Local Journalism in the Digital Age

[Commentary] The woes of journalism in the digital age are familiar: the advertising and subscription models that for decades sustained the work of newsrooms have collapsed, news outlets now compete with every person who has a blog or a Twitter account, and people who used to pick up their local paper or the Wall Street Journal for stock prices or box scores now go instead to niche outlets like Bloomberg or ESPN. While familiar, these difficulties are no longer new -- what’s only emerging more recently is a pattern: the resources for producing journalism seem to be increasingly clustering around large media markets and away from smaller markets.

This new pattern of national consolidation of news, read against the backdrop of longer-term industry changes, raise concerns about the long-term health of local journalism. We at the News Measures Research Project at Rutgers University developed a method to assess the health of local journalism. These findings lend some preliminary empirical evidence to the growing concerns about “information inequality” across different types of communities. An analysis of a larger sample of communities could ultimately help us get a stronger sense of the conditions under which these information inequalities exist, and where the need for action to address them is greatest.

[Philip Napoli is a Professor of Journalism and Media Studies at Rutgers University School of Communication and Information]