New York Times executive editor Dean Baquet offered a bleak forecast for local newspapers: Most will likely be dead within the next few years.

Baquet, speaking Friday at the International News Media Association’s World Congress of News Media, said that the loss of these smaller papers is a tragic result of the evolving digital age.

“The greatest crisis in American journalism is the death of local news,” he told the audience. “I don’t know what the answer is. Their economic model is gone. I think most local newspapers in America are going to die in the next five years, except for the ones that have been bought by a local billionaire.”

“I think that everybody who cares about news — myself included, and all of you — should take this on as an issue. Because we’re going to wake up one day and there are going to be entire states with no journalism or with little tiny pockets of journalism,” said Baquet. “I’m not worried about Los Angeles and New York. I don’t know what the model is for covering the school boards in Newark, New Jersey. That makes me nervous.”

A study by the University of North Carolina found that between 2004 and 2018, nearly 1,800 newspapers shuttered. Those losses left 200 counties with no newspaper at all and about half the counties in the entire country with only one.

Local newspapers traditionally work to hold local government institutions accountable, and research has found that as those newspapers close, government spending in those areas increases.

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