The rise of online news sites in the past seven years has been one response to the changing legacy daily newspaper environment and the relative simplicity of online publishing technologies. However, many of these news startups may not be reaching all the residents in their geographic reach or representing their region’s population accurately, according to an analysis in May 2013 by Elon University students.
Are these entrepreneurial ventures filling in the gaps in legacy media or providing news coverage to regions previously untapped by mainstream media? Do the sites serve their geographic and demographic audiences? The research, conducted under the guidance of Dr. Michelle Ferrier, evaluates hyperlocal online news sites, their content, their geographic reach and how well these sites serve their region’s residents with fresh news and information.
Earlier ethnographic research conducted in the April 2013 by Dr. Ferrier on hyperlocal online news publishers found that only 5.5 percent of hyperlocal online news sites were founded or run by people of color. Census data from 2010 shows that minorities make up 28 percent of the U.S. population.
Research Findings
According to a national analysis of more than 100 hyperlocal online news sites and state-based topical sites, 59 percent of the sites represent the demographics of the regions they cover. Many of the sites’ online readers reflect a Caucasian majority, which oftentimes is not reflective of the total regional population. In a more detailed content analysis of the sites homepages, only 40 percent of the sites accurately represent the full range of the residents in their geographic region either on the demographic factors of ethnicity, gender or both.
The sites were ranked most favorably on providing news and information to its geographic audience, with 62 percent of the sites receiving favorable rankings.
Students compared 2010 census data with site-specific demographic data and conducted a content analysis of the home pages of the sites for 14 days. A more detailed analysis of the sites used in the study can be found on the project wiki at: http://hyperlocalonlinenews.wikispaces.com/.
The student work is part of the Media Deserts Project, a larger research initiative to provide a climate map of the media ecosystem. The Media Desert Project examines daily newspaper circulation, hyperlocal online news and weekly newspapers to provide a picture of where fresh news and information is lacking. The second stage of the student research will map the geographic reach of these sites to determine if news innovations are providing news and information in media deserts. A video describing the Media Desert Project can be found here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nK9OqINpyys
Dr. Michelle Ferrier is the associate dean for innovation, research/creative activity and graduate studies for the Scripps College of Communication at Ohio University.
Dr. Michelle Ferrier is an associate professor in the School of Communications at Elon University and vice president of Journalism That Matters.
At the end of this discourse, someone will accuse me of fouling my own nest. That’s if you ever even see this commentary, printed or online in what used to be called the local newspaper.
Regardless, it will circulate. As do the words of the late Edward R. Murrow, the legendary CBS journalist, more than 50 years later that start this letter. Because if the structures of networks and media ownership and cultural representation remain the same — if they continue unaltered – then the main of us may look up one day dazed at what has transpired and realize we have done it to ourselves.
The North Carolina General Assembly this spring is considering the rollback of a longtime requirement for some local governments that legal notices be printed in newspapers, a revenue stream for publishers totaling millions of dollars a year. States across the country, including neighboring Virginia, have been gnawing on the issue as well.
Should HB 504 become law, nine North Carolina counties and municipalities would no longer be dependent on their local publications as a vehicle for bidding out state contracts, announcing property foreclosures, or conducting in public any of several other government or legal business. The counties represented in this bill could instead post notices on their own electronic servers.
But what would be lost in the transaction? The legacy local newspaper, most likely, already facing technological disruption, the “great collapse” of revenue from classified, display and subscriptions, a product struggling to reinvent itself in our brave, new digital world.
Since 2007, more than 120 newspapers have been lost to these struggles. Many locales and communities across the United States no longer have access to fresh news and information as newspapers reduce their frequency from seven days a week to four or three or go totally online. Residents glean what they can from the news aggregators, but are more knowledgeable about what is happening far away than what is happening in their own back yard.
But if the publishers of the local newspapers might set their lobbying teams to pause and look at the consequences of that loss beyond their own bottom lines, they would find that they are compelled to speak up now, because something much larger than newspapers themselves will be lost.
Our sense of place. Our sense of democracy. Our ability to learn and influence our unfolding narratives.
As long as we are willing to continue to allow community news, information and storytelling to die, then we complicit in our growing ignorance. The water is slowly heating, and we will warm ourselves, complacent believing that we are receiving all that we should. Until we are startled into the realization that we know too little, too late.
I do not speak on behalf of the institution – the newspaper. Or the local radio or television station. I ask that you consider news and information, that public service function keeps us informed and connected to local opportunities and talent. The community stories that give us a sense of ourselves and our place in the world. The cultural narratives that shape our reality and sometimes allow us to see – and move — beyond them.
Let us consider using those funds from legal notices to train community storytellers, much like the writers of the Works Project Administration in a nationwide media corps. Use our underemployed talent, whether fresh out of school or displaced from the profession or newer community voices, to bolster civic news and information functions. Boost open government initiatives to create even greater transparency especially in communities that have lost their newspaper watchdog functions.
As Edward R. Murrow has said:
“We are to a large extent an imitative society. If one or two or three corporations would undertake to devote just a small traction of their advertising appropriation along the lines that I have suggested, the procedure would grow by contagion; the economic burden would be bearable, and there might ensue a most exciting adventure–exposure to ideas and the bringing of reality into the homes of the nation.”
Murrow was referring to that new medium of television, back in 1958, and its growing programming diet designed to delude, amuse and insulate us. But his concerns and his solutions are as valid today, with the rise of the Internet and the loss of our civic commons.
There are some who will wring their hands and say that government shouldn’t be funding our news and information. They’ll point to the arguments over our public broadcasting. They’ll say that in this political and economic climate, it would be impossible to redirect these government monies to funding community news and information for a more informed citizenry. We need less government control, not more.
Let someone else pick up the slack, they’ll say, we don’t need newspapers now. We have the Internet.
They will ignore that government is already in our media. They will ignore history, that shows that this innovation called a free press was started with government licensing, preferential postal rates, even government-purchased printing presses in some locales. Our founders even insisted on a free press in the First Amendment to our Constitution.
They will ignore that we would not have the democracy we enjoy if we did not have a free press. They will believe that newspapers achieved their heights on their own and can figure their way out of their fast race to the bottom on their own, thank you very much.
But we’re talking about something more vital to our civic discourse than newspapers. We’re talking journalism, that vital community information function. One that serves our communities and its residents first, by whatever means necessary.
Community news and information for the people, by the people, of the people.
We must remain in conversation. We must stay informed and engaged. For we will grasp the enormity of what we have lost from journalism too late: Exposure to ideas and the bringing of reality into the homes of the nation.
“There is a great and perhaps decisive battle to be fought against ignorance, intolerance and indifference,” Murrow said in 1958. I would argue that we are waging it now.
But even larger cultural shifts are afoot than this general malaise and cultural distance. Garber hints at, but does not draw the line to technology’s role in not only changing how and where we get news, but to technology’s role in changing how we think and the values of what we find important.
Society’s storytelling mechanisms are changing. We’ve shifted from an oral society in earlier times to a textual, literate society industrial society to a digital, visual society where image is king along with the flash, the fragment and the immediate. Look at the popularity of Twitter, Flickr, and YouTube and you glimpse the underlying shifts occurring. So where do our long-form, linear narrative forms find an audience in this landscape? Where do our traditional news values fit in this accelerated, visual milieu? Who can claim to be the truthteller, when everyone has the means to tell their version of reality?
Younger audiences have and will continue to adopt a different aesthetic and way of making sense of the world that comes out of this cultural shift. We don’t want them to appreciate the news, we want them to need us…which means changing what we do, not how audiences see us.
Digital Content Architects 