Interesting research: Are community newspapers projecting themselves as commodities online?

This turned up in my email today as an advance alert from New Media and Society. The paper by Marcus Funk at the University of Texas has an interesting premise. The abstract:

American community newspapers, as well as larger daily publications, do little to articulate a sense of local identity or place in the banners of their websites, or their newspaper names atop the web page. Instead, newspapers routinely articulate a professional identity above a local one – often omitting the name of the community entirely, and only occasionally offering a major visual expression of the community. This complicates Benedict Anderson’s sense of ‘imagined communities’, which argues that local identity is constructed through clear articulation by print media; if newspaper websites ignore local identity in their banners, then community newspapers today are imaging commodity rather than community. This qualitative analysis of 40 American community newspapers and 80 daily American newspapers divides that local articulation into four categories (absent identity, secondary identity, equal identity and visual identity) and explores implications for the academy and newspaper industry.

At one time, this was more of a complaint, before sites got wiser on search engine optimization and began putting location more regularly into the title tags. So I wonder how important the banner is in that regard now.

However, news sites that just provide a "contact" form with no address or phone number (and even better, a list of key personnel) should summarily be shot. And I still run into too many of those.

Daily reads worth considering

From PBS's Media Shift, "At Rural Newspapers, Some Publishers Still Resist Moving Online."

Long shielded from the pressure of Internet news competition, as well as classified competitors like Craigslist, rural newspapers have reportedly fared far better than their metropolitan counterparts. While newspapers in population centers saw growing competition from online startups in the past decade, rural newspapers have faced relatively little competition. (So-called hyper-local sites like AOL's Patch are clustered in metropolitan areas and altogether absent from rural areas in the West.)

As broadband Internet spreads into rural communities -- spurred by a $7 billion federal investment -- rural newspapers are increasingly facing a question encountered by their metropolitan counterparts a decade ago: What information should be offered online?

The article quotes Al Cross, among others.

And from Earl Wilkinson at INMA: "Why is relevance to audience such a sin for journalism?"

It has this provocative line: "Start rewarding “relevance” over “quality” in the culture of your company, notably the newsroom."

Who needs the Web? Boston Courant and many other community papers

This post on the Nieman Lab blog is worth a read.

BostonCourant.com — or whatever the heck Jacobs might call the site, if he ever buys a domain name for it — exists only on [Publisher David] Jacobs’ desktop. The paper has no Twitter feed, no YouTube channel, no mobile app. It sort of has a Facebook page, but only because one was autogenerated from the Courant’s Wikipedia page. The Courant doesn’t control it.

But if the old-fangled Courant is doing journalism all wrong, someone forgot to tell its accountant. Circulation is at 40,000 and rising, the newsroom just moved into a swanky downtown office building, and the paper — which already covers four of Boston’s most affluent neighborhoods — is about to add two new full-time reporters to reach more of the city. ...

In a more subdued moment, Jacobs conceded there is something to lose by digital abstinence. Without a website, he said, the Courant misses opportunities to break news between printings. “I was discussing this with one of my reporters yesterday,” Jacobs said. “She really wants to have a website, and I said, ‘Why?’ She said, ‘Because we break so many stories before even the dailies know about them, and if we’re the first to post, we get the recognition.’ I understand that, and no one is more competitive than me.

“But look,” he continued, “it’s a question of tradeoffs. My ego and my staff’s ego — which is very important because we’re all in this to be competitive — versus losing money.”

 Jacobs is following the path many community publishers have taken ...

Loose Emus - good report on state of rural journalism

Geoff McGheee uses a review of Judy Muller's new book, "Emus Loose in Egnar: Big Stories from Small Towns," to launch a discourse on rural journalism - which, not surprisingly, he finds to be a lot healthier than the general j-meme (although, as he also notes, many are "an advertiser or two away from red ink"). But he also notes that too many also are failing to deal with digital well.

"I think the holy trinity of the small town paper is obituaries, the police blotter, and high school sports," says Muller. "That's what people care about. The police blotter is where you find out who's doing what to whom. The school superintendent beating his wife, from there it gets blown into a bigger story. The high school sports thing is so huge, I can't even explain it to a person who doesn't live in a small town. And births, not just obits, tend to dominate. If you leave town, and you subscribe online, those are the things, 'Oh my God, old Pete just died' — that might seem insignificant to someone outside of a small town, but every single birth and death means something." 

Also:

Muller takes us to the town of Hardin, Montana, which built a $27 million jail complex on spec, then launched a doomed campaign to house Guantanamo Bay inmates. The issue touches off a furious wrestling match among the local paper, the Big Horn County News, the local gossip sheet, the Original Briefs, and the Crow tribe's newspaper, the Apsáalooke Nation. Muller's storytelling shines as she leads us through the maze of conflicting agendas, local feuds, and the befuddlement of a newly arrived national reporter at the News, who tries to play it straight and gets virtually run out of town for his efforts.

His editor laments, "Mike came in with what I call the ‘Tin Man’ reporter concept: you are protected, you don't associate with the people you cover, you have no relationship to them, nor do you have the desire to develop one." Muller says that the reporter is now working for a small paper in another state. "He gets it now," she says. "You can still tell the story, but you write it in a way that makes it clear you are part of the community."

 Al Cross is quoted extensively.

The roots of community journalism

Al Cross has a good piece in Nieman Reports this month on the roots, and some of the challenges, of community journalism.

The pull-quote says it all:
‘In community journalism, there is no place to hide, and if you want to hide, then you have no business in this business anyway.’

Community Journalism of a different kind in Elkhart

I had not heard about this MSNBC site focusing on Elkhart, Ind., until a story today in the New York Times.

But I think it's worth taking some time to look at as an interesting prototype of a community journalism in-depth site. MSNBC has partnered with the Elkhart Truth, which still does most of the daily stuff while MSNBC does the depth work. It's a model that might have some application elsewhere. Not that everyone's going to be able to partner with MSNBC. But your local university or foundation might be a good substitute.

(As a former Fort Wayne newsman, I know Elkhart pretty well. It was ripe, I think, for something like this, just as Hartsville, S.C., appears to have been ripe for our HartsvilleToday project. Making these sites successful is about having a special community mix. It is worth exploring further in research.)