New Research From the LOR Foundation Reveals Gap in Local News Coverage in Rural Montana
The just-released special report also includes a database of all of Montana’s local news outlets and explores some of the factors that might have shaped the media landscape’s development.
DENVER, January 27, 2025 (Newswire.com)
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While Montana contains more than 100 outlets creating local news, the distribution of those outlets is very uneven, according to new research from the LOR Foundation. In its just-released “Special Report: Montana’s Media Landscape,” LOR notes that half of Montana’s 56 counties have a single outlet producing local news for the county, and in five counties, there are no local news creators at all.
“These 33 counties are all rural-and big,” says LOR research analyst Daniel Read, who led the research. “On average, they are 2,500 square miles, and some are much larger, like Phillips County, which is roughly the size of Connecticut. That means a single newsroom-one with a staff of only a couple people, or even a single reporter-might really have to stretch to cover stories in communities that are 20, 50, or 75 miles apart.
LOR’s special report also explores some of the factors that might contribute to how Montana’s media landscape has developed-things like population, household income, digital access, and education. It also contains a database of local news outlets that reveals some interesting examples of small newsrooms that have developed to meet the unique needs of their communities, such as the digital-only Electric, the Hello Whitefish podcast, and the Four Points Press.
In recent years, researchers have assessed the media environments of many states, but Montana wasn’t among them. So in the summer and fall of 2024, LOR, which funds community-led ideas that improve quality of life in the rural Mountain West, carried out a unique exploration of Montana’s media environment-vetting its findings with on-the-ground sources in all 56 counties-to understand just who was creating local news around the state.
“As an organization dedicated to helping local people improve quality of life across all kinds of issues, LOR regularly sees the critical role local news outlets play in rural communities,” says Gary Wilmot, LOR’s executive director. “We wanted to better understand what the media environment looks like in Montana, one of the five states where we work, in part to see where there might be gaps and opportunities to fill them.”
LOR also hopes the research will be helpful to other researchers and for Montanans who are interested in supporting their hometown outlets-or potentially starting their own.
The report-which is available publicly, along with the underlying data and methodology, at lorfoundation.org/reports/special-report-montanas-media-landscape-will be updated this spring following feedback from local stakeholders. Media interested in pursuing stories or using the data should reach out to communications officer Kasey Cordell.
About the LOR Foundation:LOR works with rural communities in the Mountain West to enhance livability and prosperity while preserving the character that makes each community unique. Currently LOR works with Cortez and Monte Vista, Colorado; Weiser, Idaho; Libby, Montana; Questa and Taos, New Mexico; and Lander, Wyoming.
Source: LOR Foundation
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