What South Carolina Loses When the Presses Stop
When the South Carolina General Assembly took up redistricting this year — a fight with consequences for every voter in this state — South Carolinians didn’t have to guess what was happening behind the Statehouse doors. The State, The Post and Courier, and the SC Daily Gazette were in the room, day after day, translating procedural maneuvering into plain language and holding the process up to public view. When major charter school reform passed the legislature this session, it did so in no small part because South Carolina newspapers had covered the issue persistently, for years, until lawmakers could no longer look away.
That is what a free press does. It is not a luxury. It is infrastructure — as essential to a functioning community as roads and water lines, and just as invisible until it fails.
And in too many corners of South Carolina, it is failing.
The numbers tell a sobering story. Between 2004 and 2019, South Carolina lost 14 percent of its newspapers, and total circulation fell by roughly a quarter — from 1.4 million to 1.1 million readers. Then came 2020, when a record ten South Carolina papers folded their print editions in a single year, silencing local coverage in communities like Union, Bamberg, Santee, Holly Hill, and Walterboro. Allendale County — one of the poorest counties in one of the poorest regions of the country — became the state’s first true news desert, a county with no local newspaper at all. Researchers warn it will not be the last. The South now has more counties without a newspaper than any other region in America.
We know what happens next, because it has happened elsewhere. When a community loses its newspaper, voter participation drops. Government borrowing costs and taxes tend to rise. Corruption finds room to grow — not because people become worse, but because no one is watching. The school board meeting goes uncovered. The county contract goes unexamined. The zoning decision happens quietly. A news desert is not merely a place without a paper; it is a place where citizens lose the ability to govern themselves with full information.
It would be easy, reciting these facts, to write the obituary of local news in South Carolina. That would be a mistake — and an injustice to the journalists doing extraordinary work right now, often with smaller staffs and tighter budgets than at any point in their careers. The redistricting coverage this year was not nostalgia. It was vital, rigorous, present-tense journalism. The reporting that helped move charter school reform was not a relic. South Carolina’s news outlets are honest about their struggles — with legislators and with the public — but they are also bullish about their value, and they have earned the right to be.
What South Carolina’s local outlets need is not pity. They need partners.
That starts with how we — businesses, institutions, and government agencies — spend our advertising dollars. It has become reflexive to hand the entire digital ad budget to national platforms. But local news outlets can run targeted campaigns too, through programmatic advertising and social media, with one advantage no national platform can replicate: they are of these communities. They know the difference between Walterboro and Walhalla. There is a place for the Googles of the world in an advertising budget — but there must also be a place for the local outlets whose reporters sit through the council meetings and coach the Little League teams. Every dollar spent with a local outlet is a dollar that funds a reporter at a public meeting.
Philanthropy’s role — and what funders need to know
It also means South Carolina’s philanthropic community treating local news as the public good it is. That is why the South Carolina Grantmakers Network has made local news a priority — not as a niche cause for media enthusiasts, but as foundational infrastructure for everything funders already care about.
Here is the case, plainly stated for our colleagues in philanthropy: whatever your mission — education, health, economic mobility, civic participation, rural development — your work depends on an informed public. Charter school reform passed this year because newspapers kept the issue in front of lawmakers and voters. Health initiatives reach families because local outlets carry the message. Accountability in county government — the kind that protects every grant dollar invested in a community — exists only where someone is reporting. When a community loses its news source, every other philanthropic investment in that community becomes harder to land and harder to sustain. Local news is not a competing funding priority. It is a force multiplier for all the others.
National philanthropy has recognized this. Press Forward, a coalition of funders committed to revitalizing local news, has mobilized hundreds of millions of dollars nationally, and South Carolina is part of that movement. Here at home, SCGN and its partners are building a coalition of funders, publishers, and civic leaders, and conducting a statewide landscape analysis to understand how news gathering is changing in South Carolina, what challenges the industry faces — including the collapse of traditional advertising — and what policy options might help news entities survive and serve their communities.
For funders wondering where to start, the entry points are practical. Learn the landscape: know which outlets serve the communities where you fund, and where coverage gaps are emerging. Direct your organization’s own advertising and communications spending toward local outlets. Support the landscape analysis and convenings now underway. And join the conversation: SCGN exists to connect funders to this work, and no foundation needs to navigate it alone.
One caution our colleagues in the news industry have rightly raised: philanthropy’s engagement must tell the whole story. Research and convenings that catalog only the industry’s struggles, without highlighting its successes, risk doing real harm — depressing the very confidence among advertisers, subscribers, and policymakers that local outlets need to survive. The story funders should learn, and help tell, is both honest and hopeful: an industry under genuine strain that is still producing some of the most consequential journalism in this state’s recent memory.
Thomas Jefferson famously said he would rather have newspapers without a government than a government without newspapers. South Carolina is not yet forced to choose. But in Allendale County, the choice has already been made by default — and the rest of the state should take note of what default looks like.
We still have time to choose differently. The papers covering the Statehouse this year proved why we should.
Langley Shealy, Executive Director
Sources: South Carolina Press Association; UNC Hussman School of Journalism “Expanding News Desert” database; Northwestern Medill Local News Initiative, State of Local News reports.