Since you’re visiting Poynter’s website, I’ll assume you’ve heard this before: America’s local news ecosystem is in crisis.
Across the country, local newspapers are closing down. This trend has prompted researchers to identify a growing number of news deserts, or communities that have little access to essential local information. A declining local press harms democracy: According to the American Journalism Project, it increases polarization, reduces voter turnout and decreases accountability for local leaders.
Yet, lost in these conversations is an analysis of whom the remaining local papers actually serve. With reporting often published in English, many of those papers are inaccessible to recent immigrants and communities that speak English as a second language. These people live in what Emma Murphy, editorial intern at the progressive magazine American Prospect, calls “linguistic news deserts,” or places where the existence of a local paper does not guarantee in-language coverage of local events.
Where do these communities turn for news instead?
While working last fall as a Poynter-Google News Initiative misinformation student fellow for WRAL-TV in North Carolina, I sought to answer this question for the largest language minority group in the state: Hispanic communities.
Our questions
Specifically, we wanted to understand:
- where Hispanic residents in Raleigh-Durham got their local news,
- how much they trust those sources,
- what barriers they face accessing local news,
- and what solutions they might have for improving the accessibility of local coverage.
The need for accessible in-language news was exemplified by an anecdote shared by one of the community leaders I interviewed for this project:
“When COVID happened, (North Carolina) was pushing for these COVID vaccine drives. … They had Spanish speakers, and they had them ready and available … and no one showed up. And they were like, ‘Well, we’re putting this out in the (News & Observer) and WRAL.’ Well, they’re not watching that. So as soon as (the) Spanish news station ran it, they were flooded, because they went to where they are.”
Without a newspaper in their first or preferred language, many minority communities struggle to access essential local news from traditional media outlets, including information about vaccine clinics, or extreme weather warnings. WRAL-TV sought to understand how they could improve the reach of their coverage for these communities.
We created two surveys — one in English and one in Spanish — consisting of questions that would help us study these topics. After standing in front of grocery stores, hanging up flyers in restaurants with my friends, and networking through community organizations, we received 26 responses over about a month and a half. We supplemented our findings with interviews with two community leaders whose experience working in local journalism and with community members strengthened our analysis.
Our findings
Consistent with national research on the news consumption habits of Latino communities, our survey revealed that local Hispanic residents rely predominantly on social media for news, followed by television and websites. Sparse translation, coupled with inadequate representation, creates barriers to news access and may drive distrust in English-language news organizations for Hispanics.
Discussing translation, respondents lamented that there are few attempts at translation of local news into Spanish. When it is translated, the translations are often sensationalist and inaccurate. As one respondent summarized:
“The American media does little to address the realities that affect Hispanic families. There is not enough translation and, sadly, many attempts lack quality because they translate very poorly and I end up uninformed.”
This lack of quality translation, coupled with a lack of holistic representation, pushes community members away from traditional media outlets for news. Community members also felt as if most English-language coverage of their community was negative, focusing on crime rather than community activities and businesses. Again, these limitations may undermine community trust in English news outlets in North Carolina.
Spanish speakers are more trusting of Spanish-language news, and some research finds that community members who receive their news from ethnic media outlets — outlets covering underrepresented communities like the Hispanic community — are more likely to trust Spanish-language journalists.
In comparison, researchers found no increase in trust for English-language reporters when community members watched mainstream outlets for news. As such, a lack of representation and translation may reduce trust in local news.
However, we found that Hispanic residents in the Raleigh-Durham area still trust traditional news sources like websites, newspapers and television more than social media for news. This suggests that barriers to accessibility — namely, inadequate translation — may drive community members to use social media for news, despite feeling as though social media news is untrustworthy. Further, community members cited fact-checks as the least trusted news source, and many community members do not know what they are.
Implications
Given that Hispanic communities are more likely to be exposed to false political information, these findings have important implications for news and fact-checking organizations seeking to promote their content to these communities.
First, the survey results suggest that English local news content and fact-checking by North Carolina outlets are failing to reach portions of the local community. Given that mis- and disinformation proliferate on social media often used by Hispanics for news, it is especially important that these organizations work to make their content visible and accessible to these communities.
Toward that end, community members provided a myriad of suggestions. First, translation must be improved, overseen by at least one bilingual reporter. The advent of artificial intelligence can assist in translation, but absent human supervision, mistakes can be made. At Gizmodo en Español, the Spanish-language version of Gizmodo, a technology news site, an AI error left part of an article entirely in English, for example.
However, it is important to remember that the Hispanic community is a large diaspora, with regional differences in language use and cultural norms. As such, one bilingual reporter will not adequately represent all groups, despite improving the reach of local coverage.
Next, coverage of minority communities should be holistic, rather than focused on issues the outlet feels may be relevant to that group. Community members in Raleigh-Durham said that local English-language coverage often overemphasizes immigration and crime in their coverage of Hispanic communities, rather than covering community achievements and businesses, for example. Based on an Oxford study that found that misrepresentation of minority communities in media undermines trust in those outlets, I suspect that well-rounded coverage could improve community trust in local news outlets.
Finally, news outlets that cannot afford to substantially increase their coverage and/or translation should partner with existing ethnic media organizations and amplify their coverage. In North Carolina, QuéPasa Media Network Raleigh, La Noticia, Enlace NC, and La Conexión all provide essential local coverage for Hispanic community members. Yet, these outlets face many of the same revenue-raising challenges as other local papers. As such, English local papers should strive to supplement and support these ethnic media outlets.
Further research needed
While these findings are important, they’re limited in their applicability: Our sample was not representative of the local Hispanic population. Further research is also needed to understand the news consumption patterns of the various ethnic groups that form the Hispanic diaspora.
Nevertheless, this study provides important insights into the ways in which existing local news organizations in North Carolina and beyond can provide respite to linguistic news deserts. Given the vast linguistic and cultural diversity of the United States, it is essential that local newspapers provide accessible content for as many of its potential readers as it can. Future research should continue to examine ways that local papers can better serve the diverse American electorate.
Chloe Nguyen, an alumnus of Duke University, was a Poynter-Google News Initiative misinformation fellow with WRAL News in North Carolina in the fall of 2023. At Duke she was an Alice M. Baldwin Scholar and a Nakayama Public Service Scholar, and currently is a George J. Mitchell Scholar.
