News Organizations and Social Cohesion in Small, Large, and Global-Local Communities

ABSTRACT

This study assesses the influence of community “structural pluralism” on local news media reporting, in the context of global networks. Adopting and adapting the community structural pluralism approach, we compare news content across low pluralism (small communities), high pluralism (urban communities), and “global-local” pluralism (urban and globally connected communities). Specifically, we examine how local news media’s role in aiding community social cohesion is shaped variably by the different arrangements of power across these communities. A content analysis of newspapers of record from 12 communities with different pluralism levels offers mixed findings. Results indicate that traditional structural pluralism theory helps explain the ways that news media reporting encourages or ignores social cohesion, a finding that suggests expanded range for this theory; however, there is little support for the idea that news reporting in global urban environments is shaped differently. There is stronger evidence that the global nature of these cities and their news outlets do not diminish attention to the local area, which is an indicant of benefits for local citizens and which runs counter to common concerns about local news. Evidence of routinized coverage also exists, as a broad range of news outlets typify coverage areas in similar ways.

Notes

¹ The Global Cities Index was started by the journal Foreign Policy, in conjunction with the consulting firm A.T. Kearny and the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. The City Innovation Index is produced by data research firm 2ThinkNow, based in Melbourne, and has been cited in World Economic Forum reports and by major news outlets (e.g., Reuters, Business Insider, Sydney Morning Herald).

² Bureau of Transportation Statistics, U.S. Department of Transportation, https://www.transtats.bts.gov/Data_Elements.aspx?Data=2.

³ Global–local cities averaged 13 Fortune 500 companies, 93,879 flights; high-pluralism cities: 4 companies, 23,810 flights; low-pluralism communities: 0 companies, 0 international airports.

⁴ This check led to keyword changes, including the following: The term “parad*” was changed to “parade” because of wrong contexts like “paradise”. The term “crim*” was changed to “crime” because of incorrect contexts such as “discriminate”. The term “migrat*” was deleted because of high numbers of animal migration stories.

⁵ Social cohesion variables had extreme outliers in less than 5% of the stories for each variable. These were changed to the lowest acceptable outlier value for each variable, which was identified by multiplying the interquartile range of each of the four variables by a multiplier of 3, a liberal standard (Hoaglin & Iglewicz, 1987).

⁶ Originally, we included names of subcommunities, but resulting quantitative differences appeared to be an artifact of community complexity rather than editorial commitment to local place. We therefore counted only the names of the cities themselves (Atlanta, Kerrville, etc.).

⁷ The percentage of residents in poverty was only marginally higher for high-pluralism communities (19.26%) than for global–local (17.74%) and low-pluralism communities (15.30%). Annual rent as a percentage of median income is roughly the same for global–local (24.03%) and high-pluralism (24.95%) communities; both are slightly higher than low-pluralism communities (20.77%). The percentage of population that is foreign born was higher for global–local communities (20.9%) than for high-pluralism communities (16.2%) and low-pluralism communities (8.0%) (U.S. Census Bureau, 2016–2018).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Bumsoo Kim

Bumsoo Kim is an assistant professor at Joongbu University in South Korea. His research interests include incivility, network analysis, and local communication ecology. 

Wilson Lowrey

Wilson Lowrey is a professor of journalism at the University of Alabama. He studies the sociology of news production.

Nicholas Buzzelli

Nicholas Buzzelli is a Communication and Information Sciences doctoral candidate at the University of Alabama. His research examines the impact that digital media has on the business and news production norms of legacy sports journalism.

William Heath

Will Heath is an instructor of mass media at University of Alabama at Birmingham. He studies how community and institutional factors affect the production of investigative journalism in student media.