Introduction

“Community journalism” has become its own genre of scholarship as efforts have been made to define the term and aggregate what counts and does not count (Hume 2012; Janowitz 1952; Reader and Hatcher 2012). Anything about the weeklies and other non-daily newspapers count (Karolevitz 1985). The 1990s movement for public journalism certainly entailed aspects of community journalism—or at least, those projects that stayed true to the citizen-oriented tenets (Carey 1999; Rosen 1999a, 1999b). Journalism that abides by (American) community values such as equality, continuity, and boosterism should be included under the label, too, scholars have said (Griffith 1989; Hine 1980; Hume 2012). Much scholarship on the community press connects the term to news about a particular group of residents or a geographic area (Hume 2012; Janowitz 1952). In his 1952 book The Community Press in an Urban Setting, Janowitz called the audiences of early urban community press homogenous, delimited in nature with discernible boundaries and dimensions (8). But that was 1952.

Much has changed in the ensuing half century, and that change needs to be documented and analyzed for its implications on civic life and the communities of the world—both traditional and nontraditional. Thus, this special issue of Journalism Practice seeks not to collect yet another impressive grouping of research that studies community in relation to newswork, as Reader and Hatcher (2012) published in their Foundations of Community Journalism. Rather, this special issue advances the conversation about the area of study by inviting manuscripts that explore community and newswork evolutions as new digital technologies are being used to vastly restructure the news industry and journalism practice in particular. In other words, all eight of the articles in this special issue are threaded by the theme of change—change in community, change in the press, change in audiences, and other evolutions and transitions that have come along with the adoption of new digital technologies. This introductory essay—and indeed, all of the articles that make up this edition—adopts the thesis statement that while the techniques and circumstances around traditionally local newspapers have morphed with globalization and digital technologies, community journalism's fundamental emphasis on the citizen and on community remains intact.

First and foremost, the volume must select a definition of the term community journalism in the modern era. In this issue, we conceptualize “community journalism” by a “nearness to people” standard (as Byerly did in 1961). This means journalists practicing from a locus of community with the primary focus on the citizens who make up that community. Previously this nearness manifested in physical closeness whereby “reporters, editors and photographers are citizen-journalists, intimately involving themselves in the welfare of the place, in the civic life of their towns, participating as an active member of the very community they are covering” (Lauterer 2006, xiv). Thus, in the early days of community journalism, “community” meant a town and “community journalism” referred to the information that was exchanged within that town's geographic borders.

But how does this look in a digital age, when the small town is global and its residents often transient and disconnected or when “community” becomes virtual? As Franklin (2006) stated in his edited volume: “In the new millennium, local newspapers are local in name only; the town or city emblazoned on the newspaper's masthead may be one of the few remaining local features of the paper,” pointing out that multinational media organizations, newsrooms' cost-driven moves to the suburbs, transient and commuting journalists, and regional administrative and editorial consolidations disconnect many newspapers from their once local-centric work environments. Combine these evolutions with the internet, citizen interactivity, ubiquitous news and information, globalization, and mobile technologies and a revolution of epic proportions has hit local news outlets that have taken as their mission to produce content appealing to a small, geographically centered audience interested in stories about the local Chamber of Commerce and the graduation list.

This Journalism Practice special issue explores this intersection of community, news, and digital technologies at a time of intense evolutionary change affecting not just our news modalities, but also our very understandings of what is community, what our role in the lives of our neighbors is, what obligations remain to our geographic locale, whether virtual connections are as meaningful as physical-world ones, and how journalism is supposed to inform us about all of this. At one time, changes in media technologies led to a reiteration of community journalism as a geographic-based phenomenon (Fairchild 2001; Hume 2012). Some have urged a renewal of local publications, radio, and public television in order to counter monolithic and generic broadcasting by monolithic corporations, preserve local flavor, customs, heritage and values, and otherwise remember where we live and who we are (Atton and Hamilton 2008; Bosch 2006; Hume 2012; Fuller 1994; Lauterer 2006). But as Friedland (2012) wrote, “smaller communities are not islands” (152). They never have been and certainly cannot call themselves such in the global, networked universe we live in today. Furthermore, Friedland makes the case for a more virtual consideration of community journalism, writing, “Whereas before the limits of communication made it necessary to live with at least some ‘unlike-others‘ in the same place, now it is possible for people to opt out of proximate communities and focus on niche communities on the Internet” (151).

If we understand that new technologies have reconstituted the very notions of not only “community” and “journalism” but also such fundamentals as what constitutes “nearness” and “locality,” then we must investigate how community-based news producers are adapting as well as citizen-interested information contributors. Our limiting definition of the genre must adapt. Reader (2012) emphasized that for community journalists to be successful today, they would nurture a particular connection to their audiences. That is, journalists of the locale should report and write thinking about the citizens, as opposed to the place.

Of course, physical location (spatial closeness) continues to be an important anchoring of communal feeling, and the research in this special issue demonstrates how community journalists can call on digital opportunities to enhance those ties—both physical and virtual. Today we must consider for a moment that community-based journalism should emphasize the “local” in all of us: that is, the idea that we can be among community as long as we are connected in some way to others. This particular notion entails an emphasis not on geography (or perhaps, not only on geography), but instead on human connectivity. Within these connections—virtual or real-world—journalists can nurture and expand what it means to belong to a home. This is the working definition of “community journalism” for this special issue.

Dimensions of Community Journalism Today

The essays in this issue consider how these dimensions of traditional community journalism production are undergoing tremendous change. Tait (2006) suggested, in Franklin's edited volume Local Journalism and Local Media, that the ubiquitous reporting devices—cell phones—carried by nearly every citizen with the capability to transmit data means incredible possibilities for regional news outlets, but also national and international ones (he was talking specifically about television, but we can extrapolate his findings for all news safely). One significant trend in community journalism is the dramatic increase in the number of news non-profit centers that have assumed a “hyperlocal” or special-interest focus such as MinnPost or the Texas Tribune as well as the entrepreneurial journalist whose missions harken back to the village weekly but whose platforms are thoroughly digital, multimodal, and interactive (Remez 2012). Scholars have only just begun exploring the existence and viability of these new business models, and little in the way of scholarship exists yet for their effect on traditional community journalism (Konieczna and Robinson, 2013). We can certainly say, however, that the ways in which digital technologies are being implemented—from the citizen journalist to the journalist leading Facebook Groups to the non-profit—have meant jockeying for authority in local domains, raising the question: Who is authorized to tell the day's local stories, and how are those stories helping to enact community today?

This special issue's slate of theoretical essays and empirical articles attacks that question from multivariate perspectives and offers an in-depth exploration of the emerging facets of the new community journalism midst media revolution. We launch the compilation with a grounding theoretical essay by Kristy Hess and Lisa Waller of Deakin University in Australia who reorient the discussion of community journalism for the digital age by theorizing about how social networking dimensions allow for new communal connections. Drawing from conceptualizations such as Castells' network society and Bourdieu's theory on field-based research, Hess and Waller posit that a new “geo-social journalism” is governing community newswork today, a model that attempts to reconcile what at first glance appears to be a fracturing of community. In practicing a geo-social perspective, journalists and media researchers must thoroughly understand the place of the news organization, of course, but they need to do this while also recognizing the shifting global constellations and networked circumstances of the community's members. Thus, this piece implies that scholars should reframe the conversation of “fractured” community that Putnam's (2001) Bowling Alone or Turkle's (2012) Alone Together lament by considering how networks of relationships have restructured our sense of what it is to be in a community. That is, the very notion of place can transcend geographic boundaries because of transient populations and virtual connections even as we continue to feel psychologically tied to certain physical communities.

Katy Culver of the University of Wisconsin-Madison reminds us, however, that even within these digitized, networked environments, community news organizations continue to hold an intrinsic commitment to their physical locales—lest citizens in small towns be forgotten as the world's boundaries appear to blend. She uses a recent Wisconsin broadband controversy that would have changed the governance of broadband from public to private and significantly limited digital access to some small towns in the rural state to reiterate the social responsibility of community journalism in the digital age. Unfortunately her analysis of editorials about this damaging, commercial move revealed little attention paid at all, and she concluded, “In failing to sufficiently cover the idea of high-speed connectivity and urge its availability for all citizens, most news organizations abandoned their social responsibility to demand that the critical information needs of their communities be met.” Her theoretical essay performs double duty by also pointing out that community journalists have an obligation to monitor these digital changes on behalf of community, so that citizens—particularly in rural towns—will not be left behind in the media revolution that is upon us.

John Hatcher and Emily Haavik at the University of Minnesota-Duluth interviewed community journalists throughout Norway and demonstrated a strong activist mentality at these local papers as well as a fierce protectionism of the small communities that they cover. These scholars argued that these journalists' very identity mirrored the identity of the physical community, with many of the reporters recounting generational existence in the tiny towns. This meant, for this study in this country, a lingering claim of community journalism whose top priority is nurturing that physical community (as opposed to watchdogging that community) remained despite any media revolution.

Michael Karlsson of Karlstad University and Kristoffer Holt of Linnæus University in Sweden turned their attention to the citizens who can now be involved in community journalism, focusing on the entire country of Sweden. They took as their starting point the utopian promise that citizens can now be the new community journalists but discovered few contributors in these realms produced content connected to any communal spirit—at least for the sites they looked at in Sweden. Rather, citizens felt empowered to write about their own special interests such as sports or entertainment, relied on official and corporate sources to write about harder news, and demonstrated a lack of grassroots deliberation in general. All in all, theirs is a fairly scathing indictment about the future of community journalism if we must rely on citizens to carry forth the torch for news and information.

Similarly, Brian Ekdale of the University of Iowa noted that Kenyan citizens—though motivated to contribute in a meaningful way to a broad community dialogue and help improve the locale—encountered nearly intractable challenges to that digital empowerment. Drawing from ethnographic fieldwork involving two non-governmental organizations in the Nairobi slum of Kibera that were training Africans to report on their neighborhoods, Ekdale found that cultural, technological, and historical hindrances forestalled the communal connections these well meaning non-profits were trying to create via citizen journalism with new-media technologies.

Researching the largest community-based projects to be established on a national scale, Burton St. John III of Old Dominion University, Kirsten Johnson of Elizabethtown College, and Seunghan Nah of the University of Kentucky analyzed Patch.com news stories. They found that despite Patch's overt mission to be community journalism—indeed, the organization cannot even be found in most large cities, but mainly in the suburbs—the stories tended to reflect a less community-centric ethos and mirrored more mainstream, legacy templates with few “regular” people within their narratives. “Some editors had a difficult time finding stories that could display how their Patch sites were closely linked to their communities,” read one damning sentence in this analysis.

Hans Meyer and Clay Carey of Ohio University surveyed both journalists and online news users throughout the United States to explore how journalists might better use social media and other digital platforms to revolutionize community—physical or otherwise—in virtual spaces. Their research unveiled several key ingredients to creating a vibrant cyberplace where people can participate and feel a sense of belonging: interaction with content producers themselves, immediate and engaging responsiveness, and direct connections. Similarly, theorizing about this shift in audience relationship, Seth Lewis of the University of Minnesota, Avery Holton of the University of Utah, and Mark Coddington from the University of Texas at Austin conclude the special issue by introducing the concept of reciprocal journalism: a way of envisioning how greater reciprocity between journalists and audiences, facilitated by digital media, might lead to better journalism in the community context. Both essays argue that community journalists can use such approaches both to reconnect citizens to the physical locality of the community and to recreate that community in virtual realms.

Conclusions

The major contribution of this issue centers on this emerging definition of how we think about our relationship to community as a place of home. What does it mean to serve the information needs of a community in a digitized social world where so many of our ties—weak and strong—are at least partially maintained in virtual worlds? Hess and Waller suggest that “flows” within both digital spaces and geographic places are important to foreground any conversation about what is community today. They argue that a “sense of place” can be articulated not only in geographically based stories, but also within the digital networks that radiate out from this core physicality. This has very real implications for community journalism, according to Hess and Waller, who suggest that small-town journalists continue to privilege the local at the same time as they acknowledge their audience might be far flung. For example, Hatcher and Haavik find that news organizations in Norway are sending their newspapers overseas to those people who feel some kind of a connection to the geographic place but can no longer be present. Indeed, digital worlds were used to “revalorize” the geographic place of the Norwegian communities (rather than explode the notion of physical community). And we consider how Ekdale found that community activists could distribute the works of their trained citizen journalists only external to the community, to a more global audience while technological and cultural structures impeded true local community consumption. One must ponder the implications when local community seems nearer to those far away than to the ones living in the geographic place. Is such communal knowledge as meaningful? The answer: it depends. The research in this special issue does indicate local community was not invigorated through citizen journalists armed with digital tools—a point made particularly strenuously in Karlsson and Holt's article about the Swedish citizen journalism sites.

Let us turn to the theme of virtual community raised in some of these articles (Lewis et al.; Meyer and Carey). Meyer and Carey's research shows how essential journalists are to nurturing community using digital technologies. They write:

Online participation that rises to a level that fosters democratic ideals and constructive community building requires commitment and motivation on the user's end, to be sure. However, structural features and attitudes on the news producer's end can also influence the amount of participation that occurs in online forums at the end of news articles.

Historically, community journalists produced information from within their smaller towns for those residents, as part of the fabric of these places. Extending that conception to today's world, we note that today's community journalist must complete that communicative loop, using virtual realms such as commenting spaces or social media platforms to ensure the connection has been maintained and that it is re-affiliated continuously online as well as in print. From our review of the community journalism literature, we know that one of the fundamental tenets is that the reporters become one with the community, attending local events as citizens first and then as reporters and serving as an adviser and advocate. As more and more of our daily lives (including relationship maintenance) move online (Rainie and Wellman 2012), the physical community itself has grown tentacles in virtual realms—in forums, on Facebook pages and other socially mediated spaces. Thus, the community journalist's job just expanded. Cyperspace becomes an extension of the community's borders that the community journalist must be aware of and engage with. Furthermore, as Culver noted, the community journalist now must also monitor the health of those new virtual borders for the local citizen. Culver demonstrated how essential these entities are to small-town community members' connection to these globalized networks. News organizations must advocate on behalf of citizens in all of their worlds—physical locale, virtual places, and other fountains of connection—to ensure the participation and engagement of these people within this new digital world.

But the research of this issue also reveals a new (or perhaps, renewed) responsibility on the part of the citizen in community journalism: it takes more than one person or entity to interact, to connect, to create a sense of community belonging. As Lewis and colleagues discuss, it takes reciprocal forms of (information) sharing for community formation and perpetuation. According to some research in this special issue (Karlsson and Holt; Lewis et al.; Meyer and Carey), citizens are forming expectations and developing standards for online community news, particularly interactive spaces. Furthermore, this special issue's articles together seem to point to an evolving and increasing role for citizens as community advocates within journalistic acts. This all points to what Hatcher and Haavik recognize as Castells' (2010, 421) concept of resistance identities, “which retrench in communal heavens, and refuse to be flushed away by global flows and radical individualism”.

Thus, by returning to our core understanding of community journalism as centered around the citizen and journalist (that “citizen-journalist” Lauterer labeled newsworkers), the media revolution at hand can reinvigorate feelings of belonging and connectedness to home. This research implies that any news work must incorporate citizens into that mission of connectivity—perhaps even sharing the platform for production—and not as mere audience members (Hess and Waller; Meyer et al.). And this issue suggests that community members—journalists or not—broaden their understanding of the borders of their home places. Virtual spaces offer an extension of the community, whose boundaries can sometimes be more defined by the feelings one has within its embrace rather than by strictly geographic lines. So even if journalists cannot reach the locals (such as in Africa), digital technologies can help relocate either fractured community or disconnected community into a new, less problematic space, allowing for a re-affiliation of connectedness. That said, this requires commitment on the part of both journalists and citizens to preserve those connections, utilize those technologies, and exercise those fundamental principles of community journalism that go back more than half a century.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Sue Robinson thanks editor Bob Franklin as well as all the contributors and the reviewers involved in this “special” special issue.