Imagining the City

Abstract

In recent years, local journalism as well as social cohesion have faced disruptions and discontinuities. While local journalism is challenged by dwindling readership, media concentration, and economic crisis, social cohesion in cities is dealing with social fragmentation, gentrification, and the increasing inflow of migrants. At the same time, the concepts are interrelated, as perceptions of belonging, identity, or community are heavily mediatized: local media provide the informational backbone of what people know about social life in their city. In our study, we operationalize cohesion as a multidimensional concept and discuss the results from a standardized content analysis of about 1300 articles in seven local newspapers from three German cities. We find remarkably similar images of social cohesion across cities. However, while social cohesion is similarly reported across cities, we found wide variation across newspaper types. Depending on whether readers prefer local newspapers, weekly advertisers or tabloids, they are presented with different images of their local society.

KEYWORDS:

• Germany
• local journalism
• social cohesion
• standardized content analysis
• urban communication

Notes

1 We refer to community as a “geographically limited entity” (Mahrt 2008, 233) which forms an administrative unit and has formative power for people's lifeworlds in the sense of sharing a communicative infrastructure, e.g. through various forms of media targeting this specific entity. This is less demanding than the understanding of Gumpert and Drucker (2008, 200), who define a “city as ‘community’—derived from the Latin communitas, referring to a unified body of individuals, of people interacting together, of people with a common interest living together within a larger society”.

2 This understanding of connectedness differs from the use of the term in the context of social media studies. Connectedness in this study refers to the quality and strength of actual and imagined vertical relations between citizens and the state, and does not require a technical link between two actors.

3 Note that the Bildzeitung and advertising papers neither publish letters to the editor nor obituaries. In local dailies, obituaries were not published within the local sections of the paper. Letters to the editor were coded in local dailies if they were published in the local section.

4 Trust in other people is so sparsely represented that we refrain from drawing conclusions for this dimension.

5 Following Putnam (1995, 665), the mere development of local newspapers' readership might serve as an indicator for trust among citizens, indicating decreasing levels of trust in all three cities.

Additional information

Funding

This study was supported by VHW—Bundesverband für Wohnen und Stadtentwicklung e.V., Berlin, Germany.