Healthy News and Information Ecosystems: What we’ve learned
At the beginning of March, the Impact Architects released our latest report, Healthy News and Information Ecosystems: A Diagnostic Framework, a year long project supported by Democracy Fund, the Google News Initiative, and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.
Our news and information framework includes 35 indicators across three categories: community; information providers; and the relationship between the two, and is detailed in the full research report. We also applied the framework in nine ecosystems across the United States — one state, two counties, and six cities or towns — to illustrate how the framework can illuminate community strengths, as well as opportunities.
From the framework, we created a playbook with the goal that anyone, anywhere can apply the framework to assess the health of their local news and information ecosystem, identify opportunities to strengthen the ecosystem, and measure progress over time.
Through this project, we identified a number of important, if unsurprising, findings about local news.
- While presence or absence of local news organizations isn’t everything, the number of news organizations does have tangible impacts on communities.
- As the number of journalism organizations per capita increases, voter turnout increases, controlling for education.
- As the number of journalism organizations per capita increases, community satisfaction also increases, controlling for overall education of the community.
2. Trust in journalism organizations is directly correlated with the presence of local news.
- As the number of journalism organizations per capita increases, journalism trust increases.
- The greater the percentage of the population who agree that local news sources mostly cover the area where they live, the more trust there is in journalism.
3. Trust in journalism organizations is also a predictor for positive civic outcomes, such as voter turnout.
- As journalism trust increases, voter turnout also increases, controlling for percentage of population with bachelor’s degrees.
4. Communities with more Black/African American and Hispanic/Latinx identifying people have fewer journalism organizations, and less trust in these providers.
- In general, communities that have greater racial and ethnic diversity among residents are home to fewer journalism outlets and fewer national newspaper chains.
- Reported trust in journalism is higher among white residents than Black/African American, and Hispanic/Latinx residents.
While these findings may come from a small sample of nine ecosystems, they show clear trends (some of which are statistically significant). Furthermore, our findings are in line with the significant research about the critical importance of healthy local news and information ecosystems in communities, further supporting the utility of this framework.
And while there’s always opportunity for more research, we’re excited to learn how people and organizations are using this framework to move from learning to action, supporting local news and get communities the information they want and need. We invite you to share your questions, feedback, and projects to strengthen your local ecosystem on our Healthy News and Information Ecosystems project page.
Next up, we’ll be delving further into our methodology and why measuring local news, even when imperfect, matters.
