This paper focuses on the importance of local news as the primary source of information for most Americans, emphasizing the need for additional research about local TV news content across a variety of topics and about elections and crime in particular. In addition, we present a detailed methodology of a new capture, coding, and digital archiving process that significantly advances current tools available to researchers, journalists, educators, policymakers, and that portion of the general public interested in local TV news content. Finally, the paper presents initial findings from an ongoing study of local TV coverage as an example of how researchers can capture and analyze large amounts of local TV news data in multiple media markets at a comparatively low cost, thus overcoming a reliance on single market studies with relatively small sample sizes.
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