Community Journalism 2014 Abstracts
“You ARE Talking to the Man”: Female Newspaper Editors’ Career Paths in Appalachia • Candace Nelson; Bob Britten, West Virginia University • Although women continue to make gains in journalism, they remain a rarity at top editorial levels. In some rural areas, such as West Virginia, women are on par with the national average for such placement, despite the state tending to lag in other areas. Using grounded theory, this research investigates the influences of rural Appalachian culture among top-level female editors. It identifies a distinct understanding of Community in Appalachia and presents a model for explaining the boosts and barriers they experience.
Follow the leader: How leadership can affect the future of community journalism • Patrick Ferrucci, Bradley University • This ethnographic study examines the effect leadership can have on newsroom culture and, ultimately, how news is produced. Lowery and Gade (2011) argued that the future of community journalism will happen online, and Kaye and Quinn (2010) noted that the Internet allows for different funding models of journalism. Together, this means online community journalism will take many different forms over the next decade. This study examines one popular form of community journalism: the digitally native news nonprofit. The study illustrates that when a journalist, and not a business executive or executives, controls the entire news operation, the community journalism organization focuses on quality journalism more so than profits.
The CxP Typology: A New Understanding of Normative Deviance, Gatekeeping, and American Community Journalism • Marcus Funk, Sam Houston State University • Abstract: Structured interviews with community newspaper editors and publishers complicate current theoretical understandings of normative deviance and gatekeeping theory. Editors and publishers expressed a great deal of audience interaction and a clear emphasis on news about “regular people and routine events,” which offers a topical rebuttal to gatekeeping theory’s assertion that journalists are attracted to news about conflict and celebrity due to a lack of dialogue with media consumers. A deeper reading of the text, however, demonstrates that “regular people” and “routine events” remain rooted in conflict and celebrity. This study suggests a theoretical broadening of normative deviance and the adoption of a “CxP Typology” to comprehensively categorize normative deviance.
Building community through dialogue at NPR member stations • Joseph Kasko, University of South Carolina • This research is composed of 20 in-depth, qualitative interviews with managers at NPR member stations to examine how they are attempting to build community through the use of dialogue. The stations came from various market sizes and from different regions across the United States. The managers reported they are using many types of dialogue, including face-to-face, formal written and electronic communication, to engage their listeners. The findings suggest the stations are working to build a presence in the community through personal relationships, regular contact with listeners and by inviting regular feedback.
Seeing Community Journalism in Online News: Examining status conferral processes in digital media organizations • Myles Ethan Lascity, Drexel University • Many scholars have hailed blogs and citizens journalists as a means of upending the traditional journalistic structure, however, users appear to prefer to channel their input through established media outlets. Few have attended to the question of why audiences – citizen journalists or causal readers – share news with established organizations when they could easily distribute the information themselves. This paper will argue that the same processes at the heart of community journal can help explain why individuals choose to align themselves with organizations rather than strike out on their own.
Getting Engaged: Public Engagement on Online Community News Sites Has Tenuous Connection to Civic Engagement • Jack Rosenberry, St. John Fisher College • A content analysis of online community news sites was used to determine that activities to promote public engagement with the site was have a slight association with civic engagement activities such as voting and participation in community activities. This result shows weak support for the idea that engagement with the news sites is an articulation of cyber-democratic engagement.
Perceptions About Posting: A Survey of Community Journalists About Social Media Postings • Leigh Wright, Murray State University • Journalists long have been the gatekeepers of content for traditional media, but now with social media, does that role still stand? Although studies have focused on larger circulation newspapers, the literature suggests a gap among community newspapers’ judgment of news values and gatekeeping as applied to social media postings. A survey of 108 journalists working at newspapers with a circulation of 30,000 or less revealed insights into how reporters and editors perceive the traditional news values of timeliness, proximity, prominence, unusual nature, helpfulness, impact, conflict and entertainment/celebrity when posting to the social media sites Facebook and Twitter. The survey revealed that 60 percent of journalists said they strongly agreed that helpfulness is a news value when posting information to Facebook, and 66 percent ranked timeliness as the most important news value for posting stories to Twitter.
Local vs. Hyperlocal newspaper: Community actor perception, readership, and advertising effects • Gi Woong Yun, Bowling Green State University; SangHee Park; Claire Y. Joa; Jing Jiang; Louisa Ha, Bowling Green State University; David Morin, Utah Valley University; Jongsoo Lim • This paper aimed to examine the dynamics of local and hyperlocal newspapers from a business and civic engagement perspective. To do so, we looked at the competitive and complementary relationship between local and hyperlocal newspapers in readership, the relationship of community engagement activities and newspapers readership, the perception of local and hyperlocal newspapers as community actors, and the perception on advertising effects of local and hyperlocal newspapers. Results indicated that the relationship between local and hyperlocal newspapers was complementary and the community actor perception of newspapers influenced readership. In the local and hyperlocal newspaper regression models, newspaper community actor perception predicted advertising effects. Respondents who were actively engaged in their local communities were more likely to purchase or visit businesses that ran advertisements in the newspapers.
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