In 2022, Bloom Labs began exploratory research about a community-based metric and practice – Geographic Consistency – that was new for our platform, newsroom partners, and the wider journalism industry. As we learned from Bay Area News Collective, our Google News Initiative project in 2021, Geographic Consistency is the consistency of news coverage about a particular place, which is an indicator of representation for local news. With this new research, we planned to extend the initial learnings through more intentional data analysis, with three of our news partners from Bay Area News Group, to explore how to measure the consistency of local news and its impact on community engagement and representation.
The research became a 13-month endeavor that was more than just an ordinary study as it began to create a framework – Geographic Consistency Model – for future research and developments outside our own. The Geographic Consistency Model was included as a research method within our study and has since been open-sourced to help any organization in the news industry measure, summarize, and identify patterns of geographic changes in local news coverage at scale.
Below are links to the initial research, the newly designed Geographic Consistency Model, and other explanatory articles or developments related to consistency. We hope this work will be helpful to more clearly understand the practice and measurement of local news consistency and how an intentional strategy for consistent coverage can positively impact community representation.