Local News & Information

"The large metro dailies covered a broad geographic region," Dougherty told me. "That was their strength and then their downfall. They may not cover the town unless the shit hits the fan, but they don't inform people of what it feels like to live there."
A data-rich view of how (and what) local news is working on Substack
The new public square is not centred on a stable set of shared sources; instead it is structured by a small number of competing, for-profit platform companies bundling a bewildering array of stuff for different people in different ways through various ranking and recommendation algorithms.
Audiences and advertisers seem to prefer this new reality,... See more
Audiences and advertisers seem to prefer this new reality,... See more
How repackaging a print guide into a pop-up newsletter helped Midcoast Villager land new readers and subscribers - BlueLena
Mariangela Salmeronbluelena.ioParticipatory journalism aims to involve the communities traditionally ignored by local news, empowering them to observe government directly to improve both representation and engagement (Green, Holliday and Rispoli, 2023). The reorientation of journalism from gatekeepers of information dissemination to facilitators of information gathering is... See more
Greater exposure to higher-quality local news leads to more political participation (Shaker, 2014), reduced polarization (Darr, Hitt and Dunaway, 2021, 2018; Moskowitz, 2021), less corporate malfeasance (Heese, Pérez-Cavazos and Peter, 2022), healthier municipal finances (Gao, Lee and Murphy, 2020), and increased political competition (Rubado and... See more