What Local Journalism Has To Do With Your Problem Potholes And Deteriorating Sewers

At a time when journalists across the country are facing layoffs at alarming rates, a new study connects quality local reporting to support at the polls for public works projects.

About the study

Researchers at UCLA and Duke University examined how people vote on funding for critical infrastructure needs. We’re talking about aging dams, sewers, roads and more.  

Susanne Whatley, who hosts LAist 89.3’s Morning Edition program, spoke with Megan Mullin of the UCLA Luskin School Of Public Affairs, who co-wrote the study. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

LAist:  Our longtime listeners and supporters understand journalism is critical to a healthy democracy, but you actually set out to measure that influence in this study. How'd you go about doing that?

Mullin: There's a lot of great research demonstrating the importance of political news for the health of our democracy and the negative impacts that have followed from the closure and consolidation of news outlets. In this study that I conducted with Andrew Trexler at Duke, we wanted to focus on the character and depth of news reporting.

Because even where local newspapers continue to publish, where local TV and radio stations continue to air, they're often operating with hollowed out newsrooms. Instead of reporting from journalists, we're seeing newspapers filled with reprints of press releases and content generated by AI. We wanted to see how readers respond to these different types of content.

So does an investment in on-the-ground reporting pay off in terms of voters knowledge and behavior?

LAist: How did readers respond to the two articles that you presented, and how did it impact their voting behavior?

Mullin: The study consisted of a large national survey. And in that survey, we showed some readers an article with bare bones reporting on a case of infrastructure neglect. A dam or sewer lines that were old and deteriorating.

Other readers saw coverage that was more informative. And here there were two groups. One saw full investigative reporting, the gold standard of journalism. And the other saw something much simpler — reporting that situated this case of infrastructure neglect in a local context, connecting it to other events in the community.

And we found that readers did respond to more informative coverage. After reading richer reporting, they were more willing to support local taxes for infrastructure repair, and more likely to hold local leaders accountable for infrastructure neglect. And these accountability gains, right, these benefits for voter behavior, were as strong for simple contextual reporting as they were for the more costly, investigative reporting.

LAist: Why did you choose the topic of infrastructure for your study subjects?

Mullin: We hear a lot about an infrastructure crisis, but a lot of that crisis is invisible. We can see potholes in our roads, but we can't see when sewer pipes are crumbling, or dams or bridges are becoming structurally more fragile. And at a time of rampant partisan division, infrastructure is one of the few government priorities on which Americans widely agree.

But investing in infrastructure is risky for elected officials if it translates into higher taxes and voters can't see the benefits. So this kind of invisible issue is where local news is so important. It can bring people's attention to these issues that they can't see with their own eyes.

LAist: We're at a time when cutbacks in local journalism have been accelerating, and there have been. LAist is among newsrooms facing budget shortfalls. Why should people care about this crisis in journalism and news deserts??

Mullin: Representation and accountability, these are the things that our democratic system relies on. And that representation and accountability rely on voters having access to information about the status of problems and the efforts of elected officials to solve those problems. Staff cuts and corporatization of newspaper ownership structures, they've had a big impact on the information available to voters. As reporting capacity has declined, so has coverage of politics.

And the coverage of local politics and local issues has suffered even more, leading to declines in voter turnout, competition for local office, and local fiscal and policy performance. So we're drawing a link between these two problems. We're showing that the loss of news reporting affects not only a community's civic infrastructure, but its physical infrastructure as well.

Read the full report