Media Coverage of Black and Brown Communities

 

The underlying problem of “news deserts” has been documented across the U.S. and is a growing area of research, debate, and discussion among journalists and academics (Stites, 2018). A generally accepted definition of news desert is “a community, either rural or urban, with limited access to the sort of credible and comprehensive news and information that feeds democracy at the grassroots level” (Abernathy, 2022). As a concept, “news desert” entered the mainstream journalistic lexicon a little over a decade ago, and its emergence has been attributed widely to the digital revolution’s detrimental impact on newspaper revenue nationwide, leading to thousands of print journalists being laid off and hundreds of newspapers being forced to close starting in the early 2000s, leaving many communities without media outlets (Conte, 2022).

The greater New York City metropolitan area provides an information ecosystem that allows us to examine how news deserts may or may not manifest themselves in suburbia. To what extent do local communities believe the news and information they have access to impacts their lives?

This site presents an overview of a multi-year action research project with the following objectives:

• To survey community-based organizations and journalists serving the communities to determine news access, document news-gathering practices, and assess issues vital to the
  community that may or may not be covered.
• To map the print and electronic media available to residents in the predominantly Black and Brown communities of Freeport, Hempstead, Elmont, Roosevelt, Uniondale, and
  Westbury, all in Nassau County.
• To gauge prospects for academic engagement in the production of “civic media.”

The studied communities are near Hofstra University and present an atypical racial and socioeconomic profile compared with the larger Nassau County. This choice was prompted by several studies that suggest news consumers of color, particularly in lower-income communities, are significantly less satisfied with coverage of the news than are their White counterparts. The racial make-up of the six communities reveals that unlike the larger county, which is predominantly White, the average population in these areas skews African American and Hispanic or Latino.

Abernathy, P.M. (2020). The expanding news desert: Do you live in a news desert? University of North Carolina, Hussman School of Journalism and Media. bit.ly/3ZY2sJW

Conte, A. (2022). Death of The Daily News: How citizen gatekeepers can save local journalism.
University of Pittsburgh Press.

Stites, T. (Oct. 15, 2018). About 1,300 U.S. communities have totally lost news coverage, UNC
news desert study finds. Poynter Institute. bit.ly/3L87AXE