Mountain News Deserts

Crime coverage was the single largest topic category across both target regions, justifying
what we heard in the focus groups about local news media’s seemingly obsessive coverage of local
crime (Table 9) – and matching the apparent interest expressed in the Google surveys.
Table 9:
Story topics across selected MT, CO & NM news outlets
None"of"above"
6%"
Environment"
6%"
Economy"
8%"
Infrastructure"
8%"
Health"
5%"
Crime"&"
emergencies"
23%"
Education"
17%"
Quality"of"life"
11%"
Source: SJN News Content Analysis
Government"
16%"
Interestingly, coverage of the economy lagged. This may be the biggest disconnect unearthed
through our content analysis: despite the economy and jobs being the leading concern in almost
every community, across all our surveys, interviews and focus groups, very little – just 8 percent – of
the overall news coverage during the selected timeframe focused primarily on the economy.
Despite quality of life being the second-highest concern according to the focus group surveys, with
nearly half the focus group participants listing it as a major priority, only 11 percent of stories
directly pertained to the topic – including pieces about everything from an initiative to get kids
outdoors to efforts to improve low-income housing to local excitement around the latest “Star Wars”
movie. The environment, too, was left out – just 6 percent of all stories primarily related to the
environment, despite 45 percent of focus group survey respondents and 31 percent of Google
survey respondents citing the environment as a top concern. While 33 percent of focus group survey
respondents said infrastructure was a leading problem, fewer than one in 10 stories addressed an
infrastructure-related issue.
On the other hand, though we heard requests for more education coverage, schools were
actually the second most-covered news topic, according to our analysis.
To get at whether a story is “solutions-y” – yes, that’s our technical term – coders asked: Does the
story contain reporting about the response to a problem, or not? The acid test: if the story
doesn’t describe a response, it’s not solutions journalism. Does the story get into the problem
solving and how-to details of implementation? Does the story present evidence of results linked to
the response? Solutions journalism is about ideas – but like all good journalism, the determination of
21"