Current Research

How much does inclusive local media cost?

A generalized workflow for journalism performance assessment and budget calculation.

Wil M. Dubree & Abby Qin

Democracy Fund | Comp-Comm-Coop | DeWitt Wallace Center

An ongoing project funded by the Democracy Fund and the Duke University DeWitt Wallace Center for Media and Democracy, this research grant was awarded to our team to work with Duke University researchers to improve the Journalism Ecosystem Model. Our team's was awarded $5000 to:

Keywords: data scraping, diversity equity and inclusion, database management, local news

Conference Presentations

Wil M. Dubree (Presented by Luhang Sun)

International Communication Association Annual Conference 2023

Abstract: Student news organizations, operating out of large universities, are critically understudied in media effects literature. In a study of 201 cases of sexual misconduct that occurred on U.S. university campuses, 19.4% were broken by student news outlets (Eckert et al. 2022), marking these organizations as important sources of original news reporting. Through this study, we hope to establish a groundwork for continuing inquiry into the unique agenda setting and framing effects of student news organizations in order to better understand their place in local media enviroments. Collecting online news articles from 6 student news organizations across 5 major US universities as well as tweets from those campuses, we observe a correlary relationship between student news reporting and rates of twitter conversation on topics of sexual misconduct across all 5 campuses. We also conclude that these relationships are stronger for campuses located in smaller communities. These results establish a strong link between student news reporting and online conversation and the importance of community size in local media effects. Future directions for research are discussed.

Keywords: data scraping, quantitative analysis, social media data, local news

Under Conspiracy Videos We Meet:

Facts, Norms, and Communities in a Transnational Sinophone Conspiracy Sphere

Qin, Abby Youran, Xiao, Fan & Dubree, Wil (2023)

Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication Annual Conference 2023

Explore our Poster | Topic Model | Codebook 

Keywords: topic modeling, supervised machine learning, generalized hierarchical linear modeling

Reports

Democracy SOS Evaluation and Recommendations Part Two, Content Study:

Robinson, Sue, Orozco, Margarita, Rahimi, Tahereh, Reingold, Rachel, Vento, Sophia, and Dubree Meyer, Wil (2023)

Democracy SOS (2023 Report); Solutions Journalism Network and Hearken

Keywords: local journalism, data scraping, solutions journalism

Check out all research here