# Does Local News Stay Local?: Online Content Shifts in Sinclair-Acquired Stations

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.07060 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.07060/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 6 of its 32 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 8 Oct 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [Efficient Estimation of Word Representations in Vector Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1301.3781/) (2013)
- [Word Embeddings Quantify 100 Years of Gender and Ethnic Stereotypes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.08412/) (2017)
- [Analyzing Polarization in Social Media: Method and Application to Tweets on 21 Mass Shootings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01596/) (2019)
- [When do Word Embeddings Accurately Reflect Surveys on our Beliefs About People?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.12043/) (2020)
- [NELA-Local: A Dataset of U.S. Local News Articles for the Study of County-level News Ecosystems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.08600/) (2022)
- [Local News Online and COVID in the U.S.: Relationships among Coverage, Cases, Deaths, and Audience](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.08515/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Quantifying Media Representation Dynamics Across 25 Years of News Reporting on Policing-related Deaths](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.06812/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Local news stations are often considered to be reliable sources of non-politicized information, particularly local concerns that residents care about. Because these stations are trusted news sources, viewers are particularly susceptible to the information they report. The Sinclair Broadcast group is a broadcasting company that has acquired many local news stations in the last decade. We investigate the effects of local news stations being acquired by Sinclair: how does coverage change? We use computational methods to investigate changes in internet content put out by local news stations before and after being acquired by Sinclair and in comparison to national news outlets. We find that there is clear evidence that local news stations report more frequently on national news at the expense of local topics, and that their coverage of polarizing national topics increases.