By Keach Hagey 

Facebook Inc. has been looking to boost its local-news offerings since a 2017 survey showed most of its users were clamoring for more.

It has run into a problem: there simply isn't enough local news in vast swaths of the country.

One-third of Americans live in a place where Facebook can't find enough local news being shared on its service to justify building a localized aggregator for that area, according to data released by Facebook on Monday.

Facebook's local-news aggregator, called Today In, was launched last year and is currently available in 400 cities through Facebook's mobile app. Facebook said it needs to be able to identify at least five news articles a day related to a city that are shared on the platform to justify building a Today In for that city.

The places where this isn't happening aren't only in sparsely populated areas, the data show. Even high-density states such as New Jersey have significant areas where Facebook was unable to find sufficient local-news coverage.

Facebook is releasing its data at a moment of profound concern about the viability of the U.S. local-news industry, which has seen advertising revenue collapse as platforms like Facebook and Alphabet Inc.'s Google have taken market share.

According to Penelope Muse Abernathy, the Knight Chair in Journalism and Digital Media Economics at the University of North Carolina and a former Wall Street Journal executive, more than one in five newspapers have closed in the last decade and a half, leaving half the counties in the nation with just one newspaper, and 200 counties with no newspaper at all.

Nicco Mele, director of the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School, predicted in 2016 that as many as half of the country's local newspapers will no longer be in print by 2021.

Online-only outlets have managed to fill only a fraction of the void. While nearly 1,800 newspapers have died in the last decade and a half, in Ms. Abernathy's analysis, only about 400 local-news sites have been born in those communities, mostly clustered around big cities.

Facebook has played a role in the decline of local news outlets. Together with Google, it has sucked up much of the advertising revenue that used to go to newspapers. The dominance of the duopoly -- which earned 60% of all digital advertising revenue in the U.S. last year, according to eMarketer, and accounted for nearly all of the growth -- has made it difficult for online-only news sites to build robust advertising businesses.

Online publishers have also complained that the platforms of Facebook and Google have too much power over who sees their news stories. A change to the Facebook News Feed algorithm last year to prioritize posts from friends and family hurt many digital publishers' traffic and put some out of business.

Facebook executives are aware that if the company kills local news, it will wound itself in the process.

"We really do care deeply about local news, not only because it's the right thing to do, but also because users have told us for years that what they want to see is more local news," said Jimmy O'Keefe, product marketing manager for Today In.

To that end, Facebook has donated millions of dollars and organized programs in recent years to bolster the local-news industry. On Monday, it also announced the Facebook Journalism Project Community Network, a grant and mentoring program for local news outlets.

The company also announced that it would be sharing its data about local-news "deserts" with leading academics, including Ms. Abernathy and Mr. Mele, to further their research.

"We've been clear from the beginning that we think the first step to solving this problem is measuring it," said Anthea Watson Strong, product manager for Today In, adding that only after collaboration with academics could the company determine "what kind of intervention" it should take.

"I'm looking forward to getting the data and overlaying it on the data we have on news deserts," Ms. Abernathy said.

Write to Keach Hagey at keach.hagey@wsj.com

 

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

March 18, 2019 06:14 ET (10:14 GMT)

Copyright (c) 2019 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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