New report highlights challenges, opportunities for state’s journalism ecosystem

Julia Goldberg, Source New Mexico

This article was originally published by Source New Mexico.

Rural counties in New Mexico have scant news coverage of their communities, and Native American and Spanish-speaking residents have few options in their languages. These are just two of the takeaways from a recent in depth analysis of the state’s news ecosystem, published alongside an  interactive local news map.

The study’s results did not surprise New Mexico Local News Fund Executive Director Rashaad Mahmood, who commissioned the work. The impetus came from the growing national philanthropic interest in supporting local journalism, and the concomitant need for more data to help funders understand local needs. LNF runs a variety of fundraising and training programs across the state.

While national studies in recent years have taken the measure of local news systems, Mahmood wanted a report that would analyze New Mexico at a more granular level, and specifically highlighted Colorado’s News Mapping Project at the outset as a model.

“It was kind of a no-brainer,” Mahmood told Source NM. “If we want to help more people in New Mexico have access to high-quality local news information, we need to understand in more detail: Where are the communities that don’t have that, and where are the strengths? And then do some analysis of what are opportunities for our work and for other funders and people to make a difference.”

Gwyneth Doland, a professor of practice in the University of New Mexico’s Communications and Journalism Department, and retired UNM Professor Michael V. Marcotte, who now runs MVM Consulting, co-lead the research behind the more than 150-page study.

The work included a detailed survey sent to news outlets statewide; the creation of a database of 139 outlets (including Source NM); and a content analysis of the strength and effectiveness of each outlet—all data that can be accessed through the map. Doland and Marcotte also surveyed more than 1,100 New Mexico residents about their news habits; conducted focus groups around the state to complement the survey data; and conducted one-on-one interviews with media representatives to “fill in gaps and add context to our data,” a news release announcing the study noted.

The research revealed that close to half of the state’s news outlets are based in Albuquerque/Rio Rancho; Santa Fe; Los Cruces; and Farmington, leaving smaller communities with fewer sources for news and information. Moreover, four counties have no news outlets at all. The state’s digital divide also impacts residents’ news options.

But the work also revealed new initiatives and a fundamental desire among residents to stay informed and connected to their communities.

Marcotte traces the genesis of the recent report back nearly a decade to work he undertook for the national foundation Democracy Fund in assessing New Mexico’s news landscape. Doland also worked on that report.

“We basically just interviewed news leaders and editors around the state to put together kind of a little more of an impressionistic report about what’s happening in local news in New Mexico,” Marcotte, who was the lead author on that study, said. “We called it the precarious local news ecosystem of New Mexico, and that preceded funding for [the Local News Fund] and a lot of the activity that has followed that.”

The growing philanthropic interest in local news, he noted, helped grow the need for “a more sophisticated look at what’s happening on the ground.”

But the seeds of the current landscape—the news deserts and the loss of smaller communities’ newspapers—stretches back farther, Doland said.

“I think we’re on this train of disruption in the media landscape that really accelerated in the early 2000s with the internet all of a sudden becoming the place where things that used to happen in newspapers started happening online,” she said.

That “digital disruption,” Doland continued, “precipitated the loss of news organizations across the country,” including the loss of newspapers. “And that process of newspapers closing their doors makes people freak out,” she said, “because we know that high quality local news correlates directly with civic health.”

That’s why numerous philanthropic organizations and other groups have become increasingly focused on local news, she said. “They want to help,” she said. “They want to improve communities.”

While the study affirmed what its authors already knew about the areas of news deserts across the state, lost newspapers and shrinking television coverage, it also revealed emergent new community media efforts.

“Doing this research was good for us to learn about some of the great things that are out there,” Doland, “some of the new, fun, cool things where there is energy and innovation and creativity happening.” One example she cited is the Cloudcroft Reader, a newsletter whose creators, she said, recently completed the LNF news accelerator training program. “Now they’re growing,” she noted. “They’re doing great work down there.”

Which is not to say that all media endeavors made the cut for the New Mexico News Map and accompanying database.

“We kind of set a bar for local news,” Marcotte said. “Are you actually doing local news, or are you just saying words that people confuse as news. Do you have a journalist working there? Are you reporting it? Do you have an ethical code? We made this sort of fine-tuned distinction between what I’m just going to call noise versus news.” As a result, an original list of 360 outlets was whittled down to 139, he said.

Ultimately, the report highlights what’s lacking in the state’s news ecosystem, but also provides actionable recommendations for addressing them. Those include expanding funding for small, rural and tribal news outlets, but also improving broadband access across the state, strengthening training programs and diversifying revenue streams, to name a few.

“One of the primary users of this report, we hope, is the general public,” Marcotte said. “We think the general public should be well informed of what local news is, who’s doing it, where is it happening…and the best we can hope is [for people to] support local journalism.”

But given all the different interest groups: news creators, consumers and funders, Doland said another important recommendation lies in the need for ongoing collaboration.

“One of New Mexico’s great positives and opportunities and successes so far is this level of collaboration between the university and the industry; between the non-profits and the for-profits …between the Local News Fund and the community foundations,” Doland said. “All of this is really good connection so far, and we encourage people to build on that.”

Julia Goldberg serves as Source New Mexico's editor and has reported on New Mexico news stories for more than 20 years.