Category: Community Journalism Journal

Kristy Hess and Lisa Waller

This article provides clarity about the different types of journalism that come under Australia’s vibrant community media umbrella and conceptualizes their relationships to one another against the backdrop of dominant media. We draw on critical-cultural theory, using the concept of media power to argue that journalism invents and reinforces the idea of  “community” among audiences, generating advantages and sometimes inequalities as well.  It is also used to differentiate certain community journalism practices from mainstream norms and conventions, although we highlight that “community” is a powerful idea that dominant media use to their advantage as well.

“Community journalism” means different things to different people in Australia. It is used to describe a wide range of media that provide information for niche audiences, from radio and television stations run by volunteers, to rotating Twitter accounts set up by activists and newspapers, and online news sites that are owned by global news companies or home office operators. The idea of “community” often conjures notions of collectivity, altruism, shared interests, sense of belonging and collegiality. There is a need, however, to examine the underbelly of this feel-good concept that is often overlooked in broader discussions about community media in Australia. This article contends that “community” is a constructed notion that creates advantages and inequalities and generates boundaries between insiders and outsiders. Furthermore, in this digital world forms of community media are inherently tied to dominant media in one way or another – whether they like it or not.

This article takes up the invitation from American journalism scholar Bill Reader (2012) to draw from the “critical cultural well” in research about community journalism. Reader argues that the cultural studies approach can generate innovative research in this field, even though it challenges many traditions of 20th century professionalism and social science (Reader, 2012). As he points out, the goal of cultural studies is not about “testing hypothesis and finding answers, but rather about discovering new and more interesting questions” (ibid, p.109).  Reader outlines some of the broad theoretical frameworks that can be used to understand community journalism from a cultural perspective, including Marxist theory, hegemony theory (Gramsci, 1971) James Carey’s ritual of communication (1989) and Benedict Anderson’s “imagined communities” (1983). This article highlights the benefits of working with an alternative perspective – that of media power (Couldry, 2003, 2012; Couldry & Curran, 2003; Howley, 2010, 2013) – which draws upon some of the well-known paradigms above. This theory helps us to investigate community journalism in two ways: how it is shaped and framed against dominant media; and secondly, the power that comes from a media organization’s ability to construct and reinforce the idea of community related to a geographic region, demographic band, or space of shared interest.

The article begins by providing some clarity about the different types of journalism that come under Australia’s vibrant community media umbrella. It will then provide an overview of the concept of media power, before turning to a discussion of the way issues of power can help to compare and contrast the different forms of community journalism and their relationship to society. We take our cue from scholars who have highlighted the benefits of studying not-for-profit forms of community journalism through a lens of media power, including Howley (2010, 2013) and Couldry (2003, 2012) and advance these discussions to acknowledge that  “community” is also a powerful idea adopted by dominant media – the very media that much community journalism serves to challenge.

COMMUNITY MEDIA – AN OVERVIEW

In international scholarship, the idea of community journalism is linked to the local newspaper, especially those serving small towns and cities (see Reader & Hatcher, 2012). But with the rise of new technologies, from radio to television and the internet, the term “community media” has transcended geographic spaces and is now also used interchangeably with alternative, independent, underground and radical media, particularly public broadcasting, blogging and internet sites (Forde, 2011; Ndlela, 2011; Howley, 2010, 2013; Couldry and Dreyer, 2007). There remains some confusion over whether community media is not-for-profit or commercial in nature (see Forde, 2011). Howley (2010), for example, defines community media as an alternative to profit-oriented media that caters for the wide range of tastes and interests of ethnic, racial and cultural minorities, who are often ignored, silenced or otherwise misrepresented by mainstream media:

…This rather generic definition … accommodates a diverse set of initiatives, community radio, participatory video, independent publishing, and online communication to name but a few. (Howley 2010, p. 2)

Forde suggests alternative and community media resonates with the unrepresented, working outside established societal power structures, dedicated to the role of journalism in democracy and occupying a place in the media-scape as “an endangered species” (Forde 2011, p. 53). We have argued elsewhere that community is a weak theoretical framework for understanding commercial newspapers in a digital world  (Hess, 2013a; Hess and Waller, 2014). But we also emphasize that community is a powerful idea, rather than a tangible reality, that should be engaged with and understood (Hess & Waller, 2012; Hess, 2014), a point we shall return to soon. Reader and Hatcher (2012) argue that news media today are hybrid models that are hard to categorize using old definitions. They identify a need to study the new ground that exists between the idea of community and journalism that we will extend by drawing upon the Australian experience.

COMMUNITY JOURNALISM IN AUSTRALIA

Australia’s commercial media rests in the hands of relatively few companies and individuals, resulting in one of the highest concentrations of media ownership in the developed world (Finklestein, 2012, p.59).  It has been argued that this has led to a narrow range of news and opinion from which people can understand their world and make informed decisions about politics and social issues (Finkelstein, 2012). Community journalism of all stripes is therefore viewed as crucial for enhancing and ensuring Australia’s media diversity (Hess et al., 2014). Community broadcasting in particular, as an alternative medium to public service and commercial media, is argued to foster citizen participation and help to preserve cultural diversity (Forde et al., 2009). It also promotes an overall “Australian-ness” through the creation of Australian content for a heterogonous audience and support for local artists  (Jolly, 2014). It is important to outline each of the styles of Australian community journalism before moving on to discuss how a media power perspective can cast some different understandings and questions about how they relate to one another, and mainstream media, in the digital age.

Community newspapers

In international circles, there is much literature that equates the local newspaper with community journalism (see especially Lauterer, 2006; Reader & Hatcher, 2012; van Vuuren, 2007; Bowd, 2007). In this way “community” is often considered synonymous with geographic territory or used in tandem with terms such as country newspapers (Bowd, 2007), rural/regional (Ewart, 2000) or the local press (Buchanan, 2009; Fenton et.al 2010; Franklin 2006). As Lauterer argues (2006), the very idea of community journalism was a choice phrase adopted by American researchers in the 1960s to replace the phrase “hometown newspaper” (see also Byerly, 1961).

In Australia, community newspapers are also understood to serve specific geographic areas. However, there is a need to carefully distinguish between “local” and “community” press in discussions about Australia’s media. It is a practical distinction that also offers an important insight into relationships of power that we will unpack later in this article. Australia’s two big newspaper groups – Murdoch’s News Corporation and Fairfax Media – own many of the nation’s community newspapers. Fairfax’s community media arm is concentrated on the suburban fringes of Australia’s southern cities (Melbourne and Sydney). News Corp Australia’s Community Newspaper Group covers more of the nation, but adopts a similar strategy (News Corp Australia, 2015). These types of community publications are largely understood as free newspapers distributed to households through the letterbox, often weekly, sometimes tri-weekly. They are often free publications that are distinguished from other titles in the company stable that audiences have traditionally paid to read in print, including long-serving local newspapers. In the state of Victoria, for example, Fairfax Media owns and operates the local daily newspaper, The Warrnambool Standard, that serves the vast south-west region. The company’s free community paper Warrnambool Extra, is distributed to households in the immediate geographic region of the city of Warrnambool. The Extra has a higher advertising-to-editorial ratio and provides more social than civic content (events and social photos rather than coverage of local government or the courts). Outside the world of the big mainstream players there are other interpretations of the community newspaper. Van Vuuren (2007) notes that there are commercial community newspapers in Australia that operate independently of Fairfax and News Limited. She defines the community newspaper in Australia as:

Those that are distributed monthly, fortnightly or weekly to residents of particular suburbs or localities, either delivered directly to households or available from local traders or on the pavement at shopping centers, and often free of charge. (van Vuuren, 2007, p.8)

Van Vuuren cites a 2005 News Corporation study of 6,500 people that found two-thirds of Australians considered their community newspapers to be the medium of most relevance to them (ibid, p.96). The Community Newspapers of Australia (2015) association, meanwhile, uses phrases such as “suburban” and “local newspaper” as synonymous with community media and under this definition they are distributed for free in print and online spaces. At the state level, the Community Newspaper Association of Victoria  (2015) defines a community newspaper as “a newspaper or newsletter that is owned by the community”. This could mean a newsletter produced by a community house, or a newspaper put together by a group of volunteers for a town or community group. This implies that such media are created as not-for-profit products that serve horizontal networks, separated from the powerful and the elite.

Community broadcasting

Australia was one of the first countries in the world to introduce not-for-profit community broadcasting (see Forde et al., 2009) and community radio is arguably most closely associated with the community journalism tag. It is often referred to as being a not-for-profit radio station, run primarily by volunteers, drawn from the community that the radio station is targeting as its audience.  Community stations broadcast in remote and rural places, as well as suburban and urban areas. Community broadcasting has been described as playing an important role in Australian culture by:

… empowering participants, providing voices for different cultures and minorities, delivering local news, information and views, providing alternative music formats, a forum for Australian musicians and writers and programs that create a sense of belonging for people and maintaining projects which nourish Australian content in the face of an increasing reliance on overseas content by other broadcasters. (Jolly, 2014, “concluding arguments”)

The Australian community broadcast sector has 360 community radio licensees, 66 per cent of which are located in rural/regional Australia (Community Broadcasting Foundation, 2015). Australian Community Broadcasting distinguishes itself from other media by actively promoting access and participation in the processes of media operations, administration and production. It is volunteer-driven, with more than 20,000 volunteer broadcasters and support staff helping to deliver media “for the people by the people” (Community Broadcasting Foundation, 2015, para 3) The McNair Ingenuity research study ,of community radio found that 64 per cent of non-metropolitan listeners in 2010 and 66 per cent in 2008 nominated local news and information as a reason for listening to community radio (McNair Ingenuity Research, 2008, as cited in Bowd, 2010). However, the 2012 Finkelstein inquiry into Australia’s news media expressed some concern that community radio services related mostly to localized communities, were largely run by volunteers, with little capacity for regular coverage of local news.

One of community broadcasting’s recognized strengths lies in its delivery of radio and television programming for specific cultural and ethnic groups throughout the land (see for eg. Misajon & Khoo, 2008).  It is a significant resource for people from non-English speaking backgrounds, as they have few media alternatives, and these broadcasts support language and cultural maintenance. Meadows et al. (2009) found that community radio plays a significant role in the settlement process for migrants and refugees.  A Turkish focus group that was part of their study explained how community radio helped to integrate people into Australian life:

It’s very important. Our children are growing up Australians anyway, maybe they’re having difficulty adapting culturally, but through the radio, they will be able to get some help or adapt anyway. And also we see our differences as richness. (Meadows et al., 2009)

Community broadcasting also helps people who have been in Australia for some time to keep in touch with their cultural heritage. Many community radio stations deliver programs of interest to a number of groups. For example, Jolly (2014) notes that in Australia’s national capital Canberra, community radio station 2XXX broadcasts programs made by and for the city’s Korean, Finnish, Chinese, Greek and Spanish communities.

There are debates as to whether community stations should stress localness and service the local “geographic” population, or emphasize participation and provide a platform for under-represented voices, views and cultural products (Gordon, 2009, p.62). It can be argued that while these tensions and debates exist, community broadcasting in Australia is engaged with the issues and strives to provide a wide range of services and cater to diverse audience needs (Jolly 2014).

Alternative media

Radical, or alternative journalism is found increasingly in online and social media spaces, but there is a long tradition of print publications, as well as community broadcasting, dedicated to political and social justice causes in Australia (Forde, 1999). Historically, alternative media journalists have been distinguished by belonging to a campaign or movement for which they write or broadcast (Forde, 2011). They have an overriding commitment to their public sphere and always, their public sphere is quite simply that which is not being served, or served properly, by the mainstream news media. Forde (2011) suggests such media is more closely aligned than any other form of journalism with the unrepresented, the “poor and downtrodden” (Downing, 2003 quoted in Forde, 2011).

Indigenous Australians are among the most disadvantaged on measures including health, education, home ownership and incarceration (Australian Productivity Commission, 2011), but they have succeeded in creating what is arguably one of the largest, strongest and most distinctive alternative media subcultures in Australia. It is mature, prolific, uncertain and evolving. Waller et al., (2015) describe it as “the consummate expression and achievement of the politics of voice, or speaking up, in the Australian media landscape”. Indigenous media is dynamic, at times working to redefine its use and meaning (Michaels 1986; Rennie & Featherstone, 2008). Diversity and differences of purpose, as well as uncertainty, are part of its essence, offering space for difference of opinion and delivery. The histories and aims of a wide range of Indigenous media outlets confirms the pivotal role they play in Indigenous activism and as mechanisms for debate and development of public opinion which has long been recognized (Hartley & McKee, 1996, 2000; Hartley, 2003; Forde et al., 2009).  Indigenous media operates across all platforms, with newspapers that advocate for Indigenous rights including Land Rights News, The Indigenous Times and Koori News. There is an extensive national network of Indigenous community radio, as well as three community television networks (see Waller et al., 2015 for a full discussion). Indigenous journalists campaign for social justice in online publications such as The Koori History Website and social media, with Twitter proving an especially popular and successful platform for radical Indigenous journalism.

UNDERSTANDING MEDIA POWER

We have sketched what we consider to be the spectrum of Australia’s community media sector, highlighting that while they all share the descriptor of “community” they can differ quite dramatically in their motivations and approaches to news. To unpack this further we return to cultural theories of media power that challenge the political economy view of ownership and control by major media players (McChesney, 2003). The cultural approach is also critical of the normative, Fourth Estate view of journalism’s power coming from its role as democracy’s watchdog (Zelizer, 2012). It emphasizes the media’s own power to construct reality, or frame the way we see the world (see Couldry, 2012). In the words of Maras (2013), media power means more than:

Just the power of the press and includes the capacity of media to “do” certain things, its power within (and over) society and power struggles between different parts of the industry and profession. Media power describes how the press and journalism occupies its field and has to do with the way public discourse is imagined and promoted and controlled, via terms such as “objectivity”. (Maras, 2013, p.12)

The concept of media power has not figured strongly in studies of community newspapers (see Hess & Waller, 2014), but it has proved a robust theoretical paradigm for understanding the social significance of not-for-profit journalism that provides media access and advocates for social equity (see especially Couldry & Dreher, 2007; Howley 2010). For example, Howley (2010) says:

For those with little or no access to mainstream media, community media provide resources and opportunities for marginalized groups to tell their own stories in their own voices. They are instrumental in protecting and defending cultural identity while simultaneously challenging inaccurate, prejudicial media representations. (Howley 2010, p.5)

In the discussion that follows here we will highlight how the ability of media organizations to construct and reinforce the idea of community among audiences can generate power and inequality on all levels. We will also demonstrate how media power helps to differentiate and contextualize Australia’s community media sector in terms of its relationship to dominant media and society.

Repositioning “community” through a media power lens

Couldry (2003) draws on Bourdieu to suggest media power can best be understood as the media’s symbolic power of constructing reality (Bourdieu, 1991, p. 166). In Introduction to Reflexive Sociology(Bourdieu & Wacquant 1992), Bourdieu used the term “meta-capital” to describe the concentration of different types of capital in the state, giving it power to decide what counts as capital in specific fields. Couldry argued that the media’s power could be theorized the same way:

Just as the state’s influence on cultural capital and prestige … is not confined to specific fields but radiates outward into social space generally, so the media’s meta-capital may affect social space through the general circulation of media representations. (Couldry, 2003, p. 688)

Much like Anderson’s (1983) idea of the imagined community, viewing community journalism through a lens of media power helps to untangle the assumption that community is in some way a tangible reality. As Webb et al. (2002, p. 88) observe, one of the enduring beliefs in most societies is that “community” in both local and national contexts has a real existence:  “An identity as tangible as the continents and as natural as the Amazon forest or the Rhine river”. They argue that community is not natural or inevitable. It is constructed by a series of discourses about society. Shaun Moores (2000) follows Anderson to argue that community might be best understood as a “fictional reality” – communities appear to have an objective existence but are actually products of the imagination (Moores, 2000, p.39). Elsewhere we, among others, have argued that media organizations, especially small newspapers, are considered to be in a powerful position to construct community ideas and values (see eg Hess & Waller, 2014; Hess, 2014; Reader & Hatcher, 2011; Howley, 2010; Mersey, 2010; Ewart 2000). For example, Mersey (2010) contends that within boundaries of community, feelings of emotional safety, a sense of acceptance and willingness to make a personal investment can develop (Mersey, 2010, p.63). We must provide scope therefore to examine how dominant media might maintain economic and symbolic power by constructing and reinforcing the community ideal.

Hess (2014) draws on cultural studies to rethink the theory of social capital in regards to commercial local newspapers, both those that are independently owned or belong to a major media company. These are the types of publications that are also considered to be synonymous with notions of ‘community’. She argues the concept of “mediated social capital” places commercial local newspapers in a position of advantage within the geo-social spaces they serve because they are seen as central to social order. They generate feelings of unity and drive a sense of collectivity among audiences, especially in times of crisis like natural disasters (Hess, 2014). This places such media outlets in a position of advantage – it may generate economic capital in terms of advertising, be used for reputation building, social networking or lobbying – what Hess conceptualizes as mediated bonding, bridging and linking social capital (see Hess, 2014).

The same idea may also apply to alternative community media. Bourdieu (1986) argues that in any social network there is a degree of symbolic power bestowed on leaders to speak on the group’s behalf. Take the alternative, Indigenous journalism example of @IndigenousX, which was founded by activist Luke Pearson. @IndigenousX is a rotating Twitter account that features a different Indigenous commentator on a new topic each week. Evidence of the symbolic capital generated by @IndigenousX can be found in the fact that The Guardian’s Australian online site now promotes and provides a platform for the featured @IndigenousX columnist every week. It is an example of user-driven innovation and of how Indigenous voices are emerging strongly in the rapidly evolving digital landscape. Sweet et al. (2013) argue its effectiveness now ranges from it providing the means to “both scale and tear down barriers to participation” (2013, p. 108); to fostering cultural emotional and social wellbeing; as a journalistic innovation and a community development intervention.

The dark side of community

The media’s power to construct community can also be used to create difference and inequality. Recent Australian research shows how this can at times create “polarizing” views (Ewart, 2014, p.804). Hess (2013, 2014) highlights how the news media’s ability to generate a sense of community can restrict outsiders and has a dark side. She provides examples where minority groups are under-represented in Australia’s country newspapers and discusses how this can contribute to social exclusion. We must be careful to acknowledge that generating feelings of unity and sense of collectivity among audiences, especially in times of crisis such as terrorist attacks, can result in exclusion as well as inclusion. In a complex, globalized world, a retreat into “communities” can be a refusal to engage or connect with difference and complexity. Deuze (2007) argues contemporary society is anything but solid or socially cohesive. He says under conditions of worldwide migration (of capital and labor, global conflict and environmental apprehension) most people experience a growing precariousness in everyday life. “As a response, citizens increasingly retreat into hyperlocal enclaves (suburban ghettos or guarded-gate communities) or global personal spaces such as Facebook” (Deuze, 2007, p. 671). People involved in all forms of community journalism are constantly negotiating what it means to be part of the community – not only bringing community into existence, but also questioning and contesting how it happens and the shapes it takes (see Hess & Waller, 2014). We must also acknowledge that in the process there is a risk that certain voices will not be included, or heard (Dreher, 2010).

Rethinking relations with the mainstream

A clear characteristic of all forms of community journalism in Australia is that they provide a crucial service by promoting and/or giving value to news and information that is not covered by mainstream media. ElGhul-Bebawi (2010) argues there is a blurring between mainstream and alterative media, but that ultimately the distinguishing feature will be the way community media contest mainstream media power (see also Couldry & Curran, 2003; Couldry & Dreher, 2007). One way of understanding this relationship more generally is through an examination of how forms of community media fill gaps in mainstream news media presence and coverage of localities, events and people. However, taking a media power perspective means we must also explore how community media relates to dominant media channels in this changing digital world.

Communities that the big players don’t speak to or for

Australia is a diverse, multicultural nation where the English language dominates the media and mainstream coverage of news from other countries does not always satisfy the needs of people with close links and interests in those places. This gap is filled by Australia’s vibrant ethnic media scene, celebrated for its contribution to cultural diversity and cultural maintenance (Cover, 2012; 2013).  There is not space here to explore the sector in depth, but there is a well-established ethnic press that has extended online, as well as a strong accent on ethnic programming on community radio and television that delivers local, national and international news, information and entertainment. In the state of New South Wales alone, there are dozens of publications in some 30 different languages, from Arabic to Vietnamese. Radio 2000 in the capital, Sydney, is a full-time multi-lingual community-based radio station and there are at least 10 community radio stations that broadcast part-time in community languages (NSW Government, 2015). On the other side of the nation, Western Australia has 18 ethnic print media outlets and at least 11 community-based ethnic radio stations (Government of Western Australia, 2015).

Other groups, including senior citizens, gays and lesbians and people living with disabilities are often critical of mainstream media in Australia for the negative ways in which they are represented, or are made invisible by not being represented (see for example Disability and Media Matters, 2015).  In response to this and as a way to build community, they produce their own programs on community radio and television, and also in niche print and online publications that provide news and information that connects those involved with their communities (van Vuuren, 2007). An example is an online publication called The Senior (2015) that provides news, information and targeted advertising for older Australians.

Demanding the big players’ attention

A key aim of alternative media groups and journalists in Australia is to have an impact on politics and policies across a range of issues – from the environment, to social justice, trade agreements and international relations – by influencing public debate and agitating for change. The literature on mainstream journalists’ sourcing practices shows that they listen most closely to their elite sources and their reports reflect the agendas of these powerful actors (Soley, 1992; Koch-Baumgarten & Voltmer, 2010). The “gaps” alternative media try to fill include the mainstream’s lack of attention to certain issues and/or where news angles reflect powerful news sources’ views at the expense of ordinary or marginalized members of communities, who are sometimes portrayed negatively. Participants in what are termed “news interventions” (Howley, 2013) therefore target mainstream news in order to influence news agendas and representations, which are seen to impact on audiences and interactions between communities. A current Australian example is the Lock the Gate Alliance (2015), which opposes coal seam gas mining. Working with alternative journalists, including Margo Kingston and the New No Fibs citizen journalism project (Kingston, 2013) the alliance and has been highly effective in its use of a range of digital media to communicate with its supporters, the public and for engaging mainstream media interest in the campaign.

Extremely local news and gaps in the media market

It is important to recognize that community journalism in Australia is not entirely independent from the state. For example, community radio relies on government funding to survive (Hallett, 2009). In 2013-14, the Australian Government committed $17.7 million to the Community Broadcasting Foundation to support its activities. Many community newspapers also receive indirect public subsidies through government advertising (Hess et al., 2015). Such government subsidies can be understood as a form of recognition for the social importance of these news services. Free newspapers and community radio that serve small geographic areas are crucial because they provide news and information that is not often available from mainstream news media, including reports about local events and everyday happenings such as road works (Finkelstein, 2012). They exist not to directly challenge media power but to fill the gaps left by the mainstream.

Consider the role of The Meredith and District News in Australia – which is arguably an exemplar of the “community” modus operandi based on altruism, shared interests, collectivity and collegiality. The Meredith and District News (2015) depends entirely on advertising, donations and grants to meet the costs of maintaining the newsletter and its primary motive is to generate a sense of community among readers, not profits. The publication grew from a school newsletter and is now affiliated with the local community center. It unassumingly challenges media power by plugging the gaps ignored by mainstream publications, but also confronts traditional norms and conventions of professional journalism in the way it is produced and presented to audiences. For example, its front page is dominated by a list of contact numbers for civic, community and emergency services rather than news stories, and its content features calls for contributions to a kindergarten cookbook and the announcement of the new school principal.

As Reader and Hatcher (2012) point out, those who study community journalism at this level begin with an appreciation that journalism is not solely the purview of major national and international media outlets:

Community journalism is at the bottom of an iceberg; it forms the greatest bulk of journalism produced in the world, but it goes largely unnoticed by the masses compared to the ubiquitous big media names readily recognized by society at large (The New York Times, the BBC, National Geographic etc.). (Reader & Hatcher, 2012, xiv)

The authors touch on an important point that highlights how dominant media use and abuse the idea of community, depending on the context in which it is considered. Despite the altruistic Gemeinshaft ideals (see Tönnies, 1957) that community represents, from an economic perspective “community” often signifies editorial content that can be used by commercial players to define a niche market in which to sell advertising to highly targeted audiences. A News Corporation study of 6,500 people revealed that 20 per cent of all newspaper revenue in Australia was generated from the “community newspaper” sector (as cited in van Vuuren, 2007). As highlighted earlier, community publications in Australia have often been established by major media companies at low cost (with high advertising to editorial ratios and more social and contributor content). As a result, they have often been distanced from the Fourth Estate ideals and notions of objectivity upheld by larger, long-serving newspapers which boast established reputations. In an interview for a study on how local newspapers connect people with one another, an editor of a daily local newspaper who also oversees a “free” community weekly paper said:

Our free paper is often described as a community newspaper because it doesn’t upset anyone…it covers the fluffy feel-good stuff. (Personal communication with author, March 22, 2012)

This comment resonates with Forde’s idea that community media are the ‘poor and downtrodden’ (2011) – at least within professional journalism circles and illuminates the powerful cultural norms and values at play that determine what is ‘good’ journalism (see Hess & Waller, 2015). Van Vuuren (2007) highlights that little research is undertaken on community publications in Australia as most academics think they “aren’t worth the paper they are written on” (van Vuuren, 2007, p. 96), This is despite research that shows many households value these publications highly and consider them to provide the news and information most relevant to them (ibid).

CONCLUSIONS

We have established that a defining aspect of community media is the way they challenge media power. But in this digital world, it is important to acknowledge that while community media is often celebrated as being independent (Forde, 2011) and serving horizontal ties, such media are connected in one way or another to dominant forms of power – both media and political ­– whether they like it or not.  Future research on community media must provide scope to examine this more carefully in the digital environment. As Curran (2003) contends, “new technology has not fundamentally changed the underlying economic factors that enable large media organizations to maintain their market dominance” (Curran, 2003, p. 227). Community journalism, from alternative blogs to community radio, increasingly relies on hugely profitable global media companies to communicate. While forms of community journalism are seen to push back against dominant media, there is a growing dependence on powerful commercial information channels such as Google and Facebook to reach and engage with audiences, especially in digital space. These are not neutral players in the media world (see eg: Picard, 2014). Viewing this through a media power lens provides a way of seeing that as dominant media changes and evolves, so too does the relationship with community media forms. Media power might become less visible and more fluid as old structures collapse, giving rise to the Digital Dynasty’s new media empires and moguls. Picard (2014) advises that studies about the use of social media should therefore be viewed through a critical lens. He goes further, to argue that all forms of information technology should be studied in terms of power relationships, rather than the naïve perception that the Internet is about widespread democratization (Picard, 2014). Community newspapers and websites that belong to big media corporations are most obviously connected to powerful information nodes and flows through their own networks, as well as via platforms such as Twitter. This means stories deemed important can be picked up more quickly and given traction in other media owned by the same parent company, and further afield.

As Reader (2012) suggests, drawing from the critical-cultural well offers a way of generating innovative research in the field of community journalism. It has helped us to highlight different motivations and approaches to news across Australia’s community media spectrum. It has also provided the framework for understanding media power operates through all forms of community journalism in two ways. First, through their ability to construct “community” in distinctive ways for both public and private good; and secondly, through their relationships with the big, mainstream commercial media channels of the digital age. Community journalism has being widely theorized against the backdrop of dominant mainstream media where it is viewed as filling a perceived news gap, or representing the interests of those who are not given a voice in big media. However, it is important to acknowledge the complexity that rests in its increasing reliance on big commercial media such as Google, Twitter and Facebook to connect with and across audiences in shifting media terrains.  This article has also argued that we must provide scope to consider the benefits and inequalities that the power to construct community presents for dominant news media players in this increasingly globalized world.

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About the Authors

Kristy Hess is a senior lecturer in journalism in the School of Communication and Creative Arts, Deakin University, Australia.

Lisa Waller is a senior lecturer in journalism in the School of Communication and Creative Arts, Deakin University, Australia.

hess-waller

 

Sam C. Mwangi, J. Steven Smethers and Bonnie Bressers

This exploratory study seeks to ascertain whether community engagement behaviors among residents of Kiowa County, Kansas, and their attitudes about the new community information portal affect their intentions to contribute content. Results indicate that while most residents are engaged and have a favorable view of this citizen journalism project, technology-based communication hubs pose unique challenges beyond civic engagement that creators of information hubs should consider.

Greensburg, Kansas, was thrust into the national limelight when an EF5 tornado hit the city on May 4, 2007, killing 12 people, injuring 90 more and destroying 95 percent of the city (Ablah et al., 2007). In the aftermath of the storm, it soon became clear that this small south Central Kansas farming community of approximately 900 people and residents of surrounding areas had vital information needs that could not be met through the existing communication infrastructure (Smethers et al., 2010). The local newspaper, the Kiowa County Signal, is a weekly publication and therefore was unable to provide the constant information updates that local residents needed. The paper’s website was in no position to fill the void because electricity and the cable system were equally affected. Area radio and television stations located in Wichita, Dodge City and Pratt, Kansas, were too remotely located to provide constant emergency communications essential to the rescue and cleanup efforts. Residents established improvisational communications networks to fill the void including use of cell phones, bulletin boards, interpersonal communication and a daily duplicated paper bulletin called the Yellow Sheet.

As rebuilding efforts got underway and area media got back on track, the Signal was a model community newspaper, providing residents with extensive information associated with rebuilding efforts. But civic leaders did not forget the frustrations of their inability to communicate with residents in the immediate aftermath of the tornado. With technical advice from Kansas State University, city and county leaders began to explore ways to fill such a void and to get information to citizens in-between the weekly editions of the newspaper (Smethers et al., 2010). An idea gradually emerged that would bring together several information sources and use modern technology to communicate with the public. The centerpiece of this communication hub is the Kiowa County Commons, which was dedicated in November 2011 and houses the Kansas State University Research and Extension office, the county museum, county library, and a state-of-the-art media center that includes a radio and audio production studio, a television studio, and a Web portal to disseminate multimedia content via a WiMAX system installed on the highest point in the community: the local grain elevator (Wilson, 2008).

Though the Media Center was not at full capacity at the beginning of this research project, the facility nonetheless had the capability to offer a myriad of information services, including streaming local government meetings and community news. More importantly, the media center plan embraces “open sourcing” as an ideal that Reader (2012) has pointed out as synonymous with good community journalism practice. Residents in Greensburg were expected to contribute a good portion of the content to the information hub as a way of building the civic vibrancy of the rebuilt city (Watson, 2011). From the beginning, it was understood that the county-owned Media Center would be on its own in terms of collecting and providing local information, as Gatehouse Media, the publisher of the Kiowa County Signal, foresaw active partnership as a potential conflict of interest (Smethers et al., 2010).  In 2001, the Center’s board of directors hired producer/manager Grant Neuhold, who attempted to transform the founders’ lofty expectations for the facility into reality. Neuhold began soliciting volunteers, who were initially a handful of local adult volunteers, and a more energetic––and electronic media savvy––group of high school students.  He launched a training program that covered basic audio-video production techniques, theorizing that building community participation and promoting buy-in of the open source aspects of the project would likely begin with a nucleus of trained citizens. Neuhold also began providing some local offerings produced by his cadre of citizen journalists, including a limited schedule of Kiowa County High School athletic events (Grant Neuhold, personal communication,  January 30, 2013).

Neuhold’s ambitious efforts to demonstrate what the Media Center could provide for the community were generally met with enthusiasm, but serious questions remained that affect the operationalization and sustainability of the center’s mission: How do local residents view the project, and what are their attitudes about contributing content to the local information network?  Although the media center and its goals seemingly serve as a model of the critical connection between communication and civic engagement, there is still the unanswered question of whether residents will use the center’s services or contribute content.

The purpose of this study is to examine civic engagement behaviors among residents of Kiowa County, their attitudes towards the new community information portal and their likelihood to contribute content. After a discussion of the literature, the study uses survey methodology to gather information to explore the research questions.

LITERATURE REVIEW

Communication and Civic Engagement

Civic engagement has been defined as a heightened sense of responsibility through which individuals, acting as citizens of their own communities, their nations and the world, are empowered as agents of positive social change for a more democratic world (Coalition for Civic Engagement and Leadership, 2004).

French scholar Pierre Bourdieu is credited with laying the theoretical foundations for the civic engagement movement through his writings on social capital which described circumstances under which individuals could use their membership in groups and networks to secure benefits. Bourdieu (1986) argued:

Social capital is an attribute of an individual in a social context. One can acquire social capital through purposeful actions and can transform social capital into conventional economic gains. The ability to do so, however, depends on the nature of the social obligations, connections, and networks available to you.

Sociologist James Coleman, who wrote widely on public issues involving schools and families, advanced Bourdieu’s ideas by helping bridge the gap between the individualistic market-oriented thinking of economists and the sociologists concerns with social networks, values and norms (Coleman, 1988). He used the term “social capital” to show ways in which social ties and shared values and norms can help people become better educated, amass economic wealth, make careers and raise well-socialized children. He argued that economists should pay attention to social ties and culture (Coleman, 1990).

Political scientist Robert Putnam borrowed some of Coleman’s ideas on social capital in his seminal book, Making Democracy Work, to explain effective democratic governance in Italy. Putnam found that regional governments in Italy, which looked very similar on paper, worked very differently depending on which region had a rich array of voluntary social groups (Putnam, 1993). In a follow-up book, Bowling Alone, Putnam used social statistics to argue that the United States has experienced a decline in social capital in the late twentieth century as Americans became less likely to join groups such as churches, bowling alleys or civic organizations. Putnam argued that the problems facing U.S. democracy and governance can actually be traced to the decline in social connections (Putnam, 1995).

Putnam’s research has inspired other scholarly works and discussions on social and political change, including studies on social capital that pay tribute to such networks as significant in development of a democratic culture and participation of citizens. The Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement (CIRCLE) (2003) has compiled a comprehensive list of indicators of civic engagement, which include: voting in national elections, joining a political party, being a candidate for local office, and civic activism, such as writing letters to a newspaper about social or political concerns, collecting signatures for a petition, collecting money for a social cause and boycotting products or services because of social concerns. For citizens to be engaged in civic life, they must be equipped with certain skills such as knowledge and understanding of community issues, values that support a civic culture, a willingness to act to advance the public good, and the skills and ability to imagine a better society and direct social change (Pratte, 1988; Carpini, 2000). Political communication research has demonstrated that news media consumption and interpersonal political discussion play important roles in civic participation (McLeod et al., 1996; Shah et al., 2001). News media provide a resource for political discussion and create opportunities for exposure to conflicting viewpoints, encouraging political talk that might not otherwise occur (Mutz & Martin, 2001: Mutz, 2002). In turn, political discussion raises awareness about collective problems, highlights opportunities for involvement, and thereby promotes civic participation (McLeod et al., 1999; Kwak et al., 2005).

Citizen journalism adds another layer to civic engagement by creating opportunities for citizens to be involved in the production and distribution of media content. Citizen journalism has been defined as ‘the act of a citizen, or a group of citizens, playing an active role in the process of collecting, reporting, analyzing and disseminating news and information in order to provide independent, reliable, accurate, wide-ranging and relevant information that a democracy requires (Bowman and Willis, 2003, p. 9). This study also acknowledges and adopts as its definition and understanding of citizen journalism the participatory (Deuze et al., 2007) and user-centered (Hermida and Thurman, 2008) nature of this trend. As Rosen (2008) noted: “When the people formerly known as the audience employ the press tools they have in their possession to inform one another, that’s citizen journalism.”

Participatory media technologies that allow the creation and distribution of user-generated content have subverted the traditional power dynamics that separated sender and receiver, thus allowing for multiple discourse through blogs, podcasts, virtual reality (e.g. Second Life), collaborative technology (e.g. Wikipedia), social networking sites and video sharing sites (Freidman, 2005; Tancer, 2007; Birdsall, 2007). These technological developments as well as a cultural trend that increasingly encourages citizens to produce media content has led to a rising embrace and popularity of citizen journalism (Tapscott and Williams, 2006).

Citizen journalism impacts the democratic process by allowing citizens to be part of a conversation in the public sphere as envisaged in the ideals of Jurgen Habermas (1989) where public deliberation becomes an integral part of democracy and civic engagement. Scholars have argued that communication is essential in the development and sustenance of civic engagement (Dewey, 1927; Kim & Ball-Rokeach, 2006a). They argue that a community with a communication infrastructure that citizens can use as a storytelling network to share their lived experiences is a stronger community.

Kim and Ball-Rokeach have developed a theoretical framework that differentiates communities in terms of whether they have communication resources that can be activated for common purpose. In developing the communication infrastructure theory, they posit that there are three forms of story telling within communities: macro, meso. and micro storytelling agents. Macro-storytellers refers to the mainstream media which tend to focus on larger populations such as city, state, or a country. Meso-storytelling agents include neighborhood associations and tend to focus on one particular section of a place. Micro-storytelling agents are the individuals who live in a neighborhood. The theory confers significant importance to the  meso and micro story tellers. According to Kim and Ball-Rokeach, “when residents talk about their community in neighborhood council meetings, at a neighborhood block party, at the dinner table, or over the fence with neighbors, they become local storytelling agents — participants in an active imaging of their community,” (2006a, p. 179). They further argue that while each agent is important, the value of agents is multiplied when they come together to form a storytelling network. “In an ideal community, meso-and microstorytellers form an integrated network where each story teller stimulates the others to talk about the local community (Kim & Ball-Rokeach, 2006a, p. 181). The Kiowa County Media Center has been an effort to provide such an integrated communication network for the community.

Local Media Use and Civic Engagement

Numerous studies have linked local media use with civic engagement and community integration, what Stamm (1985) and other researchers, such as Rothenbuher, Mullen, DeLaurell, and Ryu (1996), have called “community ties.” In this sense, media content is seen as a vital component of one’s sense of belonging to a particular locale (Janowitz, 1952; Stamm, 1985; Rothenbuhler et al., 1996).  Community attachment and local media use do not have a causal impact on one another (Hoffman & Eveland, 2010), but the two concepts do have a strong relationship in the formation of individual civic engagement and the propensity of local individuals to be involved in community issues and events (Stamm, 1985; Rothenbuhler et al., 1996). Moreover, media play a key role in the local interpersonal communications infrastructure, the “neighborhood storytelling network,” through which integrated citizens share important information gleaned from media in face-to-face or computer-mediated conversations (cf., Hayden & Ball-Rokeach, 2007; Kim & Ball-Rokeach, 2006; Mehart, 2008).

Interestingly, while studies linking media content and consumption with community cognition and affection are numerous, few studies have attempted to determine if factors relating to community engagement are predictors of an individual’s propensity to actually create news content, a key element in citizen journalism projects. Studies do link such activities as writing letters to the editor with community engagement traits (CIRCLE, 2003), but there is little literature to establish how or if one’s attachment to a community translates into the willingness to contribute news and/or visual content to a newspaper or any kind of communications hub. Littau, Thorson and Bentley (2007) attempted to determine if community engagement was a predictor of reader propensity to actually contribute content to a citizen journalism newspaper project. The study was inconclusive on these variables, although the researchers did conclude that an open-source newspaper is a viable medium in the communications infrastructure of community-involved people (p. 21).

Citizen journalism projects have occupied the imagination of both the journalism and academic professions since the development of the concept nearly a decade ago. But studies about citizen journalism sites have primarily focused on the content and goals of such ventures (cf., Lacy, Duffy, Thorson & Fleming, 2010). While content is undoubtedly important, so are the perceptions and attitudes of the audience toward such projects. Citizen journalism is based on what Watson (2011) calls “the active audience” that is engaged, technically savvy and interactive in both consuming and providing content. To ensure the viability of citizen journalism as a community medium, then, we need audience studies that gauge the consumer attitudes and their perceived willingness to participate, especially in small towns and communities such as Greensburg and surrounding Kiowa County, where the media project is based on the assumption of community contributions.

The Kiowa County experiment in providing an electronic citizen journalism hub thus provides a unique lens through which scholars may view an actual audience perspective of an open source project. Such a study was first undertaken by Smethers, Freeland and Rake (2010), who conducted focus groups in Greensburg to ascertain the feelings of county residents toward the perceived benefits of the project. That study sought to determine the propensity of residents to accept an open-source news outlet as a bona fide source of local news, and to determine the propensity of users to regularly read and contribute information in audio and video formats. Panelists quickly realized the potential of the information portal as a storytelling medium and a community information hub. However, they also forecast that sustaining the project was only possible if the Media Center’s staff could conduct regular reporting and production training sessions to teach the skills involved, and panelists’ propensity to be active contributors was still mixed, based on how they saw their technical capabilities and how they viewed the journalistic value of possible contributions. The study did not probe the actual community engagement tendencies of the panelists.

This exploratory study seeks to ascertain attitudes of residents about the community information portal in the Kiowa County Media Center in Greensburg. Specifically, the research attempts to ascertain whether behaviors of community engagement may contribute to positive attitudes about the Center and people’s intentions to become regular contributors to the content of the computer-mediated information hub.

The research questions guiding this study are:

RQ1: What is the level of community engagement among residents of Kiowa County, Kansas?

RQ2: What are the attitudes of county residents towards the Kiowa County Media Center and citizens’ perceptions of the Center’s perceived benefits to the community?

RQ3: Beyond the known criteria of individual community engagement, what other factors are unique to the adoption of a computer-mediated communication hub?

METHOD

In line with Tse’s summary (1998) that outlines the multiple advantages of electronic surveys including cost, ease of process and speed, a 32-item online questionnaire containing semantic differential, dichotomous-choice and open-ended items was designed.  Following previous studies finding that civically engaged people are active local news consumers (Stamm, 1985; Rothenbuhleret al., 1996), researchers for this study sought to survey individuals who were likely to fit such a description, and in that regard, the subscription list for a local electronic newsletter, the Yellow Sheet, proved to be an effective purposive sample.  The Yellow Sheet was originally designed to provide daily emergency communications in the aftermath of the 2007 tornado. It was a necessity at the time, considering that the Kiowa County Signal’s seven-day news cycle was inadequate to meet the community’s “24/7” news needs.  The e-publication’s constant news updates and publication flexibility proved to be so popular that it remains today as an alternative source of local news. While the sample was not random and not without limitations, Yellow Sheet subscribers nonetheless represented local business owners and managers in this county of only 2,549 total residents.  Despite the age homogeneity––they were all over 30 years old ­­–– respondents were nonetheless judged to be knowledgeable about the Media Center and display characteristics of civic engagement.

Questions that sought to examine respondents’ levels of community engagement were consistent with Littau, Thorson and Bentley (2007). Other questions involved awareness of the Kiowa County Media Center, attitudes toward it, perceived difficulties in accessing or providing content to the Media Center, possible solutions to those obstacles, and respondents’ preferred news and information subject categories. Demographic questions were also asked. The questionnaire was initially pretested with six individuals who were not part of the targeted sample but were nonetheless familiar with the Media Center project and its mission.

An introductory letter about the project was emailed one week prior to the distribution of the questionnaire. Mindful of Dillman’s dictum (1978) that follow-up reminders should be sent one, three and seven weeks after an initial mailing, but also recognizing Andreson and Gansneder’s (1995) argument that the faster delivery speed of email requires a different and faster schedule of reminder notices, researchers sent weekly follow-up reminders during the three weeks of the questionnaire’s availability.

A total of 36 surveys were completed and returned for a response rate of nearly 21 percent (20.8 percent).  Below, responses are reported through percentages on items in the semantic differential and dichotomous-choice responses, in addition to comments obtained through more qualitative open-ended questions. All spelling, punctuation and grammatical errors appear in this study as they appeared in the survey responses.

RESULTS

RQ1: What is the level of community engagement among residents of Kiowa County, Kansas?

Results suggest a high level of community engagement among survey respondents, as measured by behaviors such as participation in activities or causes, politics and elections, and current affairs. All but one respondent reported Kiowa County residency, and literally every respondent reported volunteering in the community to some degree, with nearly 28 percent (27.8 percent) volunteering “Very Often,” 33.3 percent volunteering “Often” and 38.9 percent volunteering “Occasionally.”

Similarly, only one respondent reported never working with someone to solve a community problem. Most, 38.9 percent, worked “Occasionally” with others to solve a community problem, while 33.3 percent “Often” did, and one-quarter “Very Often” did.

Almost half (47.2 percent) “Occasionally” participated in fundraising for a community charity or cause, with 30.6 percent and 13.9 percent, respectively, participating in fundraising “Often” or “Very Often.”

Reflective of the older demographic of respondents — none were less than 30 years old and 59.4 percent were 50 or over — 80 percent of the respondents (n=35) reported voting in elections “Very Often” with 14.3 percent voting “Often” and 2.9 percent “Never” voting or voting “Occasionally.” That voting behavior did not necessarily extend to political volunteerism. The majority (58.3 percent) “Never” volunteered to work for a candidate for political office, although one-third (33.3 percent) “Occasionally” did. A total of 5.6 percent and 2.8 percent, respectively, “Often” or “Very Often” volunteered to work for a candidate or political organization. Respondents were likely to voice their opinions to people in office, however. The overwhelming majority (77.8 percent) “Occasionally” contacted a public official about an issue, and 5.6 percent “Often” did. A total of 8.3 percent “Very Often” did, which was the same percentage as respondents who “Never” contacted a public official.

In response to other indicators of community engagement, 81.3 percent of respondents (n=24) reported owning their home and 71.9 percent belong to a church or other religious group. Asked about membership in community organizations, all who responded (n=16) listed traditional groups such as the Lions Club and the Chamber of Commerce.

Fewer than one-third of the respondents (31.3 percent, n=32) reported subscribing to the local weekly newspaper. Respondents nevertheless reported high levels of interest in community affairs. A total of 87.1 reported following city and county news via traditional media, the Internet or other sources “Very Often” or “Often,” and 80.6 percent said they talk about current affairs with others “Very Often” or “Often.”

While they may not be subscribing to the newspaper, nearly 72 percent (71.9 percent, n=32) of respondents reported contributing a news item to it, which could bode well for the Media Center’s goal of providing citizen-generated content. General news was the most frequently contributed followed by birth announcements, social news, church news, weddings/engagements, club news and Chamber of Commerce/economic development news. One respondent reported contributing a weekly news column for several years.

Utilizing measures of involvement well established in community engagement scholarship, respondents displayed a high-level of participation in community activities and issues, perhaps as a result of being an older demographic group with long-standing roots. Of those who reported their number of years of Kiowa County residency (n=30) — as opposed to “all my life”, etc. — the median was 30 years.

RQ2: What are the attitudes of county residents towards the Kiowa County Media Center and citizens’ perceptions of the Center’s perceived benefits to the community?

Respondents (n=32) responded affirmatively to a qualifying question: “Have you heard of the Media Center…?” Most frequently, they reported learning about it from the local newspaper, friends/word of mouth and “through all means of publicity.” Typical of small communities, responses also included, “They are located next to my office,” “watched it being built,” “If you live in Kiowa County, who hasn’t heard of the Media Center,” and, simply, “I live here.”

Nearly two-thirds (65.6 percent) of the respondents said they saw the Media Center benefiting Kiowa County. Responses about both the positive and negative aspects of the project were sought. Some respondents expressed unequivocal enthusiasm and several cited benefits to young people. One respondent said, “They work closely with the school. Kids love it. Administration of the school think Media Center can walk on water. Will broadcast games and public service meetings etc. It’s fantastic,” with another saying it’s “Another avenue for learning for the young people,” and yet another saying “students of Kiowa County will benefit from the exposure to the technology offered.” Finally, respondents said it will allow “new and more opportunities for young people to discover new passions in their lives. and give them something new to work towards or to be a door to do something else in a professional career” and it will “give the younger people something to be involved in.” Other respondents said the Media Center can promote the environmental goals of the county, it will help tell the Kiowa County story, it will promote public outreach and it can, in the future, offer worthwhile programming. “It will bring our population into the electronic age,” said another respondent.

Most of the negative responses centered on costs to the county versus perceived benefits; as one respondent said, “The county should not be in the media business. What is being funded is not worth what is being produced.” Another respondent said, “Not sure how that is a necessity to have to spend money on,” and yet another said, “I believe the cost to the county will be greater than any benefit.” One respondent pointed out the unequal access: “I don’t think it’s necessary. The basketball games did not broadcast right and if you don’t have a computer you can get no benefits.” One respondent, prefacing the comments by saying, “Really I wanted to say maybe” there are benefits, but “It is costing the county way to much for what little benefit I see. Do we need that whole center to videotape Santa with Kids? It isn’t doing anything like they initially put in their business plan.” Other respondents said they are not sure — or not sure at this early stage — what the positive or negative benefits are or will be. A couple of respondents saw a political component to the Media Center, including one who said the sentiment is shared by “a lot of people here in town.” “It seemed like an unnecessary expenditure and costly luxury wanted by only a few citizens with political pull,” said another.

Of the 27 respondents who listed categories of information they like to see on the Media Center’s Web portal (local government news, high school events, senior citizen news, community events, obituaries, etc.), most listed “all of the above” or “all of the above and more.” Some respondents specifically identified school news, community events, local government news, and news of interest to senior citizens such as “interviews with older generations about family and local history made before this generation passes.” Identified, but slightly less often, were obituaries, church news, business news, organizational news and current events. One respondent wanted “any community information that is not available on other local websites” and another said, with emphasis: “Live and/or taped coverage of City Council and County Commissioner meetings. Working with the Kiowa County Signal newspaper — not in competition against it — to further information dissemination in the community….” Some respondents reported never using the Media Center website and others said there is no content they would like to see on it.

Although a majority of respondents (53.1 percent) said they would “Occasionally” contribute information to the Media Center (news stories, social news, pictures or videos, etc.), over one-third (37.5 percent) said they would “Never” contribute content. Nearly 10 percent (9.4 percent) said they would contribute content “Often” but no one predicted contributing content “Very Often.”

Respondents universally were aware of the Media Center, and a majority saw benefits to it, particularly among the younger demographic. But concern about costs versus benefits and lack of full community buy-in was observable. While respondents seemed appreciative of the local-news and information potential of the Media Center’s content and would occasionally contribute content, a sizeable percentage of respondents did not plan to participate.

RQ3: Beyond the known criteria of individual community engagement, what other factors are unique to the adoption of a computer-mediated communication hub?

Researchers sought to examine what factors and/or obstacles may need special consideration due to the nontraditional nature of a multi-platform, open-source, nonprofit computer-mediated communication center. In response to the question, “What do you see as the obstacles to your getting involved (lack of equipment, technical skills, time, interest, etc.?),” lack of technical skills was the most frequently cited obstacle that respondents (n=26) perceived would prevent them from creating content for the Media Center Web portal, followed closely by lack of time. The next most frequently cited obstacle was a collapsed category of lack of interest and lack of relevance, presumably meaning the Media Center’s perceived lack of relevance. Lack of equipment also was cited.

In response to a question seeking perceived solutions to factors and/or obstacles preventing participation in the Media Center (n=18), the most frequently suggested solution to perceived obstacles was a collapsed category of adult classes, workshops and volunteers to help would-be contributors’ content creation, perhaps an unsurprising finding given the number of respondents who saw lack of technical skills as problematic. On a related note, one respondent noted that (s)he needed to be “about 50 years younger!” The second most frequently cited solution related to community awareness of the project. “They need a PR plan to sell the benefit to the public,” said one respondent. “That thing is a divisive issue here.” Another respondent suggested more publicity in the Kiowa County Signal, which is the local weekly newspaper; in the County Research and Extension Agent’s weekly electronic newsletter; and on the community’s sign. Yet another suggested “Better PR advertising the Media Center’s offerings. Working within the community to offer program & services that are actually needed. Working with the Kiowa County Signal on a shared information platform.” One respondent, acknowledging that corporations have donated much to the Media Center, said corporate donations of equipment should be explored to an even greater extent because “the locals are getting pretty tapped out after the tornado.” Solutions to the obstacles of time included “retirement” and the unlikely “more hours in a day.” The respondent who cited the solution, “And more people to watch my son,” also may have been responding to a perceived lack of time.

Throughout the results, there appears to be a small, but noticeable, minority who see no value to the Media Center and have no plans to participate at least partly because of a perceived political component to the Media Center’s inception and at least partly because of the public-dollar financing component. Fifty percent of the respondents (n=32) said they do not support using public funds to finance the Media Center. Those who did ranged from somewhat supportive (28.1 percent), to supportive (15.6 percent) to very supportive (6.3 percent).

Other

Because of concerns reported in earlier focus group research (Smethers, et al., 2010), one question asked about perceptions of duplication between the Media Center and the local weekly newspaper. Most (61.3 percent, n=31) perceived “Some Duplication and 9.7 percent perceived “A Lot of Duplication.” Still, a substantial number (29 percent) perceived “No Duplication.”

In addition to demographic results reported earlier, respondents’ age categories (n=32) were: 18-29, 0 percent; 30-49 years, 40.6 percent; 50-64 years, 37.5 percent; 65-74 years, 15.6 percent; and 75 and older, 6.3 percent.

More than half (54.8 percent, n=31) of respondents were male; 45.2 were female.

Nearly half (48.4 percent, n=31) of respondents graduated from college or technical school, nearly two-fifths (38.7 percent) had postgraduate education and 12.9 percent graduated from high school.

DISCUSSION

This exploratory study examines community engagement and the acceptance of a computer-mediated communication hub in the rural Kiowa County, Kansas, community of Greensburg.  Results suggest a high level of community engagement among survey respondents, as measured by behaviors often associated with community engagement and affection (Littau, Thorson and Bentley, 2007), including community volunteerism, a propensity to vote in elections, experience working with others to solve community problems, fundraising, interest in community affairs, home ownership, and membership in churches, civic and social organizations. Community-engagement results may be influenced by the fact that respondents represented an older demographic of longtime Kiowa County residents. It can be further surmised that residents who opted to return and rebuild their homes and businesses after the 2007 tornado devastated Greensburg were, by definition, people who had made an affirmative, proactive decision to engage in their community.

The previously mentioned criteria for the success of citizen journalism projects cited by Watson (2011) –– engagement, technical skills and user dependency on interactivity in consuming and providing content –– is relevant when examining the results of this study, where a mostly community-engaged sample population expressed some skepticism toward the news portal, which, by the admission of many subjects, relates to their perceived skills.  This is the second time that research in Greensburg and its surrounding county has reflected some reservations about individual citizen use and propensity to participate (cf., Smethers, Freeland & Rake, 2010).  By the admission of many respondents in this study, there is a question relating to the technical competence required to participate in Media Center functions. The overall older age of the respondents in this study, a group that has been accustomed to traditional media consumption and less reliant on computer-related platforms, may not see themselves as ready for the interactive nature of a citizen journalism venture. Indeed, that sentiment could explain the tendency of respondents to single out young people as prime beneficiaries of the Media Center project.

Obviously, this points to education in video and audio storytelling as a major factor of sustainability, but it also suggests a possible “technophobia” (Brosnan, 1998) toward the skills needed for participation. The need to overcome that barrier is among the most important findings of the study because sustainability of the Media Center is dependent on broad-based participation among county residents, including the older demographic. To date, the vast majority of participation and content creation involves high-school students who may relocate to other areas after completing their education. That said, it must be acknowledged that the Media Center has identified education and training of community participants as a need, a need that could not be fully realized in the short time since the Media Center’s inception.

A related concern is the identifiable lack of buy-in from a small segment of the community. The fact that more than one-third of respondents reported that they would never contribute content to the Center should not be overlooked by this or any entity seeking to establish a similar model for communitywide storytelling. It can be acknowledged that the social dynamics of small-town America may well include a small, but often vocal, contingent whose lackluster response to innovation can be frustrating to community leaders. However, in this study, a measureable number of people, who had exhibited high levels of community engagement, also called for more and better marketing, public relations and advertising. As every respondent indicated awareness of the Media Center, a promotional/public relations campaign would be advantageous if it focuses less on the Center’s existence and more on the value of programming and benefits of participation to individuals and community. Further, soliciting more community involvement and feedback prior to content creation could help inform what types of news and information would be most desirable.

While this study is largely exploratory, it is significant in two ways. First, it fills an existing void in communication and civic engagement scholarship. Literature on civic engagement suggests that media consumption, as well as writing letters to the editor on community issues, are indicators of civic engagement (CIRCLE, 2003). Similarly, Kim and Ball-Rokeach (2006) view the existence of a communication infrastructure and micro- and meso-storytellers as vital to the civic health of communities. But as the findings from this study seem to point out, computer-mediated communication infrastructures pose unique challenges such as fear of technology, lack of skills, and demographic patterns that must be considered. Even in communities with higher levels of civic engagement, citizens’ propensity to contribute to a local community journalism project might hinge on factors and indicators that are not currently addressed by the literature. There is clearly a gap that ought to be acknowledged in the literature as a possible hindrance to the success of technology-based community communication hubs.

Second, this study reveals a void in existing literature: studies examining the need for community involvement in designing information hubs. By its very nature, citizen journalism breaks down the gatekeeping role of traditional media organizations in determining what is newsworthy and vests such power in community storytellers. It is equally important to remove or address the gatekeeping role of civic leaders while designing such communication hubs. Some of the resistance detected in the survey results stem from a feeling of community exclusion in the initial decision making process, underscoring the need to rethink how noble community journalism innovations are introduced in communities.

Last is the thorny issue of financing the Media Center and similar proposals. Half of the respondents did not want public funding for the center, which could be state and federal grants and other monies and, perhaps more to the point, local tax dollars. Clearly, the Kiowa County Media Center must establish independent revenue streams, a challenge exacerbated by its nonprofit status. Current plans include identifying and cultivating revenue sources in larger regional cities, which could at least temporarily shift attention from the citizen journalism, community-storytelling goal of the Media Center. That said, partnerships with commercial enterprises beyond the community might be a necessary forerunner to achieving a sustainable citizen journalism hub.

LIMITATIONS AND FUTURE RESEARCH

Although the sample for this study can be regarded as a limitation, the purposive nature of the population surveyed is nonetheless important, since it was necessary to yield subjects who were most likely to contribute information germane to this study. In this case,  the non-random sample yielded valuable feedback from local business leaders and managers who were familiar with the Media Center and the community, and they provided unique and meaningful input on the central research issue: if a community builds a state-of-the-art multimedia operation that relies on citizen-produced news, will local residents support it? Because of their standing in the community, the 36 people who completed the survey — 20.8 percent of the total solicited — were believed to possess characteristics of civic engagement who would also be active local news consumers (Stamm, 1895; Rothenbuhler, et al., 1996), an assumption that data supported. Further, the age homogeneity — no respondent was under 30 years old — was not unanticipated because the respondents were established in the business community. Thus, they were judged to possess both sufficient knowledge of the research issue and have the capacity and willingness to participate in the research.

Clearly, the findings reported here open the door for further research that would provide richer data, such as a more broadly focused survey distributed to the 2,549 residents of Kiowa County to gauge their levels of civic engagement, their degree of support for the Media Center initiative, and their willingness to participate in content creation for the Center. Additionally, an analysis of the origins of the content distributed by the Media Center would suggest actual levels of citizen participation. Certainly, future studies should focus on a key finding yielded here: effective methods for recruiting and teaching laypersons the fundamentals of audio and video production and storytelling. Such studies need to delve into attitudes toward learning these new skills and how to overcome certain barriers associated with teaching such skills to adults.

While the Kiowa County Commons with its multi-million dollar Media Center was a direct result of a tornado that devastated the tiny, Midwestern rural community, this and future research could provide prescriptive insight for other rural communities that could find such a model — albeit whatever the size and scope — useful in the creation and distribution of the communities’ news of the day.

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About the Authors

Dr. Sam C. Mwangi is an associate professor at the A.Q. Miller School of Journalism and Mass Communications at Kansas State University.

Dr. J. Steven Smethers is an associate professor at the A.Q. Miller School of Journalism and Mass Communications at Kansas State University.

Professor Bonnie Bressers is an associate professor at the A.Q. Miller School of Journalism and Mass Communications at Kansas State University.

mwangi-cj2014

 

Jeremy Littau

This research introduces a new measure of social capital for users of online news communities by applying social capital concepts used to measure networks in real-world communities.  “Web-network” social capital measures the strength of ties created online for the benefit of engagement that is non-local.  Using the concept of the “networked individual” as a theoretical tool, this research sampled users of news sites that offered online community forums for comment.  The results show that traditional social capital measures rooted in local community increase both local forms of engagement and engagement in causes that are more national than local.

Work regarding civic ties and engagement by researchers such as Putnam (2000) tends to look at people’s relationships with others in the community, in conjunction with media variables such as news use, as a predictor of their civic behavior both in their hometown and nationally. Others have looked at how online community joining has increased the tendency to participate in one’s own local community (Norris, 2002). This research attempts to study those two concepts together more explicitly by examining the growing trend of news sites that offer online forums for community conversation and are built around niches (whether they be local geography or topics of interest).

Despite concerns scholars have voiced about the potentially isolating effects of heavy Web use (Ng & Wiemer-Hastings, 2005; Becker & Mark, 1999), the ease of joining online communities has led to people being engaged in places far away with those they’ve never met as the Web has evolved to include more social and networked forms of communication, particularly on news sites that cater to niche interests. At the center of this divergence is the question of how and when the use of social networks online isolates users, enhances offline actions, or represents a new type of engagement. Recent research on Americans’ Internet use from the USC Annenberg School for Communication adds to the picture. In 2013, about 62% of Americans reported some type of activity in an online community, defined as a range of uses from specific sites built to cater to user interests to social media sites such as Facebook or dating sites. This percentage reflects accelerated growth from the 2009 version of the study, wherein only 15% of respondents reported the same type of activity (Center for the Digital Future, 2009). In addition, 76% of respondents in the 2013 study reported that online involvement has not detracted from their offline community participation, and 33% of online community members reported taking an offline action due to some online activity at least once a month (Center for the Digital Future, 2013).

The purpose of this research is to understand the relationship between online community participation on online news sites that offer community forums, specifically by examining the benefits that come with that type of network engagement via a rethinking of social capital research. Whereas past research tends to focus on online participation for offline benefit, this study also is interested in understanding actions that are specifically about benefiting the online community itself. Such actions can be a stabilizing force for the community itself as well as a driver of continued engagement with the news content. News use in particular is highly correlated with community engagement (Beaudoin & Thorson, 2004; Shah et al., 2001b), so a logical next step would be to understand the role news communities themselves play. Traditional social capital measures, which measure network strength and attempt to assess community engagement, are inadequate for understanding how online communities are built and maintained. Understanding how communities built around news exchange work would help create new communities and improve existing ones. Given that both engagement with news and involvement in one’s community (whether local or virtual) is a byproduct, it is a question worth exploring for news practitioners.

LITERATURE REVIEW

Online media in the age of the “networked individual”

Internet use among Americans is higher than it has ever been, with time spent online at 20.4 hours per week on average.  Most of the distribution of time spent seems to be clustered with either light or heavy users of the Internet, with light users reporting an average of 2.8 hours per week compared to 42 hours per week for heavy users.  While some forms of Internet use can take place via web pages, self-reports of use of online communities has been on a steady rise the past few years (Center for the Digital Future, 2013).

The term “community” as applied to online (or “virtual”) worlds has undergone a steady evolution as the Web has evolved from a static product to one that is more interactive . Wellman and Gulia (1999) note that offline communities are traditionally defined in terms of geographic space but that online communities that exist have complicated the picture because of the Internet’s ability to transcend local ties. Thus came attempts to define “virtual” forms of community, which consist of organizations of people made possible by communication technology. Rheingold (1994, p. 58) was the first to define virtual community, saying it is a group of people who “exchange words and ideas” through a technologically created medium such as an online bulletin board, but this definition was not specific enough given the rapid development in ways people communicate online via different social offerings. Others have added layers of refinement by describing other features and uses. Virtual community is community enabled by the use of a networked communication technology, bonding people along lines other than geography (Hiltz & Wellman, 1997). While virtual community does not preclude bonding along geographic lines, other factors that aid in the formation of virtual communities include shared interests, purpose, goals, and values.  Early research explored geographic features and boundaries (Preece, 2000; Dennis, Pootheri & Natarajan, 1998) as well as characteristics that make up interpersonal relationships such as shared traits or affiliations (Haythornthwaite & Wellman, 1998; Preece, 2000; Wellman, 1997). Preece (2000, p. 3) defines online community as “any virtual social space where people come together to get and give information or support, to learn, or to find company” and notes that it exists independent of geographic borders.

The “locality” in this sense is in the shared interest, not in the geographic sense of place, and it is important to news organizations because they traditionally have organized themselves by geographic region.  As one would find in a real-world community, the common bond is a shared interest and the existence of norms and protocols that govern virtual community life (Brint, 2001; Wilson & Peterson, 2002) as well as information exchange. Porter (2004, para. 10) defined virtual community as “an aggregation of individuals or business partners who interact around a shared interest, where the interaction is at least partially supported and/or mediated by technology and guided by some protocols or norms.” Ridings and Gefen (2004) note two other factors that are critical in defining virtual community. The first is that the collection of people must be defined as more than having a virtual space to visit; there must be clear structures that facilitate community norms and building long-term relationships with one another. Second, in virtual communities people form an attachment to the group such that they visit often.

For the purpose of this research, a study by Ridings, Gefen and Arize (2002) offers a definition of virtual community that seems the most complete and flexible given the different types of community that have emerged on the web, and indeed it is commonly used among those who research virtual community. Ridings et al. define virtual community as “groups of people with common interests and practices that communicate regularly and for some duration in an organized way over the Internet through a common location or mechanism” (p. 273). This definition is far-reaching and flexible enough to encapsulate participation in many types of Web-based communities, from bulletin boards to social networks such as Facebook.

Scholars such as Putnam (1995) have famously argued that online associations have the potential to balkanize people rather than bring them together, but there is evidence to support the idea that the Internet can bring people together. The Internet’s relatively short history does show that the first adopters to any new communication technology trend often have been people who are marginalized due to holding a minority viewpoint or because they are a particular minority group in real-world culture (Rodzvilla, 2002), but the Internet also plays a strong role in bonding people of like interests, beliefs, and life experiences together (Norris, 2002) and has the power to create bridges between disparate groups due to egalitarian discourse online (Lin, 2007) or to accomplish other types of goals. For example, adolescents have reported finding greater social satisfaction and connection online, and people with disabilities also have used the Web to create social connections that are difficult in everyday life (Hasselbring & Glaser, 2000). Similarly, in virtual gaming worlds players accomplish tasks together in cooperation for mutual benefit (Ducheneaut et al., 2006). As it relates to online communities, online community members tend to be highly social and possess strong communication skills (Lee & Lee, 2010).

In thinking about people and how they interact both online and offline, the notion that these are separate experience arguably is a false dichotomy. Rainie and Wellman (2012) argue for the concept of the “networked individual” in an era where much of our web interaction is socially connected. In their model, which provides a theoretical layer to understanding Internet use from a networked perspective, individuals do not exist solely offline or online. Instead, individuals shift with ease between online and offline spaces, often occupying both at the same time. Offline community life and online community life are constantly interfacing with one another even while serving as discrete modes of communication at times.  In this view, while online communities do represent a new type of public that is distinct from offline publics, they are not distinct by the fact that they are separate. Instead, the conclusion from Rainie and Wilson is that we need to define online vs. offline community according to their respective functions, the actions one takes in those communities, and the locus of who is affected by those actions.

To do so requires examining network characteristics and outcomes, and the framework used for this study is the concept of social capital. Popularized by Robert Putnam in Bowling Alone, social capital is the idea that communities gain strength and work better when people take advantage of social ties to work together for mutual benefit in the form of civic engagement behaviors such as voting, volunteering, or aiding others in need (Putnam, 2000).  The core benefit is that people gain a sense of efficacy needed to change their communities for the better when they are empowered to help others through social relationships. People’s attitudes toward institutions such as government are key markers of social capital, but so is a person’s use of news for democratic purpose and association with civic groups because the latter creates networks necessary for exchange and reciprocity (Putnam, 1995, 2000).

Social capital research has two distinct scholarly streams of progression.  The first path, which invokes Bourdieu (1986) and Coleman (1988), focuses on networks between people as a type of roadway for reciprocity.  In Bourdieu’s view, economic transaction is still the building block of societal relations, but it is built within a system of social exchange.  He defines social capital as networked obligations (“connections”) that in certain circumstances can be converted to economic capital. Coleman builds on Bourdieu’s thinking as it relates to the use of social capital in the transmission of resources.  He defines social capital as a network or social structure that allows for certain actions by actors to take place within that system.  For Coleman, the benefit of social capital is that it allows a person in a community to access resources via weak-tie affiliations that they do not have via their own bonded networks (Coleman, 1988). Social capital, which he calls the changes in relationships between people that facilitate action, benefits everyone in a community when it is invested, and the benefit is that it gives people in that community access to physical and human capital.  Similarly, Lin (2001, p. 6) defines social capital as “investment in relationships with expected returns” by using network relationships to serve as ways of helping and vouching for one another in economic or idea exchange.

A second stream made famous several years later by Putnam (2000) takes a less-networked approach and homes in more on the idea of generalized trust (Foley & Edwards, 1999).  In the Putnam conception of social capital, a “virtuous circle” exists between norms, networks, and social trust that spur participation in one’s community in a self-feeding way. Network is merely a variable in social capital, not the basis of the concept itself (Putnam, 2000).  This conception combines networks and participation efforts into a definition of social capital that is distinctly different from the Bourdieu and Coleman conception because engagement then becomes a measure of networks rather than an outcome variable. Unlike the Bourdieu/Coleman branch of research, which sees engagement as an outcome of social capital created by networks (engagement is a dependent variable predicted by social capital), Putnam tends to argue that engagement is a sign of social capital.  This different conception of the relationship between networks and engagement is one reason why scholars have argued that social capital is an ill-defined concept in scholarship (Edwards & Foley, 1998).

The drawback to Putnam’s approach is there is no measure of network quality embedded in his conception. Merely having trust networks are a factor leading an individual around the virtuous circle, in Putnam’s conception, but this relationship doesn’t include measures of network importance, cohesion, type, or quality. In doing so, this conception assumes that networks lead to other factors on the virtuous circle without looking at the factors of how or why. This is why scholars have attempted to understand networks better, and in doing so treat community engagement as the outgrowth of strong, high-quality networks. This research will operate under the same principle and use Coleman’s conception of social capital.

Within the concept of social capital are two distinct forms: bridging and bonding. Bonding social capital exists between members of groups, binding together small homogeneous units such as families, ethnic groups, or religious communities. Bridging social capital consists of heterogeneous ideological and social connections between members of separate bonded groups that provide an avenue for both groups to benefit via a transfer of knowledge or resources (Putnam, 1995). Bridging social capital works because of these “weak-tie” relationships that exist between bonded members, allowing a members of a bonded community to share resources using the social connection created by the weak-tie bridge (Granovetter, 1973). The Internet is good at making weak-tie connections and diversifying a person’s real-world connections, but it also is useful in bonding groups in online community environments (Norris 2002; Hampton, Lee & Her, 2011). An even better predictor is news use. Researchers have found a consistent link between news use and social capital in communities both at the local and regional level, particularly for print and Internet-based sites (Beaudoin & Thorson, 2004; Shah et al., 2001b)

As noted earlier, most scholarship looks at social capital with offline forms of engagement as an outcome variable. Shah et al.  (2002) found that time spent online had positive relationships with engagement in the form of volunteerism and associations.  Others pointed to clear signs that reciprocity was not only happening online, but also that it was serving the purpose of bringing people together across geography for offline action (Wellman et al., 2001; Wellman & Hampton, 1999).  Shah found the same use differences that helped determine whether television use was positively or negatively correlated with social capital (entertainment vs.  information seeking) also applied to the Web, and in fact that generations that were heavily criticized by Putnam as low social capital generators actually were showing more signs of using the Web to connect socially with others in prosocial offline ways (Shah et al., 2001a; Shah et al., 2001b).  Still, there seems to be some real-world influence that is necessary to connect social capital with online community use. Lee and Lee (2010) found that key markers such as trust were missing in online community users unless they possessed high amounts of it in the real world, underscoring Rainie and Wellman’s argument that the online and offline self influence one another.

Williams (2006) found support for the existence of both online and offline social capital that contains both bridging and bonding forms. In this conception, offline social capital is offline engagement for offline benefits and online social capital is engagement in online community for offline benefits. This research attempts to expand on Williams’ work. Rainie and Wellman (2102) argue that online and offline community are distinct elements even as they are intertwined. If this is true, then we should be able to identify a type of social capital that is created online for the benefit of an online community. This research seeks to uncover that variable, called “web-network social capital.”

The research reported here uses the conceptions found in Williams, but for the sake of clarity the variables are renamed.  The “offline” social capital that Williams used will be “local community social capital” for this research, while the “online” version will be “Web-local social capital” to emphasize the ties that are created online for offline benefit in local community, as illustrated in the following figure:

FIGURE 1: COMPARISON OF LOCAL COMMUNITY, WEB-LOCAL, AND WEB-NETWORK SOCIAL CAPITAL

	Localcommunity	Web-local	Web- network
Relationships formed …	Locally	Online	Online
Benefits of formed relationships exist …	Locally	Locally	Online

The reason for this renaming is that “Web-network social capital,” will be introduced in this study as a way of distinguishing online ties created for the benefit of online networks and communities.  These concepts inform the following research question.

RQ1: Is web-network social capital a concept that is distinct from offline and online forms of social capital?

Social capital and local engagement

This network approach is how Williams (2006) conceived of the relationship between online media and social capital.  By extending on the work Norris (2002) did, Williams conceived of social capital much as Coleman did by noting that it was explained by network ties via bridging and bonding.  Williams then measured bridging and bonding within both online and offline contexts, accounting for results that show social capital can be created in both contexts and that these network ties can be separate from one another.   Online community users report more involvement in clubs and volunteer organizations than non-online community users (Center for the Digital Future, 2009), and thus those who use these communities who report high levels of local-community and Web-local should report higher levels of different types of engagement as their media usage creates stronger and wider social bonds via social capital.  The following hypotheses, then, will serve to examine whether the measures used in this study are in line with past findings.

H_1a: There is a positive relationship between local community bonding social capital and local civic engagement in virtual communities.

H_1b: There is a positive relationship between local community bridging social capital and local civic engagement in virtual communities.

H_2a: There is a positive relationship between Web-local bonding social capital and local civic engagement in virtual communities.

H_2b: There is a positive relationship between Web-local bridging social capital and local civic engagement in virtual communities.

These hypotheses, based on the past research previously discussed, will be used for two purposes.  First, they test to see whether relationships that have been previously found in online research apply to online communities.  Second, they are a test of whether social capital as it exists in the real world applies to these online settings.  In that way, these hypotheses are the beginning of an argument about how social capital exists in virtual communities and offer a way of determining face validity to the Web-network social capital construct that will be discussed in the next section.

Social capital and distance engagement

One additional problem comes in differentiating engagement behaviors Putnam (2000) noted as types of “checkbook democracy.”  He posited that a weaker form of engagement is affiliation in national groups that do advocacy but require no commitment beyond a donation.  The ease of joining such groups, he argued, meant it was a form of joining but not as meaningful as joining in a local community.  At the same time, recent presidential election cycles showed a new type of trend on the Web, that of people volunteering to staff phone banks for candidates in faraway districts or donating money to candidates for whom they could not vote due to regional location (Banks, 2009).  In addition, research has shown that reciprocity between people who have never met in the real world but know one another online is taking place in the context of Web communities.  Traditional social capital research has not been able to capture this type of non-local civic engagement, but it seems as if this is fundamentally distinct from checkbook democracy.

This research proposes that behaviors that constitute this non-local type of civic engagement be added to Putnam’s checkbook democracy measure to split out some types of engagement from traditional community-based ones.  One of these non-local indices is based on non-geographic political and cause-based work (distance activism) and one is based on acts of reciprocity and aid through distance (distance helping).  The following hypotheses examine these relationships.

H_3a: There is a relationship between Web-local social capital (both bridging and bonding) and distance helping in virtual communities.

H_3b: There is a  relationship between Web-local social capital (both bridging and bonding) and distance activism in virtual communities.

H_4a: There is a positive relationship between Web-network social capital (both bridging and bonding) and distance helping in virtual communities.

H_4b: There is a  relationship between Web-network social capital (both bridging and bonding) and distance activism in virtual communities.

METHOD

This research employed an online survey method that sampled users from four different niche online news communities.  The specific communities used were chosen because they tend to transcend geography, and thus the topic and theme for the site was more important than the location.  Past research has shown strong gravitation to topics such as politics, parenting, sports, and religion, among others (Porter, 2004; Preece, 2000, 2001) and this served as the starting point in choosing sites.  The survey sampled users from a political Web community, a parenting Web community, a religion Web community, and a sports Web community.  All of the sites used in this study tend to draw mostly users from the United States, according to the sites’ Webmasters, but within that context the sites draw users from many parts of the country. The sites contain both a mix of content and community discussion through forums that users can use to interact with one another via the Web. This mixture was a key characteristic of the sites chosen, as we were interested in news sites that had a forum for community conversation, not merely sites that were entirely built around a forum.

A key methodological problem with online surveys is that they are a convenience sample, and thus not always an accurate look at the population being studied (Williams & Monge, 2001).  To mitigate this problem, the method used for this study employed a random sampling technique by contacting individual members of the community in order to solicit responses in coordination with a message from the site operators so that users would know it was coming from a trusted source.  From this we generated a response rate statistic. The number of surveys filled out served as the numerator, while the number of potential participants served as the denominator.

Responses to the survey (N=582) were generated over a six-week period, across the four sites.  The response rate for the four sites, based on using only the randomly selected participants as outlined in the methods section, was 32.1%, which represents 582 responses from 1,808 selected users.  Several variables were scales constructed from several items.  All of these scales were analyzed using exploratory factor analysis (EFA) with Varimax rotation, and values below an absolute value of 0.6 were not included in the scale.  Only factors with an Eigenvalue greater than 1.0 were accepted for analysis.  The indices also were tested for reliability using Cronbach’s alpha, with a minimum threshold of 0.7 required for a reliable scale.

Independent variables

Three independent variables measuring the types of social capital proposed by this research were used in this study (local community social capital, Web-local social capital, and Web-network social capital).  Each of these variables consisted of multi-item indices for the factors of bridging and bonding, consistent with past research, and the questions used to build each are found in the appendix.   The local community social capital and Web-local social capital scales come from Williams (2006), and the Web-network social capital scale was created by using the questions and making them specific to online networks only.

Local community social capital is defined as the degree to which people were connected socially to people in their local community.  It had two facets consistent with the literature, “bonding” and “bridging” and is consistent with Williams’ version of offline social capital.  Bonding is typified by such questions as, “The people I interact with in my neighborhood or community would be good job references for me.”  Bridging is typified by such questions as, “Interacting with people in my neighborhood or community gives me new people to talk to.”  The variable based on this construct was measured using a 5-point Likert scale.  EFA found two factors that accounted for 65.03% of the variance and values under 0.6 were discarded (see Appendix 1 for the questions).  Reliability scores for local community bonding ( = .92) and local community bridging ( =.94) were both acceptable using the .70 threshold.

Web-local social capital (IV/DV₂) was defined as the degree to which people are connected socially to people in their online community in ways that bring offline benefit and is based on Williams’ version of online social capital. What distinguishes this version from the local community social capital construct is that while the benefits come to people in terms of improved trust and contentment in the context of their home community, the networks and relationships that facilitate these benefits are created in online contexts similar to what Norris (2002) found. Consistent with the local community version of this measure, it has two facets found in the literature, “bonding” and “bridging.” Bonding is typified by such questions as “When I feel lonely, there are several people on this community site I can talk to.” Bridging is typified by such questions “Interacting with people on this community site makes me interested in things that happen outside of my town.” This variable was measured using a 5-point Likert scale. Factor analysis for Web-local social capital was performed using the same method as the method for local community social capital. EFA found two factors that accounted for 62.67% of the variance and values under 0.6 were discarded (see Appendix 1 for the questions).  Reliability scores for Web-local bonding ( = .94) and Web-local bridging ( = .92) were both acceptable using the .70 threshold.

The final independent variable used for this research is the new construct being tested in this research. Web-network social capital (IV/DV₃) was defined as the degree to which people are connected socially to people in their online community in ways that bring benefit to the online community in which they participate. What distinguishes this Web-network social capital from the other two versions being measured in this research is that it examines the networks of relationships that exist within the context of that online community in order to see what civic-type behaviors exist that might help build and maintain that online community. Consistent with both the Web-local and local community versions of this measure, Web-network social capital maintains two facets consistent with the literature, “bonding” and “bridging.” Web-network social capital from bonding comes from the results of relationships that help people find connections with groups or individuals that share common traits such as common ideals, beliefs, or interests that form the common reason for their Web community’s existence. It is typified by such questions as, “There are several people on this community site I trust to help solve problems I am having with the site.” Web-local social capital from bridging comes from the result of relationships that expose the person to a set of ideas or people outside their own Web community and indicate interest in what other Web communities are doing.  It is typified by such questions as, “Interacting with people in this community site makes me interested in things that are happening in other Web communities” and “Interacting with people in this community site gives me new people to read about on the Web.” This variable was measured using a 5-point Likert scale. Because this is a new variable being tested in this study, factor analysis and reliability results are contained in the next section as the answer to RQ₁.

Dependent variables

The final two variables are purely dependent variables used to test the hypotheses and the ultimate goal of the model: local engagement and distance engagement.

Local engagement was defined as actions done within a local community that help others or further civic or democratic goals. The measurement in this case would scale different types of democratic or pro-social behaviors and is split among three different facets:  participation in community activities, work on community projects, and activism within the community. This variable was measured using a 5-point Likert scale.  EFA resulted in three factors accounting for 64.68% of the variance. The first factor, called “community issues,” grouped questions related to working in local politics or working to create change in communities using awareness and the political process. The second factor was related to involvement and work in organizations such as churches or charities, and thus the factor was called “service.” The third factor grouped questions about helping neighbors or socializing with them, and thus this social bonding variable was labeled “neighbors” due to the strength of connections being measured in this index. “Voting” loaded as a fourth separate factor as a single item measuring voting frequency. Reliability scores for community issues ( = .88), service ( = .79), and community ( = .81) were both acceptable using the .70 threshold.

Distance engagement was defined as actions done that help others or further civic or democratic goals in places other than where a person lives. The measurement in this case was split between two different facets: involvement in issues of national interest and giving to national causes or campaigns. This variable was measured using a 5-point Likert scale.  EFA found two factors that accounted for 58.00% of the variance. The first factor grouped contributions or work done for national campaigns, issue advocacy, or candidates in regions other than the participants’ local home, and the factor was named “distance activism” to account for this. The second factor encompassed the aspect of helping others financially or otherwise when the only bond between the helper and the person being helped is that the connection was forged first online. Thus the variable was named “distance helping.” Reliability scores for distance activism ( = .87) and helping ( = .79) were both acceptable using the .70 threshold.

RESULTS

This study attempts to determine the existence of Web-network social capital as a distinct concept. RQ₁ asked whether Web-network social capital is distinguishable from Web-local social capital. The results indicate there is support for these scales. EFA on the 20 Web-network questions (10 for bonding and 10 for bridging) along with the 40 questions for the local community and Web-local social capital scales showed that each of these three types of social capital was distinct from one another and that each factor split along bridging and bonding facets. Table 1 indicates these six factors accounted for 64.50% of the variance and provided the first evidence that Web-network social capital is a separate construct from the other two measures of social capital and describes something new about online communities. A separate EFA on just the Web-network bridging and bonding factors, done in order to confirm that these two facets were indeed separate from one another simply in the context of the construct Web-network social capital, found that these factors accounted for 57.32% of the variance that emerged in the factor analysis. Thus, support was found for the notion of Web-network social capital having bonding and bridging factors through this exploratory factor analysis.

TABLE 1

Factor loadings based on Principal Component Analysis with Direct Oblimin rotation for 60 items involving Local Community, Web-Local, and Web-network social capital (N = 582)

	Local Bridging	Local Bonding	Web-local Bridging	Web-local Bonding	Web-network Bridging	Web-network Bonding
LCBr1	.67
LCBr2	.70					.52
LCBr3	.68
LCBr4	.72
LCBr5	.88	-.51
LCBr6	.79
LCBr7	.72
LCBr8	.82
LCBO1		.84
LCBO2		.80
LCBO3		.83
LCBO4		.86
LCBO5		.90
LCBO6		.78
LCBO7		.72
LCBO8		.83
WLBr1			.67
WLBr2			.69
WLBr3			.77
WLBr4			.62
WLBr5			.82
WLBr6			.91
WLBr7			.85
WLBr8			.86
WLBr9			.71
WLBr10			.58
WLBO1				.53
WLBO2			.52	.67
WLBO3				.83
WLBO4				.76
WLBO5				.79
WLBO6				.83
WLBO7				.90
WNBR1					.83
WNBR2					.66
WNBR3					.74
WNBR4					.83
WNBR5					.82
WNBO1						.77
WNBO2						.91
WNBO3						.90
WNBO4						.94
WNBO5						.74

The final step was to do a confirmatory factor analysis in order to determine whether the theoretical basis for these factors would hold up under more robust factor analysis testing. The CFA was done in AMOS 16.0 using only the loadings that were over .60 in the EFA run beforehand. The final Web-network social capital model presented two different factors (bonding and bridging) and was found to be a good fit without losing any questions from the EFA (² = 1.85, df = 9, CMIN = 0.21, p > .05; GFI = 0.95; RMSEA = 0.01). Reliability tests found these two facets to be above the .70 threshold. Thus, the results show support for the existence of Web-network social capital as a construct that is distinct from two other forms of social capital previously seen in mass communication research.

H_1a predicted there is a positive relationship between local community bonding social capital and local engagement among users of virtual communities. Table 2 indicates this hypothesis was supported. Local community bonding (M = 3.38, SD = .95, N = 582) had a highly significant positive relationship with community issues (M = 2.25, SD = 1.15, N = 582; r(580) = .21, p < .01), service (M =2.59, SD = 1.31, N = 582; r(580) = .26, p < .01), neighbors (M = 3.36, SD = .99, N = 582; r(580) = .49, p < .01), and voting (M = 4.48, SD = 1.08, N = 582; r(580) = .12, p < .01).

H_1b predicted there is a positive relationship between local community bridging social capital and local engagement among users of virtual communities. Table 2 indicates this hypothesis was supported. Local community bridging social capital (M = 3.57, SD = .85, N = 582) also had a highly significant positive relationship with community issues (M = 2.25, SD = 1.15, N = 582; r(580) = .17, p < .01), service (M = 2.59, SD = 1.31, N = 582; r(580) = .26, p < .01), neighbors (M = 3.36, SD = .99, N = 582; r(580) = .33, p < .01) and voting (M = 4.48, SD = 1.08, N = 582; r(580) = .13, p < .01).

TABLE 2

Correlations between the measures of Local Community social capital and the measures of Local Engagement (N = 582)

	1	2	3	4	5	6
1. Local Community Bonding	1.00	.66**	.21**	.26**	.49**	.12**
2. Local Community Bridging		1.00	.17**	.26**	.33**	.13**
3. Local: Community Issues			1.00	.12**	.23**	.27**
4. Local: Service				1.00	.30**	.19**
5. Local: Neighbors					1.00	.17**
6. Local: Voting						1.00

** p < 0.01

The results of this hypothesis are in line with the literature that finds a strong relationship between social capital built in local communities and people’s engagement in those communities. Recall from previous research that high social capital in local communities tends to predict civic activity. The results from these hypotheses serve as face validity for the measurements given that the results are in line with previous research.

H_2a predicted a positive relationship between Web-local bonding social capital and local engagement in virtual communities. This hypothesis was partially supported. Web-local bonding social capital (M = 3.07, SD = 1.05, N = 582) was positively associated only with neighbors (r(580) = .08, p < .05) while it was negatively associated with community issues (r(580) = -.04, p < .01). Table 3 indicates web-local bonding was not significantly correlated with service or voting, although the relationship was approaching significance. H_2b predicted a positive relationship between Web-local bridging social capital and local engagement in virtual communities. Table 3 indicates this hypothesis was supported.  Web-local bridging (M = 4.12, SD = .65, N = 582) had a significant positive relationship with community issues (r(580) = .12, p < .01), service (r(580) = .08, p < .05), neighbors (r(580) = .16, p < .01), and voting (r(580) = .15, p < .01), although none of the three Pearson correlation figures was above .20.

The results of this hypothesis are in line with the finding of Norris (2002) that the ties created by Web-local bridging are more effective at creating engagement in local community than Web-local bonding. While the literature review noted that bonding can play a role in creating engagement in communities, it is considered a weaker predictor because it is a more insular form of networking than the weak ties created by bridges.

TABLE 3

Correlations between the measures of Web-Local social capital and the measures of Local Engagement (N = 582)

	1	2	3	4	5	6
1. Web-Local Bonding social capital	1.00	.45**	-.04**	.03	.08*	-.03
2. Web-Local Bridging social capital		1.00	.12**	.08*	.16**	.15**
3. Local: Community Issues			1.00	.12**	.23**	.27**
4. Local: Service				1.00	.30**	.19**
5. Local: Neighbors					1.00	.17**
6. Local: Voting						1.00

** p < 0.01 ; * p < 0.05

H_3a predicted a relationship between Web-local social capital (bridging and bonding) and distance helping in virtual communities. This hypothesis was supported. Web-local bonding was positively correlated with distance helping (M = 2.90, SD = 1.26, N = 582; r(580) = .38, p < .01) as was Web-local bridging (r(580) = .31, p < .01). H_3b predicted a relationship between Web-local social capital (bridging and bonding) and distance activism in virtual communities. Table 4 indicates this hypothesis was not supported. Web-local bonding was negatively correlated with distance activism (M = 2.34, SD = 1.33, N = 582; r(580) = -.20, p < .01) but Web-local bridging was not associated with the dependent variable.

The correlations for distance helping were stronger than they were for forms of activism.  The hypotheses did not predict a direction because of the nature of the Web-local social capital construct. These are online community users used to making connections online, but it was unclear whether those online ties would lead to online forms of engagement. It should be noted that Web-local bonding and bridging both are highly correlated (r(580) = .45, p < .01) and thus these factors are working together with each of the distance engagement variables.

TABLE 4

Correlations between the measures of Web-Local social capital and the measures of Distance Engagement (N = 582)

	1	2	3	4
1. Web-Local Bonding social capital	1.00	.45**	-.20**	.38**
2. Web-Local Bridging social capital		1.00	.05	.31**
3. Distance: Activism			1.00	.19**
4. Distance: Helping				1.00

** p < 0.01

H_4a predicted a positive relationship between Web-network social capital (bridging and bonding) and distance helping in virtual communities. Table 5 indicates this hypothesis was supported.  Web-network bonding (M = 3.68, SD = .78, N = 582) was positively correlated with distance helping (M = 2.90, SD = 1.26, N = 582; r(573) = .34, p < .01) and Web-network bridging (M = 3.50, SD = .69, N = 582) also was positively correlated with distance helping (r(580) = .15, p < .01). H_4b predicted a relationship between Web-network social capital (bridging and bonding) and distance activism in virtual communities. Table 5 indicates this hypothesis was not supported. Web-network bonding was negatively correlated with distance activism (M = 2.34, SD = 1.33, N = 582; r(573) = -.23, p < .01) but Web-network bridging had no relationship with the dependent variable

Taken together, H₃ and H₄ seem to support that activity online is not necessarily strong for political engagement, but it is strongly associated with helping others that one meets online.  Just as was the case with Web-local social capital, the stronger correlations were found with helping others whom a person meets online. The results indicate that the relationships built offline connect people to resources both within the community and beyond that network and that the result is that users of these communities are more likely to help people they meet online as a result of those connections.

TABLE 5

Correlations between the measures of Web-network social capital and the measures of Distance Engagement (N = 582)

	1	2	3	4
1. Web-network Bonding Social Capital	1.00	.23**	-.23**	.34**
2. Web-network Bridging Social Capital		1.00	.08	.15**
3. Distance: Activism			1.00	.19**
4. Distance: Helping				1.00

** p < 0.01

The question, then, is whether ties created offline via local community social capital behave in the same way. An additional analysis, examining the correlation between local community social capital and the distance engagement variables , as shown in Table 6, shows differences. In this analysis, distance activism (M = 2.34, SD = 1.33, N = 582) was positively correlated with local community bonding (r(580) = .12, p < .01) and local community bridging (r(580) = .12, p < .01). But for distance helping, it was positively correlated with local community bonding only (M = 2.90, SD = 1.26, N = 582; r(580) = .14, p < .01)

Given the results in H₃ and H₄ plus the extra analysis with local community social capital, it seems clear that these six social capital variables are behaving differently depending on whether the form of engagement is local or over distance due to online ties. Regression analysis was used as the next step in order to determine which forms of social capital were having the most impact on the distance engagement variables after accounting for demographics. The hierarchical regression employed entered demographic variables into the first block, followed by a block consisting of local community bonding social capital, local community bridging social capital, Web-local bonding social capital, Web-local bridging social capital, Web-network bonding social capital, and Web-network bridging social capital. A separate regression was run for each of the two distance engagement factors, activism and helping.

TABLE 6

Correlations between the measures of Local Community social capital and the measures of Distance Engagement (N = 582)

	1	2	3	4
1. Local Community Bonding	1.00	.66**	.12**	.14**
2. Local Community Bridging		1.00	.12**	.03
3. Distance: Activism			1.00	.19**
4. Distance: Helping				1.00

** p < 0.01

TABLE 7

Summary of hierarchical regression analysis for Demographics and Social Capital variables predicting the measures of Distance Activism (N = 582)

	Model 1 Demographics	Model 2 Social Capital
Demographics	B	SE	b	B	SE	b
Gender (Female = 0, Male = 1)	.20	.11	.07	.23	.11	.08 *
U.S. Citizen? (No = 0, Yes = 1)	-.45	.21	-.08*	-.52	.21	-.09*
Education	.10	.03	.11**	.08	.03	.09*
Employment	.04	.02	.07	.03	.02	.07
Income	.06	.02	.12**	.06	.02	.12**
Marital (Unmarried = 0, Married = 1)	-.03	.08	-.02	-.08	.08	-.04
Ethnicity	.11	.07	.06	.04	.07	.02
Time Online (Hours per day)	.01	.01	.02	.01	.01	.02
Posts per day	-.03	.01	-.12**	-.03	.01	-.12**
Age	.05	.01	.44**	.05	.01	.11**
Social Capital		B	SE	b
Local Community Bonding		.17	.07	.40**
Local Community Bridging		-.01	.08	-.01
Web-Local Bonding Social Capital		-.07	.08	-.05
Web-Local Bridging Social Capital		.28	.11	.12*
Web-network Bonding Social Capital		-.14	.12	-.08
Web-network Bridging Social Capital		.05	.09	.03
R2	.53	.56
Adjusted R2	.29	.32
F for R2 change	22.31 (p < .01)	15.95 (p < .01)

* p < .05
** p < .01

The final model, shown in Table 7, explained a strongly significant proportion of variance distance activism (R² = .32, F(16, 553) = 15.95, p < .01). Of the social capital constructs, the strongest predictor in the whole model was local community bonding (b = .42, t(553) = 2.51, p < .01) and Web-local bridging (b = .18, t(553) = 2.51, p < .05) also was a strong predictor. No other social capital indices were significant.

The second regression looked at helping others online. The final model, shown in Table 8, explained a significant proportion of variance in distance helping (R² = .27, F(16, 553) = 12.79, p < .01). Of the social capital predictors in the final model, Web-network bonding (b = .37, t(553) = 5.73, p < .01) emerged as the strongest predictor in the whole model and also got positive prediction from Web-network bridging (b = .16, t(553) = 2.80, p < .01) and local community bonding (b = .18, t(553) = 3.47, p< .01). Local community bridging, on the other hand, was a negative predictor (b = -.20, t(553) = -3.84, p < .01).

TABLE 8

Summary of hierarchical regression analysis for Demographics and Social Capital variables predicting the measures of Distance Helping among online community users (N = 582)

	Model 1 Demographics	Model 2 Social Capital
Demographics	B	SE	b	B	SE	b
Gender (Female = 0, Male = 1)	-.73	.11	-.27**	-.49	.11	-.18**
U.S. Citizen? (No = 0, Yes = 1)	.50	.22	.09*	.41	.21	.07
Education	.11	.03	.14**	.14	.03	.17**
Employment	.03	.02	.06	-.01	.02	-.01
Income	-.05	.02	-.10*	-.04	.02	-.08*
Marital (Unmarried = 0, Married = 1)	-.00	.08	-.00	-.01	.07	-.01
Ethnicity	.20	.07	.12**	.06	.07	.04
Time Online (Hours per day)	.02	.02	.05	.00	.01	.01
Posts per day	.04	.01	.19**	.02	.01	.08*
Age	-.04	.01	-.04	-.00	.00	-.03
Social capital		B	SE	b
Local Community Bonding		.24	.07	.18**
Local Community Bridging		-.30	.08	-.20**
Web-Local Bonding Social Capital		-.19	.12	-.12
Web-Local Bridging Social Capital		.04	.08	.02
Web-network Bonding Social Capital		.45	.08	.37**
Web-network Bridging Social Capital		.31	.11	.16**
R2	.39	.52
Adjusted R2	.15	.27
F for R2 change	10.15 (p < .01)	12.70 (p < .01)

** p < .01
* p < .05

DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION

Considering the context of this research, that it was conducted by surveying users of online community news sites, the results show there is promise in building places for community conversation into news sites. Past research already has shown a strong link between news use and social capital in local communities, and with the emergence of the Web-network social capital variable in this research it shows that giving people forums for comment and discussion beyond the comments section of a news story offers people another avenue for building and spending social capital. When news sites give users online community tools, they are cultivating a new type of audience that has different characteristics than its offline readership.

Given the strong link between news use and involvement in communities, the results here have several implications. First, giving local users some ability to participate on the site and get to know one another in a community forum could help local engagement. One way to think about this is as a step-ladder of engagement based on what past research has shown, where association with neighbors is considered the easiest form of civic engagement because you live in the same area and see one another; bonding and bridging were both positively associated with this construct. Next in the thread is voting, volunteering, or doing service in the community, and while the Web-local bridging was positively associated with it, bonding was showed no relationship. The step that requires the most effort is activism, which requires a continuous investment of time, effort and attention to community issues. In this case, bonding is a negative predictor and bridging is a positive predictor. As one goes up the ladder, bridging takes on more importance as bonding’s role decreases.

Second, the key finding in this research is that the new concept of “Web-network” exists as a way to describe the makeup of online communities, and the results of the final regressions show how it can help predict offline activity in concert with a user’s local place of residence.  Like the Web-local version of social capital, which consists of ties created online that extend into one’s local community offline, Web-network social capital in online communities appears to work best when paired with local community social capital. While the Web-network and local community measures are distinct per the factor analyses, the final regression model shows that the two are working together to predict non-local forms of engagement. This also offers some validation to the theoretical layering offered by Rainie and Wellman (2012), which noted a distinct but intertwined relationship between the online and offline self. The web-network social capital generated by the online self is distinct from the local networks built in geographic communities, but they do influence one another and work together.

The final regressions suggest a window into how news sites can encourage online community behaviors that have an impact on faraway causes, a topic traditionally unexplored because so much social capital and news research is done at the local or regional level. The presence of a strong bonding predictor matches some of what Putnam (2000) notes when he talks about how the “checkbook democracy” that comes with giving money to causes rather than doing the harder work in local community is an indicator of insular ties that are akin to bonding rather than ties created across people groups in local community. Web-local bridging’s presence is an indicator that people are using their online ties to get involved in causes outside their local community. While this might seem contradictory to the local community bonding argument, consider that it might be that these two variables work together when it comes to distance activism. Because the literature defines Web-local social capital as networks created online for the purpose of local offline action, perhaps in the case of distance activism the Web-local bridging in online communities serves as a bridge to resources online as well. That is, an unengaged person in a local community might not think to be involved locally or by distance even if they have only strong local community bonding in their network of relationships.

Web-local bonding, then, might work to spur a person to begin turning their attention outward. In a sense, local community social capital is a precursor to online forms of engagement (either helping or distance activism), Web-network social capital is the conduit that allows people to direct their offline resources toward reciprocity in the form of helping others online, while Web-local social capital is what helps users direct resources in the form of distance activism. Thus, a user of these communities enters having the trait of high local community social capital, but the networks and relationships created online via social capital allow the user to extend that trait to people they meet virtually and to treat online communities in a similar way to how they regard offline civic community. A person’s Web-network social capital could be at work in online interactions while also serving as a conduit to online forms of helping that is a natural extension of a user’s proclivity toward offline engagement.

With Web-network social capital established as a concept, there are future research directions worth pursuing. First, past research has shown that motivations for using different types of media have played a role in determining how traditional social capital works. It would be worthwhile to see how motivations for online news community use work with Web-network social capital. Second, this study aggregated results without attention paid to the topic that bound the user’s particular community together. It could be that different communities behave differently when it comes to web-network social capital depending on the community’s common interests (i.e. some communities might tend toward activism or helping others depending on topic). Third, it might be useful to further explore the concept of distance engagement now that it is a distinct variable from local forms within this strain of social capital research. Perhaps there are differences between helping other institutions and helping individuals met online. Finally, it might be that certain types of communities might be more or less prone to generating web-network social capital. Perhaps certain structures (such as chat, web forum, or diary-based formats) are better at creating this web-network social capital than others.

As with any research, this study has limitations. The sample pulled from users of news communities, and thus the results might not be indicative of all online community users. Second,  because users were sampled after posting or commenting, it should be understood that this was a sample of active online community members. Because of this, the conception of what it means to be a community member is different than if a researcher were sampling a real-world population because in that case there would be a mix of active and non-active members.

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APPENDIX: SURVEY QUESTIONS

IV: Local community social capital

Measurement: 5-point Likert scale

Factor 1: Local community bonding

1. There is someone in my neighborhood or community I can turn to for advice about making very important decisions.
2. There is no one in my neighborhood or community that I feel comfortable talking to about intimate personal problems.  (reversed)
3. When I feel lonely, there are several people in my neighborhood or community I can talk to.
4. If I needed an emergency loan of $100, I know someone in my neighborhood or community I can turn to.
5. The people I interact with in my neighborhood or community would put their reputation on the line for me.
6. The people I interact with in my neighborhood or community would be good job references for me.
7. The people I interact with in my neighborhood or community would share their last dollar with me.
8. I do not know people in my neighborhood or community well enough to get them to do anything important.  (reversed)

Factor 2: Local community bridging

1. Interacting with people in my neighborhood or community makes me interested in things that happen outside of my town.
2. Interacting with people in my neighborhood or community makes me want to try new things.
3. Interacting with people in my neighborhood or community makes me interested in what people unlike me are thinking.
4. Talking with people in my neighborhood or community makes me curious about other places in the world.
5. Interacting with people in my neighborhood or community makes me feel like part of a larger community.
6. Interacting with people in my neighborhood or community makes me feel connected to the bigger picture.
7. Interacting with people in my neighborhood or community reminds me that everyone in the world is connected.
8. Interacting with people in my neighborhood or community gives me new people to talk to.

IV: Web-local social capital

Measurement: 5-point Likert scale

Factor 1: Web-local bonding

1. There are several people on [enter Web community site here] I trust to help solve my problems.
2. There is someone on [enter Web community site here] I can turn to for advice about making very important decisions.
3. When I feel lonely, there are several people on [enter Web community site here] I can talk to.
4. If I needed an emergency loan of $500, I know someone on [enter Web community site here] I can turn to.
5. The people I interact with on [enter Web community site here] would put their reputation on the line for me.
6. The people I interact with on [enter Web community site here] would be good job references for me.
7. The people I interact with on [enter Web community site here] would share their last dollar with me.

Factor 2: Web-local bridging

1. Interacting with people on [enter Web community site here] makes me interested in things that happen outside of my town.
2. Interacting with people on [enter Web community site here] makes me want to try new things.
3. Interacting with people on [enter Web community site here] makes me interested in what people unlike me are thinking.
4. Talking with people on [enter Web community site here] makes me curious about other places in the world.
5. Interacting with people on [enter Web community site here] makes me feel like part of a larger community.
6. Interacting with people on [enter Web community site here] makes me feel connected to the bigger picture.
7. Interacting with people on [enter Web community site here] reminds me that everyone in the world is connected.
8. I am willing to spend time to support general [enter Web community site here] activities.
9. Interacting with people on [enter Web community site here] gives me new people to talk to.
10. On [enter Web community site here], I come in contact with new people all the time.

IV: Web-network social capital

Measurement: 5-point Likert scale

Factor 1: Web-network bonding

1. There are several people on [enter Web community site here] I trust to help solve problems I am having with the site.
2. There is someone on [enter Web community site here] I can turn to for advice about the site
3. There is no one on [enter Web community site here] that I feel comfortable talking to about intimate personal problems.  (reversed)
4. The people I interact with on [enter Web community site here] would put their reputation on the line for me if I was involved in a dispute on the site.
5. The people I interact with on [enter Web community site here] would help me freely if I had any questions.

Factor 2: Web-network bridging

1. Interacting with people on [enter Web community site here] makes me interested in things that are happening in other Web communities.
2. Interacting with people on [enter Web community site here] makes me want to be a part of other Web communities.
3. Interacting with people on [enter Web community site here] makes me interested in other Web communities are talking about.
4. Interacting with people on [enter Web community site here] makes me feel like part of a larger network of Web communities.
5. Interacting with people on [enter Web community site here] reminds me that everyone on the Web is connected.

DV: Local engagement

Measurement: 1-5 semantic differential scale, Never to Regularly

Factor 1: Community Issues

1. I work for local political campaigns
2. I help with local efforts to get petition signatures
3. I work to help raise awareness on important issues in my community

Factor 2: Service

1. I volunteer or work for a local charity.
2. I work on activities through my local church or service organization.
3. I attend religious services.

Factor 3: Neighbors

1. I help neighbors when they are in need.
2. I take care of my neighbors’ children when the need arises.
3. I host or attend dinner parties with friends or neighbors

DV: Distance engagement

Measurement: 1-5 semantic differential scale, Never to Regularly

Factor 1: Distance Activism

1. I have contributed money to candidates running in areas outside my community even though I cannot vote for them
2. I donate to national or state political campaigns
3. I have campaigned for candidates running in areas outside my community even if I cannot vote for them
4. I am a member of a national issue-advocacy organization (such as the NRA or Sierra Club)
5. I donate money to national causes that I care about

Factor 2: Helping

1. I have helped out someone that I have never met in-person via the Internet
2. I have given money to help out someone I first met online

 

Susan Currie Sivek

The urban information environment in which city magazines operate is changing dramatically, with the decline of local newspapers and the growth of user-generated local content. City magazine editors are re-envisioning their purpose as local information providers. This study provides a qualitative analysis of in-depth interviews with senior editors at 15 award-winning city magazines. The editors’ responses speak to the changing role of their publications today; the function of new technologies in informing local communities; and the public service that local journalism organizations offer in a constrained economic situation. 

Today’s global magazine industry is adapting rapidly to incorporate new technologies, changes in readers’ habits, and opportunities newly available due to shifts in complementary media industries. In particular, city magazines in the U.S. face serious competition from digital media, often based on user-generated content, that now supplant the magazines’ traditional local functions. However, city magazines also have new possibilities for public service journalism due to rapid changes in other local news outlets, particularly the decline of newspapers and the loss of much of their “watchdog” function within their communities. City magazines may in fact be developing into local news sources that can challenge the dominance of newspapers as providers of in-depth local journalism. Editors of these magazines express a blend of fear and excitement brought about both by this change and by the shifts in power among local information providers and audiences.

This study is part of a larger research project regarding the function of the U.S. city magazine (Sivek, 2014). The current study examines these magazines’ production processes through a qualitative analysis of in-depth interviews with senior editors at 15 award-winning city magazines. These magazines represent a mix of ownership, readership, and geographic circumstances. The editors’ responses reveal the current and developing roles of old and new technologies in informing local communities; the nature of local journalism in a shifting media environment, especially as audiences now can inform each other directly through social media; and the public service that local media can offer in a tightly constrained economic situation. More broadly, this study provides additional insights into the production and distribution of geographically focused journalism in a time of instability for the profession and industry.

LITERATURE REVIEW

The Role of City Magazines Within Local Communities

Many local media provide both information and emotional connections for citizens within cities. The role of journalism within geographically defined communities has been studied extensively, though scholars’ engagement with the term “community” has varied widely (Lowrey, Brozana, & Mackay, 2008). As these authors note, “community” may refer to shared physical location or to shared interest in a specific identity or symbols  (as in “imagined” or “interpretive” communities) – or to both of these.

In examining a wide variety of publications, magazine researchers have often analyzed the role of the magazine medium in creating the latter type of community. As Frith states, existing research supports “a shared belief that magazines can play a role in creating and reflecting community” (2012, p. 234). For example, Frau-Meigs (2000) examines the construction of the “netizens” in the early years of Wired magazine; Sender (2001) argues that The Advocate magazine crafted an imagined community of gay consumers through its gradually shifting content; and Théberge (1991) demonstrates how magazines for musicians in the 1980s represented musicians both to each other and to marketers as consumers of music products.

The present study unites both approaches to “community” because it addresses a media product that is primarily relevant to the needs of individuals within a physically defined location, but that can also be consumed by others outside that location. Thanks to digital technology, the community constructed by these city magazines is simultaneously based in both geography and imagination, without regard to where the individual audience member is located. This study examines how city magazine editors construct a shared understanding of this community through selection and representation of the locale’s primary symbols, stories, and concerns, all while responding to rapid changes in the local media environment. With this construction, city magazines, just like other local news media, highlight and define key local symbols, bring specific narratives to public attention, and even attempt to provoke action among citizens with regard to significant issues.

Most research in this area has focused on newspapers’ performance of these functions, but as Hatcher and Reader (2012) describe, there are now a wide variety of community information providers in traditional and digital media, including city magazines. For the purpose of this study, city magazines are defined along the lines used by the City and Regional Magazine Association (2014): general-interest consumer publications packaged in a traditional print magazine format, usually published on a monthly or bimonthly basis. Magazines that focus on specific topics within an urban area (e.g., parenting and family life, business) do not meet the “general-interest” qualification. Typical general-interest topics include travel and local attractions, food and dining, local personalities and leaders, local culture, business, and shopping.  Additionally, like the CRMA, this study considered only magazines that “demonstrate a commitment to editorial independent of advertiser interests”; in other words, magazines created by chambers of commerce or similar promotional publications would not qualify. These magazines represent community journalism through their focus on a specific, defined physical location, as well as through their presentation of a local identity in their depiction of key people, places, and issues within their cities.

Though city magazines of this type have come and gone over the years, the genre has persisted. Two of the magazines included in this study are notable examples of this longevity: Honolulu has been published since 1888 (under its original title Paradise of the Pacific), and Philadelphia since 1909 (Riley & Selnow, 1991). Riley and Selnow’s encyclopedic 1991 volume of profiles of regional and city magazines found that 920 such magazines were published between 1950 to 1988; 470 remained in operation in 1991 (Riley & Selnow, 1991). A similarly comprehensive survey of these magazines has not been repeated since Riley and Selnow’s book, but the city magazine genre still appears to be going strong.

Part of city magazines’ resilience may be attributed to the fact that they typically appeal to an upscale local audience that interests advertisers. A 2010 presentation by the CRMA offers some internal and external data on the medium. The presentation should be regarded with some skepticism, as its goal is to convince prospective advertisers of the value of city magazine advertising, but the presentation does at least reveal how the medium desires to present itself. The presentation claims that the association’s member magazines reach “an affluent, active audience” of over 18 million readers that is about 55 percent female, with a median age of 45 and a median household income of about $83,000 (CRMA, 2010, pp. 6-8). CRMA ranks its members’ publications, considered in aggregate, at 12^th on a list of 15 U.S. magazines with “most affluent” readerships (CRMA, 2010, p. 17). Finally, CRMA cites an Erdos and Morgan study to argue that city magazines matter to local opinion leaders, claiming that “better than 8 of every 10…[read] one or more of the last four issues of their city magazine” (CRMA, 2010, p. 22).

This CRMA sales pitch provides some rare comprehensive data currently available on city magazines. This medium is undergoing a great deal of change at present, just like other news media, and few current studies have sought to explore their production, content, or reception.  Three decades ago, a set of studies was published in Journalism Quarterly that provided insights into city magazines. Their findings are still relevant to the current research because they explored the attitudes of city and regional magazine publishers regarding the perceived function of the city magazine. For example, Hayes (1981) found that magazine publishers believed that readers were “champions” for their cities; readers were thought to be interested in city magazines because the publications supported their pride in the cities. The editors Hayes surveyed also felt their magazines were popular because their service stories helped “educated, upwardly mobile, credit-card-carrying adults” effectively use their “increased leisure time and money” (1981, p. 295).

City magazine editors also wanted to offer readers a visually attractive, upscale, and lasting medium that addressed the city in an authentic, knowledgeable local voice: “Metropolitan or city magazines provide the only medium which has the capability of establishing the ‘identity and flavor’ of a market … to capture the true ‘picture’ of the market it serves” (Fletcher & VandenBergh, 1982, p. 14). Of greater specific relevance to this study, city magazines were found by Hynds (1979) to be unique providers (during that study’s time) of perspectives and information newspapers didn’t offer, specifically entertainment, food, and lifestyle coverage. Hynds also asked editors about their perceptions of the city magazine’s function in its community, and found that most expressed “some interest in pointing out local problems and needs … about half see themselves as possible alternative voices to local newspapers” (p. 622).

A somewhat more recent study by Greenberg (2000) provides a critical look at city magazines that combines an analysis of their content and design with insights into their ownership. Greenberg’s analysis found that when major media companies purchased city magazines from their formerly independent publishers, the magazines lost their unique local feel. Instead, their design and content began to match that found in the other city magazines already owned by the major companies. That formula usually provided “toned down and reduced editorial content, increased pages of advertising and lifestyle reporting, new ‘special sections’ filled with consumer reports, and encyclopedic high-end listing sections at the back” (Greenberg, 2000, p. 251). Greenberg argues that this formula addresses local readers not as active citizens of their cities who might be concerned with significant local issues, but rather as consumers of products and services made available by magazine advertisers.

These older studies suggest that city magazine publishers and owners may primarily seek to advocate for their cities and to profit from advertising within the pages of a generally promotional publication — as opposed to seeking to provide serious local journalism. This study explores whether these findings from decades ago continue to represent correctly today’s city magazines. Though it may be tempting for the casual viewer to dismiss city magazines as more entertainment than journalism, these publications do represent a prominent way in which citizens learn about their communities. Though she focuses on local newspapers and television, Kaniss (1991) argues that local news media define urban issues and influence policymaking through their definition of local identity. City magazines also play a part in this process. City magazines claim a particular kind of authority over local identity within their communities. They typically use their cities’ names in their titles. They assess local businesses, personalities, and events in the creation of “best of” lists or local awards that they adjudicate. They are highly visible on newsstands in stores and suggest through their covers what is of value in the local community, based upon their assertion of local expertise.

Moreover, although this study focuses on American city magazines, insights here may also speak to similar publications offered in other countries. For example, Cook and Darby (2013) found that British “county magazines” tended to construct an idealized vision of life in their areas in order to present a positive environment for readers’ encounter with advertising; however, they also argue that the magazines represented a missed opportunity to “fill the news gap” left by weak local newspapers.

City Magazines and the Changing Local Information Environment

Cook and Darby (2013) suggest that space may be opening for city magazines to become more robust local information providers, especially as newspapers’ resources for original, in-depth reporting diminish. In addition, city magazines’ presentation of certain types of information may be best positioned to compete with user-generated media in terms of its innate authority and credibility.

Though local newspapers continue to provide the foundation of original reporting upon which other local news media typically rely (Project for Excellence in Journalism, 2010), they have also suffered deeply in recent years. Economic turmoil and increased competition from digital media have led to shrinking papers and dramatic layoffs. Between 2000 and 2012, U.S. newspapers reduced their editorial staffs by roughly one-third, from 56,400 to 38,000 (Edmonds, 2013). Decreased resources have limited the amount of in-depth coverage that newspapers can provide. The Federal Communications Commission’s report on the information needs of local communities (2011) found that newspapers’ coverage of local and state politics, crime, and health has diminished the most, though these remain issues of significant public concern.

Newspapers also have not performed well online in terms of constructing strong visual and content linkages to their local areas. Funk (2013) found that newspapers’ websites do not express a strong sense of local identity or of their specific communities, sometimes omitting the names of their communities entirely from the banners of their websites in favor of more “professional” images. As such, online audiences may not sense the newspapers’ local contribution as deeply, experiencing them only as yet another website to be surfed, not as a distinctly local resource. In contrast, city magazines cannot help but proclaim their local connections, given that most of them are titled with some variation of their cities’ names both in print and online.

New media consumption patterns, such as digital magazine editions, social media, and mobile reading, could generate more audience interest in such strongly local magazine content, while public interest in print newspapers declines. The Project for Excellence in Journalism (2012) found that almost three quarters of survey respondents followed local news “closely”; this audience generally preferred the local newspaper for their news. However, younger local news enthusiasts – the city magazine subscribers of the future – paid attention to a wider variety of local news sources, including traditional media, websites, and/or social media (PEJ, 2012). Younger local news users gather local information from varied sources, which may include city magazines’ print and digital products, both today and in the future. This shift in audience preferences may represent a concern and an opportunity for city magazine editors.

City Magazine Structure and Management

City magazine editors may be relatively well positioned to guide their publications’ efforts during this time of change. Although, like newspapers, they must address rising printing expenses and diminishing advertisers’ support, magazines can often better compensate for economic challenges and technological innovations. With non-unionized employees and a significant reliance on freelance writers, magazines can shed staff when resources are tight, rehire new employees with up-to-date technological skills, and assign and pay for work on a more flexible basis (Ekinsmyth, 2002). They do not have to fill a daily news hole. Magazines’ designers are also better equipped to create visual products suited for digital media distribution, such as tablet editions, than most newspaper designers; the print magazine format is easier to translate to digital media.

While adaptation to this new context will always be subject to publishers’ and advertisers’ desires, editors maintain some power to shape their magazines’ futures. While they know their print publications may be imperiled, they are also attempting to innovate so that their publications remain profitable and useful within their communities (e.g., Carr, 2013; Landau, 2014; Mickey, 2013). Editors are particularly critical to this development. They are “community connectors,” with both personal and professional interests in their local communities, fitting Hatcher and Reader’s description (2012) of community journalists. These editors respond to the changes in their local environment and audience based on those interests; they then conceptualize the right blend of content to accommodate those changes and allocate resources accordingly. For some magazines, this transformation has involved a greater investment in investigative public interest journalism; for others, audience engagement and community outreach, in both online and face-to-face forms, have become paramount.

City magazine editors may now choose to move beyond the narrow range of lifestyle topics upon which their coverage has traditionally focused. They may also be motivated to explore new topics by the fact that some of their “turf” — the restaurant and entertainment information for which they have been known — has now been encroached upon by online sources. Over half of Americans, and especially those ages 18-39, use online sources for such information, according to a 2011 survey (Pew Internet and American Life Project, 2011); that statistic is likely now much higher. Moreover, city magazines themselves are no longer limited to the print format, and can reach audiences at all times, instantaneously, through their own websites and through social media — tools for which they may already be better prepared, in terms of staffing, than newspapers. Clearly, this is an intriguing set of circumstances for city magazines; “creative destruction” of the old model of city magazine publishing is possible, but the degree to which these publications will choose to shift their mission and format is as of yet unknown.

Though city magazine editors may represent just one genre of journalism, their perspectives reveal larger insights about the impact of changing economic and technological structures on the production of journalism as a whole. To determine whether and how citizens are informed about their cities, it is important to understand how each local information provider develops and distributes its own unique contribution to a city’s information environment.

Given the existing knowledge about the state of city magazines today and the various market and technological forces to which they are subject, this study explored the following research questions:

RQ1. What do city magazine editors perceive to be the role of city magazines in their communities today?

RQ1a. How do the city magazine editors differentiate their magazines’ journalism from that provided by other local news organizations?

RQ1b. Whom do city magazine editors perceive to be the audience for their publications?

RQ1c. What are city magazine editors’ criteria for selecting the major stories their magazines will cover?

RQ2. Are city magazines trying to use new digital technologies to engage their audiences in significant local issues, and if so, how?

RQ3. What are city magazine editors’ strategies for developing their medium in the future?

METHOD

This study explores these questions through interviews with editors at a number of U.S. city magazines. The selection of these magazines began with the compilation of a list of winners of City and Regional Magazine Awards (CRMA, 2013) from 2008 to 2012. CRMA award-winning magazines were selected because these would presumably be magazines doing the “best” work in the field, with regard to satisfying the journalistic norms valued by their peers. This list included magazines receiving awards in these specific categories: General Excellence, Reporting, Personality Profile, Feature Story, Reader Service, Civic Journalism, Community Service Project, Excellence Online, and Multimedia. These award categories are all specifically relevant to editorial content and the magazines’ community engagement. Additionally, all of these awards are given across three different circulation ranges, permitting the inclusion of publications in cities of various sizes.

This initial list was then reduced to include magazines focused on specific cities, as opposed to state or regional magazines. This narrowed list included just 20 magazines for further analysis. This shortened list of magazines also represents diversity in other key factors, including city size, geographic region, circulation, and ownership (independent vs. chain). Magazines’ content, technological savvy, and resources may differ based on city size, ownership, and popularity. The final list of magazines in the study represents variation in these factors.

With this list in hand, highly placed editors at each magazine were contacted via email and asked to participate in an in-depth interview regarding their magazines. These were editors-in-chief, managing editors, or senior editors of long tenure at their magazines. Editors were appropriate interviewees for the gathering of insights about these magazines. They possess unique insights both into the construction of their magazines and into their publications’ perceived functions in their communities. As Holmes and Nice describe, magazine professionals “must have a keen sense of audience and market imperatives and a finely tuned understanding of the culture and power nexus in a specific subject matter” (2012, p. 52). These established professionals know their magazines, their audiences, their communities, and the needs of each. As such, they were able to characterize their magazines’ content, functions, goals, and opportunities.

Of the 20 magazines contacted, interviews were completed with 15, resulting in a 75% response rate. Magazines whose editors participated were: 5280 (Denver), Atlanta Magazine, Boston, Charlotte, Cincinnati, D Magazine (Dallas), Evansville Living, Honolulu, Indianapolis, Madison, Memphis, MPLS St. Paul, Philadelphia, Portland Monthly, and Washingtonian. Table 1 provides additional detail on participating magazines’ circulation, city population, and ownership.

TABLE 1: CITY MAGAZINE CIRCULATION, LOCAL POPULATION, AND OWNERSHIP

Magazine Name and State	Circulation	U.S. CensusLocal Population	Ownership
5280 (Denver, CO)	77,027	610,345	Independent
Atlanta Magazine (GA)	66,996	540,922	Emmis Publishing
Boston (MA)	110,390	645,169	Metrocorp
Charlotte (NC)	35,000	704,422	Independent
Cincinnati (OH)	37,426	333,012	Emmis Publishing
D Magazine (TX)	22,000	1,299,542	Independent
Evansville Living (IN)	13,000	116,584	Independent
Honolulu (HI)	35,000	390,738	Independent
Indianapolis Monthly (IN)	41,000	820,445	Emmis Publishing
Madison (WI)	20,833	235,419	Independent
Memphis (TN)	22,500	676,640	Independent
MPLS St. Paul (MN)	17,710	2,968,806	Independent
Philadelphia (PA)	116,840	1,547,297	Metrocorp
Portland Monthly (OR)	52,892	566,143	SagaCity Media
Washingtonian (DC)	137,002	599,657	Independent

“Independent” ownership refers to local ownership, versus ownership by a larger, national magazine publishing group. Magazines marked “independent” may be one of a few magazines published within their cities by the same publisher, but the publisher focuses solely on one metropolitan area. (Complementary publications often include a business- or family-focused magazine.) Circulation and census data gathered at time of interviews (spring/fall 2012).

The researcher conducted these interviews during spring and fall 2012 by phone. Interviews averaged 30 to 45 minutes in length. The interviews followed an informal format, structured by an outline of key questions (see Appendix), but not confined exclusively to those questions (Rubin & Rubin, 1995). Such interviews permit the researcher and respondent to together explore the respondent’s experiences and the issues they represent: “The subjects not only answer questions prepared by an expert, but themselves formulate in a dialogue their own conceptions of their lived world … [gaining] knowledge that can be used to enhance the human condition” (Kvale, 1996, p. 11).

The editors’ interview responses were then summarized and analyzed to answer the research questions above. All interviews were transcribed by the researcher, and portions of responses representing the issues identified in the research questions were gathered for analysis. Among those responses, common themes, as well as points of divergence, were noted and developed for presentation here by the researcher. To encourage greater freedom of expression in discussions of business and editorial strategy, editors were promised that their interview responses would not be attributed to them by name.

In combination with the other components of the aforementioned larger research project on city magazines, the interviews provide insights into the editorial and business concerns of these magazines, and illuminate the findings of other portions of the study, such as the magazines’ content and their uses of social media. The triangulation provided through the application of these multiple methods will lead to a deeper understanding of all aspects of today’s city magazines in the U.S.

RESULTS AND DISCUSSION

City magazine editors are aware of and are responding to the changing status of their publications in their local information environments. They are actively working to adapt both the format and content of their magazines to take advantage of new opportunities in ways that will still represent their defining attributes and appeal to their key audiences. Editors were able to clearly articulate a distinct function for their publications within their cities, which included the provision of not only service journalism, but also, in many cases, in-depth, long-form journalism on substantive local issues. The editors offered nuanced descriptions of their audiences that revealed a thorough understanding of their readers, beyond simple demographic descriptions that advertising sales staff might use. Editors also provided detailed story selection criteria that reflected their desire to continue to improve the journalism offered in their publications, while maintaining the types of coverage for which they were known. This blend of the new and familiar was thought to be most likely to sustain their publications during technological change.

Finally, the editors were both excited and daunted by the ways their staffs were working to engage more readers in the magazines’ coverage through social media and other digital tools, and they recognized the possibilities for the transformation of their publications through these media. Though experimentation with these methods varied greatly among the 15 magazines included in the study, the range of uses offered an intriguing snapshot of the opportunities offered by digital media for the reinvention of today’s city magazine.

Editors’ Perception of the City Magazine’s Local Role

Research question 1 concerned editors’ perceptions of their magazines’ role in local communities.  Editors were asked to describe what they believed their magazines did or should do for their local audiences. A frequent, broad response to this question included variations on the concept of the city magazine as an “owner’s manual” for the city. Editors said their goal was to help readers “get the most out of living in their city” and “decipher the city they live in.” The editors were somewhat divided on how true this representation of their cities ought to be to reality. For example, one editor said that the magazine offered “generally a positive picture” of the city, a sentiment echoed by others; yet some editors felt that the representation of the city in the magazine ought to include “what’s good about the city and also what’s bad … we also do a lot of critical stories because we want to call it like we see it.” As one editor put it, “We certainly don’t want to be like a Chamber [of Commerce] piece … [we think,] ‘Is this [story] going to help folks live their lives better here?’” Unlike Hayes’ findings (1981), the city magazine editors interviewed for this study appeared to be interested in presenting a well-rounded picture of their cities, even if it challenges readers’ pride.

Specific topics mentioned by these editors as recurring within their coverage included “our lifestyle coverage, whether that’s dining or travel or restaurants” and “everything from politics to sports to business to style to health … that kind of broad view.” Another editor noted the magazine’s use of content “that’s, frankly, more geared toward conspicuous consumption … that’s part of the equation … of what city magazines do.” Another type of content perceived by an editor to be essential to the city magazine was the usual “‘best of,’ ‘top docs’ [stories] — the things you have to do to sell the magazine.”

These findings resemble those of Hayes (1981) and Fletcher and VandenBergh (1982), revealing little change in this aspect of city magazine coverage in three decades. The “formula” of service content described by many of the editors also sounds quite similar to the model articulated by Greenberg (2000), which appears to be concerned primarily with readers’ role as local consumers. Yet many editors strove to venture beyond this familiar formula of service content in their publications. Regarding this content, one editor explained,

The analogy I’ve always given for it is in Hollywood: you’ll see stars doing a blockbuster movie, or they can do the indie project. That’s what I see us doing. We do the ‘best restaurants’ [story]. It helps pay the bills and it sells on newsstands, but right next to it … we’re tucking a serious investigative piece about a business, or government, or politician, that is paid for by that other story.

That type of substantial content was not often mentioned as a primary purpose of the city magazine, but editors did feel it was important and sometimes indirectly rewarding from a financial perspective:

The journalism is what resonates with people … The fact that we’re putting such clear attention and thought, heart, soul, money, resources into the journalism tells the community, ‘You are important to us. This place is important to us. We’re not just phoning this in.’ … You get that back in advertising dollars because your advertisers know people are paying attention; it’s being discussed.

Finally, one editor noted that the city magazine was more resilient during difficult economic times because it is “tied to local, not national, advertising accounts,” permitting a wider variety of coverage even when market conditions would seem to encourage an emphasis on easier-to-sell content.

Differentiating the city magazine from other local information sources.

Research question 1a addressed how editors differentiated their publications from other local information sources. First, it is worth noting that most of the city magazine editors felt little competition from their local newspapers in terms of coverage or advertising. Newspapers were uniformly recognized to be struggling, and that struggle had varying effects on the city magazines. One editor stated:

15 years ago, 12 years ago, we worried a lot about what the newspaper might do before we started to do a story. Now we don’t even really consider it … recognizing they’re not doing the kinds of stories they used to do.

Newspapers were perceived to lack the resources to investigate and promptly break major investigative stories. Moreover, the editors believed city magazines could cover those stories differently, and perhaps more effectively. The city magazines could offer the “context and perspective in a way that newspapers don’t”; they “can do a more in-depth story that would give more perspective”; they “might not break the news, but … can tell [readers] what news matters and what it really means”; they “do the how and the why, whereas newspapers really focus on the who, what, where, and when.”

City magazines’ ability to build stories during a slower news cycle and to publish longer-format stories allows them, as one editor stated, to “pick up the accountability function that newspapers offered,” though within some limits. Constantly providing fast-paced, breaking news was beyond the scope of the city magazines’ structural and staff resources. But they could do in-depth service ‘packages’ on topics “no one else does, that require work and time other local media don’t have or aren’t willing to invest in, whether the best breakfast in town or a full-scale look at [the local] start-up economy.” In general, while newspapers’ decline was apparent to these editors and they welcomed the opportunity to engage with some of the stories newspapers might once have covered, they also expressed civic concerns about their ability to “fill the role that daily newspapers do and take up their slack,” given their different structures, publishing pace, and advertiser and audience expectations.

This mode of differentiation from newspapers is distinct from that seen in the responses from editors interviewed by Hynds (1979), revealing change in the perceived function of the city magazine in the interim. Hynds found that only 61 percent of the city magazine editors in his survey felt it was important for their magazines to provide “an alternative viewpoint to that of the local newspaper” (1979, p. 621). In contrast, the editors interviewed in this study could readily articulate the relationship between what their city magazine produced and what the local newspaper produced, offering clear explanations of the two information sources’ complementary roles. As media enterprises’ economic situation has become direr and new technologies have offered challenges, perhaps it has become more pressing for city magazines to contemplate their position as local information providers and to determine the best way they can serve audiences and advertisers in this volatile time. As mentioned above, Cook and Darby (2013) describe the growing “news gap” in many communities resulting from newspapers’ decline. It seems city magazine editors are quite aware of this dilemma. Many are actively working to find ways to help fill the gap, within the constraints of their audience’s and advertisers’ expectations.

The editors also noted two other key differences between their publications and other local information sources. One of these was their writing and visual style. The city magazines felt they could provide a point of view and storytelling structure in their stories that newspapers could not. Magazines can “have a voice … and not worry with objectivity in the same way” that newspapers must. Magazines can even choose to advocate for a specific position on an issue: “It’s OK to pick a side as long as you can intellectually and emotionally defend it, and prove beyond a reasonable doubt that it’s the right side to be on.” Magazines’ writers can have “recognizable individual voices … it makes the stories memorable regardless of topic.” One editor also suggested that when newspapers did long-form articles, they tended to be “badly edited and clichéd” and didn’t “really tell stories.” Multiple editors also mentioned the appeal of their magazines’ “beautiful design” that could appeal to readers and represent topics in visually attractive and informative ways: “A magazine … it’s just prettier. It’s glossy. The photos look much more clean and clear, and the color sparkles in a way that you never get out of a newspaper.”

A second important difference from other local information sources was the degree of authority that city magazines could assert in their content. For example, one editor argued that user-generated online content about topics like local destinations or dining (as on Yelp or similar sites) couldn’t replace the city magazines’ “unbiased” and trustworthy critical analysis of service information. That analysis offered a “curated or authoritative edge” that other media couldn’t provide. That distinctive quality was a key feature of the city magazine, one editor said, and “is certainly something we’ve played up in recent years because it’s such a singular thing,” not found in other information sources. As one editor said, “User-generated content is awesome, but there’s still a place for someone who tells me where the best restaurant is this month, or five things I’ve got to put on my calendar this month.”

Perceived audience for the city magazine

Research question 1b asked about editors’ perceptions of their audience, which the editors described in relatively similar terms. Beyond simple demographics of relatively high wealth and education, editors often described readers similarly: “the leaders of the city”; “smart … sophisticated … we’re aiming for their brains”; “free time and free cash”; “curious about the city.” Editors also often made statements like “great stories transcend demographics … they resonate with everyone.” The editors believe their readers are enthusiastic about the city (“all magazines are enthusiast publications”) and about journalism. They also see themselves as similar to their readers, at least with regard to their shared attitude about the city. In other ways, they were rather different from the readers: “None of us who work at this magazine are anywhere near the demographic of it.” Therefore, they tended to use their own values and preferences to shape the magazine. Many editors suggested their staffs aimed to create “a magazine we’d want to read.”

Editors’ story selection criteria

Research question 1c asked about the criteria editors use when selecting the major stories their magazines choose to cover. The editors gave a variety of responses when asked about the criteria they used to select specific stories — particularly long-form or investigative stories — for their magazines to cover. These criteria incorporated assumptions about the audience, as described above, but also basic storytelling, competitive, and financial considerations. The editors often first responded that they just wanted “good stories,” which, upon elaboration, they explained meant “human stories” that “transcend just the people involved,” stories with “existential” significance, and stories that created “an emotional connection between us and our audience.” The stories needed to have strong narratives and contain suspense so that readers asked, “Oh my God, what’s going to happen next?” Stories also had to have true, not just tangential, local connections that deepened readers’ understanding of the city: “It’s easy to fall into a trap of what looks like a really interesting story, but when you’re done with it, your understanding of the city isn’t improved … Our big stories tell a story about the city.”

In order to maintain their differentiation from other local information sources, the city magazines also sought to be ambitious with their stories, but not too ambitious in terms of the investment required for any one story. Generally, articles needed to “advance the story” beyond the newspaper’s coverage, if any existed: “We’re choosing stories we know we can do in our own way, put our imprint on … really bring more nuance and depth to than anyone else in our market.” One editor said that rather than commissioning long-form stories, the city magazine was planning to publish excerpts of recently published books on locally relevant topics. This approach was “overcoming the challenge in producing some coverage without resources.”

Finally, one editor mentioned the key role of visual components to the city magazine’s stories, and stated that stories with strong “visual storytelling” opportunities would be more likely to be covered in the magazine. For example, this editor wanted to create more infographics, though it had been difficult to “find an illustrator who could translate what we wanted in an easy-to-understand graphic.”

Digital Technologies for Audience Engagement in Local Issues

Research question 2 addressed the extent to which city magazine editors use digital technology to reach their audiences. Perhaps the most clearly transformative issue for city magazines today is their engagement with digital media. Both their actual social network accounts, such as Facebook and Twitter, and their own websites provide opportunities for the immediate publication and distribution of content. Readers can respond to magazines’ content through comments and conversation, share their own “user-generated” content, and interact with the magazines’ staff and with each other.

While the city magazine editors often noted the “challenge of keeping up with new innovations,” they also described many ways in which the web and social media provided new opportunities to serve readers. The editors saw other websites as potential competition for some of their content, particularly service content about dining and travel, but recognized the opportunities for reporting and engaging with readers that the web and social media offer. They also mentioned that digital media could generate “more eyeballs” for advertisers, making digital outreach potentially profitable.

The city magazines’ websites were central to their digital strategies. Notably, they saw their websites as “news sources,” though not typically as providing breaking news. As one editor stated, “We don’t have enough boots on the ground to do [city hall or the state capital]. We have to be more reactive on things like that. We rely on other media,” like local television news or the newspaper, to provide initial coverage that could be pursued further on the magazine’s website.

The magazines’ websites were also places to use their writers’ expertise on a daily basis, complementing long-form pieces in the print magazines. One editor explained the relationship between the website and the print magazine:

Before, they [our writers who are experts on local topics] might only be able to do a story two months down the road, and maybe it’s really long. And now they can provide you with constant updates and analysis and commentary on the same topic. So I think they complement each other, the very short [posts on the website/blogs] and the very long.

The city magazines saw their websites and social media outreach as engaging readers between print issues. With these digital tools, “rarely does a day go by that we don’t have a connection with our readers.” One editor described re-posting stories from the magazine that had been previously published in response to news events. The republication could “make a connection that this was happening in our community today, and we’d published this piece. We already knew this [personality in the news].” This re-posting allowed the no-cost reuse of existing content, connected the magazine’s audience to the news, and demonstrated the magazine’s authority on community matters.

The websites also serve as hubs for video and other multimedia content to complement print articles. The magazines’ online content tended to reach a younger audience than their print editions. That more youthful audience appeals to advertisers. On the websites, the magazines sought to foster interactions with their readers through comments and social media integration. Multiple editors mentioned the value of having conversations with readers about stories on their website, with dialogues and sharing of stories even occurring on a national and international level, well beyond the city magazine’s local focus. The interactions were “definitely a two-way operation or a multi-way operation. [The website] isn’t just us broadcasting out, for sure.” One editor mentioned that a cover story had developed in response to a reader comment on a blog post on the magazine’s site.

Social media similarly enabled these conversations between magazine staffers and the public. One editor commented on the natural fit between the typical style of social media communication and magazines’ conversational, personal voice. Editors appreciated that social media allowed readers to share the magazines’ longer stories widely, and that social media could “reach an audience that the magazine doesn’t and prepare them for future digital products” that the magazine might offer. The social media audience likely skews younger than the audience for the print publications, given the PEJ (2012) findings described above, and so these magazines’ digital outreach may indeed be anticipating the youthful audience’s future desire for more sophisticated local news products. Some editors also described uses of social media for contests and promotions.

One editor noted the more serious potential for city magazines’ social media use: its ability to maximize an investigative story’s impact on not only the audience, but also on relevant policymakers. In this case, the magazine’s writers followed through with social media activity during legislative action pertaining to an investigative story:

As that bill was moving through … [we] were tweeting about it like crazy … Those tweets became part of the debate. The state reps started re-tweeting our tweets, which had links to the piece. And … everybody who had anything to do with this decision has read our piece, and it has dramatically reshaped the debate. And that’s all because of social media.

This example demonstrates how sophisticated use of social media can enable city magazines to disseminate their work, gain support for a specific perspective, and enable conversations around topics that matter within a local area or region.

As a whole, editors saw digital technology as supporting and maximizing the print publication’s circulation and advertising, but also as creating new opportunities for online advertising, interaction with the public, and multimedia reporting. As one editor described, “We try to create a virtuous circle where people are moving back and forth between the website and the print magazine,” with references to each medium embedded within the other, and subscription offers everywhere. While the editors felt the impact of their digital efforts on their print circulation was hard to quantify, some were fairly confident that “all these little [digital] touches” through the website and social media could “get a reader committed” to a print subscription. One editor also mentioned the hope that these interactions could serve a mutual benefit, so that readers also could “get something else out of … interacting with us via Facebook or Twitter or Pinterest.”

City Magazine Editors’ Strategies for the Future

Research question 3 concerned editors’ strategies for developing city magazines in the future. Although many of the plans for their publications’ futures revolved around digital technology, these city magazine editors also stated their intent to continue developing their print products as well. As one editor stated, “people still value the physical object of the magazine as a luxury good or leisure activity … sometimes people are disappointed to find that they were interviewed for our website and not for the ‘real magazine.’ Things in the magazine seem more real and valuable.” The print magazine still holds a certain social prestige among its audience. Within that print publication, editors often said that a major goal was to continue to improve the writing within the magazine: “I want the magazine to really become known to good writers as their home.” That writing would also ideally be applied to a greater variety of topics, for some editors. One editor would like to “put less service on the covers of the magazine and try to do at least two more covers each year that were not service covers … whether it’s profiles, or just important investigative stories.” This editor noted that some in the city magazine business argue that service covers are more appealing on the newsstand than serious topics, but still felt that shifting some covers toward serious topics would be a worthy goal.

In terms of digital strategies, the city magazine editors described the challenge for small publishing companies of taking risks with digital formats. As one editor said, the current situation is one of “confusion in the market,” with many different platforms and tools available to publishers and audiences. Some expressed a desire to let larger publishers “figure it out and make the tools cheap enough for us … without having critical mass, we risk getting caught in between and not being able to keep up.” There was some experimentation occurring, as at one city magazine that had chosen to publish a Kindle Single (one long-form story, sold as a standalone digital product through Amazon) of one of its major stories. This magazine was actively thinking about ways to address its “non-paginated economic future” — a future in which a print publication with static paper pages would no longer be central to its business. Along the same lines, another editor referred to the magazine as a “multimedia event company,” drawing income from not just the print magazine, but also from its online products and from its sponsorship and organization of local events.

Overall, as one editor stated, these city magazines are well positioned in many ways to serve local audiences and advertisers:

It’s really a great market for city magazines because we consumers increasingly want more and more local content. Advertisers and marketers are continuing to look for ways to drill down and be more local. All that speaks really well to city magazines and to making ourselves relevant across media platforms.

As these interviews demonstrated, city magazine editors are working today to explore their magazines’ capabilities in both print and digital media, to differentiate their product from other competing local information sources, to understand and interact with their audiences, and to select stories that serve that audience and take advantage of their medium’s distinctive qualities.

CONCLUSION

This study has demonstrated city magazines’ ongoing adaptation to changes in the local information environment. As newspapers’ resources and influence have declined, digital media have developed to compete with some aspects of their coverage, and with that of city magazines. City magazines have identified key strengths of their own medium and coverage style that can continue to distinguish them to audiences even as this environment and audiences’ preferences shift toward digital media. While they remain fairly focused on specific audience segments traditionally targeted by city magazines – the wealthy and the well educated – they also recognize the potential for digital media to bring their content to broader audiences and to affect local and/or regional opinion leaders.

Data on the media preferences and habits of younger media audiences, mentioned above, suggest that these editors may need to accelerate their magazines’ movement toward digital and mobile platforms. Younger readers, and especially those with higher education and income, use mobile and other digital media for local news and information (Caumont, 2013). Some of these media have encroached upon city magazines’ traditional topic areas, and have done so with user-generated content that costs nothing to produce. For example, Yelp and similar websites/mobile applications collect crowdsourced restaurant reviews that are free and easy to access anywhere. Other sites/apps offer entertainment and local event information.

These sites have only grown since the 2011 Pew report, cited above, which showed that over half of Americans use these sources for food and entertainment information – particularly those aged 18-39, those with greater education and income, and those who use mobile devices, precisely the demographic that city magazines traditionally target. Moreover, most of these young news users have not developed habits of seeking local information in print media and will need to be convinced of the city magazines’ unique utility. Whether these users will consider city magazines’ distinctive presentation of this kind of service information to be worth the magazines’ cost remains to be seen. The availability and popularity of these digital local information sources should encourage city magazine editors to differentiate their magazines’ entertainment and food coverage – along with all of their local content – and to better market their publications’ unique qualities.

This study presents a snapshot of the perspectives of a small group of city magazine editors at a time of volatility for the magazine industry and for journalism as a whole. Though the 15 editors represented a variety of publications, the study does not comprehensively cover all American city magazines, each of which faces a unique set of local circumstances and constraints. Additionally, although the editors expressed their own beliefs about their magazines’ contributions to local information, these views were not gathered concurrently with those of newspaper or television journalists, nor were they tested within this study against actual analysis of their magazines’ content (a final component of the larger research project that is still underway).

Future research should look more closely at these city magazines’ content to determine to what degree they are in fact engaging in the kind of investigative or “serious” coverage that many editors mentioned as desirable, versus city magazines’ traditional focus on service stories. A longitudinal examination of city magazines’ content would document their shift to fill the “news gap” left by newspapers’ decline, if that movement is indeed occurring. Finally, contrasting this coverage with that of local newspapers or local digital news providers would illuminate the differences in coverage content and style among these media. As the literature review revealed, most of the research on city magazines prior to this research project is quite outdated. This study can inform additional research on these publications’ contemporary status and function.

This study also raises questions about how city magazines form and engage a community of readers within a defined geographic area, suggesting that this medium should also be incorporated into future studies of community journalism. The effects of city magazine readership on local audiences should be examined. Do these local readers actually connect with the magazines’ coverage of their cities in the ways imagined by these editors? How does city magazines’ print and digital content invite the formation of a community, and who is or is not included in that community, given these magazines’ traditionally wealthy and educated readership? Do city magazine readers possess deeper understanding of or stronger emotional connections to their cities? To what degree does reading a city magazine support a relationship to the city, or to specific communities within the city? An analysis of uses and effects of local information sources that includes these magazines would aid both researchers who seek to understand the changing urban information environment and all local journalists (magazine and otherwise) who must plan effective content and digital strategies.

Overall, extending our analysis and understanding of information providers within cities beyond just newspapers appears to be increasingly important during this time of transformation in the local information environment.

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About the Author

Dr. Susan Currie Sivek is an assistant professor in the Department of Mass Communication at Linfield College.

sivek-cj2014

 

Marcus Funk

Community newspapers in Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina hold a front row seat to critical early presidential primary elections; they cover those elections, however, with an exclusive focus on coverage of candidate visits to local communities. Unlike national media, which focus primarily on “horse race” campaign coverage, community newspaper editors and publishers say they consider a candidate’s standing in state and national polls unimportant to their coverage; equally inconsequential are a candidate’s character, values, issues and policies. This survey of community newspaper editors and publishers supports gatekeeping theory but refutes its focus on normative, labeling and conscious deviance. It also helps develop literature on the “relentlessly local” focus of community journalism.

In 2008, Bill Tubbs had a question. The publisher of The North Scott Press in Eldridge, Iowa, asked the Scott County Democratic and Republican parties why their candidates for president were stumping in Davenport, a regional hub, but avoiding other nearby communities. They listened. By the time the Iowa Caucus was over, the Press had face-to-face interviews in Eldridge with the future president, vice president, and secretary of state, as well as a former senator and governor who would be embroiled in scandals within a year.

Eldridge, Iowa, is home to about 5,600 people. Tubbs’ newspaper publishes 5,000 copies every Wednesday. But during the Iowa caucus, Tubbs and journalists like him have more access to national politicians than Rupert Murdoch, Arianna Huffington or Rush Limbaugh – and, arguably, more influence over who will ultimately become president of the United States.

“Our rule: It has to be the CANDIDATE – not his/her sister, brother, husband/wife, or other surrogate. Only the candidate. If they come to our small towns and rural areas, we’ll be there,” Tubbs said.[1] “In Iowa, it’s about retail politics. The candidate who meets the most people and is the most authentic does the best.”

Local newspapers in Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina play a unique role in the American political process. Every four years, men and women vying to be the next American president walk into the offices of community journalists and ask for local news coverage. Their visits are reported more or less verbatim; their speeches are quoted, local questions are asked and the visit itself becomes the news item.

Academic analyses have indicated that, on the whole, community newspapers are more locally focused, and more locally accountable, than larger publications (Hume, 2005; Lauterer, 2006; Reader, 2006; Smethers, Bressers, Willard, Harvey, & Freeland, 2007). There is also evidence that, under normal circumstances, smaller newspapers offer kinder coverage to visiting presidents than national media (Eshbaugh-Soha, 2008; Eshbaugh-Soha & Peake, 2008; Peake, 2007). Research on early presidential caucuses and primaries, however, has been surprisingly thin, and more focused on broad trends (Palser, 2004; Patterson, 1980; Tewksbury, 2006) and the New Hampshire primary (Freitag, 2000; Golan & Wanta, 2001; Kendall, 2005) than the Iowa caucus (Heim, 2013; Len-Rios, 2002; Schreurs, 1996) or South Carolina primary (Vinson & Moore, 2007). As the first three states in both the Republican and Democratic nomination process, these elections have incredible authority determining who will, and will not, be elected president of the United States. Often, they are decided by a thin margin of votes; in the 2012 GOP Iowa caucus, for example, only 34 votes ultimately separated former Sen. Rick Santorum (R-PA) from former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney.

There exists in these states a paramount opportunity to research the intersection between local newspapers and the most national of American politics. Conversing with community newspaper editors and publishers, rather than about them, allows researchers to better understand them. What motivates these journalists? What influences their coverage? What do they think of the job they are doing? And, what might their answers illustrate about gatekeeping theory and its focus on deviance?

This study offers scholars an illustrative look at perhaps the most influential community newspapers in the country, as well as an opportunity to test Gatekeeping theory (Lewin, 1947; Shoemaker & Vos, 2009; White, 1950) in a unique environment. Additionally, for professional journalists, this study offers insights, ideas and perhaps inspiration to community newspapers in other states. And, given the surprising length of presidential primaries in 2008 and 2012, it is also possible that party elections in states like Florida, Nevada, Minnesota and Missouri will continue to grow in importance; if so, community journalists in those states could benefit from learning the coverage practices of their colleagues in earlier states.

LITERATURE REVIEW

News Coverage of Presidential Primaries

While scholarly research has scrutinized general elections in remarkable detail (Brubaker, 2011; Davisson, 2011; Delavande & Manski, 2010; Hardy & Jamieson, 2011; Hill, Pitts, Smith, & Smith, 2010; Johnson & Perlmutter, 2009; Ragas & Kiousis, 2010; Woolley, Limperos, & Oliver, 2010), considerably less attention has been devoted to crucial early contests in Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina. Published research offers interesting direction for the current study, but does not offer a comparable analysis of community journalism.

The broadest analyses have indicated a general shift toward “horse race” coverage among national newspapers and television media during the primaries. Freitag (2000) found that themes of “campaigning,” or news concerning strategy, style, strengths and weaknesses, occupied a total of 47 percent of news coverage of the New Hampshire primary between 1952 and 1996 in The Boston Globe and The New York Times; news on issues and qualifications occupied only 12 percent of the coverage. Similarly, Benoit, Hemmer and Stein (2010) found that “horse race” coverage was the most common overall topic (66 percent) among New York Times articles on primaries between 1952 and 2004. The bulk of that coverage focused on campaign strategy (45 percent), polls (11 percent) and campaign events (nine percent). Coverage of the “game,” including “horse race” coverage, also accounted for nearly two thirds of major media coverage of the 1976 primaries (Patterson, 1980). The consequences of an election are also considered factors in media consumption of political news surrounding a primary; high-stake elections see more reader interest than low-consequence ones (Tewksbury, 2006).

A study of the 2000 New Hampshire primary by Golan and Wanta (2001) found that generally, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) was treated more favorably in regional media than Texas Governor George W. Bush; McCain was positively associated with reform, leadership and patriotism, while Bush was considered more electable with the best chance to win. An intermedia agenda-setting analysis of the 2008 Iowa caucus found that neutral and liberal political blogs tended to follow the mainstream media’s agenda, while conservative blogs remained independent; agenda setting effects were also present between the media and Sen. Hillary Clinton’s (D-NY) campaign agenda (Heim, 2013). Farnsworth and Lichter (2006) found strong “network news effects” concerning relationships between “horse race” news coverage and poll changes in New Hampshire. Kendall (2005) found a close interaction between media and candidates on the campaign trail over many election cycles, but argued that online and social media are making that interaction less logistically co-dependent.

More specific scholarship has been devoted to political advertising in New Hampshire, which skyrocketed to more than $4.8 million in 2004 – up from $3 million during the 2000 campaign, and even more so from previous election cycles (Devlin, 1994; 2005). A number of studies have investigated the gendered (and arguably sexist) coverage of Sen. Hillary Clinton’s (D-NY) emotional speech during a campaign stop in Portsmouth, New Hampshire (Bligh, Merolla, Schroedel, & Gonzalez, 2010; Falk, 2009; Shepard, 2009), and one analysis argues that Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) reshaped the media narrative surrounding national security and “national insecurity” throughout the primary season (Ivie & Giner, 2009).

Perhaps most interesting for professional journalists is the innovative success of the Iowa Caucus Research Guide, a state-run program designed to piggyback news coverage of local economic development among the deluge of political reporting of the Iowa caucus. The promotion was designed to funnel news coverage, and subsequent revenue, from the caucus to local businesses and programs; estimates valued the program’s benefits at $1.4 million (Schreurs, 1996). Also noteworthy is research by political scientists Vinson and Moore (2007), who argued that local media in South Carolina had greater “local flavor” and tended to be more accurate than national media concerning the importance of “crossover voters,” negative campaigning and veteran’s issues. Coverage of character was also an important issue for local papers; it was less of an issue for national media.

“From our vantage point as scholars living in South Carolina and researching campaign spending in the 2000 presidential primary, we often wondered if the national media were covering the same event we were watching” (Vinson & Moore, 2007, p393).

Outside the election season, there is evidence that metropolitan newspapers are kinder to visiting presidents than the traveling White House press corps. President George W. Bush, in particular, was fond of shopping his policies to voters in their own backyards; Eshbaugh-Soha (2008; 2010) and Peake (2008) and found that, generally speaking, metropolitan newspapers covered presidential visits more positively than the national media. That support fluctuated based upon a newspaper’s resources, corporate ownership and local support for the president, as did support for the Iraq War. The pair also found most (73 percent) of the coverage of the president’s visits tended to be descriptive of the event itself – not a fundamental discussion of policy (Eshbaugh-Soha, 2008; 2010). There is also evidence that coverage of congressional representatives is highly related to geographic overlap between the congressional district and a newspaper’s circulation area (Schaffner & Sellers, 2003), and that local demographics and ideologies can shift metropolitan newspaper coverage in specific directions (Pollock, 2007).

Local Newspapers

However, the definition of “local” media in these studies refers more to metropolitan journalism than community journalism. Studies that specify local newspapers have referred to metropolitan publications like The Charleston Post and Courier and New Hampshire Union-Leader (Devlin, 1994; Freitag, 2000; Golan & Wanta, 2001; Vinson & Moore, 2007). While there is certainly a considerable gap between The New York Times and The Des Moines Register, there is arguably a larger gulf between the Times and the weekly Hampton Chronicle in Hampton, Iowa.

How might the Chronicle cover the caucus? Here, scholarship is blank. The researcher found no scholarship that has explicitly explored the role of community newspapers in the Iowa caucus, New Hampshire primary or South Carolina primary. While there is considerable evidence that community newspapers are more locally focused and locally accountable to local audiences, both offline (Burmester, 2011; Funk, 2010; Hume, 2005; Lauterer, 2006; Reader, 2006; Smethers et al., 2007) and online (Anderson & DeVault, 2009; Gilligan, 2011; Greer & Yan, 2010; Mersey, 2009), less scholarship is concerned with community newspapers and elections (Shaker, 2011). Community newspapers in Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina potentially influence major elections; how would they characterize the effectiveness of their coverage, and what influences that coverage?

Gatekeeping theory

Here, Gatekeeping theory has clear utility. The theory is based upon studies of a Cold War-era wire editor at a major newspaper who documented his reasons for accepting, or rejecting, wire articles for publication. Some reasons were entirely practical, like not having enough space or feeling the topic had been fully covered already, but others like “He’s too red” (communist) were entirely subjective (White, 1950). The foundation expanded the World War I persuasion techniques documented by Kurt Lewin (1947), who argued that any number of deliberate or accidental forces could influence what food reaches the domestic dinner table, and what food does not. It has since been considered an individual- and organizational-level influence in Shoemaker and Reese’s Hierarchy of Influences model (1996) and has been expanded into a variety of news formats and environments (Cassidy, 2006; Cheesman & Nohl, 2011; Cuillier, 2012; Haiqing, 2011; Hardin, 2005; Hun Shik, 2010; Minic, 2008). That homogenization of media content has been abundantly illustrated by framing theory (Entman, 1993; Reese, 2001), which considers media content (and, in turn, media homogenization) more specifically than media production, which tends to be the realm of gatekeeping theory.

The national media’s preference for “horse race” coverage, often considered as a news frame, can also be considered a Gatekeeping effect. Journalists and editors crafting that coverage are mindful of an artificial industry standard, effectively, of the link between “horse race” coverage and professional newspapers. In a similar way, community newspapers writ large adopt a clear priority on their local communities. If community newspapers behave in unison concerning their communities, and national media homogenously focus on “horse race” campaigns, it seems logical that community newspapers might structure their approach to primary election coverage in similar ways.

Generally, gatekeeping theory can be considered relatively shallow. In their formative work on the subject, Shoemaker & Vos (2009) acknowledge that, “Regrettably, theorizing about gatekeeping has not been in large supply” (p11); the theory can even be considered primarily a tactic of the news-making process. While it dovetails with media sociology (Shoemaker & Reese, 1996) and framing (Entman, 1993; Reese, 2001) nicely, it arguably lacks the same rigor. There are two reasons, however, why it is a strong choice for this study.

First, although the theory is relatively shallow, that lack of depth makes it highly tangible. Studies that directly address practical news-making decisions, like this one, are better suited using a highly practical theoretical framework such as gatekeeping theory. Of critical interest here are an editor’s practical decisions; those decisions are best considered using practical theory.

Second, a highly theoretical consideration of news as deviance has evolved from that practical focus (Arpan & Tuzunkan, 2011; Boyle & Armstrong, 2009; Breen, 1997; Jong Hyuk, 2008; Shoemaker, 1984; Shoemaker & Danielian, 1991; Shoemaker, 1996). On a sociological level, news is like the canary in the coal mine – a barometer for potential threats, both real and imagined, meant to satisfy a basic human need for awareness and security. That focus on deviance, according to the theory, is derived from a lack of interaction between journalists and audiences (Shoemaker & Vos, 2009):

People routinely survey their environments for things that are deviant or unusual because they pose potential threats. These can be as common as a car darting in front of someone on a busy street to less frequent threats like invading armies. … The difference between professional information gatherers such as journalists and the rest of us is that journalists’ surveillance is institutionalized and sanctioned, whereas we generally survey the environment for our more informal and personal purposes. Journalists fulfill people’s innate desire to detect threats in the environment, keep informed about the world, and devise methods of dealing with those threats, whether real or potential (Shoemaker, 1996, p32).

The theory is focused on journalism and media studies, and has its roots in older analyses of social control (Lauderdale & Estep, 1980; Miliband, 1969). The general idea is broadly applied, however. Put another way, in a popular self-help book on anxiety:

The shape on the horizon was either a bear or a blueberry bush, and the only way to find out was to go and see for yourself. If you go off toward the vague shape often enough, eventually it turns out to be a bear, and that day you’re the bear’s lunch. … We’re the children of the children of the children (and so forth) of the ones that played it safe and went back to the cave” (Wilson & Dufrene, 2010, p30).

In journalism studies, deviance has been operationalized under three definitions: normative deviance, labeling deviance, and conscious deviance (Shoemaker, 1984; Shoemaker & Vos, 2009).  Shoemaker & Vos’ (2009) operationalizations are used here:

Normative Deviance: Behavior, ideas, groups, or events are deviant when they break social rules or norms.

Labeling Deviance: Behavior, ideas, groups, or events are deviant when an individual or group calls them deviant.

Conscious Deviance: A person or group is deviant when aware that their behavior is in some sense wrong or disapproved.

Gatekeeping theory offers fertile ground to study deviance because it is primarily concerned with editorial decisions – deviant or otherwise – and less concerned with the effects or implications generated by the final editorial product. This study on community newspaper coverage of early presidential primaries offers an intriguing window into the study of deviance as well. For most community newspapers, a visiting presidential candidate would be considered extremely deviant – an out of the ordinary event by any measure, if not a once-in-a-lifetime occurrence. In Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina, however, such visits are regular and routine. How might community newspaper editors’ editorial decisions surrounding those visits clarify or complicate the academic understanding of news as deviance?

RESEARCH QUESTIONS

This study focuses on the motivations and influences on community newspaper editors covering the 2012 Republican Iowa caucus, New Hampshire primary and South Carolina primary. Relatively little research has been done on American primary elections; much current scholarship has been devoted to the “horse race” focus of national media. As such, this study pursues five research questions.

RQ1: How important are a candidate’s visits to a community to community newspapers covering the Iowa caucus, New Hampshire primary and South Carolina primary?

RQ2: How important are state or national polls to community newspapers covering the Iowa caucus, New Hampshire primary and South Carolina primary?

RQ3: How important are a candidate’s character, values, issues and policies to community newspapers covering the Iowa caucus, New Hampshire primary and South Carolina primary?

RQ4: How do community newspaper editors characterize the value, strengths and weaknesses of their coverage of the Iowa caucus, New Hampshire primary and South Carolina primary?

RQ5: Does community newspaper coverage of the Iowa caucus, New Hampshire primary and South Carolina primary reflect Shoemaker and Vos’ (2009) concepts of normative, labeling, or conscious deviance?

METHODOLOGY

To measure these research questions, this study utilized a 10-question survey of a sample of weekly and bi-weekly community newspaper editors in Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina. The survey was conducted online via Qualtrics, a detailed and highly customizable web survey platform. Technically, different surveys were conducted for newspapers in Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina; in each, the names of the state and caucus / primary were changed as appropriate, but otherwise the survey content was identical.

Originally, the sample was designed to be generated randomly among 40 community newspapers each from Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina. Email addresses of newsrooms and newspaper editors were collected from online databases from the Iowa Newspaper Association, the New England Newspaper and Press Association, and the South Carolina Press Association. Forty community newspapers were randomly selected from databases in Iowa and South Carolina; however, given the small number of newspapers in New Hampshire, a large random sample was infeasible. Instead, a sample of 20 newspapers was chosen, which effectively represented a census of all independently operated weekly and bi-weekly newspapers in the state; several weekly publications are operated by the same editors and staff, which limited the potential dataset. Furthermore, while there are more than 40 independently operated community newspapers in Iowa and South Carolina, there are not many more. Given the small sizes of these states, too, this dataset represents the lion’s share of community newspapers in Iowa and South Carolina; as such, this sample can only barely be considered randomly generated.

The survey was emailed four times in March and April of 2012, and participants reached a 16 percent response rate. Fifteen completed surveys and one partially completed survey were returned. Although a higher response rate would obviously be preferable, it is important to note the small size of the potential dataset. Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina are all relatively small states; indeed, that’s part of their value as early primary states. This sample reached the majority of community newspaper editors in these states, and the dataset cannot be significantly expanded; also, as Lewis and Reese noted, journalists in the digital era are busy professionals who are “simply hard to pin down for an interview” (Lewis & Reese, 2009, p.89).

Responses and response information was kept entirely confidential. For each quantitative question, identical 10-question Likert-type scales were used, with one being “rarely” and ten being “very often.” To conserve space, similar questions were combined into matrixes on the Qualtrics survey.[2]

To answer RQ1, respondents were asked “Roughly how often did your newspaper write about presidential candidates who were …” followed by “Visiting your community?” and “Not visiting your community?” Respondents were then asked how often the newspapers ran Associated Press or other wire service articles concerning the presidential candidates. An additional question asked, “If you had unlimited resources, how many articles would your newspaper write about presidential candidates who were …” followed by 10-point scales for “Visiting your community?” and “Not visiting your community?”

To answer RQ2 and RQ3, a three-item matrix question utilized the same 10-point Likert scale. The question read, “Before the (Iowa Caucus / New Hampshire Primary / South Carolina Primary) in January, how much did you consider the following when planning your coverage of a particular candidate?” Three queries followed: “State or national polls?” “A candidate’s character or values?” and “A candidate’s issues or policies?”

A pair of open-ended questions was used to measure RQ4. Editors were asked “How important a role do you think local newspapers play in the (Iowa Caucus / New Hampshire Primary / South Carolina Primary)?” And “In general, what do you think about the way local newspapers covered the (Iowa Caucus / New Hampshire Primary / South Carolina Primary)?” Responses were analyzed qualitatively to determine majority and minority opinions. Samples culled from the responses and presented here are intended to reflect the majority opinion unless otherwise noted.

RQ5 was also determined qualitatively. Analysis of the open-ended survey questions, as well as qualitative results for RQ4, determined if editor’s perspectives and editorial philosophies were consistent or at odds with Shoemaker & Vos’ (2009) operationalizations of normative, labeling, and conscious deviance; operationalizations are also consistent with a bevy of literature on deviance (Arpan & Tuzunkan, 2011; Boyle & Armstrong, 2009; Jong Hyuk, 2008; Shoemaker, 1984; Shoemaker & Danielian, 1991).

RESULTS

Community newspapers in Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina treated the 2012 Republican caucus and primaries as local news. Community newspaper editors and publishers bucked previous research on national media, which emphasized “horse race” campaign coverage; editors and publishers also argued that their coverage serves an important function in key elections.

RQ1: How important are a candidate’s visits to a community to community newspapers covering the Iowa caucus, New Hampshire primary and South Carolina primary?

Survey results indicated that candidate visits to a community are quite important to community newspaper editors. On a scale of one to 10, with one being rarely and 10 being very often, community newspaper editors in Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina reported an average 7.69 level of coverage of candidates visiting a local community (N = 16, SD = 3.05); conversely, editors and publishers said they reported on candidates who did not visit a local community with an average 1.44 level (N = 16, SD = 0.81). Respondents were also asked, given unlimited resources, how much coverage would be given to candidates who were visiting, and not visiting, a local community; editors and publishers responded with an ideal 8.31 for visiting candidates (N = 16, SD = 2.5), and 2.25 for non-visiting candidates (N = 16, SD = 2.27).

Community newspapers also reported a 1.13 (out of 10) regarding use of Associated Press or wire articles on the caucus and primaries (N = 15, SD = 0.52).

RQ2: How important are state or national polls to community newspapers covering the Iowa caucus, New Hampshire primary and South Carolina primary?

State and national polls were not important to community newspaper editors and publishers covering the Iowa Caucus, New Hampshire Primary and South Carolina Primary. On a scale of one to 10, with one being rarely and 10 being very often, respondents reported an average of 2.00 (N = 15, SD = 2.07).

RQ3: How important are a candidate’s character, values, issues and policies to community newspapers covering the Iowa caucus, New Hampshire primary and South Carolina primary?

Community newspaper editors and publishers did not consider a candidate’s character, values, issues or policies important when determining news coverage. On a scale of one to 10, responses placed “Character or Values” at 2.20 (N = 15, SD = 1.97) and “Issues or Policies” at 2.80 (N = 15, SD = 2.91).

RQ4: How do community newspaper editors and publishers characterize the value, strengths and weaknesses of their coverage of the Iowa caucus, New Hampshire primary and South Carolina primary?

Generally speaking, community newspaper editors and publishers considered their coverage an important part of the early caucus and primaries; they also routinely emphasized their local focus on, and value to, their local communities. That local focus effectively meant that if a candidate did not step into a community newspaper’s footprint, they would be ignored entirely.  Representative comments include the following:

“We do not do any stories on candidates who do not visit our area. Simple reason is we only cover local events. If you are not physically in the area, you don’t exist.” (New Hampshire)

“We all do it differently. I don’t understand why a *local* newspaper would send a reporter far afield of its own coverage area to chase candidates. Our policy is they get coverage only if they step foot in our coverage area, period.” (New Hampshire)

“We know the communities, i.e., the voters, and they know us. I believe the community places more trust in my reporting than what other, larger media outlets say.” (Iowa)

“Small local newspapers are not likely to spend a lot of space on a candidate who doesn’t appear in our community or at least send representatives to our community. Only when we can localize the information do we do that in [our newspaper]. We leave it to larger media outlets to print a candidate’s campaign promises, etc., unless we can relate them to something that directly affects our readers.” (South Carolina)

For candidates who did visit, however, that local emphasis brought with it three important attributes: specificity, accountability, and availability. Coverage was specifically tailored to particular communities, editors and publishers said, rather than the broad-spectrum approach used by the national media. Because community newspapers are already more accountable to local audiences, editors and publishers said, their coverage seemed more genuine to local readers as well.  Representative comments include:

“[The Iowa Caucus is] very important. Candidates tend to speak more specifically to small-town audiences, and must answer questions that address smaller portions of Americans. When speaking to a national audience, candidates must speak more broadly. Both specific and broad answers help us get a better picture of each candidate.” (Iowa)

“Local newspapers are in a better position to show how a candidate’s stances affect that community.” (South Carolina)

“I truly enjoy grassroots campaigning, so I enjoy the caucus. Our readership pays attention and appreciates the unbiased, complete and honest reports we provide regarding visits by the candidates.” (Iowa)

“Local newspapers play a critical role in educating voters in New Hampshire. As a small (7,000 circ bi-weekly), we are not able to cover candidates to the extent dailies can, but we cover all visits to the region and look for local angles of national campaigns.” (New Hampshire)

That local focus and accountability was particularly important for rural readers. Many editors and publishers acknowledged the authority national media and metropolitan newspapers carried when covering the caucus and primaries, but in isolated communities, local media adopted increased importance.

“Large dailies…. [the Iowa Caucus] is vital. Rural weeklies like ours, not much. They look to us for local unbiased coverage.” (Iowa)

“With the electronic media leaning to the left or right, the importance of local newspapers ranks very high.” (South Carolina)

“In rural towns, where the local newspaper is people’s first source of information, very important. But the cities have the numbers so that may be a non-factor.” (New Hampshire)

Most community newspaper editors and publishers also felt their coverage of the early caucus and primaries was generally well done. There was a small undercurrent of cynicism, and an acknowledgement that national politics are not the forte of community newspapers, but confidence was generally standard.

“[Community newspaper coverage is important] somewhat. The papers are still the best delivery system to let voters know about appearances by candidates. However, I think this time around most voters were already leaning to Gingrich since he was the lone Southerner in the race.” (South Carolina)

“Studies should be done of the work candidates do to become acquainted with the voters of small towns. Other than the local fans of individual candidates, there is a deep skepticism of the process.” (Iowa)

“Local newspapers give way too much credit to the caucus and the candidates. It’s a giant advertising campaign for both the candidates and the state, with very little substance to it.” (Iowa)

RQ5: Does community newspaper coverage of the Iowa caucus, New Hampshire primary and South Carolina primary reflect Shoemaker and Vos’ (2009) concepts of normative, labeling, or conscious deviance?

This question was also assessed qualitatively. It considered editors’ philosophies and choices concerning three types of news deviance common in gatekeeping literature: normative deviance, labeling deviance and conscious deviance. Each is based on the notion that news effectively serves as a sociological alarm bell for potential threats, and that news is based on events which are out of the ordinary of day-to-day life – and thus, potentially threatening (Breen, 1997; Shoemaker, 1984; Shoemaker & Danielian, 1991; Shoemaker & Vos, 2009; Shoemaker, 1996).

Results consistently rebuked all three forms of deviance.

Normative Deviance: In most communities, particularly small towns, a visit by the American presidential candidate would unequivocally qualify as normative deviance. In Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina, however, such visits are routine and commonplace – so much so that community newspaper editors expect them, and deny coverage to candidates who do not visit the local community. These visits do not break social norms; instead, they clearly are the norm.

Labeling Deviance: Similarly, in most communities, the coverage of an unusual or rare visit by a presidential candidate would be openly acknowledged as unusual or rare, and thus deviant; literature indicates this is true of sitting presidents as well (Eshbaugh-Soha, 2008; Eshbaugh-Soha & Peake, 2008; Peake, 2007). This is not the case in Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina, however, where newspaper editors and their readers are both accustomed to being visited early and often by aspiring presidents. No labeling deviance is present because community newspaper editors do not consider the visits unusual or out of the ordinary; in fact, quite the opposite is true.

Conscious Deviance: Qualitative analysis also indicates that conscious deviance is not present in community newspaper coverage of the Iowa caucus, New Hampshire primary and South Carolina primary. Editors are aware of the importance of their coverage, and the early primaries as a whole, and generally take the elections seriously; however, there is no sense that these states’ privilege, or the primary system in general, is in some sense wrong or disapproved. Conscious deviance does not apply.

DISCUSSION

Practical Implications

Community newspapers in Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina serve an important function in American politics. They cover among the most critical national elections, the nation’s first Republican and Democratic primaries, and arguably have considerable emphasis over who will, and will not, be president of the United States.

It is intriguing, then, that community newspapers do not give these key elections special weight or unique coverage. Editors and publishers take the caucus and primaries seriously, but only as they impact their local audience and communities. In a sense, community newspapers cover these important elections in the same way they would cover any important election – with an exclusive emphasis on local ideas, audiences and individuals.

It’s almost as if these newspapers provide a window, or an intermediary of some sort, between a local community and a national election. National figures step up to that window to speak with the local community, but only in this one-on-one context does the nation writ large exist. For audience or political science research, this is oversimplified; community newspaper readers have ample access to state, national and international media, and it’s safe to say that voters in these states fully appreciate the national implications of their ballots. However, for the particular study of community journalism, it is interesting to note that the predominant emphasis on local communities trumps the paramount non-local importance of the Iowa caucus, New Hampshire primary and South Carolina primary.

Community newspaper editors and publishers were unswayed by state or national polls, a candidate’s character of values, or their issues or policies. Front-runners and also-rans, as well as mavericks and partisan whips, were given equal consideration provided they were present and available in the community newspaper’s local coverage area. This places community newspaper coverage in stark contrast with national media, which tend to focus on “horse race” campaign coverage; it also speaks to the well-documented local focus of community journalism, and adds scholarship to the study of gatekeeping theory. Indeed, at least in these instances, media do allow some objective forces (local availability) to influence their coverage while ignoring others (character, values, issues and policies). This is entirely consistent with the notion of gatekeeping.

This study speaks, too, to political science and the American electorate. Community newspapers in these states cover the early caucus and primaries much as any community newspaper might cover a statewide election; this is worth noting given that legislatures in Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina invest a great deal of effort to remain at the front of the national primary schedule. These three states occupy a privileged position in American politics; their community newspapers, however, do not treat these elections any differently than any other non-local election. What might that say about the importance and function of the Iowa Caucus, New Hampshire Primary and South Carolina Primary? Further research specifically aimed at political science would be required to explore these questions, but they are certainly intriguing.

Theoretical Implications

As an academic theory, gatekeeping is relatively shallow and perhaps lacking in theoretical development (Shoemaker & Vos, 2009). This study argues that its shallow focus is a highly tangible boon – by retaining a practical focus on editorial decisions, the theory empowers practical discussion of extant news coverage and clear editorial decisions. This paper is one such example. Gatekeeping theory allows a salient, practical discussion of the logic and motivations behind community newspaper coverage of the three most critical elections in the American political cycle.

However, there is certainly room for theoretical development and consideration. One of gatekeeping theory’s most intriguing theoretical concepts is the notion of deviance, which has evolved out of classic studies of social control (Lauderdale & Estep, 1980; Miliband, 1969) and stems from a sociological need for humans to recognize and address potential threats of all shapes and sizes (Shoemaker, 1984; Shoemaker & Danielian, 1991; Shoemaker, 1996). News media accomplish that threat watching efficiently and expediently (Arpan & Tuzunkan, 2011; Boyle & Armstrong, 2009; Breen, 1997; Jong Hyuk, 2008). Concerning community newspaper coverage of these crucial elections, however, the concept simply fails to apply.

Three prominent perspectives on deviance – normative deviance, labeling deviance and conscious deviance – are plainly inconsistent with community newspaper editors’ reported perspectives and policies. News in this case is not about threats, or unusual events; instead, editorial decisions reflect an important but highly routine ritual of candidate visits, speeches, and politicking. In Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina, such visits are highly commonplace, and get covered as routine events – even despite the power and authority that one candidate will ultimately assume.

This complicates the notion of gatekeeping as deviance. Perhaps deviance is not as essential to the newsmaking process as previous literature has argued (Shoemaker, 1984; Shoemaker & Danielian, 1991; Shoemaker, 1996); or, perhaps it is inconsistent with the “relentlessly local” (Lauterer, 2006) orientation of community journalism (Pollock, 2007; Reader, 2006; Shaker, 2011; Smethers, Bressers, Willard, Harvey, & Freeland, 2007). Further research will be required to explore the relationship between deviance and community newspapers.

CONCLUSION

This study investigates a curious intersection in American media and politics. At the start of the presidential election process lie the Iowa caucus, the New Hampshire primary and the South Carolina primary; these elections are generally treated as important but highly routine events by community newspaper editors in those states. These editors have the unusual privilege of meeting and covering presidential contenders and, through their coverage, potentially exerting heavy influence over who will, and will not, ultimately become president of the United States.

As these findings indicate, these editors consider these critical elections with national consequences purely within a hyperlocal lens. The news is not about the nation as a whole; it is about a visit to a particular local community, and indeed a routine and expected visit. It is not curious that local newspapers focus exhaustively on local news – that is highly consistent with their editorial mission, and with a range of academic literature (Brewer & McCombs, 1996; Hume, 2005; Lauterer, 2006; Shaker, 2011; Smethers, et al., 2007). However, if ever there were an opportunity for a community newspaper to depart from its “relentlessly local” (Lauterer, 2006) focus, it would be for news coverage of a critical and prominent election like the Iowa caucus. That local newspaper editors stay true to their business model, even here, is highly noteworthy.

Findings presented here overlap also into a number of other theoretical avenues. Although not explicitly explored here, there is clear utility for Benedict Anderson’s notion of imagined community (2006); how community newspaper editors and their coverage imagine their hyper-local readership within the context of major elections with national consequences deserves more direct consideration. Similarly, community newspaper coverage of these early primaries deserves explicit consideration concerning media sociology and the hierarchy of influences model (Shoemaker & Reese, 1996), classic analyses of newsmaking (Gans, 1979; Tuchman, 1978), and the structural pluralism model (McCombs & Funk, 2011; Pollock, 2007; Tichenor, Donohue, & Olien, 1973, 1980). Given the significance of these editors’ coverage of these elections, it would be highly fruitful to consider them from a variety of deeper theoretical perspectives.

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APPENDIX 1: FULL SURVEY

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[1] Tubbs made this comment in his survey response. The mention of Tubbs and The North Scott Press in the introduction was included only after Mr. Tubbs previewed and approved the segment.

[2] See Appendix 1 for full version of the survey as it appeared on the Qualtrics web site.

About the Author

Marcus Funk is a doctoral candidate in the School of Journalism at the University of Texas at Austin.

funk-cj2-2013

 

Michael Fuhlhage

This qualitative historical case study examines how the Garden City Telegram, a small community daily newspaper, diverged from an episodic, conflict-driven frame for the debate over federal immigration reform in the 1980s and 1990s by promoting immigrants as potential citizens rather than outsiders. Qualitative content assessment of locally originated articles, opinion pieces, and wire stories in the Telegram found it promoted community dialogue by including Latino leaders in the conversation. It emphasized thematic coverage that explored the reasons for immigrants’ presence and contributions to life in southwest Kansas.

A bellicose scenario has become familiar in American discourse about immigration reform. Advocates for English as the government’s official language bellow that printing ballots and legal documents in Spanish kowtows to foreigners and wastes millions of tax dollars (U.S. English, 1983). Meanwhile, blue-collar nativists rage that “illegal aliens” take jobs away from Americans (Borjas, 1996). And conservative elites argue that accommodating foreign newcomers would undermine American culture (Buchanan, 2002). The scene is not Montgomery, Ala., where Gov. Robert Bentley enacted House Bill 56, which prohibited citizens from doing business with undocumented immigrants and required migrants and those who look like they might be migrants to prove their legal presence in the United States on demand. The year is not 2011, when that law took effect. The debate has nothing to do with the current mania for “securing our borders.”  Instead, this scenario occurred in the early 1990s. The place was Garden City, Kan.

Latino immigration has been commonly associated with urban areas and the states along the U.S.-Mexico border (Chávez, 2009). Because of this geographical assumption, it might have been easy for scholars of community journalism and diversity to ignore this small meatpacking town in a remote corner of the High Plains. But if journalists in the rest of the country had paid more attention, they might have recognized that neither Alabama nor Arizona, whose S.B. 1070 provided a model for H.B. 56, has had a monopoly on debates between nativists and those who advocate for Latino immigrants’ rights. They might have recognized the growing pains experienced by journalists caught in the demographic upheaval of immigration. Further, news media might have resisted the urge to frame the story in ways that promote conflict and threat perception and the incivility that has marked nativist responses to media discourse about immigration (Chavez, 2008). The Garden City Telegram, a newspaper with a daily circulation of 9,000 at its peak in the late 1990s (11,700 including its 2,700-circulation weekly Spanish-language supplement), struggled to make sense of the stream of Latino newcomers who came to town after IBP built the world’s largest beef packing plant outside town. Once it recognized these were foreigners, the newspaper attempted to help the immigrants find a place in the community, earn U.S. citizenship, and learn to follow local laws while preserving their cultural identity. The purpose of this article is to examine one rural community newspaper’s response to demographic change. Using the methods of the qualitative historical case study, this research shows that the Telegram served as a cultural mediator for Spanish-speaking newcomers and longtime residents by providing a locally generated alternative to the conflict frame prevalent in typical coverage of immigration. The paper’s editors and reporters promoted understanding among disparate ethnic groups, provided a voice for immigrants, and cultivated readership among Spanish-speaking immigrants who needed information to orient themselves to their new home. This research is important because it reveals in the Telegram a model for similarly situated news organizations facing similar demographic changes today as Latino immigrants take up residence in rural communities that have long been mostly white and black.

LITERATURE REVIEW: HISPANICS AS TROUBLEMAKERS AND TROUBLED PEOPLE

Hispanics — this article uses the term interchangeably with “Latinos” in reference to people with heritage in the Spanish-speaking countries of Spain and Latin America — have been virtually invisible to mainstream news media unless they were portrayed as troublemakers and victims of crimes committed by other Hispanics. American journalism has neglected Hispanics with the exception of sensational coverage of violent outbursts, such as the Zoot Suit Riot of 1943 (Salwen & Soruco, 1997). At the macro level, that is, at the level of the narrative frame, 1970s news coverage of illegal immigration on the U.S.-Mexico border was biased by its reliance on Border Patrol spokespeople and other institutional sources who had an interest in portraying illegal immigration as a growing problem and portrayed immigration in a negative way (Fernández & Pedroza, 1981). That study found that news organizations relied mainly on non-Hispanic reporters and that a reporters’ Hispanic ethnicity had a positive correlation with their likelihood of getting their information from non-institutional sources such as illegal immigrants. Several late-twentieth-century studies found the news disproportionately represented Latino naturalized citizens and immigrants as criminals and as drains on government social services (Fernández & Pedroza, 1982; Greenberg, Heeter, Burgoon, Burgoon & Korzenny, 1983; Ramírez-Berg, 1997; Rodríguez, 1999). Patterns have included an emphasis on sensationalism, exaggerations of the extent of illegal immigration, harsh tones in reporting on the subject, and lack of critical inquiry into assertions that illegal immigration heavily burdens taxpayers (Center for Integration and Improvement of Journalism, 1994). Speakers and participants at the National Association of Hispanic Journalists conference in 1993 noted mainstream media cover Hispanics without a grasp of their historical context, resulting in superficial coverage, while business coverage has focused on strikes and portrayed peaceful labor actions as violent, further promoting the conflict frame (Gersh, 1993). News reports have represented Hispanics and African-Americans as lawbreakers and underrepresented as law enforcers relative to their representation in criminal and police populations (Dixon & Linz, 2000).

At the micro level of analysis — the level of linguistic choices involving phrasing and preferred terminology — news media have depicted Hispanics as foreign to America; used dehumanizing nouns such as “aliens” and “illegals” to characterize undocumented immigrants; and included Hispanics only in the context of crime, entertainment and civil rights (Center for Integration and Improvement of Journalism, 1994). Los Angeles Times articles about the debate over the anti-immigrant Proposition 187 found that metaphors reflected anti-immigrant sentiment (Santa Ana, 1999). The following metaphors were used in Proposition 187 discourse: immigrants as animals, as debased people, as weeds, and as commodities.

Research on the news media’s role in the portrayal of immigration in rural areas beyond the Borderlands states of California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas is sparse. Most scholars have focused on the zone along the U.S.-Mexico border and cities where Mexican immigrants have tended to settle since the 1900s. More recent research has delved into media representation of Latinos in communities where their presence is relatively new. Lauterer (2006) examined how seven North Carolina newspapers accommodated Hispanic immigrant populations. The independent English/Spanish bilingual newspaper Idaho Unido subverted the dominant media paradigm in rural Idaho (Beachboard, 2007). Vargas’ content and textual analysis (2000) found news reports in the Raleigh, N.C., News & Observer newspaper gendered Latino news as feminine and reproduced a stereotype of Latinos as underclass peons. Paulin (2004) found in a broader study of five Southern mainstream newspapers that most did not portray immigration negatively, attempted to portray Latinos positively, and promoted social understanding. Still, Latinos were portrayed as victims who lacked control over their circumstances. A mixed-methods study (Stewart, Pitts & Osbourne, 2011) of the Virginian Pilot found that the newspaper attached negative stereotypes to Latino illegal immigrants and stigmatized them as members of an out-group.

Framing theory has played a prominent role in studies of media-constructed difference among ethnic groups. Framing involves selecting aspects of perceived reality and making them more salient in a way that promotes a particular definition of a problem, interpretation of cause, evaluation of morality or recommendation for treatment of whatever the text describes (Entman, 1991). Micro-level indicators of framing include the selection of sources and details (Entman, 1991; Fernández  & Pedroza, 1981). Macro-level indicators include organization, storytelling, and narrative emphasis (Iyengar, 1993; Domke, McCoy & Torres, 1999; Kellstedt, 2003). Frames are persistent (Reese, 2001), but can shift, change and be replaced (Hertog & McLeod, 2001). Framing’s focus on the connection between changes in social conditions and the construction of reality make it an appropriate theory to apply in the present study.

BACKGROUND AND METHODS: HISTORICAL CASE STUDY WITH TEXTUAL ASSESSMENT

This historical case study examines the Telegram’s negotiation of the tension between American demand for undocumented Latino immigrant labor and nativists’ urge to push immigrants back to countries of origin during debate over and implementation of immigration reforms from 1986 through the mid-1990s. Construction and meatpacking jobs in the Midwest and Southeast have given those regions the fastest-growing Hispanic immigrant populations in the United States (Durand, Massey & Charvet, 2000). By focusing on coverage in a community beyond the Borderlands, this study addresses a neglected area of research. The following research question guided a qualitative textual analysis of 47 locally originated articles, editorials, columns, and wire service stories in the Telegram:

RQ: How did framing of Latino immigration change during federal immigration reform in the 1980s-90s?

This project, which also employed interviews with four Telegram journalists and two community service providers, sprang from a larger cultural historical case study that used guided in-depth interviews with journalists and community leaders, archive research, and qualitative textual analysis of 461 articles, editorials, columns, and letters to the editor, to examine how the Garden City (Kan.) Telegram covered public debate surrounding changes in public policy and culture concerning Latino immigration in southwest Kansas.

Historical case studies aim to understand a situation from multiple perspectives. Sources may include published communication artifacts, such as books, periodicals, and government documents; and private communication artifacts, such as company reports and personal correspondence. The method of “content assessment” has been used by media historians who are interested in the cultural context of journalistic products and practices (Kitch, 1997; Marzolf, 1978). This method relies on “reading, sifting, weighing, comparing and analyzing the evidence in order to tell the story” (Marzolf, 1978, p. 16). This approach has three prongs: assessment of content for the ways media convey values, attitudes, and social norms and embrace or exclude groups; examination of the backgrounds and social systems of the producers of media content; and the significance of journalism’s presentation of information, values, and opinions. Sources in the present study include Telegram articles, interviews with newspaper staff and community stakeholders, and documents concerning the Garden City’s changing population. Content assessment is appropriate because this study set out to examine the way media content changed as demographics shifted.

FINDINGS: THEMATIC VS. EPISODIC COVERAGE IN THE TELEGRAM

The present study found the Telegram promoted community dialogue by making Latino leaders part of the conversation and emphasized thematic coverage of public debate that explored the reasons for the presence of undocumented immigrants in southwest Kansas. The Associated Press and Harris News Service, on which the Telegram depended for statewide, national and international news, emphasized episodic coverage that relied on the news value of conflict. This was not wholly unexpected since conflict, not understanding, is prominent in the criteria detailed in Tuchman’s pioneering 1973 study of news work routines. Conflict is also prominent among indicators of news value values in two of the most commonly used college reporting textbooks (Mencher, 2011; Brooks, Kennedy, Moen & Ranly, 2008). Nonetheless, understanding was a vital element in the Telegram’s local articles.

Garden City’s history of Hispanic immigration is so long and complex that the journalists of the Telegram had difficulty recognizing the change taking place around them in the early 1980s. In 1986, The Telegram was just beginning to grasp the extent of a demographic shift triggered in 1980, when IBP Inc. built the world’s largest packinghouse in Garden City (Broadway, 2000). From 1980 to 1990, the southwest Kansas town’s population rose to 24,318 from 18,246, a gain of 33 percent, and with the population increase came increased demand for police and firefighting services (Donelson, 1997). By 2000, 43.9 percent of Garden City’s 28,451 people were Hispanic, a startlingly high proportion given that Hispanics constitute just 7 percent of the population statewide (Census, 2011). Most of the growth came from Spanish-speaking immigrants drawn by low-skill jobs at the packing plants, where as much as 80 percent of the work force was Hispanic (Leiker, 2002).

For the most part, the Telegram showed little awareness of immigration issues relating to Hispanics through the late 1980s. It took wire service reports about pending immigration reform in Congress and Hispanic community leaders’ agitation about police harassment of Mexican-Americans and Latino immigrants for the paper to realize the nature of the demographic change in their midst. The Telegram’s small reporting staff devoted itself to covering the local community. Because the newspaper’s reporters failed to acknowledge the presence of recent immigrants in and around Garden City, the Telegram relied heavily on AP articles for immigration news through 1989. This is not to say that Hispanics were left out of the newspaper; rather, the Telegram did not recognize that the newcomers were any different from the town’s assimilated Hispanic population. Mexican-Americans had been part of the community since migrant workers came to southwest Kansas as sugar beet and wheat farmworkers and Santa Fe Railroad maintenance workers around the turn of the twentieth century (Oppenheimer, 2003).

In the late 1980s, both the Kansas government and the journalists at the Telegram became increasingly aware that native-born Mexican-Americans were not the only kind of Hispanics in the state. Nominal and structural changes in Kansas’ bureaucracy provide evidence of this. In 1986, the Senate Committee on Governmental Organization endorsed a bill changing the name of the Kansas Advisory Committee on Mexican-American Affairs to the Kansas Advisory Committee on Hispanic affairs (Associated Press, March 16, 1986, p. 7). As of 1986, 21 percent of Kansas’ nearly 62,000 Hispanics were of Cuban, Central American, Puerto Rican or other descent, and the state changed the name of the committee to acknowledge a growing percentage of the state’s Hispanics were of non-Mexican lineage.

The Telegram relied on Harris News Service, owned by the paper’s parent company Harris Enterprises, for reports on the beginnings of immigration reform in 1983. Harris reported U.S. Rep. Dan Glickman of Kansas voted with the majority when the House Judiciary Committee approved a bill to overhaul immigration regulations in an effort at “curbing the flow of illegal aliens into this country by creating a system of civil and criminal penalties against employees who knowingly hire such aliens” (Harris News Service, 1983, p. 1). The legislation stalled for three years but ultimately became the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 (Newton, 2008). Congressional debate and talks leading to passage of the IRCA nearly went unnoticed by the Telegram until the bill reached a conference committee to reconcile the House and Senate versions of immigration reform, when it became front-page news (Associated Press, October 10, 1986, p. 1).

Covering the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986

If there were any doubts whether there were foreign-born Hispanics in Garden City, they were erased in the late 1980s, but the Telegram was slow in picking up on radical changes to immigration laws that were in the works in Congress. Buried on page 8 on June 26, 1986, the paper carried an Associated Press article that reported the House Judiciary Committee approved a measure designed to reduce the flow of illegal immigrants —AP wrote “illegal aliens” — and improve conditions for those already in the United States (Associated Press, June 26, 1986, p. 8). Assuming the editors were aware of illegal immigrants in the community, the article would have had two main audiences: Residents with acquaintances or relatives who were illegal immigrants, or employers with workers who were in the country illegally. Then the story disappeared for three and a half months when, out of nowhere, news of possible immigration legislation popped up on the front page. The lead front-page headline blared, “Immigration bill revived” (Associated Press, October 10, 1986, p. 1). The bill was referred to as “the immigration bill” or “immigration reform legislation” throughout the legislative process. Not until the following spring did articles in the Telegram refer to the Immigration Reform and Control Act by its proper name  (May 1, 1987, p. 2). The banner headline October 15 announced, “Immigration bill nears compromise” (October 15, 1986, p. 1). The lead emphasized the reason for the flow of immigrants:

After years of failure, Congress is within a whisker of approving a bill designed to shut down the stream of illegal aliens crossing the border for new job opportunities in the United States [emphasis added]. Compromise legislation was approved Tuesday by House-Senate conferees, who took a cue from successful tax bill writers earlier in the session: They locked out the lobbyists and negotiated in secret (p. 1).

The phrase “for new job opportunities” fits a macro-level narrative frame of illegal immigrants as participants in the American dream — that is, people seeking opportunity they could not find in their home countries. The article detailed the bill’s provisions: “an amnesty program for long-term illegal aliens and a system of fines against employers who knowingly hire undocumented workers. The amnesty would apply to those who came to this country before 1982.”

The complications that amnesty might pose — chief among them was fake documentation — were noted in a local sidebar, the first Telegram staff reporting on the topic since immigration reform reappeared in 1986 (Zubeck, 1986, p. 1). The sidebar reported an estimated 5,000 to 8,000 undocumented immigrants were in southwest Kansas, with 35,000 in the state. Although Garden City had an INS field office, its officers referred questions to an INS deputy district director. The director said that during the previous year, the INS concentrated on identifying and deporting illegal immigrants who were criminals or who were holding jobs that could be held by U.S. citizens or foreigners who were in the country legally. Only 1,750 had been taken into custody in Kansas and Missouri, the two states administered by the regional office in Kansas City, Mo., combined. That such a small number were deported suggests the rest were not entirely unwelcome. Story framing can be defined as much by what is left out as by what is included. In this case, the only sources represented federal agencies, whereas the reporter could have sought comment from local immigrant or minority advocacy groups such as United Methodist Mexican American Ministries, the G.I. Forum, or the Southeast Asian Mutual Assistance Society, all of which were active in the Garden City area. Instead, the Telegram let a bureaucracy story remain a bureaucracy story rather than humanizing it with the voices of immigrants or their advocates. The paper also ignored businesses that might have been affected by the new rules for employing immigrants.

Although the Telegram carried a story on House approval (Associated Press, October 16, 1986, p. 1) and how the bill awaited final approval in the Senate with the endorsement of President Ronald Reagan (Associated Press, October 17, 1986, p. 1), the newspaper ran nothing about Reagan signing the bill into law. Instead, the story went dormant until just before the IRCA was to be implemented. Members of the community, however, did not keep quiet about it. A letter to the editor from Roman Catholic Bishop Stanley Schlarman of the Diocese of Dodge City (Dec. 20, 1986) during Christmas week read:

Over the past few years, thousands have left their homelands for political, religious and economic reasons and have migrated to our area of Southwest Kansas in search of a better life. These newly arriving immigrants, representing many nationalities, whose religious and cultural backgrounds are very different, form an impressive mosaic of people. They help form our one nation under God. They bring special gifts that enrich our communities and our lives, and should be seen as blessings from God. … Let us take to our heart the words of the Divine Immigrant, “I was a stranger and you welcomed me.” (Matthew 25:35) (p. 4).

Letters on controversies have the potential to trigger a series of letters in response. Yet this one did not. Between the bishop’s letter and implementation of immigration reform in May, the topic came up four more times. Telegram columnist Dolores Hope (March 4, 1987) wrote:

Garden City now embraces a diverse population. While many who have roots here are still around, many others have moved in … some of them, perhaps, to live here for a long time and others very briefly. The experiences of the newcomers must vary greatly, depending on both their circumstances and their personalities. Some may prefer anonymity while others seek inclusion in the life of the community. You may not know them personally, but maybe that won’t matter if you need help … or if they do (p. 4).

In an interview conducted for this study, Hope seemed unaware of how much she had written about Latinos and immigration and did not perceive her own writing as unusually empathetic or sensitive about them when asked about her connection to those topics. Her treatment of these subjects may be explained by her family’s membership in the Roman Catholic Church. Hope’s columns reflected church teachings on social justice, including the ideas that it should not be illegal to cross a border to escape poverty and that all human life is sacred (H. Hope, 1988; Blume, 1996). The Catholic and United Methodist churches took the most active role in helping immigrants relocate in southwest Kansas. The Telegram also pointed amnesty-seekers to the Catholic Agency for Migration and Refugee Service in Elkhart, southwest of Garden City and just north of the Oklahoma state line (Garden City Telegram, March 11, 1987, p. 3). The Telegram also publicized a public meeting about the new immigration law where an immigration lawyer was available to explain the law. Employers were encouraged to attend, and information was to be provided in both English and Spanish (Garden City Telegram, April 1, 1987, p. 3).

Not all in Garden City were so welcoming. A letter to the editor (Todd, 1987) complained that illegal immigrants were keeping the writer from getting work:

I have lived here for two years and have 100 job applications out to which no one has had the courtesy to answer. But I keep seeing their help wanted ads in The Telegram. IBP, The Hilton, K-Bobs Steakhouse, Val Agri and the list goes on. The joke about it all is that they claim to be Equal Opportunity Employers. The only way I have been able to survive in Garden City is that a man and his wife asked me to take care of their rentals, and in return my family and I get our rent and utilities. But a man can’t support a family this way. I want to take care of my family and have pride in doing so. Why won’t anyone give me a chance? If more personnel managers were in my place they might understand how I feel. People that are citizens of the United States are not being given a chance because employers would rather hire non-citizens with no experience just because they will work for a cheaper rate or because they feel sorry for them. Well it’s time that you take a look at our community and feel sorry for the citizens of the U.S. We need work too! (p. 4)

“Both sides of the story” vs. “all sides of the story”

While the Telegram showed its awareness of immigration issues, federal officials responsible for putting the law into effect acted as if implementation took them by surprise in the spring of 1987. So did employers. A wire story (Associated Press, May 1, 1987) explained:

Even before historic immigration reforms take effect next week, critics are saying the government has botched the law so badly that extensions may be necessary to accommodate a flood of illegal aliens applying for amnesty. The Immigration and Naturalization Service’s final rules governing the immigration were published today in the Federal Register, just two business days before the opening of the amnesty program and a month before the start of employer sanctions. (p. 2)

U.S. Rep. Charles Schumer, one of the bill’s principal writers, suggested the deadline for amnesty applications should be extended because of disarray at INS offices (Associated Press, May 1, 1987a, p. 2). A wire sidebar warned that employers were unprepared, noting, “Many employers, ranging from farmers to restaurateurs, are not ready for the new immigration law a little more than a month before it bars the hiring of illegal aliens, business and worker representatives say” (Associated Press, May 1, 1987b, p. 2). The sidebar cited the concerns of business and labor leaders such as Frederick Krebs of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, who lamented, “You’ve got a lot of employers out there who, despite all the publicity, don’t know. Others are aware and want to do something, but they’re not sure what they want to do.”  The sidebar quoted leaders with the International Ladies’ Garment Workers Union and the National Council of La Raza who bemoaned employers’ pre-emptive efforts to fire or lay off workers suspected of being in the country illegally.

A comparison of Associated Press and Telegram coverage yielded a notable contrast. The Associated Press portrayed stories with a frame of conflict, a natural byproduct of the journalistic admonition to “always tell both sides of the story.” This approach can preclude moderate viewpoints from being represented. With this approach, reporting becomes a game of opposites without middle ground in which a reporter quotes one Democrat for every Republican or one labor source for every employer source. The Telegram, in contrast, framed its coverage in terms of stakeholders, not opponents, thus providing a continuum of points of view rather than opposites (Neufeld, May 5, 1987, p. 1). The sources were Mike Heston of the Immigration and Naturalization Service’s amnesty office in Garden City; Jim Bennett, an INS enforcement agent in Garden City; Luisa Galeano, manager of Harvest America, a social service nonprofit that aided rural migrant and seasonal farmworkers and poor Hispanics; and the Rev. Penney Schwab, director of United Methodist Mexican American Ministries, which provided health care and translation services for poor Hispanics. The accent was not on showing conflict, but on telling about the procedures and potential difficulties in applying for amnesty. Adding to this pragmatic approach was a sidebar telling amnesty applicants and employers about their rights and responsibilities under the new law, including a list of things one must do to apply. At the end of the article was a paragraph in shaky Spanish that told Latino immigrants whom to call for help with applying for citizenship: INS, St. Mary’s Roman Catholic Church, and the United Methodist Care Center.

The Telegram’s terminology was also significantly different from AP’s. The lead of the Telegram’s first local story on the new amnesty avoided the label “illegal aliens” in favor of a more descriptive phrase: “Thousands of people [emphasis added]— perhaps millions — who have lived and worked illegally in the United States now have the chance to live legally and openly” (Neufeld, May 5, 1987, p. 1). The offensive term “illegal aliens,” however, did not entirely disappear from the Telegramuntil the early 1990s after the arrival of reporter Sarah Kessinger, who became the first editor of La Semana. An example typical of her approach appeared in a September 1991 report that under a new federal law, annual immigration would be increased by 100,000 a year. The terms she used were “local immigrants,” “people,” “immigrants,” “residents who had been in the United States since before 1982,” “foreigners” and “personnel from a Canadian or Mexican branch” (Kessinger, Sept. 28, 1991, p. A1).

The first wave of applicants was a mere trickle. The Telegram devoted a quarter of the front page May 6 to a photo of one INS staffer sitting alone at a table next to rows of empty chairs in the Garden City immigration legalization office, another photo of two INS officials examining an immigration legalization form, and a story on the first day of the amnesty. Again, the lead avoided using “illegal aliens” as its subject. Rather, it read, “Sixteen people showed up Tuesday on the first day of business at Garden City’s immigration legalization office, but an official expects activity to pick up as people gain confidence in the amnesty process” (Garden City Telegram, May 6, 1987, p. 1). An AP article told a similar story nationwide at legalization offices in Connecticut, New Jersey, Boston and Los Angeles, but unlike all of the AP’s previous articles, its lead used “illegal immigrants” instead of “illegal aliens” (Associated Press, May 6, 1987, p. 1).

A month later, and with 11 months remaining, a Telegram reporter wrote that applications were still slow, with a misleading headline that read, “Chances are running out for amnesty” (Neufeld, June 11, 1987, p. 1). The headline took its cue from INS district director Ron Sanders, who said, “We can’t overemphasize that the clock’s running and time’s running out on the program.” The article provided some reasons for the lack of applicants, including office hours of 8 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. Such hours would be difficult for working people to fit into their schedules, given that many worked at the IBP meatpacking plant, where strict work rules made it tough to get time off for any reason (Stull, 2003). One reason there were few applicants, the Telegram found, was that although the Garden City office had a phone, INS officials set it up with an unlisted number to “protect confidentiality.” The Telegram listed the toll-free number to give amnesty-seekers a chance to apply (Neufeld, June 11, 1987, p. 1). Schwab, of United Methodist Mexican American Ministries of Garden City, wasn’t puzzled by the initial lack of applicants and argued that the number was unlisted because the INS did not want to be inundated with phone calls. Interviewed for the present study in 2007, Schwab said:

We were processing paperwork during the amnesty, and Immigration set up this office.  They had an unlisted phone number — they wouldn’t run it in the phone book, and they never had anybody come to the office and they had to close the office because of it.

Regardless of the reasons, the article noted the most pragmatic and common reason in favor of the amnesty — immigrant labor was needed, regardless of nativist opposition:

Recent news reports have said cherry, strawberry and other perishable crops are rotting in California and Oregon because there aren’t enough immigrant workers — legal or illegal — to pick them (Neufeld, June 11, 1987, p. 1).

The scenario represented an interesting turnabout in the framing of immigration. Whereas “illegal alien as troublemaker” or “illegal alien as drag on society” have been the most common frames for immigrants in the news, it was the INS that got labeled as a burden in the Telegram. The headline on Telegram Managing Editor Fred Brooks’ June 16, 1987, editorial read, “INS red tape.” It noted:

Red tape is killing the federal government’s illegal alien amnesty program. Much of the red tape is needless. Most of it is wasteful. All of it is frustrating. … Frustrating are the bureaucratic explanations and the excuses for problems. That’s to be expected with any new government program, but the illegal alien amnesty program has been particularly blessed with a good number of bureaucratic gremlins. There’s still time for the INS to salvage things, if it’s willing to cut the red tape (Brooks, June 16, 1987, p. 4).

Two years later, after the INS closed the Garden City enforcement office, Telegram editor and publisher Jim Bloom wrote:

Closing the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service’s Garden City office is a foolish decision. But foolish decisions are the norm from the knucklehead higher-ups in the INS. … It is difficult to believe the INS, by retreating to Wichita, will do a better job of enforcing immigration laws on the frontlines in southwestern Kansas (Bloom,  November 29, 1989, p. 4).

The Telegram also blamed companies that hire illegal immigrants. A June 26, 1987, article noted the paperwork employers were required to check to verify workers’ identity and work eligibility (Neufeld, June 26, 1987, p. 1). In news articles through that date, it was frequently workers who were labeled “illegal,” not their scofflaw employers. That was not the case in that day’s house editorial, which called the required I-9 employment eligibility form “the backbone of the Immigration Control and Reform Act of 1986” (Brooks, June 26, 1987, p. 4). The editorial at long last provided acknowledgment of the companies that hire illegal workers as lawbreakers, comparing them to speed-limit scofflaws:

There will, of course, be a few “speed traps” set by the INS every so often. Fines will be stiff, from $100 to $1,000 for each ineligible employee. That threat should catch the attention of most employers. We hope it does, because the only way for the U.S. to regain control of its borders is to eliminate the economic incentive for companies to hire, and thus implicitly recruit, illegal aliens. (p. 4).

The frame of “scofflaw employers” resurfaced in an editorial that Bloom wrote in response to a New York Times report headlined “Vast fraud by migrants found in amnesty plan.” Bloom wrote:

Alas, in the face of considerable lobbying by fruit and vegetable growers in Texas and California, Congress created a loophole. The growers wanted to protect their cheap labor force. So instead of having to prove nearly five years of continuous residence, most agricultural worker applicants had to show only that they had done 90 days of farm work between May 1, 1985, and May 1, 1986. … Now the Immigration and Naturalization Service has identified 398,000 possible fraud cases among the farm program applications. … To sum up, the amnesty program and the stiffer immigration laws outlined in the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 are as open today as they were when the act was passed.” (Nov. 22, 1989, p. 4)

Not all of the Telegram’s attention to immigration matters went to undocumented workers. The newspaper also celebrated members of the community who successfully completed the path to U.S. citizenship. “New citizens: Doctor and Mrs. Arroyo make it official,” read the headline on December 10, 1987. Zefarino and Violeta Arroyo, immigrants from the Philippines who came to Garden City in 1968, became legal residents in 1972 and were sworn in as naturalized citizens with about 140 others from western Kansas, mostly Vietnamese, Cambodians and Laotians (Post, Dec. 10, 1987, p. 2). “We’ve been paying our fair share [of taxes],” Violeta Arroyo noted, reinforcing the story’s immigrant-as-exemplar frame.

The amnesty program then went unmentioned in the Telegram until April 1988, when only a week remained for people to apply. The front-page article reminded prospective applicants which documents were necessary and informed readers that the INS would accept incomplete applications and file supporting documents later (Neufeld, April 27, 1988, p. 1). The article also noted the INS closed the Garden City legalization office because it wasn’t processing many applications, although social service agencies continued to assist with them. A total of 2,200 people applied during the general amnesty period in Kansas City, 1,975 in Wichita, 967 in Garden City and 490 in St. Louis (Harris News Service, May 5, 1988, p. 3). In southwest Kansas, about 500 applied under the special agriculture worker amnesty at the United Methodist Mexican American Ministries office in Garden City and the Harvest America office in Leoti (Neufeld, Dec. 2, 1988, p. 1). In national wire coverage, an Associated Press story quoted INS spokesman Greg Leo on the eve of the May 5, 1988, general amnesty deadline: “At this time, it appears we will break 2 million” for the combined programs (Associated Press, May 5, 1988, p. 9). The AP story used the term “illegal immigrants” in the lead, although “illegal aliens” and “aliens” appeared further down in the story, an indicator that the wire service was making strides toward more inclusive language but was inconsistent.

Immigration reform in the 1990s

As the Telegram became more aware of Hispanic immigrants in Garden City, its use of stories about immigration legislation from the wire services increased. An October 1990 Telegram article reported that the U.S. House was prepared to approve a measure designed to reunite families kept apart by previous immigration law and end 25-year-old barriers against would-be immigrants from northern European nations and others that had sent immigrants to the United States (Associated Press, Oct. 3, 1990, p. 1). The measure also was intended to increase the number of “highly skilled and otherwise needed foreign workers who would be allowed into the U.S.”

Immigration legislation received no further mention until the Telegram covered Proposition 187, a California ballot that would deny illegal immigrants access to health care, public education and other social services, on its op-ed page in October 1994. Telegram editors deemed interest in 187 to be high enough that they included a brief on the front page about 70,000 protesters marching on Los Angeles City Hall to protest the proposition (Associated Press, Oct. 17, 1994, p. 1). The lead on an in-depth explanation of it took a narrative approach:

SAN DIEGO (AP) — Mary Sanchez is fed up with illegal immigrants soliciting work from street corners in her suburb, then getting paid under the table and paying no income taxes. On Nov. 8 she will vote for Proposition 187, one of the most incendiary ballot measures to hit California since the English-only initiative passed in 1986 (Associated Press, Oct. 26, 1994, p. 8).

The article noted that Sanchez was “not Hispanic but is married to a man of Mexican descent.” When the proposition passed on Election Day with 59 percent of the vote, the Telegram carried an AP story that framed the story as anti-crime, not anti-minority.  The Telegram localized few national stories, but immigration was an exception. Given the transnational nature of Garden City’s Latino immigrants and their habit of maintaining social networks over vast distances, the California vote was played much like a local issue. A local sidebar by Telegram reporter Itzel Stewart quoted Garden Citians who opposed the measure. Her sources said that children should not be deprived of an education and that it is cruel to deny medical and educational services (Stewart, Nov. 10, 1994, p. 1). One source pointed out that contrary to Sanchez’s assertion, income tax is deducted from undocumented workers’ paychecks and that illegal immigrants pay sales tax every time they make a purchase, like everybody else. A federal judge blocked enforcement of 187 because it was unconstitutional (Associated Press, Nov. 17, 1994, p. 5). Stewart, a naturalized citizen born in Panama, was the only Hispanic on the Telegram staff. Her byline appeared as “Itzel Rodriguez” after she remarried in the late 1990s.

Given that story selection and placement are among the elements of framing, the decision to give front-page, above-the-fold play to Mexican President Carlos Salinas de Gortari’s November 1994 invitation for Mexicans in the United States to come home indicates that editors perceived it as important and highly interesting to their readers. The article carries the frame of “immigrant as hard worker,” and its position suggests the editors believed it was important to promote this frame:

Salinas said Mexicans go to the United States in search of jobs — not the public services that California would deny to illegal immigrants under the state’s newly passed Proposition 187 (Associated Press, Nov. 14, 1994, p. 1).

The article’s selection contested the nativist frame of “immigrant as parasite” promoted a few days before by Telegram reader Rob Andrews, whose letter to the editor blamed immigration for crowding in Garden City’s public schools and contended Kansas should follow other states’ lead and discourage immigrants from coming for “freebies”:

An elementary school teacher told me a story about six girls in her third grade class talking about impending births in their families. Becoming curious, she asked how many of them were expecting another baby in their families soon. Five out of six. I asked her how many were Hispanic? “Oh — all of them.” … California and Texas have both passed initiatives restricting the freebies provided by the state and community to illegal aliens. The fate of these laws is still in question, but with the recent election reflecting a strong shift to the right in American thinking, proposition such as 187 are raising a lot of eyebrows. If you were an illegal alien in California or Texas, what would you be thinking? Colorado? Kansas? Garden City? … If we had enacted something like Proposition 187 four years ago, we might not need new schools now” (Andrews, Nov. 11, 1994, p. 4).

Bloom, who remained Telegram editor and publisher until 1997, didn’t miss the opportunity to respond by selecting a syndicated editorial cartoon labeled “California: The Nation’s Trendsetter.” The Golden State is depicted on a map of the Western United States with a huge “Yes on 187” yard sign sticking out of the San Joaquin Valley and a voice balloon stating, “I say we blame our problems on poor kids” (Pett, Nov. 21, 1994, p. 4). Latino community leader Norma DeLaO (1994, p. 4) wrote in a letter to the editor the next day, “We should be addressing this problem with education instead of trying to find someone to blame.” Her response evoked the “immigrant seeking opportunity” frame:

The United States is seen as a land of opportunity. People come here for a better life. We are so lucky to live in a democratic society where life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are so much valued. The immigrants who come here are fleeing persecution, poverty or war. … We should be proud of the way Garden City has embraced immigrants. The community has grown both in size and in cultural diversity that has gained nationwide recognition. Our immigrants have worked hard and have made their home here. We have many businesses that are owned by Third World immigrants. I am proud to be a member of this group (DeLaO, 1994, p. 4).

Bloom selected an editorial (Statesman-Journal, 1994) from a paper in Salem, Ore., to run in place of the house editorial that asked, “Are Americans so callous that we would take from the lowest economic rung of our population just to give the rest of us a few more pennies?” Congress turned out to be “that callous” in 1996, when it passed the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act, creating harsher penalties for illegal immigration, restricting welfare benefits to recent immigrants, and making the deportation process easier for U.S. administrators. The Telegramdetailed the impact: “Gloomy notices will be arriving in hundreds of thousands of mailboxes in the next few weeks: The government is cutting off disability benefits for up to half a million elderly and disabled legal immigrants (Associated Press, Feb. 15, 1997, p. A7). The story quoted advocate Muriel Heiberger of the Massachusetts Immigration and Refugee Advocacy Coalition in Boston, who said, “People are going to be in absolutely desperate straits. This is the money they have to pay rent, to buy prescription medication to buy the basics for survival.” Other advocates pointed to hardship cases that included Cuban and Vietnamese refugees with no family to care for them. U.S. Rep. Clay Shaw, representing the Republicans who created the legislation, was quoted as saying, “It shows how the immigrants are really coming here and using the U.S. as a retirement program.” The story employed a sympathetic frame that juxtaposed pitiably helpless people against heartless bureaucrats. Examples likely to evoke sympathy got three times the space of the explanation of why the bill was deemed necessary.

CONCLUSION: TALKING TO, NOT JUST ABOUT, IMMIGRANTS AND PROPOSING COMMUNITY SOLUTIONS

A Chinese proverb states, “To know the road ahead, ask those coming back.” The Telegram’s reporters and editors have seen the road ahead when it comes to Hispanic immigration into the nation’s interior. Community journalists, particularly in rural areas of the Midwest and Southeast that are seeing the most rapid growth in Latino immigrant population, would do well to heed the example of the Garden City Telegram and learn from its experience. By 2050, Hispanics are projected to be 24.4 percent of the American population, up from 12.6 percent in 2000 (Census, 2006). If reporters, editors and executives want a taste of what is coming their way, they need to look at how Garden City and its newspaper evolved in their coverage and inclusion of Hispanics. They also must acknowledge what scholar Arlene Dávila argued in 2008: Contrary to nativist portrayals of Latino immigrants as social liabilities, a growing consensus argues these newcomers contribute to the economies of the communities that receive them, they are moving up, and they are in some ways more “American” in their values than the native-born (Dávila, 2008). News media must embrace this change if they hope to remain socially relevant, but they also must pay attention to Hispanics to remain economically viable. Wilson, Gutierréz & Chao (2003) elaborate on this point:

More than population growth and technological advances, however, it is the economic mechanisms of support that control the development of media in the United States. Corporate advertisers largely support print and broadcast media. When advertising is increased for a particular segment of the population, the media that reach and influence that segment gain increased advertising dollars. These dollars also make it more economically profitable for managers of existing media to consider changes to formats and content to try to attract that segment and the advertising dollars that will follow (Wilson et. al, 2003, p. 297).

Community journalists should feel compelled to fulfill two needs that are quite different from the concerns of large market news organizations. The first is immigrants’ need for information to help them acculturate to the United States, a role that Latino-oriented publications have long fulfilled in places with long histories as immigration gateways (Rodríguez, 1999). The second is publishers’ need to profit. Immigrants are an engine of small-business creation and population growth in rural areas, which have suffered declining populations for decades (Farmer & Moon, 2011). These entrepreneurial immigrants have begun to create cultural, sports, and business ventures that serve receiving communities’ native and immigrant populations alike (Hernández-León and Zúñiga, 2002). Latino immigrants represent a potential new market for community publishers to sell advertising and build circulations through the introduction of bilingual and immigrant-oriented niche advertisements, features, sections, and publications.

Asked in an interview for this project what lessons the Telegram held for newspapers in markets experiencing an influx of immigrants, Bloom said, “Be aware that change is occurring in the community, and know that attitude means a lot. You can say, ‘This place is changing, and that’s bad,’ or you can make the most of things and try to make it a better place.”

The stance of the Telegram seems clear after a review of its editorials: While the paper assumed illegal entry into the United States was not praiseworthy, it saw that the local, state and national economies needed it. This pragmatism reflected the business realities of the Garden City region. Although the newspaper respected the traditional firewall between the opinion pages and the news pages as demanded by the journalistic orthodoxy of objectivity, its approaches to covering immigration were subtly tilted in favor of immigrants. Its shift to more inclusive language and away from dehumanizing terms such as “illegal alien” provides evidence of this at the micro level of word usage. But at the macro level of narrative, pragmatism was evidenced by Telegram articles’ inclusion of the defense of immigrants. Pragmatism was evidenced by journalists’ source selection, which included stakeholders such as social service providers and the immigrants themselves and thus provided points of view beyond those of INS bureaucrats and law enforcement officials.

Further, when the 1986 immigration reforms were implemented, the Telegram sought to reveal problems in INS bureaucracy and offer solutions. And last, by including information on how an illegal immigrant could apply for amnesty, the Telegram did not speak about immigrants in the third person, but directly to them. These aspects of reporting and editorializing might not reflect just sympathy so much as pragmatism: There was hard, low-paying work to do, and there were not enough people in southwest Kansas to do it, so what was the matter with bringing in help from south of the border? All of these factors combined in a strain of journalism that sought to be inclusive of foreign newcomers. In doing so, the Telegram provided a model for how community news organizations in similar situations can promote a positive context of reception for immigrants.

This is significant because, as a study of immigration discourse in the Virginian Pilot newspaper revealed, media discourse can shape the perception of real and imagined intergroup threats, leading to negative in-group perceptions and behaviors that discriminate against members of the marginalized Latino immigrant out-group (Stewart et. al, 2011). Stewart et. al explained such behavior with Tajfel & Turner’s social identity theory (1986). Social identity theory proposes that members of a dominant in-group, such as whites in a majority-white community, maintain their power and gain competitive advantage over members of marginalized out-groups, such as immigrants, by promoting and maintaining a positive image of the in-group while doing the same with negative images of out-groups. The result can be spiraling social and economic inequality and the assignment of out-group members to status as members of a permanent inferior class. In contrast to the Virginia study’s demonstration of the consequences of the symbolic construction of Latino newcomers as illegal immigrants, the present case study provides an example of an alternative construction of Latino immigrant newcomers as potential citizens and contributors to society rather than threats to the communities receiving them. The present study points to a key difference between community journalism and metro journalism. In the journalism of smaller communities in which people share an identity of place, the urge to accept may be stronger than the urge to divide. By this logic, community and in-group membership are the same.

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About the Author

Michael Fuhlhage, Ph.D., is an assistant professor at the School of Communication and Journalism at Auburn University.

fuhlhage-cj2-2013

 

John A. Hatcher

A challenge for media in a culturally complex world is building a sense of community between groups with strong cultural cleavages. In South Africa, a fledgling democratic republic is making concerted efforts to foster media that will help to overcome a history of oppression based on difference. A qualitative analysis of interviews with 62 respondents found that the community journalists see themselves as community educators whose role transcends reporting the news. The community journalists interviewed are experimenting with new partnerships and new ways of reporting the news. However, the respondents disagree on the way news should be reported, with some opting for a more solution-oriented approach. The findings underscore that the greatest obstacle to these efforts is finding a way to foster sustainable media that serve historically marginalized communities.

In an increasingly multicultural world, media studies have begun to ponder the role journalists play in informing, bonding and bridging communities that may be composed of an array of cultural groups (Deuze, 2004; Putnam, 1995; Young, 1990). Does a culturally complex world change how community journalists perceive themselves? South Africa’s rich cultural landscape provides a microcosm in which to explore this dynamic. This fledgling democratic republic strives to recognize every cultural group, represented through individual media channels with special emphasis – and government support – for media that give a voice to historically marginalized groups (Jacobs, 2004). Through a qualitative analysis of in-depth interviews and site visits with journalists across South Africa, this study explores how community journalists define their role and how that perception may vary based on differences in community connection, media type and the backgrounds of individual journalists.

LITERATURE REVIEW

This study uses the term community journalism to define a broad array of media types. There are countless ways to define and categorize media oriented toward communities: community journalism, community media, grassroots journalism, community radio, alternative media, independent media, resistance media, citizen journalism, and NGO media, to name a few (Lerner, Roberts & Matlala, 2009). Community journalism research has expanded well beyond the early studies by media scholars in the United States of advertiser-driven, print newspapers — either weekly or small daily papers — that served a geographically defined community (Lauterer, 2000; Byerly, 1961). Community media, in comparison, has defined media that are not commercially driven and that typically draw on citizens to produce content that gives communities a voice and identity (Fuller, 2007). Nicholas Jankowski defines community media as “a diverse range of mediated forms of communication: print media such as newspapers and magazines, electronic media such as radio and television, and electronic network initiatives that embrace characteristics of both traditional print and electronic media” (2002, p. 6). The concept of community itself also has many sub-categories: Increased globalization and technology have stretched the definitions of community to include groups that share geographic proximity, ideologies or simply a common interest in something as specific as a favorite rugby or football club (Christensen & Levinson, 2003).

The goal of this study is to advance existing research by comparing the perceptions of journalists who work across this spectrum and to build on the ideas of scholars who see crossover within these categories (Reader & Hatcher, 2011; Milne, Rau, Asta, Du Toit, & Mdlongwa, 2006). This study compares journalists who fit under this broad umbrella of community-focused media. Community journalism is not defined based on the type of media channel, nor the structure of the organization, nor any other categorization of this type. Instead, it uses Reader’s (2011) definition of a community journalist as anyone who shares a strong “connectedness” to his or her audience. Defining community journalism based on the orientation of the journalist allows the research to bypass roadblocks that occur when limits are placed based on community type (communities of interest versus geographic communities), media channel (radio versus print) or media structure (commercial, government-subsidized, or community supported).

At the heart of this project are questions as old as democracy itself: How do individuals form into communities, and how do different groups within these communities interact in a way that ensures the fulfillment of democratic ideals for all (Tocqueville, 1835)? Some scholars have argued that a democracy can only work in a homogenous society where all citizens enjoy the same status and common ideals (Dahl, 1989). Political philosopher Iris Marion Young (1990) uses the concept of cultural imperialism to describe how oppressed groups are left out of the political discourse of a government if it assumes all groups have equal rights. She asserts that additional steps must be taken to ensure representation for marginalized groups.

For media, the challenge is how to foster a community discourse that involves all groups. Building community is a term that has gained traction through the writings of Robert Putnam, who chronicled the decline of civic involvement in public life in the United States (2000). Putnam distinguishes between two ways of building community: bonding capital and bridging capital. Bonding capital, as the name suggests, are the activities that join together like-minded people into a stronger association; associations of people need media to help champion their voice and join them together into a unified voice (Tocqueville, 1835). For example, the community newspapers that Janowitz observed in urban Chicago in the 1950s and ‘60s helped a community define its common values, define itself in opposition to the larger city and mark the social rituals of a community (Janowitz, 1967).

But in South Africa, the challenge for journalists is to create a bridging capital that links disparate groups. Scholar Mark Granovetter describes this as “the strength of weak ties”: A community becomes stronger when everyone is involved in the political discourse (1973).

How can a community journalist communicate with both groups that enjoy great privilege and groups that are marginalized? South African scholars say this may be the most important challenge facing community journalists (Mtimde, 2007; Milne, Rau, Asta, Du Toit & Mdlongwa, 2006). The country has 11 official languages. The country’s government was created with the explicit mandate of having all groups represented. There is government-subsidized support for media that serve historically marginalized groups. As a developing nation, the country has great disparity in wealth, education and economic prosperity. The country also faces daunting challenges with social issues such as the HIV/AIDs epidemic, crime and unemployment (Sparks, 2003; Kupe, 2004).

The Media Development and Diversity Agency Act was created to foster the creation of news media to serve historically marginalized communities (Presidency, 2002). This partnership between government, private sector and civil society groups faces a daunting challenge (Media Development and Diversity Agency, 2009). In a study of South African media, one team of scholars found, “There are significant gaps in the representation of under-served groups in the South African media, both in terms of their own participation, and/or the coverage they receive” (Bosch, Davidson, Jacobs & Wasserman, 2006, p. 4). The media landscape has been dominated by white-owned media. Racial and class disparities were found to have been reinforced; there remained a great need for the inclusion of marginalized groups in the production of their own media.

Media have faced other challenges in the post-apartheid era regarding ethical standards, contentious relationships with the government and a demand for greater quality overall (Garman, 2005). In the early post-apartheid years, it was suggested that the capitalistic model of press would continue to serve mainly those enjoying greater affluence, ignoring many of the most important issues facing oppressed groups (Tomaselli, 1997).

Small, independent press in South Africa face overwhelming competition from four large media groups – Media 24, Times Media Group, Caxton and The Independent –  which dominate the newspaper landscape (Media Development and Diversity Agency, 2009). In 2009, when these interviews were conducted, the top three publishing companies owned 47.1 percent of the newspaper titles in the country (Media Development and Diversity Agency, 2009). In their comprehensive case study of six independent community newspapers, Milne et al. highlighted how small, independent publishers are motivated to better the lives of those in their community but add that few of them, “… have the time and expertise to represent the voice of small community publications in the battle against unfair competition, inequitable practices and marginalization” (2006, p. 113).

It is estimated that 94.1 percent of the adult population in the country has access to radios, the highest of all media channels (Media Development and Diversity Agency, 2009). Community radio is a small part of this radio spectrum, serving about 4 percent of the population (Media Development and Diversity Agency, 2009). However, South Africa has more than 100 community radio stations that provide airtime for local news presented in all 11 of South Africa’s official languages (International Marketing Council). One study of 10 rural community radio stations found that while they are popular sources of community information, many of these news organizations have limited ability to produce their own local content and rely on news produced by newspapers and other media sources (Megwa, 2007). Still, their effect can be powerful. Bosch described how radio builds community in a rhizomatic fashion, where horizontal community networks crisscross and strengthen a community through the sharing of information and ideas (2005).

RESEARCH QUESTIONS

The research questions guiding this inquiry explore factors that may shape the perception of the South African community journalist.

RQ1: How do South African community journalists define themselves? What relationship do community journalists see between themselves and the community they serve; between themselves and government?

RQ2: How does community journalism function in a country with a complex cultural structure?

RQ3: How do institutional rules designed to recognize and even subsidize media that serve the marginalized voices in a society influence the way community journalists define their role?

METHOD

This study employs a qualitative case study approach to draw on data from a variety of sources (Yin, 1994). Data collection focused primarily on in-depth interviews with journalists along with on-site observations that yielded field notes and observations (Bogdan & Taylor, 1998). Following a procedure that replicated the design of previous studies, primarily the work of Milne et al. (2006), journalists were located with the assistance of numerous media associations in South Africa. The goal was to find journalists who represented a variation in their cultural identity, their backgrounds, the community type, the type of news organization and the region of the country.

Interviews with journalists, which took place during a two-month visit to South Africa in May and June of 2009, followed an interview guide, but were also kept open-ended to allow respondents to have a say in the direction of the discussion. Interviews included one-on-one discussions with journalists as well as group discussions involving journalists from news organizations from around a particular region. All interviews were recorded and transcribed. Dialogue with respondents continued through email and other means. As a final member check of findings in this study, two of the South African editors who participated were brought to the United States, where they visited with journalists to discuss the similarities and differences in their perceptions of the community-journalism relationship and to review initial findings with the researcher.

The project received university institutional review board approval, and every effort was taken to design this study with thought to the impact the work would have on the participants in the study. Information sheets were given to each respondent and oral consent was obtained from all respondents. Analysis occurred in waves over the life of the project with the goal being to allow findings to emanate from the data through ongoing analysis, reflection and challenging of findings (Taylor & Bogdan, 1998).

RESULTS

The 62 respondents in this study came from 11 newspapers and 5 radio stations as well as universities and journalism education programs in South Africa. As Table 1 shows, the news organizations represent the diversity of community media situations in this country: The impoverished townships of Johannesburg, the rural agricultural lands of the northeastern Limpopo Province, the game preserves near Kruger National Park, the diverse international city of Cape Town, the university-influenced community of Grahamstown and the remote and dramatic landscape of the Eastern Cape. Structurally, they include newspapers and radio stations alike. Their business models include community-supported media, commercial media, independent media, group-owned media, media that partner with higher education as well as government-subsidized media. In spite of these differences, common themes emerged.

RQ1: Community shapes journalists’ roles, desire for innovation

RQ1 asks how the journalists in this study define themselves and how their relationships within the community influence their work. Two key findings emerge in this area. First, community membership is a strong ethical compass for most respondents. Second, journalists who define themselves as having a strong community attachment strive to be active participants in community activities, eschewing the role of the passive information gatherers.

The power of community membership

Nearly all the journalists interviewed in this study express a strong attachment to the communities they serve. Many of the respondents are not only members of their communities, but also have lived their whole lives in those communities. Chances are that their parents and their parents’ parents also called those communities home. At the Afrikaans-language newspaper, Zoutpansbergerin Louis Trichardt; at the Khosa-language radio station Vukani FM in Cala and at Bush Radio in Cape Town, journalists spoke of a personal connection to the news events they cover. The respondents see this relationship as both a challenge and an asset.

TABLE 1: NEWS ORGANIZATIONS VISITED

[1]

Name	Type, structure	Languages	Location
Kathorus Mail	Independent, monthly, free, commercial newspaper	E English, isi-Zulu, se-Setho	Katlehong,Thokoza and Vosloorus
Zoutnet Publishers	Independent, commercial newspaper group. Publishes two weekly newspapers	Afrikaans and English (Zoutpansberger); English (Limpopo Mirror)	Louis Trichardt
Kruger2Canyon News	Independent, commercial weekly newspaper	English	Hoedspruit
Bush Radio	Community radio station supported by advertising, donation and sponsorship	English, Afrikaans and Khosa	Cape Town
Radio Tygerberg	Commercial, Christian radio station	Afrikaans	Parow (Cape Town)
Grocott’s Mail	Independent weekly newspaper owned by Rhodes University	English	Grahamstown
Vukani FM	Independent community radio station	Khosa	Cala

The challenge of community membership for journalists was vivid on a visit to Grocott’s Mail in Grahamstown, where a reporter was working on a story about a popular school principal who had lost his job. School officials refused to talk publicly about the issue, but the reporter had lived in the region his whole life and had attended the school. To get more information on deadline he went to the school itself, where people talked with him but refused to say anything publicly. In the end, the reporter knew the people involved, knew what the news in the story was, but ultimately had very little information beyond the hearsay of the community (K. Butana, personal communication, June 9, 2009). Scholars of community journalism have long observed the challenge that being a community member poses for journalists. On the one hand it offers intimate knowledge of what is happening; however, it also means that these interpersonal connections and the realization that the journalist will face public accountability for what they write may hold powerful sway over their news decisions (Lauterer, 2000; Tichenor et al., 1973).

Many of the black South African journalists who participated in this study live in townships that have known great oppression and still grapple with poverty, crime and AIDS. All of these journalists spoke of wanting their journalism to make a difference. In Cape Town, the host of one of Bush Radio’s public affairs radio talk shows said she wants to empower people from her own community to discover solutions to the issues facing them. One of the editors working at the youth-oriented newspaper, Makoya Zone, owned by Zoutnet Publishers, said his mission is to inspire his fellow community members by telling them the stories of people who have succeeded:

We try to motivate people to realize what is possible. You can dream big… if he’s doing it, you can do it as well. The more we do these kinds of stories, the more people can relate (N. Gabara, personal communication, May 27, 2009).

A citizen-focused view of news was described by a group of journalists from Vukani FM, a community radio station in the remote Eastern Cape. The goal in every broadcast – if not the mandate – is to include the voices and comments of fellow community members. One reporter described how she would find stories by going back to “my community” and talk with people she had known her entire life:

You need to listen to the community, what they are saying about anything around them. Then you take that information from your community and do a plan or identify a relevant [government] department to answer this crisis and then you take it from there…

In all, you see, our strategy of coming to the community. The way we are doing our research is not about taking the [notebook] or the recorder and start asking questions. It’s just to mingle with them. You go to the communities and talk with the people and get issues. Then we follow them up (T. Mbobosi, personal communication, June 10, 2009).

Community membership leads to innovative approaches

In both formal and informal ways, a number of the journalists interviewed have taken active roles in the community, a finding first observed by Milne et al. (2006). They use terms like “building community” and “cross pollination” as they talk about trying to build a unified community out of disparate groups.

Some news organizations, like Bush Radio and Grocott’s Mail, have done so through formal partnerships with local universities and colleges. In these places, education is a core principle and the news organization is where students and community members go to learn to become journalists. At Grocott’s, this relationship allows the news organization to experiment with reaching audiences through a citizen journalism newsroom, partnerships with community radio stations, and a cell phone text-messaging project where citizens report the news. In these situations, members of the local community work side by side with students who can come from universities both in South Africa and abroad.

Even in the smallest news organization, active community involvement is at the forefront. The publisher of the Kruger2Canyon newspaper led volunteer efforts to build a new school in the community of Hoedspruit and spoke with great pride of “our school”  (personal communication, June 1, 2009). Zoutnet Publishers won the World Young Reader Prize from the World Association of Newspapers in 2004 for a series of educational supplements that were distributed through the newspaper and directly to schools throughout the region (van Zyl, 2005). Since then, the newspaper has coupled newspaper readership endeavors with work done to help build and improve local schools.

RQ2: Journalists navigate a complex cultural landscape

RQ2 asks how the complexity of South Africa’s cultural makeup might influence journalistic routines. This is a quandary facing all the South African community journalists who participated in this study. The question is how to deliver a news product that meets the needs of the entire community. The Afrikaner journalists at Zoutnet Publishers in Louis Trichardt live in a region where their cultural group is the white minority and where the local government is primarily black. In this situation, the culture of the local black population, primarily the Venda tribe, is built on unquestioning respect for those in charge:

That causes a serious dilemma. How do you handle that? As a white journalist I can write and say look, it is wrong… and my white readers will say yes. The black readers will say, what is wrong with that? They are in power. They know what is right. You actually jeopardize your credibility as a journalist to do such a thing. (F. van der Merwe, Frans, personal communication, May 28, 2009)

Language is one area where journalists at most news organizations say readers are especially sensitive. Bush Radio, in an attempt to represent all groups, produces programs in English, Afrikaans, and Khosa. Zoutpansberger, in Louis Trichardt, publishes in Afrikaans and English. Zaidi Khumalo of the Kathorus Mail said he publishes primarily in English because his readers in the townships outside Johannesburg include an array of ethnic groups including many immigrants who come to the townships from other countries (Z. Khumalo, personal communication, May 26, 2009). This is not an issue in all of South Africa. At Vukani FM in the Eastern Cape, which is more than 95 percent Xhosa speaking, questions about cross-pollination and about serving all residents of the region were met with confusion by respondents. In fact, the questions regarding issues of multiculturalism didn’t really seem to make sense to the respondents in this homogenous community.

Coupled with this challenge of language is considering how to disseminate news to a diverse community. Zoutnet Publishers decided that multiple news channels, delivering different news content to different cultural groups is the only way to reconcile the differences within the readership area (Andres van Zyl, personal communication, May 28, 2009). Zoutpansberger serves the primarily white, Afrikaner community. It is published with articles in both English and Afrikaans, though the journalists say that they hear criticism from Afrkaners if there are too many English stories (Andres van Zyl, personal communication, May 28, 2009). To serve the readers who live in the outlying area – mostly members of the Venda community – this news organization has the English-language Limpopo Mirror as well as a youth-oriented publication, Makoya Zone.

Most respondents felt news organizations should provide one media channel to serve all communities. They said this approach helps community members understand that despite cultural and language differences, the issues facing the community are ones that everyone shares. The most famous example of this may be Bush Radio in Cape Town:

It all links to our mission. That people can see that humans are humans and that we all share, we all hopefully share, a common humanity. And yes that’s all glorified terms and we try to steer clear of using them. We try to do this practically (A. Louw, personal communication, June 4, 2009).

At the Paarl Post near Cape Town, editor Anne Kruger said she knows that she probably does not have too many black readers of her paper, but she still believes it is crucial that her newspaper makes every attempt to “teach” readers to see their entire community in the newspaper (personal communication, June 3, 2009). She said this happens in large and small ways – like having a reporter cover all the schools in the region and take pictures of students that reflect the diversity of the region.

RQ3: Media subsidies and government support for marginalized groups

RQ3 asked how media subsidization and other government-supported efforts have affected community journalism in South Africa. Respondents agreed that the greatest challenge for community journalism in South Africa lies in encouraging and sustaining media that can serve historically marginalized groups. Journalists identified numerous challenges facing these news organizations. First, the communities themselves do not have a local economy that can support advertiser-driven news publications; and the businesses that do exist in these communities see little financial incentive to advertise to a market audience with little spending power. Second, local government not only does not support these independent news organizations, it also often competes with them by publishing its own newspaper that is subsidized by tax money. Third, residents of townships interested in starting their own news organizations often lack the business and journalistic training to survive (van Zyl & Khumalo, 2010).

The mission of South Africa Media Development and Diversity Agency (MDDA) is to support specifically these kinds of endeavors (Presidency, 2002). Many of the participants at a June 11, 2009, East London journalism workshop were people who had received MDDA funding to launch their newspapers and radio stations. The challenge, they said, is the publications cannot survive on their own once that initial financing has been depleted. One editor said he’d soon be going out of business because of this.

News organizations that have succeeded have done so, it appears, because they used the MDDA money initially, but knew it would require a mix of funding if they were to survive. Vukani FM’sstation manager Xola Nozewu (personal communication, June 10, 2009) said his station nearly failed because it attempted to operate as a volunteer organization using some MDDA money. Instead, the station reorganized and created a community radio station funded by support from programs sponsored by NGOs, local government, listener contributions and some advertising. Vukani FM journalist Xolani Femela, who produces a sponsored show sponsored by NGOs, said the support does not necessarily mean that the shows carry the agenda of the sponsors (personal communication, June 10, 2009). Local government shows include lots of questions from citizens about public services and the station has had great success ensuring that local government officials appear regularly to address concerns in what they said were candid, frank discussions.

A few years ago, when Zaidi Khumalo was thinking of shutting down or selling his township newspaper, the Kathorus Mail, he met fellow newspaper publisher Anton van Zyl, who worked out a partnership with Khumalo. Once a month, Khumalo sends all his stories, photos and additional content for his paper to van Zyl’s offices, 300 miles to the northeast. There, designers lay out pages and do the final production work. The Kathorus Mail is printed and shipped backed to Khumalo’s community in the townships outside of Johannesburg. Van Zyl described this relationship using the word Ubuntu, a concept that is developed more in the discussion section of this manuscript:

In our private lives, we depend on family structures. We try and look after our parents and grandparents. We try and assist when little ones need money for education, even if it’s not our own children. In the business world it is also fitting to look at our “family members” and see how we can assist (Van Zyl & Khumalo, 2010).

Different perceptions of how to report news

One unexpected theme that emerged from this research involves differing perceptions on how to frame news in a country that has experienced divisions based on race and culture. There was a perception from some respondents that different cultural groups had different news preferences. Some news organizations, like the Kathorus Mail and the Limpopo Mirror, routinely fill their front pages with the most graphic images and ghastly news stories. They are coupled with one and two-word headlines that scream out the atrocities. The editor of the Mirror said that newspapers targeting black African audiences, like the large national daily The Sowetan, have traditionally used a tabloid format with large headlines and often shocking news stories (W. Lee, personal communication, May 29, 2009). Many of these daily papers grew out of the resistance movement of the early 1980s, which may influence their approach. Some of the front pages of the Kathorus Mailincluded an image a severed hand, an abandoned fetus found in a field, a badly burned body. Editor and publisher Zaidi Khumalo, whose training as a journalist came from his work in the resistance media at Drum magazine, said it is his obligation to tell readers about the bad things that are happening in his community and not to shy away from a story even if it is shocking.

If he looks at his community as merely a community of happy faces who are going to be happy to see themselves in their newspaper, to me that’s journalism that’s not credible, it’s not. You must be able to live within the community that you write for. So that if there are issues, those issues affect you as well and you will be able to look at those issues on behalf of the community and this is what’s troubling us, not them. You don’t separate yourself from the community, that’s very important (Z. Khumalo, personal communication, May 26, 2009).

Other journalists spoke of being motivated toward news that took on larger public issues. Grocott’s Mail, for example, is now owned by the journalism program at Rhodes University and has a staff that includes professionally trained journalists as well as student interns from Rhodes and other journalism schools in the country. When asked in a group discussion to discuss the stories they were most proud of, the journalists pointed to examples in which the news organization had championed a particular cause or issue. One of those stories involved an elderly woman named Mrs. George who was in danger of losing her home, but thanks in part to ongoing coverage from the paper, the public rallied to find her a new place to live. The paper carried a front-page picture of her in front of her new home, which she moved into on Freedom Day in 2007 (van Winsen, 2007). They were also proud of a front-page photo of students at Rhodes University learning how to properly put a condom on a model of a penis with the headline, “People! This is how it’s done” (Meadows, 2008). Grocott’s general manager in 2009, Louise Vale (now executive director of the Association of Independent Publishers), said there are definitely issues in the community where the paper knows it will be criticized but where they feel it is important to take a stand (personal communication, June 9, 2009).

At other news organizations, the mission and the news values are more oriented toward community building. Heidi Lee Smith, editor and publisher of the newspaper Kruger2Canyon News, said she uses her newspaper to promote important local events and to champion issues she feels focus on the positive aspects of her community. Smith, who has no journalism training, also said she will write positive stories about local businesses as a way of promoting those places – a decision she said also ties in with building new advertising clients (personal communication, June 1, 2009). At Bush Radio in Cape Town, program integrator Adrian Louw (personal communication, June 4, 2009) said the station’s mission is to get beyond news driven by crime and violence.

At a June 11, 2009, journalism workshop in East London, journalists from small newspapers and community radio stations debated the merits of both the traditional objective, conflict-oriented approach to news reporting with what one of the workshop participants referred to as “peace journalism,” a solution-oriented style of journalism first championed by Norwegian sociologist Johan Galtung (2000) and that is espoused by NGO-sponsored media groups such as Internews(Fairbairn, 2009). Some pointed out that news organizations that simply seek out the positive run the risk of not being seen as credible if they overlook issues that require criticism. However, others countered that “bad news” – especially in historically marginalized communities – must be tempered with information that offers hope. These comments were echoed by one of Bush Radio’sprogram hosts about what she strives for in her programming.

You know, most people in communities know that next door, there is a drug dealer there. They have been knowing that for the past 20 years so they do know that crime happens every week. They know all these things, but what they don’t know is that there are alternatives to their life. You know, you don’t have to stay there and a lot of people are afraid of tackling drug dealers because they feel like… but people don’t know that there are alternatives. (D. Adams, personal communication, June 4, 2009)

DISCUSSION

It is hard to make generalizations about anything in South Africa. It is a country comprised of a collection of cultures and a strong sense of regional pride. This study intentionally chose to interview journalists from across the spectrum of South Africa’s community journalism landscape. There was variation in community structure, media channel, funding structure and the backgrounds of the individuals themselves. The most intriguing finding of this research suggests that, in spite of these differences, if this group of 62 respondents sat down to discuss the future of community journalism in South Africa, they’d likely find much to agree on. Community journalists want to create media that has an impact on their communities; that inspires communities to see the multicultural nature of where they live; that invites everyone to participate in making communities better; and combats inequities that exist because of a history of marginalization and oppression. The following seem important to consider.

Membership is the strength, and the challenge

As noted in response to RQ1, in an age of increased mobility, South African community journalists have an asset that cannot be replicated: They are community members first and journalists second. These community connections go back generations. The respondents describe themselves as active stakeholders in their communities. They are stewards of their news organizations, serving on behalf of their community members. They are boosters of these communities, willing to take on issues both in their editorial content and through leading efforts to improve community life.

Surveys of U.S. journalists have routinely found that community journalists differ from their large-media counterparts in seeing themselves more as populist moblizers, oriented toward community building through championing the voices of the ordinary citizen (Weaver & Wilhoit, 1996). Community journalism scholar Jock Lauterer (2000) says such intimate connections mean journalists consider the community impact of their news decisions.

Bridging communities remains the most daunting challenge

Analysis of RQ2 found that South Africa’s desire to become a more inclusive society poses intriguing challenges for community journalists. “Communities” in South Africa are often composed of collections of sub-communities that have historically shared a geographic region but not a sense of being one place. Efforts by media to bridge communities and overcome longstanding stereotypes face daunting obstacles. Community journalists in South Africa are experimenting with many ways of doing this. They offer information through multiple media channels, including newspaper, radio and, increasingly, through new media technologies such as cell phone-delivered text messages. They encourage citizens to join in the production and creation of news. Further, they consider the community as a whole as they make decisions about what to report and how to frame it.

But there is not agreement on the right approach. Some media organizations believe that different cultural groups within a community are best satisfied with separate media channels. Others vehemently oppose this approach, saying one community requires one media channel. Future research should explore whether one media channel satisfy all groups in a multicultural society. If, for example, a media organization is owned by someone from a cultural group that has historically held a position of privilege, is it realistic to expect a true understanding of the situation of marginalized groups within that community (Hofmeyr, 2003; Jacobs, 2004; Kupe, 2004)?

Partnerships open the door to innovation and sustainability

RQ3 asked how government support and subsidies have encouraged South African community journalism organizations. While much more research is needed in this area, the findings suggest that those who rely only on this support struggle in the long run. Those that have succeeded have done so by constructing their own hybrid models of media. They invite and teach citizens to tell the stories of their community. They use community and industry resources to train both journalists and citizens to do this work. They actively seek funding through a variety of sources including government support, partnerships with NGOs, donations, advertising, partnerships with other media and through collaborating with colleges and universities. It’s worth noting that many of the challenges recounted by these South African journalists in 2009 are ones echoed by respondents to a Pew Research Center survey of journalists in the United States, which found that non-profit news organizations that receive seed money often lack the resources and training necessary to sustain themselves (Mitchell, Jurkowitz, Holcomb, Enda & Anderson, 2013).

Traditional definitions of news are being scrutinized

An unexpected finding of this research involved differing perceptions among respondents regarding news values. A number of the respondents in this study prefer a style of news that is more solution oriented and may have connections to Galtung’s concept of peace journalism (2000). Other organizations – many of them news organizations that serve primarily black African readers – follow a more traditional approach to news, relying on coverage of crime and scandal in what might be called a tabloid-style format. Journalists at these news organizations say they do so because they want to mobilize their community and that they have to compete with some of the national daily newspapers that follow a similar news style.

In many cases, the news choices seem connected to the background and training of the journalists. Many of the younger journalists had studied journalism either in urban technical colleges or universities. Others had been taught in their own journalism organization. A number of journalists said they had benefited from the small, government-sponsored training programs that do regional workshops. Another group of respondents had come to journalism via involvement in NGOs and as community activists. This last group spoke of producing news content that explored solutions to problems in their communities. Journalists with more formal training and experience seemed to have a slightly different perception of their role, in part motivated toward the watchdog function of media, covering government leaders and institutions.

More research in this area could include ethnographic research with residents in marginalized communities, exploring what type of information they are seeking from news media and what format would be most useful to their lives. One possibility is that research could focus on mapping the storytelling networks South Africa’s township communities, replicating approaches employed at the University of Southern California’s Metamorphosis Project, which found that residents in the multicultural neighborhoods of Los Angeles have the same desires for their community and are eager for the same information about their community (Chen, Ball-Rokeach, Parks, & Huang 2011). Merrill (2004) notes that this is a crucial question in the exploration of what he calls “community-based ethics” (p. 337). Previous surveys of the public have found that, despite strong criticisms of the press from government officials, the media enjoy a strong public trust in South Africa (Hofmeyr, 2003).

Is there a cultural ethic driving all South African community journalists?

A final question to consider is whether one can generalize about the style of community journalism practiced in South Africa. Two of the respondents in this study used the term Ubuntu to talk about their role as journalists. Perhaps this sense of community obligation is one inherent in South African culture, as author Allister Sparks suggested when he explored South Africa’s transition toward a democratic republic:

The tradition of communal loyalty and social obligation survives, mutated but still recognizable, in the pullulating townships and squatter camps around the industrial cities…There is still a collectivist style of decision making in the political movements and trade unions and the hundreds of civic associations that exist in the township” (1991, p. 21).

Scholar Clifford Christians (2004) compares the concept of communitarianism with the African concept of Ubuntu. He argues that practicing a style of journalism that embraces community membership may eschew the norms of a professionalized style of journalism, favoring a viewpoint that sees the journalist firmly situated in the network of a community. The findings of this study suggest a combination of factors shape the ethic of community journalists including community membership, mission of the news organization and the training and background of the journalist.

This study should be seen as an exploratory project that points to a number of directions for future research. Future research could include content analysis comparing different media types and looking for differences both in what gets to count as news and also how that news is framed (conflict versus solution-oriented). Audience research is also crucial. Journalists may clearly see their role in the community, but the ultimate judge of their effectiveness is whether those ideals are being felt within the community. Survey research and focus group research may help to answer some of these questions. What’s more, the findings did not do enough to explore the question asked in RQ1 regarding the relationship between journalists and government in South Africa. More research should be done to help explore the true impact of government subsidies and institutional support for journalism serving historically marginalized groups.

In 2007, Lumko Mtimde, the chief executive officer of the Media Development and Diversity Agency, summarized what scholars and experts said were the keys to creating a sustainable media to serve all of the cultural groups that comprise South Africa. He concluded that journalism will need to innovate and be creative; that media is the key to encouraging citizens to participate in the democratic process and that media must become diverse in its content. His remarks echo those of U.S. media scholars Leonard Downie and Michael Schudson, who concluded that in this age of great transition, media organizations must create hybrid models of media that partner with non-profit agencies, universities and other groups to both create a new kind of journalism and build a new way of funding media that abandons the traditional model of an independent, powerful media supported solely by advertising dollars (2009). It’s a global challenge: How can communities that need media the most create and sustain it? To South Africa’s credit, it is a question that is being explored with great passion.

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[1] This table includes only news organizations where an actual site visit occurred. Interviews were also conducted with journalists attending a June 11, 2009, workshop on covering municipal government held in East London, comprised primarily of small MDDA-funded newspapers. Interviews were also conducted with journalists in the Cape Town region who worked for the Paarl Post and the Tyberberger, which are owned by one of the larger media groups, Media24. 

About the Author

John A. Hatcher is an associate professor at the University of Minnesota at Duluth.