When local papers stop being local

At the  DeWitt Wallace Center’s News Measures Research Project, we set out to document the extent to which communities have access to robust local journalism and determine whether certain types of communities are more at risk than others. We studied 100 US communities and found:

• 20 of them received no local news stories in the seven days that we analyzed
• 12 communities received no original stories during this time period
• 8 received no stories addressing a critical information need
• Only 44 percent of the stories were original
• Only 17 percent were local
• 56 percent addressed a critical information need
• Only about 11 percent of the stories are local, original, and address a critical information need
• The number of universities in a community is positively related to the total number of stories, number of original stories, and number of stories addressing a critical information need, largely because of the number of local media outlets that they tend to operate

[Philip M. Napoli is the James R. Shepley Professor of Public Policy in the Sanford School of Public Policy at Duke University, where he is also a Faculty Affiliate with the DeWitt Wallace Center for Media and Democracy]