Journalistic Networks and the Diffusion of Local News: The Brief, Happy News Life of the “Francisville Four”

Abstract

Through a combination of network ethnography and more traditional, qualitative newsroom analysis, this article undertakes a step-by-step analysis of the circulation of a particular set of news facts—those relating to the eviction and arrest of a group of homeowners in Philadelphia during a single week in June 2008, a time period in which the story of the arrests emerged, exploded, and then quickly faded away. The article discusses some of the larger explanatory factors that might have contributed to the particular pattern of news diffusion described here, as well as the degree to which the factors observed might be generalizable across other cases. The article adds local nuance to Benkler's (2006) description of information circulation in the networked public sphere, pointing to a pattern of iterative pyramiding in which key Web sites positioned within highly particular communities of interest act as bridges to larger, more diffused digital communities. The article also argues that news movement in the particular incident discussed can be characterized by an unusual combination of fact-entrepreneurship and a process of categorical misrecognition in which the circulation dynamics of the networked news ecosystem are leveraged by institutional and quasi-institutional communicative actors to advance particular occupational and professional goals, all the while misrecognizing both the identity and goals of the other nodes in the Philadelphia media sphere. Overall, the article serves as a preliminary attempt to outline the changing architecture of local journalism ecologies during a period of rapid news industry.

Keywords:

• media sociology
• newswork
• social movements
• public sphere
• network analysis

Notes

1. Over the course of this article, coverage of the Francisville Four by local TV can be characterized as the “dog that didn't bark.” Local TV outlets did not pick the Francisville incident up as a story. I briefly discuss why this might have been later in the article.

2. In this article, my attribution policy is as follows: All individuals are either identified by pseudonyms or are treated anonymously, unless I am discussing their authorship of stories (news reports, blogposts, etc.) in which they are identified and that are in the public domain. For example, the author of a private e-mail would be anonymous, as would an editor discussing general news policy, and a journalist discussing work published under his or her own byline would be identified by name.

3. A pseudonym.

4. A pseudonym.