Regina Lawrence, Research Director at the Agora Journalism Center
November 2025 | Download Report (PDF)
This report is a collaboration between the University of Oregon School of Journalism and Communication and the Local News Impact Consortium (LNIC), a collaborative initiative of the research community to establish best practices, common standards, and shared tools and methods for studying the health of local information ecosystems. It was written by Regina Lawrence, the Interim Dean of the School of Journalism and Communication in Portland. A nationally recognized authority on political communication, civic engagement, gender and politics, and the role of media in public discourse about politics and policy, Regina also serves on the LNIC Steering Committee and Newsroom Census working group.
Whether you’re a researcher, journalist, or funder, the LNIC invites you to join our mission to help ensure local communities have access to trustworthy news and information. Learn more about the LNIC >
The LNIC is an open-source initiative to rebuild sustainable, data-driven local news ecosystems. This license enables reusers of this report to distribute, remix, adapt, and build upon the material in any medium or format for noncommercial purposes only, and only so long as attribution is given to the creator. If you remix, adapt, or build upon the material, you must license the modified material under identical terms. CC BY-NC-SA includes the following elements:
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The Reynolds Journalism Institute (RJI) and the Local News Impact Consortium (LNIC) this week launched Commissioning a Local News Ecosystem Assessment: An Operational Toolkit, a resource for streamlining research into the audiences, news organizations and industry forces that shape local news.
This interview with Harsh Taneja associate professor of new and emerging media at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, is part of a series of discussions with LNIC researchers conducted by Afrooz Mosallaei, a doctoral student in the School of Communication and Information at Rutgers University.
In a 2025 report analyzing the state of media in...