Free and open to the public lecture.

Over the past decade and a half, the U.S. has lost 1,800 newspapers and half of its newspaper journalists, giving rise to news deserts across vast swaths of the country. Residents of communities that lost local newspapers are among the most vulnerable. They are much poorer, older, less educated and less likely to have access to reliable information. Penny Muse Abernathy has documented the dramatic loss of local news and reporting, the consequential shift in newspaper ownership, and efforts by digital media entrepreneurs to fill the void. Her keynote will explore the implications for our society and the collaborative effort that will be needed if we are to reverse the trend.

Professor Penny Muse Abernathy is Knight Chair in Journalism and Digital Media Economics at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill and the author of The Expanding News Desert (UNC: 2018).

Presented by the Fake News, Post-Truth, and News Literacy research cluster. Supported by the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities. Additional support from the Department of Journalism and School of Information Sciences.

Learn more: https://chapelboro.com/wchl/features/focus-carolina/focus-carolina-penny-abernathy