Community Journalism, the official journal of the Community Journalism Interest Group at AEJMC, is a peer-reviewed online journal focusing on the present and future of journalism in smaller newsrooms and communities. The journal published its first edition in 2012.
Community Journalism focuses on journalism in a broad definition of community, including local (or hyperlocal), regional, interest-based, virtual, and others. The journal is open to all research methodologies and theoretical approaches. Ideal articles will attempt to bridge the gap between theory and practice as community journalists and publishers adapt to technological advances and economic concerns.
The journal strives to become a source of information for journalists, editors, and publishers practicing community journalism; to uncover best practices in using technological advances to enhance community journalism; address economic, legal and ethical concerns in community journalism; and to build a theoretical base for academic research and pedagogy that focus on community journalism.
As an open-access journal, Community Journalism makes all articles freely available to readers. Authors retain copyrights in their submissions. The journal receives an exclusive license to publish online for one year from the date of publication, after which time the license reverts to a non-exclusive license to host the article on the website and in the archives.
Community Journalism is published by the Texas Center for Community Journalism.
Staff
Dr. Hans K. Meyer
Editor
Dr. Meyer, is the associate director of undergraduate studies and an associate professor at Ohio University. He joined the faculty in 2009 after receiving his Ph.D. from the University of Missouri. Before joining the academy, he worked as a reporter, city editor, and general manager of community newspapers up and down the Interstate 15 corridor in Utah, Arizona, Nevada, and California. He is originally from Salt Lake City, Utah.
He also serves as the editor of the Web Journal of Mass Communication Research, an online journal started by Dr. Guido Stempel in 1998.
His research and teaching focus on the intersection of new technology with community and traditional journalism values. His works has been published in American Behavioral Scientist, Journalism, Newspaper Research Journal, International Symposium of Online Journalism and other academic journals.
Dr. Tommy Thomason
Publisher
Tommy Thomason, the founding director of the TCU Schieffer School of Journalism, has left that position to become the founding director of the Texas Center for Community Journalism. Thomason began his career in journalism in the early 1970s with the Associated Press, working as a sportswriter in Arkadelphia and Little Rock, Ark. He has also worked in public relations in Dallas and as a copyeditor for several regional magazines.
Dr. Thomason has taught journalism at five universities and has been at TCU since 1984. In 1987, he was one of the winners of a national Teaching Award in Journalism Ethics from the Poynter Institute of Media Studies in St. Petersburg, Fla.
He has been one of the nation’s most active researchers on the media’s treatment of crime victims. His research has been presented at both regional and national symposia and has been cited in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, Time magazine, Presstime and the Columbia Journalism Review.
Dr. Thomason was co-director of the first national symposium on crime victims and the news media, which was televised nationally on C-SPAN, and a symposium on coverage of sex crimes, Sex in the Media: The Public’s Right to Know vs. the Victim’s Right to Privacy.
He maintains an interest in writing at all academic levels, and frequently speaks to elementary school teachers about writing workshops for children. He is the author of More than a Writing Teacher: How to Become a Teacher Who Writes, Writer to Writer: How to Conference Young Authors, Write On Target: How to Prepare Young Writers for Success on Writing Achievement Tests, Absolutely Write: Teaching the Craft Elements of Writing and Writeaerobics: 40 Exercises to Improve Your Writing Teaching, and Tools, not Rules: Teaching Grammar in the Writing Classroom.