Why Economists and Doctors Are Monitoring Local News

Researchers routinely rely on websites like data.census.gov, but this month, the top of the site displays a banner that reads: “Due to the lapse of federal funding, this website is not being updated.” Dozens of reports – from critical spending data to disease surveillance – are not updated or completely dark due to the ongoing government shutdown. Earlier this year, President Trump and Elon Musk’s funding cuts also led to the removal of publicly available datasets. Some of the datasets were restored after legal challenges, but others were not – leaving some researchers wondering what to do. For some, the answer lies in turning to news.

At the Tow Center, we regularly rely on news data to understand how “pink slime” networks function or local news ecosystems evolve over time. Last week, at the New(s) Knowledge Symposium – a gathering of researchers, journalists, and technologists hosted by the Media Ecosystems Analysis Group – I found that many other researchers have been monitoring the news for data, often in unexpected ways.

Maia Majumder, a computational epidemiologist at Boston Children’s Hospital, said that aggregated local news reports were critical for supplementing and fact-checking official sources in disease outbreaks. Because news is hyper-local, Majumder told me in an interview, it is often more helpful for examining vaccination rates or spread of disease in a community compared to  official sources that often only come at the state or national level. And if official data goes offline, news becomes even more critical. “News media help fill that gap by acting as our eyes and ears in the community,” Majumder said. “This is a role the media plays even when the government isn’t shut down, because an open government doesn’t necessarily mean a transparent one.” She previously worked at HealthMap, a platform relying partially on news to track disease outbreaks.