The Many Faces of a Local Newspaper: A Case Study in Folk Theories of Journalism

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

Abstract

To understand journalism, we need to understand how people understand journalism. We need to examine what I define as “folk theories of journalism”, different ways in which people make sense of journalism. In this paper, I use data from interviews, focus groups, and field observation to identify different and sometimes contradictory views of the role played by a local newspaper in Denmark. I reconstruct three different folk theories of journalism in the case community, one defining the local newspaper as relevant and local (“our newspaper”), a second defining it as relevant, but not local (“their newspaper”), and a third defining it as neither relevant nor local (“what newspaper?”). I show the nominally “same” newspaper means different things to people depending on which folk theory they see it through and argue that journalism studies need to pay more attention to the different ways in which people interpret journalism to understand it.

Author

• Rasmus Kleis Nielsen, U of Oxford