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Despite the resounding alarm of a nationwide decline of local news, little is known about the underlying mechanisms. Using the 2004 and 2018 U.S. local news deserts datasets alongside census and election data, I adopt spatial panel regressions to delineate causal relationships between county-level attributes and local news preservation and further demonstrate spatial heterogeneity in these relationships through geographically weighted panel regressions. I find that news media follow the money and often move away from places where they are needed most – those with more racial-ethnic diversity and growing populations. Partisan composition does not help or hinder local newspaper preservation.
This set of graphs shows variables that have prominent local effects on local newspaper preservation.
The graphs visualize results of the lagged and concurrent residuals models. All effects are overlaid on a single graph, with “+” patterns symbolizing positive effects while “-” patterns symbolizing negative effects.
Only local effects that are large enough to pass critical t-tests adjusted for multi-testing. The adjusted alpha for 95% confidence is .004 for the lagged residuals model and .008 for the concurrent residuals model.
My findings confirm the pattern long observed by media scholars – news media follow the money (Baker, 1995; Pickard, 2019; Usher, 2021). In this way, they often move away from places where they are needed most – those with more racial-ethnic diversity and growing populations. The problem of local news desert is also a problem of spatial inequality, resulting from territorial intersections of stratification factors like class and race/ethnicity, while further influencing the wellbeing of myriads of emplaced communities. I argue that, as a community necessity, the provision of local news should be democratically coordinated and publicly funded. Revitalizing local news through public funding can be the first step towards an equitable and democratic future.
Qin, Abby Youran (2024). Where is local news drying off? Mechanisms behind the formation of local news deserts in the U.S. Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1177/10776990241277885
How Much does Inclusive Local Media Cost?
How Much does Inclusive Local Media Cost?
We seek to collect a comprehensive database of news articles published by 500+ local media outlets across the U.S., use machine learning techniques to analyze their contents and incorporate geographical information to assess how well they serve local communities in various aspects.
In Preparation: Dubree, W. & Qin, Abby Youran. How much does inclusive local media cost: A generalized workflow for journalism performance assessment and budget calculation.
[Research Grant ($5,000) - DeWitt Wallace Center for Media & Democracy, Duke University]
We take a spatial approach to understand political homophily and a network approach to explain the growing spatial polarization in the U.S. by examining county-level political homophily.
We first calculated all U.S. counties’ ratio of like-minded to cross-cutting connectivity based on human mobility data and the Facebook friendship network (see left-hand figures). Then, we used GLMNet and spatial lag models to explore how a county’s political, economic, and sociocultural characteristics are related to its tendency towards political homophily. We further conducted geographically weighted regression analyses to map out spatial regimes based on different driving mechanisms of local political homophily. Overall, our analyses suggest that urban culture characterized by large population, robust local news provision, racial-ethnic diversity, and progressive political culture tend to foster politically inclusive connections. By describing and rigorously explaining various ecological factors’ associations with counties’ homophilic tendencies, we bring in a macro-level perspective to enrich our understanding of political homophily and lay the empirical groundwork for further theory building.
R&R: Qin, Abby Youran, Dubree, W., & Wagner, M. Partisan connection in context: Explaining online and offline political homophily in American counties. Paper presented at the 2024 International Conference on Social Media & Society, London, UK.
[Summer PA Award ($7,000) & Conference Travel Grant ($1,000) - Elections Research Center, University of Wisconsin-Madison]
Mutual Endorsement Network of Anti-CCP Conspiracists on YouTube.
Backbone Shared Commenter Network of Anti-CCP Conspiracists on YouTube.
I am leading a series of research investigating the anti-CCP conspiracy circle on YouTube. Considering political conspiracy theories as a combination of factually problematic information and populist morality, we draw on Habermas’s theory of communicative action to analytically distinguish the factual and moral components of conspiracy theories.
Our first study (1) maps out the conspiratorial YouTubers' mutual endorsement network and probes into their political economic connections; (2) situates these channels onto a network of audience attention and studies how conspiracy theories are collaboratively produced by networked YouTubers and audiences; and (3) qualitatively analyze how conspiracists weave together factual and moral claims to build convincing narratives.
Our ongoing research focuses on the audience of conspiracy videos. Anti-CCP conspiracy YouTube is a transnational space where mainland Chinese, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Macau audiences meet and interact with each other. We use an n-gram topic model to understand the topical focuses of each audience segment and take steps to build a supervised machine learning classifier to identify truth and moral rightness claims in the comment section. Our central question is: Given that conspiratorial YouTubers use legitimate moral claims to package their problematic facts, are audiences falling prey to misinformation or seeking moral commiseration? While answering this question, we pay special attention to the "moderation" effect of sociocultural contexts in different Sinophone societies.
Under Review: Qin, Abby Youran, Xiao, F., & Dai, L. Tell China's conspiracy well: Networks and narratives of Anti-CPC YouTube influencers. Paper presented at the 108th Annual National Communication Association (NCA) Conference, New Orleans, USA.
In Preparation: Qin, Abby Youran, Xiao, F., & Dubree, W. Under Conspiracy Videos We Meet: Facts, Norms, and Communities in a Transnational Sinophone Conspiracy Sphere. Poster presented at the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC) 2023 Annual Conference, Washington, USA.
[Graduate Student Research Funding ($800) - School of Journalism & Mass Communication, University of Wisconsin-Madison.]
Publication on the International Journal of Communication
Top Student Paper Award from NCA's Political Communication Division
STAYING TUNED FOR CENSORED INFORMATION SOURCES?
Set out to explain the "anomaly" that mainland Chinese immigrants opt for (note the selective exposure undertone in the wording) censored sources even after moving to a plural information environment, I ended up revealing a much more complex web of contextual influences on people's information practices. Immigrants’ media habits are jointly shaped by intrapersonal deliberation, micro-level contextual cues, mesolevel social networks, and macro-level structures.
Publication on Mass Communication and Society
JUDGING "THEM" BY MY MEDIA USE
Focusing on Hong Kong’s anti-extradition bill movement and drawing on a sample of 527 pro-democracy Hong Kong students, this paper investigates the relations among selective exposure, perceived selective exposure, presumed media influence, and their potential consequences. It shows that individuals’ assumption of the outgroup’s media diet is a mirror image of their own media choices. The more an individual consumes like-minded information, the more he/she expects outgroup members to do so. On the contrary, the more one uses cross-cutting media, the more he/she expects outgroup members to engage in cross-cutting exposure as well. Individuals’ perceived media exposure of the outgroup will further influence their presumed media influence on the outgroup, which may trigger potential attitudinal and behavioral reactions. The findings shed new light on the consequences of selective exposure. Besides directly influencing us through pro-attitudinal information, selective exposure can also affect us indirectly, by making us believe that our rivals are also engaging in and polarized by selective exposure to ideologically congruent sources.
Please refer to my Google Scholar page for a full publication list.
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