Below is the transcript of the interview between Bill McKenzie, Senior Editorial Advisor at the George W. Bush Institute and Danny Hayes, Professor of Political Science at George Washington University
Bill Mackenzie
Danny Hayes is a political science professor at George Washington University, where he recently authored a study on the connection between loneliness and a decline in local news. We hear frequently about a rise in loneliness, and studies have certainly documented a decline in local newspapers nationwide. Research that combined these two phenomena really got our attention here at the George W. Bush Center. They obviously affect our democracy.
Professor Hayes, welcome. Thank you for being here for this discussion. Tell us why you pursued the connection between loneliness and local news.
Danny Hayes
First of all, Bill, thanks for inviting me. Appreciate it. It’s great to talk to you and appreciate the interest in the research. The way this project started is through some conversations with students that I’ve had over the years at George Washington University, where I teach, and I teach a class on local news in American democracy.
And students have, from time to time, raised the question of whether there’s a connection between things like loneliness and social wellbeing and local news, and there has been very little research on that. And after getting enough questions from students about that over the years, I decided to try to take a little bit more systematic look.
And as you note, there’s been two strands of relatively prominent research in the United States, one on loneliness and social wellbeing and the concerns about that, and then another on the decline of local news and the consequences that it has had for democracy, for citizen engagement.
What we’re doing in this paper that I’ve co-authored with Anushra Trivedi, who’s a recently graduated superstar undergraduate here at GW, is to put those two things together and to look at whether there’s a connection between people’s exposure to local news and information in their community and their levels of loneliness and social wellbeing.
Bill Mackenzie
Before we dig into some of your findings, I was struck with– we hear a lot about social media and smartphones perhaps causing isolation, but I was really struck with that you were focusing on local newspapers. Why that?
Danny Hayes
We focus in part on local newspapers because they remain, despite the changes to the information environment, the main and best source of local reporting, public affairs information in most communities in the United States.
Now, that’s not to say that local newspapers and other news outlets like that haven’t been dramatically affected and worsened over the years, but they still are basically the main place that people can get information about their communities. The study itself is not focused exclusively on newspapers, however.
We look at things like measures of the information environment in states, which includes local newspapers and as a big part of that, but it also includes things like digital startups or access to local television news reporting. But it wouldn’t– It’s not surprising that probably many of the connections that we find between loneliness and local news are driven by people’s exposure to local newspapers, because that really is the place that people are most likely to encounter that information.
As you mention, increasing numbers of Americans are getting news from social media, but the reality is that relatively little of what people get online in general, but in social media in particular, is actually local. It’s partly because the algorithms don’t– they discriminate against local information because that kind of information doesn’t scale up beyond a geographic community.
And it’s also just people are, on social media, often passive consumers of whatever they’re being served up by national news sources or the algorithms themselves. It does seem a little bit counterintuitive in this world where people’s information diets have changed so much to be thinking about news outlets like local newspapers, but they still really are an integral part of how people get information about their communities.
Bill Mackenzie
Tell us about some of your findings. For example, you talk about this connection between loneliness and decline and local news being particularly acute in rural areas. Tell us a little bit about your findings.
Danny Hayes
The paper has a couple different pieces of analysis. The core hypothesis here is whether there is a connection between people’s exposure to local news and their levels of loneliness, whether they feel isolated from people in their lives in general.
And one of the things we do is we look at differences across the states. If you look at the United States, the 50 states have differing levels of– they have different local news environments. Some states, like Massachusetts, still have a pretty robust local news environment. For example, most of the counties in Massachusetts have more than one local news outlet serving those communities.
But in some other states, like Virginia, close to where I live, many counties have only one or even no dedicated local news outlets. There’s a lot of variation in the quality or even the quantity of local news access across the states. And it’s also the case that if you look at surveys for example, like those done by the Census Bureau in 2024, the level of loneliness also varies quite a bit across the states.
Vermont, for example, is the least lonely state in the country with about 33% of Vermont residents saying that they feel lonely at least sometimes. Whereas that number goes up to about 49% for Oregonians, who live in the state where the most people say they’re lonely. What we did is we just looked very simply initially at whether there’s a relationship between the robustness of the local news environment in these states and their levels of loneliness, and we find that there’s a positive correlation.
That correlation persists even when we take into account things like the poverty level in states or the median age or income. Even things like broadband access and other variables that we might expect would be related both to the local news environment and levels of loneliness, and we find that relationship persists even when we account for those other factors.
You mentioned rural states. One of the most striking findings in the paper I think is that we find that this connection between the local news environment and loneliness is strongest in states as they become more rural. And the logic of that is that in rural communities, people– local news plays a more important role in holding the community together.
In places, urban areas, even suburban ones, the in-person interactions that are central to reducing loneliness or helping people feel less lonely, those are more likely to be common than in less densely populated rural areas. In those places, local news outlets probably play a stronger role in fostering the kind of social integration and connection that can help people feel less lonely.
As you know, that’s pretty, I think, important because it’s been rural America where the decline of local news has been the most severe over the last 20 years. Those are the places that have really been hit hard by the decline of the local news industry.
Bill Mackenzie
Let me follow up on that because your study talks a little bit about what perhaps local news organizations can do to strengthen engagement in their communities and help people bring them out of their loneliness. Talk a little bit about that. What are the findings here that local news organizations can, and perhaps should, act upon?
Danny Hayes
I should say that at this point I have to be a little bit circumspect, because we don’t have a great deal– we don’t really have much evidence about what we might think of as the mechanism that is why local news might reduce loneliness and help people feel more connected.
But we have a couple of things that we could speculate about. One is that what local news does is it just keeps people informed about what’s happening in their communities. And simply knowing about what’s happening in your community makes it more likely that you’re actually going to go out and participate in those events. That might be parades, other kinds of community gatherings. And participating in those in those in-person interactions is really what is likely to be central to reducing feelings of loneliness.
There’s been a lot of research on social media and online, people’s behavior online, and my understanding of that literature is largely that developing relationships online or on social media, might be satisfying for people in some ways, but it doesn’t really reduce loneliness. It’s the in-person interaction with people in your community that is really important. Local news outlets’ ability to just inform people about what’s happening in their community, I think, is really central to this.
The other thing that local news can do is it simply makes them feel part of a community. Knowing– learning things about what your neighbors are doing and the way that they may be helping each other or trying to improve your own community can make you, as a resident of that community, feel more connected to that place, and thus feel less isolated from it and less isolated from your neighbors.
The example I always give to people is that I live in a suburban community just outside Washington, D.C. in Montgomery County, Maryland. We have a little monthly magazine that we get in our neighborhood, and a few months ago, I read this little short article about some of my neighbors who were getting trees planted in our neighborhood to reduce some of the trees that have been cut down because of age.
The story was very simple, but it had profiles of these people I see in my neighborhood every week and it made me feel better about living in that place. And I think that’s the kind of dynamic that local news can help produce. It just makes people feel closer and more connected to the people who they live near.
Bill Mackenzie
Your research, which we will put a link to on our site, also talks about how you would like, I think, to see more research done into this connection. If so, what would you like to see further research look at?
Danny Hayes
Just to expand on the question that you asked a moment ago, one thing is what is it about local news that might help foster social connection?
On one hand, it could be the kind of reporting about people in the community that I just described. But it could also just be more publication of events. Is– One of the challenges that I think local news organizations are facing right now in figuring out how to create sustainable business models is, what is the content that people are likely to come to their site to get?
I think our findings suggest that one thing that might be valuable for people is just being reminded and knowing about what’s happening in their community. More event-based coverage, coverage of events in the community, I think could be really important for local news to continue to or to even expand coverage of.
That’s one thing, is trying to understand what is the mechanism that might explain this relationship between exposure to local news and more social integration and less loneliness. But I think there’s also questions about other contexts.
One issue is that, concerns about loneliness and the decline of local news, these are not strictly American phenomenon. These are happening in the industrialized world all over. Thinking about how this process might also work in other countries, I think could be really useful empirically just to understand that process, but also useful theoretically to think a little bit more about what are the contexts in which local news serves this function?
It might help us understand more about why local news is connected to democracy and the circumstances under which that might be more important. I think those are a couple of avenues of research that could help expand our understanding, both of the community basis of social well-being but also the way that people’s information– exposure to information plays into that.
Bill Mackenzie
Let me ask you this last question. As you were talking, I was thinking, so what is it that we, as consumers of news and the general public what can we draw from the conclusions, the findings in this study? Is there any go and do for us?
Danny Hayes
I wish I had a– if I knew the answer to that question, I would maybe I’d be making a lot of money as a consultant or something.
But I think that people’s news consumption, I think is often passive in one sense. In that, especially with social media, people get their news in bite-sized chunks. They get it in whatever way that it’s served up to them. Many people, of course, have well-developed news habits where they have particular outlets that they go to for news and information.
But I think that if people– I think one thing that would be valuable in our democracy, is if people were somewhat more intentional about the way that they consume news. One of the reasons that I think local news– consumption of local news has declined a lot in the last 20 years, is that in, for most of the 20th century, local news was the default source of information.
The newspaper landing on people’s front door, picking up the newspaper at the gas station, or out of a box walking down the street. But it’s no longer the people’s default source of information. But I think people really do value knowing what’s going on in their community. You see this in survey data, and you see this in the way that consumers talk about what they want from the news.
But those preferences often don’t translate into behavior. So I think for all of us, being more intentional about what we want to get from news and information, might lead more people to spend more time with local news outlets, reading their local newspaper, watching local television, in ways that might not only reduce people’s reliance on national news, which tends to foster polarization and conflict, but also might make them feel closer to the communities where they live.
And you can see all over the country that this is something that I think a lot of people are really desperate for, tighter feelings of connection to the places and the communities where they live. And local news remains one of the few institutions that I think has the credibility and the ability to do this.
For consumers, I think, thinking about ways to add some local news to your diet might be helpful and valuable.
Bill Mackenzie
Thank you, Professor Hayes. It’s very insightful and thank you for the study. As I said, we will link to it on our site. Thank you very much.
