Measuring Digital Local News Desertification
Local news plays a vital role in keeping communities informed, connected and engaged. Yet across the country, many communities are experiencing a decline in local journalism, creating what researchers call “news deserts,” areas with limited access to reliable local reporting.
PRSA Hampton Roads welcomes Alexander C. Nwala, Ph.D., assistant professor of data science at William & Mary, for a timely and engaging discussion on how researchers are measuring the decline of local digital news ecosystems and what it means for communities, media professionals and democracy.
Dr. Nwala will explore how data science and computational methods are being used to analyze local news coverage, track changes in local information ecosystems, and identify gaps in the availability and diversity of community news. His research applies tools such as machine learning and large-scale data analysis to evaluate how well local news sources meet critical information needs within communities.
This session will provide valuable insight for public relations professionals, journalists and communicators seeking to better understand the evolving local media landscape and its implications for public engagement, information access and community storytelling.
Dr. Alexander Nwala’s Bio
Dr. Alexander C. Nwala is an assistant professor of Data Science at William and Mary (W&M) and director of the News Web and Social Media (NEWS) research lab. Before joining W&M, he was a postdoc at the Observatory on Social Media, Indiana University, Bloomington, with a research focus on dis/misinformation diffusion, detection, and countering of online manipulation. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science at Old Dominion University and has contributed multiple important tools and datasets to the data/web science, social media, (local) news, and web archiving communities. Dr. Nwala has taught Computer Science courses to high school, undergraduate and graduate students and has collaborated across disciplines and institutions, including with computer scientists/journalists at IU, archivists at the National Library of Medicine and lawyers at Harvard. And his research has been published in multiple peer-reviewed Journals and Conferences including the ACM/IEEE JCDL, ACM HyperText, iPres and ICWSM.