In March when Courtland Standard managing editor, Todd McAdams was invited to give a talk to the rotary club about the future of journalism, he didn’t think he’d be didn’t think he’d be unemployed. Within a week of the invite, the 157-year-old newspaper serving central New York closed, leaving McAdams giving a very different speech to an alarmed local audience. “I'm watching a community in grief, and I wish I were being melodramatic, but I'm not,” says McAdams, “There were people talking to me, they’re in denial. It's like they were trying to bargain God, to get there, to get their newspaper back.”

In their final issue, the Courtland Standard a staff article cites an expected 25% tariff on newsprint as one of the key reasons for the closure. Many factors have contributed to the decline of local newspapers from a loss of advertising revenue and readership, but the recent tariffs will impact newsrooms across the country. Canada is a significant supplier of newsprint and the aluminum used for printing plates. Tariffs along with further disruptions to the postal service will create huge challenges to print first local newspapers that are already struggling to pivot entirely to digital.

I plan to document this new wave of closures to add to my current body of work on local newsrooms that highlights their importance to their communities and to our democracy.

For the past six years I’ve photographed local newsrooms from Alaska to Florida, documenting the dedicated but dwindling newspaper landscape. The Local Newsrooms project aims to shed a light on the loss of local newspapers and their impact on communities. The project thus far has been a love letter to local newsrooms, but it fails to impart a sense of urgency. I’m ready to elevate this project with a new approach to documentation, continued in-depth interviews and grassroots exhibition.

An average of two newspapers shut down every week. In the wake of these closures many communities become news deserts. In their place is an information landscape of nationalized, and increasingly partisan, news that is ripe for misinformation. Studies show after the loss of a local paper, government spending goes up, voter participation declines and cities often lose their bond rating. These impacts are insidious and largely unseen.

To convey the urgency of the issue, I need to travel to news deserts to document the impact of the loss of local news and photograph the last days of newspapers about to close.

Lastly, I need to reach the communities most at risk. This project was printed for Photoville 2024, and with those and new exhibition materials, the work can be showcased in the towns I’ve documented. With support from The Pulitzer Center, I would be able to raise the importance of this issue to an audience that may not realize what has already been lost, and what is at stake.