Given both the historical legacy and the contemporary awareness about gender inequity in journalism and politics as well as the increasing importance of Twitter in political communication, this article considers whether the platform makes some of the existing gender bias against women in political journalism even worse. Using a framework that characterizes journalists’ Twitter behavior in terms of the dimensions of their peer-to-peer relationships and a comprehensive sample of permanently credentialed journalists for the U.S. Congress, substantial evidence of gender bias beyond existing inequities emerges. Most alarming is that male journalists amplify and engage male peers almost exclusively, while female journalists tend to engage most with each other. The significant support for claims of gender asymmetry as well as evidence of gender silos are findings that not only underscore the importance of further research but also suggest overarching consequences for the structure of contemporary political communication.

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Public-facing research institutions and university centers have played an outsized role in collecting and disseminating knowledge about local news trends in the United States. Philanthropic support, attention by policymakers, and a sense of urgency around the crisis facing local journalism have incentivized the emergence of this particular kind of research that sits adjacent to, but not fully inside, the scholarly environment. This material is well positioned to engage and activate interventions aiming to help address the crisis in local journalism and provide empirical grist for deeper scholarly work. At the same time, however, this line of public scholarship is sometimes unmoored from theoretical considerations, highly descriptive, and exists outside of peer review systems. Many of these institutions setting the agenda for research about local journalism are bound by their own norms and cultures from making robust normative claims about how the industry should respond and adapt to their findings. This chapter traces the brief history of para-scholarly groundwork mapping local news, outlines the strengths and weaknesses of this model, and suggests collaborative practices going forward that connect this important groundwork with theory-driven and peer review practices.

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