Rural residents depend on papers for local news, but urbanites are more interested in local topics

Metropolitan, suburban, smaller town or rural, all types of places are big consumers of news -- be it local, national or international. But how and where we get that news and how much we "participate" in it differs between community types. And that may be more of a function of the digital and social media available to us than our desire to weigh in on the topics. Or so a recent study of local news and community types strongly indicates.

A just-released national survey conducted by the Pew Research Center shows that rural residents did indeed still rely on newspapers for most of their local news. Researchers speculated that is because most rural areas get little coverage from other media, and many "micropolitan" towns of fewer than 50,000 people have no television station.

However, they noted that "the choices about information acquisition are not necessarily the same in all communities. For instance, it might be the case in rural areas that the local newspaper and broadcast outlets are not online or have a very limited online presence and that is a determinant in whether residents get local information online or not."

And, perhaps surprisingly, researchers found that those who live in rural communities are "less interested in almost all local topics than those in other communities. The one exception is taxes. They are also are less likely . . . to say it is easier now to keep up with local information."

Interestingly, rural people were more likely than most to say they are willing to pay for local news content through a paid subscription to a local paper; 37 percent said so, a larger share than any but suburbanites, at 40 percent.

The study, co-authored by the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism and Internet & American Life Project, in partnership with the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, also reported these findings:

• Urban and suburban residents on average use more sources of local news than their small town and rural counterparts and are more likely to consume local news on mobile devices.
• The most active “local news participators” also tend to reside in suburban and urban communities where they email local stories to others, post material on sites, comment, post or e-report.
• Suburbanites are most likely to use radio as a news source -- researchers postulated this might be a consequence of longer commutes. They are the most likely of the four distinct community types to use the Internet for information about local restaurants, businesses and jobs.

To read the full report, go here.

Experts say digitally nervous rural newspapers ignore online opportunities at their peril

Rural newspapers that ignore online opportunities may be risking their relevancy, and losing opportunities, in their communities. And what's worse, Washington State University's Benjamin Shors writes for PBS MediaShift, a recent survey suggests rural citizens are going online to look for news but struggling to find local content. That, he writes, leaves rural papers at a crossroads: To leap or not to leap to the Internet. And if they do, what content do they take with them?

"It's a 24-7 world and they come out 52 times a year," Al Cross, director of the Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues, publisher of The Rural Blog, told Shors. "The worst day to die in a rural area is on a Thursday; your obit won't be printed for a week." Digitally savvy rural journalists, the University of Kentucky professor said, could quickly publish breaking community news. "They rightly have been wary of putting information online for free because that cannibalizes their print content," he said. "But I think there is a way to go online ... You put things online that you can't put in print," such as official documents, videos, audio recordings, extra photographs and so on, to maintain the local-news franchise that is the newspaper's reason for being.

Cross said some rural papers could even jump directly to mobile platforms, as phone technology rapidly evolves and cellular networks continue to spread. The Federal Communications Commission reported Tuesday that about 14.5 million rural Americans — or nearly one-fourth of the 61 million people living in rural areas -- had no fast Internet service, or broadband, available at home. In contrast, only 1.8 percent of  Americans living in non-rural areas had no broadband access.

Bill Will, executive director of the Washington Newspaper Publishers Association, which represents about 130 community newspapers in the state, told Shors that community newspapers are struggling with the same digitally driven economic challenges that have decimated larger publications. At a spring roundtable in Washington state, sponsored by the Carnegie Corporation of New York and the Knight Foundation, several initiatives were discussed to increase digital literacy among rural journalists and their readers. (Read more)

The state of the weekly newspaper industry: healthy, more rural, not as digital as it could be

Between 1997 and 2009, the community weekly newspaper industry became dramatically more rural and more dominated by group ownership, according to a research paper, "The State of the Weekly Newspaper Industry," presented today at journalism educators' annual convention in Chicago. (Because of an error in the conclusions section, an earlier version of this item said it had become less rural.)

Fifteen years ago, 45 percent of weeklies were defined as rural, being in a city or town with fewer than 10,000 people; in 2009, the rural share was 67 percent. The suburban share fell to 21 percent, from 46 percent. Average circulation declined for weeklies based in metropolitan central cities, but grew for those in rural and suburban or "micropolitan" areas, with cities of populations between 10,000 and 50,000.

The study found that the share of weeklies that were group owned increased by about half, to 62 percent, since 1997. Research presented in 2004, using different methodology by different researchers, showed group ownership at 58 percent.

Roughly two-thirds of weeklies had websites in 2009, but only about 6 percent allowed visitors to directly upload articles, and about 6 percent had paywalls, the latest study found. That number appears to have increased greatly in the past year or two, but the research only went through 2009.

The study was presented by Stephen Lacy of Michigan State University at the convention of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication. His co-authors were Daniel Riffe of the University of North Carolina, David Coulson of Jackson State University and Robin Blom of Michigan State. For a PDF of the paper, click here.