A first-of-its-kind report by Indiana University researchers aims to provide a clearer understanding of Indiana’s local journalism environment and support future efforts to strengthen it.
“Journalism at the Crossroads of America: An Ecosystem Analysis of Newsmaking in Indiana” is the first-ever news ecosystem report for the state of Indiana. The report was produced by a team of IU Media School researchers led by Suzannah Evans Comfort, an assistant professor of science and environmental communication at The Media School.
“Local journalism is essential to civic health,” Comfort said in a news release announcing the report. “The purpose of the report is to establish a baseline understanding of the state of local journalism in Indiana today so we can think strategically about building a stronger newsmaking infrastructure that meets community needs.”
Comfort has been interested in doing more community-oriented research in recent years, and there was a need for local news research that was specific to Indiana. She waited to see if anyone else would do a study about this, but no one did. So, after getting funding last summer to support a research team, the research began, she told the Daily Journal in an interview.
“We definitely identified a need for research that’s specific to Indiana, so that we could design solutions that work for Indiana because we’re not the same as other states that have more large cities and more diverse industries and so on,” Comfort said.
The report includes a comprehensive statewide database of news organizations in Indiana and a survey of newsroom leaders, offering a detailed look at how news is produced and distributed across the state. Additionally, the report includes five video profiles of working journalists across the state to give a more nuanced, lived perspective into the work of local journalism.
Statewide, researchers identified 225 news organizations — 131 newspapers, 10 magazines, 18 digital native news organizations, 66 commercial and public television and radio stations (excluding stations that air only music or other entertainment content). Most were located in urban and college-town areas, which leaves some rural communities with limited or no local news coverage, the report shows.
Marion County is home to the most news organizations with 24, followed by Allen with 14, St. Joseph with 11, Vanderburgh and Lake both with 10, and Monroe with nine. Four counties in the state — Floyd, Ohio, Switzerland, and Vermillion — are home to no local news organizations. These are among the state’s smallest counties by population, but in total include about 112,000 Hoosiers, according to the report.
Johnson County, classified as an urban county and an “exburb” — a largely residential county on the fringe of a major metropolitan area characterized by rapid growth, high homeownership and a mix of rural/suburban development — has five news organizations listed as being based out of the county: two newspapers, two radio stations and one digital native/online only outlet. These are the Daily Journal, Franklin College’s student newspaper The Franklin, Franklin College’s statehouse-news focused website The Statehouse File and radio stations Freedom 95 and Korn Country 100.3.
Most news organizations, or 79.1%, in Indiana are corporate in nature and owned by a national or regional chain. Seventeen percent are independent, meaning they are not owned by a larger media company, and 8.3% are local affiliates of NPR or PBS. Independent news organizations, meaning they are not part of a larger company or chain, are most likely to be located in urban counties.
Comfort was surprised by the number of news organizations found.
“I was kind of happy to see that. This seemed like a fairly robust number for the population of our state,” she said.
The report’s findings do highlight ongoing challenges facing local journalism, including financial pressures and difficulty recruiting and retaining staff. The research also points to resilience across the state’s media landscape, with some organizations, particularly independent outlets, reporting stable or growing audiences and strong community connections, researchers say.
Comfort expected financial pressures to top the list of challenges, but was surprised to see it surpassed by issues with recruiting quality employees, she said.
“The recruitment finding was interesting to me because I think that hasn’t necessarily been surfaced in our conversations about local journalism so far in our state,” Comfort said. “I think that’s a helpful finding that might shape some conversations moving forward about, well, how do we recruit quality journalists to work in our state and how do we keep them working in our state.”
The project also examines how journalism practices are evolving. The report shows that social media platforms are widely used to distribute news and identify stories, while adoption of artificial intelligence remains limited as newsrooms assess its potential and risks, researchers say.
AI is controversial, with a third of news organizations saying they didn’t plan to adopt any AI use — “a pretty firm rejection” of a technology that people will probably end up using whether they like it or not, Comfort said. It reminds her of news organizations’ resistance to social media platforms about 15 years ago.
“These organizations are pretty slow to adapt to sort of the new platform reality of information, and they paid a price for that,” she said. “I’m not going to be someone who says news organizations have to adopt AI, I think that is not a realistic takeaway from this. But we don’t want a repeat of what happened with social media platformization, where news organizations kind of didn’t have their eye on the ball and paid a price for it.”
Comfort says the report is only the first step when it comes to looking at Indiana’s news ecosystem. She can see future projects looking at the content of the journalism produced, how much “original” local journalism is being made in Indiana, how many people are doing the work, how much work a journalist in Indiana could produce and what the state’s overall capacity for producing professional news is compared to the state’s population, she said.
She can also see a future report expanding beyond the news ecosystem to focus on the broader information ecosystem. This includes social media, which is a major source of information for Hoosiers, she said.
“There’s a relationship between the presence of social media platforms and maybe not the decline of news organizations, but relatively less empowered position of news organizations,” Comfort said. “I think there could be an interesting project about the role of these volunteer-run community Facebook pages that have popped up everywhere. They’re performing a journalistic function, even if they’re not journalists.”
Other than this, Comfort hopes the research will inform ongoing conversations that are happening among civic and philanthropic groups. There’s a lot of interest in trying to figure out funding models for journalism in Indiana, she said.
“In other states, they’re seeing public investment in journalism [with] public taxpayer money, we’re not going to see that here,” Comfort said. “If we don’t address that, we’re going to end up on a national level, as a country of haves and haves, not when it comes to quality, professional information access, and we probably can’t afford that as a country.”
Another issue that has to be solved has to do with paying for news. Regular Hoosiers want access to quality news about their communities but don’t want to pay for it, she said.
“People are not going to wake up tomorrow and decide to start paying for news regardless of whether they read my report,” she said. “But I hope that if they, if someone does read the report, they’ll see that our local journalists are interested in providing accurate information that serves the community, that journalists are on their side.”
To read the full report, go to mediaschool.indiana.edu/research/indiana-news-ecosystem/index.html.