Creating a baseline for ongoing analysis of the health of local news
As virtually everyone involved in journalism knows, during the current decade, the urgency of the local news crisis has deepened across the United States.
A report from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University found local newspapers around the country closed at a higher rate in 2023 than the year before, for an average of about two closures per week—and a total of almost 2,900 newspapers lost since 2005. Major cuts at large news organizations around the country, such as a 20% reduction in staff at the Los Angeles Times, have intensified the sense of crisis, prompting The Atlantic to ask, “Is American Journalism Headed Toward an ‘Extinction-Level Event’?” Budgets and staff at many news outlets have sharply declined, while AI-generated “news” and misinformation proliferate online – and while American democracy itself is facing unprecedented challenges.
In response to this crisis, the Local News Impact Consortium was formed in 2024 with a mission to develop and share research methods and open-source tools to inform residents, journalists, and philanthropy as they seek to rebuild local news ecosystems in communities across the United States.
One key to rebuilding local news is very basic: Documenting what still exists. Researchers, practitioners, funders, and concerned citizens need to develop a baseline understanding of what news organizations are still producing news in and for their communities. Gathering that information in a systematic and thorough way can also provide crucial insights into questions like:
- How much news-production capacity exists in your community?
- What types of news media are available to people in your community?
- Where are local news outlets clustered, geographically speaking, and what areas of the community/region/state are in danger of becoming “news deserts” that lack a locally-based news outlet?
Moreover, creating a newsroom census also creates a baseline for ongoing, longitudinal analysis of the health of local news ecosystems. Ideally, a newsroom census is a living document, an ongoing project of monitoring what might be declining and also what is growing within the ecosystem, to measure how it is changing over time.
This toolkit focuses on creating a “census” of news outlets that exist within a given geographic area—an important way of documenting the local news production capacity within a geographic area. Ideally, you will gather your data and document your work in ways that allow for replication later.
Who is this toolkit is designed for?
- Researchers – both academic and non-academic. This toolkit is designed to be accessible for a broad range of researchers, including those without extensive research experience.
- Practitioners from newsrooms, journalistic organizations, foundations, and civic and community organizations who are guiding or participating in efforts to understand and document.
- Local Press Forward chapters who are answering the call to “access [or] conduct, research on their local news ecosystem.”
What does this toolkit enables readers to do?
This toolkit will center around five main steps to plan your approach to systematically documenting local media outlets in a given geographic locale:
- Defining the geographical scope of your news census
- Deciding on inclusion and exclusion criteria (i.e. which news outlets should “count”?)
- Documenting existing news outlets within your geographical area (i.e. creating a “census”)
- Gathering information about characteristics of these newsrooms (and potentially, other organizations that are providing information to local communities) includingPreparing to map those outlets by gathering information needed by mapping software
- Analyzing, publishing, and sharing your findings
What is not included in this toolkit?
This toolkit does not include opinion survey-based approaches to documenting local news ecosystems (for example, surveying news audiences to determine what local news sources they pay attention to). This and other alternative approaches to studying local news ecosystems are discussed in the Overview of Approaches to Analyzing Local News section below, with some links to helpful resources.
Why create a census of local news outlets?
Assessing the health of local news in any particular geographic area often starts with simply understanding what outlets are currently producing news and information for the public in that area. Creating a census of news organizations that exist within a state, region, city, or other geographic locale can be a crucial step in what is often referred to as “local news ecosystem assessment.” This work can be critically important for various stakeholders, including:
- Funders and philanthropists who want to think about where their investments might make the greatest impact
- Policy makers who want to who want to think about which communities/constituencies currently have more or less access to relevant local news
- Research centers or civic organizations that want to kickstart a public conversation about the local news crisis
- Journalism support organizations such as local Press Forward chapters who need to create a baseline understanding of the state of local news and/or assess current capacity for news production and provision in their geographic area.
Is creating a newsroom census the right approach for your goals?
This toolkit focuses on creating a “census” of news outlets that exist within a given geographic area—an important way of documenting the local news production capacity within a geographic area and measuring the health of the local news ecosystem.
Before we dive into the steps to create a newsroom census, it’s important to pause to consider whether that research approach is the right fit for your purposes. There are several approaches to assessing the health of local news in a geographic area, and some approaches may be better suited to certain kinds of contexts and objectives. You may decide that one of these alternatives is better suited to your aims. You may also employ more than one approach in order to build a more comprehensive picture of local news in your area.
NOTE: It’s important to keep your timeline and resources in mind. If you need to move quickly or you have fewer resources available, it will probably be necessary to keep your research as simple as possible.
Alternative Approach 1: Mapping coverage areas instead of mapping the physical location of news outlets
In some geographic locales, being able to map the physical, bricks and mortar location of news outlets might matter less than being able to map how those outlets define the communities they aim to serve. This may be especially true in densely populated areas and/or in areas with overlapping media markets, such as border regions of states. In New Jersey, for example, as news researcher Sarah Stonbely notes, “people’s lives rarely stay within municipal boundaries — their jobs, grocery stores, entertainment venues, and places of worship are often one, two, three, or more municipalities away. Therefore the local news that is of relevance is not only about the municipality in which they live, but also about a larger region” (Stonbely 2021). Mapping coverage areas also accounts for the varying intended audiences of outlets within a locale. For example, some outlets, such as ProPublica’s Regional Newsrooms, explicitly set out to produce news for cross-state audiences. For an in-depth discussion of the mapping coverage areas approach, see Stonbely, 2021 (p. 10-17; available here).
NOTE: Mapping coverage areas can be used rather than or in addition to counting and mapping outlets themselves.
Alternative Approach 2: Documenting local new content
Instead of or in addition to counting and mapping the news outlets that exist within a given geographic area, researchers can focus on performing some kind of content analysis to document how much and what kinds of local news and information are being provided by those outlets. Particularly as local newsroom resources shrink, it can be just as important to understand what they are able to produce as to document that they exist.
For example, you can examine news content to assess how local outlets cover various areas within a geographic locale. For example, a 2020 report on Chicago’s local news analyzed which sections of the city were referenced most often in news stories. Other content variables include whether the preponderance of news carried by an outlet focuses on news events happening locally rather than focusing on national or out-of-state news (although, as mentioned above, out-of-state coverage can be highly locally relevant in some regions, such as in communities that lie along state borders). Another potential variable is to document how much of the coverage carried by an outlet is produced by reporters at that outlet, versus news produced by national news outlets, wire services, statewide news collaborations, etc.
Analyzing local news content can be challenging and resource intensive, however. Challenges of this approach include paywalls that block access to content, platform software used by some smaller outlets that is difficult to “scrape”, and the hours and care required to manually code news content.
NOTE: Content analysis can be used in addition to counting and mapping outlets themselves.
Alternative Approach 3: Audience studies
Yet another approach is to consider what news audiences are paying attention to within a given geographic area. From this perspective, even if a number of news outlets exist in a community and they are regularly producing actual local news content, that might not matter if few people are engaging with that content. This more audience-centric approach requires different methods than the ones we provide in this toolkit.
Quantitative methods like surveys or audience data such as that provided for a fee by firms like comScore (which tracks the browsing behavior of a large panel of Internet users), Nielsen (including Nielsen Audio, formerly Arbitron, for radio data), or qualitative methods like focus groups and community listening sessions can all provide important insights on local residents’ news habits and community information needs. (The LNIC working group on Audiences and the Public will be offering resources for this work.)
Computational approaches are also emerging for geo-mapping web domains to see where news links are clicked and shared (Yang et al. 2025; see also the LNIC Working Group on computational methods). Computational approaches have the advantage of also being able to account for things like community Facebook groups that are taking the place of shuttered local newspapers in some communities. Combining surveys and computational approaches can also reveal discrepancies in what the media is covering and what the public perceives the media as covering.
NOTE: Audience analysis can be used rather than or in addition to counting and mapping news outlets themselves.
Limitations to our approach
This toolkit focuses on creating a census of news-producing outlets in a given geographic area. We believe this is a foundational step for understanding local news and information assets and gaps. But there are limitations to this approach that should be acknowledged.
One limitation, as noted above, is that the physical location of newsrooms may not correspond to the audiences actually served by an outlet. The physical address of an outlet that produces statewide news, for example, will not be a good indicator of its intended audience. Moreover, as more news outlets are acquired by multi-state conglomerates, not only does the content they carry often become less truly local, newsrooms may be merged, meaning that multiple news websites that feature different community names on their mastheads may be produced by a single newsroom. Also, as online news organizations like Axios expand their “local” sites to cities nationwide, they may not list and may not even have a physical newsroom space in each city.
Also, simply counting local outlets and documenting their characteristics “does not accurately estimate the quality, scale, or diversity of [news] topics provided to the community” (Khanom et al 2023). Indeed, documenting newsrooms actually tells us far less than we might like about how much news is being produced within a particular geographic locale, or what its quality is, or which communities, issues, and events receive more coverage than others. That’s one reason supplementing your newsroom census with additional news content analysis can be very useful.
Nevertheless, creating a census of local news outlets can be an important step toward measuring the local news production capacity within a given geographic locale and measuring the health of the local news ecosystem.
It also creates a starting point for continuing to monitor the ecosystem over time. We recommend that researchers plan to carefully document their work so it can be replicated again at future points in time, and that they give some thought to the cadence of ongoing work (i.e, “how often will we collect this data and publish a report?“). We also recommend that researchers define the changes they would like to monitor over time, which will be helpful to inform questions asked and methodologies used.
Ready to get started?
