Measuring Media’s Ecological Effects

While media effects on individuals have been extensively studied, media effects on places are mainly examined by research on global media systems. We still lack a nuanced understanding of media’s ecological functions in more fine-grained geographical units. Answering such questions requires a shift in focus from individuals to ecologies/places, and accordingly, a methodological transition from traditional analyses to spatial analyses. In this chapter, I provide an example of spatial analysis in journalism research by studying whether local news ecologies influence non-institutional political engagement in the U.S. First, I explain and demonstrate the differences of three spatial autoregressive models – Spatial Lag of X, Spatial Lag of Y, and Spatial Durbin – in estimating the general relationships between ecological factors and political engagement. Then, I use geographically weighted regression to reveal how these relationships differ from place to place. Overall, news-rich places tend to see a higher volume of non-institutional political engagement, and the pattern applies to most parts of the U.S. except the Great Plains.