A new study helps explain why Americans continue to trust local news, even as their trust in national media, government and other institutions is falling.
The authors assert that people use “a news outlet’s local orientation as a shortcut to assess its credibility.” If a news source appears local, people are inclined to trust it.
That should be encouraging for those wanting to sustain and regrow local journalism, and to local news outlets trying to survive two decades of market disruption.
It also highlights the importance of local outlets maintaining that trust with quality and standards, and differentiating themselves from others trying to freeload on this special relationship with local residents.
Co-author Erik Peterson, an assistant professor of political science at Rice University in Houston, said it’s a good-news, bad-news story.
Like other studies, this one affirms that people still see local journalism as a beacon of truth in the hailstorm of information they’re pelted with nowadays. That’s the good news.
The bad news is that weasels are exploiting this trust.
The study didn’t say weasels — that’s my word — and instead described how political operators create local publications, known as “pink slime,” to “disseminate slanted content and disinformation through the coverage of seemingly local organizations.”
The study also found that some new, online outlets doing real journalism are failing to capture this trust because their names don’t indicate a local connection.
“I think what we’re trying to understand is what that means in an increasingly fragmented media landscape that has a mix of different types of news providers, especially online … and others that are purposely trying to mimic established local media, even though they have a very different operating practice,” Peterson said.
Other authors are Joshua P. Darr at Syracuse University, Maxwell B. Allamong at Duke University and Michael Henderson at Louisiana State University.
The study, titled “Can Americans’ trust in local news be trusted? The emergence, sources and implications of the local news trust advantage,” was published March 29 by the American Journal of Political Science.
Another takeaway is the need for more education in media literacy.
The researchers found that people’s reliance on “local” as a handy signal that a news source is trustworthy “impedes their ability to discern credible political information sources.”
They found “fictional local news sources associated with a respondent’s community garner more trust than established newspapers from other states,” the study states.
This phenomenon is exacerbated by the current political situation, with people deeply polarized and distrustful of institutions like national media.
But spurning national outlets isn’t necessarily leading people to better news sources. Simply relying on cues that a news source is local and “not part of the generally disliked national media can lead them astray” given how easy it is to fake a local presence online, the study states.
It doesn’t even go into the recent scourge of AI-generated pseudo-local news newsletters.
As documented by NiemanLab and others, one of these operations is using AI to generate “local news” newsletters in more than 300 communities in 47 states with no actual, local journalism. Others have been caught stealing the stories and identities of actual reporters to produce what we might call pink spam.
The challenge for actual, local news outlets is to help people understand and appreciate the difference.
I fear that some industry trends are going the opposite direction, making it harder for the public and potentially eroding the trust people have in local news.
Industry cutbacks and consolidation have led most newspapers to reduce their physical presence. Storefronts and headquarters buildings were sold, fewer print editions are published and some newspapers are now all digital.
As they try to survive on nickels and dimes online, instead of dollars they used to make offline, local outlets by necessity do less original reporting and may publish more national stories and clickbait.
Big newspaper chains are also exploiting the remaining trust people have in local outlets, by operating “ghost newspapers” with few if any local reporters. They are filling local papers and digital sites with material produced and reported elsewhere, blurring the line with pseudo-local news providers.
Gannett and Lee Enterprises, two of the largest chains, are going further with AI. Both are aiming to use the technology to generate “local content” to feed their emaciated local papers.
Lee in December announced an agreement to use Amazon technology platforms, including Amazon’s large language models, for “multimodal content generation.”
In job listings, Gannett says its AI initiative will free up reporters “to do the irreplaceable work of interviewing, beat development and watchdogging the powerful.”
That would be nice but I wonder how much time Gannett’s remaining local reporters have to dig deep. The company cut its workforce by about half over the last five years.
Peterson said it’s not yet clear how such business practices will affect the trust people automatically place in local news.
“Right now, at this moment, I think there’s a lot of kind of ‘riding off’ the reputations that sources have established in the past and the way that they’ve been embedded in communities for many years,” he said. “And I think it’s an open question of how long that can sustain itself if there’s not really content to back it up.”
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