On Main Street in downtown Champaign, the former News-Gazette building still stands, like a mausoleum to what is known as legacy news.
Its signage is still intact. The high ceiling and marbled empty lobby can still be seen through the front glass windows. But the statue of a newspaper boy was moved across town to Fox Drive, where the News-Gazette now operates.
Even with the changes, News-Gazette Editor Jeff D’Alessio said the need for the newsroom and its smaller reporting staff remains.
“I refuse to believe community members’ appetite for local news will diminish in such a way that what we do will be irrelevant,” D’Alessio said in an email.
Indeed, residents in the cities of Champaign, Urbana and the county are eager and voracious news consumers.
They find a steady flow of information from not only the News-Gazette, but also from small digital newsrooms, broadcast stations, and public media. At the same time, they have increasingly turned to social media for news on Facebook, Reddit, X (formerly Twitter), Nextdoor; and free video on YouTube, TikTok and Instagram.
Data from the Civic Information Index, which draws on Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism’s local news reports, show that Champaign County ranks among the strongest civic information environments in the United States.
The county earned an overall score of 71 out of 100, with a particularly strong performance in news and information, where it scored 89 and ranked among the top counties in total news outlets.
National challenges for local news
The challenges the News-Gazette has faced reflects the broader national context outlined in Medill’s 2025 State of Local News report. Drawing on two decades of data, the report documents the drastic decline in traditional local newspapers, finding that nearly 40% have disappeared nationwide and an estimated two-thirds of newsrooms’ staff have been lost.
D’Alessio said his connection to the newsroom spans decades, first joining as a sportswriter in the 1990s before returning in 2013 to help reshape the paper during a period of industry-wide disruption. He described the experience as both challenging and rare.
“Getting to remake a 100-year-old product isn’t an opportunity afforded to many,” he said. “It’s been a wild ride but a rewarding one in a lot of ways.”
For decades, much of Champaign-Urbana’s local reporting flowed through this single primary newsroom on Main Street, but that changed after the News-Gazette filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy on Aug. 30, 2019 in a move to sell most of the company’s assets to a regional newspaper chain.
Reporting by CU-CitizenAccess and Daily Illini at the time described the bankruptcy filing and impending ownership change as a turning point for the area’s longstanding daily newspaper operation.
Bankruptcy court records show the sale of the News-Gazette to Champaign Multimedia Group, LLC approved on Oct. 2, 2019, and finalized in November.
The multimedia group is a privately held media company based in Champaign, is an affiliate company of Community Media Group and was formed in 2019 after the bankruptcy of the News-Gazette. It is majority-owned by local investor John H. Satterwhite at 48%, along with several investment trusts.
The company operates print, radio and digital media and advertising services in east central Illinois, including newspapers, websites and broadcast stations in 10 central Illinois counties.
CU-CitizenAccess reported the building was sold to local businesswoman Laura Kalman on Aug. 12, 2020. The News-Gazette now works out of its offices at 2101 Fox Dr. in Champaign.
Archived versions of the News-Gazette’s newsroom directory show a sharp reduction in listed personnel following the 2019 bankruptcy and sale, dropping from 34 employees in June 2019 to 16 employees by November.
D’Alessio said in an email that the newsroom now has 16 full-time employees, though roles often overlap as staff take on multiple responsibilities. “We’re kind of in a world where everyone does everything, so titles don’t really apply,” he said.
Millions lack access to reliable local news sources
The Medill analysis found the loss of local outlets has left millions of Americans with limited access to community-level reporting. The report estimates about 50 million people now live in areas with limited or no access to reliable local news sources, often referred to as “news deserts.”
Zach Metzger, the director of Medill’s State of Local News report, said these trends reflect the collapse of the industry’s traditional business model:
“For most of the 20th century, local news depended on an advertising-based model tied to print. With the rise of the internet, that model effectively ceased to exist.”
That financial strain, he said, made newspapers more vulnerable to consolidation, as large corporate chains acquired and merged struggling outlets, often leading to further cuts or closures.
Beyond financial strain, Metzger said the impact of these changes has been uneven. Rather than a uniform national collapse, he described a widening gap between communities with strong access to local reporting and those without.
“What we should be thinking about in terms of the local news crisis is that it is a crisis of accessibility,” he said, while also saying that more affluent and urban areas are more likely to sustain news outlets or attract new digital startups, while rural and lower-income communities often lack the resources to support them.
Scott Althaus, a professor of political science and communication at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, said in an email that the strength of a local news environment depends not just on the number of outlets, but on how well information reaches different segments of a community.
“It’s clear that it’s a mix of factors, but among the most important are the vibrancy of the local news ecosystem,” Althaus said, noting that a larger supply of local news helps ensure that local issues are more widely shared and that diverse audience interests are better represented.
He said when local reporting declines, communities can lose access to information that helps hold elected officials accountable, while national news increasingly fills those gaps.
“I believe this is the most crucial issue facing the news industry and one of the most crucial issues facing our democracy, right now, is the availability of local news and information,” Senior Associate Dean of the Medill School Tim Franklin told Editor and Publisher in 2022 after a report on local news deserts was released.
Fragmented, but active local news landscape
The News-Gazette remains the area’s primary newspaper. It covers local government, courts, public safety and community events in print and online.
“You’ll never hear us say we can’t cover a story because of a lack of manpower,” D’Alessio said “If the story needs to be told, we’ll figure out how to tell it, 100 times out of 100.”
Following its sale, the paper dropped its Sunday and Monday print editions and now publishes five days a week, from Tuesday through Sunday.
“One of the reasons I still love my job is because I still get to help put out a print product to be proud of,” D’Alessio said. “Our print readership hasn’t plummeted like so many other media companies you’ve probably read about and we’re committed to print companywide.”
The News-Gazette has also expanded beyond print, distributing its reporting across a 24-hour website, social media platforms and a recently-launched local radio program. D’Alessio said the goal is to meet audiences wherever they are while maintaining a strong focus on local coverage.
“It’s not possible to be everything to everyone,” he said, “but we work really hard at being everywhere that everyone is.”
Even as platforms evolve, D’Alessio said the paper’s mission remains rooted in local reporting.
“I’m fairly confident you won’t find another daily newspaper in the country that can say it hasn’t run a single wire story on Page A-1 for more than a decade,” he said. “That’s what ‘local’ means to me.”
While the News-Gazette continues to operate as a legacy print institution adapting to digital demands, it is just one part of a broader local media ecosystem.
Local broadcaster WCIA concentrates on local news
WCIA, a CBS-affiliated television station owned by Nexstar Media Group, is one of Champaign-Urbana’s leading traditional news outlets.
Angie Salas, vice president and general manager of WCIA, said the station’s role is to provide local, unbiased reporting while serving the community through news, weather and public service.
“We are here to provide local news — unbiased local news — weather and sports and information for the viewers in the Champaign area,” Salas said. “Our goal is to keep everything on the local level and make sure that we provide both sides to every story so that people can make their own decisions.”
Salas, who has led the station at 509 S. Neil St. in Champaign since February 2024, oversees daily operations and described her role as running a local newsroom within a larger national system.
Like many news organizations, WCIA has had to adapt to changing audience habits and limited resources. Salas said coverage decisions are made daily based on what is most impactful to the community, though staffing can shape what the newsroom is able to cover.
“It really kind of depends on staffing … we might not be able to send people to everything just based on the number of resources we have,” she said.
Nexstar owns and operates more than 200 stations nationally and is trying to acquire Tegna, a digital media and marketing services company headquartered in Tysons, Va., which would make it the largest network of affiliated stations.
Staffing constraints have also pushed the newsroom to become more flexible, with staff often working across multiple roles and platforms.
“It allows us to be more creative,” Salas said. “We’ve tapped into additional skill sets that people have that we weren’t aware of.”
At the same time, the station has shifted toward a digital-first approach as audiences increasingly expect immediate access to information across platforms. The station now distributes content across social media and streaming platforms, aiming to reach audiences across different age groups.
“I feel like right now we have to almost be in a digital-first society,” Salas said. “People want information immediately … We’re trying to reach audiences wherever they consume media.”
Salas said these changes have also made journalism feel more direct and accessible to viewers.
“It feels a little bit more authentic,” she said. “You’re getting them in their real space to say, ‘This is what’s going on in our community.’”
While WCIA has adapted by expanding its digital presence and restructuring how staff work, the need to do more with fewer resources is a challenge shared across local newsrooms.
Illinois Public Media regroups after federal funding loss
Illinois Public Media, based at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, produces local and regional reporting through its IPM Newsroom and WILL radio and television stations. As of March 2026, the newsroom employs two full-time reporters covering local and regional news and often relies on student journalists to supplement this coverage.
Reginald Hardwick, WILL news and public affairs director, said the station has lost seven employees over the past year following the loss of federal funding distributed through the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which had historically supported public media stations across the country.
“Public media is different [from commercial media] in the sense that we were created to try to speak to everyone,” Hardwick said.
For decades, Illinois Public Media received about $1.5 million annually through grants funded by Congress and distributed by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. That funding was rescinded in 2025 — the first time the program had been eliminated since public broadcasting funding began in the 1960s.
“1.5 million dollars is a big pull out of our budget,” Hardwick said.
Since then, he said employees have left the station through layoffs, retirement or voluntary departures. Two full-time employees were laid off, and the organization has not been able to replace several positions when staff members left. Budget adjustments also forced the station to end a freelance sports reporting role.
Hardwick said the financial pressure has forced the station to rethink where it invests its resources. Projects that require significant time or money but generate limited audience engagement are being scaled back as the newsroom explores ways to expand digital reporting and better track audience reach.
Public media also faces a demographic challenge, Hardwick said, noting that the people in their 60s are the median age of NPR listeners and younger audiences increasingly turn to social media or streaming platforms for information and entertainment.
Despite those challenges, Hardwick said locally produced journalism remains the station’s strongest asset.
“What we can’t duplicate is our quality, empathetic, intelligent journalists covering local news,” he said. “We know when we have a story that hits, it’s because we have local folks covering it, asking questions, and doing the work that folks who are in this news desert really want.”
Independent publishers broaden local coverage
Alongside legacy outlets and public media, independent publishers regularly contribute to the local information landscape.
Smile Politely produces digital-first coverage focused on arts, culture, food and occasional civic issues.
Founder and publisher Seth Fein said the outlet intentionally avoids positioning itself as a traditional news organization.
Founder and publisher Seth Fein said the outlet intentionally avoids positioning itself as a traditional news organization.
Instead, the publication focuses on documenting and highlighting the character of the community.
“We’re a culture magazine, we are not a newspaper, we don’t pretend to be one,” Fein said. “We’re here to help tell the story of Champaign-Urbana.”
All of the publication’s writers contribute on a freelance basis, Fein said, and while the site occasionally publishes pieces on civic issues, it does not regularly produce hard news coverage.
Fein said that is largely because contributors who typically write about arts and culture often prefer not to have their byline attached to harder news reporting.
“We don’t do a lot of hard news because most people [who regularly write for Smile Politely] don’t want their by-line attached to it,” Fein said. “We’d love to do more hard news, but we’ve got to find a writer.”
Laura Weisskopf Bleill, journalist and founder of Chambanamoms.com, said the decline in traditional newsroom staffing has reshaped how local information circulates.
“Really what’s happened over the years is the number of people doing local journalism — actual journalists — has decreased precipitously because there’s just not the money there to keep all of these people employed,” Bleill said. “That’s across the board, whether you’re talking radio, TV, and of course newspaper.”
Despite those pressures, she said the Champaign-Urbana area still maintains a relatively strong local information ecosystem compared with similarly sized communities.
“I would say that our community is, frankly, lucky that we still have as much that we do considering that certainly in other geographies and other markets that may be the same size as ours that have lost even more,” she said.
Chambanamoms.com focuses primarily on sharing practical information for families and residents, including community events, local resources and lifestyle guidance.
“We’re telling people information that they need and they want to live their best lives in Champaign-Urbana,” Bleill said.
While the platform is not structured as a traditional newsroom, Bleill said its reporting practices are still grounded in core journalistic principles.
“The pillars of journalism are how we built Chambanamoms,” she said, adding that the site prioritizes well-researched information without publishing rumors.
At the same time, she said independent platforms like Chambanamoms.com and Smile Politely cannot fully replace traditional civic reporting.
“It’s incredibly capital intensive to have enough trained journalists and reporters to do justice to all the stories that need to be told in our community,” Bleill said. “I don’t know that we’re able to fill those gaps.”
Instead, Bleill said her publication focuses on delivering the kinds of timely information many residents actively seek in their daily lives.
“The reality is that people want to know what’s going to make my life better today,” she said. “That’s really what we are catering to.”
Another independent publication, the Public i, takes a different approach, focusing less on service-oriented content and more on documenting local activism and political organizing.
Editor and writer Alen Romero described the publication as closely tied to the Urbana-Champaign Independent Media Center, where it operates as part of a broader network of grassroots efforts.
The Public i is produced entirely by volunteers and funded through donations, with a free print edition distributed across the community.
“It gives space for people on the left to also have a platform,” Romero said, explaining that many contributors are directly involved in the issues they write about.
Coverage often centers on local labor actions, environmental advocacy and political movements, offering perspectives that may not appear in more traditional outlets. Romero said that role is especially important in a college town where much of the population is transient.
“It’s very important that the Public i exists so that future people who stay have a way of having their voices heard,” he said.
While its reach is smaller, the publication’s long-standing presence and community ties have helped it maintain a consistent role in Champaign-Urbana’s evolving media landscape.
Institutional forces in local news
Champaign-Urbana’s information environment is also shaped by the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, one of the largest public universities in the United States with roughly 59,000 students.
The university-affiliated yet independent Illini Media Company hosts student-run media outlets, including The Daily Illini, a student-operated newspaper founded in 1871, and WPGU 107.1 FM radio that airs daily stories at the top of each hour.
CU-CitizenAccess.org, an online newsroom based at the journalism department at the University of Illinois, has been operating since 2010 and is overseen by Brant Houston, professor of journalism and Knight Chair in Investigative and Enterprise Reporting. Houston has also written extensively about the decline of legacy news and the rise in nonprofit newsrooms in his book “Changing Models for Journalism: Reinventing the News.”
The site publishes as many as 80 student-written stories a year. The stories are often data-driven, meaning the students and federal databases are a critical part of the reporting. It also teaches students how to file Freedom of Information Act requests to local and state governments and encourages multi-media stories.
In its early days it was funded by a $50,000 grant from the Stevick Foundation of the News-Gazette, the university, which allocated $30,000 a year over 3 years, and a $100,000 community information grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, the largest journalism foundation in the U.S. The News-Gazette played a key role in obtaining the grant.
Over time the newsroom has been continue to be supported by funds from the Knight Chair and individual donors.
The newsroom started with a focus on poverty in central Illinois and justice issues, but since then has reported on a variety of issues including restaurant inspections, gun violence, traffic stops, COVID-19, property taxes and neighborhoods.
The newsroom has received national awards and received the Chancellor’s Community Engagement award in 2012.
The stories are frequently republished by the News-Gazette, Illinois Public Media and Investigate Midwest, a regional non-profit newsroom. In recent years, the newsroom has collaborated with the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, Invisible Institute and the Investigative Project on Race and Equity..
“The newsroom was at the forefront of what has become a national initiative for journalism students to cover communities beyond the campus,” said Brant Houston, the Knight Chair in Investigative Reporting, who co-founded the site and has overseen it since its inception. “The newsroom focuses on issues and watchdog work that isn’t being done because of the severe cuts in other newsrooms.”
The Center for Community News, which networks university student newsrooms providing reporting for cities and towns, estimates there are now more than 170 such newsrooms in the U.S.
CU-CitizenAccess.org also provides practical experience for students and helps them build their story portfolios. Improving access to public information and databases is a key focus of the newsroom, so students are often encouraged to create tools, programs, visualizations and apps to achieve that goal.
“Hundreds of journalism students have published real news on real issues in the community involving real people — for those people — through CU-CitizenAccess and its media partners,” said Dylan Tiger, the managing editor for the newsroom, who has been training student journalists for over six years. “Their work is part of a remedy to the growing lack of news coverage in communities desperately seeking to be heard.”
Together, these university-affiliated outlets expand the overall reporting capacity in Champaign-Urbana, supplementing coverage from traditional and independent newsrooms.
Presence of student reporters provides stronger local news coverage
Political science professor Althaus said the presence of student newspapers and radio stations gives university communities a stronger local news environment than similarly-sized cities without a campus. In Champaign-Urbana, he pointed to The Daily Illini as a consistent source of local reporting, including breaking news coverage.
Jake Williams, CEO of Illini Media Company, said in an email the organization’s approach is rooted in its connection to the community it serves.
“It’s essential that our student-run, independent newsroom be connected to the community it serves,” Williams said.
He said that connection shapes how student journalists report and collaborate, helping the newsroom maintain consistent coverage despite its student-run structure. The company typically includes about 150 to 200 reporters in a given semester.
Williams also said Illini Media plays a distinct role in ensuring access to local news.
“We are the only pure news operations that are not behind a paywall, which is very intentional,” he said.
That accessibility, he said, allows the organization to reach a broader audience across both campus and the wider Champaign-Urbana community.
Williams said the organization’s independence is another key factor in how it operates.
“Independence is the best way to avoid the threat of censorship, and we’re golden there,” he said.
Gavin Westlake, director of the newsroom at WPGU, said the station’s role within Illini Media centers on accessibility and community-focused reporting.
“I feel the largest way that WPGU defines its role in [Champaign-Urbana] is by being an easily digestible form of news for people to consume while doing day-to-day activities,” he said. “So much time is spent in the car.”
Westlake said that emphasis on audio and local coverage allows WPGU to fill gaps left by other outlets:
“I think WPGU fills a niche gap of local event coverage,” he said. “A lot of outlets tend to focus on stories that are more breaking or university-focused than on the community as a whole.”
As a student-run newsroom, he said reporters have more freedom in choosing stories, which shapes the station’s coverage.
“People have a lot more liberty to write about what they want to instead of being assigned to stories that they might not care too much about,” he said.
The emergence of AI
More recently, news platforms generated using artificial intelligence (AI) have entered the Champaign-Urbana media landscape, introducing a different approach to local reporting. These platforms rely on publicly available information, such as public meetings and official documents, to produce article-style summaries.
Citizen Portal AI, a national initiative, for example, downloads video and transcripts of local and national government bodies and uses AI to generate reports on those meetings. The project is run by Paul Allen, who successfully launched Ancestry.com.
These tools can increase the speed and volume of local coverage, particularly in communities with limited newsroom staffing. However, they differ from traditional reporting in key ways. Automated systems do not independently attend meetings, conduct interviews, ask follow-up questions in real time or probe what is behind government activities and programs.
D’Alessio said the rise of artificial intelligence is part of a broader wave of disruption that newsrooms are still trying to navigate.
“It feels like every facet of the entire industry has changed,” he said, pointing to the rapid shift toward digital platforms and the emergence of new technologies shaping how news is produced and consumed.
At the same time, he said modern newsrooms are being pushed to adapt quickly, often without clear models to follow.
“Being an editor in this age of media means having to make dozens more tough calls a day than editors used to have to make,” he said. “There’s never a proven formula to rely on.”
News sources producing local coverage in Champaign and Urbana cover a diverse range of issues, ownership and platforms:
| Name | Primary platforms | Type | Ownership | Ownership type | Headquarters | Date Established |
| The News-Gazette | Print newspaper | Daily newspaper | Community Media Group | Corporate | Champaign, IL | 1852 |
| WCIA | TV | TV (CBS Affiliate) | Nexstar Media Group | Corporate | Champaign, IL | 1953 |
| Illinois Public Media | Radio, TV & Website | Public media (NPR/PBS) | University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign | University-owned | Champaign, IL | 1922 |
| Smile Politely | Online only | Digital Magazine/culture outlet | Independently owned | Independant | Champaign, IL | 2007 |
| Chambanamoms.com | Online only | Family- and community-oriented | Independently owned | Independent | Champaign-Urbana, IL | 2009 |
| Daily Illini | Student newspaper | Illini Media Company | Nonprofit | Champaign, IL | 1871 | |
| CU-CitizenAccess | Online only | Investigative/community newsroom | University of Illinois (College of Media) | University-affiliated | Champaign, IL | 2010 |
| Prospectus | Online only | Student newspaper | Parkland College | College-affiliated | Champaign, IL | 1968 |
| Investigate Midwest | Online only | Investigative | Independently Owned | Non-Profit | Champaign, IL | 2009 |
| The Public i | Volunteer nonprofit newspaper | Urbana-Champaign Independent Media Center | Non-profit | Urbana, IL | 2000 | |
| Chambana Today | Online only | Digital local news outlet | Private ownership | Private | Champaign, IL | 2019 |
| Chambana Sun | Online only | Network local news site | Local Government Information Services/ Metric Media Network | Corporate | Chicago, IL | 2022 |
| The Sentinel | Online only | Digital news outlet | Private ownership | Private | Champaign, IL | 2017 |
| WPGU | Radio | Student radio | Illini Media Company | Nonprofit | Champaign, IL | 1973 |
| WILL | Radio & TV | Public broadcasting | University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign | University-owned | Urbana, IL | 1922 |
| WEFT | Radio | Community radio | Prairie Air Inc. | Nonprofit | Champaign, IL | 1981 |
| Champaign Patch | Online only | Hyperlocal digital outlet | Patch Media | Corporate | New York, NY | 2009 |
| Citizen Portal AI | Online only | AI-powered government summary platform | CitizenPortalAI | Private | Salt Lake City, UT | 2024 |