Local news and COVID-19 in North Carolina (page 12)

Conclusion

As the COVID-19 pandemic ebbs, it’s fitting to look back and assess how local media outlets — battered by more than a decade of layoffs and cost-cutting, yet still resourceful, dedicated and essential — covered the crisis. This study examined a sample of COVID-19 coverage from six local news outlets in North Carolina during four sample periods from early 2020 to early 2021 in order to find differences and trends in the total amount of coverage, topics covered and frames used.

While the COVID-19 crisis made it impossible to ignore the importance of local media in our lives and its vital role in our ability to function as citizens in connected, healthy communities, the crisis also highlighted in many cases the decline of local media. We live at a paradoxical time in which national news outlets are thriving and more information than ever is available instantaneously and for free, yet the sources we turn to in order to understand our own cities and towns are withering. The local news media must find a way to rise and meet the challenge of providing critical coverage in a crisis.

The findings in this study paint a picture of a local media landscape with large variations in the amount and types of local coverage audiences receive through local news websites. People who visited WLOS’ website were more likely to read explanatory stories, while those who visited ABC11 found a more hopeful spin on COVID-19. Readers in Charlotte received the largest volume of local coverage, with a heavy focus on risk, restrictions, cases and death numbers. People in Southern Pines, meanwhile, benefitted from a robust community newspaper but received no truly local broadcast TV coverage from ABC11. Local news coverage of the COVID-19 pandemic observed in this study was largely utilitarian, largely focused on basic stories about topics such as the number of cases and deaths, restrictions, event cancellations and when certain groups would be eligible to receive the vaccine.

And none of the news outlets increased their output of local articles to correspond with the increasing severity of the pandemic over time — in fact, at most, the opposite happened. This inconsistency in the amount of coverage, more than anything else in this study, illustrates that the local news outlets were not basing their coverage decisions on objective criteria such as the number of local cases and deaths. What factors those coverage decisions were based on — whether other criteria such as website clicks, reporter fatigue or losses in revenue and other resources — is beyond the scope of this study.

In order to improve their ability to respond to future crises, local news organizations should consciously plan for appropriate levels of coverage for the duration of a crisis, rather than just “flooding the zone” at the beginning. The level of coverage should match the level of local danger, rather than simply reflecting the novelty (or lack thereof) of a crisis.

This might require hard choices and actions that cut against newspeople’s instincts, such as passing on relatively minor stories (even ones that might generate clicks) early on during a crisis in order to focus on less obvious, more significant, and more time- and effort-intensive stories. Local news organizations should also embrace greater use of automation for straightforward, regularly updated stories (such as case and death statistics, or event cancellation notices) in order to free up resources for more substantive, in-depth reporting.

Local news organizations should regularly perform similar analyses to that used in this study. By tracking their output, local news organizations would gain insight into the amount of coverage they give to different topics, how that coverage is framed, and what gaps, if any, they should address. And local news organizations should survey or otherwise collect feedback from audience members about their information needs, in order to assess whether their local coverage actually matches those needs.

While the local news landscape has been transformed by harsh business realities and rapidly changing technology, this study also illustrates that a few core beliefs remain true. Local newspapers, though battered, are still often at the center of their communities’ news ecosystems.

Small towns and rural communities often receive no substantial coverage from larger news organizations in bigger communities, even news organizations that nominally cover those areas. And local news organizations can effectively respond to questions and information needs from their communities in ways that distant national news organizations — even those that are much better resourced — simply cannot. Preserving, rebuilding and expanding local news sources — even those controlled by hedge funds — should be a national priority.

While we are guaranteed to face future crises, we are not guaranteed high-quality local news coverage. Applying lessons learned from covering the COVID-19 pandemic will enable local news organizations to respond as effectively as possible when the next crisis strikes.

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