5 Steps Toward Mapping Your Local News Ecosystem: A Minimum Foundational Approach

The guidelines and suggestions provided here are compiled from recent local news ecosystem analyses from around the country, including Impact Architects’ Local News and Information Ecosystem assessment tools and state-level assessments conducted by various researchers and organizations, including Colorado, Maryland, Minnesota, Montana, Nebraska, New Jersey, Oregon, Washington, and Wyoming.

Step 1

Define Geographic Boundaries

Drawing the geographic boundaries of the area to be studied is an essential first step.

Most news census projects thus far have focused on mapping news outlets within whole states (see the list above), though some have looked at particular cities or counties, including Philadelphia and Chicago. In order to know what to count and map, you’ll need to decide if the appropriate geographic boundary for your study is the state lines, county lines, or city limits–or if you want to examine a multi-state region.

It’s also worth considering whether your goal is to document outlets that physically exist within a locale, or to also capture outlets that serve portions of that locale from bordering areas. In densely populated regions with overlapping media markets, such as the Philadelphia/New Jersey area, or in states with border communities that are served by the neighboring state’s media, such as the Columbia Gorge region of Washington and Oregon, observing state boundaries may not be entirely useful—again, depending on the researchers’ aims (Stonbely 2021). In some states, whole cities or regions are served by out-of-state news outlets in ways that will not be captured if the analysis is limited to outlets physically located within state borders. This can be particularly true of television news, since each broadcast television station serves a Designated Market Area (DMA). Some DMAs cross state lines, and typically, several counties are nested within a DMA. Another example is the increasing number of collaborative journalism initiatives that are changing the shape of local news by partnering across state lines–such as the public radio Midwest Newsroom, a collaboration between NPR and member stations that focuses on Kansas, Missouri, and Nebraska. 

On the other hand, if the aim is to document the state’s own capacity for local news production—for example, in order to advocate for state legislation to support local news—counting and mapping only the outlets within state boundaries makes sense. State boundaries also create a very easy-to-understand approach to mapping local news–easier for the researcher than trying to capture relevant out of state outlets, and straightforward for readers as well. 

Whichever approach you choose, your local news census will need to be transparent about whether outlets located outside of state lines are included in your census.

Another important consideration is the “breadth versus depth” trade-off: Does your research aim to offer detailed insights on a smaller geographical area, or to gather more limited data from a broader area? Confronting this trade-off may be unavoidable, depending the resources available for conducting your census. You may simply not have the time and research assistance necessary for an extremely detailed assessment of an entire state’s news ecosystem, for example. But even less-resourced researchers will be able to create a statewide census of news outlets and gather some basic data about each outlet. 

Similarly, will you include “hyperlocal” outlets whose coverage and reach are more narrowly focused on small sub-areas? Some small online news outlets, print-only neighborhood newspapers, and neighborhood social media sites provide a valuable service for their communities, but can be more difficult to identify than traditional newspapers, TV and radio stations. You’ll want to decide whether such outlets are important to include in your master list, or if that is a level of detail that you will not have the resources to capture. 

Finally, it’s important to note that as the number of news outlets—particularly newspapers—around the country shrinks, and those that remain increasingly are acquired by large multi-state chains or conglomerates, what counts as “local” news deserves some thought. Today’s information landscape is increasingly controlled by a shrinking number of parent companies. A growing body of research indicates that newspapers acquired by multi-state conglomerate ownership, particularly by private equity firms and hedge funds, tend to reduce their actual local news coverage (Peterson & Dunaway, 2024). While we do not recommend excluding non-locally owned outlets from your analysis–which would likely keep many television stations from being included, for example–researchers may want to gather data on whether the news outlets located in their area are owned by local or by out of state owners, as discussed further below. As also discussed further below, researchers may want to gather data on how “local” the orientation of local news really is–for example, by analyzing how much news content from news outlets in your geographic region is produced by locally-based reporters and/or is focused on events and issues in local communities.

So, before launching a local newsroom census, it’s important to think carefully about what will count as “local” news. 

In this toolkit, we suggest defining “local” news in terms of news produced by, for, and about local geographic communities. ( It is important to note the distinction between media serving geographic communities versus other kinds of communities, such as linguistic or racial/ethnic communities. We discuss below ways of capturing information about outlets that define their audiences in these terms more than geographic terms. ) We also strongly suggest being very clear about your decisions. A recent local news census out of Washington state offers a particularly clear discussion of how “local” news outlets were identified:

“To meet locality criteria, the outlet must be either a) located in Washington and primarily oriented to a Washington community or b) located outside of Washington but primarily oriented to a Washington community. To meet the first criterion, an outlet is located in Washington if its physical address or mailing address (if a physical address is unavailable) are in Washington and its primary audience is a Washington community. To meet the second criterion, an outlet may be considered local if it is not located in Washington but its primary audience or one of its primary audiences is a Washington community, evident in a Washington demonym in the outlet’s name, substantial circulation or broadcast in a Washington community, or an explicit description that the outlet serves a Washington community.”