Local News Online and COVID in the U.S.: Relationships among Coverage, Cases, Deaths, and Audience

TL;DR

This study analyzes how local U.S. online news outlets covered COVID-19, revealing that coverage was initially linked to death rates but shifted over time, influenced by politics and audience demographics.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive analysis of COVID coverage dynamics in local online news, incorporating a large dataset and examining influences like politics and audience vulnerability.

Findings

COVID coverage was initially linked to national death rates.

Coverage shifted away from COVID over time due to sociopolitical events.

Vulnerable populations received less pandemic-related news.

Abstract

We present analyses from a real-time information monitoring system of online local news in the U.S. We study relationships among online local news coverage of COVID, cases and deaths in an area, and properties of local news outlets and their audiences. Our analysis relies on a unique dataset of the online content of over 300 local news outlets, encompassing over 750,000 articles over a period of 10 months spanning April 2020 to February 2021. We find that the rate of COVID coverage over time by local news outlets was primarily associated with death rates at the national level, but that this effect dissipated over the course of the pandemic as news about COVID was steadily displaced by sociopolitical events, like the 2020 U.S. elections. We also find that both the volume and content of COVID coverage differed depending on local politics, and outlet audience size, as well as evidence that more vulnerable populations received less pandemic-related news.