NewsBeat

June 2019 NewsBeat 5 robustly reported than elsewhere. After limiting their dataset to newspapers that were clearly the paper of record in a community and setting up controls for demographic and other factors, they ended up with 11 newspapers, 46 municipalities, and 246 distinct mayoral elections to analyze. So imagine a 10,000-circulation daily newspaper, and imagine it at two staffing levels: a robust 18-person newsroom or a skimpy 3-person one. According to Rubado and Jennings' findings, that newspaper's city would likely have about 1 additional mayoral candidate running if it was covered by that strong 18-person newsroom than by those three poor overworked souls. One extra candidate may not seem like much — but logically speaking, it's the difference between an uncontested reelection and a real race, or between a two-person race and a three-way battle that gives voters 50 percent more options. It's not meaningless. (Separately, Rubado and Jennings found that the bigger the newsroom, the smaller the chance that a mayoral election will feature only an incumbent running unopposed.) A strong newsroom was also associated with a smaller margin of victory for the eventual winner. Back to that imaginary 10,000-circ newspaper: With 5 newsroom staffers, the predicted margin of victory in a typical mayor's race is about 50 percent. With 15 newsroom staffers, it drops to 33 percent. With 20, it drops to 24 percent. From the paper: We believe these findings have important implications. Newspapers have long been thought of as essential to the delicate fabric of democracy. In a well-functioning system, citizens need to be actively engaged in their government and aware of decisions made by their elected representatives. Newspapers are a means of citizen engagement, and this study provides evidence of the importance of this link. When this link is not strong — when newspapers lose professional capacity to fulfill this role — we see signs of waning engagement in the form of reduced voter turnout. We further see indications that as newspapers reduce staffing, political competition suffers in the form of reduced mayoral challenger candidates. We reason that when newspapers have reduced staffing dedicated to local government, mayors are less likely to be held accountable through provision of information about their decisions and behavior. For this sort of analysis, there's always the question of causality. Yes, the most obvious story would be "when newspapers shrink, local political engagement goes down." But it could also be the reverse: "When local politics become more boring, newspapers are more likely to shrink." Or both trends could be driven by some third force — say, "When an area's economy is in decline, political engagement goes down and newspapers are more likely to shrink." Rubado and Jennings guard against that by including a lag in their number crunching. They look at newspaper declines for one year and then political participation measures for the following year, which limits the degree to which causality could flow upstream. You can find more work by Rubado here and Jennings here. Rubado primarily researches local governments, so most of her work is less closely tied to Nieman Labby topics, but as a political scientist who looks at the role of political knowledge, Jennings has a number of papers that might be of interest. I'll highlight this new one, with Nicolas Anspach and Vin Arceneaux, which found that people can actually gain political knowledge from News Feed scrolling without actually tapping through to read any of the articles — but the tradeoff is that they end up being too confident about how much they actually know. P a y in g t o o m u c h fo r Wo r k e r s ' Co m p e n s a t io n In s u r a n c e ? 518-464-6483 NYPA offers group coverage for workers' comp through the NY State Insurance Fund. Qualified participants are eligible for a 15% advance discount and a 30% year-end dividend. If you're paying too much for workers' compensation insurance, contact Michele at NYPA today for more information. mhannah@nynewspapers.com

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