Q1: Tell me about the focus of your working group and who is involved
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.
Regina Lawrence
Q2: What are the key research questions you are tackling?
What the toolkit is designed to do, first and foremost, is empower other people to document their local news systems. Our vision is that one day, we might be able to compile and coordinate all the data gathered from around the country into a truly national picture of the health of local news. So, it’s not so much about us setting out with research questions, but rather enabling others to document which media outlets are providing news and information to specific geographic locales.
The toolkit also offers ways to think through definitional questions, like what counts as an outlet. For instance, should you include less-journalistic sites, social media, or “pink slime” sites? We’re giving people tools to think those questions through and make their own decisions about how to approach the work.
Q3: What are the major challenges in addressing these questions?
One of the big challenges is defining your geographic scope. For example, it’s easy to say we want to understand what exists in the state of Oregon, but we have communities like Vancouver, WA, which is right across the Columbia River. That’s a shared media market. So, state boundaries can feel artificial. For all these reasons, questions that seem straightforward end up requiring more thought.
Another challenge is simply trying to figure out all the media outlets that exist in a locale. We’re doing this work precisely because no complete list of outlets exists, so how do you know if you’ve really captured everything?
Q4: How do you think this work will inform local news research moving forward?
First, by enabling more people in more communities to document what exists. That’s crucial, because the first step for anyone interested in the topic is simply knowing what outlets are there before they can ask whether those outlets are growing or fading, struggling, or reaching people.
The second goal is to lay the groundwork for more uniformity in how these reports are done. We’ve tried to strike a balance between being prescriptive, saying, “Here are the variables you really should collect,” and leaving room for the fact that different researchers have different resources and timelines. Our aim is to provide a standard set of variables that can be measured consistently, recognizing that some are easier to capture than others.
Q5: If you could change something about the local news ecosystem in your own community, what would it be?
One thing that is less about changing the system itself and more about how people think about it is the term “ecosystem,” which can be misleading. It implies a natural state of things, whereas in reality, local news systems are human-made and shaped, bolstered or undermined by human forces and decisions. With that in mind, it’s important to see local news infrastructure as critical to the civic health of communities.
Finally, there’s policy. Media policy often feels invisible, since we assume the government has little or no role in U.S. news. But policy decisions, like tax credits or the lack of them, affect the media all the time. Encouraging people to think comprehensively about local news infrastructure, and the many human decisions that sustain it, would be a valuable shift.
The Newsroom Census Working Group, led by Lawrence, will publish its first report later this month.
