If you live in Omaha or Lincoln, chances are you have at least one reliable source of news. But if you’re in a more rural area of the state — say, Bartlett in the middle of the state, or Harrisburg in the Panhandle — access to trusted media drops precipitously.
“There’s nine counties in Nebraska that have no local news organizations,” said Jessica Fargen Walsh, a journalism professor at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. “There’s 43,000 Nebraskans who live somewhere where there is no local journalist at all.”
It’s a symptom of a national problem: Legacy newspapers, once the backbone of American cities and towns, are on the decline. Public radio stations are facing federal funding cuts. And local TV stations are reckoning with shrinking viewership…