How We Know Journalism is Good for Democracy

When I started working at Democracy Fund I got a lot of questions about how we know that journalism, and especially local news, really matters for democracy. I was regularly asked for data and research that illustrates the connection and that proves that healthy media is critical to a healthy democracy. In 2018 I began pulling together a growing literature review of all the research that helps us understand the impact of journalism on democracy. I kept adding to it until 2022 when Christine Schmidt and Andrea Lorenz helped do a major overhaul of the whole piece. You can find the full list of studies with summaries here.