Breaking down Wyoming’s local news landscape: Key insights from the state’s first media ecosystem…
Breaking down Wyoming’s local news landscape: Key insights from the state’s first media ecosystem assessment
How survey data and conversations with residents strengthened our methodology to assess Wyoming’s local news ecosystem
Wyoming, one of the least populous states in the country, has unique challenges when it comes to ensuring communities have access to local news. This summer and fall, Impact Architects partnered with the Wyoming Local News Fund and Wyoming Community Foundation to conduct the first media ecosystem assessment for the state.
For this work, we applied our local news and information ecosystem framework, collecting qualitative and quantitative data about Wyoming communities, local information providers, information needs, trust in news, and civic engagement (a newer addition to our methodology). We explored demographic data, identified community resources like local nonprofits and libraries, and included measures of voter registration and turnout. We also examined county government websites for all 23 counties in the state, assessing the availability of information about public meetings and elected officials as well as the accessibility of meeting materials like minutes, agendas, and recordings.
Unlike in our previous ecosystem assessments, we were able to go deeper in community in this research. With the help of Wyoming Local News Fund Director Melissa Cassutt and a WYCF intern, we conducted 28 interviews with local residents and stakeholders and led five focus groups with representatives from the six business districts across the state.
There is currently no nationally representative, regularly repeated survey of community information needs, access, and trust in news for the U.S., limiting the type of analysis we can typically do in a community. For previous assessments, we’ve been limited to pre-existing survey data from organizations like Pew and Gallup to help us understand community information needs and relationship to information providers. In this case, we were able to design a representative survey of Wyoming residents’ information needs, access, and trust in news, which was administered by the Wyoming Survey & Analysis Center at the University of Wyoming. The Wyoming survey provided rich data about the information providers communities are relying on, what residents need or want from their news providers, and how this breaks down across age groups and the political spectrum. (We’ll be digging into this data further in an analysis of all results we’ll share in the coming year.) The data allowed us to draw more confident conclusions about strengths, needs, and sentiment in the state, underscoring the importance of this kind of surveying for future ecosystem assessments of communities across the U.S.
Key findings
Publicly available quantitative data, survey results, and conversations with Wyoming residents helped us identify some key trends within the state.
- Most Wyoming communities have a local news source, but it’s not always in residents’ preferred format.
The vast majority of respondents to our survey said there was at least one local newspaper (97.1%), local radio station (95.6%), local online forum or discussion group (96.8%), or local newsletter, blog, or website (95.2%) in their community. But while survey respondents also expressed a preference for accessing the news digitally, we found relatively few digital first news outlets. In focus groups, participants also described a preference for digital news, and especially for news delivered directly to them through mediums like email newsletters.
2. In part due to its geography and small population, Wyoming has unique resource and scale challenges that make it difficult to build sustainable, community-supported news outlets.
Covering news across multiple, disparate communities can be costly and time consuming, with reporters traveling up and down the road to stories in their coverage area, journalists told us. The state’s population is too small for it to be considered its own media market, stakeholders said, and Wyomingites often rely on news sources based in neighboring states. It can also be hard to sustain a local community news source in many of Wyoming’s small communities, where residents may be unable to pay subscription prices. Three quarters of survey respondents said they do not pay for a newspaper subscription, and about 19% of respondents said the cost of local news was too much for their budget. Residents described how they’ve seen local papers close down, decrease staff or printing, and be bought by out-of-state holding companies perceived as out-of-touch with local communities.
3. Trust in news is linked with perceived partisanship of news sources as well as news consumers’ own ideological leanings.
Interviewees said news consumers often trust news sources that reflect their preexisting beliefs, and some outlets are deemed liberal by community members because they cover energy and the environment. The majority of survey respondents said that increasing accuracy/factual reporting and reducing bias would increase their trust in local news. In conversations, we heard that many are confused about the different business models of local news outlets, so there may also be opportunities to increase trust in news by working to increase transparency and media literacy.
4. Wyoming has little community media, with particularly notable gaps when it comes to Spanish-language media and news for Native American and Indigenous communities.
Though 10.8% of Wyoming’s population identifies as Hispanic or Latino, according to 2020 Census data, there is no consistent source of Spanish-language local news in the state. Todo TV, founded in 2022, aims to provide Spanish-language news programming in Teton County, but currently only has the resources to produce daily, 30-second news spots shared via Instagram. Offering Spanish-language and bilingual news is critical for ensuring communities can access information about local issues in a language that is comfortable for them.
The Eastern Shoshone and Northern Arapaho Tribes live on the Wind River Indian Reservation in west-central Wyoming, but there are few news and information providers owned and operated by Native American and Indigenous communities in the state. Interviewees described that among Indigenous communities, there’s distrust of many local news sources, with a sense that these outlets have often only reported on negative stories and don’t capture the nuances of tribal communities.
Of course, there’s still a need to explore the information needs of these and other communities in the state in greater depth to identify specific challenges and increase access to local news.
We wrote about all of this and many other findings in our full report on the Wyoming local news and information ecosystem, and we encourage you to dig into it here. We hope this assessment serves as a first step for identifying strengths, gaps, and challenges in the Wyoming news and information ecosystem.