Local Newsrooms Research Articles

Quantifying Community Interest: A Study on the Role of Audience Metrics in Hyperlocal Journalism

ABSTRACT This study examines how editors in Dutch hyperlocal newspapers use technologies for audience metrics in the news production process. As news organizations, especially small-scaled, low-budget ones, strive to engage and retain their readership, metrics analysis provides invaluable insights into audience preferences and behaviors. However, the use and misuse of audience metrics also risk increasing the dependency of small-budget newsrooms on media platforms and metrics technologies. Drawing from thirteen semi-structured interviews with ten editors and three managers from local news media conglomerates in South Holland, our findings reveal that editors and managers rely heavily on metrics such as clicks, views, and best-read stories to inform agenda-setting decisions. This reliance is further entrenched as these metrics are embedded in all-in-one editing suites, making them a constant presence and difficult to escape in the daily news production workflow. While editors in hyperlocal newsrooms display a generally positive attitude toward innovation and metrics adoption, they also demonstrate awareness of the risk of prioritizing “scoring” over “informing.” Although this article enhances our understanding of innovation in hyperlocal newsrooms and underscores the importance of audience metrics in shaping editorial choices, it also highlights the dependent position that small-scaled local newsrooms find themselves in.

Local News Reporting and Mass Attitudes on Infrastructure Investment

AbstractA growing body of research documents how shrinking local newsrooms undermine political accountability and local fiscal and policy performance in the United States. We extend this work to examine political impacts from the level of information content in local news, which has been jeopardized by reductions in newsroom staffing. To understand how information content affects public response to news coverage of a local issue, we focus on the case of preventive spending on infrastructure maintenance and repair. Inefficiently low levels of infrastructure investment are often attributed to low public knowledge about the risk of failure events. In a preregistered survey experiment, we test how the level and type of information in a news article affect support for infrastructure investment across two different types of infrastructure risk (repeated nuisance versus catastrophic failure). For both types of risk, we find that more information-rich reporting, whether investigative or event-driven, increases public support for preventive spending and imposes accountability penalties on local leaders who fail to invest in prevention.

Post-Pandemic Hiring Practices and Skills Requested by Local U.S. TV Stations

ABSTRACT Job ads are meant to capture the daily responsibilities of the position, as well as let candidates know the skills and qualities the right candidate for the job needs to demonstrate from the employer’s perspective. While Aupperle and Grzeslo (2020) studied job ads of legacy media stations, Deavours and Grzeslo (2020) were among the first to explore local broadcast television station job ads. Yet, after the “Great Resignation” following the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as recent technology and business model changes, researchers need to continue to update and monitor the rapidly evolving needs of local newsrooms. This study seeks to provide insight through a content analysis of job postings from U.S. local television stations, exploring the experience, skills, and experience requirements necessary to be competitive in today’s market, while also looking at how companies are working harder to attract talent. Using the theoretical lens of skills theory of leadership, the study also provides insight in hiring differences in station ownership, market size, and position type. Through content analysis of 349 job ads from 21 local news Designated Market Areas, findings suggest the field is embracing more convergent, digital reporting tactics, while still emphasizing the foundations of broadcast writing and visual storytelling. However, some of the most dramatic shifts in the industry toward innovation, emerging media, digital legal and ethical skills, and diversity are not reflected in job ads, creating little guidance for individuals and educators on how to prepare for an ever-changing job market.

ЖУРНАЛІСТСЬКИЙ ПРОЄКТ ПРОТИДІЇ ФЕЙКАМ «ДАВАЙТЕ ПЕРЕВІРИМО» В УМОВАХ ВІЙНИ

<p><strong><em>The purpose of the study </em></strong>–<em> characteristiщт of Ukrainian journalistic projects aimed at countering disinformation, to reveal the specifics of local media projects focused on working with local communities during the Russian-Ukrainian war.</em></p><p><strong><em>Research methodology.</em></strong><em> The research was carried out using general scientific theoretical methods of analysis and synthesis. In order to obtain quantitative indicators, the method of surveying the audience of the Pavlograd television and radio campaign was used during the recognition of true and fake information.</em></p><p><strong><em>Results</em></strong><em>. Mass media play the role of mediators of media criticism in societies with a developed civil society under conditions of democracy. Ukraine has the experience of strengthening public interest in media criticism in the conditions of war and the need to oppose unreliable information and informational aggression. Research by the Ukrainian platforms «Detector Media» and «IMI» prove that Ukrainian society is aware of the destructive influence of Russian fakes and is interested in the possibilities of opposing these destructive media phenomena. Local newsrooms that work for local communities participate in such activities, in particular, by creating media products that give the audience the opportunity to learn the skills of working with questionable information and distinguishing between false and true information. The article is devoted to Ukrainian mass media media critical projects that help their audience to become media literate and learn to work with information in the conditions of Russian information aggression. Among the various Ukrainian media products of this direction, the «Let’s Check» program of the municipal channel «Pavlograd Television and Radio Company» is highlighted. The work uses the results of program analysis and interaction with the audience on social media platforms.</em></p><p><strong><em>Novelty.</em></strong><em> </em><em>Media critical projects and projects of media literacy acquire new perspectives in the conditions of the war in Ukraine, so the classification of such projects, their review and instruments for interaction with the audience become an important factor in the formation of civil society in Ukraine.</em></p><p><strong><em>Practical significance. </em></strong><em>The results of the research can be used in the process of studying courses on communication, formation of media reality in the specialties «Journalism», «Advertising and Public Relations», «Information Business», media practitioners in matters of studying the instruments of media reality formation </em></p><p><strong><em>Key words: </em></strong><em>fakes, media literacy, media education, media reality, mass media, anti-discrimination practices, war in Ukraine.</em></p>

Locked Up: Local Newsrooms Managing a Digital Shift at the Centre of the Covid-19 Outbreak

ABSTRACTIn response to the Covid-19 pandemic, newsrooms mediated information as quickly as possible for their information-starved audience. In Estonia, Covid-19 initially impacted two large islands, which led to their isolation from the mainland as a precaution. Therefore, local journalism became more crucial than ever, providing news with proximity to the audience members who needed guidance and information, and informing the rest of the nation about the consequences the virus was having on the people of the islands. Considering the pressure on the locals, the interest of the rest of Estonia, and the unfamiliar emergency situation, our study focuses on local newsrooms’ approaches to digital news at the centre of Estonia’s lockdown on the islands of Saaremaa and Hiiumaa. We conducted eight semi-structured interviews. The results indicate that local journalists had a limited understanding of the importance of their online presence during (and before) the lockdown, and, therefore, lacked the willingness to carry out the digital shift. The shift was also hindered by the journalists’ lack of skills and knowledge of digital platforms and their specificity. Overall, we call local journalists on the islands “digital beginners”.

The New News Barons: Investment Ownership Reduces Newspaper Reporting Capacity

In recent years, local media in the U.S. have faced increasing economic precarity, and many newspapers have been purchased by hedge funds and private equity firms. How do investment owners shape the newspapers they acquire? We document the shift in ownership and its impact on the number and type of journalists that local newsrooms employ. Using over 13,000 digitized media directory pages, we measure the newsrooms of 211 major newspapers from 2005 to 2022. We estimate that the acquisition of a newspaper by an investment owner reduced the paper’s newsroom by nine reporters and editors compared to newspapers that remained under other ownership, a cut equivalent to 14 percent of the average newspaper’s staff. These cuts were concentrated among positions focused on general assignment and political reporting. Our findings indicate the rise of investment owners has accelerated the decline of local newspapers.

Journalism Ethics for the Algorithmic Era

In an era characterized by the widespread use of algorithmic systems and platforms in news production and distribution practices, the ethical practices of journalists face significant challenges. Drawing on Floridi’s onlife framework, this study aims to shed light on journalist-machine interactions and explores new ways to rearchitect journalism ethical standards through an integrative, object-oriented approach. In-depth interviews with local news workers throughout the U.S. reveal a range of issues related to decontextualization in algorithmic platform design, the hidden price of platform partnerships, and the growing reliance on automated tools that foreshadow ethical issues to come. These algorithmically-induced challenges appear to be particularly pronounced in local newsrooms, highlighting the disproportionate impact of algorithmic systems on under-served media sectors. Discussions are made around the constant push-and-pull over editorial power dynamics apparent in local news workers’ use of algorithmic systems. A distributed responsibility model is proposed as a practical way to hold multiple actors, including both humans and algorithms, accountable for journalism’s ethical standards in the algorithmic era.

Automated Journalism in UK Local Newsrooms: Attitudes, Integration, Impact

ABSTRACT Automated journalism is increasingly used in news production in UK local newsrooms. Although scholars have been discussing the disruptive potential of automation for journalism, little is known about how local media practitioners deploy and perceive automated journalism. This study aims to help fill this research gap using semi-structured interviews with media practitioners from four local news companies that use automated journalism provided by the news automation service RADAR and with employees from RADAR itself. Our findings show that local journalists evaluate this type of automated journalism based on several occupational influences, that they integrate it into news reporting in various ways, and that their use of automated journalism has an impact on journalistic output and newsroom performance. Our evidence also shows that whilst most media practitioners perceive the relevance of automated journalism for local news reporting as limited and, instead, emphasise the importance of human agency in the journalism workflow, what they report is conversely a shift in their practices which actually suggests that automated journalism has greater impact than they are currently willing to acknowledge.

Strategies for the Minimisation of Misinformation Spread Through the Local Media Environment

ABSTRACT Coping with misinformation in a media environment is one of the challenges that undermine the role of the media. The pandemic of Covid-19 influenced the media organisations in their working processes significantly and a decrease in accuracy was one of the findings of our study. This paper examines the impact of the pandemic in local media to journalists’ practices and the role of the media. We aimed to research the effects of the pandemic in the local environment on journalistic procedures and the media's role after this period. In answering the research questions, we used the method of a structured questionnaire for journalists and semi-structured in-depth interviews for local News Editors. We aimed to research the media production practices on various levels of professionals included in local news. We detected those production practices that could endanger the credibility of the local media. The findings provided insights into how Slovenian local journalists and editors define, understand, and practice fact-checking. The results led to an understanding that the perception of the media role in offering information was higher during the pandemic period and that human verification is key in ensuring the credibility of content in local newsrooms.

Journalists from Local Media in Sibiu (Romania) and the Challenges of Goal 11 from UN Agenda2030

This article addresses how journalists in the local press are interested in covering topics in the field of sustainable development, more precisely those connected with SDG11 - sustainable cities and communities. While the theoretical framework investigates recent studies on the general relationship between media and sustainable development, the applied part of this paper consists of empirical research aimed to distinguish this relationship, especially concerning SDG11 locally, in Sibiu, a city from central part of Romania. The research questions that formed the basis of the applied research were: Do local journalists know the 17 objectives of sustainable development on the UN 2030 Agenda? Regardless of whether they know the objectives or not, to what extent are local journalists interested in producing materials related to SDG 11 - sustainable cities and communities? How do they understand media reporting on SDGs in general and Goal 11 in particular? How do journalists define the relationship they have with local government institutions? What about NGOs in the area of ​​community development? How interested are the media consumers in topics related to the sustainable development of their community? For the applied part of this study, we resorted to a complementary methodological approach: on the one hand, we conducted a case study on a specific event, namely the media coverage of European Mobility Week, monitoring journalistic materials published in media outlets from Sibiu, between September 16-22, on the most relevant local news sites; on the other hand, we organized a focus group attended by eight professional journalists, full-time employees from the first two most-read local news sites: Tribuna (three people) and Turnul Sfatului (five people). The group interview comprised some pre-set questions, but we also included adjacent queries destined for clarification in-depth. The main advantage of the use and combination of the two research methods - case study and focus group - is to obtain quantitative and qualitative data relevant to journalistic practices in the local press with reference to a specific topic.
 The most relevant conclusion of this research is that the way in which journalists from the local press relate to the objectives of sustainable development does not consider primarily the agenda of institutions, but the public interest and the specific needs of Sibiu dwellers. However, local newsrooms frequently inform about decisions and actions of local institutions, such as the City Hall or the County Council. Some of them are connected to UN Agenda 2030 and have budgets including for media trusts, which is why the press releases appear in local newspapers.

Local Data Journalism in Germany: Data-driven Reporting Amidst Local Communities and Authorities

ABSTRACT This study explores data journalism within local and regional news organisations in Germany. Findings were drawn from nine semi-structured in-depth interviews with journalists working with local and regional dailies. Weischenberg’s model of contextual layers of journalism provides theoretical underpinnings to capture normative, structural, and functional insights as well as data journalists’ role conceptions. Results show that viable data is scarce at a local level and data journalists actively seek to maintain good relationships with local authorities to be granted access to data. The practice of data journalism at the local level depends on a few data journalism advocates who institutionalise the practice in their local newsrooms and take training on their own initiative. Local data journalists face similar constraints to their colleagues working for national organisations. Data-driven newswork is carried out in addition to regular duties, and collaboration with specialist correspondents who work on-site is widely reported. We find that the combination of traditional shoe-leather epistemologies of on-site reporting with data-driven practices can add to the independence and neutrality of local journalism.

The Aftertaste you Cannot Erase. Career Histories, Emotions and Emotional Management in Local Newsrooms

ABSTRACT Journalists work in a creative profession and often become emotionally attached to “their” medium. Emotions toward their work are an integral part of journalists’ career histories. At the same time, working conditions within contemporary journalism are in a state of constant change that could lead to job precariousness and general insecurity. Emotions are also understood to be part of the journalists’ engagement with the local media environment: though local newsrooms are experiencing similar changes, peripheral newsrooms have different opportunities to respond. The aim of this article is to investigate local journalists’ emotions toward their work during times of change. Drawing on a longitudinal qualitative case study based on interviews, this article focuses on how journalists manage their emotions throughout their career histories in the local media environment. The study focuses on local journalists in the VLM group, the dominant local press owner in the Czech Republic, which has experienced permanent losses and staff layoffs over the past few years. The interviewed journalists manifest deepening contradictions in their feelings towards work, the media organisation which employs them and the local community. The increasing volatility of their emotional responses has led to a general dissatisfaction and the growing importance of emotional management.

New Gatekeepers in Town: How Groups in Social Networking Sites Influence Information Flows in Russia’s Provinces

The study focuses upon “city public groups” (“gorodskie pabliki,” local newsgroups on social networking sites)—the new entrants in the local media space of the Russian province that have recently become important actors of regional public communication. Such groups combine news posting and citizen discussions, report on local affairs and gossip, and entertain. Some groups are based on user-generated content; others create their own content or act as aggregators. Being non-registered and grassroots initiatives, these media enjoy higher freedom in comparison to official local newsrooms. Given the popularity of city public groups among local citizens and local authorities’ interest toward them, owners and moderators of these media are playing an influential role for local mediated discourse. Based on the gatekeeping theory and its extensions for digital space, this article explores the emerging roles of these new gatekeepers in the local communities. Based upon 28 in-depth interviews collected by the author in Russian towns in 2017–2018, the article also analyses the professional norms and values of the owners and moderators of local city groups that they employ to perform their gatekeeping function.

Participative Gatekeeping: The Intersection of News, Audience Data, Newsworkers, and Economics

The use of metrics and analytics is becoming pervasive in newsrooms the world over. However, there is a lack of consistent terminology in scholarly literature with regards to such practice and a dearth of studies that compare practice on a wider scale that prevents more holistic understanding of how audience data are being used on the newsroom floor. These issues are addressed with the development of a new participative gatekeeping model with three previously unidentified channels of gatekeeping specifically related to the use of audience data: promotional, for the type of short-term gatekeeping done on news site homepages that involves tracking real-time metrics to position content, often tied to traffic targets; developmental, or longer-term strategies that shape future coverage and are grounded in hypotheses of audience behaviour gleaned from analytics; and a third more porous channel of experimentation where such hypotheses are tested. These channels were observed in ethnographic research in six newsrooms in three different countries at media outlets with diverse sources of revenue: Norway’s public broadcaster, NRK; Canada’s subscriber-based national news agency, The Canadian Press (CP); and two local newsrooms working within larger media organizations, The Hamilton Spectator in Canada, and The Bournemouth Daily Echo in England. Through a sociological lens, this article distinguishes language to best document the complex processes interconnected with audience data, identifies similarities in practice that override media or revenue systems, and explores how the audience, through the participatory mechanisms of metrics and analytics, shapes newsroom practice.

Community Newspaper Editors’ Perspectives on News Collaboration: Participatory Opportunities and Ethical Considerations Toward Citizen News Engagement

ABSTRACT This study examines how the United States community newspapers engage community members and how editors view challenges of citizen participatory and collaboration practices with particular focus on ethical issues. To address this, the study conducted a content analysis of interactive news features offered by online newspapers and in-depth interviews with news editors. Findings reveal various ways that local newsrooms seemingly invite citizens to participate in telling the community news. Letters-to-the-editor were discussed most frequently in all aspects of their discussions—both in positive and negative ways. Legal concerns did not arise as such concerns were avoided and filtered before inclusion and publication, but ethical considerations were also discussed modestly. Editors as a whole generally turned to ideas reflected in traditional journalism codes of conduct for citizens as a guide in their practice of submitting content with primary focus placed on truth telling, independence, and transparency. Implications are discussed in terms of citizen news engagement, news collaboration, and participatory journalism and the continued institutional control of content through normalization of the news and separation between professional and citizen.

“History of Factories”: Example of the Ukrainian SSR in the 1930s

The article analyzes one of the first Soviet campaigns dedicated to constructing a “correct” version of history. It demonstrate how and why the project of writing the history of factories and plants in the 1930s was closely intertwined with political, social, economic and cultural processes. Was explained the role of proletarian writer Maksym Gorky in the implementation of this campaign. The study reconstructed structure and tasks of the commission that collected materials and directly wrote the history of Soviet industrial facilities. The research is focused on the activities of the All-Ukrainian edition “History of Factories and Plants”. Therefore, it was analyzed what of the campaign of writing HFP in Ukraine was typical in the All-Union context and what difficulties arose in the organizational work between the “center” and “locally”: uncertainty of authorship, that is, who exactly should write the texts of plant histories (historian or writer) , insufficient number of employees in local newsrooms, lack of funding, late implementation of publication plans and so on. The activity of the All-Ukrainian edition “History of Factories and Plants” was reconstructed on the basis of materials of the Central State Archive of Public Organizations of Ukraine. The article drew attention to the problems that arose in the work of the All-Ukrainian edition “History of Factories and Plants”. Namely, it demonstrates how the untimely implementation of plans for the preparation of publications of the history of industrial facilities was “explained” by the Main Editorial Board and how the “search for culprits” in the disruption of publication plans took place. The search for the culprits carried out by the Soviet authorities is closely intertwined with the formation of the image of the “enemy” in the USSR. Enemies were called “pests”, counter-revolutionaries, Trotskyists, “nationalist groups” and so on.Manuscript received 12.03.2020

Mapping Change in Canada’s Local News Landscape: An Investigation of Research Impact on Public Policy

This study investigates whether the Local News Map, a crowdsourced digital tool that tracks changes to local news outlets, influenced policy making that resulted in new government supports for Canadian journalism. It demonstrates how scholarly research informs government decision making and identifies a more nuanced approach to tracking research impact at a time when funders are increasingly demanding evidence that research dollars are well spent. We argue that research knowledge is used for various purposes at different points in policy making and that its impact should not just be assessed in terms of influence on a final outcome. Using a mixed-methods approach to chronicle opportunities for research influence, we found that map data were incorporated into news and social media content that helped push the news industry’s problems onto the government’s policy-making agenda. The data were also used by officials to understand what is happening to local newsrooms and to develop a policy rationale for government aid. The results suggest that when impact is defined as situations where scholarly knowledge raises consciousness of an issue, informs thinking or leads to the application of that knowledge, the result is a more realistic assessment of research impact on the policy process.

A freelance-based foreign exchange programme: Tasmanian students’ professional development on WORLDREP

In the context of rapidly changing newsrooms and a constriction in entry-level positions for graduates, the Europe and Australia in the World (WORLDREP) programme seeks to prepare students by pairing freelance journalism with overseas training and exchange. However, the entrepreneurial focus of the course must be weighed against the challenges and idiosyncratic hiring criteria that graduates face on their return home. This article discusses interviews with former Tasmanian participants to compare what the students felt they acquired during the course with perceived barriers and challenges post-graduation. We find that the programme’s freelance focus cultivates a range of applied skills, an extensive publication portfolio and professional confidence. However, interviewees also reported that a lack of local newsroom contacts – traditionally provided through newsroom internships – constitutes a hurdle on their return home. This prompts a discussion about how to complement exchange programmes with local networking and professional development initiatives that can ground what students have learnt overseas in local journalism practice.

News by Numbers

Analytics are now embedded in newsroom practice. In a form of participative gatekeeping, the ability to track how the audience absorbs information is shaping editorial content. Although there is much discussion that engagement metrics, like time spent, are more important than pageviews, many advertisers are still more interested in clicks than counting time, some newsrooms still have pageview targets, and the pageviews metric is often used as a simplistic measure of reach. As such, digital editors sit cemented to monitors, working to decipher what stories have or are gaining traction. Using this information, they choose placement of content, enhance stories, and share stories via social media to build traffic, then repeat this frenetic cycle in a seemingly endless loop. But at what cost? How does the focus on metrics affect best practice in the newsroom and, potentially, information sharing in the public sphere? This article examines the impact of audience data on practice at The Hamilton Spectator, a local newsroom in Canada, to explore whether traffic-based metrics and the use of analytics impede the ability to meet journalistic standards, and/or build bigger, more informed and engaged audiences.

Managing old and new in local newsrooms: an analysis of Generation C’s multiplatform local news repertoires

ABSTRACTConvergence has substantially changed the ways of news consumption and dissemination. This research represents one of the first attempts to examine Generation C’s multiplatform local news repertoires at both media source and audience levels. Results of the cluster analysis identified three types of local news sources – traditional local news sources, web location-independent news sources, and “push” news source, and suggested that local news organisations’ traditional, web, and social platforms appealed to Generation C audiences in a similar way. In addition, this study identified three types of audiences of local news – heavy local news seekers, determined location-independent news seekers, and light local news seekers, and found that both individual and structural factors significantly predicted the classification of the audience types. Managerial implications are provided for local newsroom operations.