Aug. 15 2025
One of the foremost challenges facing the news industry today is the spread of news deserts, which are areas of the country not adequately served by local journalism. While large-scale studies have helped identify the most obvious deserts with access to little or no news coverage, more nuanced but still-plentiful examples — communities that receive crime coverage, for example, but much less about community events or sports — often fall through the cracks.
Over the last two years, the University of Missouri School of Journalism has partnered with the MU Institute for Data Science and Informatics (MUIDSI) to develop an algorithmic approach that brings greater accuracy, depth and efficiency to the process of identifying news deserts. That work, led by Knight Chair in Journalism Innovation Damon Kiesow, has now entered a new phase: researchers are going out into the field to compare the data collected by the automated system with the firsthand thoughts, perceptions and preferences of news audiences.
Hannah Artman, a postdoctoral research fellow at the School of Journalism, spent this spring conducting a statewide survey of news consumers to examine their relationship with news. From in-person interviews to an online survey, the work is ongoing, but Artman is already gaining valuable insights into a hierarchy of news needs that can sometimes appear contradictory.
“It’s interesting because in news audience research, there is almost this cognitive dissonance where people say the news is too sensationalist and it’s too negative, but then they say, ‘I love to see what the arrests are’ and ‘I need to see which areas of town to avoid,’” Artman, who has professional experience in public opinion research, said. “We need to figure out how to ask the right questions — what are the news topics that help people get around in the day-to-day and affect them personally, and how do we find common ground in how to talk about those topics?”
Fittingly in a field that is all about communication, Artman said some apparent contradictions might not be contradictions at all but could be rooted in differences between how journalists and audiences group certain topics together.
“People talk about traffic. They don’t talk about transportation systems,” Artman said. “So when they say transportation systems don’t apply to them, that doesn’t mean they don’t want to know about traffic.”
And if a critical needs framework is like a food pyramid, then determining whether a tomato is a fruit or a vegetable means little if the public isn’t on the same page.
“It’s not enough to know whether a place is a news desert or not,” Artman said. “It shouldn’t just be this binary classification. When we define communities, we’re usually using arbitrary guidelines like congressional districts, zip codes, media markets. But what happens, for example, to people who live in one area but work in another? We need to understand the more complex processes that make up news diets individually and collectively.”
The influence of geography is yet another crucial aspect of the research. Joy Jenkins, an associate professor and collaborator on the project, said that physical proximity of one’s residence to a newspaper’s range is just one of many geographical considerations; work, leisure activities and political affiliations all create ties to locations that may or may not be where audiences actually reside, complicating their preferences when it comes to news.
“There is some interest in thinking a bit differently about geography, about where people consume news and how that might shape their sense of what’s important,” Jenkins said. “This project has been a really interesting opportunity to complicate the idea of locality and understand what that means in people’s day-to-day interactions with local news.”
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