Here’s a new database for local news research, from Syracuse University and Rebuild Local News
If you’re trying to get a handle on evidence from academic research about the state of local news, it’s hard to know where to start. The research is scattered — across disciplines from political science to economics to computer science; across universities; across paywalled journals. To some extent, it’s part of the academic job description to overcome those siloes. But they’re major practical barriers for other audiences — policymakers, funders, working journalists — interested in building an evidenced-based case about the local news crisis and potential solutions.
To solve this problem, Syracuse University and Rebuild Local News teamed up last fall to build a curated, accessible local news database. Their Local News Research Hub formally launches this Thursday, May 21. “Our collective purpose is to provide a central, reliable home for data-driven insights into the changing media landscape,” the team states.
Joshua Darr, director of the Local NExT Lab and associate professor at Syracuse University, credited Democracy Fund’s literature review with laying the groundwork for an expanded, searchable database. The hub comprises about 170 studies total, including the 45 “artifacts” covered in that literature review, along with more than 120 new entries. Among these are peer-reviewed articles, dissertations, books and book chapters, and working papers.
“This is not only bridging academia to news practice or to policymaking,” Darr said; the team made a concerted effort to be multi-disciplinary in building the hub. They plan to continue updating the database, and are accepting submissions of additional research for inclusion.
The hub is searchable by discipline, research topic, and study type. Disciplines include Communication, Computer Science, Economics, Political Science, Public Health, Public Policy, and Sociology; research topics include Business Models, Community Connection, Economic Impact, Polarization, Print, and Voter Turnout and Engagement, among others. Each article in the database includes an AI-generated summary (vetted by at least two human researchers) that’s split into three components: a one-sentence Key Finding, a Study Description, and Practitioner Implications. These brief summaries are intended to help make the database useful and legible to audiences outside academia.
Here, for instance, is what comes up when you filter for communication studies on nonprofit local news.
Matthew Baker, Rebuild Local News’ first director of research, envisions supporters of local news policy as “power users” of the hub. (In beta, he said he’s already found it useful for his own day-to-day work, from gathering talking points to writing papers.) But he also hopes the database can be an entry point for people newer to local news as a civic priority. “Having something in one place, I hope, will also act as an attractor to newer users — people who are in adjacent spaces, or even legislative aides,” he said. “So I’m hoping that over time, it will serve to generate increased interest and attention on the fact that we do have relatively rigorous research that demonstrates that there is a crisis, but more to the point, the impact of that crisis.” He thinks the hub can open up the conversation around local news research and surface areas for exploration beyond individual academics’ research priorities.
Darr also thinks the database can be “useful for journalists making a case to nontraditional news funders,” including community foundations. “You have to make a case that’s not just ‘journalism is good, so we should employ journalists,’” he said. “It has to be much more of a nuanced argument about community health, community vibrancy, community economic success, and it’s a lot to ask each newsroom to show their own individual, unique impact in that way as they’re trying to build. That’s where I think academic research can have a positive effect on the ability to make that argument.” (Meanwhile, for other academics, he thinks “assembling a resource that makes writing lit reviews easier and exploring what’s been done may have a force multiplier effect on people wanting to do research on local news.”)
Baker pushed for a quantitative emphasis in the database — putting actual numbers like point estimates and effect sizes in the summaries wherever possible. Take the influential 2020 journal article by Pengjie Gao, Chang Lee, and Dermot Murphy looking at the impact of newspaper closures on public finance. In the database, the article’s summary leads with the numbers: “The loss of watchdog reporters in a city leads to cities having higher borrowing costs of 5-11 basis points and costs citizens roughly $650,000 per issue.”
While many academic articles underline statistically significant findings, that isn’t necessarily the most meaningful language for audiences trying to make nuts and bolts decisions about policy; a small, statistically significant finding on a 100-point scale isn’t as compelling or concrete as a measurable effect on interest rates or mortgage rates or taxpayer costs. Especially for a policymaker audience, Baker said highlighting numerical evidence helps “make the case that the juice is worth the squeeze.” Though the database is tilted toward quantitative research, Darr said that because there’s a divide in the research community between quantitative and qualitative research, he hopes the hub can help make each more accessible to the other. (Some local news researchers are working to better coordinate and standardize research approaches for measuring the health of local information ecosystems.)
The economic impact of local news loss is a major area of focus for Rebuild Local News because they see it as a powerful incentive for policymakers. That’s where a lot of the energy is in local news research these days, according to Darr, and the database backs that up; if you click one of the hub’s sample searches, “what is the economic impact of local news?”, more than half of the 23 related studies shown are from 2025, and only one predates 2020.
Darr said he’d like to see more research on some areas that are more difficult to quantify. “The thing we still kind of need to crack is the counterfactual,” he said. “I think a lot of the good that local news does is the stuff that it prevents from happening, and it’s hard to measure that.” That remains an important local news research challenge: “What would a community’s sense of itself look like without its local newspaper? We can look at communities where the local news has failed; we can look at communities that have both, but it’s hard to figure out a research design that gets at something as amorphous as that, but important as that, and that still varies local news.”
Darr encouraged feedback and additional research submissions for the hub. “This is not meant to be comprehensive; it’s meant to be collaborative,” he said. “The more people collaborating, the better.”