Monitoring the health of Minnesota’s local news landscape through studying the supply of local outlets.
Benjamin Toff
September 27, 2024
1. Introduction and key findings
What does a healthy ecosystem for local news look like? We know that relative to other states, Minnesota has a great number of strengths and assets, benefiting from some of the highest newspaper subscription rates and levels of civic engagement in the country. On the supply side, Minnesota also has some of the most active and vibrant institutions reporting and producing local news: a regional newspaper whose owner has invested in digital innovation and a statewide expansion in its coverage; a large and influential public media broadcaster that serves communities throughout Minnesota, which has also helped to incubate new initiatives geared toward underserved communities. From MinnPost to Project Optimist to Documenters, the state has a large and growing number of nonprofit news outlets and is home to one of the first and most active Press Forward Locals in the country—a broad philanthropic effort that seeks to mobilize funders around support for local news. In short, Minnesota is poised to be a model for what’s possible for a local news ecosystem in 2024.
And yet, Minnesota is far from immune to the same challenging dynamics impacting the industry nationally and globally. In the last several years, there have been an alarming series of stories about newspaper closures all around the state, and we know there are many places that go without access to local news of any relevance or substance to their communities at all.
This report is the first comprehensive, systematic effort to take stock of what the local news ecosystem looks like in Minnesota in 2024, cataloguing each and every outlet for local information we could identify. We have undertaken this effort in order to establish a benchmark that can be used to compare changes over time. Should we see improvements in the coming years as more communities invest in local news, we hope to be able to establish how these newly launched outlets have helped to counteract or at least stem the tide of recent declines. The report also highlights where new investments in local news are already being made both by commercial owners as well as new nonprofit initiatives, which account for a small albeit growing minority of this sector. Finally, in examining the role played by ownership and ownership changes in the disappearance of news outlets statewide, the report may also help to underscore the need for continued monitoring of these aspects of media organizations’ stewardship by policymakers, community members, and others who care about the future of local journalism in their communities.
About this project
This report is part of an ongoing project of the Minnesota Journalism Center that seeks to monitor the health of the ecosystem for local journalism statewide. We focus here on identifying where each source of local news and information exists statewide across modes of media (print, radio, television, and digital), and to some extent even beyond the boundaries of conventional journalism. We take a deliberately broad definition for what we include in our data knowing as we do that many people rely on a range of sources outside of professional journalism to stay informed about local information. We have therefore included in our news outlet census many sources, including commercial radio or single author digital creators, who may not consider themselves journalists but who nonetheless are an important conduit for local information in some communities.
A particular focus of this report is on tracking what outlets have closed and been founded in the last six years. We use the year 2018 as a key dividing line for two reasons. First, it allows for comparisons to a period sufficiently prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, which we know wreaked havoc on a large number of small businesses, especially news outlets whose finances were precarious to start. Second, this effort builds on and extends an earlier research study that sought to track all local news outlets across Minnesota, which include a census of news outlets on Facebook starting in the year 2018. This earlier study formed the backbone for the data collection we embarked on in this project.
In addition to identifying outlets and geocoding them for where their newsrooms or headquarters are based, as well as which communities they say they aim to serve, we also collected Census data about these communities, which we use to examine differences between communities that are and are not served by news outlets (the focus of section 3). Where possible we also track ownership, which we delve into in section 4 of this report. More information about the methods we used in assembling these data are provided elsewhere on the Ecosystem Mapping Project website as is a searchable table of these data and an interactive map.1
Over the course of several months, this project led us to identify just over 600 news outlets (602) based either in Minnesota or serving communities statewide. While we are confident that this number represents the vast majority of news outlets statewide, we also know our data may include some errors and omissions, especially when it comes to changes in ownership, and so we hope that in publishing our full dataset online, it will encourage journalists, publishers, and community members statewide to get in touch so that we may continue updating these data going forward in an ongoing basis. The analysis contained in this report is our best estimate of what our local news ecosystem looks like at this moment—a snapshot in time—but we also fully expect the ecosystem to keep evolving at a rapid pace, requiring sustained monitoring to best serve the people who depend on these sources to stay informed about the news that matters to them.
Key findings
- More than 12 percent of all local news outlets in Minnesota have closed since 2018, a pace of more than 11 per year. Over the last six years, we identified 76 news outlets that closed. These closures have occurred almost exclusively among print newspapers and to a lesser extent digital enterprises with broadcasters a relative source of stability across the ecosystem.
- For every two news outlets that closed, there has been one new local news outlet launched during this same period. Thirty-eight newspapers and digital sites have helped to replace some of what has been lost since 2018 with many of the new outlets situated in the same communities where closures have occurred.
- Places served by news outlets tend to be whiter and older than places without any news outlets specifically serving them. The demographic profile of places in Minnesota with news outlets serving them are also somewhat less educated and less wealthy, a reflection of the large number of small legacy newspapers that continue to serve smaller towns and communities in Greater Minnesota. Likewise, there are few differences in the demographic profile of the places where outlets have closed compared to where they have launched.
- Ownership changes may be a critical sign that closures are looming. We estimate, conservatively, that 11 percent of the ecosystem experienced a change in ownership in the last decade and that among those that did, nearly 30 percent ended up closing in the years that followed. One way to stem the tide of closures may be for communities and policymakers to pay closer attention to changes in ownership to prevent closures before they take effect.
- Nonprofit news has grown significantly as a share of the local news ecosystem. While commercial owners account for the vast majority of news outlets in the ecosystem, nonprofits were behind more than one-in-five of the new outlets founded since 2018.
2. Changes in the ecosystem
In 2024, Minnesota’s local news ecosystem remains comparatively vibrant relative to other states, but the state has seen its share of prominent closures over the past several years. In this section, we provide an overview of where outlets are situated across the state, where closures have occurred, and where new outlets have been founded in many cases to respond to the disappearance of local sources of information in some communities. What this analysis shows is that although the state has lost more than 12 percent of all local news outlets across the state, we have also managed to replace nearly half of those outlets with new arrivals that launched during this same period.
Mapping the ecosystem
We begin by examining what the ecosystem looks like when we tally up the number of local outlets in each county. This approach mirrors the most well-known effort to map the local news ecosystems, the Medill Local News Initiative, which defines “news deserts” according to whether a county does or does not contain one or more news outlets.
By this measure, Minnesota’s ecosystem clears this bar. All 87 counties continue to be served by at least one news outlet. The lone exception grayed out in our map is Wilkin County, but it too is served by the Wahpeton Daily News, based across the border in nearby North Dakota.
More generally, however, by mapping the ecosystem in this manner, it helps to illustrate the regional variation across these data. On the one hand, there is a large concentration of local news sites (155 to be exact) based out of Hennepin or Ramsey Counties. This represents nearly a third (31.6 percent) of all currently operating local news outlets based in Minnesota, but this geographic concentration is an almost direct mirror of the state’s population skew. These same two counties also account for 31.9 percent of the state’s total population. Rather, it seems the share of local news outlets in counties outside of the state’s main population center are vastly overrepresented relative to their population.
Closures
We identified 76 news outlets that have closed since 2018, or approximately 12.2 percent of all news outlets in the state. This amounts to more than 11 news outlets per year on average. We map the outlets that closed in the accompanying figure.
While closures have been dispersed across the state, they include a number of historical newspapers that date back multiple generations including the Balaton Press Tribune (founded in 1887), the Belle Plaine Herald (founded in 1882), and the Spring Grove Herald (founded in 1891). Some newer outlets are also included among the closures, including the Zenith News (founded in 2007), and the Column, a nonprofit news service under the sponsorship of Springboard for the Arts devoted to covering the LGBT community in Minnesota.
The overwhelming majority of the closures identified were among print publications (70), with the remaining six closures identified among digital-only outlets.
Bright spots
There has been a smaller but not insignificant number of new outlets founded during this same time period: approximately 6.3 percent of all news outlets we identified in the state were founded since 2018—38 in total. In other words, there has been nearly one news outlet created during these six years for every two news outlets lost.
Many of these outlets are situated in places where news outlets previously closed. For example, when the Litchfield Independent Review published its final edition earlier this year after 148 years, Meeker County, west of the Twin Cities and southwest of St. Cloud, was technically in danger of becoming a “news desert.” Although the Eden Valley Watkins Voice, based in nearby Stearns County, and the Dassel-Cokato Enterprise Dispatch, based in Wright County, continue to serve parts of Meeker County, the Litchfield area itself was left without a news outlet of its own. That vacuum prompted CherryRoad Media to launch the Litchfield Rail in May this year as well as the Hutchinson Station in nearby McLeod County, which also lost its local paper in the same closure.
This pattern has repeated itself elsewhere as well. In southeast Minnesota, the nonprofit Root River Current was founded to replace a number of local newspaper closures in that area of the state. Likewise, St. Cloud Live was founded in response to the well-publicized hollowing out of the Gannett owned St. Cloud Times. The overall effect has been to counteract some of, but not all, of the disappearance of local news around the state.
When we map all of the newly launched news outlets across the state since 2018, it is apparent that in contrast to the patterns of overrepresentation of local news in Greater Minnesota, many of these newly founded news outlets are geographically clustered in and around the Twin Cities. More than half (22) are headquartered in the Minneapolis-St. Paul-Bloomington metro area. These patterns may have significant implications for how the local news ecosystem is potentially becoming increasingly urban over time.
Lastly, it is worth noting that not all 38 news outlets founded during this period have managed to survive. Two of them: the Warroad Advocate (Warroad, Minn.) and The Bulletin (Red Wing, Minn.) were short-lived experiments that each came and went in less than a year. The Warroad Advocate only existed for two months, a short-lived attempt to provide the Warroad community with a local news source after the closure of the Warroad Pioneer, a 121-year old print newspaper that ceased publication in 2019 and the subject of a much-read New York Times feature. The Bulletin did not last much longer. Founded to merge the operations of the Woodbury Bulletin and the South Washington County Bulletin, the combined operation closed down just 10 months after it started. That led two former state legislators to found their own news site, the Woodbury News Net, which recently began publishing a regular newsletter as the founders prepare to get their full site up and running.
Areas of growth and stability
Finally, we seek to highlight several additional areas of comparative strength in the ecosystem where we have, at the very least, not observed closures, even if the sectors themselves have also been hard hit by disruption from technological change. Among these areas are broadcast television and radio, which remains among the most important sources of local news in many communities, even as growing numbers of younger Minnesotans are turning to online sources for news. While broadcasters have no doubt been affected by changes in the advertising market, they have so far managed to weather the transition to digital somewhat more smoothly than print newspapers with many local affiliates maintaining strong reach and brand recognition online.
Another area of relative stability has been among ethnic media and college media, which each account for a small but important segment of the overall ecosystem: 6.3 percent and 2 percent, respectively. We did not identify any such outlets among the closures in the ecosystem since 2018. Moreover, ethnic media account for five of the 38 new outlets in our data including some well-known success stories such as Sahan Journal and BLCK Press/Center for Broadcast Journalism. Such outlets not only provide news and information for underserved communities, in many cases such coverage cuts across geographic lines, making it an essential information source for connecting people around the state and beyond.
Likewise, some philanthropic funders see college media and partnerships with universities as an increasingly important avenue for helping to bolster local news, and Minnesota’s nearly 200 colleges and universities may well become an important part of the overall ecosystem in the coming years as a result.
As this section has helped demonstrate, the changing local news ecosystem is mixed at best with as many as 11 news outlets closing annually across the state. And yet, Minnesota’s ecosystem is resilient and by examining the wide range of outlets in the aggregate, we can also see areas of strength and growth, with one new outlets being formed for every two outlets closing. The question going forward is whether these trends will take root and empower a more vibrant future in a sustainable manner or whether these gains may ultimately be fleeting.
3. Where are the greatest gaps?
In the previous section, we examined the geography of the state’s local news ecosystem, demonstrating how a disproportionate number of outlets are situated in counties outside of the Twin Cities metro area. At the same time, larger organizations that cover Minnesota as a whole do tend to be concentrated in the state’s urban core. Of the 73 news outlets identified that cover statewide news, 59 (80.8%) are headquartered in the Twin Cities metro area.
In this section, we move beyond a mere focus on geographic differences between where outlets are situated and what communities they cover and instead drill down more closely to examine patterns in the demographics of these geographic differences. Using data from the U.S. Census, specifically the 5-Year American Community Survey (2018-2022), we look first at differences in the demographic profile between places served by one or more news outlet and places that lack a news outlet specifically covering their community. Next, we examine whether there are demographic differences between places where news outlets have closed and places with new news outlets, finding far more similarities between these communities than differences.
Mapping the local news ecosystem to demographics
The U.S. census categorizes communities in a number of different ways. In addition to the state’s 87 counties and two dozen or so metropolitan and micropolitan statistical areas, the state of Minnesota also consists of 914 distinct cities, towns, and “Census-designated places.” In our data tracking the local news ecosystem, we identified just under half of these places (41.8%) as specifically served by a local news outlet. In this section, we sought to understand better differences between those specifically served by news outlets and those that are not.
It is worth noting in considering this analysis that places not specifically served by news outlets are not necessarily news deserts; after all, most of these places are served by outlets who consider that community’s county or metro area to be in its coverage area. And yet, for many people, the notion of local is closely tied to the specific communities in which they live, not necessarily these larger geographic units.
Looking in the aggregate across all places designated as the coverage areas for news outlets in our data, we find several distinct patterns. First, places with news outlets tend to be both whiter and older than other places around the state. While places with news outlets serving them are only slightly less Hispanic or Latino than the statewide average (5.6 percent compared to 5.7 percent), they are much less Black (5.1 percent compared to 8.5 percent) and have a significantly larger percentage of their populations over 65 years old (19.2 percent compared to 16.5 percent for the statewide average).
These patterns are in large part a reflection of the fact that so many of the individual news outlets that constitute the local news ecosystem are community weekly newspapers often situated in more rural parts of the state, where populations are older and less racially diverse.
We also find that places served by one or more news outlet on the average are somewhat less likely to be places where people hold college degrees (29.5 percent compared to 38.2 percent). Likewise, there is an $11,000 difference in median household income between places served by news outlets on average and the statewide average, again reflecting the fact that so many news outlets are situated in less wealthy parts of the state.
To be clear, these data do not suggest that local news in Minnesota predominantly serve less educated and less wealthy people on average. These demographics reflect aggregate characteristics of the communities being served—not individuals—with each community weighted the same even as there are quite large disparities in populations between places statewide. For example, a news outlet serving a metro area like the Twin Cities (3.7 million) counts the same in this analysis as the Pine Cone Press-Citizen serving Boy River (with an approximate population of just 3 residents), the smallest Census-designated place served by a news outlet in our data.2
Instead, what this analysis demonstrates is again, the relative overrepresentation of less educated and less wealthy communities among the places where Minnesota news outlets (currently) exist, which also tend to have populations whiter and older than the urban center of the state.
Patterns in closures and new arrivals
Even as we see large disparities in the demographics of places in Minnesota with and without news outlets, these differences pertain mostly to the ecosystem as a whole. We also sought to understand whether closures, and for that matter, investments in new local news outlets, were also found in communities that systematically differed from the statewide average.
Focusing on just the communities where outlets have either opened or closed since 2018, we find instead that both groups of places tend to look more similar to each other and less similar to those places that lack a local news outlet serving it.
Places where new outlets were founded tend to be slightly younger: 16.9 percent over 65 compared to 19.0 percent for places where outlets closed. They are otherwise nearly identical when it comes to racial or socioeconomic diversity. Places that closed were 5.2 percent Black on average and 5.4 percent Hispanic or Latino, compared to 5.3% and 5.1% respectively for places where outlets launched. Likewise, there were few differences between places where outlets closed versus started with respect to their percentages with college degrees (34.2 percent vs 32.8 percent) or household income ($82k vs. $79.4k).
What to make of these close similarities in the demographic profile of the places where much of the changes in the ecosystem have occurred? On the one hand, it is perhaps no surprise to find such similarities since many new outlets were launched specifically to fill gaps in coverage for communities where outlets closed. On the other hand, it also suggests that many of the more entrenched patterns in terms of what communities are and are not served by local news may not be changing as rapidly as the state’s demographics as a whole.
There are limits of course to what such an analysis is able to demonstrate about the diversity (or lack thereof) of the state’s local news ecosystem. Ultimately so much of the relevant characteristics of diversity involve local news coverage in the content of news, which is likely different to discern in an analysis of the supply of news outlets. What is more, so much of the state’s wealth and racial diversity tends to be clustered in specific areas in ways that may further obscure the nature of these patterns. Nonetheless, by capturing demographic differences between places that lack news outlets and places served by them, this section helps to further illustrate the degree to which the state’s local news ecosystem is particularly skewed toward serving whiter, older, and less socioeconomically advantaged communities outside of the Twin Cities, even as these are also places where a large portion of news outlets are closing.
4. How ownership matters
In this final section, we look more closely at ownership patterns in Minnesota’s local news ecosystem. Over the course of this project, we were able to identify 94% of the current owners, and 90% of the prior owners for those outlets that had an ownership change during the previous 10 years. We categorized these owners for whether their owners were commercial or non-commercial entities including nonprofits, public media or institutions of government. In addition, we considered whether commercial owners were part of larger multi-state chains or conglomerates, either privately or publicly-owned, the vast majority of which were sole proprietorships or family owned small businesses.
The section begins by focusing first on mapping the outlets that experienced ownership changes over the last decade. We show, conservatively, that a small but significant portion of the ecosystem experienced an ownership change during this period. Perhaps more important, however, our analysis shows that a considerable share of those outlets with ownership changes went on to close in the years following. While many owners close their news outlets without ownership changing hands, this analysis does suggest that closures may be particularly likely following such changes.
Next we focus on the composition of owners in the ecosystem as it currently stands and show that the nonprofit sector in particular has grown steadily over the last six years with more than 1-in-5 new outlets founded since 2018 (21.6 percent) using the nonprofit tax status to structure their finances. We conclude with a discussion of the implications of these findings. The growing movement toward nonprofit news has attracted sustained attention from Press Forward both locally and nationally as a possible solution for the crisis facing local news, but it remains unclear whether nonprofits will remain a niche segment or become a more dominant sector of the ecosystem going forward.
Ownership changes
Tracking outlets that changed owners is difficult since not all changes in ownership are announced or reported on. Therefore, any estimate of changes in ownership require the inclusion of a caveat that we can only make assessments about known changes. Nonetheless, that limitation aside, we conservatively estimate that as many as 68 outlets (11.3 percent of the entire ecosystem) experienced a change in ownership between 2014 and today.
Outlets that experienced changes in ownership were, perhaps not surprisingly, overwhelmingly owned by commercial entities prior to the sale. Outlets owned by chains or conglomerates accounted for nearly two-thirds of all ownership changes (64.8 percent). About half of these outlets (44.1 percent) were located in the Twin Cities metro area with others distributed across the state in other smaller town and cities. In that sense, ownership changes were no more concentrated in the urban center than the ecosystem itself more generally.
When we consider among those outlets experiencing a change in ownership, what percentage ultimately closed since 2018, we find a large and significant proportion did so (27.9 percent). Although of course that means that most news outlets experiencing an ownership change did not ultimately close, comparatively the rates of closures among those without an ownership change was far lower (10.7 percent), which suggests that ownership changes and closures are strongly correlated even if most outlets that close do so for unrelated reasons.
Growth in nonprofits
Next, we consider the overall composition of the ecosystem’s owners. In the aggregate, commercial owners constitute more than three quarters of the local news ecosystem with private commercial owners (77.6 percent), including family-owned sole proprietorships, accounting for a plurality of all outlets (41.2 percent). Considering these commercial owners in more detail, more than a third of all news outlets were owned by conglomerates or chains (36.4 percent). A remaining portion is split between nonprofits (13.3 percent) and public-service media or government-owned entities (2.8 percent), each constituting a relatively narrow segment of the overall ecosystem.
This distribution of owners looks similar when considering just the subset of outlets that closed or launched since 2018 with two exceptions: publicly-traded commercial chains and nonprofits. The former was a small but significant portion of the outlets that closed (7.9 percent) a level comparable to its overall percentage of the ecosystem, but none of the local news outlets that have started in recent years were owned by publicly-traded chains. By contrast, we see much the opposite with respect to nonprofits. News outlets controlled by nonprofits were a disproportionately small share of the outlets that closed (3.9 percent) and comparatively a rather large share of those that started during the same time period (21.6 percent). This clear growth in nonprofit ownership mirrors substantial growth for this sector nationally.
As promising as this growth in nonprofits may be, it is worth questioning whether this type of ownership will prove to be any more sustainable ultimately for the health of the ecosystem than what has come before. While certainly many see promise in these models, growing competition for philanthropic dollars among an increasing number of nonprofits has already led to some frustration among outlets about the inequities and unrealistic expectations this space has at times engendered.
It is also worth underscoring that not all nonprofits are created equal. While many are independent, nonpartisan, and produce high quality journalism, a handful of the local news outlets we identified in the course of this project are connected to Metric Media, an organization that publishes largely algorithmically generated content often referred to as pink slime journalism and does so under the structure of a nonprofit. These sites are designed to look like legitimate local news outlets while largely repurposing content from elsewhere, often with a particularly conservative ideological bent. Likewise, the conservative news outlet Alpha News, which launched under somewhat mysterious circumstances in 2015, also operates as a nonprofit.
While nonprofit tax status may be an important tool for some re-envisioning of the local news ecosystem, in the coming years, we hope to assess whether continued changes fundamentally alter the composition of the overall ecosystem or whether ultimately its commercial orientation remains dominant.
5. Conclusion and next steps
This report took stock of the changes in Minnesota’s local news ecosystem since 2018, demonstrating that even as there has been a large number of closures—more than 11 per year for the last seven years—the state has also seen the emergence of a great number of new local news outlets launched during this same period to replace some of what has been lost. While local news outlets continue to be disproportionately found in more rural parts of the state, which tend to be both whiter and older as well as less socioeconomically advantaged, new outlets are also increasingly serving more diverse audience segments. Many of these new outlets are also, comparatively speaking, more likely to be owned by nonprofit organizations rather than commercial owners, although smaller family-owned small businesses continue to constitute most of the owners of local news outlets statewide.
The importance of these findings are threefold. First, they help fill in the gaps of our understanding about the nature of the local news ecosystem in Minnesota. While the outlines of these findings may be familiar to observers of this industry, the specifics matter as one typically only has a specific vantage point into the entirety of the ecosystem at any given moment. Second, by detailing the particularities of the state’s ecosystem at this moment in time, it allows future researchers to more systematically evaluate changes in the coming years as there continue to be both more closures and, one hopes, new investments made to reshape the ecosystem toward a more durable future. Finally, the data made available through this project can help guide decision-making by journalists, funders, and others who seek to understand where needs and opportunities are greatest.
Next steps: Measuring depth and reach
These contributions notwithstanding, this study contains a considerable number of limitations. Knowing about the closure or continued existence of a local news outlet after all tells us nothing about the quality of its local reporting. Nor does it tell us anything about what the public thinks of its journalism. To assess the depth and reach of local news coverage in any given community, that requires more extensively analyzing aspects of the substance of those outlet’s coverage as well as understanding how the public thinks about the supply of news available to them.
For that reason, this report is only Phase 1 of a much larger project that seeks to triangulate on those matters through a series of research projects. We have begun here by conducting a census of news outlets in order to provide a snapshot of the ecosystem at a moment in time, which can serve as a benchmark for understanding changes in the years ahead. But in the coming years we also aim to collect several other kinds of data to complement these efforts. These include studies designed to answer the following three questions in particular:
- What communities and what topics are covered in local news content by the outlets identified in this report? By assessing changes to the content of local news, we may better assess variation in the quality of local coverage in terms of who these outlets are truly serving and how.
- How many local journalists are employed in each of the communities where local news outlets may or may not be present? Understanding the link between the employment landscape for local news and the sustainability of quality local journalism is essential for assessing what kinds of interventions may be needed to bolster local newsgathering and reporting.
- What do Minnesotans think about the choices available to them for local news and information? Studying the supply of local news offers an incomplete portrait of the ecosystem without also measuring how audiences evaluate the options available to them. We hope to collect a combination of surveys and qualitative in-depth interviews with members of the public to better understand what a healthy local news ecosystem looks like from the perspective of the people those news sources seek to serve.
The health of a local news ecosystem depends upon a variety of factors, including especially the public's support for news as well as whether or not professional commitments to high quality journalism are being maintained. The ecosystem is made up not only of individuals who report and disseminate the news day after day, but also their audiences, as well as owners of the media institutions that structure so much of the ecosystem itself. Each of these parts of the ecosystem are shaped by forces that extend far beyond the borders of Minnesota, especially economic headwinds that so often constrain decision-making in newsrooms and influence the willingness of entrepreneurs to take chances on new journalistic enterprises. The indicators systematically gathered as part of this study offer one way of understanding the outcomes of these processes, but they do not tell a complete story nor do they predict the future. The next chapter for local news in Minnesota depends upon what those working both within and outside of the ecosystem choose to do with this information.
Notes
- We note that this mapping project is one of several similar efforts around the country to collect systematic data examining local news ecosystems. Researchers from across these projects are working in collaboration through the Local News Impact Consortium to establish uniform data standards and methodologies to facilitate and improve data-sharing and analysis across geographies.
- The Pine Cone Press-Citizen does not exclusively serve the Boy River community. It is one of several towns in the area it describes as part of its coverage area.
About the author
Primary tabs
Benjamin Toff is Director of the Minnesota Journalism Center (MJC), an Associate Professor at the Hubbard School of Journalism and Mass Communication, and the Project Lead for the MJC Ecosystem Mapping Project. He studies public opinion, political communication, digital media, and changing journalistic practices and is co-author of Avoiding the News: Reluctant Audiences for Journalism (2024, Columbia University Press). From 2020-2023, he was also a Senior Research Fellow at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at the University of Oxford where he led a multi-country study of the factors driving declines in trust in news. He is currently working on a new book exploring the role played by opinion surveys in news coverage of politics. Prior to his academic career, he worked as a professional journalist, mostly as a researcher at the New York Times.
Acknowledgements
For their research assistance with processing and checking the data for this report, special thanks go to Quentin Cochran and Jessica Tuleassi who provided invaluable support in helping to organize and verify the underlying data used in these analyses. In addition, Emily Kurtz assisted at an earlier stage of this project examining a variety of approaches to mapping these data for the web. Thanks, too, to Nick Mathews for helping with coding the 2018 data that became the backbone of this effort. Several other members of the Local News Impact Consortium, but especially Damon Kiesow, Regina Lawrence, Courtney Tabor, and Matt Weber all offered invaluable guidance at various stages of this project. Finally, additional thanks go to Elisia Cohen and the Hubbard School of Journalism & Mass Communication for supporting the renewed vision for the Minnesota Journalism Center, which has made this report possible.
