Identifying news deserts as a growing phenomenon is nothing new. Penny Abernathy of Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism and other scholars have been tracking the rapid national spread of local news dead spots for well over a decade.
But today, my colleagues and University of Maryland Merrill College of Journalism media scholars Tom Rosenstiel and Jerry Zremski offer a new take: a far more detailed, first-of-its-kind study diagnosing the local news crisis in a single state.
Their idea is that an intensely local focus can inspire workable ideas for news restoration in a close collaboration between the university and Maryland editors struggling to survive. But this is not just a local initiative. Rosenstiel says he will make Merrill’s research model, with detailed instructions and survey questions, available to other universities around the country. (I had no role in the study.)
The report took a year to complete with the help of a team of students. The co-authors call their report “the first-ever comprehensive baseline assessment of the status and health of journalism in the state.” They’ve created a snapshot of the content of over 150 news operations, including small online outlets that Marylanders are increasingly relying on for local coverage. In addition, they surveyed editors around the state about their needs and, in too many cases, challenges to their survival.
Their findings in “The Maryland News Ecosystem,” released Friday, are surprisingly upbeat, given the severity of the local news crisis. The co-authors located some vibrant areas of coverage where they did not expect to see them. There was robust reporting by several outlets in Baltimore, even the troubled Sun, on such topics as race, religion, police conduct, the Francis Scott Key Bridge collapse, and its aftermath. There was also vigorous reporting in several rural and quasi-rural areas.
While some local papers and websites have been closing, others have been opening. Fifty-four news organizations responded to a survey question about their outlet’s age. Thirty of those opened for business after 2000, nine of the 30 after 2020. Rosenstiel said no new news outlets were opening their doors at all when he started as a reporter in the 1980s.
As to financial health, seven out of 10 editors said their online audiences were on the rise. Three-quarters said they were “financially solvent” at the moment and 60% said they had been solvent since 2018 or longer. On the other hand, 39% of the outlets surveyed expressed doubt that they could last for another two years without boosting revenue.
According to the report, news deserts now sprawl across swaths of largely rural western Maryland and the eastern shore.
The biggest news vacuum is the Washington, D.C., suburb of Prince George’s County (population 955,000). That county is “home to a prominent county executive who is running for U.S., Senate and a school board whose legendary internal bickering has led to legal action and state intervention.” Yet comprehensive countywide coverage of local government has been nearly dead in Prince George’s for some time, with only a few hyperlocal news sites on the beat. Prince George’s news is even closer to flatlining now that The Washington Post and WAMU, D.C.’s NPR station, are scaling back local coverage to cut costs.
Can Prince George’s and the other Maryland info-deserts be re-newsed? The answer may depend at least in part on new technology.
In the study, editors said they needed more reporters, more digital training, more advanced technology or some combination of these.
Perhaps Rosenstiel and Zremski’s most troubling finding is that, in much of Maryland, county and city governments and local businesses drive the news agenda, largely by press release. These often appear verbatim — or slightly paraphrased — in content-hungry news outlets, with no analysis or follow-up by journalists. Many public meetings go uncovered. Enterprise reporting on government is rare, leaving many Marylanders in the dark about what’s being done with their tax dollars.
Rosenstiel says a partial solution would be an AI system for monitoring and transcribing government meetings, flagging immediate news developments for human reporters, and spotting long-term trends as fertile ground for enterprise reporting. Such a system might monitor vested interests who benefit from zoning decisions, or the prominence of pro-book banning witnesses in school board meetings, or police department spending on SWAT and anti-riot gear. While AI technology is no substitute for a human reporter on the scene, it could help resource-strapped news outlets get beyond printing official press releases.
Rosenstiel and Zremski released the report this morning at a Merrill College conference on restoring local news. Over a dozen representatives of Maryland news organizations, from The Baltimore Banner to the Tiny News Collective, were among the 80 registered guests, along with representatives from various save-local-journalism groups.
Local Maryland editors said at the conference that they could use help from Merrill in acquiring new technology and the training to use it, among other things. They might eventually be able to use Maryland students to supplement staff. Marty Kaiser, director of Merrill’s Capital News Service, which supplies student-reported, staff-edited news to local outlets, said he stood ready to help. Students at Maryland receive rigorous one-on-one training in newsroom standards at the news service, at the Howard Center for Investigative Journalism, and in other Merrill programs, publishing their work in professional news outlets.
Those who enrolled at Maryland hoping to get jobs that would bolster democracy can end up being bolsterers even before they have graduated.
