Media and the Public Interest Initiative

Rutgers University
This research examines the health of the local journalism ecosystems in three New Jersey communities: Newark, New Brunswick, and Morristown. The goal of this research is to develop and apply a set of reliable, scalable performance metrics intended to inform funders, policymakers, researchers, and industry professionals about the state of journalism in local communities and, ultimately, its connection to healthy democracy, and to help guide decision-making about possible areas of intervention.

This report begins by defining the contours of a local journalism ecosystem and distinguishing the notion of a journalism ecosystem from other commonly employed ecosystem concepts such as media ecosystem and communication ecosystem. This report then presents a three-level conceptual and methodological framework for assessing the health of local journalism ecosystems. This analytical framework focuses on Infrastructure (the availability of journalistic sources), Output (the quantity of journalistic output from these sources) and Performance (the extent to which this output is original, is about the local communication, and addresses critical information needs).

This report then applies this analytical framework to the three selected New Jersey communities through a content analysis of a one-week sample of news stories posted on the web and social media posts provided by the journalistic sources identified in each community. The results indicate substantial differences in the journalism infrastructure output and performance across these three communities, particularly when controlling for differences in population size. Across the majority of the measures of journalistic output and performance utilized, Newark ranked the lowest and Morristown ranked the highest, with New Brunswick consistently falling in the middle. Thus, for instance, Morristown possesses more than ten times as many local journalism sources per 10,000 capita than Newark. And, during the measurement period, Morristown journalism sources produced 23 times more news stories and 20 times more social media posts per 10,000 capita than Newark journalism sources, and 2.5 times more news stories and 3.4 times more social media posts per 10,000 capita than New Brunswick journalism sources. New Brunswick journalism sources produced 9.3 times more news stories and six times more social media posts per 10,000 capita than Newark journalism sources. MORE