Civic and Citizen Journalism 2007 Abstracts
Civic and Citizen Journalism Interest Group
Civic Respondents: A Content Analysis of Sources Quoted in Newspaper Coverage of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita • Maria Fontenot, Kris Boyle and Amanda Gallagher, Texas Tech • This paper examined how civic journalism impacts newspaper coverage by analyzing the media coverage of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita in five newspapers published in some of the affected areas. Specifically, this study focused on newspaper story sources – official v. non-official. The findings suggested larger newspapers used more official sources. Additionally, official sources were more common in the official stories while non-official sources were more common when the story focused on citizen-oriented topics.
Northfield.org: Weaving The Threads Of Community • Victoria Hildebrandt, Wisconsin-Madison • This case study examines the history, editorial philosophy, and operation of the citizen journalism website Norhtfield.org and how it strives to engage the citizens of Northfield, MN in a meaningful sharing of civic information and dialogue in order “to create an electronic commons that strengthens the fabric of community.”
The Communitarian Ombudsman: A Modest Proposal for True Citizen Journalism • Rick Kenney, Central Florida • Forty years after a “Department of Internal Criticism” for newspapers was first proposed, the debate over newspaper ombudsmen, or public editors, remains at a seemingly irreconcilable impasse. Despite a flurry of appointments in the early 1970s, there are only about fifty ombudsmen at U.S. newspapers today. The greatest failure of ombudsmanship is that it doesn’t go far enough in giving voice and visibility to the ombudsman’s work, including interacting with community.
Political Efficacy and Campaign News Attention as Catalysts of Discursive Democracy: The Case of the 2004 U.S. Presidential Election • Hsiang-Ann Liao, Queensborough Community College, CUNY • Based on Kim et al.’s model of deliberative democracy, a contextual model of discursive democracy is proposed in this study, examining the circumstances under which political conversation took place during the 2004 presidential election. It is argued that models of discursive democracy should be domain specific, incorporating situational factors that prompt people to talk about politics. Political efficacy and campaign news attention were examined as catalysts to the contextual model.
Content Differences for an Online Newspaper Site and its Citizen Journalism Publication • Jeremy Littau, Missouri • An analysis of a newspaper Web site and its citizen journalism Web site examined stories on the front page for each site. Content analysis found that there were significant differences in topics, with the front page of the traditional news site consisting of more traditional “hard news” content while the citizen journalism was more focused on lifestyle or community news. Citizen journalism stories also were more likely to be opinionated than the traditional site.
Citizen Journalism and Community Building: Predictive Measures for Social Capital Generation • Jeremy Littau, Esther Thorson and Clyde Bentley, Missouri • A survey (N=102) of citizen journalism readers explored the relations between motivations for reading (content and process gratifications), personal attitudes (interpersonal trust and life contentment), and three measures of community participation (civic engagement, interpersonal trust, life contentment. The gratifications and personal attitudes were highly predictive of community participation. Only a few differences were observed between citizens who contributed journalism and those who only read it.
Apathy: 1. Civic engagement: 0: A Case Study of Civic Journalism on Campus • David Loomis, Indiana University of Pennsylvania and Jennifer Easton, Pittsburgh • This case study of a civic-journalism project published in a campus newspaper examines the effects of a yearlong effort to increase civic engagement at a university where apathy, as measured by voting participation in student elections, has been increasing. The qualitative study involves a natural experiment, culminating in a student-government election, combined with focus-group methods to gauge effects of the project based in part on surveys of student-readers to guide news coverage.
Desiderata Across the Decades: Conversations About a Civic-Minded Model of Newspapering • Ronald Rodgers, Florida • This paper examines (1) how similar this discussion about alternative and more civic-minded models of newspapering is to a national conversation around a century ago, and (2) the irony that the impulse for that discussion a hundred years ago was not the uncongealing of a chain-ownership business model, but the threat to journalistic conduct, news content, and the press’s role and responsibility to society by the growing corporate and commercialized press.
The Future of Journalism and How to Teach It • Lou Rutigliano, Texas at Austin • In the fall of 2006 and again in the spring of 2007, the author taught a course as a reaction to changes occurring in the field, particularly news producers’ attempts to encourage the news audience to create content. This phenomenon has created an opportunity for civic and critical educators, whose interests are more closely aligned with the needs of professionals than in the past. Both seek greater journalistic engagement with the public.
Public Journalism Conflated with Propaganda: Newspapers’ Resistance to Social Action Communications • Burton St. John, Old Dominion • This piece analyzes how newspapers, facing problems of relevancy, have explored public journalism as a way to reconnect with audiences, and rejected it as propagandistic. The confluence of two factors – journalism’s professionalized vigilance against co-option and its difficulty differentiating social action communications from propaganda – led to many in the press attacking public journalism as propagandistic. The rise of professionalism after World War I and press cynicism about co-option is reviewed.
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