Why small-town journalism matters
And other research on news from early 2020, featured in the first edition of RQ1
Welcome to the first edition of RQ1, our monthly newsletter that brings you up to speed on the latest research about news and journalism. We are Mark Coddington and Seth Lewis—both one-time journalists who became academics; now we teach and research at Washington and Lee University (Mark) and the University of Oregon (Seth).
We know how hard it can be to keep up with the ceaseless cascade of new research—more and more all the time—about news and journalism. Our goal is to give you each month a brief but meaningful overview of a key piece of research from the past month, and also to point you to a rundown on other important work you might want to check out. We can never be fully comprehensive, so consider this merely a taster menu—but, we hope, one worth sampling each month when it lands in your box.
If you’ve got ideas or suggestions, please shoot us a reply—we’d love to hear them. And if you enjoy this, please share the newsletter with your colleagues so they can sign up. Thank you! If someone has shared this email with you, then you can subscribe here:
Let’s get started…
New special issue on journalism in small towns
Mark once worked for a small-town daily newspaper (The Grand Island Independent, where he covered 16 rural Nebraska counties), so we’ll start this newsletter with a look at a new special issue of Journalism that examines journalism in small towns.
Too often, the special issue editors say, we only hear one narrative about the state of journalism—a story overwhelmingly dominated by national and major traditional news media organizations. But even when talk turns to “local” journalism, that’s insufficient and vague; “local,” as they note,” can refer to a wide range of places, communities, concerns, and contexts. What’s especially missing, they argue, is a focus on place generally and small towns specifically.
Taking up that problem, the editors of this special issue—Henrik Örnebring, Eva Kingsepp, Cecilia Möller, who are part of a research group at Karlstad University (Sweden) that focuses on connecting media/journalism scholars with geographers—have assembled a collection of research papers that try to reframe how we think about the whole process of making, circulating, and underwriting news in small towns.
The issue includes several articles on an especially timely theme: the larger forces shaping the viability of small-town journalism, in the United States and elsewhere. Christopher Ali, Damian Radcliffe, Thomas R Schmidt and Rosalind Donald have an article, “Searching for Sheboygans: On the future of small market newspapers,” that illustrates “the range and heterogeneity of experience (importantly including optimism and innovation) in an industry that is often characterized entirely in terms of decline.” Picking up on this theme of adaptation in smaller communities, Joy Jenkins and Rasmus Kleis Nielsen’s piece, “Preservation and evolution: Local newspapers as ambidextrous organizations,” shows through interviews in five European countries the “significant attitude shift” that is occurring as local journalists come to develop a more symbiotic, as less adversarial, relationship between the advertising and editorial sides of news companies. And, drawing connections to growing concerns about “news deserts” that are afflicting rural areas as the scope of news coverage shrinks, Patrick Ferrucci and Kathleen I. Alaimo offer a case study that shows how a newsroom opening itself up to external influences is not necessarily detrimental to journalistic autonomy but can even have positive implications for audience engagement.
Also in the issue, several papers address the hotly contested question of polarization, including Andrea Wenzel’s study that shows how the “nationalization” of political polarization can impose itself on rural, small-town communities. At the same time, work by Kristy Hess and Lisa Waller examines what news media might do about this—including by using “deliberate silence” on certain local news debates, resisting the urge to draw out a sensationalist stance.
Ultimately, what emerges from this special issue is a very different picture than the stereotype of journalism in small towns. There is innovation amid crisis. There are news organizations that still do much to link people to each other and to their communities. And there are small-town journalists who could flex an important role in helping to deescalate rising tensions around politics and polarization.
Those are reasons enough to pay more attention to what’s happening in small-town journalism.
Research roundup
Here are some other studies that caught our eye this month:
Why bite the hand that feeds you? Politicians’ and journalists’ perceptions of common conflicts
Peter Maurer & Andreas Riedl
Journalism
Maurer and Riedl use Pierre Bourdieu’s field theory to explain how elite politicians and journalists interpret the various conflicts that arise in their relationships. Using a survey of politicians and journalists in Germany, Austria, and France, they classify two basic types of conflicts: one where journalistic standards override political ones, and ones where the reverse is the case.
Who uses fact-checking sites? The impact of demographics, political antecedents, and media use on fact-checking site awareness, attitudes, and behavior
Craig T. Robertson, Rachel R. Mourão, & Esther Thorson
The International Journal of Press/Politics
There’s been a lot of great research over the past few years on how political fact-checkers operate and on the effects they have (or don’t have) on users. But this team of Michigan State researchers step back to take a closer look at just who these fact-checking site users actually are. They find, as you might expect, that these users tend to be more politically liberal, consume a lot of liberal and mainstream news, and are highly interested in politics. But they also deepen those findings by tying them to the relationship between awareness, attitudes, and behavior in their news fact-checking consumption.
Abnegation, accommodation and affirmation: Three discursive modes for the institutional construction of independence among national news agency executives in Europe
Terhi Rantanen & Anthony Kelly
Journalism
Rantanen and Kelly are interested in how news executives assert their autonomy—economically, editorially, and politically—something that’s a key component of journalists’ claim to professionalism. The European news agency executives they interview talk about it in subtly conflicting ways: They emphatically deny any breach of their independence, but also equivocate on precisely how much of that autonomy makes it through the layers of their organizations.
It does become personal: Lessons from a news organisation’s #Metoo campaign
James Hollings
Journalism Practice
Hollings follows the case of a New Zealand news website that ran a #metoo campaign, looking at their survivor-led approach that prioritizes minimizing harm against them. He looks at the campaign as an exemplary case of reconciling their sources’ subjectivity with traditional journalistic norms around objectivity.
The domestic tethering of Lebanese and Arab women journalists and news managers
Jad Melki & Eveline Hitti
Journalism Practice
Melki and Hitti take a deep dive into the backgrounds, attitudes, and work conditions of Lebanese women journalists, and they find many of the too-familiar structural factors that limit women’s career advancement in workplaces around the world: a pay gap, glass ceilings, family-unfriendly workplace policies, and others. One particularly valuable piece of their analysis is the nuanced discussion of how the “domestic tethering” of working mothers plays out among Lebanese journalists.
The making of economic news: Dutch economic journalists contextualizing their work
Alyt Damstra & Knut de Swert
Journalism
Damstra & de Swert apply some of the questions that have vexed media sociologists for decades—Why is news so negative? and What are the main structural constraints that influence news production?—to economic journalism. They find several interesting factors at work through their interviews with journalists, including a lack of expertise on the economy they’re covering, and an increasing focus on satisfying their audience’s demands.
Social epistemology as a new paradigm for journalism and media studies
Yigal Godler, Zvi Reich, & Boaz Miller
New Media & Society
Seth co-edited a special issue of New Media & Society on the epistemologies of digital journalism that dropped this month, so we’re just a smidge biased on this one. But even Mark agrees it’s chock full of fascinating studies. We’ll finish by highlighting three of those studies, starting with this theoretical paper applying the framework of social epistemology. Each of these three Israeli scholars have done path-breaking work applying social epistemology to journalism and technology, and lay out their paradigm here in a piece that should become a touchstone for scholars working at the intersection of news production, social structures, and news as knowledge.
Discipline and promote: Building infrastructure and managing algorithms in a “structured journalism” project by professional fact-checking groups
Lucas Graves & C. W. Anderson
New Media & Society
Structured journalism is a term that’s gained a bit of currency among a small subset of journalists and scholars looking at ways that news can be structured as data and produced with the help of algorithms and computational methods. Graves and Anderson look at it as a type of infrastructure that provides a sort of common technological language between journalists, audiences, and platform companies. In this example, they find, structured journalism both expands journalists’ distribution and impact and bounds (or “disciplines”) their work in specific ways.
‘We see more because we are not there’: Sourcing norms and routines in covering Iran and North Korea
Soomin Seo
New Media & Society
Seo, who’s published several recent studies on foreign correspondents and news agencies, looks at two of the last frontiers of international news coverage: North Korea and Iran. Specifically, she’s trying to find out how journalists gather news from areas where access is extremely limited and firsthand information is often not to be trusted. But with no access to worry about having revoked and with a more collaborative approach, the distance required to cover those countries is more advantageous than we might think.
If you want to go deeper, there’s a lot more where these studies came from. Journalism Research News has a comprehensive list of journalism research published in January.
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