Where the News Matters: a Pilot Study of Facebook Groups in the News Desert Communities of West Alabama

As local news coverage continues to decline across rural America, communities have increasingly turned to social media to fill the information gap. Despite the recent scholarly focus on the news desert phenomena at a national scale, surprisingly few studies have looked at social media, and even fewer have looked at communities in detail, a major blind spot in media ecosystem research. Drawing on the information needs literature, this study employs a constant comparative approach to develop and field-test a codebook for analyzing community Facebook groups in the rural South. This pilot study focuses on a seven-county area of West Alabama, examining post content, source and drivers of engagement. The discussion contains best practices for working journalists to gather information from these groups and suggests other stakeholders who may find the information useful. Knowing the types of content social media users are most likely to engage with may help legacy media address the local coverage problem in over 200 American counties without a news source.