in Journalism and Mass Communication
This from a speech by Jan Schaffer, J-Lab Executive Director:
J-Lab has funded 55 projects since 2005 with small grants, about $25,000. Many of these efforts sought to train citizens to generate stories for the site. Some were university projects. Others were launched by so-called “civic catalysts” – those bumblebees that pollinate a lot of community groups and carry a lot of knowledge about their communities.
Here are five of our key takeaways >>> READ IT
by Doug Fisher, University of South Carolina
Small, family-owned news organizations may have the best opportunity to take advantage of the digital pathway to reach their communities, but they also may be the most endangered by it and find it the most challenging.
I’ve come to that conclusion after working last summer in the newsroom of an 18,000-circulation community daily newspaper and after years of working with other editors and publishers at individual papers or small family-owned chains.
The health of these newsrooms is important to their communities. In many instances, as case studies at the Newspapers and Community-Building symposia have shown, they are among the few institutions willing and able to stand up to the power structure. Also, as has been widely noted, they generally are suffering less economically than their big-city counterparts. [Read more...]
By Stephen Lacy
Professor, Department of Communication and School of Journalism, Michigan State University
Journalists face a crisis. The migration of readers, viewers and advertisers from newspaper and broadcast TV to the Web has combined with the current recession to eliminate jobs and raise concerns about the future of journalism itself. Many observers have addressed these concerns with conflicting conclusions. However, the importance of the discussion is not that someone will be right or wrong but that the conversation might help journalists better understand the trends, and, therefore, help them influence the ways they react to the trends.
Much of the disagreement in the discussions comes from a failure to address the particular type of markets being discussed. National journalism will be affected by the trends, but the number of news outlets addressing national issues insures that citizens will continue to receive national news from a diversity of outlets. Local news markets, however, have smaller consumer and advertising bases, and the news organizations in these markets confront a more uncertain future than do national news organizations.
The following predictions about the future of local journalism (coverage of communities, towns and cities) start with some observations about current conditions and then suggest what these mean for the future of local journalism. [Read more...]
A recent study in the Newspaper Research Journal found that citizen journalism sites differ significantly from Web site supported by newspapers. As a result, most citizen journalism sites serve as complements rather than substitutes for commercial news Web sites.
The content analysis of the sites by researchers at Michigan State University, the University of Missouri, and the University of North Carolina studied the content at 86 citizen blog sites, 53 citizen news sites, and 63 daily newspaper sites. Citizen news sites were those that produced news articles similar to those found on newspaper sites, and citizen blogs were opinion sites. [Read more...]
