Not everyone who lives in a “news desert” would describe it that way
They say all politics is local. So where’s the local news coverage this election year? Members of the “Marketplace Morning Report” team have been traveling to what are called “news deserts” to hear about the business models that are failing or informing voters as they make their choices on ballots. Earlier in the year, we reported from Val Verde County, Texas, and we heard from North Carolina, where sparse local news coverage may have played a part in a congressional election so questionable, there was a do-over. We also listened to voices from a news desert that’s about an hour’s drive from the center of American politics. And we had an extended conversation with a man in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley, who had to pull the plug on the local newspaper he published for years and now gets by by printing campus newspapers.
Today: how people living in so-called “news deserts” perceive the information ecosystems around them.
Jessica Collier is lead researcher on a report from the University of Texas at Austin’s Center for Media Engagement on news deserts, which found that people living in news deserts don’t always believe that they do, indeed, live in news deserts. Collier is also an assistant professor at Purdue University. “Marketplace Morning Report” host David Brancaccio spoke with her, and the following is an edited transcript of their conversation.
David Brancaccio: How do you define [news deserts]? I mean, they’re not news vacuums. They’re something else.
Jessica Collier: I would classify them as a community where residents do have limited access to news and information about local issues or local politics.
Brancaccio: What have you found about people’s perceptions about news deserts versus reality?
Collier: Forty-six percent of news desert residents disagreed or strongly disagreed that their community is a news desert. And when you pry a little bit more into why that is, they say things like, “We do have access to news about our community,” or “We do get information from word of mouth, or other people.” Or they say things like they turn to social media for news. And I think those are not the traditional sources that we think of when we think of where people might get news and information. But those might actually be really important in understanding news deserts.
Brancaccio: First of all, you may have a trusted friend or associate who does their homework and is useful in helping you to form, for instance, your voting decisions on Election Day. But that doesn’t mean you have a fleet of local reporters sitting in at school board meetings or county council meetings.
Collier: Certainly, and there are issues with having untrained individuals kind of be your person for that type of information. But we actually also looked at the content that exists in news deserts, and specifically on Facebook. So we called librarians in local news deserts across the country and asked them, “Where do people in your community go for news?” And we started compiling a list of reported Facebook pages that we received from those conversations. And when you look at the content on those pages, they’re actually meeting some critical information needs in their communities. And some of them are from accounts that kind of purport to be news, some of them are from personal Facebook pages of mayors in towns across the country, and some of them are local government organizations like chambers of commerce or sheriff’s departments. And so that’s where people seem to be getting information. And for those posts, we didn’t really see a lot of problematic content in terms of misinformation, or gossip, or local rumor mill-type stories.
Brancaccio: So you didn’t see specific problems with some of these non-standard ways to get information these days. So is there a problem then with news deserts if there are these alternate means of getting information?
Collier: I think that news deserts are still an issue. I think it’s important to also see how people see their own information environments in order to tailor our solutions appropriately to those communities. Because what works in one community or county may not be what necessarily works in another. And looking to these places where people are kind of sustaining their information environment in the absence of traditional journalism and trained journalists, maybe we might be able to learn some things from the way that those communities are operating.
Brancaccio: That said, I’ve seen examples of things that are newspaper-like, but are filled with partisan talking points really. Is that news?
Collier: Right. I think there are some people who turn to that information and utilize it as news, and certainly that constitutes problematic content. But surprisingly, in the data set that we have from librarians — who you would trust to have a finger on the pulse of their communities and to provide us with the breadth of sources that people are turning to — we don’t actually see those types of sources pop up often. That’s a promising finding in itself.
Brancaccio: Another role of traditional news media is to hold our elected officials’ feet to the fire — to do investigative reporting, to ask hard questions. Are you seeing that role being performed in these nontraditional ways that people are often now getting news?
Collier: I think that is what’s missing. So the majority of the content that we’re looking at or the things that people tell us about their information in news deserts don’t point to investigative reporting. It’s more of a factual, “This is the information that is being shared” — nothing that constituted that level of investigative reporting or kind of shining the light on things that might be considered corrupt or we need more transparency surrounding. So I think in terms of that service that traditional journalism provides, it’s not being met, but rather these communities are just kind of maintaining in the absence of that.
Brancaccio: Does this give you hope, the work that you’ve done here? That we media consumers, at least with local information, we have the skills to parse our media sources with a little bit more skill than we often get credit for?
Collier: I think that there is a little bit of hope coming out of these findings in this report. Social cohesion was one of the important factors that we also found, where people who felt more connected to their community — like they could trust other people or that people in their community were willing to help their neighbors — reported greater outcomes in terms of feeling like they had access to local news and feeling informed about their community. And I think maybe that speaks to then our desire to uphold news sharing in our community and still hold it to a standard of quality that maybe is missing when we don’t have traditional sources.