News desert counties: demographics in the U.S. 2023
According to a study conducted in 2023 using the most recently available data, the average poverty rate in news deserts in the United States (counties without access to or with very limited access to local news) was around five percent higher than the country average, at 16.6 percent. Citizens living in counties without newspapers were also earning a lower median annual income than the general population average, with the figure estimated at less than 55,000 U.S. dollars compared to more than 74.5 thousand U.S. dollars for the U.S. as a whole.