Newly published research highlights how typical discussions of news media decline miss the mark
By Nikki Usher (with credit to Phil Napoli, Joshua Darr and Mike Miller)
Anyone familiar with the Institute for Nonprofit News (INN) will not be surprised to hear that the traditional model of journalism has imploded, especially at the local level. But there is some new research that may be helpful as nonprofit news organizations continue to make the case for their relevance and importance in shoring up the market failure.
We’re talking not just one research paper but 17 contributions in a recent issue of the ANNALS of American Academy of Political and Social Science, with insights designed to help strengthen the conversation around community information needs through empirical, peer-reviewed work.
We broke with academic conventions: usually, you’ll only find academics contributing to peer reviewed research in scholarly journals, but we chose to include journalists and media policy leaders’ contributions as well. (The issue is dated May 2023, but it was released in February 2024.)
The research indicates that when it comes to local news and the future of the industry, we may be emphasizing the wrong things, such as brand recognition or even the consequences our democracy faces with journalism’s decline. The focus should be on providing quality information that communities need and want.
The following are some key insights from that research:
States may be better positioned than the federal government to support local news
Government efforts at the federal level to support local news via changes in media policy have failed before they started, so advocates for local news may be wise to focus their attention on support from state governments. We framed this issue as both an anniversary and a provocation. More than a decade has passed since the Working Group on the Information Needs of Communities published its “Report for the Federal Communications Commission” in July 2011, which bemoaned the “serious problems” caused by a “shortage of local, professional, accountability reporting” (Waldman and Working Group on Information Needs of Communities 2011). A follow up study was commissioned, but researchers’ efforts to go beyond a comprehensive literature review of existing research were stymied thanks to false claims about government intervention in newsrooms. For more of that story, see the essay by Lew Friedland of the University of Wisconsin here.
Journalists should get angry about the lack of federal media policy. That’s true, even if it is deeply uncomfortable for them not only to take a position on policy but also to set up a possible scenario of being dependent upon the very political institutions they are supposed to hold accountable, as Sewell Chan, editor-in-chief of the Texas Tribune, points out. Margaret Sullivan, a weekly columnist at the Guardian and executive director of executive director of the Newmark Center at Columbia Journalism School, echoes this point in her contribution, “A Media Insider’s Wish for Saving Journalism,” which makes the case for “national legislation to support the sustainability of journalism, media literacy education for adults and youth, and subsidies to newsrooms via state universities.”
State legislative efforts on the horizon will likely borrow from the following: creating tax incentives, providing general funding, establishing a task force or commission, and allocating a proportion of a government’s advertising budget to local news media. Since 2017, lawmakers in 10 states have introduced legislation to provide support to local news organizations, and these past trends are likely to inform future paths, as per Jessica Mahone of the University of North Carolina. (Not sure about what media policy actually is? Check out this primer on media policy by Duke’s Philip Napoli)
Investment owners’ newsroom cuts gut staff and shrink political coverage
We can quantify just how bad hedge funds and other investment owners are for local news: Erik Peterson and Johanna Dunaway estimate that when an investment owner acquired a newspaper, they reduced the newsroom by nine reporters and editors. That’s a cut equivalent to 14 percent of the average newspaper’s staff when compared to newspapers that remained under other ownership. Most of these cuts were to general assignment and political reporting.
Audiences have mixed awareness of legitimate local news sources, and ‘fake news’ claims still take a toll
People aren’t paying as much attention to news brands as we thought, but they are not total suckers for pink slime sites. According to Joshua Darr at Syracuse University, people perceive pink slime — deceptive, hyper-partisan news sites — as less trustworthy when they pose as newspapers than when they pose as news websites. In an experiment, though, people rated fake local news websites as credibly as real local television news websites.
Another effect of “fake news,” whether real or perceived, is that l ocal community organizations are failing to serve as digital intermediaries for journalism. In my own research, I found that when rural public health officials in Illinois sought to inform their communities about COVID-19, they worried about linking to news articles on their Facebook pages because community members were too quick to dismiss journalism as fake, biased, or factually-incorrect. The libraries, nonprofit organizations, local governments, and other local civic institutions providing community information tend to stay away from topics deemed controversial, according to a research team based out of Michigan State University. In the study, the scholars found that community organizations tended not to post about social justice efforts and ways to mitigate racialized health disparities.
Across all populations and all types of news consumers, local news was still a go-to source for information about COVID, as scholars Stephanie Edgerly and Yu Xu of Northwestern find. This is good news. Journalists should imagine audiences as having different news repertoires, or distinct patterns and motivations for information-seeking. For many news audiences, the kind of information they are seeking matters more than their preferences for particular news sources.
Journalists should be aware of the ways marginalized groups navigate systemic bias
Remember marginalized groups have developed novel ways to deal with exploitative institutions and limited resources. Understanding this acquired community knowledge will lead to more informed journalism.
As a whole, journalists and nonprofit news outlets have not paid much attention to the availability of high quality financial news and information in communities. In some cities, Black residents and other people of color turn to storefront payday lenders because there are no commercial retail banks in their neighborhoods. These payday lenders have a well-deserved poor reputation for exploitative practices. But communities are resourceful and have develop their own situated knowledge to deal with these alternative financial systems. Journalists shouldn’t simply assume that these alternative financial systems are necessarily exploitative, as Patricia Posey of the University of Chicago finds — and traditional banking options simply may never be available in these communities.
Similarly, public health recommendations during the coronavirus pandemic were targeted for those with the lowest risks for complications. But journalists failed to realize that marginalized people need different strategies to assess and understand medical advice, workplace provisions, and education policies, as Amelia N. Gibson of the University of Maryland finds. This insight can be applied far beyond the context of the pandemic itself.
News organizations need to earn the trust of marginalized groups, especially Black Americans, and legacies of past harm and continued missteps need to be front and center as newsrooms plan their approach, according to Joseph Torres and Collette Watson, staffers of the nonprofit organization Free Press.
To address problems with information gaps and access, journalists need to be creative to reach marginalized populations. Lourdes Cueva Chacón at San Diego State University and Jessica Retis at the University of Arizona, emphasize the importance of reaching people where they are. The scholars bring together nonprofit news outlets including Documented, El Tímpano, Conecta Arizona, among others, and identify how journalists decided to use text and mobile messaging to connect Latino, Spanish-speaking and new immigrant communities to relevant local news and information.
Taken together, these studies try to shift the focus of journalists and other public stakeholders away from vague conversations about declines in local news and consequences for democratic decline and civic engagement. Rather, this collection reminds us that while journalism matters, we may want to recenter our journalism around filling community information needs, or the information that enables, as the original FCC report puts it: “citizens and community members to live safe and healthy lives; have full access to educational, employment, and business opportunities; and to fully participate in the civic and democratic lives of their communities.”
