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  • Matters Arising
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Reply to: Local news in Google News

Nature Human Behaviour volume 6, pages 1045–1047 (2022)Cite this article

Subjects

The Original Article was published on 11 August 2022

replying to E. Magnusson https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-022-01421-8 (2022).

In his recent communication Magnusson1 questions the methodological choices that we made previously2 to illustrate how local news outlets are disadvantaged on Google News, mainly concerning the use of the Gini index. He also suggests that our work should aim for higher precision to “compare how often [a] Boise newspaper appears compared to CNN in [Ada] county searches”. We offer here a response and extension to our original work with a more rigorous test of the equity and representativeness of Google News’s returned results. We conducted a reanalysis of the data we presented earlier2 with more precise labels about the provenance of each local news outlet. We find that the local outlets returned in response to our original queries rarely belong to the same county—or even the same state—as the queried county. Additionally, we show in the Supplementary Information here that Magnusson’s improved Gini measure, the central element of his response, is unrelated to the on-the-ground conditions of the local media economy, reinforcing our earlier conclusion that Google News results are insensitive to the health of the local media economy. Altogether, these new results reinforce our original conclusions2 about the lack of local news in Google News search results.

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Fig. 1: Map showing America’s Google News deserts.
Fig. 2: The relative frequency of local news outlets returned in response to queries about a target county.

Data availability

Data for these updated analyses are available at the original project repository (https://osf.io/hwuxf/).

Code availability

Code for these updated analyses is available at the original project repository (https://osf.io/hwuxf/).

References

  1. Magnusson, E. (2021). Local news in Google News. Nat. Hum. Behav. [Matters Arising DOI] (2020).

  2. Fischer, S., Jaidka, K. & Lelkes, Y. Auditing local news presence on Google News. Nat. Hum. Behav. 4, 1236–1244 (2020).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  3. Bucay, Y., Elliott, V., Kamin, J. & Park, A. (2017). America’s growing news deserts. Columbia Journal. Rev. https://www.cjr.org/local_news/american-news-deserts-donuts-local.php (2017).

  4. Hindman, M. The Internet Trap (Princeton Univ. Press, 2018).

  5. Stroud, N. J. Niche News: The Politics of News Choice (Oxford Univ. Press on Demand, 2011).

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, USA

    Sean Fischer & Yphtach Lelkes

  2. Department of Communications and New Media, National University of Singapore, Singapore, Singapore

    Kokil Jaidka

Authors
  1. Sean Fischer
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  2. Kokil Jaidka
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  3. Yphtach Lelkes
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Contributions

S.F., K.J. and Y.L. designed the study, conducted the analysis and drafted and revised the manuscript.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Yphtach Lelkes.

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The authors declare no competing interests.

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Nature Human Behaviour thanks Christo Wilson, Jinhyuk Yun and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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Supplementary information

Supplementary Information

Supplementary text, Figs. 1 and 2 and Table 1

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Fischer, S., Jaidka, K. & Lelkes, Y. Reply to: Local news in Google News. Nat Hum Behav 6, 1045–1047 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-022-01422-7

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