Southern Illinois journalists are tired of talking about our media landscape problems.
The latest State of Local News report was released in October with a headline calling southern Illinois the “Land of Lincoln, land of loss.”
“The story of loss has been told a hundred times,” Molly Parker, an SIU professor who teaches investigative journalism and beat writing, told me the week after the report came out.
Here’s a more hopeful story: A team of veteran journalists from the Illinois Press Foundation, Capitol News Illinois and Southern Illinois University’s Charlotte Thompson Suhler School of Journalism and Advertising are launching Southern Illinois Source, a nonprofit newsroom that seeks to fill local news coverage gaps, hire more journalists and give students paid hands-on opportunities.
Illinois leads the nation in newspaper closures
Alas, a summary of the problem:
According to the Local News Initiative’s 2026 report, Illinois has lost more newspapers and journalists than any other U.S. state since researchers at Medill started tracking that data in 2005.
Illinois also led the country in newspaper closures this year. Five southern Illinois counties became news deserts this summer after Paddock Publications shuttered a swath of its weekly newspapers — including in Johnson County, where Molly is from.
Molly joined The Southern Illinoisan in 2014, a few weeks before I did. We watched Lee Enterprises, the newspaper’s corporate owner until 2023, hack the local newspaper’s staff to the bone — and then keep cutting.
Now owned by Paxton Media Group, the newspaper publishes three print editions a week with three workhorse news reporters. A few independent downstate weeklies are still covering local communities, like the Perry County Weekly-Press and the Hardin County Independent.
Local broadcast outlets aren’t immune to corporate consolidation, changing audience habits and newsroom layoffs.
“There’s some really great reporters out there still doing the work,” Molly said. “But there’s not enough of them to go around. ”I’m traveling the state this fall with SIU photojournalism professor Julia Rendleman on a lecture series about Illinois’ growing news deserts.
So, Julia and I are talking about problems, too, like this one: A county may not officially be a news desert, but through consolidation and the rise of ghost newspapers — publications that don’t employ any journalists — people are turning to social media to try to find out what’s going on in their communities.
Polarization and disinformation thrive on social media, and therefore, in news deserts.
We miss the community stories — often told through photos — that bind neighbors together. We also lose what Julia calls “spinach journalism.” It’s not “fun or sexy,” but it’s deeply important — like what local officials are doing with our tax money.
When Molly started covering the federal courthouse in Benton this year, staff there told her they could scarcely remember the last time a local reporter had been in court.
“A lot can go down when no one’s got their eye on the ball,” Julia said.
SIU, Capitol News Illinois partnership form SI Source foundation
Julia joined SIU’s journalism faculty in 2022; Molly followed the next year. The two sat down to try to figure out how students could do more in-depth local coverage and get published in professional news outlets.
They founded the Saluki Local Reporting Lab, an intense mentorship program in which students work closely with its co-founders — two renowned journalists — to produce impactful stories.
“I think about it like a teaching hospital,” Molly said. It especially feels that way when she walks into a courtroom trailed by four or five students, she said — like a doctor on rounds with residents following close behind. Journalism is one of those things best practiced, she said.
“We have student reporters out in the field as early as their third week of classes at SIU,” Molly said. “That’s how they learn.”
Molly joined Capitol News Illinois in 2023 as an investigative journalist, and the news outlet became an important part of the Saluki Lab model.
The nonprofit newsroom was founded in 2019 by the Illinois Press Foundation to address a news desert that had dried up in the Illinois Capitol as legacy outlets shuttered statehouse bureaus to cut costs.
CNI jumped in to fill the gap with three employees and the promise to provide free state government coverage to Illinois Press Association members.
It now employs 15 and counting and its reporting has been published in more than 500 news outlets in Illinois, including broadcast partners.
When Molly and Julia started the lab, CNI started publishing — and downstate outlets started republishing.
I became the Daily Egyptian’s faculty adviser in 2024, and encouraged SIU’s student newspaper to step into the void left behind by local media loss. Then Jeff Sutker joined the faculty and resurrected River Region, a student-led news broadcast that went dark during the pandemic.
As SIU’s journalism program continued to produce professional-caliber local stories and the partnership stars aligned, a funder took notice.
Our proposed solution: Southern Illinois Source
Jeff Rogers joined the Illinois Press Foundation after a career in newspaper editing because he wanted to start Capitol News Illinois. The foundation’s executive director (and my boss; I’m the foundation’s development director), he led the nonprofit’s growth into a journalistic powerhouse.
Meanwhile, southern Illinois news outlets continued to shrink, and the region emerged as an area of need.
Several CNI employees are downstate, including former Belleville News-Democrat and WSIU staffers, plus Molly and I. Add the CNI/SIU partnership through the Saluki Lab, and, Jeff said, the infrastructure was in place to do more with the existing resources that had already been cultivated.
“If you have to pick a place in the state where you can have the most impact, it’s southern Illinois,” Jeff said.
An anonymous Illinois Press Foundation donor wanted to give to a journalism project that could have a big impact, he said. The donor made it clear they envisioned students as an integral part of the initiative.
“We wouldn’t be doing it if students weren’t involved,” Jeff said.
Jan Thompson, director of the Charlotte Thompson Suhler School of Journalism and Advertising (also my boss), noted the school’s programs are already filling local news coverage gaps.
“Our role to help supply local news to our region is becoming increasingly important in the underserved communities of southern Illinois,” she said.Student journalists are filling these gaps around the country. A study from the Center for Community News showed that news-academic partnerships grew 24% from 2024 to 2025.
Both Jan and Jeff agree that Southern Illinois Source could be a model for other news-academic partnerships.
“I think this has the potential to be significantly bigger and more impactful than Capitol News Illinois because those local coverage gaps are a tremendous problem nationwide,” Jeff said. “We’re all trying to figure out the best way to address that … I think this is the way to do it.”
SI Source will pay students and prioritize visuals
Unlike some other news-academic partnerships, student journalists who work for Southern Illinois Source will be paid.
At SIU, many of our students are paying their own way, and they’re working — at the Daily Egyptian and the local pizza joint — to pay the bills.
“There are only so many hours in a day,” Molly said. “For some of them, it’s the difference between doing journalism and doing something else.”
After all, Molly pointed out: “No one is expecting them to work at Walmart for free.”
Southern Illinois Source is locally grown. While the Springfield-based Illinois Press Foundation is the fiscal sponsor, SIU is an equal partner and southern Illinois journalists are leading content production, student advisement and fundraising.
Local freelancers will fill out the professional roster to start (that’s where fundraising is key; more money = more journalists). Geoff Ritter, recently departed from the Carbondale Times, had his first SI Source byline in October.
Southern Illinois Source won’t compete with the existing outlets still producing news. Like Capitol News, content will be available to outlets to publish for free. And if outlets contribute stories for republication, they’ll get a fee.
“Our goal is to help stretch that reporter budget to provide content much like the CNI model that supports our media partners and doesn’t take away from them,” Molly said.
With Julia leading visuals, this nonprofit startup will stand apart.
“Research shows that your newspaper does better when you have compelling visuals,” Julia said. “We will prove that when we have strong visuals, our content is going to go farther and be read more deeply.”
‘A product that we know people want’
Julia and I gave our first news desert talk to a standing-room-only crowd at Artspace Southern Illinois on the Strip in Carbondale on a sweltering August afternoon.
When people stuck around after to ask how they could help, it felt like we were on to something.
“We are creating job opportunities for a product that we know people want,” Julia said. “People are engaging and wanting the content.”
“The model is right there,” she said.
Alee Quick is the director of development for the Illinois Press Foundation and the faculty adviser for SIU’s student newspaper, the Daily Egyptian. This story was originally published in the Fall 2026 issue of the Gateway Journalism Review.
Capitol News Illinois is a nonprofit, nonpartisan news service that distributes state government coverage to hundreds of news outlets statewide. It is funded primarily by the Illinois Press Foundation and the Robert R. McCormick Foundation.
This article first appeared on Capitol News Illinois and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.