LOCAL NEWS
“News” is often defined as information that has one or more
of these basic attributes: it is timely; it has social importance; it involves prominent people or institutions; it has
broad impact; it is unusual in generally interesting ways;
and it has proximity to the audience. Of all those characteristics, when it comes to “the local,” it is the latter—nearness
to the audience—that trumps all. Consider: A small-town
newspaper would put a story about the local Spelling Bee
on the front page while omitting entirely news about political strife in an African nation, or would publish multiple
front-page stories about the search for a new high school
principal when no other news outlet in the world would
even be interested. Some news outlets at the turn of the
twenty-first century were entirely devoted to “proximity”
news. Examples include weekly newspapers (and some dailies), “city magazines” or regional magazines, local radio
stations, and city-focused web sites.
“Local news” can take many different forms, and the
attributes of that information can vary widely from medium
to medium and from market to market. But in general, local
news is information published by a news outlet that would
be of interest only to people in a distinct and relatively small
geographic region—that is, a neighborhood, a city, a county,
a school district, or a loosely aligned region. Although local
news is a significant part of regional television and radio
newscasts, as well as regional magazines, newspapers by
far generate the greatest amount of local news coverage in
America.
Local news often can be divided into categories, or
“beats,” which facilitate routine coverage. Among the most
common local news beats are “cops and courts,” or routine
coverage of crime and punishment; “local government,” or
coverage of the deliberations and decisions of municipal,
county, and regional government bodies; “schools,” or coverage of the doings of educational institutions; “business,”
coverage of the local economy; and “local sports,” with
emphasis on scholastic and youth leagues. Most news outlets also have general assignment reporters, or “G.A.’s,” who
focus on “breaking local news,” such as traffic accidents,
structure fires, natural disasters, and public appearances by
celebrities. Local news includes many so-called “features,”
generally manifest in coverage of the social activities of
a community—festivals, fairs, fundraising events, school
graduations, and the like—or profiles of community residents with interesting anecdotes or activities.
The forms of local news also vary considerably. Many
newspapers publish what some journalists call “micronews,”
or simple listings of information, such as deed transfers;
marriages and divorces; bowling scores; school lunch
menus; calendars of local events; and, of course, notices
of the milestones of life: birth announcements, honor-roll
listings, school graduations, marriage engagements, wedding announcements, anniversaries, promotions and retirements, and death notices. “Local briefs” are short articles
that describe noteworthy events or developments, such as
fatal vehicle accidents, announcements by local government bodies, upcoming community events, and notable
accomplishments of local people. Full-length articles can
range from coverage of routine government activity (i.e.,
city council meetings, public-works hearings, audits of
government financial records) to hard-hitting investigative
work—in fact, from 1985 to 2005, thirteen of the twentythree reports that won the Pulitzer Prize for investigative
reporting were local news stories, mostly about corruption
at local institutions.
Although generally producing fewer and less-detailed
local-news stories, broadcast news outlets nonetheless do
provide a substantial amount of local news—although critics and researchers alike have noted that broadcast local
news, particularly TV news, is much more focused on accidents, disasters, and serious crime than on routine or mundane community information. However, broadcast outlets
are the most common sources for “live” information such as
local weather forecasts, current traffic conditions, vote-tallies on election nights, and high-school football scores on
game nights. Local and regional TV and radio stations also
are the primary providers of severe-weather warnings and
related information—for example, in the rural regions of
the northern states, overnight snowstorms invariably cause
children and parents to tune in to radio or TV stations early
the next morning to see if the schools will be delayed or
closed for the day. Many awards for broadcast journalism
excellence—including the Emmy Awards—are given for
in-depth local news coverage.
Historically, local news always has been a part of the
American news media. Several examples could be found
in the only edition of the 1690 proto-newspaper Publick
Occurrences, Both Forreign and Domestick. After an
introduction justifying the need for the Boston newspaper,
the editor begins the accounting of news by discussing the
quality of the local corn crop raised by “the Christianized
Indians” and reporting about a “very Tragical Accident” in
which a widower hanged himself “in the Cow-House” using
“a Rope, which they had used to tye their Calves withal….”
Later items focus on outbreaks of illness in the region, conflagrations in Boston, developments in the war against the
French near Quebec, and the comings and goings of various
sea vessels. Years later, the first true American newspaper,
the Boston News-Letter published in 1704, also included
quite a bit of local news: the arrival of ships, obituaries of local people, summaries of sermons given in local
churches, and like sundries. A focus on local crime and
violence was later a hallmark of Benjamin Day’s New York
Sun and other penny-papers of the mid-nineteenth century.
In fact, the emphasis of local news coverage in American
media is often attributed to the penny press—as historian
Michael Schudson wrote in Discovering the News, “for the
first time, [the press] printed reports from the police, from
the courts, from the streets, and from private households.”
By the late-nineteenth century, when cities were on the rise
and the American public became increasingly urban, newspapers committed considerable resources into local news
coverage, particularly coverage of local crime and corruption. In the twentieth century, radio’s audio-only delivery
became a significant carrier of local news during working hours and “drive time.” As television stations became
more numerous in the mid-twentieth century, many stations
committed more resources to local news teams, and many
adopted promotional slogans that capitalized on their localnews focus, slogans such as “We’re your hometown news
team” and “Live. Local. Latebreaking,”
Local news coverage was more than just a journalistic
consideration—it also figured prominently in the business
practices of news companies. Historian Phyllis Kaniss, in
her book Making Local News, argued that the emphasis
on local news that developed during the penny press era
was tied to urbanization. As cities grew in size, it became
more difficult for residents to get local news via gossip and
word-of-mouth, so they were willing to buy such information via newspapers. And as the nineteenth century progressed, newspaper publishers with a vested interest in the
cohesion of “the city” used local news coverage to create a
sense of “community” among the increasingly diverse and
fragmented urban population. With the rise of broadcast
news media in the mid-to-late twentieth century, newspapers increasingly turned to local news coverage as a way to
compete for the public’s attention and for advertising dollars. Later, detailed local news coverage became the primary focus of suburban newspapers as large metropolitan
newspapers provided less coverage of routine government
action and of micronews, for which the public demonstrated
considerable interest.
One journalistic practice to come out of that public interest was “localizing,” by which local news outlets reported
on local aspects of state, national, and international news.
Common examples “localizing” included stories about
local government projects that are to be funded by state
or federal budgets, or stories about local residents who are
implicated in national or international news stories (e.g.,
victims of plane crashes, soldiers killed in military actions,
athletes competing in national or international competitions). In fact, “localizing” is such a dominant practice
in American news media that many times it is done even
when national or international developments are unlikely to
affect the community. For example, when the U.S. government announces plans to close military bases, news outlets
in military communities that would be unaffected by the
cuts would run stories about how the federal action will not
affect the community.
The public’s desire for local information did not seem
to abate in the early twenty-first century. An extensive survey of the newspaper industry in 2001 by the Readership
Institute of the Media Management Center at Northwestern University found that “Intensely local, people-centered
news” ranked “at the top of the list of content items with
the greatest potential to increase overall readership of the
newspaper.”
Although the public seems to have had a strong interest
in local news, attitudes about local news among journalists
and journalism scholars is quite mixed, and has led to many
professional disagreements. Among journalists, the more
routine aspects of local news coverage are often viewed
with boredom and sometimes even contempt. Many journalists find little professional satisfaction in covering school
board meetings and county fairs or doing profiles of local
people who grow extraordinarily large vegetables. Coverage of daily police reports, Little League Baseball games.
and the like often fall to interns and entry-level reporters
rather than veteran journalists. Journalism educators essentially ghettoize local news by focusing on “big time” journalism as positive examples of “good journalism”—such
as the coverage of huge news events by major news outlets
such as CNN, The New York Times, and Newsweek—and
then point to “the small-town papers” for negative examples, such as sloppy editing, emphasis on “trivial” matters,
and a lack of “hard hitting” news. Similarly, role models
for aspiring reporters were usually nationally recognized
journalists who rarely did local news coverage. Media critics and scholars also helped to undermine the importance
of local news, since so many of them lamented that the
working media’s emphasis on arguably trivial local news
left little space for national and international news. Moreover, journalism scholars often focused their research on
the activities of the “marquis names” of journalism—that
is, the major national news outlets. And while local news
coverage was often recognized by high-profile journalism
awards, much of that recognition went to relatively large
news organizations that covered extraordinary events,
rather than for extraordinary coverage of relatively banal
events by mid-sized or small-market newspapers and news
stations. For example, the Pulitzer Prize for “breaking
news reporting” was usually awarded for local coverage of
events on the scale of the Columbine High School massacre
in suburban Denver in 1999 (for which the award went to
the Denver Post), the federal raid to remove Cuban refugee
Elian Gonzalez from his Miami relatives in 2000 (for which
the award went to the Miami Herald), and the attacks on the
World Trade Center on September 11, 2001 (for which the
award went to the Wall Street Journal).
Yet many journalism professionals and scholars also
championed local news and news outlets that emphasized
local coverage. In particular, a number of American journalists embraced what came to be called “community journalism,” or journalism that was unabashedly and zealously committed to local news coverage. “Community journalism” was most often seen as the bailiwick of relatively small
(and often rural) news outlets, such as suburban weekly
newspapers, small-town daily newspapers, rural radio stations, and regional television news stations based in small
cities. Journalism educator Ken Byerly, author of the 1961
textbook called Community Journalism, is generally credited with coining the term, which he perhaps best described
as the notion that “A dogfight on Main Street is more important than a revolution in Bulgaria.” According to the Editor & Publisher Yearbook, an annual listing of the world’s
newspapers, about 95 percent of U.S. newspapers have circulations of less than fifty thousand and as such were considered “community newspapers.” Those newspapers made
up the bulk of the membership in most state press associations, but also of some national and international journalism groups such as the National Newspaper Association
and the International Society of Weekly Newspaper Editors. Many high-profile professional organizations often ran
special local-news training sessions for community media
at regional and national conventions. College courses in
“community journalism” were offered at several journalism
schools in America, and a handful of universities created
special programs to focus on “community journalism” education and research, such as the Huck Boyd National Center
for Community Media at Kansas State University, the Carolina Community Media Project at the University of North
Carolina-Chapel Hill, and the Institute for Rural Journalism
and Community Issues based at the University of Kentucky.
And in 2004, a group of journalism educators (including
this author) formed a community journalism interest group
for the Association of Educators in Journalism and Mass
Communication in an effort to encourage more training and
research focused on local-news journalism.
In addition to these endeavors, local news had previously
been a topic of scholarly research. Both “local news” and
“community journalism” was at least part of many research
projects from the mid-twentieth century forward. (In particular, the research team of Phillip J. Tichenor, Clarice N.
Olien, and George A. Donahue were renowned for several
foundational studies of local news outlets published in the
late-twentieth century.) While such research was too varied
to summarize in this article, one common finding in many
studies was that “local news” could influence audiences in
significant ways, from the political activism to attitudes
about race and gender, to perceptions of crime and public
safety in their communities. Another common finding was
that news outlets that emphasize local news often differed
from “national” news outlets in substantial ways, from the
professional practices of the journalists to audience attitudes toward their local and regional news products.
In the early twenty-first century, local news was no longer provided exclusively by traditional news media. On a
basic level, people can use the Internet to get local news
related to places they plan to visit or places where they have
previously spent some time — thus extending the interest in “proximity” beyond physical location. But the most
note worthy development may be news production rather
than news consumption. Using the Internet, so-called “citizen journalists” are also providing information about the
goings on in their communities, from accounts of simple
activities such as block parties and community-service
projects to photographs and eyewitness accounts of major
disasters such as hurricanes and wildfires. Through a variety of online communication formats including e-mail,
amateur news sites, and “blogs,” people can document
local news that might not be covered by local news media,
“break” news before newspapers and newscasts, and provide “micro-local news” information published on mainstream news Web sites that was submitted by readers and
was generally unfiltered. Indeed, the Internet showed the
potential to overtake newspapers as the dominant source of
local news in America.
Further Reading
Byerly, Ken. Community Journalism. Philadelphia: Chilton.
1961.
Coulson, David, Riffe, Daniel, Lacy, Stephen, and St. Cyr,
Charles. “Erosion of Television Coverage of City Hall? Perceptions of TV reporters on the Beat.” Journalism & Mass
Communication Quarterly 78, 1 (Spring 2001): 81–92 .
Donohue, George A., Olien, Clarice N., and Tichenor, Phillip.
J. “Structure and Constraints on Community Newspaper
Gatekeepers.” Journalism Quarterly 66, 4 (Winter 1989):
807–812.
Kaniss, Phyllis. Making Local News. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1991.
Lauterer, Jock. Community Journalism: the Personal Approach,
3rd ed. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
2005.
Moy, Patricia, McCluskey, Michael, McCoy, Kelley, and Spratt,
Margaret. “Political Correlates of Local Media Use.” Journal of Communication 54, 3 (September 2004): 532–546.
Poindexter, Paula, Smith, Laura, and Heider, Don. Race and
“Ethnicity in Local Television News: Framing Story Assignments and Source Selections.” Journal of Broadcasting &
Electronic Media 47, 4 (December 2003): 524–536.
Schudson, Michael. Discovering the News: A Social History of
American Newspapers. New York: Basic Books. 1978: 22.
Bill Reader