By Leah Lowe
Indianapolis, Indiana – Akeem Glaspie was supposed to be covering Butler basketball this winter. Instead, on Oct. 1, just weeks before the season, the Indianapolis-based reporter announced that his position with USA TODAY Co. had been eliminated.
He was part of a larger round of sports cuts that also included Michael Chavez, whose position with the Clarion Ledger was dedicated to Mississippi high school sports, and senior trending editor Sherlon Christie, a 22-year employee. The full scope of the reductions has not yet been publicly detailed.
Three weeks earlier, McClatchy eliminated more than 90 unionized journalism and media jobs across 17 publications. Twelve of those positions were at the Lexington Herald-Leader, including seven news reporters, three sports journalists, two visual journalists and an editor. Among those laid off was Jared Peck, whose high school sports coverage had been part of Kentucky’s media landscape for more than two decades.
By themselves, those cuts look like the kind of media layoffs that have become routine enough to draw less attention than they once did. But taken together with the steady reduction of local sports staffs around the country over the past several years, they point to a larger shift in who covers high school and small-college sports, how that work is funded and where audiences now find it.
What makes the trend more notable is that there is little evidence that interest in high school sports itself is declining. More than 8.4 million athletes participated during the 2025-26 school year, the highest total ever recorded by the National Federation of State High School Associations and the fifth consecutive year participation increased.
Across Indiana and Kentucky, football stadiums are still full on Friday nights. Basketball gyms still draw crowds through the winter. Parents track scores, clips and recruiting updates from their phones. Players post film before they have left the parking lot. Coaches promote athletes directly on social media. More content is being created around high school sports than at any point in the past.
The change is not that people stopped caring. It is that fewer news organizations are paying reporters to spend their weeks following those teams.
The decline of the American newspaper industry has been well documented, but the losses continue to compound. Nearly 40 percent of local newspapers in the United States have disappeared since 2005, according to Northwestern University’s 2025 State of Local News report. Newspaper employment has fallen by more than three-quarters over that span, including another 7 percent decline in the most recent year studied, while more than 50 million Americans now live in counties with limited or no access to reliable local news.
For years, the industry’s answer to falling print circulation was digital. Newspapers moved stories online, chased search traffic, increased publishing volume and tried to convert some of those readers into digital subscribers. That strategy is becoming harder to sustain. Northwestern researchers found that traffic to 100 of the country’s largest newspaper websites fell more than 45 percent over four years. Search engines are sending less referral traffic, social platforms have become less dependable as distribution channels, and AI-generated search results increasingly answer basic questions without requiring users to visit the publication that produced the information in the first place.
Sports departments feel those changes especially quickly. Scores, schedules and statistics that once sent people to the local sports section can now be found instantly through MaxPreps, Hudl, state association websites or team social accounts. National sports coverage is available everywhere, and basic game recaps have a shorter shelf life than they did even a decade ago.
That makes deeply local knowledge both harder to fund and, in some ways, more valuable.
A local reporter who has covered the same conference for several years knows that a receiver with 30 catches in one offense may be every bit as productive as a player with 70 somewhere else. That reporter knows which quarterback changed positions as a sophomore because his team needed him to, which coach rebuilt a program that had been struggling for years and which athlete has quietly developed into a college prospect despite playing at a school that rarely attracts recruiters.
That kind of familiarity takes time. It is difficult to maintain when one reporter is responsible for dozens of schools spread across multiple counties.
Indiana and Kentucky have both experienced that contraction firsthand. The Lexington Herald-Leader moved its printing operation out of Lexington years ago, sold its longtime building and reduced print publication to three days a week in 2024 before the latest newsroom cuts arrived. In Indiana, Gannett properties have gone through repeated staffing reductions and production consolidation, including the closure of the Indianapolis Star’s local printing operation. Those production cuts were separate from reporting jobs, but together they illustrate how much of the physical and staffing infrastructure that once supported large local newspapers has disappeared.
The changes are often even more noticeable outside major cities. Smaller newspapers that once maintained their own reporters increasingly share staff across multiple markets. Some publish fewer days. Some rely more heavily on centralized coverage. A sportswriter who once followed a relatively compact group of schools may now be expected to cover a much larger territory, leaving less time for features, in-person reporting and the kind of relationship-building that made local sports sections distinctive.
At the same time, there is evidence that high school sports itself can still be a strong media product when publishers invest in it.
The Minnesota Star Tribune has made a significant push into prep coverage with Strib Varsity, a statewide operation combining traditional reporting with scores, statistics, photography and livestreaming. According to the company, 10 percent of all new subscriptions since its launch have come through Strib Varsity, while readers encountering its high school sports paywall have converted into subscribers at roughly three times the rate of readers encountering the newspaper’s primary paywall.
MassLive has seen similar results. About one-third of its new subscriptions in 2025 were attributed to high school sports coverage, according to executive editor Ronnie Ramos, and the digital outlet has continued expanding the amount and format of prep content it produces.
Those results complicate the idea that prep coverage is simply a casualty of changing audience habits. The product itself can still draw readers and subscribers. The more difficult question is whether large legacy newspaper companies can support the staffing required to produce it while managing the costs and expectations of a much broader organization.
Indianapolis Star journalist Matt Glenesk made a similar point at an Associated Press Sports Editors conference in 2022 while discussing subscription data and the value of prep coverage.
“There is nothing more local than high school sports content,” Glenesk said.
That observation has probably become more relevant, not less.
A reader in Southern Indiana can find hundreds of stories, podcasts and videos about the Colts without opening a local newspaper. A high school sectional game is different. So is a feature on an athlete who has spent four years in one program or a story about a rivalry that has mattered to two neighboring towns for generations. No national outlet is likely to provide that coverage, because its value comes from being specific to that community.
As newspapers have reduced that work, other organizations have moved into parts of the space.
In Northern Indiana, veteran broadcasters Chuck Freeby and Angelo Di Carlo launched Sports Michiana in 2024 as a digital-first operation focused on regional high school athletics and Notre Dame. The company is built around broadcasts, video, podcasts and digital storytelling rather than a traditional newspaper product.
Kentucky’s PrepSpin has grown around a similar demand, producing livestreams, highlights, interviews, photography and other digital coverage. The company has been a KHSAA streaming partner since 2013 and includes athlete exposure among its stated goals.
Recruiting services such as Prep Redzone fill another part of the market. Hudl handles film distribution. MaxPreps provides schedules, scores, rosters and statistics. State associations operate increasingly sophisticated streaming platforms. Schools themselves are producing far more media than they once did, with athletic departments, students and independent creators shooting photographs, video, graphics and social content. Coaches can promote athletes directly to college staffs without waiting for a newspaper story to do it for them.
Taken together, that ecosystem may actually produce more high school sports content than newspapers ever did. What it does not necessarily produce is the same kind of coverage.
School accounts are there to promote the school and its athletes. Recruiting outlets concentrate heavily on prospects. Broadcasters naturally prioritize games with an audience. Highlight editors are hired to show players at their best. Social creators work in an environment where attention and engagement matter. All of those roles can provide real value, but their purpose is different from that of an independent reporter who covers a team whether it wins or loses and follows athletes whether they are nationally recruited or not.
The old sportswriter did more than write game stories. Over time, that reporter became part historian, part evaluator and part community record-keeper. Years spent covering the same schools created a bank of institutional knowledge that was difficult to see until it disappeared. That loss adds another dimension for athletes trying to play at the next level.
Recruiting has become more direct and more accessible in many ways. Players can upload film to Hudl, post clips to X, contact coaches, attend camps and showcases and create their own recruiting presence without ever being featured in a newspaper.
For highly recruited athletes at established programs, that system often works well. Their coaches have contacts. Recruiting analysts know their names. Their film circulates quickly, and they are more likely to appear at camps and events where college staffs are already watching.
The gaps become more apparent farther down the recruiting ladder.
A late-developing junior at a rural school may not have a large social following. A smaller defensive back may need someone who has watched him play to explain why he consistently holds up against bigger receivers. An offensive lineman’s value rarely shows up in a box score, while a wide receiver in a run-heavy offense may have fewer opportunities than a player in a spread system without being any less talented.
The same issue extends well beyond football. Wrestlers, volleyball players, softball players, swimmers, runners and athletes in smaller classifications can all be good enough to compete in college while attracting very little attention outside their immediate area.
Independent local coverage adds context around those athletes. A coach researching a player may find game stories, all-area teams, photographs, interviews and years of references to how that athlete performed against known competition. None of that replaces film or direct evaluation, but it can help fill out a picture of a player who does not already have a large recruiting operation built around him or her.
There is also an economic issue that deserves more attention as sports coverage continues shifting away from traditional media.
Much of the modern exposure system costs money. Camps, showcases, club sports, private training, recruiting services, professional photography, video editing and social media packages can all help athletes get noticed, but they are not equally available to every family.
Newspaper coverage was never perfectly fair. Large schools received more attention than small ones. Football and basketball often received more coverage than Olympic or non-revenue sports. Plenty of good athletes went overlooked.
Still, the basic relationship was different. A player did not have to purchase a package to appear in the newspaper. A reporter or editor decided the performance, athlete or team was worth covering.
As exposure becomes more commercialized, families with greater financial resources have more tools available to build visibility around an athlete. Losing independent coverage can widen that gap, especially in rural areas and lower-income communities where fewer recruiting services and independent media organizations are operating nearby.
None of this necessarily means local sports journalism is disappearing altogether. It is being reorganized.
Northwestern has tracked more than 300 local news startups launched during the past five years, about 80 percent of them digital-only. They have not replaced the number of reporters and newspapers lost during that period, and many are clustered around larger metropolitan areas, but their growth suggests there is still an audience for local information when publishers can find a sustainable way to produce it.
Sports may be one of the better areas for testing new models because the audience is already highly engaged and accustomed to consuming the same subject in multiple formats. A high school sports reporter entering the field now may be expected to write, shoot photos, edit video, work on social media, appear on camera, record a podcast and contribute to livestream coverage. A small operation may combine subscriptions with local sponsorships, advertising, streaming, events, memberships or recruiting-related products rather than relying on a single revenue source.
The format is changing because the audience has changed. A teenager may discover a player through a 20-second clip. A parent may still want the longer story. A college recruiter is looking for film, measurements and context. A successful local sports operation increasingly has to understand all of those audiences without abandoning the reporting that makes its work credible.
That may be where the next version of local sports media begins to take shape. The Friday night game story is not necessarily obsolete, but it no longer has to stand alone. It can live alongside the short-form video, the livestream, the photo gallery, the podcast interview, the recruiting notebook and the deeper feature that gives people a reason to care about someone beyond a final score.
High school sports is not struggling to produce stories. There are more athletes participating than ever, and more ways than ever to follow them.
The unresolved part is who will still be paid to spend enough time around those teams and communities to recognize which stories matter, understand the context behind them and tell them independently.
As newsroom resources decline, the challenge is less about replacing local sportswriters than finding sustainable ways to preserve the kind of reporting they have long provided.