Local Journalism and At-Risk Communities in the United States

A substantial amount of attention has been devoted to the ongoing crisis affecting local journalism. Terms such as ‘news deserts’ and ‘journalism divides’ have been used to describe an emerging scenario in which some communities have relatively robust local news ecosystems, while others do not. However, despite the fact that such concepts indicate substantial differences across communities, researchers have only recently begun to try to understand the characteristics of healthy versus at-risk communities. Thus, what have been missing until somewhat recently are robust efforts to try to bring greater nuance and specificity to understanding the state of local journalism in individual communities. What do we know, at this point, about the types of communities where the crisis in local journalism is most pronounced? Are there particular geographic or demographic characteristics of individual communities that are systematically related to the health of their local journalism? How might such findings inform the efforts of news organizations, policymakers, philanthropic organizations, and advocacy organizations? This chapter presents research that addresses these questions, and considers how such research can be further extended to enhance our understanding of the relationship between local journalism and civic engagement at the community level.1

Geography · Journalism · Political science · Law · Media Studies and Communication

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