Abstract
Cities act as shared social structures that shape citizen identity. These bonds are solidified through fields of care, in which residents are tied to the city by both geographic space and emotional attachment. Pre-digital scholarship established that news production acts as a field of care, strengthening relationships to the urban environment. This research revisits news production as a field of care in the digital age. Driven by an ecological approach to news production informed by the historic works of Chicago School sociologists, this study examines how New Orleans operates as a news environment to build news audiences and bond urban residents to the city. Built upon a complement of qualitative methods including 49 in-depth interviews with media practitioners, ethnographic observation, and document analysis, this work advances that the city’s news ecology rests upon notions of publicness and spectacle to connect with audiences. This study finds that even in the digital age, ties to the physical community remain essential to engaging digital news audiences within metropolitan spaces.
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