Mapping the U.S. News Landscape

Samar Haider

Abstract: Over the last decade, local newspapers in the U.S. have seen a decline in revenue and readership. With the rise of digital information sources, print newspapers have found themselves losing advertising and subscription revenue, which has in turn led to a decline in newsroom employment and, in many cases, the eradication of the newspapers altogether, with those surviving being bought up by large media companies that run them with a skeletal staff and reduced printing. Simultaneously, significant attention has been placed on the phenomenon of new digital sites spreading misinformation while presenting themselves as reputable newspapers. Known as pink-slime journalism, these websites are run by media companies seeking to publish politically biased news stories under the guise of local news. While there exist multiple databases of newspapers and news sites in the U.S., each of these databases captures a different aspect of the news ecosystem. In this paper, we analyze the state of the U.S. news landscape by collecting and integrating newspaper metadata from multiple sources into one comprehensive database which contains information on the news sites' location, owner, bias, credibility, consumption, and numerous other features.