If you live in Albuquerque, you might read the local newspaper, scan through radio stations, scroll social media, or perhaps your daily routine involves watching the evening newscast. For some, it feels like a chore to sift through the information overload for what's important. However, many New Mexicans, especially those who live outside the state's big cities or who speak mostly Spanish, don't have enough sources of trustworthy information.
According to Gwyneth Doland, a professor of practice in The University of New Mexico's Department of Communication and Journalism, New Mexico is one of many large sparsely populated states that have lost scores of news outlets and journalism jobs over the past few decades, contributing to the nation's local news crisis and resulting in news deserts.
"There are huge parts of this state where no one is covering the city council or county commission," Doland said. "We saw with the Roswell floods and fires in Northern New Mexico, when things go wrong, people depend on local news organizations to tell them where and when to evacuate, but we have lost so many of these outlets that we are at a significant risk of people not getting information in an emergency, or about their schools, local elections."
Another issue is that New Mexico has only one television market located in Albuquerque. Residents of Las Cruces and the eastern part of the state receive their TV news from cities in Texas, leaving many border communities nearly devoid of broadcast television coverage.
"New Mexico's vast size, wide-open spaces and small communities are so much of what we love about this state, but they also present real challenges for news organizations who are trying to survive in let's say Union County, a county of fewer than 4,000 people," she said. "Where is that money going to come from? We have to figure out new, creative solutions to deliver information people need and deserve to know about their communities."
This is why Doland, former C&J Professor Michael Marcotte, and an interdisciplinary team of students are building an online, interactive map of local news in New Mexico. When it's ready, you'll be able to see the number and names of the news outlets based in each county, and click through to access them. That data will come from a statewide survey that received responses from more than 175 New Mexico newsrooms, big and small. The team also surveyed more than 1,000 New Mexico residents, and is now conducting focus groups in five cities. A report to accompany the map will identify news deserts and news mirages: places that may look like they have news but where community members said they don't have enough or the right kind of coverage.
"The map will be a way for everyone in New Mexico to find, hopefully, some outlets covering their area, like a Yellow Pages for news. It will give us the most accurate information we have ever had about what news outlets are there, what they're covering, how they're doing it and what New Mexico residents say they want in terms of civic information," Doland said. "The information we're getting from our surveys, focus groups and content analysis will also give us insight into how we can improve the local news ecosystem in terms of innovation and investment."
The public service project kicked off in the fall of 2024 with the help of a community-engaged research grant from UNM's Center for Regional Studies and support from Press Forward, a half-billion-dollar effort aimed at solving the local news crisis. Press Forward is funded by dozens of organizations and national donors like the Knight Foundation, which are committed to investing money into local news for the next five years. New Mexico's Press Forward chapter was started by the New Mexico Local News Fund, an organization supporting the state's news outlets, which evolved out of UNM research a decade ago.
"It's a good position to be in, where people are walking around with a checkbook," Doland said. "We want to be able to tell them, hey, here is where the need is and where you can put that money."
There have been some national efforts to look at news deserts, including Northwestern University's Medill Local News Initiative and its State of Local News Report 2024. Medill's interactive map shows the growing news deserts across the country and found five counties in New Mexico without news and only 53 news outlets in the entire state. But Doland and her team have so far catalogued 175 outlets in the state, showing that their research project will paint a more detailed picture of New Mexico.
For Doland, this project is more than just research, especially after spending 25 years in the New Mexico news industry; the first and third news outlets she worked for no longer exist. She says digital disruption was one of the primary drivers of the local news crisis. Remember Craigslist? Doland notes that when it arrived in New Mexico in the early 2000s, it upended the business model for newspapers like Weekly Alibi, a former free city paper that relied on advertisements. Then came the 2008 financial crisis and later the COVID pandemic in 2020.
"The local news ecosystem has been decimated by these cultural and financial changes over the past few decades. We have maybe lost half of the news organizations in the country," she said. "Any longtime New Mexican will tell you that Albuquerque used to have an afternoon paper and we don't anymore."
Medill's 2022 State of Local News Report predicted that by the end of 2025, the United States would have lost one-third of its print newspapers over the past two decades, but the 2024 report found that the country had already exceeded that mark.
Despite it all, Doland says some encouragement and innovation are still happening in New Mexico, such as Boomtown Los Alamos, an online news publication that started in 2023, or Cloudcroft Reader, another online news publication founded in 2023 to give the greater Cloudcroft community local news. "I think when people see the map, they are going to find a lot of surprises, I think they're going to find a lot of news outlets they didn't know existed," Doland said.
A fellow from UNM's Center for Community Geography is helping create the project's mapping element. The team is also partnering with a local news intern from New Mexico State University and New Mexico PBS on a series of focus groups.
