When Local is National

Abstract

This study explicates meanings of local journalism when what was traditionally treated as a local issue for local audiences—Miami’s rising seas—was thrust onto a national stage by national press and for wider audiences. Through a textual analysis of local news stories over a period of three years, this paper highlights how local journalists demarcated local and national journalistic boundaries, using national news to legitimize previous local coverage of sea-level rise, as news sources in local environmental journalism that strengthened presentations by local press as expertise on the issue, ultimately positioning national journalists as “outsiders.”

KEYWORDS:

• boundary intersection
• climate change
• journalistic interpretive community
• local news
• national news
• proximity
• geography

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The authors thank the reviewers for their comments on this article and Jeffrey Pierre for his assistance in collecting and organizing data for this study.

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. For more on efforts related to this study, see eyesontherise.org.

2. Harlem was quoted in nearly all the national media articles discussed in this research.

3. As a point of transparency, authors of this study were colleagues of Harlem.