Local Beats, National Consequences: The Link Between Local News and American Democratic Health

Shifts in the media landscape in recent decades have left an increasing number of Americans living in "news deserts," or counties without a local paper. Since 2004, approximately 2,100 newspapers — nearly one in four — have gone out of print, leaving well over 1,300 communities without local news outlets. Hundreds more have reduced their coverage to the point that they've become what researchers characterize as "ghost newspapers" – papers that cling to life but are too financially hobbled to serve any worthwhile democratic function. Nearly all of the others have scaled back as well, just not as far. This trend has certainly been consequential for these local communities, but the decline of local news nationwide has also deprived American democracy of one of its key support structures, and it has fueled the nationalization and, by extension, polarization, of our politics. Finding a way to revitalize local media could be a big part of the solution to revitalizing our politics

Supplemental Material - Place-Based Resentment in Contemporary U.S. Elections: The Individual Sources of America’s Urban-Rural Divide

Supplemental Material for Place-Based Resentment in Contemporary U.S. Elections: The Individual Sources of America’s Urban-Rural Divide by Nicholas Jacobs and B. Kal Munis in Political Research Quarterly</p

Final_Supplemental_Materials_(appendix)_online_supp – Supplemental material for Place-Based Imagery and Voter Evaluations: Experimental Evidence on the Politics of Place

<p>Supplemental material, Final_Supplemental_Materials_(appendix)_online_supp for Place-Based Imagery and Voter Evaluations: Experimental Evidence on the Politics of Place by Nicholas F. Jacobs and B. Kal Munis in Political Research Quarterly</p