News Deserts

Project Overview: In collaboration with George Mason University's Community Informatics Lab directed by Dr. Myeong Lee, I am studying the uneven distribution of local information, including civic information provision recorded in municipal systems like 311 and 911 (funded by NSF HCC Program #1816763). We are expanding this study to study news landscape, innovatively connecting the study of news deserts in communication studies and journalism to information science, and conceptualizing news deserts as the lack of news coverage hence the lack of news capital, rather than the lack of news organizations. 

Team members: Dr. Myeong Lee, Dr. Jieshu Wang, Julia H.P. Hsu (PhD candidate), Tugce Gundogdu (undergraduate research assistant).

Publications:

• News Deserts

  • [Accepted] Gundogdu, T., Wang, J., Butler, B., & Lee, M. (2026). The dynamic of psychological distance in news deserts: civic and democratic implications. iConference 2026

  •  Wang, J., Gundogdu, T. B., Ivic, R. K., Butler, B. S., & Lee, M. (2025). News Deserts as Information Problems: A Case Study of Local News Coverage in Alabama. Proceedings of the Association for Information Science and Technology, 62(1), 741–753. https://doi.org/10.1002/pra2.1293

• Information Deserts

  • Hsu, J. H.-P., Wang, J., & Lee, M. (2022). Towards an Expectation-Oriented Model of Public Service Quality: A Preliminary Study of NYC 311. In F. Hopfgartner, K. Jaidka, P. Mayr, J. Jose, & J. Breitsohl (Eds.), Social Informatics (pp. 447–458). Springer International Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-19097-1_31

  • Lee, M., Wang, J., Janzen, S., Winter, S., & Harlow, J. (2021). Crowdsourcing Behavior in Reporting Civic Issues: The Case of Boston’s 311 Systems. Academy of Management Proceedings, 2021(1), 16532. https://doi.org/10.5465/AMBPP.2021.16532abstract

  • Pine, K. H., Hinrichs, M. M., Wang, J., Lewis, D., & Johnston, E. (2020). For Impactful Community Engagement: Check Your Role. Communications of the ACM, 63(7), 26–28. https://doi.org/10.1145/3401720

Conference Presentations:

• [Poster] Wang, J., Gundogdu, T. B., Butler, B. S., & Lee, M. (2025, November). Spatial Dynamics of Local News: Mapping City Co-Mentions in Alabama. 88th Annual Meeting of the Association for Information Science and Technology.

• Wang, J., Gundogdu, T. B., Ivic, R. K., Butler, B. S., & Lee, M. (2025, November 14). News Deserts as Information Problems: A Case Study of Local News Coverage in Alabama. 88th Annual Meeting of the Association for Information Science and Technology, Washington, D.C. https://www.asist.org/meetings-events/am/am25/

• Lee, M., Harlow, J., Gordon, E., Wang, J., Johnston, E., Janzen, S., & Winter, S. (2020). Toward Understanding Civic Data Bias in 311 Systems: An Information Deserts Perspective. ACM CSCM 2020, ACM 978-1-4503-6819-3/20/04.