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This paper draws on research into participatory community journalism undertaken on the Castle Vale estate in East Birmingham. ‘The Vale’ as it is known locally has been the subject of significant urban regeneration initiatives since the early 90s, the area having by then gained an externally-imposed “negative reputational geography” (Parker and Karner 2011:309). Such a reputation has impacted the degree to which local residents feel community media should represent the ‘real’ Castle Vale or a more idealised, ‘human interest’ version of life on the estate. Community Media in Castle Vale has long played a role in addressing external perceptions through the funding of a community radio station, hyperlocal news website and a newspaper; yet its output remains a contested site of representational struggle. Such media are often identified as playing an important role in offering news content that is “grounded in local, hermeneutic knowledge,” (Jones and Salter 2012: 96) and research has focused on the civic value of hyperlocal media (Metzgar et al. 2011, Kurpius 2010) with claims made about its ability to “make a distinctive contribution to local social capital, cohesion and civic involvement” (Flouch and Harris 2010: 6). Drawing on research workshops and a co-created journalism project involving residents and the community media organisation, the paper reveals ways in which assumptions about the democratising function of such media come up against the tensions over representation that exist between readers and producers of media texts. The chapter offers a critical account of how researchers and archivists need to shed light on the ways citizens seek to shape histories of place in the light of sensitivities about reputation of place.
2016 •
Townend. J., Muller, D. and Keeble, R.L. (2016). Beyond clickbait and commerce: The ethics, possibilities and challenges of not-for-profit media, Ethical Space, Vol.13 No.2/3, Abramis.
McGaurr, Lyn 2016, ‘The Photography of Debate and Desire: Image, Environment and the Public Sphere’, Ethical Space, special issue ‘Beyond clickbait and commerce: The ethics, possibilities and challenges of not-for-profit media’, vol. 13, no. 2/3, pp. 16-34. Photography has long been a powerful tool of environmental communication and debate. In their efforts to promote environmental issues, landscape and wildlife photographers committed to conservation may provide images to established environmental non-government organisations (ENGOs), appear in activist documentaries, found their own ENGOs, curate websites and social media pages, run galleries or publish books. Yet the same photographs and photography events that feature in activist media may also appear in the editorial sections of commercial newspapers and magazines, and in public relations and advertising for consumer goods. This paper draws on interviews with photographers and ENGO spokespeople in North America to consider the implications for the public sphere of image events that combine activist media and mainstream media to promote environmental concern. Key words: image event, public screen, public sphere, environmental movements, Great Bear Rainforest
Since Britain’s inquiry into the culture, practice and ethics of its press following the News International phone hacking scandal, it has become awkward for journalists in the UK and elsewhere to discuss what they do and the ethics of doing it in the same breath. Hearings chaired by Lord Justice Brian Leveson – appointed in July 2011 – stretched over two years, during which we learned of the News of the World’s unsavoury treatment of the Dowler and McCann families and others, and came to question seriously the right of journalism to keep its status as a Fourth Estate. So the arrival of a newly revised text on the ethics of practising journalism and the possibilities for its regulation is more than welcome, and has great potential to clear the air.
2018 •
Abstract Hyperlocal media is a form of online, alternative community media created by citizens to service their locality. To date, much of the scholarly work in this area has focused on editorial practice, non-UK contexts, or frames these practices as response to receding mainstream local journalism and concerns of civic engagement. In this study I take a different approach, exploring instead the everyday, functional and social contexts which are established in the audience’s highly participatory use of hyperlocal Facebook Pages. I conceptualise such spaces as fields which are integrated both in the individual user’s media ideology, but also amongst a wider sense of overlapping fields of local information and socialities, both online and offline. This work emerges from ethnographic studies of two hyperlocal communities in the West Midlands, in which information was gathered through participant observation, interview, and via an innovative Community Panel approach. I argue that Facebook Pages play a key role for many people in engaging with their neighbourhoods, but not exclusively so, as I demonstrate their place amongst other sources of information and social life. The Pages benefit from being mediated by their editors to create online spaces that welcome participation partly shaped by the audience’s engagement and contribution, thus creating alternative streams of local information that challenge agendas set out by mainstream media. These become integrated into the everyday practices of the audience, therefore, care must be taken to recognise to what extent the broader experience of the neighbourhood is represented in such online practices, and I argue that certain narratives and discourses of the locality are contributed to and constructed online, and not always helpfully so, as in depictions of crime. Where the audience might challenge such depictions, and hold authority to account (the police, for example), this public sphere ideal is not typically acted through. Whilst this does not bode well for the literature’s hopes for political or civic engagement, this thesis demonstrates that audiences develop such spaces in their own vision, to enact and share a capital of local knowledge and information, sometimes innovating in their own ways using mobile technologies in order to do so. This thesis concludes by saying that such online spaces demonstrate the role of media technologies in everyday life, and the extent to which they are perpetuated and maintained by practitioners and their increasingly capable and enabled audiences.
2018 •
viCtor WiarD ReSIC Université libre de Bruxelles & Vrije Universiteit Brussels Belgium vwiard@ulb.ac.be P articipatory journalism refers to a variety of discourses and practices implicating the active role of audiences and citizens in news production and dissemination processes (Borger et al., 2103; Carpentier, 2015; Domingo et al., 2008; Paulussen et al., 2007; Wall, 2017). Participation is not a new concept (e.g., Pateman, 1970) and a citizen participation tradition already existed within the mass media framework (Christians et al., 2009: 25). Notions such as community journalism (Reader and Hatcher, 2012) and public journalism (Haas, 2007) can be seen as predecessors of digital participatory journalism. The notion has, however, gained more popularity as well as new layers of meaning over the past decade, especially due to possibilities offered by digitalization (Kreiss & Brennen, 2016).
2016 •
In recent years, a new wave of hyperlocal community news websites has developed in the United Kingdom (UK), with many taking advantage of new opportunities provided by free open-source publishing platforms. Given the trend in the UK newspaper industry towards closure and retrenchment of their local and regional press titles, it is perhaps understandable that policy-makers have shifted their gaze to these sites. This article examines the viability of hyperlocal news services with a particular focus on those that are independently owned and managed. Such operations often have a longevity that sits in contrast to a number of failed attempts by major media organisations to operate in the hyperlocal space. Yet many of the business models that underpin these sites seem precarious, often benefiting from a degree of self-exploitation. Drawing on 35 interviews with hyperlocal news publishers from across the UK, this article argues that publishers draw upon a civic discourse in order to make sense of their practice. This framing may limit the potential to develop economic sustainability and risks alienating policy-makers keen to work with an idealised “fictive” hyperlocal entrepreneur.
Increased interest in hyperlocal news has led to growing evidence of its economic value, its ability to play traditional democratic roles associated with news, and its merits and deficiencies in comparison with the outputs of a declining established commercial news industry. Given many hyperlocal producers cite the desire to play a role in producing better communities, this paper breaks new ground in examining the social and cultural dimensions of hyperlocal journalism’s news-making, community-building, and place-making roles. We examine this emergent cultural form’s affinity with telling stories, and enabling conversations, about civic and political concerns, but also its affinity with, and celebration of, the banal everyday. Employing the novel theoretical concept of reciprocal journalism, we provide new evidence about the mutually reinforcing online, and offline, practices that underpin relationships between producers and the communities they inhabit and represent. Drawing on evidence from the most extensive multi-method study of UK hyperlocal news to date, it demonstrates the different kinds of direct and indirect reciprocal exchange practices common in community news, and shows how such work, often composed of journalistic and community-activist practices, can enable and foster relationships of sustained reciprocity which improve and strengthen both hyperlocal news and the communities it serves.
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