Midterms in the local news void

The struggles of America’s local press are well-documented, but what effect that might have on Tuesday’s midterms is less clearly established. As voters prepare to go to the polls, researchers at the University of North Carolina’s Center for Innovation and Sustainability in Local Media want to show the scale of the problem. In a recent report on America’s “news deserts,” they update prior research to calculate that at least one in five newspapers has shuttered over the past 15 years, with a...