Local news organizations have long been recognized as vital organs in the corporal community. They help their members establish meaning, a shared value system, and develop a shared identity. Community newspapers and their accompanying digital counterparts are often cited as media artifacts that help develop and reinforce this sense of community while its readers are active participants. Sense of place is also a factor, with perceptions of its people and proxemic environment influencing how they feel about their community. This research explores community identity and place maintenance via engagement with digital community news artifacts after a person has relocated away from that place. It uses the Bucyrus Telegraph-Forum, a local community newspaper in Bucyrus, Ohio, and semi-structured interviews of 12 of its former residents as a case study. Findings suggest perceptions of past ties to the community, as well as place maintenance, are motivating factors for continuing consumption of the Telegraph-Forum. In addition, a preference for stories involving community members rather than the place itself, as well as the opportunity to engage with stories and others via website comments or by sharing, liking, or commenting on social media posts, helps maintain a sense of place. Implications for community journalists are discussed.
Introduction
The experience of place is inexorably intertwined with the experience of human existence. Physical places and the physical, psychological, emotional, and sociocultural roles they play in the multidimensional way community is both individually perceived and socially constructed, help establish meaning-making, shared identity, and shared values among community members (Gatti & Procentese, 2021; McMillan & Chavis, 1986; Raymond, Kytta, & Stedman, 2017; Vick & Perkins, 2013). For community journalists, place can refer to a geographic coverage area, a physical location where a news event takes place, or a psychological sense of place – an abstract concept where the members of a community act, interact, and develop symbolic meaning as well as the attachments and emotional bonds between themselves and the physical or virtual locations they inhabit (Raymond, Kytta, & Stedman, 2017; Lewicka, 2011). Community and local journalists observe, contextualize, and report on these community members who operate within these physical places, and those who read, view, or listen to journalists’ reports are connected to these places through, among other things, their developed sense of place (Usher, 2019).
For community and local news organizations, place has often been linked to the town, county, or city where the organization’s base of operations or coverage area is located, and where their readers are physically located and connected to the spaces they occupy. However, with the rise of the digital world and the transition of many traditional organizations’ physical spaces into the virtual, community and local journalists found the disconnect between their physical news products and their increasingly online readers challenging they found their online readers didn’t have the same connection to sense of place as their print readers once did (Rodgers, 2018; Weiss, 2018). According to Weiss (2018) and Rodgers (2018), it’s difficult to know where a reader lives geographically in an age where they can inhabit both physical and virtual spaces and can interact with their online news stories from anywhere in the world. This transition was exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, which presented economic, logistics, and personnel challenges, among others. It forced many news organizations to close shop entirely or close their physical spaces and transition to remote work, which also may have forced many traditional print readers online. However, whether this exacerbated transition influenced the sense of place is unclear.
A study conducted in 2019 (Pew Research Center) found that readers prefer reading news about people rather than places. In part, the study argued that this change in habit may be a result of social migration. A 2023 study (Pew Research Center) found that most of the American public (86%) gets most of their news, including local news, online. Weiss (2018) suggests readers feel connected to stories about groups of people – who they may interact with in both their virtual and physical space – whereas location-based stories no longer carry the same appeal.
Usher (2019) suggests that place-based journalism “leads insight into the evolving business of news, highlights questions of trust … and flags the role and responsibility of journalists in creating for the public larger social imaginaries and narratives about place” (p. 94). Further, the digital reader may be geographically disconnected from the specific locale for which they have developed a sense of place, yet that sense of place remains a part of their identity. It is the social element, then, that may connect or keep connected geographically disconnected readers to a place or community, or to local news coverage centered on the people who act within them. A story about a familiar baseball team might carry more weight than a story about the weather or an anonymous traffic accident. As such, Weiss (2018) and Usher (2019) argue journalists and researchers alike need to reconsider how they define the concept of proximity relative to local and community news coverage. Weiss argues that to understand the terrain that local journalists cover, it may be beneficial to review how to conceptualize geographic location and how it intersects in the digital and mobile environment. Usher argues that sense of place is pivotal, that “sustained engagement with the role of place in structuring knowledge about the world” (p. 132) is necessary to understand its impact on lived experience.
Similarly, this study seeks to further what community journalism scholars have already written about the importance of sense of place and community-building by examining the relationship community papers have to online readers separated from the geographic location but still feeling a sense of place regarding said location. Many have suggested that community building is an essential ingredient for a local paper to survive (Beaudoin & Thorson, 2004; Lowrey et al, 2008; Reader, 2012; Min et al, 2022), so it would be in a researcher’s best interest to understand how to serve their audience in both spaces. As such, this research will take a qualitative case study approach to examine how local audiences form attachments with their local and community newspapers when they no longer reside in the area. This study reinforces the idea that community journalism is more than being about scale, but about quality and supporting community relations. Community journalists may benefit from knowing that they have a wider audience, and potential subscribers, that reside outside the geographic area.
Literature Review
Community Journalism
Scholars have long suggested that community journalists operate differently because community news organizations tend to be smaller but have stronger ties to the people within their coverage areas. This level of intimacy helps local reporters do their jobs because, essentially, a local paper is a forum of conversation as much as it is a vehicle for information. Indeed, even in the digital age, they still serve as valuable resources for what Lasswell called traditional functions of surveillance of surroundings, societal correlation, and the transmission of sociocultural heritage (1948).
To be considered a local paper, some scholars suggest a total coverage area population under 30,000 serving communities outside densely populated metro areas, primarily in rural areas (Atkins, 2016; McNeil, 2015).
Some suggest it should only apply to dailies, others say weeklies. Others suggest the very concepts of local or community journalism are often arbitrarily defined by scholars (Usher, 2019). For example, The New York Times is considered an international newspaper, although arguably its primary focus is on the city of New York as the local paper of record, whereas The Washington Post and Chicago Tribune, although with international audiences, are considered regional, metro, and local. Conversely, very few identify small city newspaper The Sheridan Press as anything but a local, community daily, despite the size of its physical coverage area. This argues that size, publication frequency, and geography aren’t the most important attributes. Local or community papers are an integral resource in daily life and conversation for the community and form a place where its members may express thoughts and ideas, help forge social identity, develop social capital, and help create and maintain a shared sense of belonging (Mersey, 2010; Atkins, 2016).
In part, this is facilitated because local papers are micro-focused on news that concerns the community in which they serve and eschew regional or national coverage whenever prudence allows (Reader, 2012). By micro-focusing on local issues, local papers can foster the perception of community identity and sense of place where journalists write dialogues to increase the perception of commonality and shared values (Reader, 2012). Studies have shown that people who read their community newspaper tend to feel more in touch with the community and involved in community life and public discourse (Atkins, 2016; Beaudoin & Thorson, 2004; Yamamoto, 2011). For instance, Bobkowski et al. (2019) found that local news readers were more likely to attend neighborhood events and get to know their neighbors. Participants also enjoyed sharing news with others, which suggests local news may be more likely to be a conversation topic in a way that national news may not. Scholars have already said newspapers can provide a forum where people share information and, in turn, become involved in the community decision-making process via involvement in public discourse (Lowrey et al., 2008).
For instance, some researchers have suggested that local news has more influence on the results of local elections (Min et al., 2022). People who read local news are more likely to be aware of political issues and follow political debates (Hayes & Lawless, 2018). Nagel and Broersma (2023) said local journalists are like cultural brokers in that they bridge gaps in the social structure to allow information to flow. Journalists create connections between the policy actors and the public that may otherwise not exist. In turn, this may inspire action.
Beyond providing critical information necessary to make voting or other civic decisions, local news connects people to each other. It also fosters and maintains a sense of shared community value, a sense of social connectedness, and feelings of mutual or reciprocal influence (Atkins, 2016; Davidson and Cotter, 1997). The level of intimacy allows local journalists to become more connected with their readers and view their work through an ethical lens that prioritizes responsibility to the community over responsibility to advancing professional reputation and reach (Reader, 2006). People often feel the need to be a part of a community, to develop a social identity alongside others, and to fulfill the psychological need of belonging (McMillan & Chavis, 1986). People often feel the need to belong and be accepted, and this acceptance can strengthen the feeling of connectedness. McMillan (1996) suggests that for a community to form, its members need to feel comfortable telling their truth. Members are more emotionally connected when they feel safe being heard by others in the group, and this feeling of intimacy can help foster and strengthen a community.
Sense of Virtual Community and Imagined Communities
It is important to point out additional theoretical lenses that may help researchers understand sense of place, particularly in the context of people who may no longer reside but still identify with and are influenced by a physical location. Sense of virtual community extends McMillan and Chavis’ seminal 1986 work on community into digital spaces where people engage in social interactions with one another online, building connections with others regardless of physical proximity (Jones, 1997; Abfalter, Zaglia, & Mueller, 2012; McMillan & Chavis, 1986; Koh & Kim, 2003). As local newspapers increasingly publish online and share news stories on social media, it increasingly reaches former community members who have moved on. Guo and Zhou (2025) refer to it as a framework of locality in digital public spheres, allowing for translocal publics to engage with geographies they may no longer reside in but continue to share an interest in. While people may use virtual communities to socially interact with others in online places, research investigating those who choose to engage with others in the virtual world to maintain a sense of place centered on a physical location in which they no longer reside is lacking. Future researchers might investigate.
Imagined communities is another theoretical lens that may be useful in studying this phenomenon in future research (Anderson, 1983). It has been used to investigate NPR listeners (Reader, 2007), magazine readerships (Jenkins, 2014), and newspaper website banners (Funk, 2016). Anderson argues that place identity is, at least in part, constructed, defined, and maintained by local print newspapers (Anderson, 1983). These concepts intersect with the sense of place phenomenon when people use virtual environments to discuss or share profound thoughts, feelings, memories, and news regarding a specific physical place with significant personal connection. This suggests an “imagined community” where individuals delocated from one another use digital environments to act as if they are connected to one another, whether through shared interest or identity, former shared geography or connection to a formerly occupied physical space (Coles & West, 2016), also referred to as a “hybrid community” (Dai & Liu, 2024) or “media space” as a fusion of physical and digital spaces (Wu & Ye, 2024), blurring the line between the traditional understanding of what comprises space and place. Additionally, local and community news engagement, in person and online, help a news audience maintain sense of community, belonging, and community attachment regardless of geographic proximity (Atkins, 2016; Gulyas & Hess, 2023; Park, Lee & Fisher, 2021; 2023; Osborne & Jones, 2022; Rosenberry, 2010).
As proximity indeed does not define or shape a community, nor is it a guarantee that those residing in shared proximity will also share affinity for the location or community, an imagined community may be useful for future researchers to study this phenomenon.
Dislocated Readership and Sense of Place
Bott, Cantrill, and Myers succinctly state that relationships to place are a fundamental feature of human existence (2003). They distinguish between natural vs. built places, but do not integrate digital spaces or artifacts as facilitating or maintaining connections once a person has vacated a place. Lewicka (2011) argues that despite an increasingly mobile and global evolution of societies, the construct of place continues to hold a significant perch in a person’s identity. Hidalgo and Hernandez (2001) suggest that attachment consists of a positive, affective link to a specific place, which motivates an individual to maintain a close relationship with it. With the ongoing evolution of digital technology and its effect on longstanding local and community journalism norms, it is important to consider the relationships between newspapers and their readers in terms of helping them maintain those relationships. It has been established that readers of both print and digital versions of local newspapers feel more connected to their communities. This connection can go beyond physical or geographical location. Many community papers have an audience composed of locals within a specific coverage area, as well as migrants who traverse through it. It is also comprised of people who once resided in a specific community who have since left, yet still identify as, and maintain social or relational ties with, said community. Indeed, community-oriented digital content, such as a newspaper’s website, e-edition, or shared articles on social media, can help maintain connections to coverage areas of which they are no longer a part (Atkins, 2016; Hess, 2012) by fostering a sense of place (Hess, 2012; Hess & Waller, 2014).
Lowrey, Brozana, and Mackay (2008) argue that the very act of the formation of a community is both inclusive and exclusionary by nature, that contemporary community has become complex and fractured, and community journalism is subject to influence from power structures. However, they still foster a connection and sense of place maintenance for both those residing within its physical coverage area as well as for those who have moved on. Historically speaking, and relevant to this paper, in the early 19th century, community newspapers were a way to connect immigrants and transient workers in each geographic area to one another, but over time, the definition of what comprises a community has changed as society became more mobile, yet connected through digital media (Lowrey et al., 2008).
Contemporarily, as more people migrate to other areas yet utilize traditional, digital, and social media to maintain a sense of place, community newspapers may help people feel that they never left (Olsen, 2020). However, motivational factors as well as publication factors may present barriers – the readers must view the newspaper as credible and relevant to maintain motivation to continue to read, regardless of proximity (Olsen, 2020).
Rodgers (2018) argues that the idea of place has evolved because of an increase in digital technology, which largely eliminates geographic barriers to readership. The internet opened another dimension, which he calls field space, where social and technological worlds exist. He says journalists have a dualistic mission: while their activities are rooted in a geographic location, a part of their audience also connects in the field space. The concept of place was once used to define the area in which a person lives, but a person may communicate with people who live in a geographic location and interact in a field space. This concept was also applied in a study by Weiss (2018), who argued that place is a construct that has evolved to include virtual and geographic location. The researchers examine a case study, looking specifically at whether and how community newspaper readers, once geographically located within a community, use the digital versions of the publication to help maintain a sense of place after they have physically removed themselves from the environment.
Research questions
- RQ 1: What factors motivate dislocated readers to continue engaging with community newspapers?
- RQ 2: How does engagement with community newspapers through digital platforms contribute to a sense of place and identity among dislocated readers?
Method
Case Study Design and Context
This study draws on reader interview data collected as part of a larger case study examining community journalism, paywalls, and relationships between local news organizations and their audiences. The larger project used multiple sources of evidence, including interviews with journalists and readers, newspaper content, circulation information, and organizational and social media data. The present study focuses specifically on the complete set of 12 reader interviews collected for the larger project to examine how readers’ geographic relationships to a community intersect with their continued engagement with its local newspaper and their sense of connection to place.
A case study approach was appropriate because the study sought to understand reader attachment within the real-world social, geographic, and journalistic context in which relationships between community newspapers and their audiences develop. Case studies are particularly useful for examining contemporary phenomena that cannot be separated easily from their contexts and for addressing questions concerning how and why social processes occur (Stake, 1994; Yin, 2018). Rather than seeking statistical generalizability, the present study uses a bounded community newspaper case to provide an in-depth examination of how local journalism may contribute to readers’ sense of place and community, including among readers who no longer reside within the newspaper’s immediate geographic area.
The larger study was geographically bounded to Ohio, where the researchers lived or had previously lived and had familiarity with the state’s communities and local news environment. The Bucyrus Telegraph-Forum was initially identified through an Associated Press report about news organizations that removed paywalls from COVID-19 coverage (Bauder, 2020, March 20). The newspaper’s editor subsequently agreed to participate in the larger study. The Telegraph-Forum provided an analytically useful case for examining community journalism because it combines longstanding ties to a small geographic community with the ownership and digital subscription infrastructure of a national newspaper chain.
The Bucyrus Telegraph-Forum
The Bucyrus Telegraph-Forum is based in Bucyrus, Ohio, a city of approximately 12,000 residents. The newspaper has served the community for approximately a century, dating to 1923, when two Bucyrus newspapers, the Daily-Forum and News-Forum, merged. At the time of data collection, the Telegraph-Forum was part of the USA Today Network owned by Gannett. Its print circulation was approximately 4,000 copies, and it published a print edition every day except Sunday (Ohio Newspaper Association, 2017). Its circulation and emphasis on serving a geographically defined community are consistent with definitions of small-market community newspapers (Ali et al., 2019).
The newspaper operated within a small but varied local media environment that also included radio and digital news organizations serving Bucyrus and Crawford County. At the time of the larger study, the Telegraph-Forum maintained a small newsroom and operated under Gannett’s broader subscription-focused and digitally oriented business model. An annual digital subscription to the paper was $9.99 a month. The newspaper used a metered digital paywall that provided readers with a limited number of free articles within a 30-day period. These characteristics make the Telegraph-Forum a useful bounded case for examining how a long-established community newspaper functions as a connection to a geographic community while simultaneously reaching readers through digital platforms beyond that community’s physical boundaries.
Participants and Recruitment
All 12 reader interviews collected as part of the larger case study were included in the present analysis. Participants were originally recruited as readers of the Bucyrus Telegraph-Forum rather than specifically on the basis of whether they currently lived in or outside Bucyrus. Potential participants were identified through comments they posted in response to news content published on the Telegraph-Forum’s official Facebook page. This recruitment strategy provided a means of identifying individuals who demonstrated active engagement with the newspaper’s content.
More than 300 potential participants were contacted through Facebook Messenger and invited to participate in an interview. Because initial participation was limited, a $10 Amazon gift card was subsequently offered to individuals who completed an interview. Institutional Review Board approval was obtained for the research, and participants were anonymized to protect their identities.
The interviews included readers with different geographic relationships to Bucyrus. Of the 12 participants, 4 currently lived in or near Bucyrus, while 8 had relocated outside the area. Participants were asked about their current geographic location, their perceptions of the Telegraph-Forum’s coverage, whether they subscribed to the newspaper, and how frequently they read its content. Because the present analysis examines the relationship between geography and attachment to a community newspaper, participants’ current location and their continued relationship with the Telegraph-Forum were particularly relevant to the analysis.
Recruitment through Facebook should be considered when interpreting the findings. Because participants were identified through comments on Telegraph-Forum news posts, the sample consists of readers who demonstrated some degree of digital engagement with the newspaper. The recruitment strategy was useful for locating active readers, including those who might no longer reside in the newspaper’s geographic community, but it may also privilege readers with stronger or more visible relationships with the newspaper than readers who consume its content without interacting with it on social media.
Interviews
Data were collected through one-on-one, semi-structured interviews. Interviews were conducted by telephone or Facebook video chat and lasted approximately 30 to 45 minutes. Semi-structured, open-ended questions were used to allow participants to describe their relationships with the newspaper and community in their own terms while ensuring that common topics were addressed across interviews.
Participants were asked about their perceptions of the Telegraph-Forum’s coverage of the area, their current geographic location, whether they subscribed to the newspaper, and how frequently they read its articles. These questions provided information about participants’ news-consumption practices while also allowing them to discuss their relationships with the newspaper and the community more broadly. Because the interviews were originally conducted within the larger case study, geographic relocation was not used as an eligibility criterion for recruitment. Instead, participants’ geographic relationships to Bucyrus emerged as analytically important when examining the complete set of reader interviews for the present study.
Data Analysis
The interview transcripts were analyzed using an inductive thematic approach (Braun & Clarke, 2024). Following transcription and anonymization, the researcher read each interview multiple times to become familiar with the data and to identify recurring ideas and experiences across participants. Rather than beginning with predetermined categories of reader attachment, the analysis sought to identify patterns within participants’ accounts of their relationships with the newspaper, Bucyrus, and the broader community.
The transcripts were manually coded, with relevant passages identified and color-coded during repeated readings. Initial codes and patterns were then compared across the 12 interviews to identify commonalities as well as differences in participants’ experiences. Related codes were grouped into broader patterns and refined through continued comparison with the interview data. Through this inductive process, themes concerning nostalgia, sense of community, and sense of place emerged from participants’ accounts rather than being imposed as predetermined coding categories. The themes were subsequently examined in relation to the study’s broader question of how engagement with community journalism may help readers maintain connections to a place, particularly when physical proximity to that community changes.
This approach prioritizes contextual depth and the interpretation of recurring patterns within the bounded case rather than statistical generalization to all community newspaper readers. The analysis therefore provides insight into how the relationship among local journalism, geographic location, and community attachment was experienced by readers of the Bucyrus Telegraph-Forum, while recognizing the particular characteristics of the case and the digitally engaged sample.
Findings
The interviews demonstrated that readers’ relationships with the Bucyrus Telegraph-Forum were closely connected to their relationships with the community the newspaper serves. Across the interviews, three interrelated themes emerged: community and identity, a sense of virtual community, and dislocated readership and sense of place. Participants described the community in terms of shared characteristics, relationships, institutions, and experiences, while their use of local news provided a means of remaining aware of those elements of community life. This connection was particularly apparent among readers who had moved away from the area but continued to consume Telegraph-Forum content. Of the 12 participants, 4 lived in or near Bucyrus/Crawford County and 8 had relocated outside the area. The accounts of relocated readers demonstrate how access to community news can allow a relationship with place to continue after geographic proximity has been lost.
Community and Identity
Participants’ descriptions of community frequently emphasized characteristics they believed distinguished the area and contributed to its identity. For some, those characteristics centered on the rural and traditional nature of the community. Reader 5, who had lived in the area for 49 years, described it as “conservative and faith oriented,” while another participant characterized the community as “rural and traditional.” These descriptions suggest that participants understood community as more than a geographic boundary; it encompassed shared characteristics and experiences through which they made sense of the place and the people who lived there.
Local news provided one way of seeing that community represented. Participants described the Telegraph-Forum as a source of information about people, institutions, events, and civic affairs that were specific to the area. For Reader 5, regular newspaper use included reading obituaries and coverage of community events, as well as following issues involving wind turbines and city council. The newspaper had also profiled the participant’s grandson during his sports season, coverage that the participant said “meant a lot to me” because it chronicled that period of his life. Such accounts demonstrate how community journalism can connect readers not only to events occurring within a geographic area but also to the people and experiences through which they understand that community.
For some participants, this connection continued after they had left the area. Reader 10, for example, grew up in Bucyrus but was living in Michigan at the time of the interview. Despite the distance, the participant remained a digital subscriber and reported reading approximately one article per day: “I grew up in Bucyrus. I no longer live in Ohio. I live in Michigan now. But I’m always interested in what’s going on in my hometown.” The participant also explained that subscribing was a way to read the articles while supporting local journalism. This connection was not entirely nostalgic; the participants continued to follow contemporary issues affecting Bucyrus, including local politics, employment, economic conditions, and the future of the community.
The persistence of these relationships was also evident among other former residents. Reader 4 had lived in Bucyrus for 22 years before moving elsewhere but continued to read several Telegraph-Forum articles each week, explaining simply that Bucyrus was their hometown. The participant identified community events, civic organizations, high-school sports, courts, politics, and obituaries as important forms of local information. Thus, continued readership provided former residents with access to the people, organizations, and civic life of a community that remained meaningful even after relocation.
Sense of Virtual Community
Participants’ accounts also showed how digital access enabled connections with the community to continue beyond its geographic boundaries. Readers encountered Telegraph-Forum content through the newspaper’s website, digital subscriptions, email, and Facebook. These channels were especially important for participants who no longer lived in Bucyrus because they made community-specific information accessible regardless of physical location.
Reader 8 offered one of the clearest examples. The participant grew up in the community but had subsequently lived in California for 23 years and was living in Philadelphia at the time of the interview. Rather than reading a physical newspaper, Reader 8 accessed the Telegraph-Forum online and described doing so as “a way for me to keep up with my hometown.” The participant’s description of Bucyrus also remained strongly connected to memory and identity: “It’s home,” the participant explained, associating the community with “great memories of growing up.”
For Reader 8, however, digital access provided more than memories of a former home. It allowed the participant to continue following people and institutions with which they had longstanding connections. The participant described reading about an old high school and following local sports from afar, explaining that local news had been “very vital for me to stay connected with friends” while living far from Bucyrus. In this way, online access allowed community ties established through earlier experiences to remain active despite geographic distance.
Facebook provided another pathway to local information. Reader 11 explained that Telegraph-Forum articles appeared in their Facebook feed and that headlines concerning local government, city and county affairs, and local elections prompted them to read the stories. Other participants similarly described Facebook and online local-news sources as routine means of learning what was happening in the community. Digital platforms therefore extended the circulation of community news beyond the physical distribution of the newspaper and allowed readers to encounter local reporting as part of their everyday online media use.
The experience of Reader 6 further illustrates how digital and interpersonal channels can overlap in sustaining connections with a former community. Reader 6 lived in Arizona but had grown up in Bucyrus and retained family and personal ties to the area. The participant did not regularly subscribe to the Telegraph-Forum but encountered newspaper material through Facebook and through information shared by a sister who still lived in Ohio. The participant also recalled a longstanding family relationship with the newspaper—the participant’s mother had worked as a proofreader for the Telegraph-Forum. Digital circulation, family connections, and memories of the newspaper thus intersected in maintaining access to the former community.
These accounts illustrate how community newspaper readership can extend beyond the geographic boundaries traditionally associated with a local publication. For geographically distant readers, websites, email, Facebook, and interpersonal sharing provided mechanisms through which local information remained accessible. The community represented in local news could therefore remain part of readers’ everyday information environments even when they no longer physically inhabited that community.
Dislocated Readership and Sense of Place
The relationship between local news and place was most apparent among participants who had moved away but continued to follow Bucyrus and the Telegraph-Forum. Their accounts suggest that continued readership helped preserve a connection not simply to the physical location but to the people, institutions, events, and civic affairs that made the place recognizable to them.
The kinds of stories participants chose to follow were particularly revealing. Reader 2, who had moved away after living in the community from 2017 to 2020, remained a digital subscriber and read approximately three to five articles per week. The participant explained that the Telegraph-Forum did a particularly good job of covering local organizations and “showcasing the local happenings.” Having previously worked at the local library, Reader 2 continued to follow stories involving the library, theater, and other community organizations, as well as stories involving familiar people. The participant explained:
“If it’s a local thing, especially with people that I know from there, or … anything with the library or the theater or any of the other groups that do things I pay attention to.”
The participant contrasted this with state or national news, which could be obtained from numerous other sources. This distinction illustrates the particular function of community journalism for relocated readers: the value of the Telegraph-Forum was tied to information that was difficult to obtain elsewhere because it concerned specific people and institutions with which the reader had an established relationship.
The connection also extended to ongoing civic affairs. Reader 2 continued following a city council controversy after relocating, explaining that “there’s like some drama and stuff with the city council. So … I’ve been kind of following that since I moved away.” This suggests that dislocated readership was not limited to remembering a previous version of the community. Former residents could remain interested in the community as a changing, contemporary place, including its politics and civic debates.
Reader 4 similarly continued reading about community organizations and events after moving away and reported recognizing people appearing in Telegraph-Forum stories—”somebody’s brother or sister, whatever the case may be.” The familiarity of people within local coverage connected newspaper content to existing social knowledge. Local journalism therefore provided a continuing window into the social fabric of the former community.
For other participants, local news connected present-day readership with longer personal histories. Reader 6, who had lived in Arizona for decades, recalled Bucyrus schools, churches, community festivals, downtown spaces, childhood activities, and family members who had remained in or returned to the area. The participant described Bucyrus simply by saying, “I loved it.” Although the participant’s current Telegraph-Forum use was less regular than that of some other relocated readers, newspaper and Facebook content provided points of contact with a place embedded in personal and family memory.
The relationship between distance and newspaper use was not identical for all relocated readers. Continued attachment to Bucyrus did not always result in a paid subscription. Reader 8, for example, said that living outside the community influenced the decision not to subscribe, even though the participant continued using the newspaper to follow the hometown. The participant explained that digital technology, texting, and information shared by others made it easier to “keep up with everybody” from a distance and added, “If I was living in a community, I’d probably subscribe.” In contrast, Reader 10 maintained a digital subscription despite living in Michigan. These differences suggest that geographic relocation may alter the form of the reader-newspaper relationship without necessarily eliminating the underlying connection to the community.
Taken together, the interviews show that a sense of place can persist through continued engagement with community news after readers relocate. The Telegraph-Forum provided access to information about familiar people, obituaries, community organizations, schools and sports, local events, government, and civic controversies. For readers who had moved away, these were not interchangeable with state or national news. They were forms of information tied specifically to a place with which readers had prior social and personal relationships. Digital access allowed those relationships to continue across distance, positioning community journalism as one mechanism through which geographically dispersed readers could remain connected to the ongoing life of a former home.
Discussion and Implications for Future Research
Industry professionals may consider these findings when they select content to promote. Our findings suggest that readers prefer having a connection with the paper, via physical copies or via stories shared online. Stories about community members and those others knew were the stories that people remembered.
However, case studies are based on just one example, but can help explicate or suggest future research into an observable phenomenon. This research examined the sense of place and sense of community within a small group. Future research may extend this research into a larger population, and may integrate theoretical perspectives from the sense of virtual community or imagined communities, or may extend into diaspora communities using news media from their places of origin to maintain a sense of place.
Future studies may be expanded to include more participants with more diverse relationships to their communities. Readers interviewed in this study said they were all active in the community when they resided there, but talking to more readers in the community who were not involved in politics or other organizations might render different results.
Scholars have found that community-oriented digital content can help maintain connections to coverage areas of which they are no longer a part (Atkins, 2016; Hess, 2012) by fostering a sense of place (Hess, 2012; Hess & Waller, 2014). Most of our participants were removed from the location, yet they still felt drawn to the paper. The connection they had to the people with whom they interacted, and the memories of past interactions, made them feel connected to their hometown, and the articles shared online helped facilitate that connection. Hidalgo and Hernandez (2001) say it’s the positive memories that are the most powerful, which makes leaving a place difficult. Like other journalism scholars (Reader, 2012; Beaudoin & Thorson, 2004; Lowrey et al., 2008; Min et al., 2022) have said, we found that community journalism may be defined by more than just proximity. This has become apparent in the digital age.
Readers interviewed for this study said they appreciated hyperlocal content because the local paper lets them know what is going on in the community. Even when residents moved from the community, they said they followed the paper. These findings are in line with what Weiss (2018) suggested, in that many participants said they read the paper to keep in touch with people rather than places. Readers said the paper served a purpose to provide information, but when asked about the stories they remembered, most readers talked about times the paper covered issues they felt personally connected to. Readers who lived in Bucyrus wanted to read about what was going on in their neighborhood, while readers who had moved away wanted to read about people they knew. Furthermore, people indicated that this connection was a part of their identity, their hometown identity.
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About the Authors
Dr. Samantha Peko is a Lecturer at the University of North Georgia. Email her at Samantha.peko@ung.edu
Dr. Aaron Atkins is an Assistant Professor at Weber State University. Email him at datkins@weber.edu
Dr. Enakshi Roy is an Assistant Professor at Towson University. Email her at eroy@towson.edu
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