Andrew Trexler is a doctoral candidate in political science and public policy at Duke University. Trexler’s research examines the news media, public opinion and political behavior in the United States.
As part of our series on local news researchers, CISLM Student Employee Kathryn DeHart interviewed Trexler via Zoom. This interview was published on Dec. 4, 2024 and has been edited for length and clarity.
Center for Innovation and Sustainability in Local Media: What’s a recent research project you’ve done that has helped us understand the challenges facing local news
Andrew Trexler: I’ve got two. One is a slightly more discouraging result, and one is possibly a more encouraging result.
For the first project, I conducted field experiments here in North Carolina, where I recruited a probability sample of registered voters from the Triangle area and randomly provided them with free access to the (Raleigh) News & Observer for about two months during the 2022 midterm elections. The intent of this project was to determine the extent to which price is a barrier for people for consuming local news. By providing that to people for free, the hope was that people would be more able to engage with local news content. They would learn about local politics, and that could potentially help them in navigating local politics around the midterm elections.
I, unfortunately, found that almost nobody used the digital subscription that I provided. Out of the 500 people who were assigned to the treatment condition, only 19 even used it once. The number of people who used it even 10 times was even smaller , five people or 1%. In the surveys that I conducted as part of the study, I found that this treatment didn’t really do anything to improve local political knowledge and didn’t move a variety of political attitudes that I measured. That signaled to me that that price may be a barrier for people to consume local news content, but it isn’t really the barrier. Perceptions of low relevance to people’s lived experiences may be the more relevant concern.
I think there’s been a lot of really great work that’s been done both by local and state governments, but also by nonprofit organizations to financially support local news organizations in the hopes that keeping those institutions alive. (I think it’s) going to have a positive impact on public discourse and on the political process. I think that’s true, but we have these other barriers that we need to think about, like how to get people engaged with local news content.
The second project I’m working on is trying to tackle that question. This is a collaborative project with Jennifer Gaudette at the University of California, San Diego and Josh McCrain at the University of Utah. We were interested in how local news organizations essentially pitch themselves to their audiences to try to get additional engagement, additional financial support. There are a lot of very standard ways that news organizations do this: in their email campaigns, the little banner ads on their websites, things like that. A lot of it is focused on powering the newsroom, or access to subscriber exclusives and things like that. We wanted to pull in some ideas from the academic literature to see if some information treatments regarding the state of local news and its financial stability might help in the branding of local news organizations.
We conducted what’s called a conjoint experiment in which we asked a non-probability sample of US adults from across the country to consider hypothetical offers or subscriptions to local newspapers. We varied a lot of different substantive appeals that were included in those offers, as well as different features of the news outlets themselves to get a picture of not only which appeals were interesting to people overall, but also to different types of people.
We measured their existing engagement with local news organizations, and whether or not they were financially supporting a newspaper in any way at the time so we could look at the differences between those who do and who apparently don’t. We found a few interesting things. For example, we found that newspapers that really sell themselves as nonprofits actually had a really positive impact relative to a replacement offer from another newspaper. A variety of substantive appeals also had a positive effect on preferences. Selling the newspaper as a truly nonpartisan source as a way through local media to sort of escape the polarization of national politics and the government watchdog function were also very popular.
What we’re doing now is we are working with a few local news organizations and nonprofit news organizations to test out some of the best performers from that laboratory setting and trying them out in the field to see if we can get a broader and more diverse population interested in consuming local news content and financial aid supporting the local news industry.
CISLM: What should non-academics — local journalists or civically engaged community members — learn from that research?
AT: I think local news organizations are cognizant in general of the fact that they are often speaking to a relatively limited audience. In theory, a democracy really depends on a broad base of engagement from the public in democratic processes, and local news organizations are front and center in making that possible.
I think from some of the work that I’ve been doing, along with other folks in the academic world, we have been really trying to encourage news organizations to think about how they can broaden their audience to a larger section of the public in one form or fashion. As local news continues to narrow its audience to a small subset of highly engaged individuals who tend to be wealthier and live in more urban areas, the ability of local news as an industry to serve that normative democratic purpose is limited. Partnerships between academics like myself and local news organizations to try to figure out ways that we can broaden the appeal and broaden engagement to more people is critical.
CISLM: What’s a recent research project in local news that you admire?
AT: Emily Thorson, an assistant professor at Syracuse University, recently published a book called The Invented State, which is about policy and misperceptions among the mass public. Some of her work is looking at preferences for what she calls “policy current information” that the news is typically very interested in novelty, or what’s upcoming. She’s showing us a real hunger among the public for information just about how current policy actually works, and that’s a basis that one really needs in order to be able to evaluate proposals for changes to existing policy from political leaders and think about the consequences of future policy.
There are a lot of really big misperceptions about how U.S. policy actually works today and media organizations can help fill those gaps. She also shows through her work that in contrast to a lot of very politicized, stylized facts that get thrown around in political discourse, a lot of these policy misperceptions are actually very correctable. In the journalism space, we spend a lot of time thinking about fact checking. This is actually a sort of branch of fact checking that we can have a really big impact in by providing more information on how current policy works as part of news coverage. It really helps people understand sort of the state of the world as it is and think about how they might like to see the future look in the future.
CISLM: Why does local news research matter?
AT: Local news research matters a lot, particularly in a federalized system of government like we have in the United States. A lot of government powers are delegated to the local level, and that means that a lot of things that local government does are going to have a really big impact on people’s lived experiences within local communities. Additionally from the political science perspective, people who enter office at the local level often then move on to state level and then federal level and even international level posts, so the government accountability mechanisms that local news can help provide at the local level can have really big side effects over time in terms of who succeeds within the political world and what sort of policy they are able to implement later down the line.
I think it’s important from the government watchdog perspective, but then also from the perspective of helping a local community maintain an actual local identity and stay connected with one another. Local news organizations are really critical for that process. Anybody who’s worked in journalism is probably familiar with the fact that local news organizations today are really struggling financially. The revenue model that used to support those organizations bundling a lot of content that was geographically localized has really disappeared. We’ve seen a broad decline in newsroom employment at the local level, which really limits the capacity of those organizations to provide those functions. Local journalists are really critical, not only for politics and public policy, but also just for community and society.
I think work on local news, particularly tackling that demand side of the problem, is really critical going forward in trying to not only try to maintain those organizations and those institutions, but also in thinking about how they can best serve the public going forward, as the broader media environment continues to evolve.
CISLM: What excites you about the future of local news?
AT: From my perspective as a researcher, I think the increasing attention to the challenge from not only academics and from journalists, but also from public policy scholars and from local and state governments is really exciting.
I would also add things like Press Forward are huge improvements. I think increasing attention will, over time, bleed into public awareness about the state of local news organizations. I think it’s very easy to get caught in the doom spiral, but I think the investments that we are starting to see in trying to reinvigorate the local news industries is really exciting.
CISLM: What helps you get through a long day of work?
AT: I do a bit of baking. Like many people in the pandemic, I made a sourdough and mine is still alive. My sourdough’s name is Hamilton because it means “to rise up.” I sometimes take a day on my weekend to just do a bunch of baking and make some sourdoughs and even making sourdough pastries or sourdough pizza.
Are you a researcher, either academic or of the practice, who’s studying local news? Join our Local News Researcher Community, a peer group that meets every month to discuss upcoming, in-progress and recently published projects. Sign up here.