1

Community Journalism
A Concept of Connectedness

Bill Reader

❖ ❖ ❖

T he concept of community journalism long has been regarded as a

specific practice of gathering, packaging, and distributing news
in predominantly small, distinct geographic markets, with an empha-
sis on local news and information about community life. For many
decades in the 20th century, “community journalism” was used as a
synonym for “small-town newspapers.” Yet in the first decade of the
21st century, renewed interest in the cultural roles of journalism in
community life has broadened the concept to something that reaches
well beyond newspapers in small towns and includes various media
in many different types of communities—special-interest magazines,
online-only newsletters for professional communities, local indepen-
dent radio, “hyperlocal” websites, and so on. Some of that interest
has been assumed to represent a stunde null in the study of commu-
nity journalism, with some scholars suggesting that the concept of
community journalism is new and emerging. In fact, contemplation

3
4 FOUNDATIONS OF COMMUNITY JOURNALISM

of community journalism as a distinct concept can be traced back to at

least the middle of the 20th century, and perhaps even to the forma-
tive days of journalism studies decades before that. Those early works
were mostly essays or textbooks focused on professional practice; that
is, most were primarily how-to texts rather than “why” texts, and most
were written for students and professionals, not scholars looking to
research the topic under any kind of theoretical framework. There
are a few exceptions, of course. For example, Anderson, Dardenne,
and Killenberg suggested in the mid 1990s that “news organizations,
especially local newspapers, should occupy a prominent place in a
community’s life and conversation. Viewing community as a place of
inquiry asks journalists to consider what messages and dialogues are
necessary to increase the perception of commonalities” (1994, p. 101).
Those attempts at theory building have been instrumental in the matu-
ration of community journalism as a distinct subdiscipline, and that
focus has in turn attracted a small but dedicated collective of scholars
and inspired several university-based initiatives.
The goal of this chapter is to analyze the original texts that focused
specifically on community journalism as a distinct term. Later chapters
will focus on the scholarly research that followed the development of
the concept.

❖ ORIGINS

The term community journalism appears to have been coined in the

1950s by the late Kenneth R. Byerly, a newspaper publisher turned pro-
fessor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. After joining
the UNC faculty in 1957, Byerly was assigned to teach a course called
“Country Weekly Newspaper Production,” but it seems he didn’t
care for the course title. In a personal letter to Jock Lauterer (one of
Byerly’s students in the 1960s, and now a leading scholar in the com-
munity journalism discipline), Byerly said his dispute with the course
title was that not all community newspapers were in the countryside,
and not all of them were weeklies (Lauterer, 2006, p. xviii). The course
was renamed “Community Journalism.” Byerly then used the term as
the title of his 1961 textbook, a collection of observations and essays
by him and scores of other community journalists. That book’s utility
today is mostly as a historic document, as it is dated and was devoted
 Community Journalism 5

exclusively to newspapers in the U.S. Yet there is much in Byerly’s

book that transcends time, geography, and media forms.
Community Journalism was a comprehensive, mid-20th-century
guide to newspaper publishing in small towns, suburbs, and dis-
tinct neighborhoods in large cities. It addressed practical matters:
approaches to covering various types of local news (accidents, schools,
obituaries, etc.), editing opinion pages (editorials, letters from the com-
munity, public service work), and managing the business aspects of
a for-profit newspaper (public relations, advertising and circulation
management, financial management, even strategies for starting or
purchasing a newspaper). It was also a 400-page articulation of the
distinctions between community journalism and marquee news media
of the time—specifically, the large-circulation daily newspapers in
major cities that were considered the paragons of the news industry.
Those differences were most often framed in terms of the relationships
between journalists and members of their audiences. In his preface,
Byerly explained the concept of community journalism as such:

Community newspapers today are burgeoning in big city and sub-

urban areas and have new strength in small cities and towns. They
offer much in employment, satisfaction, income, service, and own-
ership. A reason for the success of these . . . newspapers is their
“friendly neighbor” relationship with readers. This affinity also
creates problems for community newspapers which differ from
those of the metropolitan press. (1961, p. v)

Byerly’s proposal that community journalism differs from metro-

politan journalism was further explained throughout the book, but one
passage provides a poignant summary: “Community newspapers have
something that city dailies lack—a nearness to people. This is a great
strength, and a great problem” (1961, p. 25). For all of us community
journalism scholars, that notion of “a nearness to people” provides a
common theoretical anchor.
From a research perspective, the study of community journalism
is largely the study of the relationship dynamics between journalists
and the communities they serve: it is concerned with the degree and
implications of “connectivity” between journalism and communities.
That connectivity has been tested in some research, such as one study
that found that audiences have more regard for their local newspapers
6 FOUNDATIONS OF COMMUNITY JOURNALISM

than for newspapers in general (Lavrakas & Holley, 1989) and another
demonstrating that editors of some small newspapers viewed ethics
more in terms of responsibility to their communities than did some edi-
tors of large newspapers, who tended to view ethics more in terms of
the professional reputation of the newspaper itself (Reader, 2006). That
“nearness to people” can, Byerly argued, increase the community’s
accessibility to the journalists (often described in terms of “bumping
into them on the street”), which in turn can increase journalists’ sense of
accountability for their behaviors within a community. It also can cause
the journalist to be much less forthcoming with information that could
be embarrassing or harmful to individual community members or to the
community as a whole (a concept explored in some detail in the oft-cited
University of Minnesota studies of Tichenor, Donohue, & Olien, 1980).
As an example of that community-focused restraint, Byerly included in
his book this explanation from the editor of a small Wisconsin weekly:

No weekly newspaper can live in close harmony with its read-

ers and properly serve its community if it hears all and tells all.
A daily reporter can record and report all of the personal
exchanges in a council meeting, for example. The weekly reporter
should use his own good judgment when mere personal conflicts
arise—and he should print only that which is constructive.
This is not being dishonest with readers. It does not mean that the
paper must cover up anything. It simply means that the whole truth
should be the constructive truth—not petty palaver. (1961, p. 26)

Another example of the idea of “good judgment” appears in

Byerly’s chapter on covering “Courts and Crime,” in which he
addressed the pros and cons of publishing the name of a drunken
driver who asked that his name not be printed (1961, pp. 83–87). On the
one hand, Byerly argued, printing the names of offenders adds to the
legal punishment in the form of public embarrassment, which could
be harmful to the individual and (more importantly) his innocent fam-
ily members. But Byerly also found that many editors argued in favor
of publishing such names, and for various reasons: to deter crime, to
ensure the accused gets a fair trial in the public eye, to alert the public
to the misdeeds of their neighbors, to set the record straight rather
than to allow the rumor mill to spread the news, and to demonstrate
that the newspaper will not play favorites just because an offender
 Community Journalism 7

makes a personal plea to “keep it out of the paper.” It is that kind of

routine, interpersonal dilemma, Byerly suggested, that journalists in
large media outlets rarely must (or are willing to) consider. He argued
that journalists working for larger media might, for example, simply
fall back on legal arguments (the public’s right to know, rather than
the community’s need to know), but smaller, local media also had to
weigh the best interests of the community against the best interests of
the individual members of that community. The broader standards of
detached journalism could not simply be applied as a matter of course
in such a close-knit situation.

❖ THINKING BEYOND “COUNTRY EDITORS”

Byerly may have coined the term community journalism, but the idea
that journalism at the community level is different from regional/
national/global journalism was hardly a new idea in the mid
20th century. The importance of local, community-focused media was
celebrated by democracy’s early champions, not least among them
Alexis de Tocqueville, who wrote in his Democracy in America:

A newspaper is an adviser one need not seek out because it

appears voluntarily every day to comment briefly upon commu-
nity business without deflecting your attention from your own. . . .
So as men become more equal and individualism more of a men-
ace, newspapers are more necessary. The belief that they just
guarantee freedom would diminish their importance; they sustain
civilization. (1835/2004, pp. 600–601)

Well into the middle of the 20th century, the work of the com-
munity press was similarly heralded as the backbone of democracy,
as celebrated in occasional profiles of the “country editors” working
in idyllic small towns. Those often romanticized accounts appeared
in national magazines such as The Saturday Evening Post (Byers, 1937;
“The Country Newspaper,” 1946) and The Nation (Conason, 1975).
That romanticism also was captured in the memoirs of some renowned
“country editors,” such as:
• William Allen White of The Emporia Gazette in Kansas. White’s
editorial, “What’s the Matter With Kansas?” earned him
8 FOUNDATIONS OF COMMUNITY JOURNALISM

national attention, and his editorials against the Ku Klux Klan

won him both deep admiration and seething scorn. His autobi-
ography won a posthumous Pulitzer Prize in 1947.
• Henry Beetle Hough of the Vineyard Gazette on Martha’s Vineyard,
whose 1940 memoir Country Editor won critical acclaim across the
nation. The Atlantic Monthly gushed, “This is an oasis book, the
oasis exasperated journalists, editors, and printers dream of when
their jobs begin to bind” (Hough, 1974, back cover).
• John Henry Cutler of the Duxbury Clipper on Cape Cod, whose
first memoir, Put It on the Front Page, Please! (Cutler, 1960), was
described by a New York Times critic as “one of the gayest weekly
mirrors of New England small town life. . . . If you are planning
to start a paper, by all means read Mr. Cutler’s book. . . . In any
event, you will find here a stimulating view of country life in
America” (Cutler, 1965, back cover).

The romantic ideal of the country editor was tempered, of course,

by anecdotes that were not at all flattering to the community press.
Early critics of community journalism focused on the “friendly neigh-
bor relationship” as something that threatened journalistic indepen-
dence, arguing that it could lead to timidity and laziness lest journalists
offend their “neighbors” with aggressive reporting of community con-
flicts. To many critics in the upper echelons of the profession, commu-
nity journalism became a euphemism for the old-style “booster press”
common in the 18th and 19th centuries.
Much of that criticism was, again, a result of assumptions by the
elites of the profession that they were the ones who set the standards
that all should follow. In his second memoir, Cancel My Subscription,
Please!, Cutler (1965) recalled a letter he received from the editor of a
national journalism trade magazine, scolding the small-town editor for
not publishing the names of local residents arrested for drunken driv-
ing. Cutler’s response was:

Why add to the penalty meted out by law? In a small town, who is
punished more in this case, the offender, or his wife and children?
If a town is small enough to support a friendly, neighborly paper,
isn’t it big enough to omit a name that would make publicity the
worst part of the punishment? (Cutler, 1965, p. 136)
 Community Journalism 9

Framed as an ethical debate, the passage demonstrated that Cutler’s

concern in that situation was more for the effects of his journalistic
choices on an individual member of the community than on the rou-
tines and standard practices of the broader journalism profession.
Comparisons within the community media provided more mean-
ingful criticisms, many of which have been supported by anecdotal
evidence of local journalists reporting on serious local problems. For
example, the community media in and near Libby, Montana, did little
to report on the asbestos poisoning in the community by a large ver-
miculite mine nearby, and the problem wasn’t reported to any depth
until Andrew Schneider of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer broke the story
in 1999 (Moss & Appel, 2001). There are also many newspapers and
newspaper companies that invest very little in their newsrooms, and
as such live up to the stereotype of what Lauterer (2006) calls “the
bottom-feeders of community journalism” (p. 56). Lauterer, a strong
advocate of community journalism in general and community newspa-
pers especially, frankly acknowledges that “many small-town papers
seem to attract and harbor the washed-out derelicts of our business;
community papers at their worst become sort of a stale backwater for
the flotsam and jetsam of journalism” (Lauterer, 2006, p. 44).
A noteworthy early excoriation of the “lazy community newspa-
per” stereotype came in 1964, when media critic Ben Bagdikian wrote
a scathing rebuke of the “lazy editor” in Harper’s Magazine. Although
Bagdikian’s scorn was primarily aimed at the publicity services that
produced the ready-made propaganda that could be published as
news copy, he did not spare the small-town newspaper editor who,
facing a deadline and staring at an empty hole on a page, would
go “fishing through the purple mats and yellow mimeographed
canned editorials in his lower drawer, feeling for one exactly nine
column-inches long” (p. 103). In the opening paragraphs of that essay,
Bagdikian challenged the heroic mythos of the “country editor”:

The unperishing myth of American journalism is the ideal of the

small-town newspaper as the grass-roots opinion-maker of the
nation, the last bastion of personal journalism, the final arena where
a single human being can mold a community with his convictions
and fearless iconoclasm. Needless to say, there are some small papers
like this and they are marvels to behold. But the fact is that most small
10 FOUNDATIONS OF COMMUNITY JOURNALISM

dailies and weeklies are the backyard of the trade, repositories for any
piece of journalistic junk tossed over the fence, run as often by print-
shop proprietors as by editors. Mostly they serve as useful bulletin
boards of births, deaths, and marriages (providing this news comes
in by its own initiative); only in exceptional cases do they raise and
resolve important local issues. When it comes to transmitting signals
from the outside world, a remarkable number of these papers con-
vey pure—that is, unadulterated—press agentry. Its subject matter,
which is printed both as “news” and as editorial comment, ranges
from mouthwash to politics—usually right wing. (p. 102)

Bagdikian’s suggestion was to become a new unperishing myth of

the profession—the belief that small-town journalism was somehow
substandard to the big leagues, rather than just different. Yet even
Bagdikian was careful to not use a broad brush to condemn all commu-
nity newspapers, writing:

To imply that a small circulation automatically means surrender

to boilerplate is unfair to a number of small dailies and weeklies
which, whatever their politics, are plainly the product of diligent
personal editorship, and precisely in those places where this takes
courage because the editor does literally have to face his readers
on the street. (p. 110)

Those “diligent” community journalists are not hard to find. State

and regional journalism organizations give hundreds of awards each
year to community media (newspapers, TV stations, online-only publi-
cations) that do noteworthy journalism at the community level.
The academy and the profession tend to feed that stereotype of the
“lazy paper” with their own brand of hero worship for the big-league
players of journalism and their international acclaim. That, too, is an
old story. In 1909, for example, James E. Rogers wrote in The American
Newspaper:

Obviously it is absurd to assert that a small four-paged country

journal . . . in any way compares with the huge twenty-four paged
daily of a large city . . . we find both as regards size and influence,
that “the power of the press” rests absolutely with our cities and
not with the country. (cited in Riley, 1938, p. 39)
 Community Journalism 11

Consider also this more recent example: In the months of hand-

wringing in America over the 2007 sale of Dow Jones & Co. and its flag-
ship The Wall Street Journal to global media baron Rupert Murdoch and
his News Corp., nearly all of the commentary and analysis focused on
whether Murdoch would meddle with the respected independence of
The Wall Street Journal. Only a handful of the hundreds of such articles
and essays even mentioned the two dozen–plus community newspa-
pers also owned by Dow Jones via its Ottaway Newspapers subsidiary.
Many of the Ottaway newspapers were respected community papers
that had earned strong market penetration in their communities and fre-
quent awards from state press associations. They also were immensely
successful businesses. According to an article in The Boston Globe,

the Ottaway community publications posted operating profits of

$48.2 million last year on $252.2 million in sales, outstripping the
$33.9 million in profits on revenue of $1.1 billion for the Dow Jones
operating group that includes the Journal and Barron’s magazine.
(Weisman, 2007, p. D1)

That is a 19% return from the Ottaway newspapers, compared to about

3.4% return from the company’s flagships. Dismissing the community
newspapers as “those silly little Ottaway papers” (Weisman, 2007),
Murdoch vowed to sell off the community newspapers almost imme-
diately after purchasing Dow Jones; his eyes were fixed on The Wall
Street Journal. But one of the business owners in a New England com-
munity served by an Ottaway newspaper said to the Globe:

Certainly we’re all talking about it, and we’re all concerned about
it. . . . The Ottaway papers tend to be local papers. They’re not
centralized. If any of these papers were to lose that local flavor, the
readership would plunge. And that would create a void for the
local advertisers. (Weisman, 2007, p. D1)

Coverage of the sale of Dow Jones can serve as an exemplar for

the current schism between mainstream journalism and community
journalism. It’s a case in which the famous and powerful media mogul
expressed more concern for prestige than for profitability, and the local
business owner expressed more concern about the “local flavor” of a
community newspaper than about who owned it.
12 FOUNDATIONS OF COMMUNITY JOURNALISM

❖ BUSINESS AS A HOLISTIC ASPECT OF

COMMUNITY JOURNALISM

The concerns of the local business owner about the flavor of a small-
town newspaper illustrate another important criticism of community
journalism—the close connections between the business side of the
operation and the news side. Community journalism is usually much
less rigid in regard to the “wall” between newsroom operations and
business operations typically found at larger news organizations
(An & Bergen, 2007). It is certainly far less adversarial, viewing adver-
tisers not just as sources of revenue, but also as legitimate members of
the community. Some community editors consider advertising to be edi-
torial copy and will accept only ads that are appropriate for their read-
ers, preferring advertisements from businesses within the community.
In his memoir, Hough suggested that approaches to advertising
provided another example of how community journalism differed
from the journalism of the major newspapers of his day:

On the face of it, the cost of reaching a million readers through

country weeklies was greater than the cost of reaching a million
readers through city dailies; and there were plenty of city dailies
which claimed to cover not only entire states but regions of states.
It was a curious anomaly which found the Gazette, for
instance, too costly a medium to be used by the nation’s larg-
est and wealthiest corporations, yet a practical and economical
medium for a small grocery store with an advertising budget of a
hundred dollars a year. The truth was, of course, that there was no
absolute advantage or disadvantage in respect to cost; there was
simply a difference in the point of view. . . .
[O]ur advertisers were known to our readers as human
beings, as individuals, and I think this tendency to personalize
them—a tendency inherent in the treatment of news in a country
weekly—was of more value than countless columns of disingenu-
ous promotion copy could have been. (1974, pp. 265–271)

Aside from that advertiser-as-neighbor philosophy, organiza-

tional structure of community news operations also has played
a role in the more accommodating attitudes community journal-
ists may have toward their advertisers. Community media tend to
 Community Journalism 13

have small and undifferentiated staffs. Many community news-

papers are run by only one or two people (in many cases, the
owners). In such situations, the business aspects of community
journalism benefit from being both flexible and personal, and the
community journalist is faced with wearing many different hats.
If there is a “wall” in many community media, it is a wall within
the journalist herself. In his 1974 textbook Community Journalism:
A Way of Life, small-town editor/publisher Bruce M. Kennedy
described the business side of community journalism this way:

A community newspaper editor’s day is not strictly newspaper-

ing, for he is also a small-town businessman. . . .
[N]o newspaper can continue to publish the news, pictures,
and advertising of a small community unless that newspaper also
shows a profit. The editor brings his talents for journalism, his cre-
ative abilities, to the weekly newspaper; the businessman’s side of
his nature, instinctive or acquired, brings the profit. It is a tribute
to this distinguished profession that the weekly newsman can play
both roles, striking this difficult balance of making a business prof-
itable and a newspaper excellent and not have the two interfere
with each other. (p. 195)

It is important to note that three generations of textbooks about

community journalism—Byerly’s foundational text of 1961, Kennedy’s
text of 1974, and Lauterer’s contemporary text first published in 1995—
include chapters about the business concerns of a community news
product. So do the community-editor memoirs mentioned earlier.
Like the chapters discussing how best to cover local government, how
best to include content reflecting on community life, and how to use
the editorial page to spark public debate on all manner of issues, the
chapters about managing the business aspects of community media
focused largely on the connections between media and their communi-
ties. Hough alluded to that very point in his memoir, recalling when a
larger daily newspaper tried to compete with the Vineyard Gazette:

The acute and direct competition came into our field when a
neighboring daily decided that it would “cover like a friendly
blanket” our towns and many others in order to offer some thou-
sands of “rural and suburban circulation” for a price in the slave
14 FOUNDATIONS OF COMMUNITY JOURNALISM

market of mass advertising. . . . This daily believed that a familiar

formula could be applied, that it was only necessary to print
names, names, names, in order to enjoy circulation and the respect
of readers. . . . The truth was that the traditional formula was idle
and silly. The thing which makes people in small towns read their
papers is news, and they have no interest whatever in names—
even their own—which do not mean something at the time and in
the context of town life. . . .
In the long run the daily’s personal items were so padded
and its general news so garbled that we had little to fear from the
competition. No desk man ever troubled to learn the place names
in our county, and the geography attributed to us was remarkable.
(1974, pp. 267–268)

An important subtext of Hough’s recollection is the issue of scale.

Byerly, Lauterer, and many others have suggested that scale is a pri-
mary delineation of what is community journalism and what is not.
In particular, the word “small” is ubiquitous in the literature: “small-
town,” “small circulation,” “small staffs,” “small radio stations,”
“small newspapers.” The allusion is that community journalism cannot
exist in larger media, and certainly not in national and international
media. Attitudes toward the myth of the small (Is it of little conse-
quence? Is it perhaps more “authentic,” to evoke Walter Benjamin
[1969]?) should be the focus of more intense scholarly consideration.

❖ BEYOND “BIG” VERSUS “SMALL”

Past and continued research into differences between “large” and

“small” news media has been and will continue to be important, but
such studies are not necessarily concerned with community journalism.
The truth is that a reporter on the lead TV news team in a sprawling
city could be much more connected to the community than a mem-
ber of a three-person weekly newspaper operation in a town of a few
thousand people. It may be more difficult for journalists serving large,
pluralistic audiences to have strong connections to their communities,
and it may be quite easy for such connections to be established by a
reporter serving a small, homogeneous audience, but neither that dif-
ficulty nor that ease will alone dictate the strength of the connection.
 Community Journalism 15

Consider this hypothetical situation: When the graduate of a journal-

ism school takes her first reporting job at a hyperlocal news website in
a suburb where she has no personal ties, and then leaves the job after
eight months having neither liked the community nor cared about its
people, it would be difficult to say that she had strong connections to
the community. Likewise, who can really argue that a journalist who
has lived and worked his whole life in a single large metropolis cannot
practice community journalism because he works for the most popular
TV news station in that city?
For scholars in the social-scientific paradigm, such scenarios raise
an interesting question: What is the operationalization of community
journalism? Is it the size of the outlet, the size of the community, the
attitudes of individual members of the community toward the journal-
ist (and vice versa)? Is the fact that a national-politics blogger has only
a few hundred readers all the evidence necessary to say that he is a
community journalist? Organizational and audience size may be a use-
ful metric in the study of community journalism, but it cannot be the
only one.
Perhaps a more useful metric than size is content, specifically con-
tent classified as “community focused.” Traditionally, that has meant
“local news,” but the concept of “local” is too confining in an age when
many communities transcend physical proximity of the members.
There are many examples of community journalism that serves such
scattered collectives. Consider the Small Farmer’s Journal, a quarterly
magazine published in rural Oregon and reaching like-minded read-
ers around the globe, and at this writing entering its fourth decade of
publishing; or the Shambhala Sun, a bimonthly magazine for devotees
of Western style “engaged Buddhism.” An analysis of letters to the
editor published in those two magazines revealed strong rhetoric of
community, as if the magazines themselves served as the nexus of
community, and all attached to it—writers, editors, advertisers, and
subscribers—as members of those distinct communities (Reader &
Moist, 2009). Obviously, such publications have no “local” to serve, but
their content is focused entirely on their communities.
In communities of place, local information has been at the core of
community media, regardless of whether that information is serious
news or trivial gossip, courageous editorials or banal lists of prop-
erty transfers. But it is the presence (perhaps the dominance) of the
trivial and the routine that provide observable clues of community
16 FOUNDATIONS OF COMMUNITY JOURNALISM

connections; such information is rarely found, and certainly never

with any frequency, in the pages or broadcasts of major news media.
Gibbs (1995) suggested that local news is “people-oriented, location-
specific news about such things as who won ribbons at the county fair,
or when the city’s going to fix that big chuckhole on Main Street”
(p. 33). Morton contended that community journalists are “chroniclers
of local minutiae and the concerns of everyday life” (1990, p. 57). To
be sure, serious news—coverage of local government and local courts,
of conflicts between the powerful and the vulnerable, of crime and
tragedy, of scandal and triumph—is also part of the mix. But in com-
munity media, even the serious has a decidedly local focus. Some ana-
lysts have noted that the coverage of news often thought mundane by
big-league journalism standards (zoning board hearings, homecoming
parades, comprehensive listings of even the most trivial police reports)
is just as important, if not more so, to community life than large-scale,
award-winning service projects aimed at revealing unusually large
statewide and national problems (Morton, 1990; Sheppard, 1996).
How that community-focused information is gathered and pro-
cessed is another distinguishing characteristic of community journal-
ism. In community journalism, the audience is often quite involved
in the procedure, with much content being suggested, requested,
or even submitted by people in the community. Hence the typical
publication in community media of check-passing photos, group
shots of kindergarteners, reader-submitted essays and opinions,
and galleries of pictures of family reunions or deer hunters with
their trophies. In that regard, community journalism has long been a
forum for so-called “citizen journalism” and interactive in a very real
sense, even before the Internet came to be. Online communication has
expanded and improved that interactivity, for certain, but it did not
create it.
From a pragmatic standpoint, the small staffs of community media
rely on citizen submissions to supplement what the staff could produce
itself. But in many ways, such deference to what the community sees
as newsworthy is at the core of the concept: community journalism
typically places less value on the norms of the profession at large (as
codified in most trade publications, college textbooks, and journal-
ism school classrooms) than it does on the norms of the individual
communities they serve. Bruce Kennedy, the small-town newspaper
editor, put it this way:
 Community Journalism 17

It’s rewarding to be part of nearly everything involving your

community, the printable as well as the unprintable. It’s flattering
to have your opinions asked for, your counsel sought, whether
you’re really as wise as all that or not. You build many monuments
in [the] newspaper business. Your newspaper and energy leave a
wake of new buildings, successful projects, guidance, and direc-
tion. Helping others, boosting the community, the area, or “the
cause” will become, like the Thursday paper days, endless. . . .
Small-town newspapering is belonging. (1974, pp. 7–8)

❖ CONCLUSION

As a new generation of scholars refocuses on community journalism

as a distinct part of the broader mass communication discipline, it is
important to not only gather past research into a cohesive collection of
studies, but to take that inquiry in new directions that study “connec-
tions” using a variety of methods and theoretical frameworks.
As with most things involving community journalism, however,
that lament also is hardly new. In 1938, John Winchell Riley, Jr., of
Rutgers University wrote in the American Sociological Review:

The typical country weekly, in addition to its personal journalism,

its boiler plate fillers, its articles on extraordinary or exciting local
events, is a series of chatty confidences about the town’s every-
day living. Its few pages are packed with columns headed “Local
Items” or “Personals” or “People We Know.” These columns con-
tain all the miscellany of the community’s ordinary and expected
events: its births, marriages, and deaths; its comings and goings;
its family and club changes; above all, the non-economic, leisure
activities of its members. . . . Yet, the country newspaper, consistent
and detailed register though it may be, has been given very little
consideration as a possible source for sociological research.
Its desirability as a source is indubitable. Obviously such
a paper has two advantages over most other sources available
for the various kinds of community studies: In the first place, it
provides material for the intensive study of trends from an histori-
cal standpoint; and this material is so consistent and repetitive in
nature that, with the employment of proper precautions, it lends
18 FOUNDATIONS OF COMMUNITY JOURNALISM

itself in a number of ways to quantification. In the second place,

the weekly offers the sociological investigator the possibility of
avoiding any marked bias in his selection of material. Convenient
as this source may be, however, its importance may be more
questionable. This depends upon the accuracy of its data, and the
degree to which they actually are consistent over time. Thus any
estimate of its importance must rest upon a broader knowledge of
the nature of the country weekly itself. (pp. 39-40)

Despite the contributions of several important and helpful stud-

ies over the past decades, the field of community journalism remains
largely unexplored, and the depths uncharted. Scholars who are
intensely interested in the role of journalism in communities should
attempt to take up Riley’s challenge, albeit 70-plus years after the fact,
and against many entrenched institutional biases against the “silly
little papers” that dominate the journalism world.

❖ REFERENCES

An, S., & Bergen, L. (2007). Advertiser pressure on daily newspapers. Journal of
Advertising, 36(2), 111–121.
Anderson, R., Dardenne, R., & Killenberg, G. M. (1994). The conversation of jour-
nalism: Conversation, community, and news. Westport, CT: Praeger.
Bagdikian, B. H. (1964, December). Behold the grass-roots press, alas! Harper’s
Magazine, 102–110.
Benjamin, W. (1969). The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction.
In Illuminations: Essays and reflections (pp. 217–251). New York: Schocken
Books.
Byerly, K. R. (1961). Community journalism. Philadelphia: Chilton.
Byers, M. R. (1937, May 29). I want to see the editor. The Saturday Evening Post,
100–105.
Conason, J. (1975, November 8). A press for the people. The Nation, 467–468.
The country newspaper: Symbol of democracy. (1946). The Saturday Evening
Post, 218(47), 160.
Cutler, J. H. (1960). Put it on the front page, please! New York: Ives Washburn.
Cutler, J. H. (1965). Cancel my subscription, please! New York: Ives Washburn.
Gibbs, C. (1995). Big help for small papers. Quill, 83(2), 32–35.
Hough, H. B. (1974). Country editor. Riverside, CT: Chatham.
Kennedy, B. M. (1974). Community journalism: A way of life. Ames, IA: Iowa State
University Press.
 Community Journalism 19

Lauterer, J. (2006). Community journalism: Relentlessly local (3rd ed.). Chapel

Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
Lavrakas, P. J., & Holley, J. K. (1989). Images of daily newspapers in their local
markets. Newspaper Research Journal, 10(3), 51–56.
Morton, J. (1990). Newspapers seeking a sense of community. Washington
Journalism Review, 12(8), 57.
Moss, M., & Appel, A. (2001, July 9). Protecting the product: A special report:
Company’s silence countered safety fears about asbestos. The New York
Times, p. A1.
Reader, B. (2006). Distinctions that matter: Ethical differences at large and
small newspapers. Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly, 83(4),
851–864.
Reader, B., & Moist, K. (2009). Letters as indicators of community values: Two
case studies of alternative magazines. Journalism and Mass Communication
Quarterly, 85(4), 823–840.
Riley, J. W., Jr. (1938). The country weekly as a sociological source. American
Sociological Review, 3(1), 39–46.
Sheppard, J. (1996). The strength of weeklies. American Journalism Review, 18(6),
32–37.
Tichenor, P., Donohue, G., & Olien, C. (1980). Community conflict and the press.
Beverly Hills, CA: Sage.
Tocqueville, A. de. (2004). Democracy in America (A. Goldhammer, Trans.). New
York: Penguin. (Original work published 1835)
Weisman, R. (2007, July 26). Ottaway readers, advertisers cast wary eye on
Dow Jones talks. The Boston Globe, p. D1. Retrieved April 19, 2011, from
http://www.boston.com/ae/media/articles/2007/07/26/ottaway_
readers_advertisers_cast_wary_eye_on_dow_jones_talks/
 Community Journalism
Must Tackle Tough Local Issues ●

Linda Steiner

C ommunity journalism is credited with representing, reinforcing,

and even constructing community. The form speaks to, from,
and about community, presumably bringing people together with an
understanding of their shared frame of reference, and their responsibil-
ity for upholding it. Definitions of small-town/weekly/community
(those terms are typically treated as equivalent) news media imply
several common features, including relentlessly local content, limited
orientation in size and geography, and local, independent ownership.
Howard Ziff’s (1986) distinction between “provincial” and “cosmopol-
itan” newspapers still holds: the former are grounded in local values,
to be criticized only on behalf of other, deeply held communal beliefs.
The latter insist on objectivity and stand above local values.
Nevertheless, both kinds of news organs share an inherent respon-
sibility to gather and report stories of vital interest to citizens, includ-
ing external threats and challenges as well as internal conflicts and
tensions. Moreover, glowing praise of independent community week-
lies often ignores that community newspapers increasingly are units of
chains, edited by careerists without local roots, and written by people
who don’t know one another and rarely meet up at regional offices.
They regularly produce special editions celebrating the “anniversa-
ries” of the locality or newspaper, but often are unable to put contem-
porary problems into historical context. No less driven by bottom-line
considerations than are urban dailies, owners of weeklies rarely spend
money, or risk advertising revenue, to probe local tensions and deep-
seated problems. Morris Janowitz’s 1952 findings are perhaps all too
relevant a half century later: community media foreground social and
personal news, local volunteer associations, municipal services, and
community involvement; they avoid or ignore controversy. Astute
readers may resent all of that. Or perhaps, with their remote-controlled
garage openers and far-flung social networks, readers neither care nor
feel part of the community.
Community journalism too often exploits how “community” is
a “warmly persuasive word . . . never to be used unfavourably,” as

21
22 FOUNDATIONS OF COMMUNITY JOURNALISM

Raymond Williams put it (1983, p. 76). That said, taking community or

community newspapers seriously requires critical examination of both
concepts, specifically by questioning the prevailing notions of commu-
nity undergirding local journalism. Even the “common” roots linking
“communion,” “community,” and “communication,” as James Carey
famously emphasized (1989, p. 18), do not make homogeneity the goal
of community or democratic processes. That is, community spirit, to
the extent it is desired, does not depend on denying interconnections
to issues of the “outside” world, ignoring internal conflict, or excusing
unpleasant realities such as religious bigotry or racism as part of local
culture. If condescension toward community journalism is unwar-
ranted, so is complacency from within community journalism.
Even small towns do and should include diverse people with
different understandings and experiences. People committed to
fellowship must appreciate diversity and make room for plural-
ism and argument. Vigorous intercourse among different people
enriches community. Communities thus need local news institutions
(whether printed, Web-based, or broadcast/cablecast) that engage
citizens in animated, provocative discussions of their heterogeneity
and diversity.
This is no brief advocating scurrilous personal attacks, unethical
half-truths, or exaggerated contentiousness. But community journal-
ists, if they are willing, can inspire critique and even investigation of
local problems. Community journalists can engage people in civic pro-
cesses and enlarge their political presence so they can actively respond
to Carey’s stipulation that community institutions nurture citizens’
moral, political, and intellectual capacities.

❖ REFERENCES

Carey, J. W. (1989). Communication as culture. New York: Routledge.

Janowitz, M. (1952). The community press in an urban setting. Chicago: University
of Chicago Press.
Williams, R. (1983). Keywords: A vocabulary of culture and society. New York:
Oxford University Press.
Ziff, H. M. (1986). Practicing responsible journalism: Cosmopolitan versus
provincial models. In D. Elliott (Ed.), Responsible journalism (pp. 151–166).
Beverly Hills, CA: Sage.
 Community Journalism 23

Linda Steiner is a professor and director of research and doctoral studies at the
University of Maryland’s Philip Merrill College of Journalism. She studies how and
when gender matters in news and newsrooms and how feminist groups use media.
Other research areas include media ethics, journalism history, and public journalism.
Steiner is editor of Critical Studies in Media Communication and serves on six
editorial boards. Her most recent book is Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies
(University of Illinois Press, 2010), coedited with Clifford Christians of the University
of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign.