Say you were offered a job in a town you’d never been to. How would you know if you would like to live there? How are the schools? What is the crime rate? Is there any nightlife? Can you afford a house or apartment there?
W&M Data Science assistant professor Alexander Nwala suggests you could begin your research with a site he and his students created: the Local Memory Project, an interactive map that lets you easily find local news sources – newspapers, television and radio stations – in all 50 states and around the world.
“Given the decline of local media and the concerns about how that can diminish high-quality information and exacerbate misinformation, I think stories highlighting local media are important to inform the public about the problem,” Nwala said.
The Local Memory Project began life eight years ago in the Harvard Library Innovation Lab, where Nwala was then a fellow. The existing site – now hosted by William & Mary – was built by Nwala’s students, chiefly Ian MacDonald ’25, a computer science and film major, who built it under Nwala’s supervision with a set of data compiled by Gangarni Ariyarathne, a Ph.D. student in data science. The project aligns with the Data and Democracy initiatives in the university’s Vision 2026 strategic plan.
Local sources of information are critical to civic functioning, Nwala said, because national media outlets only parachute into most American cities and towns when something devastating or scandalous has happened. If you want to gauge what is really happening across communities, you need local news sources.
“There’s no way that national news media organizations will be able to cover what’s happening in all communities, and that’s why the local news media organizations are very important,” he said. “They report on what’s happening in their schools, their water sources, their local elections and so on.”
That said, local news media organizations – especially newspapers – are in serious decline. Revenue from subscriptions and advertising has dried up. Search engines have taken a lot of traffic and ad revenue from them. “When you search for news on Google now, you get all the information in the search page without having to click on a link. So, what happens is, folks don’t even leave Google to get information,” Nwala said.
The Local News Initiative, a research project affiliated with Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, estimates that in the past two decades, more than 3,200 print newspapers have closed. In addition to closures and mergers, newspapers are shrinking in size, shifting from dailies to weeklies or becoming exclusively digital.
Nwala first became aware of this trend when he worked on the Local Memory Project at Harvard. “We even saw big hedge funds buying a lot of these organizations. Imagine someone with a for-profit agenda owning a local news site that is supposed to serve the public,” he said.
The site migrated from Harvard to William & Mary when Nwala joined the faculty here in 2022. He worked with his students to revive the project. Ariyarathne was instrumental in updating the site’s database.
For McDonald, who will graduate in May with a double major in computer science and film, the opportunity to build the website was a way of learning firsthand how to put his sophisticated coding skills to work.
“I used React with TypeScript and JavaScript to build the project. I used D3 for the visualizations, and then I used Docker to host it on a Kubernetes cluster,” he said. “I was trying to explain it to my dad, and he said his head had exploded. ‘I don’t know what you just said,’,” his father told him.
McDonald, who also works as technical director for DisinfoLab, a student-run research project at W&M’s Global Research Institute, admits that, like most people his age, he is not a newspaper reader. But his work on the Local Memory site dovetailed with DisinfoLab’s mission to check all the ways misinformation is spread online. “Especially in this age where we are flooded with so much information, finding credible, authentic information and verifying it has become much harder, especially when folks go to social media to get their news,” he said. “Local news is such a critical thing to the way we spread information, so the fact that they’re all going away and becoming so hard to find is such a tragedy.”
Carrie L. Cooper, dean of university libraries, sees the value in a tool like the site Nwala’s team built. “What I adore about the Local Memory Project is the research was seeded by a research library and has a practical and important purpose – the ability to identify local media platforms and quickly view how the coverage of a topic varies,” Cooper said. “The research and practical tools coming out of the NEWS Lab @ William & Mary is an example of William & Mary’s commitment to democracy in the Vision 2026 strategic plan.”
Nwala says the site needs refinement in part because so many sites are closing every year. He’d also like to add a browser extension to allow users to click on a town or enter a zip code that would lead directly to local news stories for a user-supplied topic. With more resources, there might also be a way to capture the archives of defunct news sources.
“We hope to drive traffic to some of these local news sites because they need that, they need attention,” Nwala said. “There’s something about folks knowing and supporting their local news sites, it’s like vaccinating people against misinformation.”
Susan Corbett, Communications Specialist
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