After decades of working for national news media’s biggest names, Paul Miller retired to Carmel-by-the-Sea in the 1990s. But instead of spending his days soaking in the Monterey Peninsula’s stunning cliffsides, he bought a struggling local newspaper. Thirty years later, The Carmel Pine Cone is a well-funded, well-oiled machine that prints weekly and is free to the public. Miller’s Pine Cone is a shining example of one of the Golden State’s thriving local news ecosystems, and a model for small-town press looking to build sustainable businesses.
In September 2025, in another corner of California, Aysha Pettigrew joined the Merced Sun-Star as a reporting fellow. Their two-year stint at the paper is funded by a University of California, Berkeley initiative to increase the number of journalists in local newsrooms around the state. But in November, just two months into their very first reporting gig, parent company McClatchy laid off every single staffer at the Sun-Star — except Pettigrew.
Because Pettigrew’s salary was being paid by the Berkeley program, McClatchy could not lay them off. Pettigrew and the California Local News Fellowship determined that the best idea was to stay and cover the community that had just lost most of its journalists.
“I knew that this was a possibility,” Pettigrew said. “But I was like, ‘I don’t know what my role is now.’ I was hired to be the economic mobility reporter, and I was starting to carve out my beat and find my sources … now I kind of have to cover everything.”
On paper, Carmel-by-the-Sea and Merced have something in common: Neither technically qualify as a news desert, as both have multiple local newspapers serving their communities. But that’s where the similarities end. In Carmel, Miller oversees a thriving newsroom that has become a model for independent local publishing. In Merced, Pettigrew is one of the city’s only remaining local reporters, and the only one at their outlet.
The contrast underscores a growing challenge for researchers and policymakers alike: Measuring the health of local news has become far more complicated than simply counting newspapers.
The numbers don’t tell the whole story
At first glance, California’s local news landscape seems to be thriving. Even the state’s least populous areas compare favorably to some of the United States’ largest regions by one common measure.
Three of the smallest counties — Sierra, Modoc and Colusa — have the lowest ratios of people per outlet in the state, and appear to be miles ahead of other major counties and regions, including Washington, D.C., Cook County (Chicago), Kings and Queens Counties (New York City) and King County (Seattle). This set of statistical calculations paints a very positive picture of the average Californian’s ability to get local news about their county.
The problem, however, is that these numbers do not gauge the quality of that reporting.
Matt Pearce, director of policy at Rebuild Local News, prefers to add a second statistic to present a fuller picture of who is bringing local news to California communities: the “Local Journalist Index,” a tool that analyzes the number of “Local Journalist Equivalents” in each U.S. county. According to the tool’s website, Local Journalist Equivalents represent the number of journalists in the area who cover local matters almost exclusively.
A street in downtown Carmel-by-the-Sea, California, in November 2022. The coastal community is home to The Carmel Pine Cone, an independent weekly newspaper that has become a model for sustainable local journalism. (Manuela Durson/Shutterstock)
“The number of publications in a given location is useful for trying to establish access to information in some respects, but it may not measure production as accurately,” Pearce said of building the tool. “There are a lot of different ways of measuring the decline in local news production, local news access, and this was our particular contribution to it.”
California ranks near the bottom of the list for Local Journalist Equivalents per 100,000 residents, with just six, placing it at 43rd out of 50 states.
Two California counties — Riverside and San Bernardino — rank among the 10 lowest counties with populations of more than 500,000. The two came in at third and fourth lowest, respectively, with 2.3 and 2.4 local journalists per 100,000 people.
And just as in Carmel and Merced, the health of California’s local journalism is more than meets the eye. The state contains multitudes of newsroom styles: ones that thrive in analog environments and ones that exist as a digital product only, ones that are flush with funds and ones that are just scraping by. Together, they form a local news ecosystem that simple metrics struggle to capture.
Three newsrooms, three realities
Unlike many newspapers, the Pine Cone has virtually no online strategy. Readers looking for stories on its website are directed to a PDF of the print edition, and the paper relies almost entirely on print advertising for revenue. Miller credits the paper’s longevity to a simple philosophy: “Content is king.”
“When I bought the paper, I wanted to focus on the content, and that’s all I’ve ever done,” said Miller, who jokingly calls himself the paper’s “chief light bulb changer.” “For some reason, the success has followed.”
Success, for Miller, isn’t measured in pageviews. It’s measured by advertisers who keep coming back and a folder of reader emails labeled “Attaboys.” The Pine Cone generates roughly $60,000 a week in advertising revenue — more during special issues — enough to support a newsroom that remains unusually robust for a paper its size.
All of Miller’s staff live in Monterey County and write for the paper either full or part time, ensuring every reporter lives in the community they cover. That local focus stands out even more in the data. Monterey County sits below the national average at just 6.6 local journalists per 100,000 residents, though it is above the California average of six.
That success is hardly universal. In Merced, which the index reports has just 3.6 local journalists per 100,000 residents, Pettigrew remains the only full-time reporter at the Sun-Star, even though it prints three times per week. They also write as a satellite reporter for the Modesto Bee, covering Merced and working from the Bee’s newsroom a few days each week. Merced, a growing city of some 90,000 residents in California’s Central Valley, faces a grim reality: There are never enough reporters at the Sun-Star to cover everything that needs to be covered.
Downtown Merced, California, seen from above in autumn 2022. The city is served by just one full-time reporter at the Merced Sun-Star. (Jacob Boomsma/Shutterstock)
“Sometimes in cities, it feels like there’s a lot of competition for stories,” they said. “But here, sometimes I have five things I’d like to cover today, and I can only do two of them.”
In Humboldt County, Jennifer Cahill faces a similar problem: She is the editor-in-chief of the North Coast Journal, a newspaper that has a full-time staff of three. Cahill and her two other editors work out of a small office in Eureka. Every other contributor is a freelance writer who has another job. Cahill is the only one in the office allowed to work more than 40 hours per week, and though her official title is “managing editor,” she doesn’t feel that it reflects the newsroom’s status.
“It seems sort of weird to have the title as if we still have newsrooms with a dozen people,” she said. “It gives me that vibe of like, ‘barely managing editor,’ ‘mostly surviving editor.’”
Though her staff has always been small, it shrank to its smallest size ever after the paper laid off a fourth staffer as an emergency measure over the summer. And while the paper is now “in the black,” it still does not have enough money to take on more staff.
When she asks new writers to freelance, Cahill jokes with them, “I would love to underpay you.”
Cahill said limited resources shape what kinds of journalism her newsroom can produce. She’d like to pay a more diverse set of writers, but often can’t.
“I need to have people of all different backgrounds covering material of all different backgrounds, so that we don’t just have white voices reviewing film, or we don’t just have white voices talking about art,” she said. “I think that is an invisible kind of discrimination, and I don’t want to see it.”
The cost of fewer journalists
A Rebuild Local News analysis of the latest Local Journalist Index found that 75% of counties that had some local papers but low Local Journalist Equivalent concentrations produced no local health or education coverage compared to half of counties with larger numbers of local journalists.
Naturally, this is not the journalists’ fault. Multiple studies have noted that many smaller newsrooms will prioritize stories that generate more engagement, because that engagement means advertising revenue, which helps them stay open.
The consequences also go beyond the newsroom. Researchers at Rebuild Local News argue in a separate report that areas with weaker local journalism ecosystems pay a hefty financial price.
Downtown Eureka, California, at sunrise. The Humboldt County city is home to the North Coast Journal, where a full-time newsroom of three covers the community. (Manuela Durson/Shutterstock)
The report, built on previous research of U.S. news deserts, found that local governments in these areas have spent $1.1 billion in additional borrowing costs on municipal bonds. The underlying 2020 report — “Financing Dies in Darkness? The Impact of Newspaper Closures on Public Finance” — attributes these additional borrowing costs to fewer watchful eyes from the press.
“From a policy standpoint, subsidies that support local journalism and reduce the footprint of local news deserts would help to offset the $1.1 billion in annual borrowing costs and the additional costs associated with higher taxes, government spending, and corruption,” RLN’s 2026 report states.
One size does not fit all
If there’s one takeaway, it’s that there actually is no single solution to a lack of local journalists in any given California newsroom. California is a diverse state in many ways, including when it comes to the set of problems — and potential solutions — its newsrooms face.
The newsrooms featured in this story are from areas wealthy and poor, urban and rural, coastal and inland, populous and not. Their funding comes from advertising, fellowships, contributors, grants and more.
When we measure the health of a local news ecosystem in any one of California’s 58 counties, it is almost misleading to focus on one feature over another. It may be more important to count the journalists who cover a county than the papers sitting on newsstands. And in all 58 counties, this looks entirely different.
The solutions to the crisis must therefore be as diverse and localized as the communities that each of these papers serves. To insinuate otherwise does a disservice to the good they aim to bring to their readers.
This story was originally reported as part of Jennifer Nehrer’s capstone project at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. You can read the original version here.
I know that you mention that “The newsrooms featured in this story are from areas wealthy and poor, urban and rural, coastal and inland, populous and not,” but I do feel it’s important to highlight that there is a very big difference in the wealth of Carmel vs. Merced. U.S. Census Bureau data shows that Monterey County has a median household income of $97,000, while Merced County’s is $65,500. While that doesn’t discredit the Carmel paper’s work, it makes sense that it is able to have such large revenues from print advertising when you consider the town’s demographics.