Wes Bremme (Student), Ann Reisner (Advisor) Department of Media, College of Media and Cinema Studies, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Understanding the Media Journey of Local Issues: The Case of the Flint Water Crisis Acknowledgments Professor Ann Reisner, Academic Advisor and Co-Researcher. The College of Media at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Conclusions Analysis of media coverage of the events in Flint, Michigan demonstrates the filters of newsworthiness through which local stories must pass to be considered of national relevance. Though reported by local media as a human interest story, mainstream media framed the crisis in political and economic terms. This is reflected by national news beginning coverage when the story became a political scandal, rather than when residents were first affected. Situation The water crisis in Flint, Michigan developed when the city council voted for a cost-saving initiative to purchase water from the Karegnondi Water Authority (KWA) rather than the Detroit Water Department. Detroit then refused to sell the city of Flint any water. The KWA would not be completed for another 3 years, forcing the city to use unclean, corrosive water from the Flint River. Without infrastructure suited to providing clean water, residents’ water consumption resulted in unsafe levels of lead in their blood, an uptick in Legionnaire’s Disease diagnoses, and reports of lead poisoning in children. While at first the crisis was covered only via local news channels, it gradually caught the attention of mainstream news media and became a national story due to organized activism from Flint citizens and the involvement of the scientific community. Abstract This study examines the media pathway taken by the story of the Flint, Michigan water crisis from local to national news platforms. This analysis was accomplished through a specialized tool used to track the spread of a story over time and across media channels, as well as through the creation of a comparative timeline of news coverage. This study represents the preliminary step of an in-depth examination of the way in which local news stories can spread beyond their direct area of influence, and bring important issues into the national conversation. Methods Media tracking program MediaMeter Dashboard, a part of the open-source Media Cloud project created through a collaboration of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University and the Center for Civic Media at MIT. Data analysis programs QDA Miner 4 and WordStat produced by Provalis Research company. Multimedia timelines aggregated from the websites of The Flint Journal, Detroit Free Press, The New York Times, Mother Jones, Fox News, and The Huffington Post. Results Analysis of this timeline of news sources indicates, as predicted, that local news media (represented by The Flint Journal and Detroit Free Press) provides more detailed coverage of events both before and during the event than mainstream sources. Local sources placed an emphasis on the role of citizens as activists and in telling the story of resident Lee Anne Walters. Comparatively, mainstream sources (NYT, Fox, and Huffington Post) overall tended to focus on city policymakers, Governor Snyder, and budgetary concerns rather than the story of Walters or other residents. Mainstream sources also neglected to cover the story’s background. These results represent the preliminary round of research on why this pattern emerges in the path of an individual news story from local to national news channels. As such, conclusions cannot be generalized to stories outside the crisis in Flint, Michigan.