Mike Sullivan had no intention of getting involved when the local paper shut down. In fact, he wanted to wash his hands of the matter entirely.

But when residents of Weare, New Hampshire, began telling the library director they had no way to get local information anymore, Sullivan knew he had to do something.

“[Libraries] do all sorts of weird things,” Sullivan said. “We do what nobody else does, whatever that may be.”

So in March 2017, Sullivan and the staff of the Weare Public Library started their own weekly newspaper for the community of just over 9,000.

“We printed on a photocopier, and we killed it in a few months,” Sullivan said. “Had to go out and buy a new one.”

It started with local election information – providing zoning board candidate information, town hall meeting times and election results. But “Weare in the World” has since expanded to include a police blotter and features on local businesses, as well.

While Sullivan currently maintains his job as the library director in Weare, he said the main reason he decided to add “writer and editor” to his resume was in order to respond to a community need.

“That’s sort of what we in public libraries do these days,” Sullivan said. “On the other hand, there was a very clear argument that this has got to be somebody else’s problem, not ours. In fact, I still hear it from a few of the more conservative types around. ‘You really should concentrate on checking out books.’ But the fact of the matter is, so often we pick up what no one else can or will do.”

Sullivan recognizes Weare comes very close to a news desert – a community with no local news outlets for residents to turn to at all. While there are blogs and Facebook pages, he said oftentimes the residents of the rural New Hampshire town cannot access that information on their own.

“Where it really hurts is people who don’t like to go online or don’t follow Facebook. That’s who really gets lost,” Sullivan said. “We’ve got an aging population here, so that’s a big chunk of our people. We design the newspaper specifically for people who don’t live online.”

One remedy to news deserts comes in the form of citizen journalism – locals reporting on what they see, hear and experience in their own communities. But according to Sara Netzley, associate professor of journalism at Bradley University in Peoria, Illinois, it is still not enough.

“I don’t ever want to say that citizens can’t or shouldn’t act as eyes and ears in situations like this. They can, and they’ve done a good job in a lot of instances,” Netzley said. “But there is really power in training and understanding news values, impact, ethics and routines. That’s not to say the media is perfect. They are not. They make mistakes. But there’s a little more accountability there. There’s just a little more clarity of purpose there.”

Local news outlets are necessary for localizing national events, according to Netzley, and that’s where news deserts are becoming increasingly dangerous. They prevent information from being distributed to residents in isolated areas – like small towns in Central Illinois.

“If healthcare benefits get slashed, this tax bill goes into effect … Great. So what does that mean?” she said. “It’s going to be different here than it is in Chicago, or Washington state or Louisiana. We need to know locally what our leaders are going to do, how are they going to fix it, are there going to be local solutions that fill the gap where things are falling short? Without local journalists to devote that kind of time and energy, we’ll never know.”

Lisa Depies, editor of the Geneseo Republic in Geneseo, Illinois, said she and her staff focus especially on localizing national news for their small town.

“We really try to be as, the magic key word, hyper-local … We’re really looking at people and places, neighbors and faces,” Depies said. “For example, recently, Barbara Bush died. Well, here a lady had gone jogging with her with her at one point way back in the ‘80s, so we [covered that].”

The Geneseo Republic is a weekly paper, published every Friday. Depies said she isn’t concerned the area, which is home to 6,000 residents in the immediate area and about 4,000 in smaller farming communities surrounding the town, will become a news desert. Her readers are far too loyal to allow that.

“People are interested … It feels like everybody in town reads the paper,” she said. “I know grandma buys the paper, but then they pass it on to four other relatives … We joke at the public library our weekly paper is the one they keep behind the counter and people have to go check it out, because otherwise too many people were stealing it. There’s a demand for it, they’re willing to walk off with it.”

Like Geneseo, Netzley’s hometown of Lincoln, Illinois, is a small and close-knit community. But she said she has begun to see the beginnings of a news desert – and others are starting to notice, as well.

“[Lincoln] had a great paper … They have been gutted. The staff size has shrunk so much since I was there, and it was small when I was there. The editors they’ve had in place since I left have maybe not been so focused on the news as one would like,” she said. “My mom still lives in the area, and she’ll complain that she’ll read the paper and see a report about a fire that happened, or there was a bad car accident. She’ll get to the end and realize, ‘Oh, it was in Springfield.’”

Shrinking circulation and staff sizes does not just affect small town newspapers, though. The Journal Star, located in Peoria and serving the town with a population of just over 110,000, has seen a reduction in newsroom resources, as well.

Chris Kaergard, assignment editor and political reporter at the Journal Star, said there are “tons of things” he would report on if the paper had the means to.

“Our coverage of minor government entities has gone way downhill – that would be the park board, the sanitary district, the tri-county planning commission, the library board,” Kaergard said. “Even in outlying communities, where we used to be able to send reporters regularly, we no longer do … City of Eureka public meetings, or Metamora or Germantown Hills … We used to regularly have reporters at those city council meetings. Now we have one reporter.”

Kaergard said he can’t imagine not having information provided by journalists on the community he lives in.

“First and foremost, in your local community, your school district and your city council and, to a lesser extent, your county board and your park board, in Illinois, all of those governments together end up making up the largest share of your property tax bill,” Kaergard said. “Not having newspapers means not having reliable, unbiased, regular coverage of where the decisions are made that cost you, the taxpayer, the most money.”

As a taxpayer and a journalist, Kaergard said he wants to know where his taxpayer money is going – and if it is being spent responsibly. That is why local journalism is a necessity for communities.

“Citizens don’t know what’s being done in their name, or worse, they’re depending on the government to tell them,” he said. “[The Stark County Board] has to set the salaries of every member of the officials who are being elected in each December. They have to do this in open session. It’s a basic Open Meetings Act thing. Our stringer heard and went to the meeting and lodged a protest because the Stark County Board decided, ‘Oh, that’s kind of an embarrassing thing to talk about their salaries in the open. Let’s go into executive session and do it.’ That’s a classic example of why you need to have people there. These guys didn’t mean anything by it, they were looking to save face for some people who they all know, go to church with or see at the grocery store. It wasn’t an attempt at shenanigans, but was still illegal and immoral in what they were trying to do. If we hadn’t had a reporter there, there would’ve been nobody to call them out on it.”

But what can save local journalism?

Depies said her readers have come to depend on the stories about their neighbors, teachers and athletes to keep their town going. So the Geneseo Republic reports on what happens in town, but it also engages in the community and gives residents what they’re looking for.

“I had an older lady call a few years ago because she felt she had the most beautiful tree in town, so you do a story on something like that,” Depies said. “I realize that’s not the sort of thing that’s getting covered in your New York Times, but still. What makes it interesting? What will make them talk about it at the coffee shop?”

Netzley said the sheer need for local news coverage may ensure its presence.

“We have plenty of resources for national,” she said. “But if you have cut the local newspaper and they have fewer people to go cover school board meetings or to talk to residents about concerns with maintenance of city roads, for example, who’s going to cover that? Nobody. The content is never going to be quite as compelling, even though it’s often more important and there is more of a day-to-day impact on the people they are supposed to be serving.”

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