Local Matters Again?

Buried deep in a new Pew poll's methodology section is a question about how often folks follow local news and compares 2011 results with previous years.  Respondents were asked if they follow local news closely only when something important is happening or whether they follow it closely whether or not something important is happening.

The results are surprising and, to some, comforting.  My message?  Don't get comfortable quite yet.

According to the survey methods section, from 2002 to 2008, the percent of people who followed local news whether or not something important was happening hovered around 56 or 57 percent of U.S. respondents.  In the current 2011 survey, 72 percent said they followed local news whether or not something important was happening.

Wow.  That's a helluva jump.

I did a 2010 study in Newspaper Research Journal that used some of the same data but examined changes from 1998 to 2008.  My results are somewhat different, odd since I used Pew data, but this may be a function of my analysis strategy. Let's assume my data are somewhat different.  If so, the jump in the interest in local news demonstrated by the Pew report is stunning and, to me, while welcome -- also inexplicable.  Without access to the raw data for comparison purposes, let's look instead at changes in some of the other questions over time to see if we can find an explanation.

•  The report includes a jump in "national" news interest (mid-50s most of the time to 68 percent in the latest report), which supports a change in local as well.

• But, "international" interest doesn't follow the same trend.  This one jumps around a lot, probably due to current events in that given year.  Let's put it aside.

• Here's my major methodological issue.  In previous Pew surveys, the "local" question comes late in the instrument after many questions about specific media use.  In the 2011 version, the "local" question comes quite early -- the sixth question asked.  In 2008, as a comparison, it's the 77th question asked.  It's possible these items were rotated in some random way, but if so I don't see it discussed.  It's likely respondents were primed differently when "local" news is asked after a long list of potential media consumption habits.  If I'm right, the jump is questionable, making comparisons across time problematic.

So we can't get to excited about the jump in local news interest, at least not until we find out whether it may be a methodological fluke rather than evidence of a sudden burning desire in the American public for local news.

Local News

Being a journalism guy I've always had an interest in local news.  In fact, one of my recent Newspaper Research Journal articles looked at the audience for local news over the past 10 years.  Now comes a new Pew study that digs even deeper.

My own stuff found newspapers had a core print audience of people interested in local and community news, particularly local government news.  Whether that audience is big enough to sustain a newspaper/online enterprise is a different matter, but this new Pew report suggests the interest in local has increased and newspapers play a key role, though people today use a mix of media to keep up with various kinds of local news.  The chart below says it all, at least in where people go for specific local news.

But buried deep in the report is a suggestion of growing interest in local news.  And, if you'll excuse the word play, is good news.

Unchanging Interest

Some things never change.

Take, for example, the interest people say they have in politics. A new Pew Center report finds that interest in politics remains largely unchanged from 1987 to 2009 (scroll down to see the graph).

If anything, interest has inched up a bit. That's good news, though I suspect a lot of newspaper publishers wonder why all this interest fails to translate into an audience. Interest in local news has increased -- 70 percent said in 1987 they were interested in local news, 78 percent said so in 2009.

Here's a fascinating yet ironic data point -- newspapers are the chief source of local news, and interest in local news remains steady and even increases slightly, yet newspaper readership is dropping.

One way to understand this paradox is to combine readership of the print newspaper with its online site. The numbers look better, though of course for newspapers this shift from print to online comes with a significant drop in advertising revenue -- which pays the bills for the expensive job of covering the news (opinion is cheap to produce, but facts are expensive to collect).

Even local TV news is suffering, both in audience and in advertising dollars, and local blogs can't really cover local news, not with people on the street, in the courthouse, sitting through five-hour council meetings, going to crime scenes, leafing through police incident reports, and all the rest. So we have all this interest in local news but not enough interest to pay the bill to collect the news. That's the rub, and it's not one easily resolved.

It may be time to reconsider what we (the royal journalistic "we") call news.

Maybe a 3-hour sewer board meeting isn't news any more. Was it ever?

Maybe the political infighting between members of the city council really isn't that important to people. Was it ever?

Maybe burglaries in your neighborhood really don't matter. Oops, that one is still news. In fact, I'd argue we need to spend more time on crime coverage if we want to keep audience. People care about this stuff.

How do people define local news? High school sports? Crime? School activities? Zoning? Puff pieces and thumbsucking features on local folk? No one really knows. The Pew Center is terrific as a resource in asking the basic question, but someone else needs to burrow deeper into how real people define "local news" and probe the irony that people are so interested but so so interested as to pay for it.

We do know a few things. Wackos on the right say people are sick of the "liberal bias" of newspapers and that's why they quit. Sorry, but studies show again and again there's no real relationship between partisanship, ideology, and circulation. Loonies on the left make the same argument as the kooks on the right, but both are wrong. We simply don't know what people mean by local news, not really. We all have ideas, hunches, but those don't mean a hell of a lot. We need to understand more on this, because what people know about their communities is a cornerstone of democracy.

Local News

Everyone preaches that local news, hyperlocal stuff, is the future of newspapers and successful news sites.

Yeah, but ...

Here's a story about the decline in the number of reporters covering LA. By LA I mean Los Angeles, not Lower Alabama. In the piece:

But now just four reporters tend this turf anywhere close to full time: two for The Times, one for eight dailies controlled by newspaper baron William Dean Singleton, and one for City News Service, although that young reporter frequently gets pulled off for other duty.Back in my day, as many as a dozen full-time reporters walked this beat, filling the row of cramped, glass-walled cubicles on the dimly lit fourth floor just above the supervisors meeting room.

Not a happy time, unless of course you're a cheating stealing politician who now has more free reign to do whatever the hell you want. And no, not many bloggers do the kind of legwork to make up the difference, not yet at least. I'm hopeful, just not convinced.

Newspaper Cuts

Newspapers are chopping at the muscle, at the bone, to cut costs. This is sad on any number of levels, but it also raises serious questions about what people will know, especially about local government, as fewer reporters hit the streets on their behalf.

Nobody covers a community like the local newspaper. TV can't do it. Radio won't. A handful of bloggers provide interesting local commentary, but few spend the shoe leather to sit through long meetings or to dig through courthouse records or visit, every day, the police and read piles of incident reports. And then there is the investigative side of daily newspaper journalism, the watchdog role that sometimes catches the bad guys doing what they shouldn't be doing.

The bad guys, I'm afraid, are about to have a field day. Developers and their bought-and-paid-for politicians will soon have a free ride thanks to fewer reporters checking the records, attending meetings, sniffing out good stories. I'm hoping a few independent bloggers will take on this role, and I suspect quite a few will, but the systematic coverage of local government will suffer.

What people know about their communities, their schools, that's the important day-to-day stuff that matters more to lives than national or international coverage, yet we'll see less and less of this.

And we'll know less.

Good News, Bad News, and HyperHype

We know people are less interested in news -- but what kind of news?

• Interest in Local News remains largely unchanged from 1998 - 2008. That's good news, you'd think, for newspapers.


• But ... interest in Community News has dropped. Weird. And bad news.


• Also largely unchanged, interest in: crime, health, business, culture & arts, and consumer news.


• Okay, so what's dropped then? Politics and Washington news (pre-prez campaign), international news, sports (I find this one hard to believe, but there it is), and entertainment (thank god!).

The results are based on Pew's study, conducted every two years, of media consumption. The usual caveats apply, such as social desirability, but there is no reason to believe people are more or less socially desirable in their media answers in 2008 than they were in 1998, so we have to accept the trends for what they are.

What are they, then? Interesting. I can't figure out the difference between "community" and "local news" and why there'd be consistent interest in one, decreasing interest in the other. The "community" interest has dropped over 10 years from 31 to 22 percent. Interest in local news remains consistently hovering at about 20 percent across the same time. Weird. Odd. Unexplainable.

And of concern to people who sell newspapers or who think hyperlocal is the way to go. These results suggest, as do some recent newspaper numbers and the lack of success by certain hyperlocal projects, that the hyperlocal angle has been hyperhyped.

The Flight from Local News?

No one is hurting more than newspapers, in both advertising and circulation loss. You'd think that people have suddenly lost interest in local news, the one niche newspapers own.

Nope.

A new Pew poll includes a question asking how much people follow local news. The percent who said "most of the time" hasn't really changed from 1998 - 2008. In 1996, 61% said they follow local news "most of the time." By 2008 that number is down only to 58%. Not much change, probably within the margin of error. So if interest in local news remains relatively strong, wassup? Newspaper readership and local TV news viewership in the same period have both dropped dramatically.

First, it's the large metro papers that are bleeding readers and advertisers. Weeklies are holding fairly steady. Large papers have a harder time today feeling "local." And few people report going online for local news, so we can't blame the Net. It's a complicated problem, this continued appetite for local news at the same time the major provider of local news -- the hometown paper -- is seeing drastic drops in readers.

How does this connect with what people know? Fewer reporters mean local politicians will get away with murder, or the political version of that. People will be less informed about what local government is up to, and it seems local blogs are not really filling that void. Not yet, at least. So how do people explain an appetite for local news but not buying the paper?

That's a damn good research question.

The Incredible Shrinking News Audience

A bunch of reports out this week point out circulation declines at major U.S. newspapers. This is where, quite frankly, the bulk of "news" is created, despite what people think TV and cable news and all the rest, which repackage and rerun the same stories over and over (shark attack, Obama and Wright, shark attack, rinse and repeat...).

A column points out, through deft use of links to other studies, how bad it really is. Online audience grows, but the numbers are small compared to the print decrease. The math is simple: a smaller audience.

What people know will boil down to the bits and pieces they catch from CNN, from Fox, from broadcast networks. Most of that is inadvertent exposure to hyped, repeated, partisan-flavored coverage. For the six people who watch PBS, you get some serious content. No one else, at least not on the boob tube. And research shows again and again that watching TV news does little to increase political knowledge. Some studies suggest it actually decreases knowledge.

We learn from print, whether off of dead trees or pixels. But the audience continues to shrink. Think of the Wicked Witch in Oz. "I'm melting, I'm melting." That's the news audience you hear, or maybe just the anguished sobs from people who run news organizations.

And as it shrinks, it becomes more partisan. Hence the emergence of Fox, the changes at CNN, the recent success of MSNBC. What will people know? Very damn little, except that they hate the other guys, as they watch their favorite hosts set up and knock down straw men that represent the other side of the partisan divide.

Do people even care about local news? Stuff in their own neighborhood, their own town? I'm in the middle of analysis of eight years of data to answer just that very question, because that's the only niche newspapers still own.