Who's Producing Local Journalism? Assessing Journalistic Output Across Different Outlet Types (original) (raw)

The economic challenges facing local journalism and the associated declines in revenues and newsroom staffs have generated great interest in understanding the composition and dynamics of local news ecosystems. Much of this research has focused on case studies of individual communities while other research has focused either on the content produced by local news outlets in the face of these challenges or on the consumption of local news by the American public. However, despite what we know about the challenges faced by local journalism, the content of local news outlets, and Americans’ preferences for local news sources, we don’t know a great deal about how different types of outlets are serving the information needs of their communities. This paper addresses this question through an analysis of 100 randomly selected communities across the U.S. Across these 100 communities, this study analyzes over 16,000 stories provided by 663 local media outlets. For this analysis, local media outlets fall into one of four categories (radio stations, TV stations, newspapers, and online-only outlets). Each story in the sample was content analyzed to determine whether the story was original, local, and addressed a critical information need. To understand the journalistic performance of different outlet types, this study analyzes each the story output of each outlet type relative to the outlet type’s numeric frequency. Doing this allows us to assess each outlet type’s news production relative to that outlet type’s prominence in the news ecosystem. To examine production in this way, ratios were calculated comparing the share of total stories, original stories, local stories, and stories addressing a critical information from each outlet type to each outlet type’s share of outlets. Key findings of this study include: ▪ Local newspapers significantly outperform local TV, radio, and online-only outlets in news production, both in overall story output and in terms of stories that are original, local, or address a critical information need. For instance: o Local newspapers account for roughly 25 percent of the outlets in our sample, but nearly 50 percent of the original news stories. o Local newspapers account for nearly 60 percent of the Local news stories in our sample – more than all of the other outlet types combined – despite accounting for only 25 percent of the outlets in our sample. o Local newspapers account for nearly 60 percent of the stories that meet all three criteria (original, local, addresses a critical information need), with the other outlet categories each accounting for only 10 to 15 percent of the stories that meet all three criteria. ▪ Online-only media outlets remain a relatively small component of local media ecosystems, accounting for about 10 percent of the local outlets in the sample and generally producing only about 10 percent of the news stories in the sample, across the various content categories (original, local, addresses a critical information need). o Online-only outlets do perform well in terms of the proportion of their story output that addresses critical information needs (over 80 percent). ▪ Radio stations represent the most common type of local media outlet in our sample, but generally are the weakest in terms of the extent to which their story output is original, local, and addresses critical information needs. Overall, these findings suggest that newspapers are the most important producers of local news in terms of the volume of journalistic output being produced for local communities. The relative paucity of online-only local media outlets, and the relatively limited (compared with newspapers) journalistic output of these outlets suggest that online-only outlets have yet to come close to matching local newspapers as significant sources of reporting that is original, local, and addresses critical information needs. These findings support the continued importance of public policy and philanthropic efforts to support the viability of local newspapers. These findings also suggest that commercial and philanthropic efforts to establish online-only outlets as comparable alternatives to local newspapers remain far from this goal.