Developing standardized approaches and open-source tools to rebuild local news ecosystems in communities across the United States
The LNIC believes that understanding and intervention in the local information crisis could be improved if researchers, founders, and funders shared a common set of research standards, protocols, and playbooks.
Our goal is to bring together researchers, journalists, and funders around developing a shared set of practices for measuring local information ecosystem health. In doing so, we will enable more systematic evaluation of changes in these ecosystems across geographies and over time.
Local information ecosystems are changing faster than we can study them.
Local newspapers are closing at an alarming rate. Commercial local news ownership increasingly consolidating. Fly-by-night “pink slime” outlets are posing as local journalistic outlets with little transparency. It is difficult to track growth in importance of emergent new digital outlets and other trusted messengers for local information.
Incomplete data leads to unmeasurable impact.
Local news outlets, researchers, community foundations, other funders of local news (including Press Forward and its network of Press Forward Locals), often lack data needed to evaluate need and impact. Communities in most dire need are not always able to advocate for themselves . Assessing impact rigorously requires researcher independence.
Scale, scope and expense is too large. The broader research community is too fragmented to track these changes in a robust and consistent manner. Scale of challenge is too large for any single institution to tackle by itself. The research itself is costly, and risks irrelevance if disconnected from the communities being studied.
The consortium is collaboratively developing standards, protocols and research playbooks of generally accepted best practices in local news research.
Target Issues