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Session Submission Summary

A New Chapter in the Life of Local Journalism: Changing Conceptions of Journalists and Journalism in Local News

Sun, May 24, 9:00 to 10:15, Caribe Hilton, Conference Room 8/9

Session Submission Type: Panel

Abstract

It is widely acknowledged that technological and economic pressures are driving a change in the culture of journalism. Except for a few notable exceptions, however, much of the research on these changes has focused on national and international media outlets. This is true despite the fact that local and regional journalism is changing in different and equally dramatic ways, with legacy news outlets faltering, online news sites proliferating, and citizens adopting new habits for consuming, distributing, and even producing news. In this context, basic questions, whose answers once seemed settled, have been raised anew. Among them are these: who is a journalist, what is journalism, and what audiences do both serve?

This panel of international scholars investigates these questions through different prisms and in the context of a variety of local journalistic cultures. All underline that local journalism is different from national journalism and needs to be understood on its own terms. Ryfe assesses how news producers in a region of the American west, who have little connection to mainstream journalism, imagine their role. He finds that journalistic imagination is strongly shaped by the location of news outlets in the public sphere. Nielsen asks about the “folk theories” Danish newsreaders apply to local journalism. He finds that the newspaper can mean something very different to different readers. Usher investigates the role architectural space plays in shaping the way local American journalists imagine themselves and their practices. By focusing special attention on practices for reporting breaking news, she shows that new configurations of space can open novel ways of imagining news production. Powers and colleagues compare the impact of media systems on how local news producers in Seattle and Toulouse understand themselves and their practices. They discover that media systems mediate the impact of economic and technological pressures, and lead journalists to innovate in remarkably different ways. Finally, Williams and colleagues provide a glimpse into the situation in the UK, where hyperlocal news producers increasingly act, and intend to act, as journalists. As legacy metropolitan news outlets shrink in the face of new pressures, Williams et al. provide some hope that hyperlocal news sites may fulfill some of the conventional roles journalism has played for decades. Together, these papers provide a snapshot of a new chapter in the lifespan of journalistic culture, one in which more and different kinds of people produce news and claim the mantle of local journalism.

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