How Local News Reduces Loneliness

When thinking about the harms caused by the collapse of local news, our minds might first turn to the practical: Less local news means more corruption, more government waste, and meager knowledge of candidates for local office. 

More recent research has also found that the local news crisis exacerbates polarization and misinformation. When community news contracts, the vacuum is filled by national media (more partisan) and social media (optimized for anger, misinformation-friendly). 

That got Danny Hayes, a professor of political science at The George Washington University, wondering: If local news influences communal feelings, could it also influence personal feelings? 

His recent study is stunning. He and researcher Anusha Trivedi compared levels of individual loneliness in comparable communities, some with robust local news and others without. They found that those with less community news had higher levels of loneliness, especially in rural areas. In a state that is half rural, a 10-point increase in the share of the state’s low-news counties leads to a 1.4-point increase in loneliness. 

Then they examined local news consumption in a nationally representative sample and found a similar pattern. Those who consume more local news were less lonely than those who didn’t. 

Then, Rebuild Local News and Muckrack, as part of its annual Local Journalist index released this week, explored the data from a different angle. The study focuses on the number of journalists rather than the number of outlets, and found an 82 percent drop in the number of Local Journalist Equivalents since 2002. 

Looking at matched pairs of states with similar rural populations, those with more journalists per 100,000 residents also had lower loneliness rates. For example, Nevada and Massachusetts have nearly identical rural populations, around five to eight percent, but Nevada has roughly half the journalist density and the highest loneliness rate.  

Why would this be? The mechanism may be the same as why we have more polarization: With less local news, people are more likely to turn to social media and their phones, which has, by itself, been shown to increase loneliness. 

But Hayes and Trivedi suggest two other possibilities. 

First, local news, when done well, provides information about events and places that draw people together. If you don’t know about the crafts fair or the community theater’s latest production of The Crucible, you’re more likely to stay home. 

Though not as romantic, even information about political or civic conflicts can help. You go out to protest the new prison, you’re bonding with fellow NIMBYs. 

Second, on a more psychological level, local news “may also encourage people to identify as a member of their community and feel connected to the people in it,” as Hayes and Trivedi put it.  

So, while fancy journalists used to disparage the mere “human interest stories” they had to write when they first started, it turns out that those may be among the most important. Stories about other people—whether a puff piece or an obituary—help create more nuanced bonds. 

An earlier scholar who looked at this phenomenon, Clyde Bentley, wrote in 2001, “The unifying function of the newspaper … was of social integration. Whether it was by providing them news of their neighbors, helping them cope with the death of a friend, or simply telling them that tuna was on sale at the market, the newspaper made survival in their community much easier and more enjoyable, a function of the community­building ability of the press.” 

When the internet first arrived, it seemed digital tools would happily take up these functions. Online calendars tell you what’s going on. People can share information and gossip on Facebook groups.  

But those methods don’t appear to have the same positive effect on personal disposition, or at least not at a level sufficient to offset the catastrophic loss of news outlets that try to foster a more communal feeling. 

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