NELA-Local: A Dataset of U.S. Local News Articles for the Study of County-Level News Ecosystems

Abstract

In this paper, we present a dataset of over 1.4M online news articles from 313 local U.S. news outlets published over 20 months (between April 4th, 2020 and December 31st, 2021). These outlets cover a geographically diverse set of communities across the United States. In order to estimate characteristics of the local audience, included with this news article data is a wide range of county-level metadata, including demographics, 2020 Presidential Election vote shares, and community resilience estimates from the U.S. Census Bureau. The NELA-Local dataset can be found at: https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataset.xhtml?persistentId=doi:10.7910/DVN/GFE66K.

NELA-PS: A Dataset of Pink Slime News Articles for the Study of Local News Ecosystems

“…The number of articles produced per state is highly correlated with the outlet density per state (0.923 correlation coefficient). Importantly, the outlets in NELA-Local were vetted to be authentic local news outlets (Horne et al 2022) and, as expected, zero outlets overlap between the two datasets.…”

“…There are several related news datasets that can be used in conjunction with NELA-PS to answer various research questions. First, the NELA-Local dataset can serve as comparison to work done using NELA-PS (Horne et al 2022). NELA-Local is a dataset articles from 313 authentic U.S. local news outlets between April 2020 and December 2021.…”

“…Once all websites were processed, we set up the data collection to run twice a day, going over each of the collected feeds and scraping all articles in it that had not been collected before. This process follows the same approach as other NELA datasets (Nørregaard, Horne, and Adalı 2019; Gruppi, Horne, and Adalı 2020; Horne et al 2022).…”

“…While the dataset described in this paper will remain static for provenance, the dataset will be supported by the authors. The authors have a track record of maintaining and supporting datasets for the research community (Nørregaard, Horne, and Adalı 2019;Gruppi, Horne, and Adalı 2020;Horne et al 2022;Trujillo et al 2022;Horne 2022). Any updates to the dataset will be documented and deposited in a separate repository.…”

“…Figure1: Flow diagram of article collection system. Note the collection system is the same system that was developed in Nørregaard,Horne, and Adalı (2019) and used inHorne et al (2022). This flow graphic is fromHorne et al (2022).…”