Gather Data on Outlets in the Master List
Here we provide an overview of some important information to gather. It’s important to note that there are many potential data points that a well-resourced research team could gather, and some kinds of information about news outlets are easier to find than others.
Once your master list has been created, you should compile some basic data on each outlet. This will lay the basis for creating an actual map of news outlets in your state or other locale, and help you answer key questions such as which geographic areas are most heavily served by local news outlets and which are relatively under-served; the proportion of newspapers versus other kinds of news outlets serving your geographic locale; and what kinds of ownership and business models characterize the news outlets in your locale.
We focus here on the information that is the most foundational and easiest to find. Further below, we provide a supplementary list of a) more detailed information about news outlets that researchers may want to invest in gathering and b) additional information about counties or municipalities that can be gathered to enhance your news ecosystem assessment.
Download templates for data collection, including CSV files, instructions, and sample data, here >
10 Recommended Data Points to Gather on Local News Outlets
The information in this section can for the most part be gathered directly from news outlets’ websites, supplemented in some cases by additional online searching.
DATA POINT 1: Outlet name, as it appears on their website or masthead.
DATA POINT 2: Digital location or URL of outlet’s website
Most news outlets today tend to have some kind of web presence, although for very small legacy newspapers, that may simply be a collection of digitized PDFs or an itemized list of links to news stories. As noted above, a fundamental inclusion question is whether to require that a news outlet have some kind of website in order to be included in your census–a convenient way of delineating what will and will not be included–or whether you will also try to identify small print publications or other outlets that do not have any digital presence.
DATA POINT 3: Physical location
Office or newsroom address, with separate categories for city and county. Physical addresses or geo-location information is what will enable the literal mapping of news outlets in your geographic region. So, even if you do not have immediate plans to create a map of news outlets in your locale, gathering this information can allow you or others to do so later.
In most cases it should be possible to find a physical address on an outlet’s website. If television station addresses prove difficult to find, the FCC’s public inspection files will provide physical addresses.
Note: The websites for some news outlets may not list a physical address, and in some cases of chain ownership, separate websites may be managed by the same underlying newsroom. The Oregon report, for example, counts websites with separate URLs and different daily content as separate “outlets” in their database, but readers should note that these may or may not correspond to different underlying bricks-and-mortar news outlets.
DATA POINT 4: Founding year or the year the outlet was started.
DATA POINT 5: Media outlet type
Categorizing a news outlet into one outlet type can in some cases be a bit challenging. For example, as most newspapers have by now developed some kind of digital presence and many have reduced or dropped their print product, what makes them a “newspaper” any more? Researchers may wish to distinguish between “legacy” newspapers – outlets that historically were print publications – versus “digital news sites” that originated online as one way of making these distinctions.
Our recommended categories can help deal with this challenge by distinguishing among outlets that still appear in print only, those that are digital only—either legacy newspapers that have now dropped their print product, or digital news start-ups—and those that have both a print and a digital product.
Similarly, more public radio stations today consider themselves “multimedia” news providers rather than simply as radio stations. So it may be helpful to think, as Impact Architects suggests, in terms of the “primary distribution medium” of each outlet.
Recommended categories:
- Print only
- Digital only
- Print and digital
- Broadcast television
- Public radio
- Commercial radio: Other
When categorizing TV and radio stations, researchers may wish to distinguish “relay” stations, which are transmitters that rebroadcast signals from a main station and do not generally produce original content. This is especially important to the extent that the goal of your research is to document the capacity for local news production in your geographic locale.
DATA POINT 6: Frequency of publication
Publication frequency (i.e., the consistency of an outlet’s news production) can provide useful information, when aggregated, about the news production capacity within a given geographic locale. Recommended categories:
- Daily
- Weekly
- Monthly
- For broadcast outlets, this will generally be ‘daily’
Frequency of publication may be difficult to discern for digital-only news outlets, which may publish irregularly; one solution is to add “regularly” (meaning updates and new content appear more than once a week) and “irregularly” (meaning once or twice a month) as options. If a digital outlet publishes less frequently than every month, they are likely not an important local news provider and the researcher may decide not to include them. Ethnic media may be exceptions as they are sometimes more active on social media and publish only infrequently to their websites.
DATA POINT 7: Community/communities served, as defined by the outlet.
Many news sites describe on their home or “about” pages the geographic communities they serve. Researchers should note if an outlet serves a particular community of identity, rather than of geography (e.g. African American/Black, Hispanic/Latino, Asian/Asian American, Native American, Hyperlocal, Gay/Lesbian/LGBTQ+, etc). These outlets can be vital information sources for these communities, and documenting them provides an additional valuable layer to local ecosystem assessment. If an outlet offers news in a language other than English, that is important to note as well.
DATA POINT 8: Owner, the individual(s) or company that owns the outlet.
As conglomerate ownership of newspapers increases, the actual ownership of local newspapers may be becoming harder to track. In Oregon, for example, Carpenter Media Group purchased three dozen local newspapers in 2024, but as of early 2025, few of those newspapers’ websites listed Carpenter Media as their owner. The original owners (EO Media or Pamplin Media) were still listed as owners months after the sale—even after Carpenter began merging and closing some outlets. For helpful guidance on how to establish the ownership of outlets, see Impact Architects’ News & Information Ecosystem Playbook.
DATA POINT 9: Owner location, in- versus out-of-state owner, based on the owner/corporate parent’s physical/geographical address.
As Impact Architects points out in their Playbook, “Identifying the ownership structure of a publication takes some manual work, but it is important information to better understand just how ‘local’ the local publication is.”
DATA POINT 10: Business model
This last variable in our “Key Variables” list is a simplified way of thinking about the ownership structure of media in your local ecosystem–and this information is relatively easy to determine with some online searching. Recommended categories:
- Commercial
- Non-profit or public media
This simplified dichotomy between commercially operated media versus non-profit and public media builds on research showing the fundamentally different “logics” that shape the amount and type of public service-oriented news an outlet is likely to produce. Put simply, commercially operated outlets are, on average, less likely to invest in an ongoing way in watchdog reporting, public affairs information, and viewpoint diversity as are nonprofit and “public” media (which in this context does not refer to ownership per se, but rather simply to media that are freely available to all, not operated for profit, and that receive some public funding). There are certainly variations in this pattern, and researchers should be careful not to overgeneralize based on this variable: Some privately-owned newspapers, for example, have a long history of strong public service orientation. Documenting the overall mix of commercial versus non-profit media in your local ecosystem can nevertheless be valuable.
Download templates for data collection, including CSV files, instructions, and sample data, here >
Six Additional News Outlet Data
In this section, we highlight a more nuanced way of analyzing media ownership. Research teams with adequate time and resources to do some additional digging may want to add some or all of the following variables.
DATA POINT 11: Local news originators vs curators
Depending on the goals of the project, it can be valuable to distinguish outlets that produce original news from those that largely re-package content produced by others. For example, an ecosystem assessment in New Jersey released in 2020 distinguished local news “originators” from all other news outlets in each municipality. A 2021 report on local news in Colorado not only mapped news outlets per county, but also did some content analysis to determine the number of original local news stories those outlets produced on a single weekday. A similar approach was adopted by a recent report on Montana’s local news ecosystem, which distinguished between “local and regional news creators (those producing original news content) and curators (those repackaging original news content).” This variable can be very useful as a measure of the news production capacity within a geographic locale.
DATA POINT 12: Scope of coverage
As discussed in the Overview of Approaches to Analyzing Local News section above, it can be very useful to try to document the communities or geographic scope each news outlet seeks to serve (what we might call their “aspirational coverage area”). As discussed earlier, coding only the physical location of an outlet may not reveal much about the radius of coverage each outlet actually provides. Coding for actual coverage area can be challenging, however.
To do a thorough job requires extensive manual or computer-assisted content analysis. However, even low-resource research teams can record how each outlet defines the scope of coverage it seeks to offer. For example, many newspapers’ mastheads include a mission statement or other verbiage indicating the communities they seek to serve, which can simply be copied and pasted into your database. Again, only some form of careful audience studies can actually determine the real extent of a news outlets’ reach, and only systematic content analysis can discover to what extent they are regularly producing stories about the local communities they aim to serve.
Nevertheless, documenting each outlet’s aspirational coverage area can fill in the picture of local news provision in your geographic locale. For example, once that information is gathered, it is possible to create categories of aspirational coverage areas:
- Hyper-local/neighborhood
- City-wide
- Statewide
- Regional
DATA POINT 13: Audience size
Relatedly, it can be very useful to document the reach of the news outlets in your geographic locale. Documenting audience size takes some additional work and will not always be possible for every outlet. And it requires looking at different sources of data, potentially including direct correspondence with news outlets and/or or examining their materials for advertisers and sponsors, often called “media kits.” Types of audience size data include:
- Daily or weekly print circulation, as reported by print publications
- Digital traffic, as measured by, for example, unique monthly visitors and/or time spent on an outlet’s webpages (with the latter being a more precise measure–see Hindman (2011).
- Some tools you can use (some require a fee) for this kind of audience data are:
- Comscore: Offers industry-standard audience measurement with third-party-verified traffic and demographic data.
- Similarweb: Offers data on web traffic volume, top traffic sources (direct, referral, search, social), visitor geography, engagement metrics (e.g., time on site, bounce rate).
- SEMrush: The traffic analytics tool offers web traffic estimates, audience overlap, top pages, engagement metrics, and traffic sources.
- Social media reach: Total followers across platforms (Facebook, Twitter/X, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok) can indicate community engagement, though follower counts don’t always translate to active readership. Note that audience data can vary significantly in reliability. Third-party estimates may not align with outlet-reported numbers, and social media followers don’t necessarily indicate local readership. When possible, note your data source and collection date, as these metrics can change rapidly.
DATA POINT 14: News production capacity
Measures of news production capacity provide insight on the ability of a news outlet to produce and deliver quality local news to its community. Researchers may examine an outlet’s operating budget (i.e., its ability to fund staff, news production, etc.), and/or its editorial staff levels (i.e., its ability to cover beats and produce news stories). Obtaining this data can be challenging, but is possible given adequate research time and resources–see the recent local news assessment out of Washington state for one example, which reports the results of an intensive effort to gather survey data from newsrooms around that state. Well-designed surveys can potentially work to glean this information, although newsroom owners/editors may not wish this information to be reported publicly. In that case, the information can be aggregated, and your report can focus on aggregate newsroom capacity in your locale, rather than reporting budgets and staffing levels for each individual newsroom.
DATA POINT 15: Ownership structure
Researchers can determine if each outlet in their locale is a single holding (e.g. a family newspaper) or one of multiple holdings by a corporate owner. If multiple, it can be useful to determine the number of holdings of the parent company. This can be measured as either an exact count or in terms of categories—e.g., 2-5 total holdings, 6-10, 11-20, etc.
DATA POINT 16: Nature of ownership
With some additional online searching, researchers can usually determine whether the parent company of a newspaper or commercial radio or TV station is:
- Privately owned
- Publicly-traded but privately owned (i.e. owner retains majority of shares), or
- Publicly-traded and shareholder-controlled
This information can be useful for characterizing the incentive structure of the entities that shape the information ecosystem in your locale (Hamilton 2004; Dunaway 2008; 2013).
Note: A simpler categorization that may be easier for researchers to determine is to simply distinguish between privately held versus publicly-traded media companies.
In addition, researchers may wish to document whether the newspapers, television stations and radio stations in their locale are owned by investment firms, including hedge funds or private equity firms. As documented in a growing number of studies, acquisitions by hedge funds and private equity firms are particularly likely to result in staffing cuts and other cost-saving moves that negatively impact the quality of local news (LeBrun et al 2022; Peterson & Dunaway 2024). For example, the Colorado Media Project tracked this variable for news outlets in that state and found that hedge funds own 19 of that state’s largest newspapers and nearly one-fourth of the state’s print news circulation.
Download templates for data collection, including CSV files, instructions, and sample data, here >
Enhancing Research with Additional Data on States, Counties, and Metropolitan Areas
If you are conducting a state-level or regional news ecosystem assessment, it can be greatly enhanced by gathering demographic and other information specific to that state and even the counties within it.
Doing so can reveal the characteristics that correlate with the number of news outlets in each county, for instance. This information can be important for guiding interventions to improve local news production capacity. For example, areas of a state with fewer socioeconomic resources may have a harder time sustaining for-profit news outlets, which rely on advertising, subscriptions, events, and other revenue sources that may be in short supply in that region.
The following county-level information can be gathered through the U.S. Census Bureau; the Local News Catalyst toolkit has gathered some of this information into a user-friendly database searchable by state, county, and zip code.
- Revenue sources: Understanding how local news outlets fund operations provides insight into their sustainability and independence. As traditional advertising revenue declines, many outlets now rely on multiple income streams including subscriptions, grants, donations, events, and sponsored content. This data can be challenging to obtain since outlets rarely publish detailed financial information. Look for revenue clues in “about” pages, media kits, annual reports (for nonprofits), or through direct outreach.
- Population size and density: Prior research suggests a clear relationship between how populated certain geographic areas are and how many news outlets are located there. Population size and population density are therefore important indicators of the conditions likely to sustain or inhibit a thriving local news ecosystem. “News deserts”–areas where local residents are under-served by or have limited access to local news–are particularly likely to develop in sparsely populated areas (see for example Saiz-Echezarreta et al 2024).
- Income levels: Related to population size and density, the income levels of geographic areas are clearly related to how much access communities have to local news (see also Usher 2021). The Census Bureau tracks data on median household income, per capita income, and the proportion of persons living in poverty in each U.S. county.
- Education levels: Again, closely related to population size/density and income levels, education levels in an area can be clearly correlated with the availability of local news. The Census Bureau tracks data on the proportion of high school graduates and the proportion of people holding higher degrees in all U.S. counties.
- Age: The Census Bureau tracks data on the proportion of population under 18/over 65, along with other age-related data.
- Racial/ethnic demographics: The Census Bureau tracks data on the percentages of Black, Hispanic/Latino, Asian, American Indian, and other racial and ethnic minority residents in counties across the U.S.
- Urbanization: In addition, researchers may want to categorize counties into rural, urban, or suburban. Factors that impact local news availability like population density, income, and education levels are often correlated with these categories, which can provide a handy way of displaying and explaining your findings to various audiences. (As we will discuss further below, displaying your data in terms of rural versus urbanized regions can be an effective way to portray your local news ecosystem).
While this information can be extrapolated from the U.S. Census data, such as determining whether each county is more rural, suburban, or urban by dividing each county’s population density by its square mile area, the U.S. Department of Agriculture provides data on the degree of urbanization of U.S. counties.
Other variables can be useful for measuring the civic capacity, political characteristics, and overall civic health of various communities within a geographic locale, including:
- Number of schools, colleges, and universities: The National Center for Education Statistics database includes this data by ZIP code.
- Percentage of registered eligible voters
- Partisanship: Vote choice estimates for the 2016 and 2020 elections can be found in the Cooperative Election Study databases.
- Amount of philanthropic investment in media: The Media Impact Funders database pulls from foundations’ financial reports to show “the full scope of philanthropically-funded media projects” in areas around the world.
Other resources can provide useful county-level data, including the Local Journalist Index 2025, created by MuckRack and Rebuild Local News. This site maps the number of working journalists in each county of the U.S., calculated as “local journalist equivalents” to account for part-time employment, reporters who cover more than one county, etc. These data can provide critical context and additional depth to your local newsroom census.
Another useful resource is the Civic Information Index, which “uses data to map drivers of engaged, informed, equitable, and healthy communities nationwide,” with a particular focus on “recognizing journalism as part of the broader civic health ecosystem.” It provides county-level data and shows how each county compares to others nationwide on variables including:
- Percent of households with broadband: A useful measure of how easily residents of a county can access our increasingly digital news and information environment
- Average literacy score: A useful measure of how easily residents of a county can make use of print or text-based media
- Percentage of residents living in high poverty neighborhoods
- Rate of unemployment
- Voter turnout: A useful measure of civic engagement levels
- Volunteer rate: A useful measure of residents’ capacity for community engagement
Local news outlets per county: The Civic Information Index also includes a count of local news outlets per county, but local researchers should do their own research to cross-check that number.
CONTINUE READING: STEP 5: Analyze, Publish, and Share Your Data >
