More than half of American counties are without access or have very limited access to local news. Political scientist and Andrew Carnegie Fellow Joshua P. Darr has been studying what the loss of local news means for American communities
Joshua P. Darr, a political scientist at Syracuse University and a 2022 Andrew Carnegie Fellow, shares what he’s learned from his ongoing research into the relationship between local news and polarization, what publications can do to earn back trust, and why — despite the news industry’s struggle for survival — he sees signs of hope.
Local newsrooms are in this existential crisis for many reasons. Print ads traditionally made up around 80 percent of newspaper revenues until platforms like Craigslist gutted classified ads, digital ads replaced printed ones at much lower profit margins, and Facebook and Google started scooping up 70 percent of those smaller revenues. As newspaper profits tanked, chain owners and hedge funds started buying them up and cutting staff, sharing content between outlets, and generally making their news less informative and less local. Subscribers dwindled as the product worsened and readers found other free content online, forcing many newspapers to close.
Local news outlets that remain open face steep challenges. Many newspapers today are more accurately classified as “ghost newspapers,” existing in name only and failing to produce much original reporting. As staff declines, it becomes more difficult for metropolitan newspapers to cover individual neighborhoods, suburbs, or anything other than citywide issues effectively. More than half of newspapers are owned by a hedge fund focused on profit, not long-term sustainability or serving communities. These changes in technology, economics, and ownership have simply been too much for the industry to endure.
Across the country, newspapers are disappearing at a rate of roughly two per week.
Source: The State of Local News 2023 (Northwestern University/Medill School of Journalism)
The consequences are clear and wide-ranging. Political competition and representation are demonstrably weaker without local coverage: research shows that shrinking newsrooms lead to fewer candidates running for local offices, such as mayor or school board, which means incumbents are more likely to win and spend less money on campaigning. Politicians who represent areas with poorer local news coverage do not work as hard in hearings and committee meetings, vote the party line more frequently, and bring back less funding to their districts. Scholars in economics, communications, and political science have shown that these declines in responsiveness go hand in hand with decreased civic engagement in these areas following local news decline: less political news about congressional elections leads to lower knowledge, participation, and turnout in those elections.
Americans share many common concerns with those that they disagree with ideologically and politically, and local news is far better than national news at showing us those common interests and identities — not only in the realm of politics, but also by covering arts and culture and high school sports, or even writing obituaries. It is much harder to see the world in stark shades of red and blue if you get your news from a local newspaper.
National politics is characterized by conflict between Democrats and Republicans, and the parties are increasingly far apart from each other across many dimensions: not only ideology and policy preferences, but also simpler things like whether they like each other and are comfortable socializing together. Polarization fundamentally refers to distance, and when the parties are further apart, it’s harder to meet in the middle or see the other side clearly.
Anything that doesn’t fit neatly into the categories of Republican or Democrat, such as local identity or many local policy debates, can be depolarizing. But when local media disappears, nonpartisan identity weakens, and divisive national news fills the void. As partisan differences deepen, other identities — race, religion, and even where you eat and what car you drive — start to become aligned with that party identification.
My 2018 article with Matthew Hitt and Johanna Dunaway (Andrew Carnegie Fellow Class of 2024) tested this theory using data from 2008–2012 and found that split-ticket voting — when someone votes for one party’s candidate for president, for example, but a different party further down the ballot — decreased by 1.9 percent after a newspaper closure. We showed that this couldn’t be explained solely by uninformed voters, since those in areas with closures were no less likely to leave downballot contests blank (known as “roll-off”). We also looked at areas where newspapers closed just after the 2012 election and found no effect: this told us that it wasn’t just “the kind of areas that lost a newspaper,” but specifically a newspaper closing before the election, that was polarizing. In short, losing a newspaper makes people switch into national news, which means less exposure to local races and more partisan voting.
of U.S. counties have just a single surviving news outlet
counties do not have a single local news outlet
Source: The State of Local News 2023 (Northwestern University/Medill School of Journalism)
The decline of local news receives the lion’s share of the attention, but the opposite is also true: plenty of research shows how more and better local news has been shown to improve the civic life of communities. Better local news means higher turnout, even with low-turnout groups(such as young voters) and in lower-turnout elections (like state judicial contests). Voters also consistently make better-informed and less-biased assessments of local downballot candidates where local news is stronger.
We discovered another way local news could have civic benefits in our 2021 book, Home Style Opinion, in which we studied the effects of a 2019 experiment in localization by the Desert Sun newspaper in Palm Springs, California. The editor at the time, Julie Makinen, read our article about the polarizing effects of newspaper closures and decided to do something about it: the newspaper dropped national politics from its opinion page for the month of July. No more nationally syndicated columnists, mentions of President Trump, or discussions of Congress — just California and Palm Springs topics for 31 days. We showed that national politics previously comprised a full third of the opinion page — 3,500 miles from Washington, D.C.! We also conducted surveys before and after the experiment that showed affective and social polarization — in other words, whether you like people on the other side or are comfortable socializing with them — slowed down over the course of that month in Palm Springs, relative to a comparison community (Ventura) that maintained its national opinion content.
As a political science PhD who had primarily done quantitative research, I appreciate that my Andrew Carnegie fellowship gives me the chance to get out into the field and observe journalists in action as they navigate today’s financial and attention economies. I’ve completed several visits to cities and newsrooms where I interviewed journalists, community members, and local politicians; worked with Trusting News — a research and training project that empowers journalists to demonstrate credibility and earn trust — to inform and assess their efforts using experiments; and, in the next few weeks, will field survey experiments in key cities where new and exciting models of local journalism have emerged.
My interviews with city councillors in several midwestern cities were particularly illuminating. Local politicians have a keen awareness of the media options in their cities, and even if they have an oppositional relationship with their city’s newspaper (or what’s left of it) today, they are nostalgic for a time when it was stronger and more widely read. Many younger politicians, especially, are enthusiastic consumers of local nonprofit news and hope it succeeds, suggesting that we should include local politicians’ perspectives in our continual reimagining of local news.
New models of local news should aim to produce sustainable civic benefits while addressing its role in reinforcing inequalities. For-profit local newspapers have, in many cases, ignored disadvantaged neighborhoods or sent reporters only to cover crime and other negative stories. Those communities should be a partner in creating the future of local news, with the goal of using civic information to hold their municipal government accountable, make sure their residents’ positive stories are uplifted, help make state and city policies and services easier to use, and explain how government actually works to supply a solid foundation for civic action.
One way to do this, as I’m seeing in my research, is through incorporating a program called Documenters into the newsroom. Documenters is a simple idea: pay local residents to attend local government meetings, take notes, and pose questions that journalists or their fellow citizens might be able to help them answer. After getting its start with City Bureau in Chicago several years ago, Documenters has now spread to nearly 20 cities and is an essential part of the newsrooms I recently visited, such as Mirror Indy in Indianapolis and the Signal newsrooms in Cleveland and Akron. That sort of creative thinking is blossoming despite (or, perhaps, because of) our current crisis, and it makes me hopeful about the future of local news in America.
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