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Editor's note: Daniel Wheaton is also the Midwest Newsroom’s data journalist based at Nebraska Public Media. The analysis for this project was done outside of his duties at the station.
The number of journalists working across the nation has decreased in recent decades, but exactly how dire the landscape is in Nebraska wasn’t known — until now.
The Nebraska News Map and ecosystem report details the number of local news outlets and local journalists across the state, adding Nebraska to a list of states that have mapped the landscape of journalism.
Jessica Walsh, a journalism professor at The University of Nebraska-Lincoln, led the nearly year-long project. The team reached out to every news organization in the state to better understand the landscape of local news in Nebraska.
Walsh and Daniel Wheaton, the geographer on the project, sat down with Nebraska Public Media’s Dale Johnson to discuss the project. The transcript below is lightly edited for clarity.
Explore the Nebraska News Map here
Dale Johnson: Jessica, what were the key findings in your project?
Jessica Walsh: First of all, thanks for having us here. This is really exciting to get to talk about this project. So we spent about a year doing a sort of comprehensive landscape assessment, as it's called, of all the local news organizations in the state, and we found that there were 9 counties in the state that didn't even have a local news organization based in that county. In addition, more than 40,000 people in Nebraska live in a county where there's no local journalists who are based there. Maybe on the bright side, we have almost 600 local journalists working in the state, getting up every morning and telling the stories of the people who live in their communities. We found some positives and also some things that were troubling. Just one more thing to throw out there, we found that there were 55 counties in the state that had 2 or fewer local journalists covering that county and working in that county.
Johnson: And we do want to bring up, and we will eventually hear the fact that there is about a 12% Spanish speaking population in the state of Nebraska, and we'll take a look at the Spanish language television stations and or radio stations, but those were some of the negatives, Jessica, what were some of the bright spots in Nebraska to consider?
Walsh: Yeah, so this part of this project, I visited a lot of newspapers and radio stations around the state, and this summer, spent a lot of time really, honestly, trying to track people down, these busy publishers who are kind of like one-man or one-woman shops. And so in doing that, I got to talk to a lot of people who work in local media in the state, and there is a lot of really cool stuff going on. There's a young woman up in Madison who went away for college and moved back to Madison and bought the newspaper with a little bit of help from her family, and now she's the publisher, the writer, the reporter. And she felt like, if she didn't come back to Madison, she didn't know who else would. People are also being innovative in thinking what a newspaper can be. The Stapleton Enterprise is running a speakeasy out of the newspaper. We also heard from people who work in local media, despite having fewer resources and fewer journalists, are still getting up every day and doing the work of covering their communities. And it was really inspiring.
Johnson: Newspapers don't look anything like newspapers used to look when I was a kid. They're smaller, they're condensed, and because of lack of staff, they're much thinner. Can you talk about some of the innovations or the workarounds that you saw in your project? Jessica, people doing the best with what they have?
Walsh: Talking to the editor of the Scottsbluff Star-Herald. She is managing multiple newsrooms, editing for multiple newspapers, and she is doing her best with the resources she has, because she loves what she does and she believes in it. So I really think there remains this commitment among at least the local journalists I talk to — to continue to do the work, even if it's hard, even if it's maybe lonelier than it used to be, even if they have fewer resources and more ground to cover one
Johnson: Of the innovations going on at the Ord Quiz and the Imperial Republican, they don't have any full timers. They don't have any part timers. So who do they have? They have the community. The community is contributing, and freelancers are kicking in with news items.
Walsh: There is at least one newspaper that's relying on high school students to cover local sports for the newspaper because they don't have sports reporters anymore. So it's sort of like, rather than have nothing, we are going to supplement our coverage with the resources we have in the community. And that's something that we saw quite a bit. I want to bring in Daniel Wheaton here. But talk about this type of project that had never been done before, I understand. Is that correct?
Daniel Wheaton: Yeah, the biggest challenge was just, how do we get this really nebulous thing? How many news organizations are out there? How do we put this in space? And basically, Jessica went out, did this massive survey, and I did the boring data work of connecting all of those points together and saying, this went specifically in this county, this one specifically in that county, because it's difficult to kind of apply space to this nebulous concept. So that's why we really stuck to a very core methodology that we've seen other researchers use. For instance, we only focused on local news organizations that are actually producing local news. So a radio station that just reads press releases, things like that wouldn't really count. So that's why we wanted to focus on the journalism itself. And we also took information from the FCC to see exactly where these radio stations and TV stations are broadcasting across the state. And frankly, that was one of the big surprises to me. Pretty much everywhere in the state you have at least one radio station, and sure, it's probably not going to be the most clear sound in some parts of the Sandhills or in some edges of Nebraska, but it is impressive that there is radio and TV all across the state, but it was a real challenge of getting this nebulous thing and putting it into these lines and polygons and squares of the 93 counties in Nebraska.
Johnson: And where can that be found?
Wheaton: Newsmap.unl.edu, it’s got a nice little introduction, which walks you through all the key points that Jessica has hit. And then you can explore, go deep into your county, see how many people and news organizations are working all across the state. And we also have some demographic information to give you some context, for instance, income, who people voted for, and also the diversity in the state, because it's important to see where those haves and have nots are
Johnson: Now I don't want time to get away Jessica, before we talk about Nebraska's Spanish speaking population, Hispanic and Latino. 12% of Nebraska's population is either Hispanic or Latino origin, roughly 235,000 people. How are they represented in a map, television, newspaper and or radio station?
Walsh: Yeah. So if you're thinking about local news that is reported for and spoken in Spanish. That's just one place, and that's in Omaha. Telemundo has a station in Omaha. They have at least three reporters working there, specifically producing news in Spanish for a Spanish speaking audience. And that's it. So if you are someone in Lexington or Schyler or some of these places with higher Hispanic populations, there really isn't any dedicated local media for you to consume. So think about questions you might have about where to vote when the school board is meeting, and what they're discussing, and these sort of really important elements of civic life that you learn about by being able to speak and understand the language. So I think that was something that was really concerning, and something that we should all really be thinking about is, how is the Spanish speaking population in Nebraska being served by local media?
Johnson: What was your takeaway at the end of this project? Were you hopeful? Did you see hope or lack of it?
Walsh: I mean, I There are a lot of things that give me hope, because I don't see, I didn't encounter a lot of local journalists who were really bitter or who were saying, I just want to leave. A lot of the people I talked to had been doing local reporting for many, many years, and they were the only source of local news in their town. And I really did feel like there was a strong commitment by the people I talk to, anyway to keep, to stay and keep doing that work. But I don't see any trend right now with the way we're going, where there are just more and more local journalists each year. I think we'll probably see fewer. But I think one of the important things about this project is that at least now we know right so like we know where the news deserts are in Nebraska now, and with the resources on this website, grant writers, people who are interested in starting local news organizations, they have access to information they didn't have access to before. And so I think that also gives me hope that this provides a platform for some people to take action, think of solutions, because now they have evidence that can help them make those decisions.
Johnson: Daniel, your takeaway from the data?
Wheaton: Yeah, I feel that it's worth noting. The landscape of local journalism in Nebraska is changing a lot, but we're seeing it mostly with these statewide organizations that are sharing news for free. So. Flatwater Free Press, the work that Nebraska Public Media does the Midwest Newsroom as well as the Nebraska Examiner, but that's statewide coverage of mostly the legislature and politics. What we haven't seen is more local enterprise and accountability reporting. So if you're a funder out there who wants to make sure the spirit of journalism remains in Nebraska, perhaps that's where the next step needs to be is some more county and city level reporting, which we know is not totally dead, but it could use a little bit of help, because when there's just one person covering an entire area, it's difficult to do everything. And that's the challenge we're kind of seeing right now, is that there's only so many hours in the day, only so many stories you can reasonably write, so things are falling through the cracks, but at least we know where those cracks are.
Johnson: And again, the data is available at newsmap.unl.edu, Jessica, Daniel, thank you very much. I'm Dale Johnson, Nebraska Public Media News.