Community Journalism Midst Media Revolution

This edited volume documents the changes taking place in local community practices globally. Digital technologies and globalization have forced evolutions in how we go about producing and consuming journalism, and these essays empirically and theoretically advance the scholarly conversations about those trends. What does it mean to serve the information needs of a community in a digitized social world where so many of our ties – weak and strong – are at least partially maintained in virtual worlds? With authors and data from all over the world, this work celebrates a fundamental connectedness to citizens and their community and renews the emphasis on home as a mandate for any locally focused news organization. The contributions to this volume explore the "flows" within both digital spaces and geographic places that are an important foreground to any conversation about what is community today. Several terms are coined and explored in the volume, including "geosocial journalism" and "reciprocal journalism" that account for the essentiality of information sharing in global public realms to inspire feelings of community belonging. Other chapters include a review of Patch.com – one of the largest grassroots, digital platforms for journalism – a survey of how Norwegian community media organizations are adapting to digital worlds, how Swedish citizen sites operate, and the ethics of community journalists to advocate for their citizenry regarding digital matters. Venturing towards both optimism and dismay, the collection argues that understandings of communal borders have expanded. So even if journalists cannot reach the current locals (such as in Africa as one chapter relates) or globally transient locals, digital technologies can help relocate fractured community into a less problematic, virtual space. This requires commitment on the part of both journalists and citizens to preserve those connections, utilize those technologies, and exercise those fundamental principles of community journalism that go back more than half a century. This book was originally published as a special issue of Journalism Practice.

This edited volume documents the changes taking place in local community practices globally. Digital technologies and globalization have forced evolutions in how we go about producing and consuming journalism, and these essays empirically and theoretically advance the scholarly conversations about those trends. What does it mean to serve the information needs of a community in a digitized social world where so many of our ties – weak and strong – are at least partially maintained in virtual worlds? With authors and data from all over the world, this work celebrates a fundamental connectedness to citizens and their community and renews the emphasis on home as a mandate for any locally focused news organization. The contributions to this volume explore the "flows" within both digital spaces and geographic places that are an important foreground to any conversation about what is community today. Several terms are coined and explored in the volume, including "geosocial journalism" and "reciprocal journalism" that account for the essentiality of information sharing in global public realms to inspire feelings of community belonging. Other chapters include a review of Patch.com – one of the largest grassroots, digital platforms for journalism – a survey of how Norwegian community media organizations are adapting to digital worlds, how Swedish citizen sites operate, and the ethics of community journalists to advocate for their citizenry regarding digital matters. Venturing towards both optimism and dismay, the collection argues that understandings of communal borders have expanded. So even if journalists cannot reach the current locals (such as in Africa as one chapter relates) or globally transient locals, digital technologies can help relocate fractured community into a less problematic, virtual space. This requires commitment on the part of both journalists and citizens to preserve those connections, utilize those technologies, and exercise those fundamental principles of community journalism that go back more than half a century. This book was originally published as a special issue of Journalism Practice.

This book illuminates the concept of disaster communities through a series of international case studies. It offers an eclectic overview of how different forms of media and journalism contribute to our understanding of the lived experiences of communities at risk from, affected by, and recovering from disaster. This collection considers the different forms of media and journalism produced by and for communities and how they may recognise and speak to the different notions of community that emerge in disaster contexts – including vulnerabilities and consequences that arise from environmental destruction and geophysical hazards, the insecurity created by armed conflict and limitations on journalistic freedoms, and result from human (in)action and humanitarian crises.

This comprehensive edited collection provides key contributions in the field, mapping out fundamental topics and analysing current trends through an international lens. Offering a collection of invited contributions from scholars across the world, the volume is structured in seven parts, each exploring an aspect of local media and journalism. It brings together and consolidates the latest research and theorisations from the field, and provides fresh understandings of local media from a comparative perspective and within a global context. This volume reaches across national, cultural, technological and socio-economic boundaries to bring new understandings to the dominant foci of research in the field and highlights interconnection and thematic links. Addressing the significant changes local media and journalism have undergone in the last decade, the collection explores the history, politics, ethics and contents of local media, as well as delving deeper into the business and practices that affect not only the journalists and media-makers involved, but consumers and communities as well. For students and researchers in the fields of journalism studies, journalism education, cultural studies, and media and communications programmes, this is the comprehensive guide to local media and journalism.

The Routledge Companion to Digital Journalism Studies offers an unprecedented collection of essays addressing the key issues and debates shaping the field of Digital Journalism Studies today. Across the last decade, journalism has undergone many changes, which have driven scholars to reassess its most fundamental questions, and in the face of digital change, to ask again: ‘Who is a journalist?’ and ‘What is journalism?’. This companion explores a developing scholarly agenda committed to understanding digital journalism and brings together the work of key scholars seeking to address key theoretical concerns and solve unique methodological riddles. Compiled of 58 original essays from distinguished academics across the globe, this Companion draws together the work of those making sense of this fundamental reconceptualization of journalism, and assesses its impacts on journalism’s products, its practices, resources, and its relationship with audiences. It also outlines the challenge presented by studying digital journalism and, more importantly, offers a first set of answers. This collection is the very first of its kind to attempt to distinguish this emerging field as a unique area of academic inquiry. Through identifying its core questions and presenting its fundamental debates, this Companion sets the agenda for years to come in defining this new field of study as Digital Journalism Studies, making it an essential point of reference for students and scholars of journalism.

Based on extensive research into weekly rural publishers and rural readers, Reviving Rural News demonstrates that a new financial approach to community journalism is urgently needed and viable. This book provides historical context for the state of local news, examines the influence of journalistic identity and boundaries that have prevented change, and offers practical guidance on how to adapt the financial strategies of weekly newspapers to the habits of modern readers. Findings are grounded in robust data collection, including surveys, focus groups, and a year-long oral history study of a small weekly newspaper group in the United States. A new model known as Press Club is presented as a template via which memberships, events, and newsletters can better engage community journalism with its audiences and create a more sustainable path for the future. Reviving Rural News will be of interest to advanced students and researchers of local, community, and rural journalism as well as practitioners looking to bring about real-world change in journalism organizations.

This unique text addresses the gap between journalism studies, which have tended to focus on national and international news, and the fact that most journalism is practised at the local level, where people live, work, play and feel most 'at home'. Providing a rich overview of the role and place of local media in society, Hess and Waller demonstrate that, in this changing digital era, the local journalist must not only specialize in niche 'place-based' news, but also have a clear understanding of how their locality and its people 'fit' in the context of a globalized world. Equipping readers with a nuanced and well-rounded understanding of the field today, this is an essential resource for students of journalism, media and communication studies, as well as for practising and aspiring journalists.

Mapping Citizen and Participatory Journalism in Newsrooms, Classrooms and Beyond assesses citizen journalism within the context of hyperlocals, non-profits and large global news organizations, critically examining various forms of participation by citizen contributors to the news. The essays included within the book answer questions such as: Does citizen journalism close the news participation gap between the Global North and South? How can citizen journalism enable the socially excluded to overcome marginalization? What are the obligations of professional news outlets to citizen reporters in war zones? Furthermore, some contributors critique the ways traditional journalism makes use of non-professional content, while others propose new analytical frameworks such as reciprocal journalism, connective journalism and the Appropriation/Amplification Model. The book also investigates efforts to teach ordinary people journalism skills in Europe, the Middle East and both North and South America. Some of the programs scrutinized here instill under-represented groups with semi-professional news values. Other projects support citizen journalism infused with activism such as the photographers of the favela-based jornalismo popular or the volunteer digital humanitarians covering global crises and, in doing so, demonstrate new ways to respond to the rise of grassroots participation in the production of news. The chapters in this book were originally published as special issues of Journalism Practice.