The Routledge Companion to Local Media and Journalism

by Agnes Gulyas (Editor), David Baines (Editor)

Overview

This comprehensive edited collection provides key contributions in the field, mapping out fundamental topics and analysing current trends through an international lens.

Offering a collection of invited contributions from scholars across the world, the volume is structured in seven parts, each exploring an aspect of local media and journalism. It brings together and consolidates the latest research and theorisations from the field, and provides fresh understandings of local media from a comparative perspective and within a global context. This volume reaches across national, cultural, technological and socio-economic boundaries to bring new understandings to the dominant foci of research in the field and highlights interconnection and thematic links. Addressing the significant changes local media and journalism have undergone in the last decade, the collection explores the history, politics, ethics and contents of local media, as well as delving deeper into the business and practices that affect not only the journalists and media-makers involved, but consumers and communities as well.

For students and researchers in the fields of journalism studies, journalism education, cultural studies, and media and communications programmes, this is the comprehensive guide to local media and journalism.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781032474595
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
Publication date:	05/27/2024
Series:	Routledge Media and Cultural Studies Companions
Pages:	522
Product dimensions:	6.88(w) x 9.69(h) x (d)

About the Author

Agnes Gulyas is Professor in Media and Communications at the School of Creative Arts and Industries, Canterbury Christ Church University, UK. Her recent projects have focused on local media gaps and local news consumption in the UK, as well as journalists' use of social media. She is a founding member of the Local and Community Media Network of the Media, Communication and Cultural Association, UK.

David Baines is Senior Lecturer in Journalism at the School of Arts and Cultures, Newcastle University, UK. He worked in local and regional newspapers for 30 years before moving to the academy, where his research focus is on transformations in local and community media, journalism practices and journalism education. He is a founding member of the Local and Community Media Network of the Media, Communication and Cultural Association, UK.

Table of Contents

Introduction: demarcating the field of local media and journalism

Agnes Gulyas and David Baines

Part I - Histories and legacies of local media and journalism

1. Historicising the afterlife: local newspapers in the United Kingdom and the ‘art of prognosis’

Rachel Matthews

2. A history of the local newspaper in Japan

Anthony S. Rausch

3. Local news deserts in Brazil: historical and contemporary perspectives

Carlos Eduardo Lins da Silva and Angela Pimenta

4. History of local media in Norway

Eli Skogerbø

5. State of play: local media, power and society in the Caribbean

Juliette Marie Storr

6. ‘Peopleization’ of news: the development of the American local television news format

Madeleine Liseblad

Part II - Local media policies

7. The death of broadcast localism in the United States

Christopher Ali

8. Developing local media policies in sub-state nations: the case of Catalonia

Mariola Tarrega and Josep Angel Guimerà

9. Local journalism in Australia: policy debates

Kristy Hess and Lisa Waller

10. The development of community broadcasting legislation in Kenya

Rose N. Kimani

11. Local media policies in Poland: key issues and debates

Sylwia Męcfal

12. The impact of communication policies in local television models: the cases of Catalonia and Scotland

Aida Martori Muntsant

Part III - Local media, publics and politics

13. Local journalism in the United States: its publics, its problems, and its potentials

C.W. Anderson

14. Remediating the local through localised news making: India’s booming multilingual press as agent in political and social change

Ursula Rao

15. De-professionalization and fragmentation: challenges for local journalism in Sweden

Gunnar Nygren

16. Central and local media in Russia: between central control and local initiatives

Ilya Kiriya

17. The return of party journalism in China and ‘Janusian’ content: the case of Newspaper X

Jingrong Tong

18. Strategy over substance and national in focus? Local television coverage of politics and policy in the United States

Erika Franklin Fowler

19. From journal of record to the 24/7 news cycle: perspectives on the changing nature of court reporting in Australia

Margaret Simons and Jason Bosland

Part IV - Ownership and sustainability of local media

20. Business and ownership of local media: an international perspective
    Bill Reader and John Hatcher
21. Local media owners as saviours in the Czech Republic: they save money, not journalism
    Lenka Waschková Císařová
22. What can we learn from independent family-owned local media groups? Case studies from the United Kingdom

Sarah O’Hara

23. Local media in France: subsidized, heavily regulated and under pressure

Matthieu Lardeau

24. ‘I’ve started a hyperlocal, so now what?’

Marco van Kerkhoven

25. The hyperlocal ‘renaissance’ in Australia and New Zealand

Scott Downman and Richard Murray

Part V - Local journalists and journalistic practices

26. At the crossroads of hobby, community work and media business: Nordic and Russian hyperlocal practitioners

Jaana Hujanen, Olga Dovbysh, Carina Tenor, Mikko Grönlund, Katja Lehtisaari and Carl-Gustav Lindén

27. Not all doom and gloom: the story of American small-market newspapers

Christopher Ali, Damian Radcliffe and Rosalind Donald

28. Local journalism in Bulgaria: trends from the Worlds of Journalism study

Vera Slavtcheva-Petkova

29. Specialised training of local journalists in armed conflict: the Colombian experience

Yennué Zárate Valderrama

30. From community to commerce? Analytics, audience ‘engagement’ and how local newspapers are renegotiating news values in the age of pageview-driven journalism in the United Kingdom

James Morrison

31. Two-tier tweeting: how promotional and personalised use of Twitter is shaping journalistic practices in the United Kingdom

Lily Canter

32. Centralised and digitally disrupted: an ethnographic view of local journalism in New Zealand

Helen Sissons

33. Situating journalistic coverage: a practice theory approach to researching local community radio production in the United Kingdom

Josephine F. Coleman

Part VI - Communities and audiences of local news

34. What does the audience experience as valuable local journalism? Approaching local news quality from a user’s perspective

Irene Costera Meijer

35. Local journalism and at-risk communities in the United States

Philip M. Napoli and Matthew Weber

36. The emerging deficit: changing local journalism and its impact on communities in Australia

Margaret Simons, Andrea Carson, Denis Muller and Jennifer Martin

37. Strength in numbers: building collaborative partnerships for data-driven community news
    Jan Lauren Boyles
38. Bottom-up hyperlocal media in Belgium: Facebook-groups as collaborative neighborhood awareness systems

Jonas De Meulenaere, Cédric Courtois and Koen Ponnet

39. Local news repertoires in a transforming Swedish media landscape

Annika Bergström

40. The what, where, and why of local news in the United States

Angela M. Lee

Part VII - Local media and the public good

41. Local media and disaster reporting in Japan

Florian Meissner and Jun Tsukada

42. Public service journalism and engagement in US hyperlocal nonprofits

Patrick Ferrucci

43. Local public service media in Northern Ireland: the merit goods argument

Phil Ramsey and Philip McDermott

44. Participation in local radio agricultural broadcasts and message adoption among rural farmers in northern Ghana

Adam Tanko Zakariah

45. Pacific Islanders’ talanoa values and public support point the way forward

Shailendra Singh

46. Alternative journalism, alternative ethics?

Tony Harcup

Editorial Reviews

"An immensely important and timely collection of insights and research from veteran and emerging scholars of local media and journalism. This compendium of work by international scholars lays an excellent foundation. Given all that is at stake, one hopes this is the first of many volumes." - Penelope Muse Abernathy, Knight Chair in Journalism and Digital Media Economics at the University of North Carolina, US.

"A vital resource for anyone interested in why local media and journalism matters and how to ensure it sustains."- Natalie Fenton, Professor of Media and Communications, Goldsmiths, University of London and Co-Director of the Centre for the Study of Global Media and Democracy and founding member of the Media Reform Coalition

"The volume achieves an admirable depth of focus by anchoring local journalism practices in relation to a range of contextual forces. This rich and textured contribution to the field of journalism studies directs our attention to an important yet often under-researched dimension of the disrupted, evolving journalism landscape and deserves to find a wide readership." - Herman Wasserman, Professor and Director of the Centre for Film and Media Studies, University of Cape Town, South Africa.

"Offering studies from around the globe informed by leading edge research, this significant, scholarly, landmark collection reasserts the significance of local media and local journalism for public engagement and deliberation" - Professor Bob Franklin, founding editor of Digital Journalism, Journalism Practice and Journalism Studies and author of numerous publications on local media.

From the Publisher