New News: Journalism We Want and Need (.pdf), a study of local news coverage by Chicago’s Community Media Workshop, reports that local news coverage is declining in the city’s major news outlets. ‘

The CMW used local news keywords to search the print editions of the Chicago Sun-Times and Chicago Tribune from 1986 to the present. They found that local news keywords decreased after a peak in 1994, except for corruption and bribery. ‘ The study was commissioned and funded by the Chicago Community Trust, a Knight Foundation grantee. It ranked’Chi-Town Daily News‘first among Chicago’s news sites, excluding the web sites of large media outlets like the Tribune and the Sun-Times. ‘ Check out the Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy and the Knight Community Information Challenge to learn more about local news sites in your community.