News reporting is among the least-trusted professions in the U.S., right there with lawyers, elected officials, used car dealers and public health. And yet, the service is important.
"Local newspapers write about your roads. They write about the weather. They write about all the wildfires creeping in close to us. They celebrate the local high school team's state championship. I mean, they're just documenting history in real time," said Rob Curley, executive editor of the Spokesman-Review.
"We know that local news is really important for providing critical information to communities, and that information is really important for citizens to be able to make informed decisions about their daily lives. And related to that is the importance of local news to not only civic life, but to a very robust and healthy democracy," said WSU Professor Jennifer Henrichsen.
"We often think of news as major national or international outlets, but the truth is that most of the fourth estate in this and most other countries is small local outlets that report on their communities. They are the majority and the lifeblood of journalism in this country," said WSU Professor Pawel Popiel.
Some believe local news is in trouble. Media companies are having a hard time making enough money to hire and sustain reporters and editors. Some are giving up on the notion on doing news.
Americans value local news, according to a poll released last year by the Pew Research Center. The study shared that people value their local news sources and journalists and what they do. That’s true for people who identify with both major political parties. But it also reported fewer people are paying attention to local news and when they do, they tend to go online to find it, rather than watch or listen to local broadcasts or reading their local newspapers. A shrinking number of people are buying subscriptions to local news outlets. Traditional revenue sources are drying up, forcing organizations to find other ways to stay in business.
Henrichsen and Popiel are co-authors of a study about who reports and writes news in Washington.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Jennifer Henrichsen: We wanted to first understand what outlets exist in Washington State because there hasn't been a comprehensive examination of outlets that include, you know, magazines and radio and TV, online and newspaper before.
There has been national level efforts to try to map some of those categories as well as a local effort to map newspapers, but we didn't really have a sense of what exists comprehensively in the state.
So we started out with sort of open source data collection, trying to understand what outlets exist across the state. And then we interviewed civic leaders, policymakers, journalists, editors, and scholars as well as some publishers to try to get a better sense qualitatively. What are some of the concerns that they're seeing? How has local news evolved in the state over time? What are some of the challenges and what are some of the opportunities to kind of improve local news going forward? And then we also conducted a survey of news outlets that fit our database, so they fit the categories for inclusion.
Doug Nadvornick: What did you find out? Tell me kind of the range of who's providing reporting around the state.
JH: We found more than a thousand initial outlets, and we applied the criteria to those outlets, and we came up with, or the number that resulted was, 353 outlets that met that criteria. And we found quite a few didn't, right, for either locality reasons or for content reasons.
We also found that there were certain places in the state that had no qualifying news outlets, which means that they're news deserts. We found five counties that only had one outlet and another five counties that only had two outlets. So this means that it's dispersed across the state and we found that there are concerns about local news coverage in counties across the state. So there's limited media diversity, which in turn has real implications for citizens being able to get news that matters to them, that helps them get information that is needed for them to make decisions, or even other sort of critical information needs, like understanding the wildfire situation in Washington that affects both the east and the west side of the state.
DN: Who has concerns about this, besides people in the journalism industry?
JH: We found that civic leaders had a lot of concerns about the lack of local news, about how local news is being increasingly hit financially, how there are increasing news deserts. There's also what's called a rise of ghost newspapers, or basically when an outlet exists in name, but has to do the same amount of work with dwindling staff and fewer resources to try to reach the communities in which they are located.
So it's not just journalists who care about this. It is civic leaders. It’s people in the community who are leading foundations. It’s policymakers. It also should concern, and I do think it concerns, a fair number of everyday individuals who want to see their papers and their outlets provide them information so that they can make decisions about their lives.
Pawel Popiel: I will only add that businesses in particular are also a little concerned about this because they're losing outlets in which to advertise both their products and services.
DN: What did you find in terms of who owns the local news outlets around the state?
JH: We actually found that a majority of the local news outlets are companies that tend to be private family owned companies or nonprofits or locally or community owned organizations. And that's good news because these are ownership types that are most likely to produce locally situated news coverage. But we also found that nearly one third of Washington's news outlets belong to national chains. And that can be troubling because sometimes what happens is when a national chain gets ownership of a local news outlet, it results in staff basically going away. It results in staff layoffs. It results in reduced coverage. It results in less local coverage. And that obviously has pretty important implications and consequences for the survival of local news in this state.
DN: What do we draw from this if we want to think about how do we strengthen the local news ecosystem in the state? How does your study contribute to that going forward?
JH: So this is the most comprehensive study to date of the ecosystem. It's also a snapshot in time to an extent because the ecosystem is in constant flux. We asked our interviewees about different ways to strengthen local news in the state. And we came up from those interviewees with a lot of different recommendations for policymakers and civic leaders, community leaders, to make sure that this report can inform future progress, that it can improve the situation facing local news in the state.
And we have a variety of recommendations. So we talk about how policymakers can consider specific funding mechanisms to bolster local news, how they can support research to regularly assess the health and local news coverage across Washington. We also suggest the need and the importance of local foundations supporting collaborative journalism initiatives across the state or working to fund different types of journalism positions in outlets potentially.
PP: I’d like to highlight the fact that nearly 50% of the outlets that we identified in the state have budgets of less than $250,000. This means that they can't afford to hire and retain salary professional journalists to cover local news in their communities. This means that they are facing resource constraints and it is unclear how many of them will be able to continue to operate. All of this, our report, our findings, and our analysis point to a desperate need for financial resources for newsrooms to keep operating, especially locally situated ones, for ways to make the talent pipeline more resilient, since we also have learned from our data collection that's still ongoing related to staffing levels at outlets, that a lot of news outlets in the state of Washington rely on part-time labor simply because they cannot afford full-time journalists. So making that talent pipeline more resilient and robust should be a priority.
DN: First, where can people find your study if they want to read more in depth?
JH: We have the whole report on the Murrow News Fellowship website under the research tab. In addition to having all of the report laid out in different sections so people can skip to whatever they find most interesting and appealing, we also have an interactive map that citizens can zero in on their particular location and identify by medium what outlets serve them. So they can see what newspapers are in their area, what radio stations are in their area, radio outlets are in their area, etc.
