Journalism

This article addresses the knowledge gap regarding small market newspapers in the United States. We address a deceptively simple research question: what is the state of small market newspapers in the United States as seen through the eyes of practitioners and industry experts? Based on in-depth interviews with experts and practitioners, we argue for a more nuanced vocabulary to describe newspapers and local news. Grouping all newspapers into a monolithic industry – as general sector analyses often do – suggests a homogeneous experience. That is not the case. Smaller publications face their own challenges and opportunities, and they define success and innovation on their own terms. This reality needs to be better understood.

This study uses 48 in-depth interviews with managers, editors, and reporters at local and regional newspapers and their parent companies in four countries (Finland, France, Germany, and the United Kingdom) to examine how they discuss changes to their business models and the ways their news organizations are adapting to emerging audience-consumption trends in the digital environment. The results show that interviewees continue to prioritize the economic importance of their print products, despite declines in advertising and subscriptions. They also believe that for local news to continue, journalists must better understand the business strategies of their news organizations. Finally, they acknowledge the value of experimenting with new approaches to monetization, including implementing paywalls and using analytics to personalize content. In balancing the merits of their print products with their desire to develop new digital offerings, local newspapers seek to operate as ‘ambidextrous organizations’ that exploit the products of the past while exploring innovations that may help sustain them in the future.

This case study examines the social institutional influence on how a nonprofit community newspaper conducts newswork. Utilizing both in-depth interviews and participant observation, the data illustrate how the government, the audience, donors and advertising impact news construction processes. The results are analyzed through both management and media sociology theories. Finally, the authors elucidate how nonprofit news organizations can optimally operate as an open-system (or organism), allowing for all peripheral social institutions to impact newswork without losing any autonomy over the journalism.

Within the context of a high-choice, digital media environment, this study explores how people in their early adulthood perceive the value of news from the small town where they reside and their attitude towards paying for it. Based on qualitative data from in-depth interviews and a media landscape sorting exercise, the study demonstrates how those willing and unwilling to pay differ in terms of lived and anticipated value experiences with small-town newspapers. The study posits that there is a misalignment, for them personally and for the local community, with regard to their perception of small-town news media’s value. What might not be important for them as individuals is nonetheless experienced as important for the society they live in. The study expands on studies of perceived worthwhileness of news media in a small-town context and introduces the concept of societal worthwhileness to encompass media users’ incorporation of collective interests in their value assessment of news media.

Journalism studies has undergone a geographic turn in which considerable research has sought to reconceptualise understandings of place and space in the digitally networked environment. This article argues that the concept of distance, as the physical spaces between places, has largely been overlooked in journalism research but could add a useful dimension when examining the construction and consumption of local and hyperlocal news. Empirical research into the news contexts of a geographically large rural Australian municipality, and the diverse experiences of two towns situated a sizable distance apart, reveals a paradox in the place-making value of news. While closeness between newsrooms and audiences benefits the development of a sense of community, outlets at a greater distance from smaller towns are more likely to offer balanced political coverage of public interest matters. These findings suggest that there is a need for a well-developed theory of distance that can account for the complexities of news contexts within and between ruralities.

This article investigates how the press stigmatized Toxteth during, and immediately following, the disturbances in 1981. It builds upon a body of literature on territorial stigmatization where there is a gap in understanding surrounding the production and formation of stigma. Drawing on the acceptance in literature that the media is a key contributor to territorial stigma, I delve further to understand some of the techniques that the media uses to stigmatize place. I engage in a combined quantitative and qualitative analysis of 496 newspaper articles from five British newspapers to examine how the press reports on Toxteth, and who constructs Toxteth’s identity. I show that the name of ‘Toxteth’ was largely defined by the media and that the residents of Toxteth were denied a voice in the press coverage in 1981 with fewer than 10 per cent of all articles quoting a resident. I refer to this process as ‘stranger-making’, and it underscores the way that the media denied residents an ability to construct their own identity and the identity of their area. While stranger-making involves obfuscating the unique contours of Toxteth and silencing voices, the press simultaneously impose aspects of identity from a position of power through the techniques of naming, negativity, and oppositionality.

As the United States grapples with increasingly partisan media and affective polarization, how do cultural and political fault lines filter into residents’ daily lives, and how are they navigated? This case study of a region within a red state uses a communication infrastructure theory framework to examine how this political context affects residents’ relationships with media and their larger community storytelling networks. Through a series of focus groups, story diaries, and interviews with residents and local journalists, it explores whether shared communication resources remain and the potential for creating spaces for dialogue across political and demographic divides. Findings illustrate how residents negotiate interpersonal relationships, community spaces, and local and national media in a polarized communication context. The study highlights the importance of recognizing place-based identities and media representations to facilitate trust in journalism and points to possible responses for local news and community engagement.

A recent controversy over plans to build a mosque in the provincial Australian city of Bendigo provides an interesting case to explore the news practices of one small-town newspaper faced with an issue that triggered an avalanche of hate speech, bigotry and extremist voices. Between 2014 and 2016, there was open conflict inside the city’s municipal chamber, violent street protests, hate campaigns and disinformation on social media. This research considers the role of the Bendigo Weekly in facilitating and shaping debate among local news audiences. Our research reveals that the newspaper deployed silence as a deliberate strategy for countering hatred and to tourniquet debate to the local level. The newspaper argued this was in the interests of serving as a ‘moral compass’. The importance of engaging a diversity of voices in deliberative democracy is widely celebrated in journalism studies. This essay, however, extends scholarship on silence as a form of agency for countering hate speech that is becoming an increasing feature of the digital era.