Wyoming Local News & Information Ecosystem

In partnership with The Wyoming Local News Fund and Wyoming Community Foundation, Impact Architects employed our local news and information ecosystem framework to document the state of the Wyoming news and information ecosystem as of 2024. This approach was originally developed in 2020 with support from Democracy Fund, Knight Foundation, and Google News Initiative and was most recently updated in 2023/2024 in partnership with Democracy Fund.

The framework includes four categories with a total of more than 85 indicators: community characteristics; information providers characteristics; community information needs, access, and trust in news; and civic engagement and democracy.

For this assessment, we had an opportunity to go deeper than previous reports in two ways: first, through more interviews and focus groups. Second, we designed a community information needs, access, and trust in news survey that was administered by the Wyoming Survey and Analysis Center (WYSAC), which brings in the perspectives of a representative sample of residents in the state, are a snapshot of a recent moment in time, and answer specific questions about both residents’ information needs and their preferences.