Explicating Local: An Audience-Based Framing of Local Community and Local News

Abstract In recent years, much has been made of the crisis in local news. Communities across the United States are rapidly losing local news coverage. In response, policymakers and community advocates have sought to craft new mechanisms to support the health of local news ecosystems. This work interrogates the core ways in which community members understand and define the communities within which they live and examines the socioeconomic and media variables that impact how local communities are defined by the people living in those communities. Data are drawn from a national survey in the United States that was designed and implemented to better understand different framings of local communities in the context of media. Findings demonstrate the critical role that media, and the provision of media serving critical information needs, has in the mutual shaping of how community members define and perceive the boundaries of what is local. Subjective definitions are far more prominent and are shaped more directly by media consumption and the context of place. Firm boundaries are hard to establish, but this work points to key levers such as local newspapers, local television, and community size that directly impact how community members perceive their local community.

Researchers often fail to understand the core units of that which we are analyzing despite a renewed focus on boundaries as to what is and is not in the domain of journalism.This shortcoming is particularly salient to local journalism; ask 50 reporters, 50 consumers of news and 50 academics to define local journalism and you will end up with a plurality of definitions stretching across the range.Digital production of journalism has blurred the boundaries of local further, as the role of place becomes increasingly less relevant with online production facilitating the broad dissemination of information for even the smallest of rural newspapers (Franklin 2006).Further, consumers' views have been impacted by factors such as demographic shifts fueled by increased mobility (Kitamura 2016), while production has been impacted by the consolidation of media production, the shift to digital, as well as other variables (Champlin and Knoedler 2002;Martin and McCrain 2019).
In recent years, audience-centric geosocial work on local communities has sought to understand the concept of community based on social dynamics as well as physical location (Althaus, Cizmar, and Gimpel 2009).From a perspective of news media production, researchers often focus on understanding how producers of news define the communities they serve by looking at the areas of needs relevant to the local audience (Firmstone 2016).Thus, an audience-focused perspective of news media is blended with research on communities to develop a conceptualization of local that captures (a) geographic perceptions of local with (b) content/production perspectives on what is local, as well as (c) social factors that impact the sense of local.
An audience-centric framing of local community that incorporates socioeconomic and respective media ecosystems offers several important contributions to the study of local news and the field of digital journalism and mass communication research.Media ecosystems are defined as the journalists, news organizations and consumers that form the information network of a geographically defined area (Anderson 2010); digital technology is increasingly central in these ecosystems.First, this work situates audiences at the center of the local sensemaking process, acknowledging the vital impact of their understanding of local on a wide range of policy and production related issues.Second, this work explicates the complexity of an audience-based definition of local in relation to the spectrum of geographic-based meanings and more symbolic meanings and defines distinct categories useful for future research.
Building on an analysis of a survey of respondents in the United States, this work examines audience definitions of local based on where people live and in the context of their everyday engagements with their respective local news ecosystems.The findings show that context-based definitions of local are more significant than geographic-based definitions for community members and are driven by a range of socioeconomic and media-based variables.The following sections review extant research on local news and communities and leverage this research to develop a framework for understanding how local and community are defined in the context of local news.

Local Audiences, Local News and Broader Contexts
Some argue that local is subjective, meaning "different things to different people at different times" (Ali 2017, 33), but this fuzziness creates challenges for researchers, policymakers or practitioners.In late 2021, policymakers struggled with this concept in formulating a proposal for providing a tax credit to local news producers in the United States.The original text of the proposed Build Back Better bill would have provided a payroll tax credit for local news producers: The term 'local newspaper' means any print or digital publication if (A) the primary content of such publication is original content derived from primary sources and relating to news and current events, (B) such publication primarily serves the needs of a regional or local community, (C) the publisher of such publication employs at least one local news journalist who resides in such regional or local community, and (D) the publisher of such publication employs no more than 750 employees during the calendar quarter with respect to which a credit is allowed under this section.
Notably, this legislative action focused on local as oriented around the nature of the news outlet, as opposed to the community.Ultimately the legislation did not pass, but it highlights the vagueness of policy definitions of local.The area covered is defined as "a regional or local community."This distinction of local could become even more significant as discussions grow around public funding for local journalism; New Jersey recently passed legislation paving the way for small grants to support local news production (primarily digital), but state legislators similarly struggled to provide a concrete definition for what constitutes local (Stonbely, Weber, and Satullo 2020).Even in policy contexts, it is clear that the question of defining what is local is pertinent and problematic.This calls to mind Robinson's (2014) discussion of the distinction between community and local, where community focuses more centrally on citizens and a sense of community (or a "nearness to people," as Robinson notes).Local appears to be a broader term, capturing a sense of belonging to a region, or tying together multiple communities.The issue remains relevant for policymakers as other states such as Massachusetts explore legislation supporting local news production.
Local news providers have been shrinking in terms of personnel and reporting resources for more than a decade, with many closing (Jenkins and Nielsen 2020).Remaining news organizations are left to cover larger geographic areas, and to make the decision not to cover, or deliver, content to outlying areas.Aggregation of local news at a regional level has resulted in a lack of local flexibility, altered topics covered (Jenkins and Nielsen 2020) and encouraged news organizations to rely on non-local, duplicative stories provided by wire services or parent companies (Johnston and Forde 2011).These changes further call into question the 'local' aspect of local news organizations (C� ısa� rov� a 2017).
The challenges of conceptualizing local are exacerbated in the digital context, where local news is often even more diffused and regional given the broad reach of online news sites and social media-based news.The shifting of distribution and consumption to social media has created notable challenges for regional and rural newsrooms (Hess and Waller 2020), and these organizations have been slow to adapt to digital (Radcliffe and Ali 2017).The shuttering of these local and regional papers has left many local communities without newspaper coverage (Abernathy 2018).Thus, the current local news environment is facing a significant threat, and declines in local news have a significant effect on how community members understand and perceive their immediate local community (Shaker 2009).Clearly understanding the evolution of perceptions of local will serve to inform both policy and production debates.

Approaches to Defining Local
Media scholars have criticized previous attempts at setting boundaries for "local" as too narrow or too expansive (Napoli et al. 2017).Lewis (2012, 842) noted the significance of such definitional boundaries in journalism studies as "much of the consternation in journalism today pertain to how the field is 'constructing itself'."This work builds on prior work by Lowrey, Brozana, and Mackay (2008) that conducted a structure review of extant literature and pointed to the central role of location and shared meaning in defining community, as well as the role of geography, engagement, social cohesion and power in giving meaning to the relationship between local community and media.The following section reviews extant literature on the concept of local in research pursuits across the academy.In doing so, we build a typology of local news based on the following: (1) local as distance, (2) local as boundary, (3) local as proximity and (4) local as cultural creation.It is important to note that there is a tension between local and community that is often apparent in journalism research.Robinson (2014) captures this tension well, noting that "local news" often extends beyond a single community and has become more regional in nature, whereas a sense of community is inherently something more bounded and specific.This work endeavors to focus specifically on the perception of local community as it relates to local news.We intend, in choosing this framing, to capture consumption of both local news and more narrowly, news that is community-specific.

Local as Distance
Distance is traditionally thought of as a baseline measure of locality (see, for example, McKenzie 1927), but digital technology has eliminated many distance-related obstacles (measured as either time or distance of travel).While the global communication network may alter the lived experience of distance, it does not mean that distance does not matter at all (Mosco 2000).Mersey observes, "geography matters to citizens and to journalism" (2009,357), which Freeman (2020) echoes as a "geographic turn" in journalism studies.
Distance is directly relevant in discussions of news, both as time and physical distance of travel; the distance between news organization and news audience alters news values, with reporting focused on rural idyll representations, instead of harder focus on controversial issues (Freeman 2020).Often, distance is used as a more stringent measure for defining localness.One study in agriculture defined local food "as food produced within 100 miles of an individual's residence" (Rose et al. 2008).For traditional newspapers, the definition of distance is not as cut and dry, but local news and local news coverage retains a more immediate focus in terms of distance covered (Guo 2011).In digital environments, the importance of distance becomes more ambiguous for publishers (Harlow and Chadha 2021), but it is unclear how that fluid relationship with distance as time or physical distance translates to audience perceptions of local and distance, as explored in the first research question: RQ 1 : How do socioeconomic, media access 1 and consumption related variables impact community members' view of local based on (a) distance or (b) time?

Local as Boundary
In addition to time and distance, localness is often perceived based on predefined boundaries-real and artificial.Boundaries, by and large, are constructed by people.Governmental boundaries, surrounding states, counties and municipalities, matter greatly for taxes, funding and representation, and notably in political contexts (Althaus, Cizmar, and Gimpel 2009).Newspaper organizations draw a wide variety of local borders, and the meaning of local, hyper-local and regional can vary significantly.These physical boundaries have become far more fluid online (Hess 2015).News organizations draw lines around coverage areas, delivery areas and viewing areas, but online those boundaries are harder to delineate.Either way, such boundaries are often symbolic boundaries.Perceptions of and understanding of the boundaries of a local community are often directly related to media consumption (Palmer and Toff 2020); Palmer and Toff found that one reason consumers avoided news was because they perceived little connection between their sense of community and news consumption.But boundaries in the digital era are increasingly blurred (Beckett and Mansell 2008), and ultimately not well understood from the audience perspective.Thus, this leads to our second research question, aimed at better understanding how local boundaries are understood from the audience perspective in the modern digital news environment: RQ 2 : How do socioeconomic, media access and consumption related variables impact community members' view of local based on boundaries?

Local as Proximity
A third area of focus in framing local is the definition of local as proximity.Whereas local as distance and local as boundary offer precise, objective designations of local, local as proximity is subjective and individualized.Local food, for instance, is produced in the locality close to where "I" live (Eriksen 2013).Localness of community newspapers has been described as a "nearness to people" it covered (Byerly 1961, 25).Proximity is relational, meaning local has connective property.Relational proximity between producers and consumers often is presented as "immediate, personal and enacted in shared space" (Hinrichs 2000, 295).Hess (2013) notes that in the context of local news, distance is often "geo-social," whereby local is realized as the intersection of geographic space as well as social behavior (sports, interests, hobbies, etc.).This broad view of local conveys notions of "morality, values, trust and quality" (Ali 2017, 31).The relationship between audience understanding of local, and proximity-based views of local, is explored in the third research question: RQ 3 : How do socioeconomic, media access and consumption related variables impact community members' view of local based on proximity?
This view of local as relational further echoes the shift of local news to digital modes of production, where local proximity is less directly relevant and relational definitions become more important.

Local as Sense of Community
Psychologists define sense of community as "a feeling that members have of belonging, a feeling that members matter to one another and to the group, and a shared faith that members' needs will be met through their commitment to be together" (McMillan and Chavis 1986, 9).Framings of local can be seen as a type of cultural construct, meaning, it offers "an air of 'we know it when we see it?'"(Usher 2019, 96).This sense of knowing manifests in a collective creation of community.A cultural approach has shaped the meaning of local in the context of news, with local creating "a grounded connection with, and understanding of, a physical place and its social and cultural dimensions that is practical and embodied" (Hess and Waller 2016, 197).
Sense of community most directly captures audience emotions about what constitutes community.Gulyas, O'Hara, and Eilenberg (2019) observed in a study of local news consumption in southeast England that understanding of local news was directly linked to engagement and consumption of different forms of online news.Local community, and an audience-centric understanding of local, may prove even more critical as production continues to decline.Recent work shows that audiences may substitute local news with an increasing reliance on community source news and networks of peers to replace lost local news (McCollough, Crowell, and Napoli 2017).Inclusion of a sense of a community thus serves to inform a more aggregate perception of the impact of audience perception of local community.
The sense of community that drives localness is clearly important, and directly linked to news media consumption (Usher 2021).This relationship is explored in the following research question: RQ 4 : How do socioeconomic, media access and consumption related variables impact community members' view of local as a sense of community?
Local news consumption is often linked to broader community effects such as the level of political activity and civic engagement.This relationship is perhaps best demonstrated in the absence of local news (Mathews 2022).Local newspaper closures have been connected empirically to less knowledgeable citizens (Shaker 2009), more polarized voting behaviors (Darr, Hitt, and Dunaway 2018) and lower civic engagement (Shaker 2014).The coronavirus pandemic exacerbated challenges within local news ecosystems, forcing more than 100 local newsrooms to shutter (Hare 2021).
A decline in local news often directly translates to a decline in the availability of critical information to community members.Local journalism is central in providing critical information needs to communities (Waldman 2011).These eight needs were identified by Friedland et al. (2012) in a literature review prepared for the Federal Communications Commission: (1) Emergencies and risks, (2) Health, (3) Education, (4) Transportation systems, (5) Environment and planning, (6) Economic development, (7) Civic information, (8) Political life.Critical information needs matter because provision of that information helps to foster a sense of community through local news consumption (Batsell 2015).In one study examining nearly 16,000 local news stories from television, print and radio, local newspapers accounted for a quarter of the outlets, but nearly 60% of the local news stories in the sample (Mahone et al. 2019), with related work showing these sources are central in providing critical information needs to community members (Napoli, Weber and McCollough, 2018).Thus, in the context of understanding how community members view local community, the final research question asks about the impact of the perceived value of critical information needs: RQ 5 : How does the perceived value of news about critical information needs impact community members' view of local?

Methodology
A robust survey methodology was employed to better understand the framing of local by community members and to evaluate the previously developed research questions.

Data Collection
An online survey of audience members in the US was constructed and distributed via the Qualtrics platform.Data were collected from a national sample, mapped against US census data on a state-by-state basis.In other words, responses were collected from states on a proportional basis with a degree of error of 1%.For instance, the 2020 US Census population of Minnesota is 5.7 million; this is 1.7% of the total US population.Survey targets for the state were set between 0.7% and 2.7% of all responses; this approach was mirrored for all fifty states.In addition to population, responses mirrored US Census data in terms of gender, household income and race.
Respondents were recruited through a paid survey deployed by Lucid and drawn from seven different national sample online survey pools (subpanels).Each respondent was paid approximately $4 per survey completion (the exact amount varied based on the subpanel, and ranged between $2.50 and $6 per response).The survey included 25 questions and took approximately 15 min to complete; some questions were omitted in analysis because they were non-significant in the regression analysis.
The survey questions used a combination of questions about perceptions of local, local media availability and consumption and socioeconomic variables.Questions were included to ask about access to technology (cell phones, computers), as well as questions about access to the Internet.Two questions were designed to capture respondents' perceptions of local.First, survey respondents were asked to define what "local means to you" using a "few sentences," and second, respondents were asked to indicate "the approximate extent of your local community in miles" on a sliding scale.Local media questions were asked to better understand the local news ecosystem of respondents.Participants were asked about the type of local news sources they have access to (television, word of mouth, radio, local print, social media, websites, blogs, etc.), and were asked to indicate which of those sources they had used in the past week.
Survey participants were asked to indicate what they viewed as important about the role of local news.Survey questions also were included to measure the degree to which respondents view critical information needs as central to a community, and to what extent community media serves those critical information needs.For instance, survey respondents were asked, "How important are each of the following areas to you with regards to local news coverage?,"and subsequent response categories included the plain language text describing each critical information needs (i.e., "Health and welfare, including specifically local health information as well as groupspecific health information where it exists.").Response categories were based on a five-item Likert-type scale ranging from "Not at all important" to "Extremely important." Additional measures evaluating political views and access to media were included.Prior work (see, for example, Napoli, Weber and McCollough, 2018) found that racial composition of a community impacted availability of local news.Variables about internet and technology access were also included, given prior research pointing to the wide variability in both internet and technology access across local communities (Pew Research Center 2019).Additional questions included asking respondents' age (continuous), household income (categorical in $25,000 increments), race (categorical: white-non-Hispanic, black-non-Hispanic, Hispanic, other race-non-Hispanic) and gender (categorical: male, female, non-binary, other), based primarily on previous research by the research team and categories emerging as relevant from the extant literature review.Respondents also were asked to identify if they lived in a large city, suburb near a large city, small city or town, or rural area.
Particular attention was given to the ordering of survey questions.For instance, the question asking about how respondents define community was asked before the question asking respondents to give a distance-in-miles definition to community to avoid predisposing respondents to think of community as a distance measure.
The draft survey was pilot tested with a small group of respondents (N ¼ 240) and evaluated; then the full survey was launched (N ¼ 2,465).A total of 4,671 respondents received invitations to respond to the survey, yielding a 57.9% response rate.Given the random sampling approach in this study, the response rate ultimately does not impact the significance of the findings as long as the resulting demographics are in line with expectations.Deidentified survey data used in this study can be downloaded at (anonymized URL for review).Several techniques were used to validate respondents and insure validity of our data.First, an attention checker question was included that asked respondents to identify a national newspaper from a selection of media choices.Second, responses were hand-verified to validate the coherence of the open-ended question and to check for straight lining behavior.Third, all respondents were asked to provide their zip code, and verified that data against the recorded zip codes stored by the survey company.Data collection took place from November 15 to December 15, 2021.

Dependent Variable
Definitions of community were coded based on six emergent categories.These categories were derived based on an iterative and emergent coding process established between the two authors.First, the authors reviewed the answers provided by respondents and created their own independent categorizations; then the authors met, reviewed the categories, and discussed where there was overlap and discrepancies.In the second round of coding, the authors agreed upon a set of six categories.These categories include local as an objective distance (miles), as an objective distance (time), as an objective boundary (city, county, zip code), as a subjective boundary (area, neighborhood, region), as a subjective proximity (close, nearby), and finally as a cultural boundary (a "community," a "local," etc.).Both researchers coded the data, and the categories were discussed and refined.Figure 1 illustrates a word cloud of the top 50 words from local descriptions (excluding pronouns and other basic text), which was used by the authors to assess key themes.
The authors both participated in coding.To establish intercoder reliability, both authors coded 20% overlap of the data and measured interrater reliability using Cohen's Kappa (j ¼ 0.96) (Cohen 1968).Following the coding of the data, the breakdown of categories was as follows: objective distance, miles (11%), objective distance, time (3%), objective boundary (16%), subjective boundary (31%), subjective proximity (25%), cultural boundary (12%).Multinomial logistic regression requires a reference group in the model; given that distance is a basic and concrete measurement of localness it was assigned as the reference group for analysis.

Independent Variables
Correlation and descriptive analyses were conducted including all variables.Variables were not included in the analysis where there were nonsignificant relationships, where variables did not align with the proposed constructs, or where variables did not account for significant variance in the overall model.The measurement of independent variables is described as follows with demographic variables established in the model.Household Income.Household income groups were broken down in increments beginning with income less than $30,000 (28.1%), $30,000 to $49,999 (24.3%), $50,000 to $74,999 (21.2%), $75,000 to $99,999 (11.5%), $100,000 to $124,999 (6.1%), and greater than $125,000 (8.8%).Categorical variables were coded as dummy variables, with a dummy variable created for each income group.
Race.Race was coded as a dummy variable, with 1 ¼ white, non-hispanic, and 0 included black, non-hispanic, hispanic and other races, non-hispanic.The breakdown of respondents was 69.1% white, non-hispanic, 13% black, non-hispanic, 12.1% hispanic, and 5.6% other races, non-hispanic.
Age. Respondents' age was provided as part of the panel data with the survey, and therefore was coded as a continuous variable (average age ¼ 42).

Community Setting.
Prior research links community setting to media consumption and sense of community.(Hess 2015;Mathews 2022).Community setting was a categorical variable, with 1 ¼ Urban, 2 ¼ Suburban, 3 ¼ Small city/town, 4 ¼ rural.In the handling of the regression, each was coded as a dummy variable.

Average Critical Information Needs Importance.
Respondents were asked to evaluate the average importance of each critical information need in the context of their consumption of local news based on a 5-point Likert-type scale (not at all important ¼ 1, to very important ¼ 5).As noted, critical information needs are defined as emergencies and risks, health, education, transportation systems, environment and planning, economic development, civic information, and political life.A composite score was created averaging the responses across categories.
The following variables capture audience members' media access; social media access was measured but was non-significant.

Use of Local Television for Local News.
Respondents were asked to select media used to access local news.Other media options were evaluated in analysis but were nonsignificant.Of the 15 media options provided, only three media options (local TV, local newspapers and word of mouth) were selected by more than 40% of respondents.A dummy variable was created to account for the use of local television for local news (19.3%).

Word of Mouth for Local News.
A dummy variable was created to account for the use of word of mouth as a source local news (13.7%).

Use of Local Newspapers (Print or Online) for Local News.
A dummy variable was created to account for the use of local newspapers for local news (11.6%).This category was included given the importance of local news to a sense of community as outlined in prior research.

Data Analysis
Descriptive analyses were conducted to assess the relationships between variables and patterns in the data.Data analysis was performed using R (R Core Team 2020), and primarily using the nnet package (Venables and Ripley 2002), which is designed for multinomial logistic regression analysis.Multinomial logistic regression is suitable when conducting an analysis where the dependent variable is an unordered categorical variable with two or more levels.Independent variables-either continuous or dichotomous-are used in combination with maximum likelihood estimation to predict the probability of categorical membership.
Prior to running the multinomial logistic regression, the data were checked for multicollinearity.The researchers evaluated the variance inflation factor (VIF) and confirmed that no values were above 10 and the tolerance index was greater than 0.2 (Bowerman and O'Connell 1990).Model fit was estimated with log-likelihood estimation as well as an estimated approximation explained variance such as Nagelkerke's (1991) R 2 (approximation is necessary with log likelihood models where traditional explained variance cannot be calculated).

Differences in Perspectives on Local Community
Beyond the demographics noted above, the political orientation of respondents was generally split (18.3% ¼ conservative, 55.3% ¼ moderate, 19.3% ¼ liberal) but ultimately was not a significant variable in the subsequent regression analysis.First, 23.2% of respondents live in an urban area, 36.3% live in a suburban area, 23.6% percent live in a small town and 17.0% live in a rural area.Among respondents, local television news (19.3%), word of mouth (13.7%), internet search (13.5%) and social media (13.4%) were the most prominent sources used for news in the past week prior to the survey.Looking specifically at social media, Facebook was used most frequently for local news-far more than any other social media outlet (39%).
Technology use varied in certain contexts, although overall technology use was consistent.94% use a cell phone regularly (more than once a week), 74% use email, 60% use a tablet or laptop computer and just 33% use a desktop computer.Challenges persist with regards to accessing information online via technology.To that end, 20% of respondents reported that they don't have regular access to some form of home internet service and 40% of respondents indicated that they had trouble accessing the Internet either sometimes or often.Respondents primarily access local news online (40%) or via their phones (32%), with only 27% of respondents indicating that they access news via print.
Most respondents viewed critical information needs as somewhat or extremely important when asked to evaluate them on a five-point Likert-type scale.For example, 71.3% of respondents placed emergencies and risks in the top two categories; similarly, 69.4% of respondents placed information on health in the top two categories and 68.2% placed political information in the top two categories.Conversely, when asked how they feel about how critical information needs are covered, it is clear there is a gap.Of respondents, 57.8% indicated that critical information needs are covered somewhat or very well, 54.4% ranked health information similarly and 59.3% ranked political information similarly.Critical information needs remain a central part of local communities, but it is clear there is a gap between perceived importance and coverage.

Understanding Categorization of Local Community Orientations
A Multinomial Logistic Regression Analysis was conducted, demonstrating the effects of the independent variables on the probability of predicting local community orientations.The model was statistically significant (X 2 ¼ 1100.15,p < 0.001).Results are presented in Table 1.
Objective Time: Research Question 1 asks about objective boundaries based on time and distance.Distance was used as the reference for analysis, so all regressions compare to distance categorization.Age (male ¼ 1; b ¼ 0.16) was negatively related to the probability of a respondent describing local community in a way that relied on an objective description of time; age was negatively related (b ¼ À 0.62).This suggests that younger adults are more likely to describe local communities using terms related to objective descriptions of time; similarly, males are more likely to use objective notions of time in their description.Objective time descriptions include phrases such as "15-minute drive away," or "within 10 min from home." Research Question 2 asks about boundary definitions of local, which was divided in coding into subjective and objective realizations of local based on the categorization of responses.

Objective Boundary
Objective boundaries rely on use of boundary terms such as town or county, respondents' age (b ¼ À 0.71) and living in an urban location (b ¼ À 0.34) were significant in predicting objective boundary descriptions.In other words, younger respondents living outside of urban locations are more likely to use objective boundary descriptions.Language used to describe objective boundaries included phrases such as "in my county," or "in this town."A respondent in a rural area defined local as, "in my town and surrounding counties," while another in a more suburban area defined local as, "the town I live in or the town adjacent."These definitions provide a clear sense boundary that is explicitly defined.

Subjective Boundary
Research Question 3 asks about subjective boundaries, which capture concepts such as "within my community," and the sense of local as proximity.Race (b ¼ À 0.76) indicated that white, non-hispanic adults were less likely to describe community based on subjective boundaries.Similarly, older adults were less likely to use subjective boundaries (b ¼ 0.28), as were respondents living in an urban location (b ¼ 0.15).Suburban residents were slightly more likely to use subjective boundaries in their description (b ¼ 0.06) as were respondents who use local television as a primary source for news (b ¼ 0.55).This echoes Ali's (2017) notion of local community as denoting a sense of place known to those in the community.One survey respondent described as local in this sense as "the surrounding community where I live," and another remarked, "the community I am a part of."These definitions evoke a sense of proximity without using specific definitions.

Subjective Proximity
Research Question 4 asks about subjective proximity.Subjective proximity refers to phrases such as "very near to me," or, "within my immediate proximity" and "nearby." The probability of using subjective proximity descriptions for local community is increased for those in the lowest household income bracket (HHI less than $30 K; b ¼ 0.16).Race (b ¼ À 0.77) and age (b ¼ À 0.32) both negatively affected the probability of using subjective proximity descriptions.On the other hand, respondents in urban (b ¼ 0.04) and suburban (b ¼ 0.27) communities were more likely to use subjective proximity descriptors, as were respondents who relied on word of mouth for local news (b ¼ 0.33).

Sense of Community
Research Question 4 and 5 both asked about subjective sense of community and the associated impact of critical information needs.Local community orientations that focus on sense of community relied on phrases such as, "anywhere in my community where I feel safe," or, "places in my hometown that I have known my whole life."Race (b ¼ À 0.59) and age (b ¼ À 0.04) both negatively affected the probability of using sense of community descriptions.On the other hand, residents in suburban (b ¼ 0.07), small city (b ¼ 0.15) and urban locations (b ¼ 0.18) were more likely to use sense of place descriptions, as were respondents who relied of word of mouth for local news (b ¼ 0.42).Research Question five explicitly asked about critical information needs.
Respondents who viewed critical information needs are important in the provision of local news were also more likely to use sense of community descriptors (b ¼ 0.11).Overall, 29.9% of responses were categorized as objective, 70.1% were categorized as subjective.

Discussion
The following section builds on the results and establishes connections to some of the broader challenges facing local news organizations.The discussion is broken up between a discussion of objective and subjective measures of local, and the broader connection to the framing of community in the context of local media and media policy.

Objective and Subjective Views of Local
The most striking distinction in the results is the difference in relationships between objective and subjective definitions of local, and critical information needs, media consumption and socioeconomic variables, drawing on a comparison of the findings across the research questions.More baseline, objective definitions of local were tied to demographic variables, as analyzed in the first research question.Objective definitions of local, analyzed in the second research question, were clearly linked to younger males in the case of time, and younger non-urban community members in the case of objective boundaries (as compared to those who used objective distance measures).
More subjective measures, as analyzed for the third and fourth research questions, were more likely tied to non-demographic variables.For example, boundary-based subjective descriptions of local were more likely to be used by non-urban, non-white, younger adults.These descriptions were also driven by consumption of local television for community news.Subjective descriptions of proximity were more likely to be used by those who used word-of-mouth as a primary source of local news, as were subjective descriptions of sense of community.In each case, local news consumption (either from television or word-of-mouth) was the largest variable by magnitude.Sense of community definitions of local were also likely to be associated with non-white, nonurban community members who value critical information needs as a function of local news (as shown in the analysis for the fifth research question).The importance of word-of-mouth points to a sense of community that is connected to knowing other people; the finding may also suggest reliance on seeking news from others who more frequently consume local news.
The findings point to challenges in shaping definitions of local in the context of media ecosystems, local news and digital media.First, urban populations and younger audiences appear to look at local from more objective, prescriptive pointsof-view, using measures of distance, time and boundaries that can be thought of in concrete terms.This suggests that from a practice perspective, these audiences are easier to target with established techniques (e.g., geographic targeting).Non-urban audiences, and especially rural non-white audiences, think about community in subjective terms; there also tends to be a connection between media consumption (through television or word-of-mouth) and descriptions of community that focus on belonging and sense of a culture of community.Further, this shows that these types of audiences will be more difficult to target using traditional techniques, but also may be more likely to consume digital local news that is less likely to be geographically anchored.This echoes what others have pointed to as an increasing urban and non-urban divide in how we think about community, but also how media is currently consumed by different local populations (see, for example, Usher 2021).This underscores what others have echoed (e.g., McCoillough, Crowell and Napoli, 2017); perceptions of local news increasingly need to take an audience-centric view of local to accurately understand how consumers view their media markets, especially as digital forms of local news become more dominate and the central role of place is less connected.

Local News Definitions and Implications for Policy and Research
A modern framing of the interplay between local community, audience understanding, local news, and community demographics, is critical for future policymaking, for research, and for practitioners as they work to better connect with their audiences.Policymakers often favor more concrete, objective approaches to measurement, but the findings about the distinction between objective and subjective approaches to local point to the critical connection between subjective measures and the sense of community that can be fostered by a rich media ecosystem.

The Role of Definitions in Policymaking
Definitions of local news are an important tool of understanding the media ecosystem and formulating policy to address challenges facing local news organizations in the United States, especially in response to the ongoing role of digital and social media in the distribution of and consumption of local news.Recently, policy attention from big tech, foundations and local governments has shifted to local news organizations.For example, Facebook's Journalism initiative aims to provide local news organizations with funding; but it is unclear how Facebook defines and limits what counts as a local news organization.Many state legislatures are now considering initiatives to develop mechanisms that can support local news organizations, either through subsidies or grants.New Jersey's Civic Information Consortium is one such example; the State of New Jersey launched one of the first initiatives to explicitly provide small grants to support the health of local news media ecosystems (Stonbely, Weber, and Satullo 2020), but local was strategically ambiguous.
While this study specifically emphasizes audience perceptions in the United States, the broader discussion of the significance of conceptualizing local, especially in the local media policy space, is global in nature.For instance, the federal government in Australia created a $50 million fund to support regional news organizations.However, critics of the decision argued that the funds largely went to big media conglomerates and ignored the smaller, local news organizations (Hess 2020).A clearer definition of the scope of regional news could potentially have helped to guide the funds to a more focused cluster of organizations.

The Role of Definitions in Research
For researchers, it is increasingly imperative to be able to define and explicate what is referenced when researchers discuss the local community as an object of study.Recognizing the different categories and choosing a clear operationalization of local will provide clarity in future scholarship.As noted in the opening, clarity in operationalization is important for both practice and policy.Given current policymaking efforts a clear definition of local journalism has direct implications for the distribution of funding.
The findings related to rural, non-white audiences and the connection to media consumption reinforces prior work demonstrating that local news can be particularly effective in helping to drive a sense of community for residents (Mersey 2009), and that understanding community members perception of local is also central to that work.From a policy perspective, the loss of that local news will continue to weaken that sense of community.As noted by Hess and Waller (2016), "there is an unmistakable hype around its reinvention in the digital age through the hyperlocal phenomena" (p.134)."Local news" is not a new concept, and while some of the discussion of the effect of digital is perhaps hype, digital technology has impacted local news significantly in certain areas, especially with regards to expanding the reach of local news beyond what has traditionally been thought of as the boundaries of local.Hyperlocal brings this concept to a more microscopic definition of local, and is an area of local news that warrants more investigation in order to better understand how local is operationalized within sub-regions of a local community.
Ultimately, absent a clear understanding of the local in digital journalism and local journalism research, it is difficult to get a full sense of the current research on the space of local and even more difficult to build theories explaining the phenomenon.Addressing this predicament would benefit future local journalism scholarship, which is in great need in the academy.

Limitations
The results in this research are limited by the bounds of what can reasonably be assessed in the time and resource constrained environment of an online survey.Future research should look at the relative importance of various media within communities; in this case, the initial goal of this research was to look at the overall media ecosystem, and therefore relative importance was beyond the scope of the project.Nevertheless, this is clearly an area where future scholars will want to explore.Further, sense of belonging within a community was not directly measured in this study; future work should build on this research to look at the relationship between sense of community and sense of belonging within a community to better understand the ways in which understanding of and framing of community ties to the sense of belonging one may feel within that community.Finally, the finding regarding word-of-mouth as a primary source of local news points to a need to better understand community interactions; it is also possible that peer-to-peer interaction mediated the provision of local news via social media and other digital sources.This open-ended question should be examined in future research.

Conclusion
This study echoes an audience-driven approach to constructing the definition of local and a deeper understanding of the ongoing effect of digital disruption on perceptions of local.Given the direct relationship between digital journalism and local news, refinement of definitions of local will advance practice and policy within the field.Further, this focus on an audience-based definition of local follows similar research efforts in the "audience turn" within media studies (Costera Meijer 2019) as audience members define and make sense of terms, including the taken-for-granted concept of "news."The distinction between objective and subjective measurements of community is an important advance for local news researchers; the work demonstrates that there is a much clearer connection between subjective definitions, and that more objective based approaches to localism are likely to overlook the importance of the connection to local media ecosystems.

Figure 1 .
Figure 1.Word cloud of the top 50 words.

Table 1 .
Multinomial regression analysis of independent variables and local orientations.