The loss of local news is linked with increased government secrecy, according to a new study conducted by the Brechner Center for the Advancement of the First Amendment at the University of Florida, John Volk of the Local News Initiative reported and Editor and Publisher announced yesterday. “The findings lend the first empirical evidence to the connection, long intuited, between the declining health of local news ecosystems and decreased government transparency,” according to the report. “They add to the growing body of research that demonstrates the impact of news deserts on democracy, including increased partisanship, lower voter participation, and diminished civic engagement.”

“Where there are no newspapers and weakened newspaper systems, government secrecy is flourishing,” said David Cuillier, director of the Freedom of Information Project at the Brechner Center and author of the report. “Government officials see that journalists are hurting, and they’re taking advantage of that.”

To measure transparency, Cuillier and his colleague Brett Posner-Ferdman, a law student at Penn State, requested the same seven records from 44 state governments under each state’s public records law. They found that the states with fewer newspapers per capita were more likely to deny or ignore their requests. They also found that responsiveness to requests improved in states with stronger press associations. Overall, about a quarter of requests were fully complied with, while another quarter were outright denied or not responded to.

The Medill Local News Initiative has tracked a net loss of more than 3,300 local newspapers and 45,000 newspaper journalists in the US since 2005. Those losses represent drops of about 33 percent and 60 percent, respectively.

The researchers did not find a significant connection between the density of digital-only local news sites and government transparency. Cuillier argued that these typically small start-ups can’t be expected to replace the work once done by large newspaper teams.

“They’re stretched too thin,” Cuillier said of digital-only local news sites.

Virginia native and Maryland based former Washington Post journalist Miranda Spivack explained that government secrecy can take its most damaging form at the state and local levels where most citizens encounter government. She documented local officials’ attempts to hide critical information about issues ranging from toxic chemicals in firefighter gear to dirty drinking water in her book “Backroom Deals in Our Backyards: How Government Secrecy Harms Our Communities and the Local Heroes Fighting Back” published earlier this year.

“It paralyzes communities in a lot of ways,” Spivack said of local governments’ noncompliance with transparency laws. “It puts a lot of power in the hands of officials and private companies, usually, that they’re doing business with.”

Medill researchers requested records from a sample of 165 news desert counties earlier this year, looking to learn who, if anyone, was requesting records from these local governments. Almost half did not respond to the requests. Of the 54 counties that produced records in full, more than 70 percent received no records requests from journalists in a full year.