AMERICA’S LOCAL NEWS CRISIS has reached affluent Marin County, where a new study reports more than half of those surveyed say local news is much harder to find than national news.
Of the 832 adults surveyed, 51% said it’s difficult to find news about what’s happening in their city or town. But only 21% said that about national news.
The 30-point gap is the widest found by the national Civic Information Needs Census. CINC, a research arm of the Civic News Company, calls this gap “the Proximity Paradox.”
“We were really struck, said Andrew Golis, Senior Advisor to the CEO of the Civic News Company, “that Marin residents reported a much worse time finding local information than the folks in Chicago, Tampa Bay and Arkansas.”
Data for the survey was released Thursday. Done by Embold Research and partly financed by the nonprofit Bay Area publisher Cityside, the data was collected between May 14 and 22, with a margin of error of 3.6%.
The study reported that 96% of Marin residents say it’s important to be informed locally. Some 9 in 10 residents said local information — about priority topics such as disaster preparedness, public safety, the environment and politics — is “very” or “somewhat” important in their everyday lives. But fewer than 6 in 10 said they are “very” or “somewhat” satisfied with the information they can find on those four topics.
What they want to read and where they find it
When they were able to find it, residents were most satisfied with news about weather, dining, sports and emergency alerts. They were least satisfied with stories of local infrastructure or employment issues.
Residents said they got most of their local news digitally, especially from search engines and local online sources, but not with equal ease. Younger residents, 18-to 34-year-olds, who lean toward social media, had the most trouble accessing local news, as did residents who earned less than $50,000 a year.
The study said residents aged 35 to 49, the most likely to volunteer in the community, were especially unsatisfied with their ability to get the information they need. Only one in four from that group said they were satisfied when seeking information about changes in local or state policies or laws, or about a crime occurring near them.
Also varied was confidence in taking civic actions, such as contacting government officials or navigating government web sites. Younger residents were less confident than others in taking civic action, and Latino residents, about 20% of the county, were far less confident in taking civic actions than were white residents. Non-graduates were less likely to be involved civically than were college graduates.
Not mentioned in the study were differences in local news satisfaction based on city or region, though interviews with news leaders in the county suggest such differences exist. Rural West Marin, for example, has, for its size, several local news sources — including a Pulitzer Prize-winning newspaper, the Pt. Reyes Light, popular local radio station KWMR and a well-visited social media outlet called the West Marin Feed.
In Southern Marin, the Tiburon/Belvedere Ark, and, countywide, the largest outlet, the Marin Independent Journal, win large numbers of national and state awards for journalism excellence. The county’s complex media ecosystem includes resilient outlets such as the Pacific Sun and Marin Magazine, strong student news in the Redwood Bark, the noncommercial Radio Sausalito and new entrants such as Mill Valley Briefing and Marin Buzz.
Fallen flags contribute to local news desert
In other Marin communities, however, gaps seem obvious, as once strong printed weekly newspapers there are no longer published. This reflects a national trend, with Northwestern University documenting the loss of more than 3,500 newspapers since 2005, almost 40% of all papers, overwhelmingly weeklies. In most cases, digital successors do not rise to replace the lost journalism. The resulting local news drought affects an estimated 50 million Americans.
Marin, which is smaller than most California counties, and far richer, has not yet joined the growing number of communities taking major steps to respond to the nation’s local news crisis.
But interest has grown in recent years both in new approaches and in support for the existing news system. The Cityside group, which publishes nonprofit outlets in Richmond, Berkeley and Oakland, co-funded the Marin study as it evaluates the need for a new nonprofit newsroom in the county. In 2025, the Marin Community Foundation awarded the Bay City News Foundation a $120,000 grant to increase local news coverage in Marin, to give the stories away to all local outlets, both nonprofit and for-profit, and publish them on Marin News Matters.
Bay Area writer Eric Newton, who worked for 25 years with major journalism funders nationally, has been studying news media in his home county of Marin.