Reposting vs. reporting: How Facebook groups are replacing shuttered rural newsrooms
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TRINIDAD, Colo. — “Trinidad is a Facebook town,” said Karen Jo (KJ) Agnello, the founder and moderator of The Voice of Trinidad, a Facebook page dedicated to sharing local news and events in a town without a designated newspaper.
With a population of about 8,200, Trinidad is one of many small southern and eastern Colorado communities where resident-run Facebook groups are filling the void left by shuttered local newsrooms. These Facebook groups share everything from local events to police updates to weather warnings.
With ballooning follower counts and Facebook’s fact-checking rollbacks, many volunteer Facebook group moderators turned part-time citizen journalists face questions about their roles in the news media, and the thin line between reposting and reporting.
Approximately 2.5 local newspapers close each week in the United States. Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism estimates that more than 200 counties in the United States are now in “news deserts,” or areas where there is limited access to reliable local news and information.
Colorado experienced significant setbacks in 2024, when five rural newspapers shuttered in the span of about two weeks.
Corey Hutchins, a professor with the Journalism Institute at Colorado College and the author of “Inside the News in Colorado,” a Colorado media-focused newsletter, documented the closures of both print and radio newsrooms across Colorado in his annual year in review.
In an interview with Rocky Mountain PBS last year, Hutchins said Cheyenne County, one of the state's first news deserts, is now reliant on social media for news dissemination.
“The only thing you’re going to find on [the Colorado News Mapping Project] identified as a place where locals have told us they’re getting their local news and information [in Cheyenne County] is a Facebook page,” said Hutchins.
Through in-person visits and interviews, Hutchins and teams of Colorado College students conducted extensive research into the state of local news in many rural Colorado counties.
Their findings, documented in the Colorado News Mapping Project, illustrate an interactive, county-by-county map of Colorado where visitors can see what sources of news exist in a given area, be it a newspaper, a radio station, another local publication or in some instances, only a Facebook group.
As many local Facebook groups grow in size, nationwide and state-specific mapping projects are beginning to consider including more social media outlets, like those represented in the Colorado Mapping Project.
The Colorado News Mapping Project lists three counties — Cheyenne County, Mineral County and Conejos County — as each having only one news outlet: a local Facebook group.
The Conejos County Bulletin Board, the only outlet listed in Conejos County (population of about 7,500), has around 3,100 members; the Creede Chronicles Group, the only outlet listed in Mineral County (population of about 1,000) has about 1,900 members.
Facebook groups are slightly different from Facebook pages. Facebook pages are operated by a single account, more like an individual Facebook profile. This allows for slightly more control than Facebook groups, which can be moderated by one or multiple accounts.
“Cheyenne Wells, Kit Carson, Arapahoe Memories, NEWS, ADVERTISEMENTS!” is the only outlet listed for Cheyenne County, which has a population of about 1,700 people. The Facebook group serves the Cheyenne Wells and Kit Carson areas, according to the group’s “About” page.
Patty Hevner is the founder and one of the moderators of the “Cheyenne Wells” group. She is also the deputy clerk for Cheyenne County.
“I just wanted to learn more about the history of the area, so it started just as an history page more than information,” said Hevner.
“And then when the local newspaper, the Range Ledger, shut down in 2022, I asked a local president of the historical society and thought, ‘Well, we don’t have a newspaper anymore, so it may be beneficial to residents to stay up to date.’”
The group originally started as just “Cheyenne Wells, Kit Carson, Arapahoe Memories.” She added “NEWS, ADVERTISEMENTS!” to include her expanded coverage.
Hevner is the first to say that she is not a journalist. She clarified that she does not write any stories, she only shares posts she finds online.
The group is public, meaning anyone can see and share posts. However, anything posted must first be approved by Hevner.
The majority of the feed is pictures of local school sports and updates about tomorrow night’s game or the previous night’s scores. Mixed in between are announcements about a local bakery, weather advisories and historical photographs of the area in the 1930s.
There is no original or investigatory reporting as one might find in a newspaper with dedicated journalists. All images and announcements are pulled from other sources, as Hevner said she does not have the capacity to write updates herself.
She said she checks sources based on their relation to the county (i.e. if the posters are local residents) and vets posts that seem like “spam.”
There are more than 1,600 members in the public group, though Hevner said she does not pay attention to the member count, nor does she want the page to grow much larger.
“I think what it’s become is a one-stop spot to look for information, like school news, road closures, weather-related things… but I don’t want to be a journalist and go to town meetings and all that,” said Hevner.
“I work full time, and others like me are busy… we don’t have the ability to do this forever.”
Many of these newspaper stand-in Facebook groups are run by individuals with full time jobs.
The moderator of the 10,000 member “La Veta-Cuchara Community” Facebook group, who asked to remain anonymous as “Krystin V,” works full time as a software engineer.
She has administered the page since 2023, a responsibility she assumed with little effort after the previous moderator grew tired of sifting through spam submissions.
“It’s not that difficult to run, but that’s partly because I’m already tech savvy,” said Krystin V. “There is definitely a digital divide in rural areas, and I can see why it might be overwhelming for others.”
Those interested in posting to the page must first answer Krystin V’s prompts, which include “Describe yourself as any 20th century TV show.”
“For some reason, people from overseas and bots always answer ‘I Love Lucy,’ so I can be pretty sure that anyone saying ‘I Love Lucy’ is spam,” Krystin V said.
Krystin V is committed to keeping the page informational as opposed to promotional, and she has faced backlash from some local businesses owners interested in placing notices about their shops or restaurants.
“We don’t exist as an advertising playground. We still support local businesses, but not faceless businesses… and they can share from their personal pages if they want,” she said.
Agnello, the founder and moderator of The Voice of Trinidad Facebook page, began her work in a much more promotional spirit.
She first began informing Trinidad and the surrounding area about upcoming events and activities on the radio in nearby Raton, New Mexico. When her monthly segment halted due to COVID-19 stay-at-home restrictions, Agnello took her announcements to Facebook and founded The Voice of Trinidad, which today has about 1,500 followers.
“I’m addicted to Facebook,” said Agnello, “I just scroll and scroll and share what I can find that seems relevant, or post stuff that I learn from flyers or from other organizations’ pages.”
Agnello said she often spends more than 10 hours a week scanning social media for everything from upcoming street markets to local shop discounts to free medical clinics. She has developed a roster of trusted sources to pull from and stays away from non-local and non-familiar accounts that might be fake. However, she has neither the time nor technology to conduct full-proof background checks on every account she sees.
“As far as the dissemination of information goes, we are a Facebook town,” said Agnello. “Some people read the newspaper, but a lot of the news either isn’t local or it doesn’t come out enough, so it’s mostly word-of-mouth or Facebook where people are finding information.”
Karen Hill, the moderator behind The Fountain Valley News Facebook page, experienced the shift to Facebook while she was still working with the Fountain Valley News’ print edition.
Hill started reporting with the 66 year-old weekly paper in 2019, where she and the small family-run publication helped dispel gossip and hearsay from being shared on other Facebook groups.
“You’d get 20 different people saying 20 different things, so we tried to combat that as a local newspaper,” said Hill. “Unfortunately, now that we are essentially gone, that’s pretty much all people have at this point.”
The Fountain Valley News Facebook page had 10,000 followers when it shuttered — over one-third of the town’s population — so Hill decided to keep the page active on a volunteer basis.
Two years later, Hill continues to share events she finds online as well as photos and information shared by other local volunteer photographers, which she said are invaluable to keeping the page online.
However, Hill, who juggles freelance work between caring for four children, is struggling to keep the page going, much less do original reporting like she had for the near two decades she worked as a full-time journalist.
Agnello, Krystin V and Hevner said that as moderators, they are not journalists and do not wish to be journalists. What they do is more curation as opposed to investigative reporting.
They all acknowledged the potential risks and the propensity for many of these pages, if unchecked, to turn into spaces of mass spam, foreign (non-local) advertising and mis- or disinformation.
“Even if you don’t spend hours each week, you have to [keep watching] because these groups can get out of hand if no one is watching,” said Krystin V.
Meta, the parent company of Facebook, recently announced that it would be ending its fact-checking program and replacing it with a “community notes” system, similar to those on X.
The company also announced plans to adjust its content moderation policies, which had previously reduced the amount of political content that appeared in a user’s feed.
At the same time, struggling or shuttered local news outlets sometimes point to Facebook as the reason for their decline.
According to Reuters, local publishers lost out on tens of billions of dollars after tech giants like Google and Facebook “gobbled up the digital advertising market.” In 2020, Google and Facebook accounted for more than half of digital advertising revenue — revenue that drove local newspapers to share their news online, eventually leading to a decrease in advertising and attention on their own pages.
In 2022, Facebook decided to deprioritize news on its platform, another blow against local journalism outlets.
Companies and organizations such as New_Public and the Online News Association are building tools and resources to develop digital spaces — including Facebook groups and pages — into more trusted sources of information, and potentially sources which could help support or fill gaps in communities without more traditional means of newsgathering.
The moderators who keep the news flowing in small Colorado communities shared a passion and feeling of duty to continue the circulation of news and information through their often overlooked communities.
Hill said “it’s who I am as a journalist” and feels guilty when she neglects the page, and she wished –– as did Tom and Linda Perry, as well as Agnello, that there were a single, reliable source, like a website, that could be used instead of social media.
“I went to Facebook kicking and screaming,” said Agnello. “It’s not always easy, it’s frustrating a lot, it takes a lot of time… but it’s important.”
“I definitely think that our community is driven by that fabric, and I think that by using social media, we are finding new ways of doing things that might work.”
Type of story: News
Based on facts, either observed and verified firsthand by the reporter, or reported and verified from knowledgeable sources.
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