By Marilyn Odendahl
The Indiana Citizen
April 10, 2026
The news about newsrooms has not been good.
Cutbacks and closures, layoffs and less reporting seem to have dominated the headlines, but a recent study of the media ecosystem in Indiana is making some news consumers hopeful that community journalism is growing.
“When it comes to local news, I am feeling optimistic, because I think we’ve turned the corner from just talking about problems to actually designing and thinking about the future,” Suzannah Evans Comfort, associate professor at The Media School at Indiana University, said.
Evans Comfort drew her insights and conclusions from a study she and her colleagues recently completed, “Journalism at the Crossroads of America: An Ecosystem Analysis of Newsmaking in Indiana.” She presented the findings and highlighted areas for more research to an audience of academics, students and, of course, reporters at a public event held in Franklin Hall commons on the IU Bloomington campus.
Evans Comfort said the research, which the Media School says is the first news ecosystem report to examine the state of newsgathering in Indiana, provides a much-needed snapshot of the industry.
“The idea is to, again, establish that baseline of understanding what’s going on with journalism right now in our community, so that we can think about the future and moving forward,” Evans Comfort said during a presentation of the report at IU. “So, it’s not really backward facing. We’re not trying to recreate what happened over the last 20 years in journalism. We’re just looking at where we are right now and where we might be going in the future.”
A key component of the report is the database of news organizations in cities, towns and counties across Indiana. Clicking on a county will show a list of the media outlets by their name, medium, ownership and location.
Hoosier newsrooms are facing familiar pressures, such as less financial security along with some new challenges created by advancing technology. Many news organizations have either slashed staff or closed down altogether.
However, Evans Comfort cited to research that found local news is more trusted than national news. Also, studies done by academics outside of journalism have linked the decline of local news to a range of adverse effects, including higher borrowing costs for government, higher rates of misconduct by financial advisers, more air pollution and fewer violent crimes solved. Moreover, social-media platforms, which also provide information, are not considered to be as accurate and do not serve the communities as well as journalists reporting the local news.
Indiana journalists are especially focused on their communities, according to the IU study. A majority of Hoosier reporters said serving their audiences, discussing local policy, helping build a stronger community and showcasing the positive aspects of their community were “extremely important.”
This local focus distinguished Indiana journalists from national media reporters. The study found 73% of Hoosier newsgathers said avoiding reporting of stories with unverified content was “extremely important,” compared to 47% of national media journalists. However, just 7% of Indiana reporters said being an adversary to government was “extremely important,” compared to 20% of reporters for national media.
“So, what this says to me is that there is something a little bit different about how journalists who do local news in Indiana perceive their roles compared to a national sample,” Evans Comfort said. “This (finding) would be supported by a lot of research that shows that national journalism tends to be more polarizing in nature, more conflict-oriented, compared to local journalism.”
Based on the results of her research and survey, Evans Comfort said the current outlook for journalism in Indiana is mixed. Newsrooms are still facing many challenges, but within the past five years, startup news organizations have bloomed around the state and are helping to revitalize the industry.
In particular, she pointed to Bloomington and Indianapolis, which actually have more news organizations than they did 10 years ago.
The IU Media School study identified 225 news organizations in Indiana, which included 131 newspapers, 10 magazines, 18 “digital native” newsrooms, and 66 commercial and public television stations and radio stations that broadcast news content. Still, the study found news organizations are not evenly distributed across the state and even within a competitive news market, some communities are not receiving enough attention.
The locations of news organizations across Indiana are as follows:
Marion County, where the state capital is located, has 24 news organizations, the most of any county in the state. Allen, St. Joseph and Vanderburgh counties follow with 14, 11, and 10, respectively.
However, Floyd, Ohio, Switzerland and Vermillion counties, which are the state’s smallest counties with a total population of 112,000, do not have any local news organizations based in their communities, the study found.
“In counties where they have a lot of news organizations, like Marion County, … and have had lots of news organizations for as long as anyone can remember, there are still communities that have been underserved, or, I would argue, even unserved by the news organizations there,” Evans Comfort said. “So, just the presence of news organizations is not necessarily a nuanced understanding of whether they’re living up to the potential that we hope news organizations live up to.”
Operational funding is still a persistent problem for Indiana news organizations, according to the study. Of the 103 senior newsroom managers who responded to Evans Comfort’s survey, 40% said they were not sure if their news outlet would be solvent in five years, while another 12.1% said their organization would not be solvent. However, a majority, 59.2%, of newsroom managers said their outlet was financially solvent and 47.6% were confident it would still be solvent in five years.
Evans Comfort highlighted the decline in paid subscribers as a key reason for the financial insecurity. Namely, more than 80% of Americans “simply will not pay for news,” she said. The 17% who do buy subscriptions tend to be educated and affluent.
“If you are someone who believes that professionally produced local journalism is an essential component of community health, … you probably also believe it should not only be accessible to people who are affluent and educated, it should be accessible to everyone,” Evans Comfort said. “So, we have a really challenging environment when it comes to just the financial situation in local news.”
Interestingly, the study found that as pressing as the balance sheet is, news managers said recruiting and retaining quality employees were bigger challenges. The study found Indiana news organizations averaged about 11 editorial employees with 70 newsrooms reporting five or fewer editorial employees.
Evans Comfort said the concern about finding and keeping good newsroom staff was unexpected. In the study, she asked if Indiana was experiencing a “journalism brain drain,” and said figuring out how the Hoosier State can become attractive to aspiring and experienced journalists is “a challenge worth tackling.”
Although some states, such as Washington, California, New York and Illinois, have made a public investment in local journalism, Evans Comfort does not expect that to happen in Indiana.
The study found ownership of news organizations in the Hoosier State is dominated by media corporations. Of the news outlets across the state, the owners are as follows:
Still, Evans Comfort expects the future of news organizations to become more oriented financially to a nonprofit model, rather than a commercial model.
She does not expect commercial media to disappear, but did say the competition for paying subscribers “is just going to get more and more and more and more and more competitive.” As a result, she said, commercial media organizations will likely have to merge and consolidate in order to share resources and lower costs.
“If we care about hyperlocal news, we need an infrastructure that actually can support that,” Evans Comfort said.
Dwight Adams, an editor and writer based in Indianapolis, edited this article. He is a former content editor, copy editor and digital producer at The Indianapolis Star and IndyStar.com, and worked as a planner for other newspapers, including the Louisville Courier Journal.
The Indiana Citizen is a nonpartisan, nonprofit platform dedicated to increasing the number of informed and engaged Hoosier citizens. We are operated by the Indiana Citizen Education Foundation, Inc., a 501(c)(3) public charity. For questions about the story, contact Marilyn Odendahl at marilyn.odendahl@indianacitizen.org
