Let’s say you’re a philanthropist, and you want to invest a significant amount of money in journalism. Or perhaps you work for a nonprofit organization and are seeking to allocate more funds to journalism. Press Forward, a major philanthropic initiative to revive local news in the U.S., is among them.
How would you go about deciding where your money should go?
It’s a complicated question, and industry experts are working on the framework to answer it in more consistent, data-driven ways.
To do that, a census is necessary. There is no database with a complete census of all news organizations by community, state or the U.S. And what, exactly, is a news operation, anyway? These are questions being kicked around by the Local News Impact Consortium (LNIC), a collaborative initiative among several academic institutions to establish best practices, common standards, shared tools and methods for studying the health of local news.
Regina Lawrence, the research director at the Agora Journalism Center at the University of Oregon and a member of the LNIC steering committee, has published a Local News Ecosystem Toolkit to help researchers build a better baseline of data. An accurate census of newsrooms is crucial to grasp what news deserts look like and where they exist.
Lawrence was involved in establishing a census in Oregon, and she found the task more challenging than expected.
“The more I talked to people about our reports and talked to people who were doing similar work in other places, the more I realized that there were some shared things that we were all doing kind of similarly and learning about, but at the same time there really wasn’t any one place that you can turn to say, ‘What’s the easiest and best way to do this, what should I be thinking about?’ So, it’s really just as simple as that.”
The toolkit notes that documenting what exists can yield insights into a community's news production capacity, the types of news media available, and where local news outlets may be geographically clustered.
The toolkit centers on five main steps to systematically document local media outlets:
The LNIC has established working groups to leverage data gathered through census collection. The working groups include Computational Methods, Audience and the Public and Journalism Employment.
Damon Kiesow, the LNIC Chair, said many discussions have centered on how researchers will define a news organization. Would an independent podcaster qualify? What about radio station networks that give news summaries based on newspaper reports?
Local news is generally “by, for and about locals, right?” he said. “Some people clearly fall into two of those categories. … You might have a story that appears locally, but it’s written by somebody at a member of the chain or the corporate ownership about the local community, but not really local. It’s more of a syndicated story, maybe of interest, but not locally specific or relevant.”
Kiesow said some research in Missouri showed that roughly 1,000 stories are published daily on local news websites, but only about 25% are locally written about local people, places and things.
“We're trying to get beyond the assessment of news deserts as being ‘Do they have a newspaper, a TV station or not?’, and into the assessment from an audience perspective, like, what actually is being provided, and what’s the quality of it?”
Bob Miller has spent more than 25 years in local newsrooms, including 12 years as an executive editor with Rust Communications. Bob also produces an independent true crime investigative podcast called The Lawless Files.
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