Waynesboro, Staunton and Augusta County are news deserts, per a measure from Local Journalism Index 2026, a joint project of Muck Rack and Rebuild Local News.
This Local Journalism Index is an effort to determine the number of Local Journalism Equivalents in a given community, similar to the number of full-time equivalent jobs in the standard workplace.
The definition was meant to be expansive – rolling in TV, radio, digital only, newspaper, podcasters and Substackers, full-timers and part-timers, as long as they publish their work online.
Measured against where we were nationally in 2002, which, coincidentally, is the year that we launched Augusta Free Press online, the results are, to borrow from the LJI folks, “jarring”:
- nationally in 2002, there were 40 Local Journalism Equivalents per 100,000 residents.
- the national average in 2026 is 7.8 LJEs per 100K.
Here in the Waynesboro-Staunton-Augusta market, we’re at:
- 5.0 LJEs per 100K in Staunton
- 3.4 LJEs per 100K in Waynesboro
- 3.4 LJEs per 100K in Augusta County
Think about this for a second: since 2002, communities, on average, have lost more than 80 percent of their local journalists.
And let’s be real here: we know who the six are in our local market – the four on the staff directory at The News Leader over in Staunton, and then the two of us here at AFP.
Just for context, when Crystal and I were working together at The News Virginian in Waynesboro in 1999 – which, incidentally, cut its last remaining full-time position earlier this year – we did a head count, and came up with a newsroom staff of 20.
If the News Leader had a similar number over on the other side of the county, that means in the neighborhood of 40 FTE journalists were keeping tabs on the local area – local government, the school boards, the police, local community events, local sports.
Now, there are six.
Gotta say, our six here locally do a bang-up job trying to keep on top of everything.
From the LJI 2026 report:
- 77 percent of U.S. localities produced zero education articles mentioning a local community during those three months; of the localities with fewer than five LJEs, nine out of 10 had no local coverage of education in the preceding quarter.
- 76 percent had no local articles about healthcare.
- 17 percent of content produced by local news outlets is actually not local.
Just speaking for us here at AFP, somebody has to push the Virginia DEQ to hold a first, and then a second, public hearing to try to keep Northrop Grumman from dumping tons of pollutants into the air and our groundwater; remember how the DEQ tried to get away with a public notice in The News Virginian, whose circulation is under 1,000 three days a week now?
Ditto for there needing to be somebody to remind the Waynesboro School Board that it can’t just hire a new superintendent from within, when the data from the state Department of Education show that our schools are failing, miserably, and are in need of a fresh set of eyes to get things moving back in the right direction.
Somebody has to press the Augusta County Sheriff’s Office and the Virginia State Police on the officer-involved shooting that took the life of a Staunton man last year, about which there may always be questions, given what happened, and the rush to judgment on the part of the people that are elected to show impartiality in such matters.
ICYMI
- Waynesboro: DEQ sets second public hearing on Northrop Grumman pollution request
- More state data reinforces what we need to do with Waynesboro Public Schools
- Rubber stamp: VSP investigation into Dustin Griffin officer-involved shooting finally done
The reason journalism jobs are gone is, Google and Facebook took away 99 percent of the advertising money that used to support our jobs – and while they need our content to keep people clicking on something, it’s not like they’re exactly forking over even pennies on the dollar to help keep us afloat.
That’s where you come in.
We keep making it a point here at AFP to leave our content free for all to read, without a paywall, because we feel like it’s important that as many people as possible know about Northrop Grumman trying to pollute our environment, our schools being in need of a makeover, the local sheriff’s office needing to be held accountable.
I don’t begrudge entities like The New York Times and Washington Post for putting their content behind a paywall, because we all have bills to pay, but doing that leaves important information and knowledge about the inner workings of government for a smaller subset of the population – the privileged few, as it were.
We rely on our loyal base of readers and supporters to keep us moving forward.
If you’ve read this far, thanks – and maybe consider dropping a tip in our Tip Jar, and if you own a business, hey, we’ve got eyeballs, as one of the only two games in town.
I’ve adopted the phrasing of Walt Disney, who once said of his work, paraphrasing here, that he didn’t make movies to make money, but made money so that he could make movies, to what we do at AFP.
We don’t do the news to make money; we make money so that we can continue to use AFP to make our communities better places to live.
Thanks for being a part of what we do to that end.
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Chris Graham
