NEWS ECOSYSTEMS

The News Ecosystem Mapping Project (NEMP) at the Center for Cooperative Media is a first-of-its-kind effort to map, at a granular level but with scale, all local news providers and local news ecosystems in one U.S. state: New Jersey. The hope is that the project acts as a proof of concept and that the method we have developed can also be applied elsewhere... In addition, we gathered structural data about all 564 municipalities in New Jersey, including median household income, the percentage of the population with a college education or higher, municipal spending per capita, voter turnout in the 2016 presidential election, and whether the municipality voted Democrat or Republican in 2016. We are using that data, correlated with the number and type of local news providers, to identify the structural characteristics common to news deserts and news oases.