MENOMONIE (WQOW) – Dunn County is in a ‘local news desert’ according to a new report, leaving community members working to fill the gap.
The Local Journalist Index report by Muck Rack and the nonprofit Rebuild Local News calls it a “stunning collapse in local news reporting” around the country.
In 2002, U.S. counties averaged 40 full time journalists per 100,000 residents. Now that average is just 8.2 journalists per 100,000 residents, a 75% drop according to the report.
In Dunn County, the index reports 0.1 full-time-equivalent journalists in the county.
“The information is not going to get out there unless someone writes about it,” said UW-Stout journalism and mass communication professor Kate Roberts Edenborg.
She says the lack of local news affects the county at both the government and the community levels. Without local news, people are less informed about what their government is doing.
“The information is not going to get out there unless someone writes about it,” said UW-Stout journalism and mass communication professor Kate Roberts Edenborg.
She says the lack of local news affects the county at both the government and the community levels. Without local news, people are less informed about what their government is doing.
“There’s access to the information, there always has been,” Roberts Edenborg said. “The agendas and minutes are there, but to sift through all that as a community member is a pain.”
That’s what journalists do: sift through that public information and ask questions to find out what it means for residents. They also tell stories about the people living in the community, helping people connect with their neighbors.
“There’s obviously value in both, but I think there’s that missing piece of connection within the community because we don’t have that,” Roberts Edenborg said.
There are people in Dunn County who report the news, but don’t meet the full-time criteria of the Local Journalist Index, click here to read about the methods used in the report.
The Library of Congress lists two active newspapers in Dunn County, The Dunn County News, which is a satellite of the Chippewa Herald, and The Colfax Messenger, which lists one writer on its website.
Roberts Edenborg says community members are working on their own to fill the gap.
“There’s not probably a lot of journalists per se, but there’s a lot of people trying to do the work of journalism,” she said.
Menomonie News Net is a nonprofit news outlet run by volunteers and other citizens use websites to write about what’s going on. Roberts Edenborg works with UW-Stout journalism students to write stories about the community, but she says it can be difficult for individual people to reach wide audiences.
“I see sometimes another website or there’s a couple of other podcasts that are related to informing the community,” she said. “So there’s information out there, it’s just figuring out how to pull it all together.”
Dunn County, and other parts of western Wisconsin face some geographical challenges for local news. Most of Dunn County is closer to Eau Claire, but the county technically falls within the Twin Cities TV market.
Pepin County faces the same problem, also counting just 0.1 full-time journalists per 100,000 residents.
Eau Claire County counts 22.1 full-time-equivalent journalists per 100,000 residents. Wisconsin as a whole counts 11.4.
Click here for the full nationwide report.
Toby Mohr, from Sparta, is a multi-media journalist at News 18.
Article published with permission. Click here to read the full article.