You might have heard about the Northwestern University journalism school’s Local News Initiative, a “team of experts in digital innovation, audience understanding and business strategy” with the goal to “reinvent the relationship between news organizations and audiences to elevate enterprises that empower citizens.” Its webpage shows a team of approximately 40 professors, students, and other affiliates, and lists funding from several foundations and individual contributors.
But historian Alice Dreger reports some problems with their data. From 14 Jan 2024:
Can we talk about the Local News Initiative’s widely-cited yet deeply mysterious map of the American local news landscape? Run out of Medill, Northwestern University’s journalism school, the map is generated from a “proprietary database” we’re not allowed to see. . . . Without being able to see the raw data, it’s impossible to know what the map really shows . . .
Let’s start with an easy example from the Greater Lansing area, Michigan’s capital region, where I [Dreger] live. Since 2002, Rina Risper has been running The New Citizens Press as a newspaper dedicated primarily to our area’s local Black community. The organization’s Facebook page describes it as “a multicultural newspaper based in Lansing, MI.” Yet when you click on the Medill map for our county (Ingham), the map shows zero “ethnic outlets” of news. Either New Citizens Press is miscategorized or this 22-year-old newspaper is completely missing.
The stated methodology of the mapping project hints at why New Citizens Press is apparently missing. The project team uses particular journalism associations like INN and LION Publishers, industry lists, and surveys to create the map. If an organization hasn’t made its way into those base sets, it appears it doesn’t qualify as a local news organization on this map, no matter how good a job it’s doing, no matter for how long. . . .
On 6 May 2024, Dreger updated with some good news:
Well, the Medill team apparently changed course since then, because now we can see who they are counting in each county.
And lo and behold, while four months ago the map claimed there were six local news outlets in Ingham, now it says there are seven, and it counts The New Citizens Press among them.
But wait. Remarkably, the Ingham map does not count East Lansing Info (ELi), the news organization I helped found ten years ago (and retired from last fall), even though ELi is a member of both LION and INN, two major operations from which the map claims to draw data.
Oy. Not a good sign. A cursory search indicates other members of INN also appear to be missing, including AfroLA and Baltimore Witness.
She puts out this call to local news organizations:
Do me [Dreger] a favor. Poke around your own area of the map, see what you find, and let me know. Go to this page, then scroll down just below the map and choose your state. Then click on the county you’re interested in. (The map can be a little buggy; try hovering all around the county to get it to engage, and reload the page if necessary.)
And some people responded:
Penda Howell, CEO/Publisher of NJUrbanNews.com, looked at the map for Essex County, New Jersey, and sent us a note letting us know that his outlet is listed as digital but not categorized as serving the Black community. That’s strange, since the mission statement of the organization makes plain their core service: “We are dedicated to covering New Jersey’s vibrant African American community through informative stories and thorough coverage. Founded in 2018, The motto of NJ Urban News is ‘A Voice for the Voiceless.’ We cover stories often overlooked by mainstream media impacting the 1.3 million people that makeup New Jersey’s Black community.”
Sean Nestor checked the map for Lucas County, Ohio, where he lives and discovered that the Toledo Journal is counted twice, once as “Toledo Journal” and once as “The Toledo Journal.” In one case it’s counted as an ethnic outlet. In the other case, it isn’t. Writes Sean, “The Toledo Journal is one of two Black-owned print publications; the other, The Sojourner’s Truth, is not listed, nor is La Prensa, a local Latino newspaper. The list also omits the Mirror, a print paper covering the Toledo suburb of Maumee as well as the Sylvania Advantage, which covers another suburb (Sylvania).”
Ken Martin of the Austin Bulldog examined the data for his county, Texas’s Travis County. “It lists 5 digital outlets but states only two are nonprofits when in fact 4 are nonprofits: The Austin Bulldog, Austin Vida, Austin Monitor, and Texas Tribune.”
And Tony Schinella, Senior Field Editor for Patch Media in New Hampshire and Rhode Island, sent in a doozy of a message to Medill’s team in response to having had a look at the data. . . . “I was really surprised by the exclusion of New Hampshire’s very active Patch.com sites from the study’s Local News Landscape map. As the founding editor of the Concord NH Patch site, the flagship for the state, in May 2011, it was dismaying to see my 12-plus years of hard work delivering news to the city ignored.” . . .
Dreger continued on 9 May 2024:
The map has also long been missing the Wayne & Garfield County Insider, a 30-year-old print weekly newspaper covering those two counties in southern Utah. The Medill map doesn’t list the Insider at all. In fact, it counts Wayne County as having no local news, meaning it’s one of those counties counted as a total “news desert” on the map. . . .
There’s just no excuse for this omission. I say that because Erica Walz, who runs the Insider, has told the Medill team over and over again about this mistake.
“I have contacted the Medill people FOUR times about the fact that we exist,” Walz wrote to Local News Blues, “and that they have repeatedly missed/neglected our existence in their study.”To no avail.
“Medill has not recognized our newspaper, which is a much more significant presence [than Corner Post] providing community news in our region. I had specifically asked them to recognize The Insider, and received a reply from their investigators, Penelope Abernathy and Zach Metzger, that they would do so, but they haven’t managed it.”
From the webpage:
Penelope Muse Abernathy, a visiting professor at Northwestern University, is a former senior executive at The New York Times and Wall Street Journal, who specializes in researching local journalism. She is the author of two books and five reports, including The State of Local News (Northwestern University: 2022).
Metzger is responsible for managing, updating, and analyzing the different databases of news organizations maintained by the Medill Local News Initiative. He is also currently pursuing his PhD at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.
Dreger followed up:
In a preliminary response to our (many) questions, Zach Metzer, the Director of Medill’s State of Local News Project, explained at least why Patch and Chalkbeat are missing.
“We have not previously included franchised groups like Patch and Chalkbeat in our datasets; for this year’s report, we will be considering ways to incorporate these organizations into our research.”
Yowza. So the map that’s been claiming to tell us where local news is missing hasn’t been tracking Patch or Chalkbeat. Because “franchise.”
I’d never heard of Patch before so I did a quick google search. One of the links was to New York City Local News, which led with the following stories:
Northern Lights Over NYC? Here’s What To Know About Strong Solar Storm
NYC Rents Break April Records In Latest Bad News For Tenants: Study
NYC Restaurants: Free Chicken(s)! + H Mart Food Hall
15-Year-Old Girl Faces Murder Charge In Queens Teen’s Stabbing: NYPD
Machete-Wielding Man Who Attacked Cops In Times Square Sentenced: DOJ
NYC Restaurants Ordered Closed May 3 – May 10
Man Rapes Woman After Choking Her From Behind On NYC Street: NYPD
Whale Speared By Cruise Ship Bow Sails Into Port: Top 5 NYC Stories
Hochul Signs ‘Sammy’s Law’ For 20 MPH NYC Speed Limits
44-Ft Whale Speared By Cruise Ship Bow Sails Into NYC Port
It doesn’t look like they’re doing any actual reporting here.
I was curious so I went over to the Patch site for Concord, New Hampshire, which seemed to have more active reporting. So I guess it varies from site to side, and I can see how it could be difficult for the Local News Initiative to distinguish between actual local news outlets and astroturf efforts. There’s no clear place to draw the line.
P.S. Here’s the methodology for the Local News Initiative project. They do a lot of work! But, when data are concerned, there’s always more work to be done. It’s not clear how they can best connect to people on the ground with knowledge of local news.
On the plus side, they still seem to be doing better than the Electoral Integrity Project.