National and Local News Consumption and Indices of Community Participation in an American Civic-Journalism News Environment

ABSTRACT

This paper readdresses issues of the relationship of news consumption patterns to community participation in the US context, however, it looks not only at local news, but also national news. It tests the relationship of both types of news to the important measures of community conversation (both face-to-face and digitally based), and adds “attitude about community participation” to the equation. National news is surprisingly strongly related to both community conversation and attitude, and both of the latter variables are more predictive of community participation than either of the news consumption measures. The relationships are tested in a large American metropolitan area whose newspaper, operating against current trends away from civic journalism, had been actively practicing such for years before our survey was fielded.

KEYWORDS:

• News consumption
• community participation
• local news
• national news
• civic journalism

Acknowlegements

The authors are grateful of three reviewers for their insightful comments which greatly improved this study. We thank the management of the Florida Times Union for cooperation in identifying zip codes to include, and examples of their civic journalism efforts over the years preceding our study, particularly former editor Frank Denton and former publisher Mark Nusbaum.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Data Availability Statement

The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author, [E.T.], upon reasonable request.

ORCID

Esther Thorson http://orcid.org/0000-0003-4697-1251

Weiyue Chen http://orcid.org/0000-0001-5066-1382

Additional information

Funding

We also thank Reynolds Journalism Institute at the University of Missouri for funding the survey.