Analysis of Montana’s News Coverage | LOR Foundation
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Analysis of Montana’s News Coverage

Montana
  • Organization Funded: Rutgers University
  • Date Funded: March 31, 2025

Project Leadership

  • Matthew Weber, PhD Professor of Communication — Rutgers University

    Dr. Matthew Weber is a professor in Rutgers University’s Department of Communication, School of Communication and Information. Dr. Weber is a computational social scientist who studies local news ecosystems and is a founding member of the Local News Impact Consortium, a nonprofit organization that supports local news research.

About the Project

This study analyzed a week’s worth of news—more than 26,000 stories from 191 outlets—to map the breadth of news coverage across Montana. Researchers identified each story’s topic and used mapping tools to identify the places it mentioned. Knowing what topics and places Montana newsrooms cover provides a clearer picture into where information about local communities is readily available, and where it isn’t. This matters because communities with local media coverage tend to have higher civic participation, more opportunities to attract resources, and stronger economies for small business. In general, communities with access to local news are more resilient.

Project Insights

Over the course of seven days in April 2025, researchers scraped more than 250,000 webpages from Montana news outlets. After processing this data, they found 26,740 news stories from 191 domains that mentioned approximately 150,000 locations. Stories were categorized into nine themes (business, civic information, education, emergencies and risks, environment, health, politics, transportation, and sports). Mapping themes and locations together provides a clear picture of the news content coverage landscape in Montana.


Highlights from the report:

  • Adjusted for population, the number of news stories mentioning places in rural counties is slightly higher than in urban counties. However, the overall amount of coverage is heavily concentrated in urbanized counties. For example, eight Montana counties account for half of the stories, while 21 rural counties account for less than 10% of news stories.
  • Western Montana, along with Yellowstone County (Billings), has the greatest density of overall new coverage.
  • In terms of news themes, stories about civic information, politics, emergencies and risks, transportation, and the environment mostly mention places in Western and more urban counties (particularly Missoula and Gallatin Counties), while stories about sports, education, health, and business were more equally distributed across Montana’s 56 counties.

Read the full “Understanding local news and information ecosystems” report.

Reports Special Report: Montana’s Media Landscape
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Local news outlets are critical to many aspects of life in small towns. New research from LOR maps where these local news creators can—and cannot—be found across the state, and digs into some of the factors that might contribute to how Montana's media landscape has developed. Read more

To learn more contact our Research Analyst. Meet Daniel