LNIC Research Reports

Newsroom Census/Ecosystem Mapping Toolkit

By Regina Lawrence | October 2025 | Download Report (PDF)

Table of Contents

INTRODUCTION

MAPPING YOUR LOCAL NEWS ECOSYSTEM

CONCLUSION

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

REFERENCES

APPENDIX

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References

Abernathy, P. M. (2018). The expanding news desert. Chapel Hill, NC: Center for Innovation and Sustainability in Local Media, School of Media and Journalism, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Bengani, P. (2020). As election looms, a network of mysterious “pink slime” local news outlets nearly triples in size. Columbia Journalism Review, 4.

Dunaway, J. (2008). Markets, ownership, and the quality of campaign news coverage. The Journal of Politics, 70(4), 1193-1202.

Dunaway, J. (2013). Media ownership and story tone in campaign news. American Politics Research, 41(1), 24-53.

Friedland, L., Napoli, P., Ognyanova, K., Weil, C., & Wilson III, E. J. (2012). Review of the literature regarding critical information needs of the American public

Hamilton, J. (2004). All the News That’s Fit to Sell: How the Market Transforms Information Into News. Princeton University Press.

Hindman, M. (2011). Less of the same: The lack of local news on the Internet. Prepared for the FCC. www. fcc.gov/document/media-ownership-study-6-submitted-study.

Hindman, M. (2018). The Internet trap: How the digital economy builds monopolies and undermines democracy. Princeton University Press.

Horne, B. D., Gruppi, M., Joseph, K., Green, J., Wihbey, J. P., & Adalı, S. (2022, May). NELA-Local: A dataset of US local news articles for the study of county-level news ecosystems. In Proceedings of the international AAAI conference on web and social media (Vol. 16, pp. 1275-1284).

Khanom, A., Kiesow, D., Zdun, M., & Shyu, C.R. (2023). The news crawler: A big data approach to local information ecosystems. Media and Communication, 11(3), 318-329.

Lawrence, R. G., Tabor, C., Nicolosi, M., & DeVigal, A. (2022). Assessing Oregon’s Local News & Information Ecosystem: Connecting News, Information, and Civic Health. University of Oregon, School of Journalism and Communication.

LeBrun, B., Todd, K. & Piper, A. (2022) “Buying the News: A quantitative study of the effects of corporate acquisition on local news,” New Media & Society 26(4), 2189-

Metzgar, Z. (2024). The State of Local News 2024. Northwestern University, Medill School of Journalism Local News Initiative.

Moore, M., & Ramsay, G. N. (2024). Local News in National Elections: An “Audit” Approach to Assessing Local News Performance During a National Election Campaign. Digital Journalism, 1-20.

Nadler, A. (2018): “Nature’s Economy and News Ecology.” Journalism Studies, DOI: 10.1080/1461670X.2018.1427000  

Napoli, P. M., Stonbely, S., McCollough, K., & Renninger, B. (2017). Local Journalism and the Information Needs of Local Communities: Toward a scalable assessment approach. Journalism Practice, 11(4), 373-395.

Peterson, E., & Dunaway, J. (2024). The new news barons: Investment ownership reduces newspaper reporting capacity. The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 707(1), 74-89.

Saiz-Echezarreta, V., Galletero-Campos, B., & Arias Molinares, D. (2024). From news deserts to news resilience: Analysis of media in depopulated areas. Journalism, 25(12), 2641-2660.

Stonbely, S. (2021). What makes for robust local news provision? Center for Cooperative Media, Montclair State University, February 2021.

Stonbely, S. (2023). What makes for robust local news provision? Structural correlates of local news coverage for an entire US state, and mapping local news using a new method. Journalism and Media, 4(2), 485-505.

Thorson, K., Medeiros, M., Cotter, K., Chen, Y., Rodgers, K., Bae, A., & Baykaldi, S. (2020). Platform Civics: Facebook in the Local Information Infrastructure. Digital Journalism, 8(10), 1231–1257. https://doi.org/10.1080/21670811.2020.1842776

Usher, N. (2021). News for the Rich, White, and Blue: How place and power distort American journalism. New York: Columbia University Press.

Wenzel, A. (2020). Community-Centered Journalism: Engaging people, exploring solutions, and building trust. University of Illinois Press.

Yang, K. C., Goel, P., Quintana-Mathé, A., Horgan, L., McCabe, S. D., Grinberg, N., … & Lazer, D. (2025). DomainDemo: a dataset of domain-sharing activities among different demographic groups on Twitter. arXiv preprint arXiv:2501.09035.

About this report

This report is a collaboration between the University of Oregon School of Journalism and Communication and the Local News Impact Consortium (LNIC), an open-source initiative to rebuild sustainable, data-driven local news ecosystems.

Whether you’re a researcher, journalist, or funder, the LNIC invites you to join our mission. By contributing to our growth, participating in working groups, or engaging with the tools we’re building, you can help ensure local communities have access to trustworthy news and information. Learn more about the LNIC >

About the author

Having served as the Associate Dean of the School of Journalism and Communication in Portland and Research Director for the Agora Journalism Center, Regina Lawrence is currently serving as Interim Dean of the School of Journalism and Communication.

She is a nationally recognized authority on political communication, civic engagement, gender and politics, and the role of media in public discourse about politics and policy. Her two latest books are Hillary Clinton’s Race for the White House: Gender Politics and the Media on the Campaign Trail and When the Press Fails: Political Power and the News Media from Iraq to Katrina, winner of the Doris A. Graber Outstanding Book Award from the Political Communication section of the American Political Science Association. She also serves on the LNIC Steering Committee and Newsroom Census working group. Learn more about our working groups >

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We are focused on one piece of the broader effort to strengthen local news: conducting what we’re calling a Newsroom Census. The goal is to document the news and media outlets that exist in and serve specific geographic communities. Ultimately, we’re creating a toolkit that researchers, journalists, civic organizations, philanthropies, and others can use to better understand the local news ecosystem in their area.

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