News Deserts + High Gun Violence: How We Shaped Our Outreach Strategy
Bolstering local journalism is a major emphasis for the Gun Violence Data Hub. Many areas with high rates of gun violence have few reporters on the ground, and receive limited — if any — attention from the national news media.
The Data Hub sought to identify possible collaborators in these areas. As data journalists, we wanted numbers to help guide this work.
We began with data on news coverage. The Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University tracks news outlets across the country, including local newspapers, public radio, ethnic media, and digital publications. This study, published in October, allows Medill to determine whether a county is a “news desert,” one with no local news outlets.
By their estimation, 206 counties in the U.S. were news deserts in 2024. More than 3.5 million Americans live in those areas.
The researchers also built a model to place counties at danger of becoming news deserts on a “watch list.” They define watch list counties as those “with only one news source that are at an elevated risk of losing that source.” That model found another 279 such places spread across the U.S.
These news desert and watch list counties have significantly higher poverty rates than the rest of the nation, the study found. The people who live there are also older and fewer have bachelor’s degrees.
We filtered the data from Medill to focus on counties with one or no local news outlets, and ultimately decided to include any county with a single outlet (not just those on the watch list) in our analysis.
Gun Death Hotspots
The next step was to determine how many of these counties also have high rates of gun violence.
We started by using CDC data on deaths from firearms, which captures homicides, suicides, and other types of gun deaths. We calculated the rate of gun deaths per 100,000 residents for each U.S. county from 2013 through 2022. That provided a decade’s worth of information, a reliable baseline for our comparisons that’s more resistant to an outlier year or two of data.
From there, we chose to limit our list to counties with per capita gun death rates in the top 20 percent. We then needed to link them to the news desert data.
Joining them to news deserts would give us a list of counties without a news outlet — not all that helpful for searching out journalistic collaborations — so we used further data from the U.S. Census Bureau to identify counties next to news deserts, and to come up with a list of news outlets in those places. We then filtered that for just those outlets next to news deserts that had high rates of gun deaths.
Identifying the relevant news outlets in counties with a single outlet was simpler: We filtered that list to show just the solo outlets in counties with high rates of gun deaths.
All told, the analysis spit out a list of 335 outlets in counties with high rates of gun deaths that only have a single local news source, and another 319 outlets in counties next to a news desert with a high rate of gun deaths. (There were 35 news desert counties with high rates of gun violence.) We found clusters of these counties in Mississippi, New Mexico, Kentucky, Idaho, and elsewhere.
We anticipate this work will help the Gun Violence Data Hub deepen coverage of gun violence in areas that most need it and that don’t have the media presence to provide it. If your newsroom is interested in working with us, get in touch.
We’re open to collaborating with newsrooms of all sizes, in all places, and in coverage areas with any level of gun violence. If you think there’s a story to tell in your backyard, please reach out.