What does the model do?

TThe Journalism Ecosystem model estimates the cost of fully funding local news ecosystems at the school district, township, city, county, congressional distsrict, and state levels. To estimate that number, it combines US Census data with real-world journalism expense figures drawn from an anonymized dataset provided by the Institue for Nonprofit News.

What's on this website?

This website showcases two interactive calculators that recreate the logic of the model, allowing users to easily interact with its ideas. The calculators on this website also explain how the model arives at its cost estimates, hopefully easing users' paths to directly engaging with and changing the model themselves.

This website is maintained by the DeWitt Wallace Center for Media & Democracy, part of Duke University's Sanford School for Public Policy.

Calculator 1: Estimate costs for the national news ecosystem

One of our calculators re-implements a part of the model that estimates the cost of funding local news around the country.

Following the lead of the model, the calculator lets users specify the number of editorial employees to be funded across localities. For example, the user could specify that all municipalities in the country be covered by an education reporter, a community services reporter, and a criminal justice reporter.

Upon seeing that input, the calculator would count the number of municipalities in the country and multiply that figure by 3 (reporters/county) to calculate the total number of editorial employees required to cover cities at that level.

To determine the cost of funding those employees, the calculator would multiply that total number of editorial employees by average expense data based off numbers from the Institue for Nonprofit News.

The national ecosystem calculator hosted on this website differs slightly from the model developed by SeaChange in that it allows the user to select the number of editorial employees assigned to each type of locality. We made this change to demonstrate how the model can easily be changed to introduce more granularity.

Calculator 2: Estimate costs for a single state’s news ecosystem

Our second calculator functions much like the national news ecosystem calculator but estimates numbers at the state level. The state calculator may provide a useful prototype for researchers hoping to transform the model to explore the costs of funding local news ecosystems at smaller scales (e.g., at the city or county level).