BREAKING BOUNDARIES

Abstract

This paper reconceptualises the role of the small “local” newspaper in a new media environment and argues that definitions and concepts currently used to describe and define such publications are becoming increasingly problematic as newspapers shift into both print and online formats. The paper highlights the continued importance of geography for such newspapers at a time when there is wide academic debate on the relevance of territory and boundaries and the impact of time–space compression in a new media world. It argues, however, that a focus on a newspaper’s geographic connection must also acknowledge the increasing boundlessness and openness of the social space in which a newspaper operates. Ultimately this paper suggests the concept of “geo-social” news may be a more appropriate framework for scholars to consider such publications. I draw on the work of geography scholars, and discussions around “space” and “place” to construct the notion of “geo-social” news, highlighting some exemplars of small commercial newsroom practices in Australia, the United Kingdom and Canada and discussions with newspaper editors in Australia to demonstrate the relevance of the “geo-social” concept.

Keywords:

• community
• digital news
• geo-social
• local
• newspapers
• power geometry
• sense of place
• space of flows

Introduction

The World Wide Web and information communication technologies (ICTs) have revolutionised the way individuals communicate with one another. Traditional media outlets, which once dominated the relay of news and information across the globe, have been swept up in this revolution, grappling with ways to accommodate and capitalise on the changing media landscape (Meyer 2004; Franklin 2008; Hirst 2011). Newspapers that were published in print and delivered door to door are now duplicating their products to include online sites, or scrapping their print publications entirely in favour of online platforms. This paper challenges the traditional definitions and concepts associated with small newspapers and begins to reconceptualise their role in a digital world. The type of newspapers I refer to here are those which have a strong historical connection to a specific geographic area(s) and are distinguishable by the titles of their mastheads which pay homage to the geographical locations in which they serve. A snapshot of such newspapers may include, for example, The Ballyclare Gazette, Hebden Bridge Times, Blairgowrie Advertiser, Pocklington Post in the United Kingdom, the Creswell Chronicle and Baker City Herald in Oregon, Whistler Question in Canada and The Maitland Mercury, Warrnambool Standard and Wimmera Mail Times in Australia (see, e.g., http://www.newspapersoc.org.uk/, www.newspapers.com.au, www.usnpl.com for more detailed lists). The number of these newspapers across the Western World is likely to be in the thousands. Such newspapers mostly operate as commercial enterprises rather than not-for-profit publications. The types of newspapers I discuss here are owned by major media companies or private enterprises which employ a range of staff including journalists, editors, managers and salespeople. Their content comprises sections such as news, opinion, sports, classifieds, births, deaths and marriages, and advertisements.

Scholars and industry are yet to agree on a universal definition to describe small commercial newspapers and they are most commonly referred to as “community media” (Lauterer 2006; McManamey 2004; Lowrey, Brozana, and Mackay 2008; Reader and Hatcher 2012; Hurst and Provis 2000), “country newspapers” (Bowd 2009; Kirkpatrick 1995), “rural/regional” (Ewart 1997, 2003; Bowd 2007; Hutchins 2004) or the “local” press (Traue 1997; Oliver and Maney 2000; Bowd 2009, 2007; Buchanan 2009; Franklin 2006). In this paper I will argue that a shift towards the concept of “geo-social” is a more appropriate lens through which to redefine and conceptualise such news outlets in the digital age. The term “geo-social” is beginning to gather momentum in technological circles where it is used to describe mobile locatable devices which can help people identify or connect and coordinate users with local people or events that match their interests, based on their geographic location (Gupta et al. 2007; Farrelly 2011). In discussions about newspapers, I draw on literature regarding geography, space, flows, place and “sense of place” (Castells 1996, 2010; Massey 1994; Couldry 2000; Couldry and Curran 2003 ; Cresswell 2004; Dovey 2010) to define “geo-social” as news outlets that have a solid link to geographic territory while acknowledging the wider social space in which these publications play a role, both in holding an influential position in certain social flows and movements and as a node to the wider global news media network. Whereas geo-social networks emphasise a user’s location in technological circles (Vincente et al. 2011), I suggest “sense of place” helps to conceptualise individuals’ physical, psychological and/or social connections to particular geographic territory without necessarily locating them within these physical spaces. In building the case for “geo-social” news, this paper draws on several exemplars of newsroom practices in Australia, Canada and the United Kingdom and discussions with several online and print newspaper editors working for small commercial newsrooms in Australia which are part of a wider study on the future of these publications.

Shortcomings of “Community” in Mapping Media Geographic Territory

The common features that dominate the literature on commercial newspapers serving small towns and cities are their links to “community” (Lauterer 2006; McManamey 2005; Kirkpatrick 2001; Byerly 1961; Reader and Hatcher 2012) and “local” (Buchanan 2009; Bowd 2007, 2009; Oliver and Meyer 1999; Traue 1997; Franklin 2006), particularly in describing their connection to geographic territory (see, e.g., Rosenberry 2011). American scholar Jock Lauterer, for example, who authored the widely cited book Community Journalism, defines “community newspapers” as largely commercial ventures with circulations below 50,000 and published daily, weekly, tri-weekly or bi-weekly which “serve people who live together in a distinct geographical space with a clear local-first emphasis on news, features sport and advertising” (2006, 1).

Lauterer argues the term “community newspaper” has been the choice phrase among American researchers in this area since the 1960s when it was coined to replace the phrase “hometown” newspaper. Other scholars offer “vague and uncritical depictions” of the community news publication but often situate them in a geographic community and producing content relevant to a particular area (Lowrey, Brozana, and Mackay 2008; Rosenberry 2012).

Using the notion of “community” to describe and define the geographic territory a newspaper serves and the people within it presents some immediate challenges in the digital age. The very use of the term community is considered problematic in wider academic discussion (Massey 1994; Lee and Newby 1983; Cohen 1985) and it is associated with much ambiguity and debate across a range of disciplines. Scholars have been particularly dismissive of community and its link to geography, and argue that while individuals may engage in similar communication channels or reside in a similar geographic area, it does not necessarily make them part of the same community (Foster 1996; Lee and Newby 1983). Foster, for example, suggests that although communication serves as the basis of community, it must not be equated with it, while Lee and Newby contend that just because people live close to one another does not necessarily mean that they have much to do with each other:

There may be little interaction between neighbours. Rather it is the nature of the relationships between people and the social networks of which they are a part that is often seen as one of the more significant aspects of “community”. (1983, 57)

Increasingly, media and journalism scholars are pointing out that in using the term community we can no longer assume that readers of such newspapers necessarily reside in the same locale (Reader and Hatcher 2012; Howley 2005; Franklin 2006). Franklin, for example, highlights that the emergence of the internet means that people can read an online newspaper from anywhere on earth, providing they have the necessary equipment such as a computer and internet connection (Franklin 2006). Reader and Hatcher (2012, 3) argues the concept of community journalism has expanded well beyond the small-town newspaper and that many researchers consider the concept to be new and emerging. Community media, for example, is now used to describe and theorise alternative, independent underground and radical media, particularly public broadcasting, blogging and internet sites (Forde 1999, 2011; Rennie 2006; Ndlela 2011; Hoynes 2011; Howley 2011; Couldry and Dreyer 2007; Howley 2005; Halleck 2002). Here scholars focus on media serving communities that are united by participation, activity or points of view (see, e.g., Webb, Schirato, and Danaher 2002; Eckert 2000), rather than geographic territory. Howley defines “community media” as an alternative to profit-oriented media which serves the diverse tastes and interests of ethnic, racial and cultural minorities that are often ignored, silenced or otherwise misrepresented by mainstream media (2011, 2). Given that alternative, not-for-profit media and the small commercial newspaper serve somewhat distinctive roles and functions, it is appropriate to build a more distinguishable framework in which to understand the latter in a changing media environment. As “community” is a somewhat slippery term, using it to describe and define newspapers with links to geographic territory clouds the importance of geography to the traditional newspaper in this changing media world. I do not discount community entirely, however, and later in this paper I will situate the small newspaper as playing a powerful role in constructing the idea of community as part of the media’s influential position in social flows and movements (Anderson 1983; Couldry and Curran 2003; Entman 2010; Hall 1973; Schudson 1995, Silverstone 2007).

A Word on the Local

The use of the term “local” appears to have escaped much of the controversy and debate that has surrounded its “community” bedfellow. But scholars who have used the term “local” to describe small commercial newspapers have also been criticised for their lack of analysis of the concept (Pauly and Eckert 2002, 311). Cheng’s (2005) review of the term “local” in media literature found the term to be generally associated with geographic territory, but there was a strong stream of literature that treated “local” as people oriented; that is they refer to people rather than geographic territory (Entman 1990; Disayawattana 1993). Franklin (2006) highlights the difficulties of using “local” to describe small newspapers in a changing media environment. He suggests local newspapers are “local” in name only and the town or city emblazoned on the newspaper’s masthead may be one of the few remaining local features of the paper. He cites ownership of local press ceasing to be local, newspaper offices moving from the town centre as part of cost-saving measures, production shifting to centralised locations, and the fact that journalists are less likely to be “local” and spend their entire working life on a particular paper “since career development in a newspaper group requires ambitious journalists to move around the country to gain experience in different journalistic roles within the group” (Franklin 2006, xxi).

Putting the “Geo” in Geo-social

This paper then, seeks to highlight the importance of geography as a specific characteristic of small commercial newspapers without depending on more ambiguous terms such as “community” and “local”, which traditionally have been used to describe the geographic space in which such newspapers serve. For the purposes of this discussion, geography is considered interchangeable with location or the “absolute point in space with specific coordinates and measurable distances from other locations” (Cresswell 2009, 1), notably a town, city or region. This should be distinguished from the idea of “place” which Nick Couldry considers to be locations in space that have significance for human agents (Couldry 2000, 24), a point to which I shall return.

The content of small newspapers continues to relate to the happenings within a particular geographic location or those connected in some way to it (Hurst and Provis 2000; Lauterer 2006; Mersey 2009). To illustrate this, the online home pages of the 10 newspapers highlighted in the Introduction, on 26 April 2012, all featured stories relevant to the geographic area represented in their mastheads as their top five articles. The home page of the Cresswell Chronicle in Oregon (www.thecreswellchronicle.com), for example, included stories reporting on the town’s municipal offices being in potential violation of state law due to a lack of financial audits and a story about a high school in the district hosting a concert to raise money for its music programme. The importance of geography is reflected in a set of journalistic news values recognised as perhaps the strongest expressions of how journalists shape the news across mainstream and local media outlets. “Proximity” or events which are geographically close to readers (Mencher 2010) is considered among a series of important news factors which overlap and are shared across news organisations (Galtunge and Ruge 1981). Noelle-Neumann (1993) says there is a shared set of assumptions that all news people have on criteria for acceptance of stories by audiences. Evensen (2008) lists these as conflict, consequence, prominence, timeliness, proximity, and human interest. Shoemaker et al. (2007) extend on the work of Hicks and Gordon (1974) and Morton and Warren (1992), to suggest proximity has both physical and psychological elements which will be of use in understanding small commercial newspaper practices in the local–global nexus and which may also be extended to illustrate the small newspaper’s role and readers’ connection to place.

Research on newspapers highlights a continuing synergy between geography and news in a changing media landscape. Lowrey, Brozana, and Mackay, in a review of the literature on community newspapers, found that 40 per cent of studies focus on the relationship between the news media and a small town or neighbourhood (2008, 282). Thomas argues Welsh newspapers that reflect people’s local city/town/village are still the most appealing in Wales (2006, 51), while Mersey’s survey of adults in Maricopa County Arizona (2009) suggests a geographic connection remains important to local newspapers in a multi-media world. Her study found that geography continued to matter to citizens and to journalism and respondents were more attached to their geographic communities than those online. She argues this reinforces “the importance of journalists covering geography in the first place” and indicates the challenge to local newspapers in light of dwindling circulation figures is to stay geographically relevant (357). My own research on small newsroom practices in Australia points to an increasing emphasis on geography to provide signposts to stories for online readers. An interview with an online editor in a small newsroom which forms part of one of the country’s largest media organisations, Fairfax Media Limited (http://www.fxj.com.au), highlights this. She said sub-editors across the network were being encouraged to ensure names of towns and cities were included in headlines to make stories easier for readers to search for on the internet:

I have to fix up headlines to make them “Google worthy”—if there is a fire in a small town and the headline in the print edition says “HOUSE FIRE KILLS TWO PEOPLE” I now make sure I get the name of the town in the headline that appears online. People seem to be more likely to “google” a place name … if you type into Google the words “HOUSE FIRE”, you might get 100,000 different things pop up but if you are more specific in your headline you have got more chance of people finding their way to [the newspaper’s] website. (interview, 12 March 2012)

In a new media context, the emergence of the terms “hyper-local” and “local-local” also emphasise a reinvigorated interest in geography as media industry and entrepreneurs experiment with new business models in the changing technological landscape (Edmonds 2007; Palser 2010; Glaser 2010). Mark Glaser defines hyperlocal as “information relevant to small communities or neighbourhoods that has been overlooked by traditional news outlets such as newspapers, radio and television news” (2010). The term is largely used to describe small independent media operations, “which offer stories and minutiae of a particular neighbourhood, street, postcode or interest group” (Shaw 2007), but the idea has also attracted interest from large media operations, particularly in the United States.

There is, however, wide debate on the relevance of geography and spatial boundaries to forms of media as the speed of communication technology increases (see, e.g., Meyrowitz 1985; Lash and Urry 1994; Castells 2009) which warrants some attention here as I do not assume, for example, as Lauterer (2006) has suggested, that a newspaper serves only those people who live together within a distinct geographical space. While the relationship to geography is a distinctive characteristic of small commercial newspapers, in the digital age it becomes increasingly important to understand the role such outlets play in a local–global context and for this it is worthwhile wading into the complex and contentious debate around “flows”, “spaces” and “places” (Couldry 2000; Castells 2010; Massey 1994; Cresswell 2004; Appadurai 1996a; Falkheimer and Jansson 2006). Falkheimer and Jansson (2006) suggest, for example, that there is a spatial turn in media studies and boundaries between the imaginary, symbolic and material spaces are becoming negotiable and volatile. Such concepts underpin the idea of the “social” in “geo-social” news as they provide scope to acknowledge the connection a small newspaper has to a geographic territory whilst considering the degree of openness and boundlessness of the social space in which such newspapers operate.

The Role of “Space of Flows” and “Place” to Geo-social News

Much academic attention in postmodern times has focused on the order of movement and communication across flows and spaces (McLuhan and Fiore 1967; McLuhan and Powers 1989; McLuhan, Fiore, and Agel 2001; Baudrillard 1983; Castells 2010; Appadurai 1996a) or “time–space compression” (Harvey 1989). Simply put, such scholarship highlights how technologies from transport to email, internet and media broadcasting have created a geographical stretching of social relations (Massey 1994). “Space” has been defined as everything from a meaningless realm (Creswell 2004) to something that is not a tangible reality from the point of view of natural science but a construct of experience (Castells 2010; Massey 1994). Manuel Castells (1996) in his conceptualised network society suggests space is society and distinguishes between the “space of flows” and “space of places”. These notions provide the theoretical building blocks in which to understand the “geo-social” nature of the twenty-first-century newspaper in its print and online forms.

To Castells, modern cities are constructed around a “space of flows” where geographic locations can be conceptualised as part of a local–global network defined by important information and interaction. Castells considers “space of flows” a spatial logic which determines the expressions of society (Hutchins 2004) and is associated with functionality, power, politics and wealth. Castells argues:

The “space of flows” is the material support of simultaneous social practices communicated at a distance [without geographical contiguity]. This involves the production, transmission and processing of flows of information. It also relies on the development of localities as nodes of these communication networks and the connectivity of activities located in these nodes by fast transportation networks operated by information flows. (2010, xxxii)

A limitation to the space of flows in this discussion is that while Castells sees the media as playing an increasingly important role in all social action, he does not consider this to be one of power—rather he considers the media a door through which the contestants for power pass en route to battle (Couldry and Curran 2003, 3). Couldry and Curran, however, contend direct control over media production is an increasingly central dimension of power in contemporary societies which depend increasingly on the fast circulation of information and images. Geographer Doreen Massey (1994, 149–50) refers to the “power geometry” of time–space compression to describe how different social groups and different individuals are placed in distinct ways in relation to flows and interconnections. Massey, among others, argues the news media are among those who hold influential positions in social flows and movement and can use time–space compression to their advantage (Massey 1994; Morley 2006; Couldry 2000).

The “space of flows”, “nodes” and the importance of media power in the digital space provide for a more in-depth understanding of how the small commercial newspaper holds an influential position in certain social flows and movements and serves as a node to the wider global news media network. Hutchins (2004) draws on Castells to suggest the viability of small news outlets is in part due to the fact that they act as mediators and interpreters of global networks of power and flows. He suggests that within a newsroom, professionals are needed to sift and edit state, national and global news to localise stories, explain their relevance to readers and to make sense of the cascading streams of news produced daily (Hutchins 2004). The concepts of proximity and scope afforded by Shoemaker et al. (2007) are useful in understanding how this might be operationalised within small newsrooms. They contend proximity is a characteristic of an event tied to physical referents, whereas scope is the cognitive variable that represents journalists’ judgements of an event’s psychological closeness to the audience and helps to explain the subsequent emphasis that newspapers give to certain events and information. They suggest that unlike geographic closeness, which is immutable, journalists can enhance an event’s psychological closeness and overcome the negative force of long physical distance by emphasising or interpreting the local, state, national or international angle (232–4). The small Australian commercial newspaper, the Warrnambool Standard, and its coverage of the Eyjafjallajokokull volcanic eruption in 2010, thousands of miles away, highlights the congruency of proximity and scope in placing the global in context of the local. The newspaper published articles about one of its journalists being unable to return from Ireland because of the ash in the wake of the eruption (Alexander 2010) and also ran stories discussing the importance of the region’s own volcanic history to tourism and whether the region’s only dormant volcano could erupt again in the future (Collins 2010). Two years later in 2012, the newspaper reported that a puff of Icelandic ash had made its way to Warrnambool when two Icelanders visited the city with a container of ash to show at a Rotarian conference (Sinnott 2012).

Castells (2010) suggests the internet has transformed the work process of newspapers and the mass media at large where newspapers have become internally networked organisations globally connected to networks of information on the internet. Couldry contends that accelerated flows of information and people always involve “nodes” through which those flows pass: “what matters, economically and socially is where you are in relation to those nodes” (2000, 27). This presents significant advantages to the small commercial newspaper linked to larger media networks in digital space as the power of network flows becomes increasingly more important (Lim 2003, 284). Fairfax Media Limited, which owns newspapers, internet sites and radio stations across Australia, provides a working example of such. According to one editor of a small newspaper within this network, being part of Fairfax with its local–global connections has particular advantages for smaller publications in the digital space. In an interview with the author he says:

The digital network that we are part of is a national network. If we put up a “must have” news story on our website … it will be picked up by the national network and that’s when it might go international in the blink of an eye. That’s how news traffic flow works. Within minutes you’ve got attention from around the world. Online, we have the unassailable infrastructure of the entire Fairfax media machine behind [us] and that is going to become more and more apparent as it becomes more of a digital product than a publishable product. (interview, 20 March 2012)

Small newspapers then, are not only filtering information from global and national network flows but they also send out, through their internally linked news networks, information which at times must be deciphered in a global context. The editor, whose comments appear above, summarises the advantages of this:

In the digital space, an international audience doesn’t care about where the story breaks and they don’t have to live in our town to get access to the newspaper and that story—if it’s “click bait”, that is, if the story is sexy enough it doesn’t matter where the story originates from, proximity is not important to international news sites if there are other news values, particularly if it is novel or unusual. (interview, 20 March 2012)

The editor’s reference to “click bait” highlights the importance of news values much broader than proximity and scope (see Shoemaker et al. 2007) when news travels from the local to the global in somewhat chaotic but patterned ways. The editor gave the example of a story the newspaper published about a live shark being dumped on the front door step of the newspaper office. He said within minutes the story was picked up by the Fairfax news network and disseminated to news websites across the country, attracting interest from national television, radio and international news media, including the BBC (2009) and the China Daily (2009), all of which focused on the unusual nature of the story to share with international audiences. Most importantly, the editor said the story translated to unprecedented interest in the newspaper’s own website from audiences across the globe.

On Place and “Sense of Place”

Discussions about space and flows may position the small commercial newspaper in a local–global information nexus, but it does not assist in understanding the motives or connections of those who regularly read small newspapers in either print or digital formats. In conceptualising “geo-social” news, an examination of “place” and “sense of place” are beneficial here. Castells argues that the “space of flows” does not permeate down to the whole realm of human experience in the network society as the overwhelming majority of people live in places, and so they perceive their space as “place-based”, within the boundaries of physical contiguity (2010, 453). Giddens also connects “place” to locality—“it refers to the physical settings of social activity as situated geographically” (1990). Massey, however, strongly resists the idea that boundaries, such as geographic territory, define “place”. Instead she considers place to be a construct of social relations which are formed “out of a particular constellation of social relations meeting and weaving together at a particular locus” (1994, 154). This paper adopts the view of scholars such as Creswell (2004) and Dovey (2010) who offer a compromise on the issue of geographic boundaries to suggest “place” to be a mix of the social and the spatial and a concept that cannot be reduced to either.

Massey’s discussion on “progressive sense of place” (1994), however, is useful in understanding “geo-social” news in the context of place, space, flows and power. Buchanan, for example, draws inspiration from Massey in her discussion about the North American newspaper. She argues the small newspaper is an example of generating a “sense of place” among readers as it brings together historical, regional, national and international perspectives in its content by “placing” readers in the context of the world (Buchanan 2009, 64). This symbolic or communicative dimension of “place” shares some synergies with the rich vein of literature that discusses the media’s ability to shape and define reality as a potent form of social power (Couldry and Curran 2003; cf. Entman 2010; Hall 1973; Silverstone 2007), and where terms such as “community” and the “local” may be best understood in regards to the “geo-social” construct. As an important node within the space of flows, the small commercial newspaper can be understood to hold a degree of symbolic power in constructing the idea of “community” and the “local” among those connected to such nodes. Anderson (1983), for example, argues that society has become so large and complex that people can no longer be personally familiar with it, so instead they rely on the news media as their window on the world. Michael Schudson says the media carry a great deal of symbolic freight in regional identity, “more than they know”. They help to “establish in the imagination of people a psychologically potent entity—‘a community’ that can be located nowhere on the ground” (1995, 15), while Howley argues that the cultural expression produced by media provides a distinctive lens to explore how local populations understand and make sense of place in a globalised world (2011, 129).

Importantly, “sense of place” also offers scope to consider the more individualistic motivations and choices of those who read small newspapers. Buchanan defines “sense of place” as one’s identification with a place engendered by living in it (2009, 66), However, she makes reference to the work of Eyles and Butz which is more nuanced because they emphasise that one’s sense of place or affiliation with a particular location can have social, emotional or economic foundations. This ranges from one’s social ties, family “roots” and nostalgic connections to those who view it instrumentally based on a means to an end such as goods, services and opportunities (Eyles 1985; Butz and Eyles 1997). As the editor of a small Australian newspaper commented:

Who is our audience? It’s a difficult question really and we are still guessing. There are the usual suspects—the people who live here, but … increasingly there are many more readers who don’t live here, but they either most certainly once lived here, they still know someone who lives here … or they want to come and live or work here. (interview, 27 February 2012)

Newspapers serving geographic areas that are popular tourist destinations further emphasise this point. The Whistler Question in Canada serves a geographic region with a permanent population of about 10,000 residents but the area is also home to a popular ski resort which attracts almost two million visitors each year. The newspaper says that because of the complex nature of the population it has had to carefully design content to include readers from “all categories … offering news, sport, activities and events as well as regular entertainment/visitor/activity sections ‘where to go’, ‘what to do’, ‘where to eat’” (Whistler Question 2012). This demonstrates that a small newspaper not only “places” readers and their locality in the context of the world (Buchanan 2009; Hutchins 2004), but also acknowledges that one’s connection or identification with a small commercial newspaper and the geographic region in which it exists varies from individual to individual. Readers do not necessarily need to reside within the “place” to be motivated to read such publications. Importantly, a “sense of place” differs from the more collective, cohesive notion of “community” and does not assume that readers all have shared values, points of view or common interests merely because they reside in a particular geographic space or have some connection to it. As Massey reinforces, “place” and “community” are rarely coterminous:

[there] has been a persistent identification of “place” with “community”. Yet this is a misidentification. One the one hand, communities can exist without being in the same place—from networks of friends with like interests, to major religious, ethnic or political communities. On the other hand, the instances of places housing single “communities” in the sense of coherent social groups are probably—and, I would argue, have for long been—quite rare. Moreover, even where they do exist this in no way implies a single sense of place. For people occupy different positions within any community. (1994, 153)

The helpful differentiation between the physical and psychological elements of proximity as a news value for journalism, of Shoemaker et al. (2007), is useful in understanding small newspapers’ contribution to “sense of place”. While, the physical component of proximity is evidenced in news stories which relate to happenings within a particular geographic location or those connected in some way to it, the psychological element provides not only an understanding of how such newspapers place international events in a local context for their readers, but it highlights the news media’s symbolic, cognitive role in shaping a “sense of place”, “community” and “local” for its regular readers.

Conclusion

Scholars have suggested that the role of the “newspaper” needs to be reconceptualised with some posing the question “when does a newspaper stop being a newspaper” when its format moves from print into online arenas (Franklin 2008; Hirst 2011). The shift towards “geo-social” news begins with a view of merging the role traditional newspapers play across print and online platforms. The concept not only acknowledges geography as an important characteristic of such publications but it points to an examination of the wider social spaces in which a small newspaper operates and the constellation of social relations in which individuals come to identify with the “place(s)” such newspapers cover. Small newspapers, then, should be served well by mastheads that act as signposts to their geographic identity in an increasingly online world. “Geo-social” news does not dismiss the powerful role such newspapers play in constructing the idea of community and the local among readers—“geo-social” news can, for example, instil a sense of “local” identity through notices about rites of passage such as births, marriages and graduations (Buchanan 2009; Appadurai 1996b)—but it avoids using community and local to describe geographic space and the people who live there. Most importantly, it widens the theoretical net in which to understand such commercial news publications in the local–global nexus, the increasing emphasis on flows and nodes of information and the changing nature of audiences and advertisers for such publications in the digital age. It is an invitation to begin reconceptualising how we consider the newspaper of the twenty-first century, rather than relying on popular definitions of old that must be carefully reviewed and considered in this changing media world.

Acknowledgement

The author would like to thank Professor Ian Richards, University of South Australia, for his helpful advice in compiling this paper.