Geo-Social Journalism

Abstract

This paper begins by problematizing the use of “community” to define and theorize small commercial media outlets that have geography as their primary characteristic—particularly hyper local and small traditional newspapers connected to larger media organizations in digital space. We then extend the concept of “geo-social news” to outline “geo-social journalism” as a specific form of news work currently grouped under the “community media” umbrella. Geo-social is a concept for exploring how small commercial newspapers change as media technologies evolve. It offers a framework for understanding how these news outlets and audiences connect via the notion of “sense of place”. It can also be used as a lens for theorizing their role in social flows and movements and as nodes in the global media network. The practice of “geo-social journalism”, meanwhile, has two dimensions. Firstly, journalists must engage with the land (environment/agriculture/industry), populations, histories and cultures of the places they report news. Secondly, it involves connections and understandings of the shifting constellations of global and national systems, issues and relationships of the digital era. Finally, this paper argues that by its very nature, “geo-social journalism” eschews theoretical universalizing and instead demands fine-grained analyses of the specific dynamic of each “geo-social” publication, its setting and the practices which shape it and it in turn shapes.

KEYWORDS:

• community media
• digital media
• geo-social
• information flow
• local news newspapers
• place
• sense of place
• space

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

We thank the two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments for improving this paper.

Notes

1. The types of newspapers we discuss here operate as commercial enterprises rather than not-for-profit publications. They are owned by major media companies or private enterprises that employ a range of staff including journalists, editors, managers and salespeople. Their content comprises sections such as news, opinion, sports, classifieds, births, deaths and marriages, and advertisements.

2. Interviews and focus groups conducted with readers and journalists across three small newspapers in Australia in 2012.

3. For the purposes of this discussion, geography is considered interchangeable with location or the “absolute point in space with specific coordinates and measurable distances from other locations” (Cresswell 2009, 1) notably a town, city or region.

4. Bourdieu outlined four types of capital: economic, cultural (embodied and/or objectified in the form of cultural goods such as art work, and institutionalized such as academic qualifications), social, and symbolic (honour, prestige) (Bourdieu 1986). He also referred to the concept of “habitus” (or the structure of dispositions, tastes, practical know-how, second sense) that equips social actors in a particular field. (Bourdieu 1977).