FAQ

You can email the project director Jessica Walsh with any comments, questions and concerns. 

The main data collection started January 2024 and finished November 2024. Most of the data was collected from February through September; another round of fact-checking and verification in fall 2024 resulted in additional changes to the map and analysis up through the end of December 2024.

We used:

Demographic data: 2022 American Community Survey (5-year estimates) 

Broadcast contours: FCC 

Broadband data: State of Nebraska  

Voting information: Nebraska Secretary of State 

GIS: Geocod.io, QGIS 

We relied generally on the term “local news originator” described by Sarah Stonbely in her research on New Jersey’s local news ecosystem.  Student researchers were trained on a codebook that described how to determine whether a news organization was a local news originator.  Our criteria included: 1) journalist staffing 2) production of original local news (no aggregators) 3) presence in Nebraska 

 We did not assess content in local newspapers, broadcasts and digital sites against criteria for critical information needs as defined by Friedland et al., 2012). This is an important and valid measure to determine whether local news is actually serving a community, but it proved too difficult to assess every local news organization in the state because 1) more than 20 Nebraska newspapers do not have websites, so we could not evaluate their content 2) some newspaper content was behind paywalls 3) it was too time-consuming to listen or watch every local station to ascertain whether programming met these criteria.  If a newspaper was included in the state's press association directory, it was assumed they were a local newspaper producing local news. Lead researcher Jessica Walsh consulted multiple times with the director of the state's press association to assure newspapers included were indeed local newspapers.

We described local news originators as those organizations that had at least one full-time or part-time person doing journalistic work, which included reporting, photojournalism, editing or some other editorial task. We did not include people who worked on the business side of an organization selling ads or playing music, for example. In very few cases, where freelancers provided content for a newspaper but they did not have full- time or part-time staff, we counted that organization as a local news originator. For example, The Ord Quiz and The Imperial Republican do not have full-time or part-time staff. We made this determination after speaking with the publisher/owners of those newspapers. In addition, there were a few instances where a newspaper’s address was in a different town than the community stated on their nameplate. In these cases (The Waverly News, for example, doesn’t appear to have an address in Waverly), we still counted Waverly as having a local news organization and mapped the newspaper to the center of the town because we could verify Waverly coverage and staffing). The Sarpy County Times did not have a physical address and had no city/town/village name associated with it, so it was included in the analysis, but is not represented by a point on the map. Instead of an address, we used the centroid of the zip code or PO box of the town. To assess inclusion in some of these gray areas, this information was collected via email and phone conversations with local news outlet owners, editors, publishers or news directors.

News aggregators were not counted in this analysis. News aggregators do not produce original news but instead recycle news produced elsewhere.  

Nebraska Public Media, Nebraska’s PBS and NPR stations, has a network of radio and television stations that broadcast across the state. NPM falls outside of the definition of local news originator, but the broadcast contours were included in the map as public media is a key part of the news ecosystem. NPM was counted as a statewide news originator. 

Friedland, L., Napoli, P., Ognyanova, K., Weil, C., Wilson, E. (2012). Review of the literature regarding critical information needs of the American public. Report submitted to the Federal Communications Commission. https://transition.fcc.gov/bureaus/ocbo/Final_Literature_Review.pdf  

We started our process with directories provided by the Nebraska Broadcasters Association and the Nebraska Press Association. In addition, the project staff’s knowledge of Nebraska’s local news landscape as well as reporting work by professor Jessica Walsh, the lead researcher, helped identify any hyperlocal digital sites and ethnic media sites that were not in the traditional media directories.  

For larger newspapers with full-time staffing lists and robust news sites, we checked those staffing lists against two journalist database programs (MuckRack and Cision) in case the news organization’s staffing list was outdated. For smaller local news organizations with no public staffing lists or staffing lists behind paywalls, we called and/or emailed the newsroom to manually verify staffing and local news origination. The project team contacted more than 70 newsrooms via email or phone to verify information.  

It was sometimes difficult to ascertain what broadcast radio stations and TV stations provided local news. To do this, we consulted public staffing lists for presence of staff with journalistic titles (see FAQ: How did you define local news organization?), consulted publicly available program guides and if needed, called the newsroom. 

We worked closely with Flood Communications, the largest single media owner in the state, to identify what radio and TV stations provided local news and what ones did not. Only stations that met the definition of a local news organization were included.  Like newspapers with a single corporate owner, Flood Communications TV and radio stations include newsrooms that share resources across geographies and platforms. Flood journalists who worked at multiple stations were counted according to our process for counting local journalists (see the FAQ How did you count journalists who worked for more than one news organization?) 

Flood also operates multiple digital sites under the umbrella News Channel Nebraska where digital and video stories and newscasts are posted. Many TV stations do this, so these sites were not counted as additional local news organizations, but we acknowledge their value to local communities.  

Additionally, we also documented every statewide journalist. Those statewide news organizations are represented on the map as points based on the geographic location of the organization even if those journalists may cover other areas. Those statewide journalists are included in the journalist count as statewide journalists, not local journalists. 

Once the survey of news outlets and news staffing was complete, that data was joined to spatial data representing Nebraska’s 93 counties. 

The 2022 American Community Survey five-year estimates were used for demographic data on race, income, citizenship, veteran status, home ownership and education and the language spoken at home. 

Nebraska election data was gathered from the Nebraska Secretary of State. 

Broadband permeation, defined as the number of homes, businesses and public offices having access to wired broadband, was gathered from the state of Nebraska. 

The counts of local news organizations and the sum of journalists working for those news organizations were then summed and aggregated by county to allow for comparisons of the variables described above.  

For broadcast stations, we gathered data from the Federal Communications Commission to show where Nebraskans can watch or listen to local broadcast news originators via a radio or over-air television. AM signals are not reachable at night, so if a station broadcast on both AM and FM, the FM polygon was used on the map. TV stations that only broadcast on low frequencies, only on local cable networks or whose contours were not available on the FCC’s website were excluded from the map but still counted in the analysis. Flood Communications, for example, owns TV stations that have no FCC contour maps.  

If a person worked at a news organization full-time, we counted them as one full-time equivalent employee. If a person was part time, we treated them as one half-time equivalent employee. However, if the same person was listed as working at multiple outlets, that one full-time equivalent employee count was divided among the organizations. So, if a person worked at two news organizations full time, that full-time equivalent employee was counted as half in each organization. For part-time employees, the same logic was used, but instead of starting from a value of one, they started from a value of 0.5. 

We initially started out asking every publisher, editor and station manager/news director we talked to how many freelancers they had used in the past month and the past three months. We called and emailed more than 70 publishers, owners, station managers, news directors and editors multiple times, sometimes, just to find someone to talk to, only to then find out that they all had different ways of describing and using freelancers. In addition, the quality of freelance work could not be assessed; the number of stories could also not be reliably assessed. Ultimately, we felt our ability to collect standardized, reliable data on freelancers for every local news organization in the state was too difficult and would produce unreliable data.  

Instead, we stress that we acknowledge the importance of freelancers, particularly at small, resource-strapped weeklies but felt we could not reliably track their contributions. 

Local sports reporting is an important part of local news coverage. We counted local sports journalists and sports directors at stations and newspapers that carry news and/or sports. We also counted statewide sports news sites covering Nebraska sports if the site had a distinct focus on Nebraska and had a physical presence in Nebraska. HuskerOnline and Nebraska247, for example, were not counted because although they cover Husker Athletics and have journalists based in Nebraska, they have no physical presence in the state and thus could not be mapped.

Like the decision to not count freelancers, this was a difficult choice. Initially, we collected coverage area information from every newspaper we could reach by phone or email, but this 1) included partial counties, which were difficult to map  2)  was too reliant on self-reported information (how did we know how often a newspaper actually covered a town or city in their coverage area?) 3) was time-consuming as there were some newspapers that were difficult to reach  

We acknowledge, as other researchers have, that tracking local news organizations by county is not the ideal way to show local news health. To account for this, we decided to track the presence of local journalists to provide a different – but also not perfect – way of tracking local news health.  

This was also a difficult decision. Because we used the county as our base unit of analysis and only wanted to count each local news organization one time, we used the digital map to show coverage area (using the FCC’s publicly available contour maps) of broadcast stations. There is a layer of the map that allows users to see broadcast coverage. In addition, local broadcast reporters (and newspaper reporters) in more rural areas seemed to cover a lot of ground, and it was difficult to ascertain how much time they spent in what location.  

Yes, I hope so. Now that we have the groundwork for data collection and analysis and a website is built, the goal is to do another news map report in the next several years. 

First, this project would not be possible without the generous donation of University of Nebraska-Lincoln alum Marty Liggett, a native of York, Nebraska, who is the executive director of the American Society of Hematology in Washington, D.C. Liggett’s donation helped kick start this project and funded the data analysis, website construction and other aspects. I also want to thank the University of Nebraska-Lincoln Research Council, which placed its trust in me and supported this research with a $10,000 faculty seed grant in 2024. In addition, the Nebraska Press Association Foundation and the Nebraska Broadcasters Association provided donations that helped support the students that worked on this project. College of Journalism and Mass Communications student Carleigh McFarlane and now-graduate Alex Kopf worked on contacting newspaper publishers and owners; Carleigh also did some reporting on local news. Now-graduate Sarah Lawlor helped me sort through the state broadcaster’s association directory to determine which stations were local news originators. Sarah also did some reporting that was featured in the report. Student worker Nandini Rainikindi helped construct the website. 

Thank you to my dean, Dr. Shari Veil, who secured the private donation that kickstarted this project, believed in this idea and shares my enthusiasm and commitment for supporting journalism in Nebraska.  

NPR Midwest Newsroom data journalist Daniel Wheaton was a valuable partner in this project. He guided me throughout the data collection and data analysis process, did the analysis for the project and formatted the files for the map. Thank you to Ben VanKat and Quentin Lueninghoener at Hanscom Park Studio in Omaha, who created the map and helped us create the most effective, user-friendly version of the map as possible and endured many requested design and data point revisions. Daniel, Quentin and Ben were great partners on this project because they also care about journalism in Nebraska and are familiar with the state’s geography and population. 

I had help from outside of Nebraska as well. Thank you to Sarah Stonbely, who is now a research fellow at the Tow Center at Columbia University, for talking with me about how she built the New Jersey local news ecosystems map. Thank you also to Sarah’s data analyst, Zev Ross, who also talked with me about their project. Regina Lawrence, the research director for the Agora Journalism Center at the University of Oregon, who helped construct and research Oregon’s news map, also provided valuable knowledge. Corey Hutchins, a journalist and educator at Colorado College, who worked on the Colorado news mapping project, also provided guidance. University of Minnesota professor Benjamin Toff’s Minnesota local news ecosystems project, which just launched in September, also provided inspiration. In addition, Penny Abernathy’s work mapping news deserts at the University of North Carolina and then at Medill provided guidance for news map making as well. I also want to acknowledge the Local News Impact Consortium, a collection of local news ecosystem researchers who want to provide more standardized procedures for creating news maps. I recently learned about this group and applaud their work to strengthen local news ecosystem research.