Duke research documents news deserts

Research from Duke University provides new evidence on the problem of “news deserts,” communities where news and information about critical local issues is nonexistent or severely limited.

Researchers analyzed more than 16,000 news stories, gathered over seven days, across a hundred U.S. communities not situated in major media markets. They found 20 communities where local news outlets contained not a single local news story.

“We wanted to assess the health of local journalism on a scale that hadn’t been done before, and in doing so we confirmed that the problem is as bad as we thought, maybe even worse,” said Philip Napoli, lead author of the study.

Among the findings: only about 17 percent of the news stories provided to a community are truly local, meaning about or having taken place within the municipality, and less than half (43 percent) of the news stories provided by local media outlets are original and produced by the local media outlet.

The study also found that communities closer to a large media market have less robust local journalism, larger proportions of Hispanic/Latino populations are associated with less robust local journalism and a community’s status as the county seat had no effect on the quantity or robustness of local journalism.

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