It’s been a tumultuous few weeks for Bloomington-Normal media.
The owner of The Pantagraph, Davenport, Iowa-based Lee Enterprises, let go its Central Illinois executive editor Aug. 19 in an apparent cost-cutting move. It’s the latest in a long string of reductions at the Bloomington newspaper.
Kelsey Watznauer, who was promoted to the role nine months ago, was responsible for news content in Lee’s papers in Bloomington, Decatur, Mattoon and Eureka. She was told her position was eliminated.
Justin Conn, who had been sports editor, is now listed on the Pantagraph website as the new Central Illinois executive editor overseeing those newspapers. In a note to readers published Sunday, Conn said he and his wife plan to move from Decatur to Bloomington-Normal. Watznauer’s exit, and the recent layoff of another newsroom employee, brings The Pantagraph’s news staff to just 10, down from around 25 in 2019 and 75 in 1999.
Meanwhile, Atlanta-based Cumulus Media made several cuts at its Bloomington radio stations, which includes news-talk station WJBC, Top 40 station WBNQ and country station B104. Cumulus shut down its news department Aug. 3 and laid off the host of its top-rated morning show, Susan Saunders. The show Saunders hosted for nearly 29 years on WBNQ was a mix of music, local news and interviews with newsmakers and other community voices.
“Nobody here locally had ever thought that they would get a note from up above saying that, ‘These employees no longer work here because we are doing restructuring and refinancing. So sad, too bad, thank you very much for your service,’” Saunders told listeners during her final show Friday. [Saunders had confirmed her departure in a Facebook post several weeks earlier.]
Cumulus also laid off Blake Haas, the afternoon host on WJBC who also served as its news director and program director. That has essentially gutted a WJBC news department that, decades ago, was one of the most active and dynamic in the community. [WJBC’s morning host, Scott Miller, remains on the air and regularly interviews newsmakers.]
The cuts at The Pantagraph and the radio stations continue a downward trend in the years since out-of-town corporate owners took control of what were once locally owned, profitable media outlets. These corporate owners bring their own baggage to town.
The billionaire investor David Hoffmann took a majority ownership stake in Pantagraph owner Lee this year, pledging a stabilizing investment in the business. That has yet to show dividends for Bloomington-Normal news consumers.
Cumulus entered bankruptcy earlier this year and plans to reorganize with Alden Global Capital as one of its largest stakeholders. Alden has hollowed out newspapers across the country.
"Alden is the hedge fund that built a newspaper empire by buying distressed publishers, cutting staffs, consolidating operations and monetizing real estate and other assets. Now it is coming to radio," Mike Blinder, publisher of Editor & Publisher Magazine, wrote last month.
John Volk, a researcher with the Local News Initiative at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University, said journalism jobs have become increasingly scarce in small markets across the country.
“I hear this has been all too common at this point,” Volk said on WGLT’s Sound Ideas, noting journalism jobs in the U.S. dropped 36% from 2013 to 2024.
There are 60% fewer newspaper journalists since 2005.
Volk said there are multiple factors, including the fracturing of audiences, loss of advertising revenue and the consumer shift to digital. Volk noted much of legacy media struggled to adapt to new forms of distribution early in the 21st century and some never recovered.
“Any number of factors make it really hard to be a publisher of local news, whether you are at a small nonprofit or you are at a major for-profit legacy newspaper,” Volk said.
That's added up to far fewer reporters covering a growing Bloomington-Normal. WGLT, which has beefed up its local newsroom to fill in these gaps, only has four full-time newsroom staffers.
Volk pointed to studies which show the reduction in local news leads to more political polarization, less government transparency, higher borrowing costs and other social ills.
While corporate media has been responsible for job cuts across the country, public media has not been immune. There have been at least 550 layoffs in public media since the Trump administration successfully pushed Congress to defund NPR and PBS in July 2025, according to the industry tracker Semipublic.
WGLT has not laid off staff, but it left two reporter positions unfilled after the defunding.
Trump bump fades
There are other pressures. Many news sites saw increased traffic after the election of Donald Trump as president in 2016 as more readers felt the need to be plugged in in ways they hadn’t before. That boosted the fortunes of The New York Times, Washington Post and others, but it was not sustaining.
Volk said page views among the top 100 newspapers dropped 45% in the last four years.
Volk conceded that reduced news content may be one factor, but he said AI large language models [LLMs] are enabling consumers to bypass news websites for information, while changing algorithms from the likes of Google and Facebook are steering consumers away from certain news content.
Volk said he’s not seen newsrooms use AI on a large scale, but the information platform Patch Media uses AI to scrape content for thousands of communities. He said Medill surveys of Chicago news consumers show a majority of news consumers has an unfavorable view of AI being used to aggregate news.
Solutions
Volk said philanthropic organizations are stepping in to try to fill the void.
Press Forward pledged $500 million for newsrooms across the country. WGLT received funding to expand its economy and business coverage. The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation is helping to fund an expansion by the Canadian community news company Village Media to Illinois and two other states. Job postings from earlier this year show Village Media hopes to expand into five Illinois markets, including Bloomington-Normal, Champaign-Urbana, Decatur, Peoria and Springfield.
Volk said other efforts have helped, including a new Illinois law that enables news organizations to get tax credits for the number of journalists they employ. He noted the state gave out $4 million in credits each of the last two years.
Volk said the defunding of public media has not been as “apocalyptic” as first feared, as many supporters came to the short-term rescue. He’s not sure that can be a long-term solution.
“I do worry about where this is going for the next three to five years where maybe people stop feeling the urgency,” he said. “We’ll have to wait and see.”
Volk said he’s noticed more concerned citizens have turned to Facebook groups and other social media to share news that traditional media used to cover. While he’s grateful to see more public engagement, he cautioned against becoming too reliant on anything not produced or vetted by a professionally trained journalist.
“Those are the kinds of things we lose when we lose local news,” Volk said.
