Week of May 14, 2026

From the editor’s desk

A prescient warning that we heard in 2016, on an episode of John Oliver’s Last Week Tonight, has been ringing through our heads for a decade now.

Oliver showed a clip of David Simon, creator of The Wire (and a former Baltimore Sun news reporter) discussing the decline of local news. Simon said:

The next 10 or 15 years in this country are going to be a halcyon era for state and local political corruption. It is going to be one of the great times to be a corrupt politician.

Back in 2016 when he said this, local news outlets had already been in decline for a decade, after classified ad sales dropped, and the whirlwind growth of online news obliterated print-subscription sales and acclimatized readers and viewers to getting news for free—all of this upending the industry’s revenue model. Thousands of news organizations had already closed. Most of the rest had already scaled back coverage. And that was before the pandemic made it worse by paralyzing the local businesses whose advertisements had been the backbone of support for local news. In and after 2020, many more news outlets closed.

So, things have been bleak nationwide for a while. Now we have some new data indicating where things are the most bleak—right here in the Silver State.

In 2024, Gi Woong Yun—dean of the University of Nevada, Reno’s journalism school—and a small team of colleagues set out to study the health of Nevada’s local news industry. The results came out this spring.

The team found that Nevada ranks 50th—yes, that would be dead-last—in the number of journalists per capita. Over the last 20 years, as the state’s population has grown by half, the number of news reporters here has stayed about the same. It’s 19.3 per 100,000, down from 27 per 100,000 in 2004-05.

The way this math works in the real world is simple: When there are fewer journalists, there is less coverage. That means the public knows less about what is happening behind the scenes in areas like health, education, business and government. That means David Simon was not exaggerating one bit when he predicted a golden age of corruption.

So, what now? There are efforts afoot to find new and better ways to make sure the news industry can bring you more and better news and continue to try to fend off corruption. Locally, UNR launched the The Project for the Revitalization of Local News, which has so far brought more quality radio news reporting to Incline Village and Elko, working with KUNR and KNCC. That’s a great start—especially since these groups managed to expand radio news coverage at the same time the Trump administration was pulling the plug on public radio support. But Nevada is going to need more in order to help get local news back into its best health.

In California, there are some successful initiatives under way that we might be able to emulate. To name just one: The readers of our sister publication, the Coachella Valley Independent, have benefited from the California Local News Fellowship, a program primarily funded by the state of California, and administered by the University of California, Berkeley.

Since 2023, the program has placed yearly cohorts of more than 35 early-career journalists in newsrooms across California for two-year stints. Haleemon Anderson worked in the Independent newsroom from 2023-2025, winning four California Journalism Awards in 2024 alone; she continues as a freelancer for the publication. In September, the Independent is slated to welcome a new fellow to Palm Springs—to cover health issues in the Coachella Valley. The state of California has chipped in about $15 million per year to fund this program.

Could a similar a program work in Nevada? Of course it could. If one of our state’s universities could administer it, and the Legislature could fund it, the state of journalism in Nevada would improve significantly.

The ‘RN&R’ is a finalist in four categories in national journalism contest

AAN Publishers (the Association of Alternative Newsmedia) announced the 2026 AAN Awards finalists today—and we are proud to announce the RN&R is a finalist in four categories:

• Max Stone’s “A complicated legacy: Dani Putney, the non-binary child of a mail-order bride, comes to peace with a fractured identity” is a finalist in the Arts Feature—Shorter Form category.

• Frank X. Mullen’s “Facing our darker history: As the feds censor narratives about racism, local officials tell the truth about Reno’s Chinatown and its government-ordered destruction” is a finalist in the Feature Story—Shorter Form category.

• Jason Sarna’s “Psychedelic therapy: Nevada patients, doctors and lawmakers push for a legal pathway” is a finalist in the Health Care Reporting category.

• Best of Northern Nevada 2025 is a finalist in the Print Special Section category.

Placements will be announced on July 9 at the 2026 annual AAN conference—being hosted by our sister publication in Palm Springs, Calif.

Check out the complete list of finalists here.

—Kris Vagner, managing editor

—Jimmy Boegle, publisher/executive editor