Nieman Foundation at Harvard
If a philanthropic organization is looking to support local news in a given community, it typically wants to figure out the answers to a few questions before committing funding: What are the community’s information needs? Who, if anyone, is meeting those information needs, and what kinds of support would be meaningful to them?
That might sound easy enough. But even taking a straightforward-seeming step like making a list of all the news organizations in a community is surprisingly tricky. And if you’re a philanthropic organization aiming to support local news — and understand the state of local news — in a national context, that trickiness is multiplied.
Philanthropic organizations trying to meaningfully fund local news are running up against challenges that another group — local news researchers — have been grappling with for some time. As currently structured, research into the state of local news in the United States struggles to keep pace with the scale, and speed, of changes to the landscape. Since at least 2023, local news researchers have informally discussed the need for more coordination and collaboration in the field to improve research, and make their work more efficient. But within the past year, a coalition of scholars across the country have taken action by creating the Local News Impact Consortium, which aims to elevate, standardize, and expand local news research — while making that research more practically useful outside of academia.
“A lot of people assume that there is some list somewhere of all the local news outlets in particular places,” said Benjamin Toff, an associate professor at the University of Minnesota, director of the Minnesota Journalism Center, and vice chair of the consortium’s executive team. “And that just doesn’t exist.”
Toff leads the consortium along with executive committee chair Damon Kiesow, the Knight chair of journalism innovation at the Missouri School of Journalism, and treasurer Matthew Weber, professor at Rutgers’ School of Communication and Information. The consortium’s steering committee also includes scholars at Northwestern’s Medill, the University of Texas at Austin, the University of Oregon, and Syracuse University. The Knight Foundation committed $250,000 in seed funding. That funding will be divided among consortium member institutions, which will use it in the coming months “to demonstrate proof of concept and workability,” Toff said.
Together, the researchers are focused on “building open source tools and resources to facilitate more rigorous, systematic local ecosystem research and helping to connect and support the broader network doing this work,” Toff explained. The consortium has broken out four working groups with different focuses: audience-centric approaches to understanding local news ecosystems; approaches to measuring changes in the employment landscape; approaches to building more standardized databases for tracking local news outlets and sources; and approaches to computationally collecting and measuring changes in the content of local news.
When I first spoke with Toff, I was reminded of a separate conversation I’d had with a local journalist in 2023. That reporter had described to me his vision for a map with lights capturing the state of local news in municipalities across the country. Each community would be symbolized by a green, yellow, or red light to indicate the strength of local news, and corresponding need for funding, there. In his vision, such a resource could guide funders to invest where the need is greatest.
In short, compiling truly comprehensive national data about what local news outlets exist, not to mention keeping such a database up to date, is a tall order. And whether this is a goal of the consortium is an ongoing conversation. “Whether it makes sense for the consortium to serve as a repository for more comprehensive national data or to play a supporting role to others building public-facing maps will be a collective decision left to the consortium’s members down the line,” Toff told me.
Toff first began reckoning with the research challenges of the local news field while collaborating with then-graduate student Nick Mathews on a research project a few years back. They tried to do “a census of every news outlet we could identify” across three states. Around the same time, as Toff was taking over leading the Minnesota Journalism Center, he decided he wanted to “update the data for the current ecosystem in Minnesota and see what has changed over the last five years.”
“The more I started to look into models for how to do this, the more I realized there are a growing number of efforts to try to map local news ecosystems,” Toff explained. “Everybody’s sort of reinventing the wheel each time they do it.”
The consortium identifies three key challenges with local news research today, which Toff started to encounter in his earlier research.
The first is the sheer pace of change: as the consortium puts it, “Local information ecosystems are changing faster than we can study them.” Print newspapers are closing, digital-first and social-first outlets are popping up, and ownership is consolidating. Meanwhile, “academic researchers are incentivized in certain ways by their institutions, and so they’re not always in alignment with the pace of what I think many people recognize is the need in this space,” Toff said. This kind of applied research needs to be responsive and timely. Sometimes, academia isn’t.
The second challenge the consortium wants to tackle: The speed of change, and the challenges of gathering comprehensive data about the number and type of existing local news outlets, make it difficult to impossible to take research a step further and assess the scale of local news impacts and community needs. “We know there are all these problems,” Toff said, “but we don’t have good ways of identifying where the greatest need is and where interventions can be most effective.”
For instance, Impact Architects’ report recommends a five-part search for local media outlets, including the State of Local News Project, broadcast TV, broadcast radio, Center for Community Media databases, and stakeholder contributions. But even after consulting all those sources, “there are surely outlets that we did not encounter in our search.” And they could not “systematically identify local podcasts, community newsletters, or community-oriented social media, such as Facebook groups.”
The difficulty of comprehensively surveying local news outlets is in part due to “data structure issues,” Toff said. Beyond the data sources siloed by medium, researchers may miss the tiniest hyperlocal news organizations. Definition is also a challenge: “What is a local news outlet, for purposes of this kind of mapping, and what’s not?” While Toff supports erring on the side of inclusiveness, “different maps take very different approaches to that.”
The third challenge: A project that can comprehensively capture the changing state of local news is expensive, and a massive workload. The academics in the consortium believe collaboration makes more sense than piecemeal advancements at different academic institutions, and will yield better, more efficient research.
Last September, building on his earlier collaboration with Mathews, Toff released a report on the “supply” of local news outlets in Minnesota. In a follow-up report, he plans to explore employment and content of those news organizations. That research dovetails with the consortium’s working groups geared toward better understanding the type and depth of local news out there; the consortium working group on local news content has already begun a couple of small pilots, and Minnesota will be one of its pilot states this spring.
“If you’re only looking at where there are and are not news outlets, and you focus on closures, it’s too late,” Toff said. “We need measures of the health of these ecosystems that capture what’s actually going on on the ground before these outlets have closed.”
