Impact & Coverage
What ETTG actually covers - in live numbers.
Stats updated hourly.
Geographic Coverage
Note on coverage gaps: … The mission of ETTG is to close that gap. Articles from state-level sources still reach county and city pages through geographic attribution, but that is not the same as having a publication that calls the county home. If you come across any errors in geographic attribution or know of local sources we haven't indexed yet, please let us know.
Coverage Map
Switch between the national state overview and the county-level choropleth without leaving the Impact page.
State Coverage
State-level map shaded by the share of counties with at least one directly indexed local source. Hover for details, click a state to open its full impact page.
County Coverage
National county-level choropleth using live county records. Switch between active source count, nearest indexed source distance, and research completion status. Alaska and Hawaii are shown as insets.
Source count shows directly indexed active local coverage at the county, city, or explicit county-coverage level.
News Desert Watch
Persistent county-level desert periods tracked over time, with newly formed and recently resolved changes surfaced publicly.
States With Open Deserts
Current Open Counties
Run the pending migrations and first refresh cycle to populate current counties here. No currently open persistent desert records.
Recent Changes
No newly formed persistent desert records in the last 30 days.
No persistent desert resolutions in the last 30 days.
How We Work
Source Selection
ETTG indexes RSS feeds from local news outlets across all 50 states. Sources are added through a combination of manual curation, automated discovery (scanning public directories and Wikipedia lists of local outlets by state), and community submissions. Every source is reviewed before being made active.
We do not accept payment for source inclusion. Inclusion decisions are based solely on editorial relevance to a geographic community.
Geographic Attribution
Each article is attributed to geographic locations through a multi-stage pipeline:
- Primary attribution: the source's home location (e.g., a county newspaper is attributed to that county)
- NLP (Natural Language Processing) extraction: the article title and summary are analyzed to identify other locations mentioned, using a named-entity recognition pipeline
- Location index: every article-to-location link is stored in a dedicated index, enabling any county or city page to surface relevant stories without fetching the full article
The result: a single article can appear on the feeds of multiple states, counties, and cities it is genuinely relevant to - not based on keyword matching, but on geographic entity recognition.
What We Don't Do
- We do not write or edit content - all articles link back to their original publisher
- We do not rank sources by political leaning or editorial perspective
- We do not use behavioral tracking, cookies, or user profiling
- We do not accept money from sources in exchange for preferred placement
- We do not store article full text; we store only title, summary, and metadata
Limitations
ETTG indexes sources with publicly accessible RSS feeds. Sources behind paywalls, outlets that haven't published a feed, and sources not yet discovered are not included. The index grows continuously as new sources are submitted and verified.
Geographic attribution is handled through NLP and is probabilistic by nature. Confidence thresholds filter out low-confidence assignments, which means some articles may not be attributed even when a geographic connection exists.
The … counties without an indexed local source represent where the work continues. Some are genuine news deserts, others have sources we simply haven't found or added yet. ETTG is still growing, and we surface these gaps openly as a reminder of what's left to do.
Using This Data
All ETTG data is available via our free public API. Journalists, researchers, civic technologists, and developers can access geographic data, source directories, article metadata, and community entities without charge (with rate limits).
Coverage by State and District
Click a column header to sort. Click again to reverse. Click any state or district to see its full county-by-county breakdown.
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Questions about coverage, sourcing decisions, or corrections? Contact us.