In the US, traditional newspapers have undergone a period of contraction, with many papers shutting down entirely. This has been especially hard on local news, because even those newspapers that survive are likely to be consolidated with former competitors, shrinking the total number of outlets and the reporters that once fed them. At the same time, the growth of the Internet and increasing availability of tools for content production has fueled hopes that citizen journalism—a combination of blogs and news-focused sites run by members of the community they cover—might pick up some of the slack. A survey of citizen journalism sites, however, suggests that we're a long way from replacing what has been lost, and the legacy news sites have gone a long way towards adopting current technology and practices.
Although a number of national publications appear to be weathering the collapse of print, local news is often handled poorly, or not at all, by these papers. That means that individuals looking for news about local politics or events are forced to turn to local news organizations, which generally have been hit badly by the changing media landscape. Significant cities like Seattle and Denver have seen dailies shut down entirely, and many cities that once supported several papers have seen that number shrink dramatically.
Regardless of the precise dynamics, there are clearly fewer reporters at work, and many of the ones out of a job presumably had sufficient knowledge of their local community to provide topical and relevant information to their communities.
Since the economics of print are unlikely to revert back to those of the medium's heyday, many of the people who have tracked local news have raised the prospect that some form of citizen journalism, either in the form of blogs or organized volunteer news sites, might take up the slack. One of the references cited by the authors of the new survey even suggested that, given the interactive nature of many blog sites, they might actually promote public debate in a way that more traditional media could not.
To get a sense of how well new media was substituting for the old, the authors chose a random assortment of 45 cities of various sizes, and threw in Chicago to ensure that at least one of the three largest markets was represented. Within those markets, they identified over 363 online journalism sites, which spanned the range from ad-free blogs to what they call "legacy" sites, those run by traditional news outlets. In addition, they scanned the academic literature on modern journalism, and identified 60 sites that were well regarded as providing good or innovative approaches to covering local issues.
With the sites identified, the authors gathered several stories from each, and analyzed them in terms of their content. This included both the article itself as well as the associated content, including discussions, multimedia content, links to external sources, and so on.
By many criteria, legacy sites are doing pretty well. They're more likely to provide information on the site's mission and a statement on how they handle the privacy of their users than either the "superior" or randomly selected citizen journalism sites. They are roughly as likely to provide RSS feeds for their content, and provide content like podcasts and polls. Legacy sites also do pretty well when it comes to some of the features promised for citizen journalism. They're more likely to enable their readers to upload information about community activities and letters to the editors, and often enable the users to host video or audio content.
A quarter of the sites legacy sites, however, still haven't embraced the practice of linking to external information, and the rate of linking fell behind those of the citizen journalism sites. The sites identified as superior displayed an odd pattern, with the majority having either very few or high numbers (>30) of links. The authors suspect that this pattern is, in part, a matter of source availability. Legacy sites are more likely to rely on direct communication with individuals, rather than external information, for the material in their stories. Both legacy and the superior sites tended to have more sources per story than their peers.
There was a bit of an odd breakdown when it comes to story topics. Local arts and culture were very well represented among the citizen news sites, while legacy media seemed to have a fondness for crime. The sites identified as providing superior coverage seemed to have an abundance of government and economic stories, which may explain how they were identified as superior in the first place.
Summing up, the authors paint a fairly grim picture of the state of local news. "Despite hopes for a thriving genre of citizen journalism as at least a partial replacement for legacy journalism, those hopes have not been realized," they conclude. "In content and coverage, CitJ [citizen journalism] lags behind legacy web sites on a variety of dimensions considered indicative of news quality."
That may be the case, but there are a couple of other ways to view the survey results. For starters, it appears that fans of traditional media should celebrate the results: legacy sites have identified many of the promising participatory features of citizen journalism, and embraced them. Discussions, content hosting, and online interactivity all feature prominently on the legacy sites now.
The authors' judgment may also be overly harsh when it comes to citizen journalism. Even if a given site is limited by a lack of features or resources, savvy users can easily recognize the limitations and use the site accordingly, supplementing it with other sources as needed. A collection of citizens' sites with diverse skill sets may do better at compensating for the lack of local coverage than any individual site.
Finally, a critical factor was outside the scope of this study: does a given site provide compelling coverage? All the best practices in the world won't do the public much good if it never reads the material.
Newspaper Research Journal, 2010. DOI: unavailable. Vol. 31 No. 2.