Date: 2026-08-06. This is a measurement update, not a ghost-paper audit or a change to the scorecard.
The 2026 Local Journalist Index supplies a current county-level Local Journalist Equivalent (LJE) capacity proxy from Q1 2026 journalist, outlet, and article data. It reports 7.8 LJEs per 100,000 nationally and 558 counties below one per 100,000. Its content analysis classified 4.2 million articles, of which 181,949 met a conservative strong-local-content test. This is a useful current capacity screen, not an outlet census.
The methodology and FAQ make the limits material: LJE is modelled rather than payroll headcount; it misses non-web, Facebook-only, email-only, some paywalled, unbylined, and air-only work; and its metro allocation can credit county capacity without a directly attributed journalist or article. The 2026 release is its baseline, not a comparable annual trend series.
[Verification Phase 2, 2026-08-10 — this workstream holds the filing's strongest counter-evidence to its own published framing, and none of it reached a public page.] LJI's own findings, verbatim: "7.8 Local Journalist Equivalents per 100,000 residents, an 81% decline since 2002"; "Some 209 million people – living in 70% of the counties – are in areas below the already anemic national average"; and, over 4.2 million Q1-2026 articles, "nearly 77% of U.S. counties produced zero education articles mentioning a local community during those three months. Some 76% had no local articles about health." Critically, LJI counts journalists across "websites, TV, radio, podcasts, newsletters and more" — so it does not carry Medill's commercial-broadcast exclusion at all. The whitepaper's Part 2 argues that the exclusion makes the desert count look worse than reality; on a measure without that blind spot, roughly three-quarters of US counties produced no local education or health reporting in a quarter. See steelman-log.md, target A.
LJI does not count individual ghost mastheads or publish outlet-level staffing. Medill's 2025 public methodology likewise verifies outlet content but does not include reporter staffing. The two systems therefore cannot establish a Medill-served-county-plus-ghost-outlet crosswalk. Use low-LJE counties only to prioritize a pre-registered outlet-level audit—dated roster, recent original local bylines, and independent verification—not as a ghost-paper classifier.