Cities and small towns across America once woke up to their local newspaper on their doorstep. Over the last several decades, though, those newspapers have begun to disappear a University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill study showing that disappearance has heralded the rise of news deserts in the United States. That’s the focus of this episode of Stats and Stories with guest Penelope Abernathy.

Penelope Muse Abernathy is a former executive at The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times, is the Knight Chair in Journalism and Digital Media Economics at the University of North Carolina. A journalism professional with more than 30 years of experience as a reporter, editor and senior media business executive, she specializes in preserving quality journalism by helping news organizations succeed economically in the digital environment.  Her research focuses on the implications of the digital revolution for news organizations, the information needs of communities and the emergence of news deserts in the United States.

She is author of “News Deserts and Ghost Newspapers: Will Local News Survive?” — a major 2020 report that documents the state of local journalism, what is as stake for our democracy, and the possibility of reviving the local news landscape, and she is the lead co-author of “The Strategic Digital Media Entrepreneur” (Wiley Blackwell: 2018), which explores in-depth the emerging business models of successful media enterprises.