# NELA-Local: A Dataset of U.S. Local News Articles for the Study of County-level News Ecosystems

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2203.08600 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.08600/

## Key facts

- Cited by 6 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 16 Mar 2022.

## Built on by (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [News Source Citing Patterns in AI Search Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.05301/) (2025)
- [Fake News Detection: Comparative Evaluation of BERT-like Models and Large Language Models with Generative AI-Annotated Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.14276/) (2024)
- [When it Rains, it Pours: Modeling Media Storms and the News Ecosystem](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.02118/) (2023)
- [Large Language Models Require Curated Context for Reliable Political Fact-Checking -- Even with Reasoning and Web Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.18749/) (2025)
- [Does Local News Stay Local?: Online Content Shifts in Sinclair-Acquired Stations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.07060/) (2025)
- [Exposing Pink Slime Journalism: Linguistic Signatures and Robust Detection Against LLM-Generated Threats](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.05331/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In this paper, we present a dataset of over 1.4M online news articles from 313 local U.S. news outlets published over 20 months (between April 4th, 2020 and December 31st, 2021). These outlets cover a geographically diverse set of communities across the United States. In order to estimate characteristics of the local audience, included with this news article data is a wide range of county-level metadata, including demographics, 2020 Presidential Election vote shares, and community resilience estimates from the U.S. Census Bureau. The NELA-Local dataset can be found at: https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataset.xhtml?persistentId=doi:10.7910/DVN/GFE66K.