Many people who live in “local news deserts” don’t feel deprived of local news, study finds

Back in 2019, Pew found that most Americans think local news is doing just fine. In Pew’s survey of 35,000 U.S. adults, 71% said they believe “their local news outlets are doing very or somewhat well financially.”

The industry’s attempts to educate consumers “[seem] to largely have gone unheard,” Amy Mitchell, then Pew’s director of journalism research (she now heads the Center for News, Technology, and Innovation) said in a briefing at the time. “There’s really a disconnect there between the public’s knowledge and understanding about the industry and how it’s functioning, compared with what we see in headlines day in and day out about budget cuts and revenue declines.”

I was reminded of that study as I read the results of another study, this one from the Medill Local News Initiative at Northwestern University. Medill worked with Qualtrics last summer to survey 500 U.S. adults from 206 counties that fit Medill’s definition of news deserts (“counties with no professional source of local news, such as a print or online newspaper, based within that county”), and another 500 adults from counties you might call news oases (those with 30 or more professional news outlets).

One key finding: Many people who live in “news deserts” don’t seem to care much (or, as Medill puts it, they “don’t know what they’re missing”):

The poll showed that people living in news desert counties, defined as those with no professional news outlet based in their county, generally consume news at nearly the same rate as people living in areas served by local newspapers. Moreover, they don’t think of themselves as being deprived of local news sources. They appear satisfied to have social media, TV news and other options to fill the gap.

And:

In general, people in both news deserts and news-rich communities follow similar routines. In news deserts, 49% of respondents reported looking at news about their communities at least once a day, compared with 53% in areas with abundant news sources.

Despite being deprived of local news sources, people in news deserts don’t seem frustrated with their ability to stay informed. Consumers in news deserts and news-abundant areas both report that accessing reliable local news is relatively easy to do, with 90 percent and 94 percent of respondents saying that news is somewhat or very easy to access, respectively.

Importantly, the survey left it to answerers to define the term “news” — meaning when respondents reported consuming news daily about their local community, they were including sources beyond traditional journalism, such as social media influencers or friends and family.

Other studies have also suggested that most Americans think they get plenty of news.

Medill posits that folks living in news deserts are happy enough because “residents get so used to feeling thirsty that they no longer realize there is a different way to live.” There are other potential explanations too. A big one: Normal people simply may not value professionally run local news organizations as much as journalists wish they did.

You can read the full study (conducted with support from the MacArthur Foundation) here.