May 29, 2026, From Outlets to Coverage: Understanding New Jersey's Local News Landscape
Discover how New Jersey’s local news ecosystem is changing—and which communities are being left behind. This webinar will reveal new findings from a statewide analysis of more than 66,000 news stories, offering new insight into news deserts, ownership patterns, and the future of local journalism.
The Computational Media Lab in the School of Communication and Information at Rutgers University will release a comprehensive report, From Outlets to Coverage: Understanding New Jersey’s Local News Landscape, detailing the state of local news coverage in New Jersey.
Key recommendations from the report include:
• The presence of a media outlet does not mean a community receives adequate coverage; coverage across municipalities varies widely.
• Demographic differences strongly impact coverage; Hispanic communities are often underserved compared to others as are lower income communities.
• Ownership has a strong impact on coverage; media companies owned by private equity or public conglomerates tend to produce significantly less local content
The webinar will feature a panel discussion about the state of local news in New Jersey, including Deb Howlett, founder and editor of the NJ State House News Service, Marc Pfeiffer, a Senior Policy Fellow and an Associate Director of the Center for Urban Policy Research at the Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy at Rutgers, and Krystal Knapp, founder of The Jersey Vindicator and the hyperlocal news website Planet Princeton.
About the report:
From Outlets to Coverage: Understanding New Jersey’s Local News Landscape examines the evolving local news ecosystem in New Jersey through a large-scale content analysis of more than 66,000 news articles collected from 724 media outlets statewide. Using computational methods and geographic analysis, the study maps disparities in local news coverage, identifies persistent news deserts, and evaluates how factors such as ownership structure, demographics, and political composition shape the distribution of local reporting. The report shows that measuring local journalism through actual content coverage—rather than simply counting outlets—provides a more accurate understanding of information access and inequities across communities. Further, this research has significant implications for future policymaking related to local news in New Jersey.
About the author and panelists:
The Computational Media Lab at Rutgers University is an interdisciplinary research lab focused on analyzing local media ecosystems. The lab is led by Matthew Weber, who is a professor of Communication. Weber is an expert in computational social science and local news. His work is funded by several external agencies, including the National Science Foundation, Department of Energy, and the William T. Grant Foundation. In addition, the work was supported by Pavan Kokkiligadda, a masters student in Computer Science at Rutgers University, and Gayathri Ravipati, a computer scientist based in Austin, Texas, and an alumnus from Rutgers University. Analysis and research for this report was conducted by Matthew Weber, Gayathri Ravipati and Pavan Kumar Kokkiligadda. Learn more at comlab.rutgers.edu.
Deborah Howlett is founder and editor of the NJ State House News Service and a Lecturer II in journalism and digital media in the School of Communication and Information at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey. Howlett has more than 25 years of experience as an award-winning journalist for The (Newark) Star Ledger and USA TODAY.
Marc Pfeiffer is a Senior Policy Fellow and Faculty Researcher in the Center for Urban Policy Research at the Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy at Rutgers University. He retired in 2012 from a 37-year career in New Jersey local government administration, having served as a municipal administrator in several municipalities, and 26 years of service in the State’s local government oversight agency, the Division of Local Government Services.
Krystal Knapp is the founder of The Jersey Vindicator and the hyperlocal news website Planet Princeton. She is an award-winning reporter and journalism entrepreneur who has been featured by NPR, CNN, and The Washington Post, and has spoken nationally on local journalism.