For New Mexicans living in metropolitan areas like Albuquerque and Santa Fe, local news is easy to find. But news deserts are numerous around the state and trustworthy local news can be hard to come by.
A new report by media professionals, educators, and students creates a map of local news outlets and highlights news gaps. KUNM spoke with project directors Gwyneth Doland, a University of New Mexico Communications and Journalism professor, and former journalism professor Michael Marcotte.
GWYNETH DOLAND: The local news map is an interactive website where anyone can go and see a picture of all of the local news organizations in New Mexico, click on them, find out more about them, click through to their websites and see their social channels. The project had several elements. One of them was a survey of news consumers. The other was a survey of local news organizations.
KUNM: So with this year-long effort, what were some of your key findings?
MICHAEL MARCOTTE: So there are four counties where there is no local news outlet based there at all. There's another eight counties that have one local news outlet based there, almost everything it seems, is aggregated in the Albuquerque area, where we have over 30 news outlets, many purporting to serve the entire state. But how well are they actually serving the local needs of the local citizens in those small counties?
DOLAND: One of our major findings is that rural parts of this state make up a lot of our news deserts, the newspapers there have shrunk. The ones that still exist are smaller. They have fewer resources. They're working really hard, and people support them overwhelmingly. They're very valued in their communities, but because of all these changes in the industry, they have fewer resources than they had before.
MARCOTTE: It's all about digital these days, but New Mexico has been very slow to move into digital innovation. It's uneven, and the audience clearly wants to get news on their phone, on their computer, on their mobile platforms, and they're frustrated that in many cases, they can't find that locally.
DOLAND: So consumers are frustrated that they can't get news the way they want it, so they're not paying for it, but without that money, without that support from consumers, news organizations don't have enough money to pay for the tech to do it.
MARCOTTE: Advertising still definitely dominates the economy of the local news ecosystem. But as we know, it's advertising that has been undercut by big platforms like Facebook and Google and so forth. So advertising dollars are hard to get in the local outlet, and yet that's still their dominant business model.
KUNM: Was there anything that surprised either of you?
DOLAND: People are really curious about what's going on in their town, but if their newspaper comes out once a week and doesn't post very much online, they're not getting that sense of immediacy that they may be used to or that they see on TV, but the TV doesn't cover their remote area, and so they go to Facebook, and now there are these groups popping up all over the state, all over the country and they get information there, but then they don't trust it.
KUNM: What are some of the solutions to filling this gap?
DOLAND: There's a lot of people who don't see themselves reflected in local news. There's a lot of tribal, Pueblo communities that are not getting covered at all, Spanish-language speakers, Spanish learners, but also rural communities that are just completely uncovered. So we have these news deserts that we recommend people look at as places for investment and innovation.
One of our strengths that we have now is collaboration. There's a notable level of collaboration in New Mexico's local news ecosystem with these online outlets like Source NM and New Mexico in Depth sharing their content for free. You know, City Desk ABQ, some of those folks share their content for free. And then, of course, public media, the big TV stations, but also all of the small public media stations around the state. The collaboration between those folks is amazing. We think there's a lot of potential to increase that kind of collaboration, shared services. Maybe we can have shared accounting, you know, some shared editing, things like that.
KUNM: So when we're talking about solutions, when we're talking about collaborating, who needs to be involved and who needs to be at the table, when it comes to this?
MARCOTTE: We want the people of New Mexico to understand what the local news crisis is all about, see it on a verydetailed level, and the study will help them do that. When it comes to the economic challenges. Advertising dollars are scarce. We have these kind of small economies. But there are ways to inject resources into the space, some of them, and I'm just going to go there. I think the state government has a role to play.
DOLAND: I want all of you to think about how much you spend on streaming video every month. Add up all those services and then ask yourself, how much do you pay for local news? And how important is local news? If there's something, a paper, a radio station, a television station out there that you like and you trust, what are you doing to support it and make sure that it is still here. If you like it, support it, and then you'll see, you know, an increase, hopefully, in what you get back out of that.
Support for this coverage comes from the Thornburg Foundation.
