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The newsroom is nearly empty. The outlines of desks are still visible in the carpet, faint impressions of a busier past. Fluorescent lights hum overhead. Since 2018, Ann Hermes has been visiting local newsrooms all over the United States with her camera and studio lights. Her mission? To document unguarded moments of a news business that is quietly fading away.  

The State of Local News Report by the Medill Local News Initiative, a study that has tracked local outlets in the US for a decade, found that nearly 40 percent of local newspapers have disappeared since 2015. In 2025 alone, more than 130 newspapers closed, matching the pace of 2024 and leaving roughly 50 million Americans with little or no reliable source of local reporting.  

The idea for her photo and video series, Local Newsrooms, started in 2016, when Hermes began to hear repeatedly a familiar accusation: that journalists, taken as a class, were elitists, detached from the communities they claimed to serve. "If you’ve been in the local newsroom, you can see that it is very far from the truth," she said to iMEdD, speaking from her home in Brooklyn, New York. 

After visiting the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, a local newsroom that in 2015 won a Pulitzer Prize in breaking news photography for its visual coverage of Ferguson, Hermes kick-started six years of self-funded trips to more than 50 local newsrooms "from Florida to Alaska and everywhere in between," often combined with other photography assignments. 

She has focused particularly on newsrooms near or adjacent to news deserts, which she describes as "the last foothold for news coverage in these areas." Now, she plans to take this work to the areas where it could have the biggest impact, and to show it in local libraries, hoping it will encourage communities to support trusted local news. "I think a lot has been written about the demise of local news, but people who live in these communities often aren’t aware of........

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