Introduction to
Community Journalism
MCOM 404: Community Journalism
What constitutes a community?
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Community is a word that researchers have
struggled to define for decades
One of the most obvious ways is by using
census data,
But a community can also be defined by
the development of relationships and
systems within a location or organization
What constitutes a community?
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Stamm and Fortini-Campbell’s suggests
(1983) three domains of community
community as a place, community as a
social structure and community as a Social
process.
They break down these domains into
connections or ties that people form.
What constitutes a community?
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Ties to place include home ownership,
years of residence in the community and
anticipated length of stay.
Ties to structure include friendships,
relationships with neighbors and other
community members, and participation in
volunteer groups, service clubs and
committees.
What constitutes a community?
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Ties to social process involve engaging in
community affairs, attending meetings,
sharing concerns and thoughts, and
facilitating change.
What Community Journlaism?
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Waddle defined CJ as:
Community journalism is the “bonding
between reader and newspaper that occurs
when a genuine caring relationship”
replaces profit motive.
What Community Journlaism?
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Lauterer, in his book, “Community
Journalism:
A
Personal
Approach,”
elaborates on the definition of community
journalism says:
Community journalism occurs when
journalists become “citizen journalists,
intimately involving themselves in the
welfare of the place, the civic life of their
towns”
What Community Journlaism?
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Community journalism flourishes when
journalists are “an active member of the
very community they’re covering”
Lauterer makes a distinction between
community newspapers and large dailies,
saying, “The most common misconception
is that the community paper is a small
version of the big city daily. Nothing could
be further from the truth”
What Community Journlaism?
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Community journalism flourishes when A
positive and intimate relationship between a
newspaper and its community is what sets
small-town papers apart from big city dailies
(Lauterer, 2000).
Community journalists care about the town’s
“successes and tragedies and rewards and
problems and even its wonderfully plain,
ordinary, everyday life” (Waddle, 2003, p. 16).
What Community Journlaism?
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Community newspapers also provide an
“affirmation of the sense of community,” a
reader’s desire that bigger papers cannot
fulfill in addition to the local news that other
newspapers and other media do not cover.
Community journalists play a role “in
defining and reflecting the perspectives of
community members” (Husselbee &
Adams, 1996)
What Community Journlaism?
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Brook Hodges, editor of the 4,100
circulation newspaper in Winslow, Ariz.,
said journalists shouldn't have to choose
between being a journalist and being
involved in civic activities (O’Brien, 2003).
“‘Our town is so small, if you aren’t involved
outside of the newspaper, you can’t have a
life,’
What Community Journlaism?
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Hodges said. ‘Everybody’s kids play ball.
Everybody goes to the same church.
You’re entitled to be involved in your
community’” (O’Brien, 2003, p. 16).
What Community Journlaism?
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Some elements we should be considering
in building community journalism:
1. Closeness, intimacy and really getting to
understand the community and care about
what is happening in the community.
2. Personal connection
3.
Have
a
cultural
connection,
understanding to the community.
What Community Journlaism?
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4. Community transcends geography
because
of
shared
experience-communities of interest.
5. Not telling a story; we are telling
someone's story.
6. We are mirroring the community, we
have to mirror the people within the
community,
What Community Journlaism?
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7. News organizations don't live in a
vacuum; we are interdependent with our
neighbors as well as
with the traditional sources.
8. Community is a process-- through which
people live their lives.
9. A good community journalist has to care
about the community, but also about the
people.
What Community Journlaism?
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10. Digital technology--using it for
conversation
11. Leadership role. The news media can
span community boundaries. Can be the
stabilizing magnet
to help the communities to work together.
12. Can enhance the conversation to seek
the truth.
What Community Journlism?
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Community journalism is a more peoplecentered approach to developing stories
and the stories ‘suggested for the media.
Community journalism is also known as
public journalism or civic journalism which
contains a wide range of practices
designed to give news organizations
greater insights into the communities they
cover with the purpose to serve the best
interests of them.
Public Journalism
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The US journalistic reform movement
known as “public” (or “civic”) journalism has
during the past decade inspired like-minded
initiatives in other parts of the world,
including
Africa
(Malawi,
Senegal,
Swaziland), the Asia-Pacific Rim (Australia,
Japan, New Zealand), Europe (Finland,
Spain, Sweden), and South America
(Argentina, Columbia, Mexico).
Public Journalism
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Since 1988, when the first public journalism
project was launched by the LedgerEnquirer, a local newspaper in Columbus,
the vast majority of projects have been
conducted by newspapers, many television
and radio stations, both private and public,
have experimented with public journalism.
Categories of Public Journalism
Projects
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The public journalism projects conducted to
date fall within two broad categories:
election initiatives
and special projects.
Election Initiatives
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During national and local elections, news
organizations
committed
to
public
journalism have made efforts to focus their
reporting on topics of concern to citizens
rather than on the campaign agendas of
candidates for office.
Election Initiatives
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This has been accomplished by identifying
citizen concerns through large-scale
telephone surveys,
focus group discussions,
and indepth interviews,
soliciting questions to candidates from
citizens and relaying their answers in the
news pages,
Election Initiatives
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Facilitating actual interaction between
citizens and candidates in the form of townhall style meetings,
and reporting back on the outcomes of
such citizen-candidate encounters.
Special Projects
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News organizations committed to public
journalism have engaged in special
projects aimed at focusing attention on
political problems of particular concern to
citizens,
such as race-relations,
educational inequalities,
and poverty, among others.
Special Projects
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This has been accomplished by reporting
on those problems from the perspectives of
citizens rather than politicians, experts, and
other elite actors,
offering citizens opportunities to express
and debate their opinions in the news
pages,
elaborating on what citizens can do to
address given problems in practice,
Special Projects
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Organizing sites for citizen deliberation and
action such as roundtables, community
forums, and local civic groups, and
following up on citizen initiatives through
on-going and sustained coverage.
Public Journalism in News
Organizations
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Aside from such project-based initiatives,
many news organizations have taken steps
to make public journalism an integral part of
their
routine
information-gathering,
reporting, and evaluation practices,
including by restructuring their newsrooms
from conventional beat systems revolving
around institutional sources of information
to include multiple teams focusing on
particular topics of concern to citizens,
Public Journalism in News
Organizations
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reporting on those topics from the
perspectives of citizens rather than various
elite
actors,
and
offering
citizens
opportunities to evaluate news coverage on
a regular basis.
Citizen Journalism
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The ability of the ‘ordinary person on the street’
to create and distribute their own content has
increased exponentially over the last decade.
Factors
for
this
include
technological
developments that have reduced the price and
increased the availability of user-friendly content
capture devices, such as Flip cameras and
mobile phones, alongside the absorption into
popular consciousness of free distribution sites
such as Youtube and Facebook.
Citizen Journalism
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The result of this production is certainly a
lot of footage of sneezing animals and
laughing babies but there is also more
depth and heart to the application of these
social media tools, and this is the ground
held by citizen journalists.
Citizen Journalism
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Citizen Journalism is defined in We
Media as, “public citizens playing an
active role in the process of collecting,
reporting, analyzing, and disseminating
news and information."
Popular examples of citizen journalism
breaching the mainstream media on an
international and national field include the
Arab spring uprising,
Citizen Journalism
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the Occupy movement or the commentary
in the blogosphere that tracked the summer
riots in the UK.
Citizen Journalism
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From both the formal and informal
interpretations of Citizen Journalism, one
message seems to come through more
clearly than others: the relationship to
news.
The term seems to relate to ordinary
people creating, reporting from or
commenting on key newsworthy events.
Citizen Journalism
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It is this close relationship to traditional
journalism that has led to some
professional journalists criticizing, “the
unregulated
nature
of
citizen
journalism…for being too subjective,
amateurish, and haphazard in quality and
coverage.”
Citizen Journalism
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By sharing the term ‘journalism’, there
seems to be an in-built expectation from
the mainstream that citizen journalists
should be maintaining the standards and
mimicking the guidelines by which
professional trained journalists tell their
‘news’.
Citizen Journalism
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In reality though, individual citizen
journalists can enjoy the freedoms of telling
their stories in their own ways using social
media to do so – and the results can
therefore be wide-ranging in efficacy, effect
and form.