Community Journalism 2016 Abstracts
Youth Participating in Civic Engagement: “Doing that Volunteering Stuff” at the Kiowa County Media Center • Bonnie Bressers, Kansas State University; Sam Mwangi, Kansas State University; Steven Smethers, Kansas State University; Bondy Kaye, Kansas State University; Levi Smith, Kansas State University • The Kiowa County Media Center, a hi-tech production facility in Greensburg, Kansas, was founded to produce an open-source portal serving a rural population, but the community’s propensity to contribute content was uncertain. Focus-group and survey research suggests that local junior and senior high school students are willing content producers. Students who volunteer there are significantly more likely to believe they will engage in other aspects of community life than their non-participating counterparts.
Weekly Newspapering: How Small-Town News Workers Decide What is News • Christina Smith, Georgia College and State University • This research, under the sociology of news theoretical framework, explores the key practices, strategies, and norms of news production for news workers at three small-town weekly newspapers. Using an ethnographic case study approach, the study draws on newsroom observations and interviews with news workers to examine how external and internal influences affect how small-town journalists produce news for their weekly newspapers.
Building a media community at NPR member stations through news programming • Joseph Kasko, SUNY Buffalo State • This research is composed of 20 in-depth, qualitative interviews with managers at NPR stations across the U.S. to examine how they are attempting to build a sense of community through news programming. The findings suggest public radio stations are using local news programming to build a media community. The stations know a lot about their listeners and their communities and they are attempting to engage and serve them through local news programming.
Media Deserts: Local Ethnic Communities in Silicon Valley Face a Crossroads • Laura Moorhead, San Francisco State University • The digital revolution has become a two-edged sword for San Francisco Bay Area’s Silicon Valley. Local communities are being swept by demographic and economic change, as media institutions weather ongoing challenges. Many ethnic and community media outlets lack capacity to use technology to their fullest capacity. While immigrants can use iPads to find news about their home countries, they bypass local ethnic media. Leaders of ethnic newspapers worry that younger journalists will not pick up the torch, because they see a dim financial future for ethnic and community media. This exploratory qualitative study considers the current media situation in Silicon Valley through focus-group interviews with eighteen media leaders who shared their experience about ethnic media. Participants included mainstream, ethnic, and community media outlets; newspapers, television and radio; and for-profits and nonprofits. This study provides insights into how media organizations might better work with and serve ethnic and underserved communities.
Multimedia Content Incorporation in Hyperlocal News Sites • Monica Chadha, Walter Cronkite School of Journalism & Mass Communication, Arizona State University • Hyperlocal news sites are a new form of community/citizen news sites that report on communities and neighborhoods that are no longer part of mainstream media news coverage. They are experiments in digital media and studies related to them are important to extend scholars’ and journalism practitioners’ understanding of how these sites cover local news in urban and rural settings. This study examines the extent to which hyperlocal news sites incorporate multimedia content and the reasons why they would or not increase multimedia inclusion in hyperlocal news content. The results of a web survey that included closed and open-ended questions revealed that almost all hyperlocal sites incorporate some form of multimedia content, video seems to be the most popular but also the most expensive in terms of time and money. Respondents’ adoption of technology and increased multimedia incorporation is dependent on their perception of audiences as well as their professional identity.
Boosters or watchdogs? American sports journalists’ perception of their professional roles • Sada Reed, Arizona State University • The following study adapted Weaver, Beam, Brownlee, Voakes, and Wilhoit’s (2007) 15-item measure of journalists’ role perception in order to survey 116 sports journalists working for newspapers throughout the United States about their perceived journalism roles. This paper also examined the relationship between newspaper circulation size and journalism roles, as well as determined if sports journalists’ demographics could predict sports journalists’ perception of their professional roles. Results suggest that sports journalists primarily identify with the adversarial and populist mobilizer functions, though there was no statistically significant correlation between populist mobilizers and newspaper circulation size. A multiple regression found that demographics (i.e., sex, race, education, circulation size and years at current news organization) could predict 13.4% of the adversarial function, with education being a statistically significant predictor. These demographics, however, could not predict populist mobilizers.
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