front cover of Community-Centered Journalism
Community-Centered Journalism
Engaging People, Exploring Solutions, and Building Trust
Andrea Wenzel
University of Illinois Press, 2020
Contemporary journalism faces a crisis of trust that threatens the institution and may imperil democracy itself. Critics and experts see a renewed commitment to local journalism as one solution. But a lasting restoration of public trust requires a different kind of local journalism than is often imagined, one that engages with and shares power among all sectors of a community.

Andrea Wenzel models new practices of community-centered journalism that build trust across boundaries of politics, race, and class, and prioritize solutions while engaging the full range of local stakeholders. Informed by case studies from rural, suburban, and urban settings, Wenzel's blueprint reshapes journalism norms and creates vigorous storytelling networks between all parts of a community. Envisioning a portable, rather than scalable, process, Wenzel proposes a community-centered journalism that, once implemented, will strengthen lines of local communication, reinvigorate civic participation, and forge a trusting partnership between media and the people they cover.

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front cover of Metro Dailies in the Age of Multimedia Journalism
Metro Dailies in the Age of Multimedia Journalism
Mary Lou Nemanic
Temple University Press, 2020

The death of the daily newspaper in the internet age has been predicted for decades. While print newspapers are struggling from drops in advertising and circulation, their survival has been based on original reporting. Instead of a death knell, metro dailies are experiencing an identity crisis—a clash between traditional print journalism’s formality and detail and digital journalism’s informality and brevity.  

In Metro Dailies in the Age of Multimedia Journalism, Mary Lou Nemanic provides in-depth case studies of five mid-size city newspapers to show how these publications are adapting to the transition from print-only to multiplatform content delivery—and how newsroom practices are evolving to address this change. She considers the successes when owners allow journalists to manage their newspapers—to ensure production of quality journalism under the protection of newspaper guilds—as well as how layoffs and resource cutbacks have jeopardized quality standards.

Arguing for an integrated approach in which print and online reporting are considered complementary and visual journalism is emphasized across platforms, Nemanic suggests that there is a future for the endangered daily metro newspaper.

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front cover of The News Untold
The News Untold
Community Journalism and the Failure to Confront Poverty in Appalachia
Michael Clay Carey
West Virginia University Press, 2017
Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication Tankard Book Award winner
Weatherford Award winner, nonfiction


The News Untold offers an important new perspective on media narratives about poverty in Appalachia. It focuses on how small-town reporters and editors in some of the region’s poorest communities decide what aspects of poverty are news, how their audiences interpret those decisions, and how those two related processes help shape broader understandings of economic need and local social responsibility. Focusing on patterns of both media creation and consumption, The News Untold shows how a lack of constructive news coverage of economic need can make it harder for the poor to voice their concerns.
 
Critical and inclusive news coverage of poverty at the local level, Michael Clay Carey writes, can help communities start to look past old stereotypes and attitudes and encourage solutions that incorporate broader sets of community voices. Such an effort will require journalists and community leaders to reexamine some of the professional traditions and social views that often shape what news looks like in small towns. 
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front cover of The Wired City
The Wired City
Reimagining Journalism and Civic Life in the Post-Newspaper Age
Dan Kennedy
University of Massachusetts Press, 2013
In The Wired City, Dan Kennedy tells the story of the New Haven Independent, a nonprofit community website in Connecticut that is at the leading edge of reinventing local journalism. Through close attention to city government, schools, and neighborhoods, and through an ongoing conversation with its readers, the Independent's small staff of journalists has created a promising model of how to provide members of the public with the information they need in a self-governing society.

Although the Independent is the principal subject of The Wired City, Kennedy examines a number of other online news projects as well, including nonprofit organizations such as Voiceof San Diego and the Connecticut Mirror and for-profit ventures such as the Batavian, Baristanet, and CT News Junkie. Where legacy media such as major city newspapers are cutting back on coverage, entrepreneurs are now moving in to fill at least some of the vacuum.

The Wired City includes the perspectives of journalists, activists, and civic leaders who are actively re-envisioning how journalism can be meaningful in a hyperconnected age of abundant news sources. Kennedy provides deeper context by analyzing the decline of the newspaper industry in recent years and, in the case of those sites choosing such a path, the uneasy relationship between nonprofit status and the First Amendment.

At a time of pessimism over the future of journalism, The Wired City offers hope. What Kennedy documents is not the death of journalism but rather the uncertain and sometimes painful early stages of rebirth.
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