Sue Robinson

Traditionalists vs. Convergers: Textual Privilege, Boundary Work, and the Journalist—Audience Relationship in the Commenting Policies of Online News Sites

As newspapers move toward web platforms, journalists struggle with their authoritative role in society. A documentation of policy development for commenting on news articles, this research considers these reader-content areas as places of boundary work for the journalist—audience relationship in interactive news environments. This ethnographic examination demonstrated significant internal conflict among both journalists and readers. The ‘traditionalists’ — those who want to maintain a hierarchal relationship between journalists and audiences — clashed with the ‘convergers’ — those who felt users should be given more freedoms within the news site. The resulting policy privileged journalism by relegating reader input to specific, structured spaces. But for the first time, audiences participated in that policy development, asserting their own textual privilege according to a value system apart from journalistic norms. The result was a grand identity complex for the news profession characterized by interrupted information flow patterns and diffused power over knowledge. Institutional hierarchies for policymaking and execution are radically changing.

‘Anyone can know’: Citizen journalism and the interpretive community of the mainstream press

In Madison, WI, two news groups – bloggers and local reporters – are squaring off, developing separate value systems and establishing protocols of intergroup activity. This study explored those framing values and documented individual role play within this Midwestern city’s information-producing community. An informal interpretive community of citizen journalists offers ways of knowing distinct from the way the press has traditionally practiced, negotiated and shared news stories. Interviews with citizens and professional journalists revealed convergences between these groups of news writers as well as dichotomies. This evidence showed that both the entrenched community of journalists and the emerging one of citizen news writers are framed by values of socially responsible missions, access to information, entitlement to knowledge and informal notions of professionalism. When ‘anyone can know’ – a quote from these interviews – the result is an adaptive organization of information producers that influence each other and redefine the aims, standards and ideology of journalism.

CITIZEN JOURNALISTS AND THEIR THIRD PLACES

This research examines whether people who contribute to local news sites achieve feelings of community typically associated with Americas “Third Places” (an Oldenburg, 1991, term that refers to the coffee shops, libraries and other community gathering spots). The article posits that some so-called “citizen journalists” find that they enhance their individual fulfillment, empowerment over information and local communal connections when they contribute to local news sites and blogs online. The research also explored why some otherwise motivated people remain non-contributors. Four realms of tension inhibit full engagement—perceptions of a social collective, authority over information, temporal confusion, and a spatial discomfort between physical and virtual worlds.

Emerging news non-profits: A case study for rebuilding community trust?

A new news disseminator has emerged to revitalize the profession of information gathering – the non-profit news organization. Adopting a framework of community trust, this article begins a scholarly response to the questions: Who are these non-profit journalists and what do they aim to accomplish? A rhetorical analysis of nearly 50 mission statements and ethnographic work on two case studies revealed a commitment to rebuilding public trust, to reclaiming community journalism, to re-emphasizing the “ordinary” citizen, and to pioneering collaborative news work by means of digital technologies. Our analysis demonstrated that many of these organizations, in considering news as a public good, work to re-conceptualize the industry for citizens, but depend upon a level of funding that might not be viable in the long term. However, this research posits that little in the way of true community trust can be achieved until these organizations discover a sustainable business model.

A Qualitative Experiment: Research on Mediated Meaning Construction Using a Hybrid Approach

This article presents a hybrid methodological technique that fuses elements of experimental design with qualitative strategies to explore mediated communication. Called the “qualitative experiment,” this strategy uses focus groups and in-depth interviews within randomized stimulus conditions typically associated with experimental research. This mixed methods research draws on the advantages of qualitative inquiry to better understand meaning construction and gain a more holistic reading of response differences between varied groupings of mediated content.

VIETNAM AND IRAQ

This paper contrasts two ideas of journalism as a ritual of communication and as a ritual of an objective professional norm by textually analyzing five newspapers’ coverage of the 2004 presidential campaign between John Kerry and President George W. Bush, whose mnemonic battles over Vietnam served to illustrate two fundamental concepts of objective history and cultural memory. Journalists’ professional norms failed to reframe the politicized memories in any meaningful way. Instead, journalists used the conflicting collective memory as the substitute frame, reenacting the original conflict in the newspapers. This paper explores a specific example of how memory processes are employed through journalism.

When White reporters cover race: News media, objectivity and community (dis)trust

When White reporters cover issues involving race, they often fall back on traditional, passive practices of objectivity, such as deferring to official sources and remaining separate from communities. Using in-depth interviews and focus groups combined with textual analysis in a case study of one Midwestern city, we explore the ethical tensions between the commitment to neutrality and the need for trust building in communities. This essay suggests that the current practices by White reporters may be unethical and argues for an active objectivity focused on loyalty to all citizens. This statement about the clashing of ethics explores a middle ground for reporters in historically White-dominated communities caught between long-time norms and the demands of an increasingly diverse society.

The Active Citizen's Information Media Repertoire: An Exploration of Community News Habits During the Digital Age

Digital technologies have reconfigured how active community members know about local news. Sampling one Midwest communitys most engaged citizens—collectively, a “community of practice”—this research formalizes one emerging media-information repertoire around the issue of homelessness. Components of this repertoire include motivations, structuring conditions, norms of usage, and perceived consequences for media-source selection. Commenting, sharing, and other information exchange become “acts of news” for individuals involved in communities of practice. Through shared information-exchange practices, citizens can not only advocate their social causes but also reinvigorate their own affiliations to the community of practice and to the city itself. The use of this media repertoire by these individuals reconstitutes and amplifies their role in the pursuit of fostering a civil society focused on homelessness. The findings illuminate the process of how community activists work as an informal organizational form and, as a result, build a stronger commitment to civic action.

Legitimation Strategies in Journalism

In Madison, Wisconsin, a member of a typically marginalized community challenged the status quo with the proposal for a charter school dedicated to Black youth. A year of debate ensued in mainstream news organizations and social media. Calling on critical race theory, this research compares the legitimation strategies of journalists to school officials, activists, and others writing online. Using textual analysis and in-depth interviews, the evidence demonstrated that even as journalists and others worked to reinforce the status quo by drawing from dominant institutions and principal storylines, the digital work of authentication and grassroots organizing of African-Americans and other supporters of the charter school forced an alternative discourse to develop—one centered on experiences of inequities. The article also shows how organizational constraints stymie well-meaning reporters when trying to story-tell about issues of race, and how all of these strategies from both Blacks and Whites come from a place of identity construction and maintenance.

Book Review: Bennett, W. L., Lawrence, R. G., & Livingston, S. (2007). When the Press Fails: Political Power and the News Media from Iraq to Katrina. Chicago: University of Chicago Press:

alized cultural industry. Although some chapters are fact based and descriptive and thus do not always ask critical questions, each chapter in this book could be a good resource for undergraduate and graduate courses on international mass media and globalization. While discussing the international media in a classroom, it is important to investigate how each society’s media systems operate through domestic policy and regulations. As national boundaries become less visible, it is crucial to examine the process of transmitting and consuming another society’s culture through mass media and what kind of problems arise in each society to maintain cultural expression through the consumption of cultural commodities. Moreover, not only do these chapters present case studies from different regions, they also allow readers to revisit their own definition of cultural diversity and to reconsider the act of trading culture as a phenomenon that is not unique to the availability of a global network of mass entertainment but is based on a continuing growth of a liberal trading system, which might not always positively influence the maintenance of cultural identity and expression. This is not to say that the free flow of information is not a positive act but to indicate that the consequence of such freedom might conflict with the value systems of regional cultures, exemplified especially in the way democratization sometimes becomes a way of westernizing non-Western communities. This is, again, not a new concept; however, the book offers focused analyses of processes and/or outcomes of cultural trade that might not contribute to furthering the acceptance of cultural diversity in a globalized world.