CRII: III: Measuring the alignment between the interests of local communities, local news, and the national news media

As citizen interests combine national and local community topics, their interaction with online news sources is expected to reflect this duality of focus. For example, online news should combine stories about local school districts and ones about national interests. In this award, the researchers will advance our understanding of how local and national news reports address the needs and interests of local communities. The findings could inform more effective communication strategies and improve our knowledge of critical issues affecting communities. This research comprises four main thrusts. First, creating a novel longitudinal local news repository to complement an existing longitudinal national news repository the researchers pioneered in a past collaboration with the Internet Archive. Second, the project will research new natural language processing (NLP) approaches to identify the geographic locations covered or not covered by the news, to provide a dynamic measurement of news deserts in a rapidly changing news landscape. Third, the project will mine community interests and needs expressed by topics on social media and search trends. Fourth, the project will explore the alignment between the interests of local communities and news topics. By fulfilling these goals, this research would create new techniques and best practices in building longitudinal local news datasets, which could be a valuable resource for researchers from different disciplines to study the United Stated via local media. Additionally, this effort would pioneer novel NLP models for identifying communities covered by news reports, and map the extent of local news deserts to unveil neglected and marginalized communities. Moreover, the proposed activities will quantify the degree of alignment between community interests and news stories. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.