NJ newsrooms are dying and shrinking, but is government funding the answer?

It’s a lot harder to find local news coverage in New Jersey than it used to be.

Thursday marks the first national “Local News Day” — a “day of action” to bolster local outlets as the U.S. media landscape grows more barren by the year. Cuts to local news are especially dire in New Jersey, where the number of news outlets and journalists reporting on the state and its communities has been on a decadeslong decline. Legacy brands are contracting — a trend made stark last year, when the Star-Ledger, the state’s largest circulation newspaper at the time, ended its print edition and several affiliated newsrooms closed up shop entirely. The Local Journalist Index counts just five journalists for every 100,000 residents in the country’s densest state — the second-worst ratio in the country.

As a wave of new start-ups aims to fill the gaps, state lawmakers are weighing new ideas on how they might boost local news. But they’re grappling with Gov. Mikie Sherrill’s proposal to cut all funding for a program that has buoyed Garden State journalism for most of the last decade.

Local journalism advocates say the cause couldn’t be more urgent, and warn that the contraction threatens the flow of information through neighborhoods, eroding the sense of connection individuals have with their community.

“If you do not have access, you do not participate in your community as much,” said Stefanie Murray, the director of the Center for Cooperative Media at Montclair State University, which looks to grow local journalism in New Jersey with financial, logistical and planning support. “It starts to rip slowly at the fabric of your community, your local society. Access to news information is a public good and should be funded as such and should be thought of as such.”

Among the casualties of recent years: The Jersey Journal, owned by the Star-Ledger’s parent company, NJ Advance Media, shut down in February 2025 after 157 years of operation. Smaller operations have been vulnerable, too. The Hudson Reporter and Bayonne Community News surprised their communities when they closed in 2023. WNET will end a broadcast agreement with New Jersey in June, ending the state’s current incarnation of PBS.

Gothamist got a preview of the most recent study of the New Jersey news landscape, conducted by Murray’s center, and losses since the pandemic have been acute. The study found 730 news outlets covering New Jersey in 2025, down from 779 in 2021. That includes outlets that are based out of state but dedicate resources to New Jersey news, including Gothamist and WNYC. A significant number of ethnic news outlets covering the Garden State are based out of state. The center doesn’t have data from years prior, but the New York Times reported last year that New Jersey lost 129 newspapers – roughly 60% of print products – since 2005.

The lack of coverage is especially concerning in a state with a reputation for high taxes, government excess and political misdeeds. As the Times noted, the loss of the Jersey Journal left “Hudson County — a hotbed for political corruption — without a daily newspaper.”

Start-ups with momentum

Murray said several new outlets are trying to establish themselves amid the closures.

“ They need support from local residents and municipalities and state agencies and other nonprofits,” Murray said. “So it really is a business question. It's a supporting-small-business question I see when I look at the local news ecosystem in the state, because we need more journalists and we need more coverage of municipalities.”

More than half of New Jersey outlets — 460 of them — cover news at the county level or with even more local focuses, according to the Center for Cooperative Media study. And more than half operate with five or fewer journalists on staff. The vast majority of local outlets in New Jersey are for-profit businesses. Just 35 of the newsrooms are nonprofit, and there are 13 public media outlets.

Aaron Morrill is the founder of the Jersey City Times, a for-profit outlet with a staff of four dedicated solely to covering New Jersey’s second-largest city since 2019. Morrill said his newsroom is trying to fill the void left by last year’s closure of the Jersey Journal, which had been a fixture of the community since 1867.

“Our readership has grown substantially,” Morrill said. “ With the closure of the Jersey Journal, we became more important to people.”

Roughly 80% of single-entity outlets – companies that operate just one newsroom, rather than a chain of newsrooms or a franchise – reported annual revenues of $500,000 or less, and most of those reported making less than $250,000 each year, according to the study, Murray said the center’s analysis indicates that $250,000 is the minimum revenue threshold news outlets need to generate to be sustainable.

Relying on donors

Advertising sales remain the most common primary source of revenue for local news outlets.

New Jersey Urban News, a for-profit newsroom covering communities of color in the state’s largest cities has a staff of four. It was founded in 2018 by Penda Howell, who has decades of experience working on the business side of media.

Howell’s goal is to boost coverage of people and places that more established outlets often overlook. He said he’s increasingly looking to philanthropy and grants to balance his budget.

“I launched New Jersey Urban News with the idea of being a traditional advertising revenue model that would support the businesses and operations,” Howell said. “But as we've gone along, pretty quickly, I realize we need to pivot.”

He’s not alone; the Center for Cooperative Media’s study has found philanthropy and donations are now the second-most common source of income for local news outlets. And while many philanthropic organizations have more money to share than ever before, Murray said competition for those dollars has surged as federal cuts under the Trump administration have opened new gaps in academia, the arts and social services.

“Philanthropies are having to make really difficult decisions,” Murray said. “When you have someone coming to you and saying, ‘We need money to feed children.’ That is a lot more dire than, ‘We need money to get information to people about feeding children.’”

The Online Journalism Project last year awarded the Jersey City Times a 10-year grant that pays out $400,000 each year. It was a rare break that allowed Morrill to hire full-time staff and open a physical newsroom in Downtown Jersey City, near City Hall.

“ This was like a dream come true,” Morrill said. “ I would not have three full-time journalists and be able to pay myself a salary had I not received that funding.”

Philanthropy also fuels the work of New Jersey Monitor, a nonprofit newsroom of six journalists dedicated to covering state government. The outlet is part of the States Newsroom network, which works to bolster such coverage around the country as legacy media withdraws from state capitals. The Monitor’s reporting is free to access and is available for other outlets to republish.

Terrence McDonald, who worked for years at the defunct Jersey Journal, is the outlet’s editor, and said the goal is to keep as many people informed about happenings in Trenton as possible.

“ The stuff that's happening in state houses impacts an average person's life more than probably what comes out of D.C.,” McDonald said. “It's really important for people to understand what's happening in their state capital.”

‘Zeroed out of the governor's budget’ — again

The New Jersey Civic Information Consortium was created by state law in 2018 and has emerged in recent years as a source of local news grants. It receives state money while also raising private funds. Since its creation the consortium has received $16 million from the state, and raised an additional $4 million on its own. That has translated to 135 grants for 75 outlets, reporting the news in 19 of New Jersey’s 21 counties.

“ Over the last four years of funding we've made tremendous strides in the call for us to make sure that communities are connected and informed,” said Ayinde Merrill, program officer for the consortium. “We need to make sure we just can't backslide in that work.”

New Jersey Urban News is one of the outlets that has benefited.

“That support has enabled us to squarely center our business around community engagement. It has allowed us to position our reporting around the audience and where it sees themselves in our coverage and how they engage us,” Howell said.

The consortium’s grants for first-time grantees reach up to $80,000, while awards for repeat grantees can be up to $120,000.

“ A three-year window of funding is probably the minimum amount for most of these organizations,” said Lisa Sahulka, the consortium’s executive director. ”In some instances, they're fledgling organizations and if we were to pull our funding, they would close.”

But the consortium has never had a dedicated source of funding in the state budget and is at the mercy of Trenton lawmakers — many of whom aren’t eager to fund outlets that will hold them accountable. Last year, then-Gov. Phil Murphy proposed cutting all of the consortiums’ funding. That followed Senate President Nick Scutari’s push to make it more difficult and more costly to access public records in the state. Murphy and lawmakers also slashed state funding to NJ PBS by 75%.

State lawmakers ultimately appropriated $2.5 million for the consortium, but Sherrill has zeroed out its funding in her own budget proposal. The cut is part of blanket cuts to all add-on appropriations lawmakers tucked into the state’s current budget.

“ The goal is really to get recurring funding,” Sahulka said. “This is a public good, like roads and streetlights and things like that.”

Sherrill’s office did not address questions about the proposed cut but said she “believes local news plays an essential role in New Jersey.”

New Jersey Monitor was recently awarded funding from the consortium that allowed McDonald to hire a new reporter dedicated to health care issues. But he said Sherrill’s tough talk on budget belt-tightening makes it unclear if lawmakers will be able to add funding this year.

“ Lawmakers have been sort of used to just taking the budget as it's presented to them by the governor and just adding hundreds of millions of dollars in extra funding and it just getting signed,” he said. “It doesn't sound like this governor is going to allow that.”

Sending state spending to newsrooms

Despite Sherrill’s decision to kill funding for local news, lawmakers are considering a bill that would require state agencies to spend 30% of their advertising budgets on local media outlets. The money would flow first to the consortium, which would then determine which outlets were eligible and issue grants. Murray said research by the center has found state agencies spend between $20 million and $30 million each year on advertising.

“It’s a small-business, spend-local bill, and it could have a big impact,” Murray said. “A $20,000 to $50,000 to $60,000 contract — which is small potatoes for a state budget advertising budget of $20 [million] to $30 million — could be transformative.”

The bill follows an example set by local law in New York City, which spent $72 million over a five-year-period on government ads in local media, according to a report from CUNY’s Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism.

Howell is among the local news advocates lobbying for the bill. He was the chief revenue officer for the New York Amsterdam News when the city began boosting its local advertising spending, and he called that policy a game-changer.

“ We're not asking the Legislature to add money to the budget to support this initiative or effort,” Howell said. “What we're asking is that they redirect the money that they're already spending to help support small, independent media in New Jersey.”

State Sen. Andrew Zwicker, a Somerset County Democrat, is sponsoring the measure. He said the state advertising spending would effectively replace lost revenue after the state removed a requirement that legal notices be published in newspapers, while also expanding the types of outlets that will benefit from state spending.

“ We need to come up with some way to have a dedicated source of funding for our local media to cover, you know, council meetings or local boards or the state Legislature,” Zwicker said. “This is working in other states. So I want to make this happen in New Jersey.”

There is strong public support for a more robust press corps in the state, according to a Rutgers-Eagleton poll released Wednesday which found 65% of New Jersey residents would like more news about their local area. The poll, which was conducted in partnership with the consortium, found the desire for more local news held up across party affiliations and demographic categories.

Ashley Koning, the poll’s director, said such bipartisan support is rare for any issue.

“The appetite for more local news exists across the board,” Koning said in a statement. “The question these numbers raise is whether the local news infrastructure exists to meet that demand – or whether less credible sources, like social media, are filling that void and deepening it in the process.”

Editor’s note: Michael Sol Warren was previously employed by NJ PBS.