Does New Jersey have a ‘media desert’ problem?

[Commentary] "Assessing the Health of Local Journalism Ecosystems: A Comparative Analysis of Three New Jersey Communities” -- funded by the Democracy Fund, the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation, and the Knight Foundation -- took on the ambitious task of trying to locate every single news source in three New Jersey cities (as found online) and then assessed their quality by actually reading them for a one-week period. The report’s findings draw attention to a provocative idea: that lower income communities are drastically underserved when it comes to news, and have fewer news sources than wealthier ones to cover their concerns. The study also suggests that the fewer news sources in a community, the less likely there is to be news coverage of issues critical to informing that community.

The report helps bring attention to the idea of “media deserts.” Like “food deserts” in urban areas where nothing healthy can be found, a media desert or news desert is essentially an uncovered geographical area that has few or no news outlets and receives little coverage. Media deserts can leave “massive unfilled gaps … that create tremendous opportunities for political and corporate corruption to flourish and that undermine effective democratic participation,” according to the report, whose lead author, Philip M. Napoli, teaches in Rutgers’ School of Communication and Information. The report doesn’t definitively answer the question of whether wealthier communities are always better served. More work is needed. But the Rutgers report might help us get there. Its intention was not just to tell us about New Jersey but to create a methodology for looking at communities across the country to assess the health of their media ecosystems. So a measure that combines the availability of journalistic sources, the quantity of journalism output from these sources, and the extent to which this output is original, as presented here, offers a way to begin looking more comprehensively into the concerns raised in the report. The team will next look at a broad range of communities, with the hope of examining 50 to 100 communities across the US.

[Nikki Usher is an assistant professor at George Washington University's School of Media and Public Affairs]