A Virtuous Circle: Explaining News Deserts and Their Relationships with Social Capital

Popularized with the term "news desert," the decline of the number of newspapers has cast a gloom over the future of American democracy. However, there has been little research on what factors are related to such phenomena. To fill this gap, we construct a theoretical framework based on previous research relating market conditions to news deserts, and study how news deserts relate to social capital. Our analyses find population, and education have strong negative associations with news deserts and potential journalism divides, where newspapers decrease disproportionately according to the community's African American composition. Age has a weak negative association with news deserts. Furthermore, our analyses reveal that having more newspapers has a positive effect on community social capital in its economic connectedness, cohesiveness, and civic engagement. Consequently, economic connectedness and cohesiveness positively impact the number of newspapers next year, showing evidence of a virtuous circle. This study advances the discussions around the "news desert" a step forward by empirically investigating its social impact on our communities.