Local news

thumb|[[WFLA-TV|WFLA's Alessandra Young at Tarpon Springs]]

In journalism, local news covers events that would not be of interest to another locality, or otherwise be of national or international scope. It, in contrast to national or international news, caters to the interests of the local community and focuses on local events and issues. Some key features of local newsrooms include regional politics, weather, business, and human interest stories.

Local news readership has been declining in recent years, according to a recent study. As more and more television consumers tap into streamed programming, local news viewership is declining. Nikki Usher, an associate professor at the College of Media at the University of Illinois, argued in "The Complicated Future of Local News" that "critical and comprehensive local news is a recent invention, not a core element of the history of American democracy."

Conversely, citing Alexis de Tocqueville in the second volume of Democracy in America (1840), political scientist Robert D. Putnam noted in the first edition of Bowling Alone (2000) that differences between the Greatest Generation and the Silent Generation in the United States versus Baby boomers and Generation X in local civic association membership rates and various forms of civic and political engagement was significantly associated with generational differences in news consumption broadly and of newspaper subscriptions especially, such that Americans born before 1946 reported in a Yankelovich Partners survey at the end of the 20th century that they derived belongingness from local newspapers at more than twice the rate of Americans born after 1964.

Television

Opt-outs of local television news are frequent before, during, or after national evening news television programming. Television networks can also commission or make provisions for local stations to produce longer standalone local news programs. Some local television markets/viewing areas within a country may even have a dedicated 24-hour local news channel. Local news stations have also started covering less and less local politics in favor of stories that they believe will garner more clicks or attention. Less than 15% of the news and public affairs programming on commercial news/talk radio was local programming, while the total number of local cable news channels nationally was not growing (and possibly declining in some regions) since most channels were only attempting to break-even rather than be profitable and most cable operators did not invest in local cable news channels and had no plans to do so.

Public-access television (PEG) channels were seeing declining funding and most cable operators did not carry PEG channels. Only 23 states and the District of Columbia had a state public affairs network (SPAN) modeled after C-SPAN that was carried on cable television, and the 2011 FCC report noted that SPANs were not covered under the agency's must-carry rules. A subsequent Pew Research Center study released in 2014 estimated that 54% of statehouse reporters were employed by newspapers, newswires, or college student publications rather than broadcasters, news websites, or other nontraditional media. However, the 2014 Pew study also estimated that 53% of statehouse reporters in the country did not cover the beat full-time for their publications, that 71% of newspapers and 86% of local television stations had no statehouse reporters, and that there was a 35% staff reduction in full-time statehouse reporters from 2003 to 2014 at 220 newspapers surveyed. A subsequent report issued by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) in 2023 found that increases in staffing at digital-native news websites from 2008 to 2020 were not offsetting cuts in newsroom staffing among newspapers (which numbered in the tens of thousands of jobs), while a 2023 Congressional Research Service (CRS) report found that newspapers and television still employed the majority of payrolled newsroom staff in the United States in 2022 while online-only news websites employed less than 10%.

The 2023 GAO and CRS reports noted further that the reduction in subscription and advertising revenue for the newspaper industry from 2000 to 2020 that constituted the overwhelming majority of its inflation-adjusted total revenue was not being offset by digital circulation or online advertising. Also, the 2011 FCC report noted that even though the share of total U.S. advertising spending received by newspapers had been falling since the 1950s, the share received by television and cable did not exceed the share received by newspapers until the 1990s, and that paid circulation by newspapers did not begin to consistently decline until the 1980s. However, despite the shift in advertising revenue to television and cable, the 2011 FCC report noted that local television stations were also seeing declining newsroom staffing alongside newspapers, with some stations outsourcing, reducing, or ending their local news programming and more frequently in smaller media markets. The 2011 FCC report also noted that the agency's must-carry rules did not favor television stations that provided local news programming. The 2023 GAO and CRS reports both noted survey research showing an increasing preference by the American public to receive news through the internet rather than through television, radio, or in print and a declining willingness to pay subscriptions for news, while the 2011 FCC report referenced survey research that found declining news consumption across technological mediums and a preference for entertainment programming on television rather than news.

Additionally, the 2011 FCC report and the 2023 GAO report both noted the unbundling of soft news and hard news content on the internet that formerly provided cross subsidization for newspaper beats, and along with the 2023 CRS report, both noted the unbundling of news content from advertising due to the rise of classified advertising websites and search engine and social media marketing that offer greater targeting than news websites. In light of such changes in consumer preferences and market dynamics, the 2023 GAO report suggested along with the 2011 FCC report that local public interest journalism is at risk of market failure due to having the non-excludable and non-rivalrous features of a public good that generates positive externalities and is vulnerable to free riding. The 2023 GAO report also noted that the FCC has no regulations or guidelines for broadcasters that define what constitutes public interest programming and allows broadcasters wide discretion in determining how to fulfill their public interest obligations under the Communications Act of 1934. Like the Federal Radio Commission under the Radio Act of 1927, the FCC promulgated various public interest programming guidelines and regulations (such as the fairness doctrine) and a process for ascertaining local programming of interest to the communities that the stations were licensed to serve through the 1970s, but these were rescinded or relaxed under FCC Chairs Charles Ferris and Mark Fowler in the 1980s. while a 2025 Pew survey found that only 36% of American adults reported having a cable or satellite television subscription.

Also, along with the 2023 GAO and CRS reports, a 2022 United States Copyright Office (USCO) report noted that while the news industry and Big Tech companies do not dispute that news aggregators and the web feeds of social media websites drive significant traffic to news sites, the news industry disputes the extent of the traffic and its economic value since aggregators and feeds direct users to articles rather than home pages and because of a substitution effect from aggregators and feeds featuring headlines and portions of article lead paragraphs. The 2023 CRS report noted that the Big Tech companies that receive the majority of online advertising revenue and compete with the news industry for such revenue are also the largest providers of advertising technology to the news industry, and that the Big Tech companies had been alleged to have engaged in anti-competitive conduct in the provision of advertising technology, news aggregators, search engines, social networking services, and app stores. The CRS noted further that almost two-thirds of total U.S. advertising spending by 2020 was online and that more than half of online advertising spending was received by Google and Facebook alone, while inflation-adjusted total U.S. advertising spending fell overall during the preceding two decades.

Ultimately, the 2022 USCO report found that the effectiveness of copyright protections for the news industry were undermined by an inequality of bargaining power between the news industry and the Big Tech companies in concluding that the online advertising revenue dispute between the industries was more of an issue for competition policy rather than copyright law. The 2021 Pew survey also noted that previous industry research released in 2020 found that 55% of American households subscribed to multiple streaming services, while the 2025 Pew survey found that 83% of American adults watched streaming services and that 55% watched streaming services and did not subscribe to cable or satellite television. reports issued by the CRS in 2016 and 2020 noted that the FCC had not expanded its definition of multichannel video programming distributors to include online video distributors, and that the regulatory framework for broadcast, cable, and satellite television does not generally apply to streaming television (including must-carry requirements). The 2020 CRS report noted further that vertical integration was a common practice in the streaming television industry, and while subsequent market analysis using the Herfindahl–Hirschman index suggested a trend towards greater competition, the analysis still found market concentration to the degree of oligopoly.

Relatedly, the Pew Research Center issued a report in June 2023 that analyzed the content of 451 podcasts listed on the daily top 200 most popular charts of Apple Podcasts and Spotify from April through September 2022. The report found that only 15% of the podcasts surveyed had a news or current events focus, and that 46% of the news-focused podcasts were affiliated with a traditional news organization. Additionally, 51% of the news-focused podcasts covered sports and topics other than politics and government, and while the episodes of the news-focused podcasts tended to be longer and released more frequently, 78% of the news-focused podcasts followed a commentary, interview, news summary, or recap format rather than an in-depth reporting format. Also, while only 8% of the 451 podcasts surveyed were available exclusively through one site (since 90% were also available through Google Podcasts, 82% through Stitcher, and virtually all of the 51% with a video component through YouTube), only 31% were operated independently while 69% were affiliated with a larger organization, and 47% sought financial support from listeners by paid subscriptions, merchandise sales, or donations with 60% of independently-operated podcasts doing so in comparison to 41% of organization-affiliated podcasts.

Influence of Facebook on news stories

In 2018, Tech Crunch journalist Josh Constine reported that Facebook "stole the news business" by using its sponsorship of new outlets to make many news publishers its "ghostwriters." Constine further noted that Facebook has been targeting local news sources for many years.

See also

• Broadcast journalism
• Citizen journalism
• Open-source journalism
• Social media

References

Works cited

Local community news