Mildred Perreault
International concerns about clean water are increasingly being discussed in the news media. However, research investigating how local and regional publications cover water issues such as water pollution is limited. Nebraska is an agricultural state in the Midwestern United States situated above a large aquifer that provides drinking water to nearly 90% of the state and supports the irrigation of crops, feeding the state’s economy. A study of reporting in newspapers in Nebraska on the primary contaminant in the state’s groundwater - nitrates - were pulled from an electronic database over a four-year period to examine the quantity and types of news stories on this environmental concern in Nebraska. The paper sought to understand the existing outputs of community Critical Information Needs (CINs) around environmental coverage. Stories printed in newspapers from 2017 to 2020 showed that there is a lack of substantive, local, reporter-bylined stories on nitrate contamination in Nebraska’s water. In particular, the stories printed in weekly newspapers were rarely about the topic, thus leaving a large segment of the state without comprehensive coverage of this issue.
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