NELA-Local: A Dataset of U.S. Local News Articles for the Study of County-level News Ecosystems

TL;DR

This paper introduces NELA-Local, a comprehensive dataset of over 1.4 million U.S. local news articles from diverse counties, combined with detailed county-level metadata, to facilitate research on local news ecosystems.

Contribution

The paper provides a large, publicly available dataset of local news articles linked with demographic and political data for studying local media dynamics.

Findings

Dataset covers 1.4 million articles from 313 outlets

Includes county-level demographics and election data

Enables analysis of local news ecosystems

Abstract

In this paper, we present a dataset of over 1.4M online news articles from 313 local U.S. news outlets published over 20 months (between April 4th, 2020 and December 31st, 2021). These outlets cover a geographically diverse set of communities across the United States. In order to estimate characteristics of the local audience, included with this news article data is a wide range of county-level metadata, including demographics, 2020 Presidential Election vote shares, and community resilience estimates from the U.S. Census Bureau. The NELA-Local dataset can be found at: https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataset.xhtml?persistentId=doi:10.7910/DVN/GFE66K.