America is overrun with “news deserts,” cities and towns where local coverage is lacking or altogether absent. As newspaper circulation continues to decline along with ad revenue and newsroom employment, a common casualty is the expensive, time-consuming practice of original reporting.
Without journalists digging through property records or attending city council meetings, looking for official wrongdoing and revealing secret deals, local politicians will operate unchecked—with predictable consequences. But the fallout is much bigger than just keeping municipal government honest.
Studies have shown that communities without quality local news coverage see lower rates of voter turnout. Cities where newspapers shut down have even seen their municipal bond costs rise, suggesting an increase in government expense due to a lack of transparency. More broadly, towns without serious local news coverage demonstrate less social cohesion, corroding any actual sense of community.
A study published last month by Duke University’s DeWitt Wallace Center for Media & Democracy found that the quantity and quality of local news stories is lacking across the country. Only 17 percent of stories produced by local outlets are based on events that actually occurred nearby. And more than half of their news reports originated somewhere else, such as a wire service. With television, segments often come from a network or parent, easily repurposed by affiliates anywhere in the country. (Moreover, only 56 percent of all local reports addressed a critical informational need—such as crime or infrastructure—rather than celebrity gossip or sports.)
The study used U.S. Census data to identify almost 500 communities with 20,000 to 300,000 residents and randomly selected 100 of them. The analysis surveyed 16,000 stories produced by print, radio, television and digital media from both English and non-English outlets, found through media databases and manual searches.
“It’s the job of these outlets to focus on the civic, political and economic issues that are uniquely relevant to these geographic communities, because they will not be covered by out-of-market media outlets,” said Philip Napoli, a professor at Duke’s Sanford School of Public Policy and the lead author of the study. “Local government is exactly the kind of place where journalistic resources are being cut.”
But Napoli doesn’t blame the media for the lack of quality local journalism. Rather, he empathizes with their financial struggles. To keep pace with a changing and consolidating media ecosystem, local news outlets have dedicated their limited resources to covering and aggregating national stories reported by national news organizations.
As a result, only 11 percent of the surveyed news stories were local, original and addressed hard news, the report shows. And some outlets stopped producing stories about their local communities altogether.
Stefanie Murray, the director of the Center for Cooperative Media at Monclair State University, works with so-called hyperlocal media outlets in New Jersey that focus exclusively on providing news to small communities. But Murray said these bootstrap organizations are a long way away from filling the overarching local news gap that plagues the U.S.
Of course, the current economic reality facing local news operations makes it difficult to stay afloat, explained Joe Lanane, the executive editor of Community Impact Newspaper, which produces free hyperlocal papers for 45 communities in Texas. He said he understands the temptation to package news made elsewhere to cut costs, “but if we try to follow the rest of the news industry with national and state coverage, we’ll lose that battle,” he said.