A former Metro Editor at the Chicago Tribune and Sunday Editor at the Chicago Sun-Times, Jacob is chronicling the Local News Initiative’s progress for the project’s website. He is the co-author of eight books on history and photography.
Articles by or about Mark Jacob
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As many legacy news organizations downsize, it increasingly falls on nonprofits to do the deep dives that have long been a central function of American journalism. In a new video reporting project at Northwestern University, students profiled seven innovative organizations in the Midwest, including two that conduct investigations to shed light on the biggest stories of our time. The Midwest Center for Investigative Journalism, an Illinois-based outfit, tracked how the COVID-19 pandemic affected workers in...
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As the local news crisis grows, staffs are thinning out and gaps in coverage are widening. But reinforcements are coming -- journalism students doing the work that would otherwise go undone. University of Kansas students are operating a local news website in a “news desert” about 10 miles east of the campus. Students at Franklin College in Indiana are covering state government for a nonprofit website that is battling against civic disengagement. Both programs are...
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An Ohio news outlet that’s owned by the readers it serves. A start-up newsletter for Iowa’s Black residents. A student-reported website bringing information to a “news desert” in Kansas. And a digital-only Ohio newsroom modeling “solutions journalism.” These are some of the innovative news organizations profiled in a new video reporting project by students at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing Communications. Medill Professor Craig Duff’s class of 14 students worked in...
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Local news organizations are working hard to improve their news apps and get readers to download them, touting them as a superior customer experience that boosts engagement and loyalty. While they see mobile apps as a win-win for their customers and themselves, the apps remain a niche product, with a small minority of visitors consuming their news that way. The Medill Local News Initiative interviewed executives from McClatchy, Tribune Publishing and the San Francisco Chronicle...
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Just when local news outlets were ramping up audience events as a way to increase revenue and engagement, the pandemic hit. So their events programs were devastated, right? Nope. While in-person events went on the shelf, many local news outlets made an impressive shift to virtual, sometimes even ramping up their level of connection to their audience. The Texas Tribune, which was known for its public gatherings before the pandemic, found that the simpler, less...
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Joshua Darr, an Assistant Professor at Louisiana State University’s Manship School of Mass Communication, has written a book with Matthew P. Hitt of Colorado State University and Johanna L. Dunaway at Texas A&M University, “Home Style Opinion: How Local Newspapers Can Slow Polarization.” The book reveals their finding that the polarization of news consumers is slowed when a local news outlet's opinion section concentrates on local issues rather than national politics. The authors believe this...
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Dave Gehring is a former Google employee who co-founded Relay Media and then sold it to Google in 2017. Now he’s Co-founder and CEO of Distributed Media Lab, which is “building the first frictionless open web distribution platform for quality content.” DML can embed a collection of stories on any local news website that is, in effect, a portal to the wider news web without taking readers off of that site. He talked with the Medill...
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As the local news crisis deepens, growing awareness and shifting political dynamics in Washington are raising hopes that targeted legislation can pass to help make local journalism more financially sustainable. “This Congress is going to be the most likely to tackle local news that we’ve had in a very long time,” said Steven Waldman, President of Report for America and coordinator for the Rebuild Local News coalition. “People understand that the collapse of local news...
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Nearly half of local news outlets’ digital subscribers are “zombie” readers who visit the website less than once a month, according to a data analysis in 45 markets by Northwestern University’s Medill Spiegel Research Center. Spiegel found that 49% of digital subscribers didn’t go to the websites they had paid for even once a month, putting them in a category known in news-industry slang as “zombies.” Concern is growing about this problem because even though...
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Mayur Gupta, a former executive with Spotify and Freshly, joined the Gannett USA Today Network in September as Chief Marketing and Strategy Officer. He holds this crucial role at a key time for Gannett, which merged with GateHouse in November 2019 to form the nation’s largest newspaper chain. Gannett has partnered with Northwestern University’s Medill Local News Initiative in data analysis involving more than a dozen of its news outlets. In this interview with the...
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The financial distress threatening the future of the local news industry is now a pervasive concern of those working in the media business, and few of them see advertising revenue as the best path forward, according to a new survey by Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing Communications. The first-ever Medill Media Industry Survey of nearly 1,400 members of the U.S. news media was conducted by Associate Professor Stephanie Edgerly of the...
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Penny Abernathy, whose groundbreaking research has shown the growth of the nation’s “news deserts,” will become a visiting professor at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing Communications. Abernathy will start next month in the position after retiring as Knight Chair in Journalism and Digital Media Economics at the University of North Carolina’s Hussman School of Journalism and Media for the last 12 years. Cindy Burnham Penny Abernathy Medill Dean Charles Whitaker announced...
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The pandemic and other major news events have helped boost digital subscriptions dramatically at local news outlets in 2020, with a new industry analysis putting the overall increase at about 50% in a year’s time. But that encouraging news comes with questions for 2021: Can local news organizations keep those new subscribers and attract more if the news cycle quiets? Can legacy outlets establish brand affinity in an often chaotic and crowded web world? Can...
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As much of the local news industry hammers away on a financial strategy emphasizing digital subscriptions, Local Media Association CEO Nancy Lane says this approach should be paired with efforts to gain philanthropic support. Here’s an edited transcript of an interview of Lane by the Medill Local News Initiative’s Mark Jacob. Mark Jacob Are digital subscriptions growing fast enough to help local news outlets, especially legacy outlets, reach financial sustainability? Mark Jacob Nancy Lane Some...
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National digital news organizations are increasingly entering local media markets, creating a new model for serving local audiences whose traditional news sources have suffered from years of disinvestment. In the last few months, Axios has announced that it is placing reporters into four local markets, and ProPublica is starting new operations in the South and Southwest while also expanding its Illinois operation to cover the Midwest. Meanwhile, The Athletic reported that its sports coverage –...
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Two major news industry organizations, McClatchy and Mather Economics, have signed on to the new Medill Subscriber Engagement Index, a tool designed to give local news outlets more actionable intelligence on their readers than ever before. McClatchy, one of the nation’s largest local news chains, is providing data from its 30 local outlets, including such well-known outlets as the Miami Herald, Charlotte Observer, Kansas City Star and Sacramento Bee, according to Shannan Bowen, McClatchy’s Director...
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In the early 2000s, we were supposed to write blogs. Then we weren’t. In the mid-2010s, we pivoted to video. Then we hit pause. So when people say local news outlets should go all-in on email newsletters, some degree of skepticism is understandable. Are newsletters the future, or are they just a fad? The local news industry is in the midst of a major strategic shift from reliance on shaky advertising revenue to asking readers...
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In a project launched at Northwestern University, researchers are working on sophisticated ways to identify news media markets that are similar to each other. The thinking: If news publishers understand which markets are like theirs, they might find success with innovations that worked in those similar markets. The Medill Local News Initiative’s Mark Jacob interviewed two of the researchers: Medill Associate Professor Stephanie Edgerly and Rachel Davis Mersey, a former Medill Professor and Associate Dean...
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Speaking at a Northwestern University online event to debut a new documentary on the local news crisis, Sen. Sherrod Brown of Ohio expressed support for a temporary anti-trust exemption that would give news publishers more leverage to negotiate with tech giants over advertising revenue. The Medill Local News Initiative event on Sept. 30 marked the first showing of “Newstown,” a film by Northwestern professor Craig Duff that examines the aftermath of last year’s closing of the 150-year-old...
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Local news publishers across the country are asking themselves this existential question: How do I convert subscribers from print to pixels? Successfully overseeing that transition would allow local news companies to save the cost of manufacturing and distributing a printed newspaper, and it would help readers build a digital habit for the long term. In early 2018, the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette undertook a bold experiment. In phases over more than two years, it took away subscribers’...
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The Youngstown Vindicator, a 150-year-old newspaper, announced in the summer of 2019 that it was closing. The fate of the newspaper known as the “Vindy” was a painful blow to its northeast Ohio city and a grim symbol of the growing distress in America’s local news industry. The news was also the inspiration for a new documentary called “Newstown” by former Youngstown resident Craig Duff, a professor at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, Media,...
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Northwestern University researchers have completed their prototype of a Medill Subscriber Engagement Index for digital news and expect to launch the innovative tool by the end of this year. The index will show local news executives which aspects of their online content are helping them acquire and keep subscribers and which content is causing “churn” – people dropping their subscriptions. It also will highlight best practices and will allow executives to compare their newsrooms with...
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As many legacy news outlets struggle to survive, industry analysts are looking to digital start-ups as a promising way to revive coverage of local news. After all, digital-only means you don’t need massive presses or barrels of ink or fleets of trucks. The barriers to publication are low, so there’s great growth potential. Right? Well, maybe not. At least not yet. A recent update of the University of North Carolina’s “news deserts” research by Penny Abernathy...
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Margaret Sullivan, media columnist for the Washington Post, is out with a new book, “Ghosting the News: Local Journalism and the Crisis of American Democracy,” published by Columbia Global Reports at Columbia University. Sullivan is a graduate of Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing Communications. She talked with the Medill Local News Initiative about the crisis in local journalism and how it affects citizens’ sense of community. This is an edited transcript. Mark...
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Local news outlets are working hard to keep the digital subscribers they’ve gained from COVID-19 coverage, and they’re seeing encouraging signs that the newcomers are sticking with them in these turbulent times. As news outlets shift away from an advertising revenue model, subscriber retention is an increasingly crucial issue. Newsrooms are engaging these new customers through personal email appeals and giving special attention to “zombies” – a nickname for people who buy subscriptions but never...
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During the pandemic, Illinois residents have gotten their news most often from local and national television rather than from newspapers or radio, according to a poll commissioned by Northwestern University. The poll also showed that when Illinoisans want local information about COVID-19, news outlets in their area are the primary way they get it, rather than social media, government websites or politicians. The polling on COVID-19, conducted March 30 to April 17 with 1,845 respondents...
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Before 2020 even started, we knew it was shaping up as a brutal year for journalism jobs as major chains were merging and cutting staff. We knew small publications, especially weeklies, were struggling. We knew “news deserts” were growing across the country. Then came COVID-19. Now 33,000 American journalists have been laid off, furloughed or given pay cuts. The impending recession – or even depression – could take out some of the best advertising customers...
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With podcasts and smart speakers on the rise, Northwestern professor Candy Lee wondered how consumer preferences in voices and accents might affect the news business. Do people prefer a man’s voice to a woman’s? Would they rather hear a local accent or an “NPR” accent? Lee, a professor at Northwestern’s Medill School of Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing Communications, launched a research project to explore the issue. Among the findings: Female news readers...
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A former television broadcaster turned legislator has filed a bill in the Illinois General Assembly that would create a task force to explore the state’s local news crisis and offer recommendations for how to address it. The task force would “review all aspects of local journalism” in Illinois, with an eye toward identifying “communities underserved” by journalism and well as “strategies to improve local news access and public policy solutions to improve the sustainability of...
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About 300 people attended a Chicago journalism town hall Sunday that was characterized by sharp comments about the search for financial stability and the need for diversity both in newsroom staffs and service to audiences. The three-hour discussion came at a time of turmoil in Chicago’s news industry, with Tribune reporters making a public call for a white-knight investor as Alden Global Capital, a firm known for slashing news staffs, takes a major stake in...
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As digital news start-ups show the ability to attract and keep audiences, they are paving the way for more such outlets to fill the gaps created by the financial distress of the nation’s legacy news chains. A case in point is The Beacon, a Kansas City start-up that plans to start publishing this summer in a media market where the 140-year-old Kansas City Star is part of the McClatchy chain, which filed for bankruptcy protection...
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The Salt Lake Tribune announced in November that it had received Internal Revenue Service approval to become the nation’s first legacy newspaper to go fully nonprofit. The Medill Local News Initiative interviewed the Tribune’s Editor, Jennifer Napier-Pearce, about what this transformation will mean. Here is an edited transcript. Mark Jacob Can you explain how nonprofit status is going to work? Mark Jacob Jennifer Napier-Pearce There are two parts. The Tribune itself is becoming a nonprofit....
Walter E. Hussman Jr., publisher of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, is pioneering a bold strategy to transition readers from print to digital by taking away their daily newspaper cold turkey and giving them a tablet with a daily online replica that mimics the print edition. Hussman’s experiment is make-or-break for the Democrat-Gazette. If successful, it may finally offer an effective way for news organizations to lure longtime loyal readers away from print editions that are expensive...
What should be news organizations’ top financial strategy? Growing advertising revenue? Growing subscriptions? Neither, say researchers at Northwestern University’s Spiegel Research Center, who believe there’s a better answer: Growing Customer Lifetime Value. CLV is a common forecasting tool that allows businesses to calculate how much customers will be worth for the length of their relationship. The two most important things that determine the future value of a reader relationship are the amount of profit received...
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An analysis of subscriber behavior data by Northwestern University’s Spiegel Research Center has found that a news organization’s customers who use an ad blocker are more likely to keep their subscriptions. The new study, while limited in scope, raises important questions about whether news outlets are turning off some of their best customers with intrusive advertising, and whether their bottom line might be better served by curtailing or customizing those ads. Spiegel Executive Director Tom...
Everyone seems to produce email newsletters these days. But not everyone is doing it well. Which is a shame, since newsletters have been identified as a key way to build subscriber loyalty as local news operations shift from reliance on advertising dollars to a customer revenue model. Major data research conducted by Northwestern University’s Spiegel Research Center and released by the Medill Local News Initiative in February established that readers who visited news websites regularly were more...
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Jim Iovino is director of a new program called NewStart at West Virginia University’s Reed College of Media. NewStart matches small media outlets with people who want to acquire them and run them. The new owners will earn a master’s degree as they receive training in journalism and business skills. Iovino, a former Deputy Managing Editor at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, is the Ogden Newspapers Visiting Assistant Professor of Media Innovation at WVU. Here’s an edited transcript...
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Building on major research into the behaviors of local digital readers, Northwestern University’s Medill Local News Initiative and its Spiegel Research Center have been named recipients of a Google Innovation Challenge award to create a Subscriber Engagement Index. The index will serve as a new tool to give local news organizations “timely, unique, actionable insights about the online behaviors of their digital subscribers,” said Medill Senior Associate Dean Tim Franklin, head of the Medill Local News...
Local news organizations, which have long used email newsletters to drive readers to their websites and boost page views, are increasingly offering newsletters as destinations of their own to boost subscriber loyalty. A major data analysis, conducted by Northwestern University’s Spiegel Research Center and released earlier this year by the Medill Local News Initiative, showed that a primary factor in subscriber retention was regular reader visits. Daily email newsletters are an attempt to replicate the kind...
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A Northwestern University data analysis last year on three big-city news outlets showed that a regular reader habit and strong coverage of local news were the key factors for keeping subscribers. But a question remained: Was that true only for major metros, or for local news organizations in general? Now Northwestern’s Medill Local News Initiative has found part of the answer from a follow-up study on 12 small news outlets. Indeed, the results of both...
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A recent webinar for the News Media Alliance highlighted how research by Northwestern University’s Medill Local News Initiative has helped the Gannett news chain come up with new strategies to attract and keep digital subscribers. Gannett’s Indianapolis Star was part of a project last year in which Medill analyzed 13 terabytes of data from the Star, Chicago Tribune and San Francisco Chronicle. The key takeaway: Creating a regular reader habit was paramount in retaining subscribers....
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Northwestern University’s Medill Local News initiative, whose data analysis has identified reader habit as vital to retaining online subscribers, is taking its research findings on the road to help the journalism industry navigate a shift in its reliance from advertising dollars to reader revenue. Medill and its partners will discuss the research findings and the paths forward for local news at three major conferences in the next two months – the Newspaper Association Managers on...
Joie Chen, a former CNN journalist who is Northwestern University’s Director of Medill Programs/Washington, was talking to the Global Seminar on Local News about how U.S. journalists feel besieged. She cited the murders of five newsroom staffers last year at the Capital Gazette in Maryland. She recalled the physical assault on a reporter by now-Rep. Greg Gianforte of Montana. And she noted President Donald Trump’s denunciations of the media as “the enemy of the people”...
The financial pressures on local news are a worldwide problem, according to participants in the Global Seminar on Local News, co-sponsored by Northwestern University’s Medill Local News Initiative and Germany’s Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung USA foundation. At the Chicago seminar June 25, Dapo Olorunyomi, Publisher and CEO of Nigeria’s Premium Times, said his country’s media were dramatically squeezed by competition from tech companies. “The true newsroom in Nigeria is Facebook,” with 25 million people in his country using...
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Here’s a question for local news producers: What are your readers doing when they’re not visiting you? That’s the question asked by Northwestern University’s Spiegel Research Center in an eye-opening study of three metro news websites based on data from the media analytics company Comscore. And it’s a particularly relevant question because the study showed that the three news sites commanded less than 1 percent of their desktop users’ total digital time. The study, conducted...
The Medill Local News Initiative and Germany’s Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung foundation will host the Global Seminar on Local News, a June conference in Chicago to discuss worldwide challenges to local journalism and their impact on democracy. The seminar will feature presentations by news executives from Bulgaria, Nigeria, Mexico and Germany as well as influential U.S.-based voices on the crisis in local news. The June 24-26 event is invitation-only, but video of the main discussions on June 25...
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The recent launch of Apple News Plus is the biggest test yet for news bundling—the idea of selling access to a wide variety of news sources through one platform at one price. Apple News Plus costs $9.99 a month for more than 300 titles, mostly magazines but also a few newspapers such as the Wall Street Journal and the Los Angeles Times. In general, local news organizations have not signed on, put off by Apple’s...
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Here’s a neat trick that other newsrooms might want to steal. During Chicago’s recent election, the Tribune ran a quiz headlined, “Which Chicago mayoral candidate do you align most closely with?” The Tribune got candidates to answer a set of 14 questions, and then readers were invited to answer the same questions and learn which politician they were most in synch with. The feature served multiple purposes: educating readers on the candidates, helping readers focus their...
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Gabriel Kahn says his data project, Crosstown, delivers “the kind of information that allows citizens to be the squeaky wheel.” Kahn, a professor at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School of Journalism, and his team are developing Crosstown to analyze and publish data on “core quality-of-life issues” such as traffic, crime and air quality. The goal: to make large data sets useful on a local and even hyperlocal level. “Part of it comes from my...
As online news organizations try to pivot to reader revenue models to achieve financial sustainability, a New York-based firm called Piano is among those offering expertise. The Medill Local News Initiative at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing Communications interviewed two Piano executives about the shifting media landscape. Michael Silberman, Piano’s Senior Vice President for Strategy, helped launch Vulture.com and TheCut.com and was a founding editor at MSNBC.com. Patrick Appel, Director of...
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The old-fashioned image of the loyal newspaper reader was someone who went through each edition methodically, reading deeply from front to back. Today’s loyal online news reader may be quite different. Perhaps she catches a look at a local news homepage while waiting for the train. Or she might read an emailed newsletter with story links, scanning a dozen headlines on different stories. If she finds something interesting and has the time, she reads the...
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As online advertising lags, many local news organizations are shifting their strategy to focus on reader-based revenue models, especially digital subscriptions, as a path to financial sustainability and greater community service. That pivot is redefining the goals for many news outlets. Rather than chasing viral “clicks” to boost ad revenue, they are trying to establish their value to subscribers. New strategies require new insights into local digital audiences. That’s why a major new Northwestern University...
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When Northwestern University researchers analyzed subscriber data from three major metro news outlets, they identified coverage areas and reader behaviors that correlated with customers keeping their subscriptions. Two key ones were a regular reading habit and consumption of unique local content. But two other behaviors jumped out because they showed no correlation with subscriber retention. In a possible paradox, people who read many stories and read them for longer were no more likely to keep...
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A recent meeting of Northwestern University’s Local News Initiative team and its three “learning lab” partners – the Chicago Tribune, Indianapolis Star and San Francisco Chronicle – found heightened interest in news organizations growing their digital subscriptions as a key strategy for financial sustainability. A “click” culture in American newsrooms, in which online page views were the overriding measure of success because they boosted advertising revenue, appears to be giving way as online ad sales continue...
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Three leading U.S. news organizations are serving as “learning labs” for Northwestern University’s Local News Initiative, a project to harness data and other research tools to find ways to make local journalism sustainable. The three outlets – the Chicago Tribune, Indianapolis Star and San Francisco Chronicle – have submitted terabytes of anonymous online reader data to Northwestern’s Spiegel Digital and Database Research Center for analysis. A key goal: to correlate reader behavior with what the...
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Research by a San Diego State University professor is challenging our definitions of what local news is, and could have an impact on the ways journalists tailor their product to their audiences in the future. News organizations today need to move beyond their antiquated definitions of location and dive deeper into the nuances of geographic spaces in this digital and mobile media era, wrote associate professor Amy Schmitz Weiss in a new journal article featured...
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A $100,000 grant from the Robert R. McCormick Foundation will fuel new research by Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing Communications that is intended to provide tools that can improve the financial viability of local journalism, while also seeking to increase Americans' sense of community and making them more informed about their democracy. The grant, announced Nov. 12, will include both data analysis and qualitative research this year and next, conducted as...
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This is the first in a series of articles on America's local news crisis and the work of the newly launched Local News Initiative at Northwestern University's Medill School. It's a jarring contradiction: The public has never had better access to news, yet local journalism is suffering a dramatic decline. Which means there’s plenty to read and view, but it might not tell us very much. On a single day in July, the New York...
Projects Mark Jacob has worked on.
The crisis in local news is indisputable: Round after round of layoffs, expanding news deserts and abandoned areas of coverage, particularly in the case of long-established print publications. Now, the challenges to local television news are beginning to accelerate.