This chapter lays out one route to reinvigorating local news, by increasing demand among younger and older Americans alike. Based on survey data and a series of experiments, we show that the simple acts of informing citizens of the importance of local government and reminding them of its relevance can go a long way toward increasing local news consumption. The newspaper industry of the twentieth century is a thing of the past, but growing consumer interest in local news – from both traditional outlets as well as emerging digital sources – can create incentives for news organizations to provide the coverage of local government that democracy needs.

The story of this chapter is that when it comes to local engagement, the decline of local news affects the political behavior of citizens across the spectrum very similarly. The growing scarcity of reporting about local government has led to growing disengagement among Americans of all stripes.

At a time when political observers worry – justifiably – about the health of the US’ national political institutions, threats to local democratic governance cannot be ignored. The local news media – by providing accurate information to citizens about what is happening in city halls, county governments, school boards, and other local political institutions throughout the country – constitute a vital link in the democratic process. Political representation and government effectiveness thus depend on reinvigorating the local news media and the citizen engagement that goes along with it. It can be done, but without a collective effort by citizens, journalists, and groups committed to strengthening local journalism, the long-term health of American democracy may be in peril.

This chapter provides a thorough empirical account of the connection between local news and political engagement during the last two decades. Drawing on a variety of data sources, we go beyond the existing research to demonstrate that the demise of local newspapers we documented in Chapters 2 and 3 indeed contributes to reductions in political engagement in America’s cities and towns.

This chapters turn our attention to how reduced access to local politics coverage has played out. We first investigate the extent to which the local news crisis has affected large versus small daily papers across the country. We then examine which parts of local government were the most likely to be ignored by local newspapers as their reporting ranks thinned. These analyses are critical because they shed light on the kinds of communities that lost the most coverage and the parts of local government most likely to go without scrutiny.

The demise of the newspaper industry in the last two decades has exacerbated the problems of limited public engagement in local politics. The downward slide of local government coverage has left the nation less knowledgeable about its local elected officials and less likely to participate in local elections. These trends are concerning enough as they have already played out. But they are particularly worrisome given local journalism’s precarious future. Without a revitalization of the local media environment, democratic accountability and quality representation in cities and towns across the United States will become increasingly elusive.

Once the nation’s preeminent news source, daily newspapers have in recent years seen a massive reduction in their reporting capacity. As a result, residents of cities and counties across the United States now have access to less coverage of their local governments than at any time in modern American history. As the potential for new sources of local news, such as internet start-ups, remains uncertain, the prospect of an unprecedented information crisis looms on the local horizon.

On August 9, 2014, Michael Brown, an unarmed eighteen-year-old African American man, was fatally shot by Darren Wilson, a white police officer, following a violent altercation on the streets of Ferguson, Missouri. With many of the crucial facts surrounding Brown’s death under dispute – in particular, whether Wilson’s stop of Brown was justified, whether Wilson or Brown initiated the confrontation, whether Brown surrendered or resisted arrest – many residents in the majority African American community took to the streets to protest what they viewed as an emblematic instance of police brutality, as well as general indifference among community leaders toward the concerns of black and brown residents. In response, Ferguson police – and eventually the Missouri National Guard – mustered an intimidating show of force in an effort to contain the protests. The presence of large numbers of heavily armed police and guardsmen exacerbated an already tense situation, leading to charged and sometimes violent encounters between protestors and law enforcement officials. Wilson’s killing of Brown, the heated and sometimes violent protests, and the extraordinary heavy-handedness of the police response made the events in Ferguson national news, riveting public attention and forcing conversations about police brutality and the over-policing of communities of color.