Even as study after study has shown a nosedive in local reporting, Rhode Island and Massachusetts appear to receive better news coverage in 2025 than communities in many other states.
Rhode Island maintains a critical mass of reporters who dig into the state’s most important stories and uncover hidden news, but municipalities outside Providence generally tend to get less coverage than in the past.
Media critic Dan Kennedy, a professor at Northeastern University in Boston, said the situation is similar in Massachusetts.
“I think that the media landscape in Massachusetts is a lot better than it is in many other parts of the country,” Kennedy said in an interview with Ocean State Media.
I think that the media landscape in Massachusetts is a lot better than it is in many other parts of the country
“We have a robust daily newspaper, we have a second daily, and we have good weekly and neighborhood newspapers and digital outlets,” he said, and despite the defunding of public media by Republicans in Washington, “we continue to have two very strong news-oriented public broadcasting outlets in Greater Boston.”
Kennedy said things get more spotty at the local level in Massachusetts.
“In our state, every single one of our 351 cities and towns needs accountability journalism to keep track of what’s going on with the city council or the select board, the school committee, neighborhood development, things like that,” he said. “Unfortunately, we’re in a situation where you might have one town that has a robust startup news project of some sort and right next to it is a town that has nothing.”
The situation is similar in Rhode Island, where The Providence Journal walked away years ago from a network of news bureaus once intended to cover the state like the morning dew.
And although the ProJo, like newspapers everywhere, has far fewer reporters than in the past, those still there continue to offer valuable reporting. The Boston Globe opened a Rhode Island bureau in 2019 and an independent nonprofit, the Rhode Island Current, emerged a few years later.
A number of other local outlets cover the news in Rhode Island, including TV stations WPRI and WJAR, Providence Business News, our own Ocean State Media and independent sources like EcoRI and Steve Ahlquist.
Rhode Island and Massachusetts both scored relatively highly in a recent study of where local journalists are still operating. Rhode Island ranked 8th and Massachusetts 11th in the country.
“Almost 40% of all local U.S. newspapers have vanished” over the last two decades, according to a recent Northwestern University report. Still, some communities around Rhode Island get detailed coverage from local newspapers.
The downside, though, is that there’s less coverage than in the past of the granular day-to-day coverage from communities outside Providence.
That has real consequences, Kennedy said.
“If you happen to live in a community that has little or no hyper-local news coverage, it’s very difficult for you to know what’s going on in local government,” Kennedy said. “That keeps people from running for office, it keeps people from voting in local elections. Without that watchdog role, it can lead to an increase in corruption and wrongdoing and even minor wrongdoing just because no one is holding them to account.”
Even on a more basic level, Kennedy cites the example of how an absence of coverage of youth sports deprives a community of some of the glue that once held it together.
The ‘Little (News) Engine That Could’
The Medill Local News Initiative reported last week that while the number of digital-only news sites is growing, they don’t come close to replacing the number of reporting jobs that have been lost.
Medill also found that locally owned papers are closing faster than those owned by private equity or other investment firms.
A counter-example to that trend came when Joy Fox bought what is now known as Beacon Media last year. It publishes local weekly newspapers in Warwick, Cranston and Johnston.
Fox said the challenges faced by her company are similar to those for any small business.
“We’re lucky to have the support of local advertisers, along with our readers,” she said. “While the challenges are there, I say don’t count us out and we remain the little engine that could, plugging along every week, providing that reliable, trusted coverage of our communities.”
Fox added: “We’re needed now more than ever, so that it’s on us, our team and this newsroom and newsrooms across the state — from the East Bay Newspapers, The Valley Breeze, Newport This Week, Jamestown Press — that we have to be more creative to reach readers beyond our printed pages.”
The effect of consolidation can be seen in how Gannett now owns the Providence Journal, and Rhode Island’s three commercial TV stations are operated by two large broadcasters, Nexstar (which owns WPRI, Channel 12) and Sinclair (which owns WJAR, Channel 10 and now operates WLNE, Channel 6). The good news is that Nexstar seems to defer quite a bit to its local management in East Providence, which continues to invest in investigative and enterprise reporting at WPRI.
Ocean State Media is co-presenting Media Literacy Week -- a time to encourage media consumers to more closely examine what they read, listen to and view -- in Rhode Island. Click here for more information
