Who actually talks to local reporters, and who doesn't
Pew Research looked at what it takes for an American to have spoken with a local journalist — not read their work, not shared it, but actually talked face to face with one. The answer isn't what you might think.
It's not the people with graduate degrees or the ones who read the morning paper. It's the people who have spent more time in their own zip codes — the ones who've lived in the same town longer, who know the mayor and the council members and the reporter who covers them. The less mobile, the more likely to have a real conversation with someone who writes about them.
The flip side is worth paying attention to: the young, the mobile, the ones who bounce between cities for work or school, and the ones who get their news mostly online. They're the ones local papers are losing. They don't know the reporter's name because they've never met her. They don't know the local newsroom's number because they've never called it.
Why this matters for us: when the people who actually live here stop talking to the people who write about them, the stories stop being ours and start being written about us.
Why this matters for us: when the people who actually live here stop talking to the people who write about them, the stories stop being ours and start being written about us.
“The less mobile, the more likely to have a real conversation with someone who writes about them.”