identified, only 353 outlets actually produced content that constituted journalism, covered local communities, and was published regularly. Moreover, the findings identify two counties that are news deserts in Washington state, five counties with only one outlet and another five counties with only two outlets. Twelve counties (30%) out of Washington’s 39 counties have two or fewer outlets per county, and 64% of counties fall below the state’s county average of outlets.

Less populous, rural areas are particularly lacking in news outlets, as are some denser urban areas when factoring in their population density. Fewer staff, due to budget cuts or industry changes, are tasked with reporting on an expanding number of issues, often spread across large, diverse communities; affecting rural and urban areas.

Additionally, a significant proportion of outlets report an annual operating budget of less than $250,000, which indicates fewer reporters and less money to cover news. These trends suggest many outlets struggle to cover local news, and some outlets will likely face closure without external support.

Interviews with more than two dozen journalists, civic leaders, and scholars point to staffing and budget reductions as key drivers of the crisis. According to the founder of Gig Harbor Now, Pat Lantz, who was interviewed for the report: “We pay a professional amount, but the professional amount is hardly a living wage.”

Low salaries make it difficult for journalists who love their profession to stay in it. Madison Miller, who worked at multiple Washington newspapers and magazines, left the local news industry twice because of job cuts and stagnant salaries. She told us that she decided to leave journalism “just because I couldn’t afford to stay.”

Revenue losses, rising costs, and news ownership consolidation have compounded local news outlets’ financial and capacity concerns. Inadequate compensation makes it difficult for news organizations to recruit and retain journalists, contributing to a less diverse workforce and revealing multiple cracks in the journalism workforce pipeline. These resource constraints are forcing a growing reliance on contingent laborers, including freelancers and volunteers.

And yet journalists note that freelance journalism is not a sustainable profession.

Freelance journalist Chase Hutchinson told us how difficult it is to make a living as a freelancer working for various news outlets, including those in Washington, “If you don’t sleep and put in probably double the amount of hours as a full-time job, you can pull it off … But it’s not sustainable as a long-term career.”

To address the crisis, interviewees highlighted several opportunities for news organizations to diversify revenue streams through direct donations, local business support, foundation grants and state initiatives; leveraging technologies and embracing new strategies to reach expanded audiences; and increasing collaboration among journalists and news organizations to cover stories in a resource-strapped environment.

Despite that, it is clear that public support, including initiatives, legislation, training programs, and public and philanthropic funding support is needed to bolster local journalism. In Olympia, legislation was introduced this session to support local news.

The legislation would have made small grants available to news organizations across the state to support reporting on civic affairs. The funding was going to come from an increase on an existing business tax surcharge on companies like Amazon. The proposed legislation had strong bi-partisan support, and even though it did not make it out of the Senate Ways & Means Committee this year, advocates hope it will be considered again next year.

Policymakers can continue to ensure Washington is on the vanguard of local journalism innovation by considering legislative funding mechanisms that bolster local news, supporting research into local news, and maintaining laws that allow journalists to carry out their essential work.

When local news outlets shrink or disappear, communities’ critical information needs go unmet, and an overreliance on divisive social media and misinformation increases. Social cohesion and community identity erodes, exacerbating existing socioeconomic and racial inequities. Without high-quality local news coverage of politics and community life, civic and political participation decreases.

In short, local news is essential for democratic life. And yet, it is in short supply.

Jennifer R. Henrichsen and Pawel Popiel are assistant professors at the Edward R. Murrow College of Communication at WSU.