Small-town Newspapers Research Articles

Dispatches from the Farm: The Literary Craft of John Gould’s Maine Humor

Dispatches from the Farm: The Literary Craft of John Gould’s Maine Humor

“Defenders of perversion”: Professing Same-Sex Marriage Rights in the Local Press

This case study provides an important socio-historical snapshot of the same-sex marriage debate in a small city in central Alberta between December 2004 and August 2005. We explore the relationship between professors and small-town newspapers in fostering democratic dialogues on key social issues through an analysis of faculty columns and the responding Letters to the Editor in a local paper. In so doing, this research focuses on two social groups located in a particular social environment, each representing a particular frame: the professors working in the local university who maintained an op-ed column in the local paper and supported a equality frame; and the general public living in Camrose and the surrounding rural area who supported a morality frame. This article contributes to our understanding of scholarly engagement in the town-gown context, the democratic role of the press, and how a particularly contentious social and political issue—same-sex marriage—was experienced and framed by concerned citizens in a small conservative rural city that is also the home to a liberal arts and sciences university campus.

Examining audience perspectives on local newspaper futures

When it comes to examining innovation and small-town newspapers, audience expectations and perspectives have received less focus than newsroom practices and processes. This article presents the findings of Australia’s most comprehensive national survey of local newspaper audiences ( n = 4116), which engaged with readers of more than 170 independently owned, small-town newspapers across the nation. The survey was underpinned by a ‘geo-social’ methodology, which provides a multidimensional framework for understanding the ‘place’ of newspapers in the digital age within their specific geographic context, in this case rural Australia. It used ordinal, nominal and qualitative questions to explore respondents’ experiences, histories, expectations and perspectives related to their local newspaper. Respondents were asked about their preferences for reading and receiving local news, what their newspaper can do better, and the policy debates and interventions shaping the sector. Results indicate a continued desire for the printed product, a passion for localness in terms of both production and content, and a greater say for local news audiences on the policies shaping the future of news in non-metropolitan settings.

NewspaperArchive.com

<ext-link ext-link-type="uri" xlink:href="https://NewspaperArchive.com">NewspaperArchive.com</ext-link> currently offers subscription-based, full-text online access to 11,548 American and 3,878 international newspaper titles. While the genealogical newspaper database does provide a selection of major titles, the strength of the collection resides in its vast selection of small town and short-run newspaper titles. Institutional subscribers may purchase an annual subscription to any single title from a selection of major titles offered by the company, or titles may be combined to create a collection tailored to the needs of any institution. <ext-link ext-link-type="uri" xlink:href="https://NewspaperArchive.com">NewspaperArchive.com</ext-link> also offers “single-state” subscriptions, “multi-state” subscriptions, and “global” access subscriptions to the content of the entire online database to institutional subscribers. Members of the public may purchase a subscription to Newspaper-Archive.com for a fee, as well. <ext-link ext-link-type="uri" xlink:href="https://NewspaperArchive.com">NewspaperArchive.com</ext-link> offers strong coverage of the United States from 1772 to the present and provides international content for over 40 countries. Readers should consult with <ext-link ext-link-type="uri" xlink:href="https://NewspaperArchive.com">NewspaperArchive.com's</ext-link> newspaper titles directory page for a complete list of titles and information regarding coverage before making any purchase. <ext-link ext-link-type="uri" xlink:href="https://NewspaperArchive.com">NewspaperArchive.com's</ext-link> content will interest a broad range of people and is recommended for students in higher grade school levels through graduate school and beyond.

Moral compass: How a small-town newspaper used silence in a hyper-charged controversy

A recent controversy over plans to build a mosque in the provincial Australian city of Bendigo provides an interesting case to explore the news practices of one small-town newspaper faced with an issue that triggered an avalanche of hate speech, bigotry and extremist voices. Between 2014 and 2016, there was open conflict inside the city’s municipal chamber, violent street protests, hate campaigns and disinformation on social media. This research considers the role of the Bendigo Weekly in facilitating and shaping debate among local news audiences. Our research reveals that the newspaper deployed silence as a deliberate strategy for countering hatred and to tourniquet debate to the local level. The newspaper argued this was in the interests of serving as a ‘moral compass’. The importance of engaging a diversity of voices in deliberative democracy is widely celebrated in journalism studies. This essay, however, extends scholarship on silence as a form of agency for countering hate speech that is becoming an increasing feature of the digital era.

Understanding the relationship people in their early adulthood have to small-town news and paywalls

Within the context of a high-choice, digital media environment, this study explores how people in their early adulthood perceive the value of news from the small town where they reside and their attitude towards paying for it. Based on qualitative data from in-depth interviews and a media landscape sorting exercise, the study demonstrates how those willing and unwilling to pay differ in terms of lived and anticipated value experiences with small-town newspapers. The study posits that there is a misalignment, for them personally and for the local community, with regard to their perception of small-town news media’s value. What might not be important for them as individuals is nonetheless experienced as important for the society they live in. The study expands on studies of perceived worthwhileness of news media in a small-town context and introduces the concept of societal worthwhileness to encompass media users’ incorporation of collective interests in their value assessment of news media.

Review Essay: Joseph Crespino's Atticus Finch: The Biography

Review Essay:Joseph Crespino's Atticus Finch: The Biography Frye Gaillard Atticus Finch: The Biography: Harper Lee, Her Father, and the Making of an American Icon. By Joseph Crespino. New York: Basic Books, 2018. Xx, 248 pp. $27.00. ISBN 978-1-5416-4494-6. In Atticus Finch: The Biography Joseph Crespino has given us a brilliant, readable historian's rumination on the making of a literary icon. How did Harper Lee conceive of Atticus? What were the subtleties in her own understanding of this most iconic of fictional characters, and how did Atticus capture our hearts and imagination as he did? These are the questions Crespino addresses, and I was surprised at the depth of personal reflection this book prompted. I was thirteen when my father gave me a copy of To Kill a Mockingbird. This was 1960 and the book had just appeared, and in my own Alabama family---with roots in the county where Harper Lee was born---Mockingbird carried its share of controversy. One of my aunts refused to read it, so offended was she by its revelations of racial injustice. My father was a different story. Like Atticus, he was a lawyer who believed that the courts, alone among human institutions, were "the great leveler," and when he was elected as a circuit judge in the year of Mockingbird's publication, he had promised Black voters that his courtroom would be colorblind. But in our family all of this was a delicate dance, for my father was also a segregationist, deeply [End Page 355] invested in the status quo. As Crespino reminds us, this was also true of Atticus. We know this because Harper Lee told us so, not so much in Mockingbird, though there were intimations of paternalism, but in her second book, Go Set a Watchman, which she had actually written first. Atticus is older in Watchman, and to the horror of many American readers, he is not as likeable the second time around. As Crespino writes, "Atticus, though physically weakened, is still wry, lively, and loving. The novel turns when Jean Louise discovers a racist, right-wing book among his reading materials. She heads immediately to the county courthouse where Atticus … had gone to a meeting. Looking on from the balcony, she discovers that it is a gathering of the White Citizens' Council. The rest of the novel tracks her outrage and disbelief that her wise and loving father would take up with such bigoted malcontents" (74). Crespino makes a strong case that personal experiences for Harper Lee shaped the dual character of Atticus. If, as most biographers assume, her father A. C. Lee was one of the prototypes for Atticus, A. C.'s career as a small-town newspaper editor foreshadowed the depiction of Finch in both of Lee's novels. Crespino pores through the untapped trove of editorials in the Monroe Journal, which A. C. owned and edited for two decades. What he finds is a patrician idealist who believed in the law and good order and, among other things, hated the southern practice of lynching. These ritualized killings were still widespread in the 1930s when Lee began his editorship of the Journal, and as he knew from his time as a lawyer, they sometimes enjoyed the cover of the courts. Lee once represented two Black men accused of murdering a White man, and one of the victim's sons was a member of the jury. Despite Lee's objections, the verdict was swift and his clients were hung. A few years later a Black man accused of raping and murdering a White woman was kidnapped from a small-town jail about forty miles south of Monroeville. Crespino describes what happened next: "[T]hey took him to an alternate location and murdered him, but not before subjecting him to two hours of sadistic torture, including castration, forced [End Page 356] autocannibalism, stabbing, burning with hot irons, and dismemberment of toes and fingers. They tied Neal's body to the back of a car" (13-14). A. C. Lee hated such moments of barbarism and carried stories on the front page of the Journal about the grand jury investigation that followed...

Book Review: Dan Bernstein, Justice in Plain Sight: How a Small-Town Newspaper & Its Unlikely Lawyer Opened America’s Courtrooms

Book Review: Dan Bernstein, <i>Justice in Plain Sight: How a Small-Town Newspaper &amp; Its Unlikely Lawyer Opened America’s Courtrooms</i>

Embodying Word and Image: Magazines in Illustration Studies

“Do you like illustrated articles?” asked The Western Home Monthly in 1901.[1] The answer was obvious, but drawing attention to illustration reminded prairie and northern readers what a magazine subscription offered that small-town newspapers largely did not. In 1903 editors boasted that WHM was going to be “Amply Illustrated”—special articles in particular, “so that they may

The Capital Times: A Proudly Radical Newspaper's Century-Long Fight for Justice and for Peace by Dave Zweifel and John Nichols

Reviewed by: The Capital Times: A Proudly Radical Newspaper's Century-Long Fight for Justice and for Peace by Dave Zweifel and John Nichols Jonathan Kasparek Dave Zweifel and John Nichols, The Capital Times: A Proudly Radical Newspaper's Century-Long Fight for Justice and for Peace. Madison: Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2017. 319 pp. $25.00 (paper). The small-town newspapers that proliferated across the Midwest in the early twentieth century are often easy targets for ridicule, earnestly reporting on inconsequential local events or engaging in the shameless boosterism that Sinclair Lewis satirized in Main Street and Babbitt. Even though these newspapers did bring national and even global news to local residents, thereby connecting them to the larger world, the flow of information seldom went the other way. Few newspapers had any impact beyond their local readership, and the idea of national leaders seeking out the opinions of small-town editors seems absurd. An important exception to this is the Capital Times, founded in Madison, Wisconsin, in 1917, when the city's population stood at about 35,000. As described in their new history of the paper, The Capital Times: A Proudly Radical Newspaper's Century-Long Fight for Justice and for Peace, former editor Dave Zweifel and long-time contributor John Nichols describe how the publication expanded beyond purely local or state issues to become one of the most influential sources of midwestern liberal thought. The Capital Times's liberal politics began with its founder, William T. Evjue, who left his job as managing editor for the Wisconsin State Journal in protest of its publisher's support for American involvement in World War I. Evjue was a close associate of Senator Robert M. La Follette—one of only six senators to vote against a declaration of war—and enthusiastically defended the senator against charges of disloyalty. Until his death in 1970, Evjue remained the driving force behind the paper, even as old age forced [End Page 182] him to hand off editorial responsibilities to his hand-picked successor Miles McMillin. Under Evjue and McMillin, the Capital Times was often ahead of its time, denouncing the Ku Klux Klan and racial intolerance in the 1920s, urging action against Nazi Germany in the 1930s (ironically breaking with the La Follette family for their isolationism), and denouncing the red-baiting tactics of Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s. Subsequent editors—Elliott Maraniss, Dave Zweifel, and Paul Fanlund—continued this tradition of arguing persuasively for liberal causes: housing desegregation, labor rights, environmental protection, feminism, gay rights, and many others. "Radical" is probably an overstatement, especially since the 1960s spawned far more radical publications, and the editors were careful to distance themselves from the more controversial activist groups. Nonetheless, the "Cap Times" remained faithful to its progressive roots. Although the Capital Times did devote much of its content to local reporting, two factors made it far more significant than most other Wisconsin newspapers. First, Evjue invested significant resources to make his views known beyond Madison. He published a special, expanded edition of the paper on Mondays that was mailed out to subscribers all over the state. In 1925 he launched WIBA, which broadcast his daily "Hello, Wisconsin!" program to farmers and laborers statewide. This combination of mail subscriptions (the 1960s saw a peak circulation of 50,000 copies a day) and a radio network made the Capital Times a familiar presence even beyond the state's borders. Secondly, national figures paid attention to the paper. Harry Truman cited a 1951 story by reporter John Patrick Hunter about how Madison residents were afraid to sign a copy of the Bill of Rights at an Independence Day picnic as an example of how the Red Scare threatened fundamental American values. Both John F. Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey eagerly sought the newspaper's endorsement in the 1960 presidential primary, as did Eugene McCarthy in 1968. Indeed, national figures from George Norris to Bernie Sanders have regarded the paper as a vital link to midwestern liberals, giving the paper national influence. It is this national significance that Zweifel and Nichols ably demonstrate. Organized topically, the book includes chapters on foreign policy, environmental issues, civil rights, the 1960s, and...

The Farmer’s Game: Baseball in Rural America by David Vaught

Reviewed by: The Farmer’s Game: Baseball in Rural America by David Vaught Charles Klinetobe David Vaught, The Farmer’s Game: Baseball in Rural America. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012. 232 pp. $29.95. In The Farmer’s Game: Baseball in Rural America, David Vaught examines the role of baseball in rural communities. Vaught argues that baseball and baseball historians have overly focused on the Major Leagues which has, in turn, overly focused their attention on the big cities and thereby improperly excluded small towns and rural spaces from our understanding of the history and evolution of the game. “Rural baseball,” writes Vaught, “needs to be understood in its rural context, not as a by-product of the developing urban-professional game” (11). Vaught makes no claim to the slender book being comprehensive or capturing the complexity of how baseball expresses the myriad of communities and cultures in rural America. He instead defines the book as “exploratory and suggestive rather than definitive or comprehensive.” (10) As such, the book is organized around six wholly independent essays exploring the role of baseball in rural communities. The most compelling of these examines baseball in Texas cotton country where it became important, and imbued with different meanings, in German, Czech, Latino, and Anglo communities. Vaught’s research is impressive. He provides more than forty pages of notes for 151 pages, of text, along with a bibliographical essay. He demonstrates an immersive command of a variety of sources, including court cases and small town newspapers. For more recent subjects, such as Bob Feller and Gaylord Perry, Vaught also conducted a number of interviews. Vaught points to Jules Tygiel’s maxim that to write good baseball history, one must first take their eye off the ball (150). Unfortunately, at times, the ball can get somewhat lost which can leave the book somewhat uneven. Vaught can write, often quite wonderfully, of the intertwined lives of the Coopers and Doubledays in upstate New York and the economic transformations brought by the Erie Canal, but there is nary a baseball to be seen. This leaves the posited connection between baseball and communities feeling sometimes tenuous, particularly as the myth of baseball being created by Abner Doubleday in Cooperstown has been long discredited, though Vaught indulges in a speculative journey to reduce it to a possible misunderstanding. This can also be a reflection of the lack of available sources, which may also serve to push the study to the urban and professional games. Furthermore, while Vaught argues that rural [End Page 104] baseball needs to be understood on its own terms, further exploration of its connections to the urban game may be warranted. Vaught writes that in 1877, a year before the formation of the National League, players in rural Texas were already emulating the style of traveling professionals who had barnstormed through the region. Also, in the early urban and professional game, teams and players who were unsophisticated or crude in their play were referred to as “country.” This may not be a comfortable connection between the urban and rural game, but it is worthy of exploration. At their best, sports are an expression of community and culture. In The Farmer’s Game, David Vaught explores this expression in a handful of rural communities. While it is neither comprehensive or final, it is a worthy contribution. Charles Klinetobe University of Nebraska–Omaha Omaha, Nebraska Copyright © 2018 Paul Mokrzycki Renfro

New York Amish: Life in the Plain Communities of the Empire State

New York Amish: Life in the Plain Communities of the Empire State

American College Students' Shoplifting Experience: A Comparison of Retrospective Self-Reports to Micro-Level Criminological Theory

IntroductionShoplifting, often referred to in small-town newspaper police logs by its statutory title of concealment, is one of most frequently committed, agonized over and costly crimes in societies around world. Sociologists, psychologists, merchandizes, entrepreneurs and loss-prevention experts have long studied this international phenomenon. Social scientists look for environmental and psychological factors that might explain motivations for shoplifting, and retailers generally search for ways to thwart shoplifting to reduce lost profit. The actual number of shoplifters, number of incidents and amount of financial loss due to shoplifting is difficult, if not impossible, to determine as many incidents go undetected or unreported to police. The National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS, 2012) claims that roughly two-thirds of all thefts go unreported, and some experts (e.g., Dabney, Hollinger & Dugan, 2004; Hollinger & Davis, 2002) think shoplifting is one of most underreported crimes. Shoplifting and demographic profile of shoplifter are also inherently difficult to explain. According to New Hampshire Revised Statutes Annotated (USA), A person is guilty of willful concealment if, without authority, he or she willfully conceals goods or merchandise of any while still upon premises of such store (NHRSA, 2016, p. 637, 3-a). Also defined as the act of stealing merchandise offered for sale in a retail store (Perlman & Ozinci, 2014, p. 685), misdemeanor of shoplifting has been vigorously studied because of its economic, retail trade, loss prevention, and theoretical interest. The authors of this paper focus on theoretical perspective.There are many examples of extent and financial cost of shoplifting around world. In Pakistan, despite an increase in modern security and surveillance, pilferage of smart phones and mini laptops has dramatically increased (Rana, 2015). India, an emerging global power, ranks as one of world's leading nations in shoplifting with a $1.6 billion annual loss (Sharma, 2010). In Russia's plunging economy, reported shoplifting accounted for a $12 million loss, but unofficial estimates put loss at closer to $26 million (Telegraph.co.uk, 2015). When India, Russia and United States are compared in terms of economic relativity of financial loss (meaning percentage of loss compared to their GNPs) India was first, Russia second and United States third (Magnier, 2011). Bamfield (2004) studied 476 major European retailers and reported that over 1.2 million shoplifters were apprehended in 16 countries, including France, Germany, Greece, Austria, Spain, Norway, United Kingdom and Italy. In Australia, shoplifting is biggest cause of retail shrinkage and, along with other forms of retail theft, contributes to a $2.7 billion loss (Thompson, 2015). Even in Finland there were over 45,000 reported cases (Kajalo & Lindblom, 2011). Needless to say, wherever it occurs around world, magnitude of shoplifting negatively impacts police work and courts, adds to costs of goods, and results in loss of sales taxes for towns and cities.In United States, financial loss to retailers due to shoplifting is around $10-13 billion each year (Bamfield, 2010; Blanco, Grant, Petry, Simpson, Alegria, Liu & Hasin, 2008; Chen, Shyu & Kuo, 2010; Dabney, et al., 2004; Forney & Crutsinger, 2011). Shoplifting and worker theft together cost American retailers about $32 billion each year (Wahba, 2016). According to Bressler (2011), shoplifting in United States has recently increased 11.2%. The National Association for Shoplifting Prevention (NASP, 2016) estimates that there are 27 million shoplifters in American today. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI, 2014) Uniform Crime Reports specified 1,259,577 reported incidents. Shoplifting accounts for 21.5% of all reported larceny-thefts. …

The Radical Right, the National Municipal League Smear File, and the Controversy over Metropolitan Government in the United States during the Postwar Years

This paper reports on activities undertaken by the National Municipal League (NML) and the Public Administration Service (PAS) during the 1950’s and 1960’s to counter libelous and slanderous actions taken by grass roots activists in opposition to efforts to reform metropolitan governance across the United States. I utilize records from the NML archives—and give special attention to their “Smear File”—to chronicle and analyze the key events and actors. Specifically, I focus on the ideas of opponents of metropolitan government reform from the South and West in the United States including Jo Hindman, Dan Smoot, and Don Bell. These individuals used right-wing idea distribution vehicles including magazines, small-town newspapers, and subscription newsletters to disseminate their arguments and rally support for their cause. I also analyze the actions of their foes at the NML and PAS—namely those of Alfred Willoughby, Executive Director of the National Municipal League; H.G. Pope, President of the Public Administration Service;Richard S. Childs, former President of the National Municipal League; and Karl Detzer,Roving Editor for Reader’s Digest and contributing writer for the National Municipal Review, the academic and professional journal of the National Municipal League. This study adds to the literature explaining the lack of metropolitan governmental frameworks at the local level in the United States, which has been built on the work of Charles Tiebout, Vincent Ostrom, Robert Bish, Ronald Oakerson, and Roger Parks. Although this analysis is idiographic and historical in perspective, it does not necessarily challenge the core empirical results of the nomothetic modeling of these scholars.

The Influence of Economics on Newspaper Election Coverage in 1870s Montana

The Influence of Economics on Newspaper Election Coverage in 1870s Montana Nathan Parmeter 1 A s America wrapped up celebrations of its centennial in 1876, attention shifted to the presidential election between Democrat Samuel Tilden and Republican Rutherford Hayes for the White House. 2 Throughout the country, the election was heavily watched and followed, as a variety of national issues were at stake for American citizens regardless of their choice for president. The Helena, Montana Territory newspaper, The Helena Weekly Herald was no exception to the amount of coverage given prior to the election. Once it became clear that the 1876 election would be the closest and most controversial race ever, the Weekly Herald jumped on the issue, sometimes dedicating half of its weekly edition to the national election. At first glance, it seems surprising that a small town newspaper (Helena only had around 5,000 residents in 1876 3 ) would dedicate a large amount of coverage to the election for several consecutive weeks because of the fact that Montana residents weren’t voting in it due to Montana’s then- status as a territory. 4 The intense and heavily biased coverage of the 1876 election in Helena can be attributed to the platforms of the Republican Party and the fact that their platform of direct economic and infrastructural development would have helped Montana connect economically to the rest of the country, attract more settlers and eventually gain statehood. Other minor aspects of the Weekly Herald’s coverage during the weeks before and after the election reveal insights into national political issues prevalent in Montana Territory and how local coverage of such issues furthered the agenda of the newspaper. In order to understand why a newspaper in a small town in a thinly populated territory would cover the 1876 presidential election controversy with such depth, exposure and bias, an understanding of the national and regional context of the election needs to be explored. By this point in American history, the Civil War had been over for more than a decade, and the nation was industrializing in the north and economically advancing in the Midwest and West. 5 Montana Territory was formed in 1864 out of the Idaho Territory, and much of the economy at this point was based on mining. 6 The town of Helena was founded in 1863 by a group of pioneers and ex- The author, being also an editor, recused himself from the editing process regarding this article. It received no special treatment and was required to conform to all standard requirements. 2. Michael F. Holt, By One Vote : the Disputed Presidential Election of 1876 (Lawrence, Kansas: University Press of Kansas, 2008), i. 3. R.E. Fisk., “Notes from Montana”, The Helena Weekly Herald (Helena, Montana), Dec. 21, 1876. 4. Clark C. Spence., Territorial Politics and Government in Montana, 1864-89 (Urbana, Illinois: University of Illinois Press, 1973), 1. 5. Mark Wahlgran Summers, The Ordeal of the Reunion: A new History of Reconstruction (Chapel Hill, North Carolina: University of North Carolina Press, 2014), 191.

Nature Talk in an Appalachian Newspaper: What Environmental Discourse Analysis Reveals about Efforts to Address Exurbanization and Climate Change

As the people of Southern Appalachia confront the challenges of climate change and exurban development, their foundational beliefs about the environment and human-environment relations will significantly shape the types of individual and collective action that they imagine and pursue. In this paper, we use critical discourse analysis of an influential small-town newspaper to understand how the environment is being represented publicly and consider how these representations might affect local environmental politics and efforts to mitigate or adapt to climate change and exurban sprawl. We find that the environment is generally represented as an amenity to be enjoyed rather than a subject of concern, that environmental degradation, when represented at all, is often discussed in vague or distancing terms, and that human agency is typically presented in individualizing, hyper-local terms rather than in collective, community- or national-scale ones. In conclusion, we suggest that these representational styles are likely very effective for inspiring interest in and connection to local landscapes, but they do not provide a strong basis for collective efforts to understand and address climate change and exurbanization.

Family-Owned Newspapers: Filling Niches in Local U.S. Communities

Since small-town newspapers are facing increased competition and technological changes that are threatening their survival, the purpose of this paper was to analyze the strategy-making activities of these organizations from an ecological perspective. Findings indicate that family-owned newspapers were finding stability in retaining their core print businesses while migrating content to the web. Too many variations from the norm appeared to weaken financial footholds and were often eventually abandoned. Such behaviors indicate a rationale for upholding a “tried-and-true” approach in newspapers. While profits may fluctuate, the uncertainty that occurred with variation seemed to play a role in increasing the threat of failure for these small, family-owned newspapers.

Thomas Wolfe and Eugene O'Neill

Thomas Wolfe and Eugene O'Neill

“The National Gain is Nil”: Talking About Infant Mortality in Interwar Alberta

This paper uses the concept of biopolitics to analyze the ways in which infant mortality was talked about in Alberta between the beginning of the first world war and the beginning of the second. Material is drawn primarily from small-town newspapers. Infant mortality is understood as a form of perverse reproduction, in which life and death are unnaturally juxtaposed, threatening the integrity of the emergent polity of Alberta. The two main tropes in talking about infant mortality are military and economic, contingently linked to Alberta's experience of the first world war and of economic stress in the postwar years.

REVIEW: Journalism at the community media level

Review of Foundations of Community Journalism, edited by Bill Reader and John A. Hatcher. Los Angeles: Sage Publications, 2012, 283 pp. ISBN: 9781412974660 (pbk)This publication adds to a growing body of scholarly work currently being undertaken in the subfield of journalism and mass communication studies known as community media or alternative media. At first glance, the book appears to present a largely American perspective in its coverage of community journalism, but further reading assures one that the editors have fostered an approach that has universal relevance. The term community journalism is broadly defined as ‘journalism at the community level’. While the origins of community journalism in the United States is strongly linked to small-town newspapers, the practice has expanded in the 21st century as the notion of community itself has evolved from its link to geographical ties towards the emergence of global communities linked by ethnicity, religion, culture and interests. This deterritorialisation of community newspapers is demonstrated in the Pacific through the work of Tongan-born publisher Kalafi Moala, who prints weekly editions of Taimi ‘o Tonga for distribution to diaspora Tongan communities in New Zealand, Australia and the United States. With the changing conception of community journalism, it has become necessary to study this subfield within broader theoretical approaches, as the editors of this volume reflect in the book’s preface, ‘to prepare the next generation of scholars for a media environment in which community journalism no longer operates in the shadow of “big J” journalism.’ At the end of each chapter the volume includes reflective contributions from scholars and practitioners who bring valuable insights towards enabling a greater theoretical understanding of the field.