Journal of Communication Inquiry

When it comes to understanding news audiences in rural areas, scholars often focus on declining readership and the challenge of how to encourage existing audiences to pay for content. There too has been burgeoning interest in news avoidance more broadly in digital spaces, with an emphasis on studying those who actively or intentionally resist or reject the news. This paper explores a gap in the research by seeking to understand the conditions and circumstances in which people who do not engage with their local news in print or digital format might be activated to do so. The paper presents the findings of an Australian survey of Facebook users who live in rural and regional areas and identify as people who do not engage with their local news. Findings highlight the need to conceptualise a subsection of the audience who express a desire to engage with their local news but perceive barriers to doing so. These barriers include cost, accessibility and perceived quality of content. We introduce the term ‘latent’ audience – potential news consumers who remain hidden from industry and scholarly view until changing conditions and circumstances lead to their manifestation.

This research puts forward the theoretical concept “print imprint,” articulating the connection between the printed newspaper and its reader’s “Self.” This paper contends that the printed newspaper draws out the meaningfulness of ownership, touch and nostalgia, all influential ingredients of the self. This research centers on interviews with 19 former readers of a weekly newspaper that shuttered. The findings illustrate the significance, usefulness and uniqueness of the printed newspaper. In particular, participants expressed a relationship with the printed newspaper, calling it “my paper.” Ultimately, this research argues that the loss of the weekly newspaper prompted a loss or lessening of self of the abandoned readers. Finally, this article argues this “print imprint” extends beyond printed newspapers and should be considered for all print products, including magazines and books, pointing to future research possibilities.

This study considers the possibility that students are subversive actors in a hidden curriculum of anti-intellectualism. Mass communication provides the arena in which intellectuals are held up to public judgment, and consequently media education represents a promising context for observing the enculturation of resentment. The hidden curriculum framework incorporates three sources of influence: socio-demographics, student-oriented anti-intellectualism (impatience with education, disliking instructors), and three dimensions of journalism ideology: the consumer-oriented and loyal roles and accountability to the public. Data are drawn from questionnaires distributed to undergraduates at five U.S. colleges with comprehensive programs in journalism and mass communication (JMC). Republican identity, student anti-intellectualism, and journalism ideology predict support for news media exposing faculty as subversive. The study concludes with suggestions for future research on how JMC education, from a comparative perspective, could be vulnerable to anti-intellectual incursions depending on media system and populist climate.

This essay complicates interpretations of digital architectures in online journalism production in terms of journalistic interlopers and intralopers during an age of increased influence of technologists on online news development. While much normative scholarship revolves around social media, metrics, algorithms, artificial intelligence, VR, and other forms of digital innovation applied to journalism, the essay argues that such work must not focus merely on the actions of today's tech-savvy journalism but should interrogate social and cultural relationships at the center of journalistic production so not to as become distracted away from the embedded practices of ideological incorporation that shapes media messages and reproduces inequalities through what and how journalism covers. In the future, as we approach a notion of the Metaverse, scholars must interrogate the long-standing embedding of elite ideologies into the news as journalists collaborate with technologists (or as journalists become technologists), interact (and re-interact) with elite ideologies at accelerating rates in networked societies, and move into new digital realms we have not yet imagined.

The miniseries When They See Us constitutes an example of how a based-on-real-events fiction work can add to its poetic role the ability to participate in shaping democracy. Although journalism is not its central issue, this Netflix series makes a representation of the press in which it shows how the media failed in fulfilling its democratic role and tries to make amends for it. By analyzing 21 scenes dedicated to the media from a narrative perspective, this paper shows how the series represents the press’ failure in acting as watchdog during this case. Moreover, it also shows how this representation of the press turns the series into a watchdog itself.

In 2016 and 2017, several newsrooms presented guidelines for using the term “alt-right” in the wake of events such as the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia (USA) and the US presidential campaign of Donald Trump. This study analyzed metajournalistic discourse regarding the use of the term “alt-right” including internal newsroom policies and updates to newsroom manuals and externally published public discourse. The analysis tracks how news organizations and academic and trade journalism associations participated in discourse about the use of “alt-right,” and their peers’ policies around use of the term. The study finds that discourse shifted from requiring contextualization of the term in the first wave to requiring journalists to define the term or not use it at all in the second wave that began with the Charlottesville rally. Journalism organizations acknowledged, at times endorsed, and used each other's statements in developing their own understandings as an interpretive community and a community of practice.

Communitarians argue that social identity is formed through the connection between individuals and their communities. The purpose of this study is to examine how the institution of journalism functions as part of a larger community. Media influence and are influenced by the larger social, cultural, legal, political, and economic systems in which they operate. This textual analysis focused on the breakdown of four Boston institutions—the Catholic Church, the police force, the justice system, and the daily newspaper—depicted in the film Spotlight. These institutions failed their community, allowing decades of sexual abuse to go unrecognized and unpunished—at least until the Spotlight team investigated allegations against Catholic priests. Through the lens of communitarian ethics, the researchers argue that stakeholders must recognize the need for a strong community from which the press can report, explain, correct, and connect.

The legitimacy of public broadcasting has been under pressure for several decades. Attempts to repair and restore this legitimacy have led to an intensification of accountability instruments and measures. These instruments and measures tend to focus on consumption figures or cost-benefit analyses, requiring new ways of capturing public value. This article argues that, given the media’s persistent role as an interpreter and multiplier of news via traditional distribution channels and diverse new platforms providing information and opinions, professional follow-up communication is a relevant source for the examination of broadcasters' contributions to public debate. The essay explores how the analysis of newspapers via computational methods can be used by public broadcasters to reflect on and demonstrate their role in public debates in contributing a diversity of topics and viewpoints.