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Lately, when traveling anywhere new, I find myself looking at the houses and buildings I pass, wondering what news is being produced at that moment, in that town, that might be missed if it doesn’t have a local outlet. If it’s a less affluent or rural area, chances are good that there isn’t a journalist attending its school board or municipal meetings. Yet as the Pivot Fund’s Tracie Powell wrote recently, all the money in the world can’t stand up a successful newsroom if it doesn’t first take a close look at the community it wants to serve: “Who is already trusted in this community to deliver news and information? What are the actual gaps in coverage, and who is attempting to fill them? How do people [here] find out what they need to know?”
As the field collectively expands its definition of “what counts” as local news, the number of sources from which useful civic information can come has expanded accordingly—and we are challenged to imagine new ways of accounting for and mapping them. More and more researchers are recognizing the fact that, especially in so-called news deserts, people are actually awash in information, some of it false and harmful, but much of it coming from the people and places with which communities already interact on a daily basis.
Of course, it’s not that these community organizations are all of a sudden producing useful civic information; they’ve been engaging and communicating with their constituents for years. What is (relatively) new is their ability to reach a much wider audience via the internet and social media—and perhaps through deeper partnerships with local journalists.
We’ve come a long way since the days when “news” was what happened at city hall and in the police precinct, or among other local power-holders. A major silver lining of the profound revolution still shaking journalism is the reorientation away from primarily reporting on the activities of those in power toward considering activity at every echelon and in every corner of a community as newsworthy. Moreover, it’s not only problems that grab headlines, but now solutions, too.
I’ve been looking closely at one town: Charlotte, North Carolina. The research we’re conducting there aims to see the city’s news and information landscape through this holistic lens. We’ve identified thirty-four news organizations of all shapes and sizes serving Charlotte, including eleven that cater to the city’s various ethnic communities, four that are oriented toward identity-based communities (e.g., faith-based or LGBTQ; one of those, The Voice, is also counted in the ethnic category because it serves both a church community and the Greek community in Charlotte), and two that are topic-oriented (e.g., business). They span all media, and have varying levels of online presence; all but two are also based in Charlotte.
New research continues to confirm earlier findings that local journalism is most likely to thrive in communities that are financially well off, have a strong business base, and maintain a certain level of population density—all of which works to provide both advertising and audience revenue. Charlotte meets all of these standards and is clearly not a news desert. So the questions one asks are different here than they would be in a city that is served by only a couple of outlets, or none at all.
Charlotte is also rich in civil society organizations (CSOs), those nonprofits, houses of worship, schools, and libraries that serve their communities and have constant engagement with them. By one count, the city of Charlotte has more than 1,500 nonprofit community organizations. To put that in perspective, the same database lists 402 organizations for the entire state of Wyoming.
What can a context like this teach us about local news ecosystems? One of the things we’re looking at is news outlets’ actual coverage areas, which is an elusive finding that is often not even visible to newsrooms themselves. Looking at the coverage of prolific news outlets in dense cities like Charlotte allows us to zoom in to the neighborhood level to see which parts of a city are covered more often, and which are covered only rarely. My colleagues at the Brown Institute have been honing the techniques for this work since 2019, when they partnered with the Lenfest Institute and the Philadelphia Inquirer to analyze that outlet’s coverage.
We are also looking at a news outlet’s topical coverage, as represented by a semantic map. This type of data visualization analyzes stories and clusters them according to topic, so that one can easily identify which topics a news outlet focuses on, and to what extent. It becomes even more interesting when the topics covered by multiple organizations are mapped, showing topics about which multiple outlets are writing, such as a political race, and topics covered by only one outlet. The sample map below tests this on the output of three North Carolina organizations—two news outlets and one community organization, finding overlap in the coverage of a toxic contaminant in the waterways, but singular focus on stories about personal health by one of the news outlets.
We’re overlaying these findings with structural and demographic features of the city, such as access to high-speed broadband. Does geographic coverage correlate with access to broadband? Does topic coverage gravitate toward those stories that people in certain parts of the city are more likely to care about? Among Charlotte’s many community assets is an organization called the Charlotte Urban Institute, housed at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. Its wealth of data about the city, including broadband access at the neighborhood level, is an invaluable resource that will allow us to ask questions like these.
We have the ability to analyze the output not only of local news organizations, but also of any of those 1,500-plus community organizations—many of which have robust communications that rival some local journalism orgs. For example, the North Carolina Coastal Federation, the CSO represented by the topic map above, produces a blog that keeps its community updated on the activities of the organization as well as the research and science that goes into its work. We envision collaborations between news organizations and CSOs based on maps that show topics and geographies where their content overlaps.
Making visible the existing communications of organizations like Carolina Coastal could help answer the questions posed by Tracie Powell at the outset: Who is already trusted in this community to deliver news and information? What are the actual gaps in coverage, and who is attempting to fill them? How do people in this city find out what they need to know?
In cities like Charlotte, this could create even deeper community engagement for news organizations—and greater reach for the CSOs. In places that don’t have a wealth of resources, those insights become even more valuable, by suggesting efficiencies and fostering collaboration.
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