Lab Director/Principal Investigator – Dr. Joshua Darr
The focus of the Local News Experimental Testing Lab ― Local NExT Lab ― at Syracuse University’s Institute for Democracy, Journalism & Citizenship, to begin during the 2025-26 academic year, is to develop and conduct testing to help individual newsrooms determine what attracts and informs their target audiences, and scale implementation of validated tactics.
IDJC senior researcher and Newhouse Associate Professor Joshua Darr will develop and lead the effort. Darr will collaborate with nonprofit newsrooms on the cutting edge of changing how local news is delivered to areas that need it.
This lab will connect funders who are interested in assessing and improving their investments; innovative local newsrooms trying to change how news is collected, framed, and delivered; and academic researchers who can design, implement, and interpret experiments to generate scientific knowledge that can help the entire local news industry.
As the local news industry continues to adapt to its current economic crisis, there is also opportunity: local news today represents an incredible laboratory of innovation. Causally valid choice-based experiments represent a promising path forward for local news innovators, who can bring their ideas to the Local NExT Lab and see them tested experimentally while being involved throughout the design, implementation, analysis, and interpretation phases.
This lab builds on Darr’s work supported by the Knight Foundation, Center for Media Engagement, Carnegie Corporation of New York, and the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, in partnership with industry leaders such as Trusting News, Hearken, Solutions Journalism Network and the American Journalism Project.
Local NExT Lab will produce:
- Annual report compiling learning, projects, and fundraising from that year
- Peer reviewed articles about these tests
- Book project about working with these organizations and their process of innovation
- Creation of Slack channel for participating newsrooms to discuss their ideas, innovations, and implementation
- Executive short courses at IDJC in Washington, DC, to share best practices with newsroom leaders, journalism advocacy groups, and funders
- Conference in Washington, DC, to allow newsrooms to present and share their ideas and results