Building an audience,bonding a city: digital news production as a field of care

News production and urban identity: establishing fields of care

A city is far more than mere geographic space for public interaction. Park et al. (1925) defined the metropolitan environment as

a state of mind, a body of customs and traditions, and of the organized attitudes and sentiments that inhere in these customs and are transmitted with this tradition. It is involved in the vital processes of the people who compose it; it is a product of nature, and particularly of human nature. (p. 15)

In its ideal construct, the city imposes a mutual social structure that shapes citizen identity and creates shared meaning among urban residents (Bloomfield, 2006; Lefebvre, 1996; Park et al., 1925; Simmel, 1950).

Emotional attachment to the city arises between the material environment and the urban dwellers who call that locality home (Relph, 1976; Tuan, 1979). Humanistic geographers began to intricately profile such connections between self and city in the 1970s. Tuan (1979), for example, posits that two elements construct this notion of attachment to urban environments: public symbols (prominent landmarks or monuments) and fields of care, or ‘networks of interpersonal concern’ (p. 416). Fields of care exist when urban residents possess emotional ties and/or attachment to geographic space and when citizens are vocally aware of this sensing and/or spatial connection. Building upon Pierre Bourdieu’s construct of field as a locality that structures and governs human action, Tuan (1979) posits that fields of care existing within communities become lodged in everyday experiences – for ‘the feel of place gets under our skin in the course of day-to-day contact’ (p. 418; Benson and Neveu, 2005).

Fields of care manifest as a result of prolonged exposure by residents to the space and place of the city (Tuan, 1979). To this end, the presence and strength of fields of care vary from city to city depending upon the depth of citizens’ long-term engagement within the community (Tuan, 1979). To outsiders to the urban environment, fields of care are often difficult to distinguish (Tuan, 1979). To insiders, fields of care are most visible in the rituals and celebrations that define community (Tuan, 1979). Arising from this notion, fields of care also infuse social ethics of commitment within citizens who inhabit the urban landscape (Relph, 1976). The notion that fields of care are defined by communal gatherings and by collective civic action sets the conceptualization apart from similar constructs, such as ‘sense of place’. Taken together, fields of care ‘lend character’ to the city, bonding its residents in both ritual and responsibility (Relph, 1976; Tuan, 1979: 418).

In the pre-digital age, news production reinforced this notion of mutual identity for city residents – solidifying emotional bonds to the urban environment by creating fields of care (Kaniss, 1991; Lindner, 1996). In the built environment, journalistic output should ideally enable the ‘city and region [to] understand its problems, its opportunities, and its sense of local identity’ (Kaniss, 1991: 2). The integration of media into the identity shaping of urban dwellers can be largely traced back to the Industrial Age (Janowitz, 1952). In Western industrialized nations, factory workers assimilating into the urban environment developed stronger informational needs to more fully understand events happening beyond their neighborhood block (Kaniss, 1991; Lindner, 1996; Tuchman, 1978; Wirth, 1938). Upon their arrival into the metropolis, new city residents relied heavily on media products – particularly newspapers – to adjust to their new environment and to learn about local civic life (Christians, 2009; Friedland, 2014; Kaniss, 1991). The work of metropolitan newspaper beat reporters acted to further define the character of the city (Burd, 2008; Doolittle and MacDonald, 1978; Martin, 2000; Rodgers, 2013). Furthermore, the physical location of downtown metropolitan newsrooms has been historically intertwined with notions of urban identity (Usher, 2015).

While scholarship has advanced that pre-digital news production contributed to the construction of urban character, this work has yet to be fully revisited in the digital age. Today’s new media products – particularly blogs and hyperlocal websites – continue to ‘stimulate our appetite for consuming the local’ (Zukin, 2009: 228). Further examination of digital news production and its ability to establish fields of care stand essential to understanding how social identity is established in urban space, as well as how news organizations can better connect with their local audiences, who are increasingly difficult to reach.

City as digital news production locus

Studying the interplay of news production within the context of a city’s geography in the mid-2010s may, at first, appear antiquated. Historically, scholars have argued that modern technology has displaced place-bound geographies (Anderson, 1991; Meyrowitz, 1985; Rheingold, 2000 [1993]). These largely pre-digital conceptions of the city suggest that emergent, electronic technologies bifurcated the urban landscape into physical and virtual space (Graham, 2004). Yet as Meyrowitz (1985) concedes, ‘changes in media in the past have always affected the relationship among places’ (p. 115). While recent scholarship (Castells, 2010; Rainie and Wellman, 2012) have attempted to fuse the dimensions of urban space to the notions of networked community, prior studies of digital communication flows in the city have largely ignored the emotional and psychological bonds that exist between urban dwellers, their environment, and the production of news.

Researchers have recently revisited using the city as both an object and field site of scholarly inquiry (Anderson, 2011; Lowrey, 2012; Wahl-Jorgensen, 2016). This orientation largely owes its heritage to the Chicago School scholars, who believed that data acquired in the laboratory must be paired with boots on the ground – for urban space had to be fully experienced to be fully understood (Park, 1940, 1941; Park et al., 1925). In addition to his influential work theorizing journalism as societal knowledge production (1940), Park (1952) and his Chicago School colleagues advanced a framework of ‘human ecology’ to their studies of urban life, in which the scholars examined competition for resources that led to the ordering of societal interactions. Apart from the Chicago School, Lefebvre (1996) also employed the extended metaphor of an informational ecosystem to describe the routines and customs that bind urban dwellers together within the environment of urban space. Taken together, these early studies – particularly the works of the Chicago School – act as the foundation for the modern integration of ecological thinking applied to describe digital media space today (Wahl-Jorgensen, 2016).

Following in this scholarly lineage, researchers have increasingly applied ecological approaches to study the urban news environment in the digital age. In the mid-2010s, media ecology can be succinctly defined as inquiry that delves into ‘what roles media force us to play, how media structure what we are seeing or thinking, and why media make us feel and act as we do’ (Scolari, 2012: 205). More specifically, ecological approaches tend to focus upon the ‘interinstitutional circulation of news’ within a community (Anderson, 2010: 292). To journalism studies scholars, the primary objective of ecological inquiry lies in explicitly charting daily interactions between specific media platforms and the behaviors of audience members to unveil the workings of urban cultural environments in which news production occurs (Anderson, 2010; Nielsen, 2015; Scolari, 2012).

While prior ecological studies have advanced our understandings of how city residents tell stories within their neighborhoods (Ball-Rokeach, 2001; Meijer, 2013), how newspapers occupy a central role in urban news production (Pew Research Center, 2010), how urban news diffuses within digital networks (Anderson, 2013; Anderson et al., 2015), how local news production translates to civic engagement (Friedland, 2014), how urban dwellers learn and share news in social spaces (Pew Research Center, 2015), and how the health of urban civic discourse can be measured (Napoli et al., 2015), this scholarship still barely scratches the surface in fully explicating how digital news production bonds establish fields of care in the urban environment. Media ecologists have been inquisitive about the relationship between the audience and media (defined collectively), viewing citizens as active participants within the news environment (Anderson, 2013). To date, however, little empirical research has explicitly concentrated upon the interplay between fields of care and news production. Ecological approaches, if applied to examining the extent to which media products perpetuate fields of care, can further build our broader understandings of how the city operates as a news environment.

The (re)built environment of New Orleans

In selecting a city for both object and field site, scholars have posited that the city chosen ideally should ‘become anywhere – a placeless place with underlying patterns that can be found in any metropolis’ (Gieryn, 2006: 10). In the optimal construct, even though the city as a case study is not strictly generalizable, it would have some transferability of findings cross-culturally with other urban environments. Yet as ecological studies operate in practice, the city as a case study is often strategically selected for its ‘complications’ – ‘patterns and processes that [are] of signal theoretical importance for social scientists’ (Gieryn, 2006: 16, 19). To better assess how fields of care are forged by news producers, the selection of a news ecosystem in which these emotional ties are readily apparent and visible is essential.

To this end, New Orleans – given its distinguishing artifacts forged in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina – provides an extreme city as a case study that clearly and compellingly articulates how news production interfaces with fields of care. Katrina, the colossal storm that roared ashore in 2005, washed away the majority of the city’s communicative infrastructure. In the storm’s aftermath, the city encountered a design moment – ‘a critical juncture in the history of a city in which the most basic components of a city’s character – its social fabric and urban form – are fundamentally altered’ (Wagner and Frisch, 2009: 238). In such periods of rapid restructuring, designers of urban space must move beyond mere rebuilding of the landscape; urban planners are instead charged with infusing new life into struggling spaces (Wagner and Frisch, 2009). When more than 650,000 residents of the region returned homeward, their ties to the spatial dimensions of New Orleans were strengthened (Paxson and Rouse, 2008). At the same time, citizens railed against national media depictions of New Orleans as a city in chaos after the storm (Anthony and Sellnow, 2011). Despite this fact, in the immediate weeks after Katrina (a period referred to by its residents as ‘the recovery’), the production of news within the city had a ‘positive anchoring effect’, providing a signal to displaced residents that the city could be inhabitable once again (Chamlee-Wright and Storr, 2009: 631). Campanella (2006) has referred to this sentiment within New Orleans post-Katrina as ‘persistence of place’ (p. 141). A survey conducted of New Orleanians after the storm suggests that nearly three in four residents believe that the city’s media has a central responsibility to reflect the city’s culture – reflecting this emotional tie to the urban geography (Climek et al., 2012). Campanella (2006) states that ‘layered networks of urban infrastructure also make the modern urban site “sticky”’, in that residents of New Orleans are more strongly tethered to the materiality of city space – particularly post-Katrina (p. 142).

However, this ‘stickiness’ of New Orleanians to the city predates Katrina’s landfall. New Orleanians have long possessed strong neighborhood-level bonds to the city’s material space (Campanella, 2006; Flaherty, 2008; Powell, 2012). As a planned city founded in 1718, the geography and infrastructure of New Orleans emphasized publicness, explicitly allocating urban space (in both public squares and private architecture) in the city’s design for open engagement and exchange between citizens (Powell, 2012). The built environment of New Orleans acted to disposition the city toward public engagement (Powell, 2012). In these spaces, New Orleanians developed their symbolic bond to the city, borne out through elaborate cultural rituals. Of these spectacles, parading stands as the cornerstone New Orleanian experience that reinforces urban connectivity for residents (Raeburn, 2007; Regis, 1999; Wagner, 2008). The city’s weekly ‘second line’ (or jazz funeral) parades draw thousands (Regis, 1999). In these spectacles and others (such as the city’s lavish annual Mardi Gras celebration), New Orleanians are not passive observers; instead, the city’s core culture revolves around active participation (Johnson, 1993). Wagner (2006) terms this spirit creole urbanism, which refers to ‘the everyday interplay between historic urban neighborhoods with a density of social life that promotes a unique street culture rooted in a culture of assimilation and diversity’ (p. 104). In New Orleans, the symbolic bond to urbanity is both expressive and exuberant.

The city’s spirit – undergirded by notions of publicness and spectacle – was severely tested by Katrina’s wrath. Returning to New Orleans more than a decade after Katrina, this research examines how and to what extent the complex news ecology in the built environment can strengthen fields of care in the digital age.

Methods

This study’s case study approach, guided by historic works of urban studies scholars (Park, 1940, 1941; Park et al., 1925) and modern works of media ecologists (Anderson, 2013; Ball-Rokeach, 2001; Lowrey, 2012; Napoli et al., 2015; Pew Research Center, 2010, 2015), relies heavily upon a complement of immersive methods, including in-depth interviews, ethnographic observation, and document analysis. Adopting an ecological approach to study New Orleans as a news environment, this research is founded upon 3 months of fieldwork in the city’s media environment. During 92 days in the field in fall 2013, the researcher identified all news producers in the city and surrounding suburbs and conducted interviews with journalists from the Crescent City’s outlets and platforms. The study’s 49 in-depth interviews with the city’s news practitioners – conducted between August and November 2013 – encompassed 19 journalists working primarily for print publications, 13 journalists working primarily for digital publications, 9 journalists working for radio broadcasts, and 8 journalists working for television broadcasts. It should be noted that while some interviewees worked across legacy platforms, all study subjects also produced digital content. To contextualize the responses from journalists and to better understand how fields of care function in the community, 11 additional interviews were conducted with community leaders (7 with civic activists and 4 with local academics). The semi-structured conversations (with interview subjects drawn from a ‘network ethnography’ approach, in which the city’s news producers were identified through a small-scale social network analysis of digital network ties) averaged 52 minutes in length (Anderson, 2013; Howard, 2002). The conversations centered upon information needs in the community; emotional ties of residents to the city; and how the roles, expectations, coverage, and audience engagement efforts of news outlets within the New Orleans news ecosystem have changed in the period following Katrina’s landfall. Participants were afforded anonymity, if requested. Before publishing, all quotes were confirmed with research subjects for accuracy.

In addition to interviewing, scholars of the Chicago School placed significant energies in observation of the city landscape, with a heavy emphasis upon detailed description of the urban environment (Abbott, 1997; Bulmer, 1984; Gieryn, 2006; Hannerz, 1980). Because fields of care are more observant to insiders (or the residents who dwell in urban space), immersion in the news ecology through fieldwork was essential. As a result, the researcher observed places where news was produced and consumed (i.e. libraries, coffeehouses, and community centers) throughout the city. The ethnographic data were paired with a small-scale document analysis. For context on the city’s history pre-Katrina and rebuilding post-Katrina, the researcher additionally consulted archival documents, news accounts, and oral histories from The Louisiana and Lower Mississippi Valley Collections at Louisiana State University. These additional layers of qualitative data sharpened insights from the practitioner interviews.

The process of interviewing, observation, and document retrieval within the New Orleans urban news ecosystem was highly emergent, as insights gleaned from the field fueled future inquiry (Burawoy, 1991; Eisenhardt, 1989). This perspective parallels the works of Chicago School researchers, who adopted a flexible, ‘fluid, evolving, and dynamic’ research orientation (Corbin and Strauss, 2008: 13). To analyze the data, the researcher constructed interview transcripts and field notes (from observations and document analysis), which were critically analyzed for recurrent themes (Emerson et al., 2011 [1995]). These categories were examined for patterns of meaning existing in the data – particularly concepts that explored the extent to which fields of care were developed by news producers in the city of New Orleans (Creswell, 2012; Yin, 2009). Taken together, the qualitative methods provided a multitude of perspectives by which to examine how the city of New Orleans operates as a news environment post-Katrina.

Taking news production public

In rebuilding New Orleans as a news environment post-Katrina, local journalists explicitly wished to rebut the painful distortions circulated by national media in the storm’s aftermath. Residents criticized national journalists without ties to the local community, who parachuted into New Orleans after the hurricane’s landfall (Anthony and Sellnow, 2011). Upon returning to New Orleans, the city’s news producers placed a higher value upon showcasing the city of New Orleans as locals experience it. ‘We’re making programs for people who love New Orleans’, said Grant Morris, host of local podcast ‘It’s New Orleans’. ‘There are no brass bands or piano players. It’s the New Orleans experience if you really live here’. Similarly, Renée Peck (a former editor for the New Orleans-based newspaper, The Times-Picayune) created NolaVie – a hyperlocal arts and entertainment website – to ‘provide a portrait of what it’s like if you visit here, or if you live here – an opportunity to peek through the window’.

After Katrina, New Orleans news producers also restructured the material space in which news production occurs. Increasingly, newsrooms were often viewed (particularly by digital practitioners) as centers of news production that were too distant and removed from local audiences. To be more accessible to city residents, several news producers began scheduling face-to-face meetups to interact with citizens and sources in the gathering spaces in which they typically congregate. In 2013, digital news nonprofit The Lens hosted ‘Offline with The Lens’ coffees at a rotating set of neighborhood coffee shops, where residents could schmooze with the outlet’s reporters, as well as share ‘what the media should be covering but isn’t’. Similarly, the city’s Digital News Alliance – a collective of the city’s four most frequented hyperlocal websites (The Lens, My Spilt Milk, NOLA Defender, and Uptown Messenger) – scheduled regular happy hours for audiences at Molly’s at the Market, a popular pub in the city’s French Quarter. These informal gatherings, the city’s journalists agree, strengthened relationships with their audiences, bridging physical and digital space. Physical gatherings have also been priorities for non-institutional digital producers of news, too. To leverage community-based online networks of activists rebuilding the city after the storm, prominent bloggers created the city’s Rising Tide conference. The annual face-to-face gathering aims to hold government accountable as New Orleans continues its resilient march toward the city’s rebuilding.

Beyond shifting the location of journalist–source interactions, the city’s rebuilt communicative architecture more deeply prioritizes the use of communal space for information exchange. Here, the city’s residents are active participants in the construction of conversation around the news. Hosts of the hyperlocal podcast ‘It’s New Orleans’ weekly choose four or five local artists or musicians to talk with average citizens over drinks in local clubs and bars. Regular listeners are welcomed and encouraged to appear as guests on the show. Similarly, ‘Out to Lunch’ – a program available online and broadcast on the city’s National Public Radio affiliate, WWNO – features economist and Tulane finance professor Peter Ricchiuti, the city’s A-list business owners, and thought leaders who are invited to dine at the city’s famed Commander’s Palace restaurant each week. With microphones on the dining table, Ricchiuti interviews experts, while listeners can come and join the questioning live.

Physical spaces that typify the act of civic gathering within neighborhoods – libraries, front porches, and senior citizen centers – have also been re-appropriated post-Katrina for the purpose of news production. At HeadQuarters Barber Beauty & Natural Hair Salon, owner Jamal McCoy began hosting a weekly local news program from the shop, broadcast on BlogTalkRadio. In addition to drawing guests and musicians from the local community, residents could call into the show. HeadQuarters also played host to the largest scale experiment in redefining news space in New Orleans post-Katrina. Eve Troeh, WWNO’s creative director of news, had been brainstorming about how the station could better reach underserved audiences in the city – residents who were the least likely listeners of public radio broadcasts, both on legacy and on digital platforms. These challenges were compounded by the fact that WWNO, which launched an all-news format in 2012, did not have a full-time news staff. Troeh said:

We thought it would be great to once a week – to call places where people are talking about issues – to call into a beauty shop or a barber shop and to be a fly on the wall for those conversations. It would be great to drop a microphone in there.

The public radio affiliate launched its ‘Listening Post’ project, which places recording stations (retrofitted telephone booths) in neighborhood locations where residents gather. There, New Orleanians directly share their thoughts on news issues impacting the community. Each week, the public radio station issues a call for commentary, posing three specific questions to residents on a particular topic, such as education or health care. To record a comment, locals simply visit the Listening Post location and share their thoughts. To operate each post, users speak into microphones and press downward on a transcription pedal, which starts and stops the recording. The very design of the recording booths lends itself to the New Orleanian notion of publicness. The booth is not enclosed but open to the air – enabling anyone to not only listen while others speak but also the ability to join the conversation as well. Troeh says:

It’s a way to almost identify issues that don’t rise to the level of news. There is no event that is happening. We’re just checking in with people. We’re coming to them without there needing to be a reason. It’s kind of like when you first become friends with someone. You schedule time together. But when the relationship progresses – you know where the person is and what they’re doing. We just want to hang out with people.

Journalists, who retrieve memory cards from the Listening Posts each week, compile the submissions into a 4- to 5-minute ‘montage of voices’, broadcast on ‘All Things New Orleans’, the station’s signature, half-hour news magazine, which is available as a podcast. As the Listening Posts move through the city, news also migrates from the solitary to the communal while concurrently embracing the notion of publicness long embedded in the city’s culture of urban space.

Creating shared spectacle

As the production of news post-Katrina migrated spatially from internal newsroom to external community, the city’s practitioners were also redefining the very nature of how citizens engage with the news products that journalists create. In the storm’s immediate aftermath, public meetings to debate the city’s rebuilding provided unintentional pieces of theater. Records from public meetings of the Louisiana Recovery Authority indicate citizens vocally and passionately assembled in heated discussion related to the city’s high levels of crime, the inefficiency of state and federal financial assistance, and the quest to revive New Orleans’ flagging economy. Years after these public sessions laid bare the city’s grief after the storm, New Orleans as a news environment remains guided by the city’s long-standing affinity for public spectacle.

Building upon this notion of publicness, journalistic actors repopulating the city’s news ecosystem have initiated public discussions between newsmakers and citizens to extend coverage, to solicit feedback, and to engage in deeper dialogue with the community. The Lens, for instance, crafted a series of ‘summer salon’ sessions on public policy topics ranging from the state of the city’s charter schools to the status of investigative journalism in the city. Lively debates – such as ‘Is it “last call” for Louisiana’s coast?’ – have also extended The Lens’ reach beyond traditional, digital-only news products. The nonprofit newsroom also launched a monthly ‘Breakfast with the Newsmakers’ series, which hosts an open-to-the-public, citizen-generated interview between the audience and a guest speaker. Average readers of The Lens can simply show up and ask questions. To enhance its outreach, the news nonprofit hired a full-time events coordinator and part-time events assistant in 2013 to manage the programming.

Within the Crescent City, these public conversations around the news also continue through productions that are purposely staged. Such theatrical spectacles illustrate the open nature of knowledge exchange between news producers and consumers while embracing the lineage of spectacle that undergirds New Orleans as urban place. Two local production companies have showcased how the news and the stage can collide. Local playwright Jim Fitzmorris penned ‘A Truckload of Ink’ for the city’s NOLA Project theatrical ensemble. The play parodied the city’s post-Katrina news environment. In particular, the drama centered upon the 2012 business model shift of the The Times-Picayune, which transitioned from a daily hard copy product to a digitally focused publication initially available in print 3 days a week. After the show, ‘Truckload’s’ actors, playwright, and crew hosted a series of ‘talkbacks’ – open discussions with the audience and journalists. Similarly, New Orleans-based journalist Jeff Crouere created ‘Politics with a Punch’, a monthly live stage show that he describes as the city’s version of ‘Politically Incorrect with Bill Maher’. In addition to hosting a daily talk radio show on local affiliate WGSO, Crouere invites local politicians, humorists, average citizens, and musicians to debate the news publicly. Crouere’s productions include a networking happy hour, dinner, and 90 minutes of ‘fast-paced, free-wheeling, no-holds barred discussion of what is happening in our city, state and nation’. While Crouere’s program launched in 2002, the theatrical productions gained ground post-Katrina as a cathartic third place to satirize the city’s collective massive challenges. The shows routinely sell out. He finds that ‘Politics with a Punch’ broadens his audience beyond his daily radio program, which is targeted at politically active New Orleanians.

The expansion of theatrical programming in the city reflects the city’s long-standing, lighthearted orientation toward satirizing public life, for in New Orleans ‘no public figure is safe from a good, comedic lambasting’ (Wagner, 2008: 178). Animating journalism as theater makes news more accessible to New Orleanians, permitting a deeper level of engagement, NOLA Project staff contend. ‘You put everybody together in one room and you continue the conversation after intermission and continue the conversation [around the news] after the performance ends’, Beau Bratcher, Managing Director of the NOLA Project says, ‘When you see movies or read nonfiction, that conversation just isn’t there’.

Promoting fields of care in the urban news ecology

News production never stopped in New Orleans – even when the city did not materially exist post-Katrina. More than 10 years after the storm’s landfall, the city’s digital news ecology has been rebuilt to focus upon notions of publicness and spectacle. In viewing the city as a news environment today, the manufacture of news in New Orleans continues to reinforce a shared, social identity, further bonding urban dwellers to urban space. Mirroring the pre-digital works of Chicago School sociologists, digital news production in the city of New Orleans acts as a field of care by linking news audiences together in physical space and by creating rituals that drive audience engagement.

Within fields of care, citizens must be emotionally tied to the physical, geographic space of the city. Even in the age of digital news production and consumption, the city’s news ecology is increasingly oriented around face-to-face news conversations that occur in physical, public spaces that have been re-appropriated for news exchange. By moving news production from private newsrooms into communal gathering places, engagement with the news (as well as engagement with the newsworkers who produce it) becomes more approachable for audiences. At the same time, fields of care require that citizens possess an active awareness of their emotional ties to the urban environment. News producers operating in the city’s ecology have placed high priority upon content that is viewed by residents as authentic and reflective of how New Orleanians see their city – a key exemplar of how urban dwellers construct fields of care. In an extension of creole urbanism, Crescent City citizens place great allegiance in products made locally. The city’s residents also expect to directly, publicly, and vocally engage in news production through acts of spectacle. New Orleanians, through their public engagement with the news, are active participants in the construction of shared social meaning about the city in which they live.

The exploration of New Orleans as a news environment suggests that the maintenance of fields of care depends upon active audience engagement efforts by the city’s news producers. To bridge the digital and physical production environments, journalists must nurture neighborhood-level interactions. Tapping into the bonds that tie communities together, news producers can strengthen fields of care by manufacturing socially responsible content that advances civic life in local communities. In its most hopeful construct, digital news production as a field of care can fortify civic engagement by more deeply connecting residents together in conversation about the places in which they live. In the context of dynamic city environments that may encounter or endure design moments, journalists must not only build audiences; they must build relationships, ‘checking in’ with residents in the physical spaces that they call home. For journalists, digital news production as a field of care requires time to cultivate connections with the audience. Convening conversation in communal space, in short, requires perpetual – not ad hoc – engagement with audiences. All of these behaviors require leaving the newsroom and spending more time in the communities that readers call home.

Forged through the transitions of tragedy, trauma, and transformation associated with Katrina’s aftermath, the symbolic bond of New Orleanians to urban space appears to be far more visible and visceral than other cities. In the post-Katrina evacuation period, residents were physically and emotionally separated from the community that they called home for weeks, months, and in some cases, years. All interviewees concur that during this period of separation from New Orleans, their emotional connections to the city grew stronger. This study’s conclusions, therefore, are limited by the unique explanatory power possessed when viewing New Orleans as an urban news environment. By replicating this study in other urban news ecosystems, the findings of this study could be extended. To date, however, the resurgence of scholarship using the city as a news environment has focused markedly upon case studies from North America and Western Europe. To further propel this study, future research can identify other global cities that have recently endured similar ‘design moments’, in which a city’s communicative architecture was rebuilt from the ground-up. On one hand, potential case studies, for instance, could profile how recent rebuilding efforts from the 2004 tsunami in Banda Aceh or the 2011 earthquakes in Christchurch, New Zealand, could solidify fields of care in the news ecology. On the other hand, further academic inquiry is also needed to establish whether the act of digital news production constructs fields of care in more stable urban spaces that have not been ravaged by natural disaster. Cross-cultural studies that would compare and contrast news ecologies between East and West would significantly fuel our understandings of how cities operate as news environments globally.

Within the urban environment, fields of care – through ties to geography and identity – help citizens establish bonds to city life. Sustaining these connections stands vital to the healthy functioning of communities. The act of news production helps urban dwellers better understand the geographic spaces in which they live and better articulate their relationship to the city. Through the construction and maintenance of fields of care, journalists can not only build audiences; news practitioners can actively bond city residents to the shared social spaces they call home.