Measuring the Health of Local News Systems

• In Event: Local News and Democracy

Abstract

The number of local news outlets around the United States has declined rapidly over the past several decades. One recent report determined that over 2,000 newspapers closed in recent years, “leaving at least 1,800 communities that had a local news outlet in 2004 without any at the beginning of 2020” (Abernathy 2020, 13). Yet a growing body of research suggests that the health of democracy is tied to the fate of local news. As newsrooms close and contract, resources for journalism shrink, and challenges to democracy mount, researchers need reliable, replicable, and comprehensive methods for documenting the state of local news ecosystems across diverse communities.

Studies have shown that the supply of local news is correlated with rates of civic engagement. Declining civic engagement is linked to “the dwindling supply of information that citizens need to keep apprised of their elected officials’ actions and behavior” (Hayes & Lawless 2021, 5). The loss of local news also contributes to political polarization. When local newsrooms are hollowed out and national news replaces a truly local focus, people learn less about city- and state-level politics, voting levels decline especially in down-ballot races, and polarized voting increases. In fact, research suggests that “When people read news about their neighborhoods, schools and municipal services, they think like locals,” but “when they read about national political conflict, they think like partisans” (Darr et al 2021).

While it is increasingly important to document the loss of local news outlets, it is equally important to acknowledge that legacy journalism has not always served communities or democracy very well. Indeed, many communities are “historical news deserts” — areas whose lack of access to professional, truly local news about their communities far preceded the contraction in the news industry over the last two decades (Usher 2021). Moreover, much of the content provided by local outlets may not actually be local news, and may overlook important public issues in favor of human interest, scandal, and salacious stories; feature content dictated by corporate headquarters rather than deep local reporting; and focus heavily on crime, often through a racialized lens, creating distorted pictures of minority communities (Neff et al 2022).

As attention to the crisis of local news mounts and research proliferates, now is the time for an integrative assessment of various approaches to measuring the health of local news ecosystems that also moves beyond the limitations of earlier efforts. For example, it is time to move beyond a focus merely on newspapers, and to develop frameworks that incorporate the variety of media and other sources from which people today learn about their communities—particularly for studying both urban and rural “historical news deserts.”

This paper conducts an analysis of over two dozen scholarly studies, white papers, and public-facing reports that have attempted to map, measure, and assess the health of local news ecosystems over the past decade. We identify common variables along with variables less commonly pursued, looking at methodological approach, operationalization of key variables, and supply-side approaches versus efforts to measure types of actual content produced by local outlets versus efforts to measure types of audiences and communities served by local news. Specifically, we code each study for its geographical scope, types of media outlets included, attention to the demographics of local populations, inclusion of BIPOC-owned media, etc. We then use that analysis to sketch already-unified terrain and point toward new frontiers in the study of local news ecosystems. This comparison will yield a better understanding of strengths and gaps in measuring the health of local news ecosystems.


References

Penelope Muse Abernathy, “News deserts and ghost newspapers: Will local news survive?” University of North Carolina (2020) https://www.usnewsdeserts.com/reports/news-deserts-and-ghost-newspapers-will-local-news-survive/.

Joshua P. Darr, Matthew P. Hitt, and Johanna L. Dunaway, Home Style Opinion: How Local Newspapers Can Slow Polarization (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021).

Danny Hayes and Jennifer L. Lawless, News Hole: The Demise of Local Journalism and Political Engagement (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021)

Timothy Neff, Pawel Popiel, and Victor Pickard, “Philadelphia’s news media system: Which audiences are underserved?”, Journal of Communication (2022).

Nikki Usher, News for the Rich, White, and Blue (New York: Columbia University Press, 2021).

Authors

• Regina G. Lawrence, University of Oregon

• Courtney Darian Tabor, Vrije Universiteit Brussel