This project attempts to apply a macro lens to a community’s response to a global situation through in-depth analysis of local newspapers’ coverage of the COVID-19 pandemic. A variety of natural language processing and textual analysis approaches will be applied to articles published in four news sources from Douglas County, Kansas, beginning with the first mentions of COVID-19 in January 2020 and continuing to the present. By providing a framework to visualize and explore these articles as data, the intent is to reveal trends and patterns that develop and shift over time, content and perspectives that are included or excluded, and other features of the text.