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news policy data | Aug 7, 2025

Illinois Newsrooms Receive $4 Million from State

by John Volk | volk_maps

Forty Illinois local news entities operating 120 outlets are receiving $4 million in state tax credits under a new law designed to encourage the retention and hiring of journalists, according to documents released this week. The organizations that have received credits represent a cross section of Illinois’ local news ecosystem, according to records obtained through a Freedom of Information request by the Medill Local News Initiative. They span major legacy organizations, small community newspapers, digital...

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data | Jun 6, 2019

Sobering Reality for News Outlets: Your Readers May Be Elsewhere 99% of the Time

by Mark Jacob | LocalNewsIni

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...

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data | Apr 1, 2019

USC’s Crosstown Project Turns Big Data into Local News

by Mark Jacob | LocalNewsIni

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...

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