By Jesse Holcomb and Jorie Cho
Any news organization hoping to better understand their community’s information needs will face the question of how to go about measuring that information. Some may commission a survey or focus group, others may pursue direct interviews. But most news organizations aren’t in the audience research business, and the prospect of collecting this kind of data can feel overwhelming for some.
That’s why the Local News Impact Consortium has created a working group focused on measuring local audience information needs. This first installment of the working group’s efforts tackles a specific problem, specifically for those who wish to survey or interview their communities: crafting high-quality questions and focus group questioning routes.
Survey and focus group questions are deceptively simple to design; in fact, they take a great deal of time and expertise to develop. The good news is that if you are designing a survey questionnaire or focus group questioning route, or partnering with a firm to design one, you don’t need to reinvent the wheel.
A new database of accessible local news audience research
Our team has spent the last year reviewing existing local news audience research and has compiled these studies into a sortable database. We’ve identified more than 100 local news audience studies, including surveys, focus groups, and direct interviews. While some of these studies explore the characteristics of local news audiences at a national level, most of these studies examine audiences within a specific state or metropolitan region.
To be sure, this database is not exhaustive—we purposely avoided peer-reviewed academic studies which, for all their scientific value, are difficult to access in gated scholarly journals. Rather, we wanted to surface existing survey and focus group questions in a way that will be user-friendly and frictionless as possible.
Consider a hypothetical use-case: a local news startup in Montana seeks to fill statewide information gaps. The startup’s leadership, board, and funders are interested in better understanding residents’ news-seeking habits and information needs. A search through our database would turn up a 2015 overview of a survey commissioned by the Greater Montana Foundation providing some helpful baseline statistics on how Montanans’ get their news. But the user might also find additional research from a neighboring state with shared characteristics, Wyoming. Here, the user would find a more recent study conducted by Impact Architects that includes a survey questionnaire which could easily be adapted for Montanans.
Or, consider another hypothetical example: a local community foundation in Georgia is working with a group of interested parties—community development corporations, local journalists, and advocacy groups—to identify whether there is demand or interest in a rural swath of the state for a local news service. A survey might not seem like the right tool at such an early stage. But a series of focus groups could surface the kinds of answers to questions these interested parties didn’t even know they had yet. It can be challenging to find a questioning route for a focus group; many studies fail to include it in their methodology sections. But our database, which can be sorted by research methodology, would lead the Georgia group to a study of Oklahoma’s news media ecosystem, complete with a detailed focus group questioning route that could be adapted to another geographic region.
A list of local research vendors
For anyone interested in partnering with a professional research firm to administer a survey or focus group, we also offer another feature in this database—a list of research vendors, including national and global firms, but also some who operate within a specific state or region.
The bottom line: many studies of local news audiences have been published in recent years. There’s no need to start from scratch when crafting a survey questionnaire or a focus group questioning route. We hope this database makes it easier for news outlets, foundations, community groups, and researchers to surface high-quality, tested research instruments aimed at understanding what local communities need and want.
Please let us know if there is a research vendor or local news audience study that you think should be added to our database.
Look for more resources to come from the audience research working group. Many thanks to working group members Stephanie Edgerly, Kang-Xing Jin, Elisa Shearer, Harsh Taneja, and Andrea Wenzel.
