Community journalism

Community journalism is locally-oriented, professional news coverage that typically focuses on city neighborhoods, individual suburbs or small towns, rather than metropolitan, state, national or world news.

If it covers wider topics, community journalism concentrates on the effect they have on local readers. Community newspapers, often but not always publish weekly, and also tend to cover subjects larger news media do not. Some examples of topics are students on the honor roll at the local high school, school sports, crimes such as vandalism, zoning issues and other details of community life. However, such "hyperlocal" articles are sometimes dismissed as "chicken dinner" stories.

Leo Lerner, founder of Chicago's erstwhile Lerner Newspapers, used to say, "A fistfight on Clark Street is more important to our readers than a war in Europe."

An increasing number of community newspapers are now owned by large media organizations, although many rural papers are still "mom and pop" operations.

Most community journalists are professionally trained reporters and editors. Some specialized training programs in community journalism have recently emerged at established undergraduate and graduate journalism programs. Community journalism should not be confused with the work of citizen journalists, who are often unpaid amateurs, or with civic journalism, although many community newspapers practice that.

At the "Emerging Mind of Community Journalism" conference in Anniston, Ala., in 2006, participants created a list characterizing community journalism: community journalism is intimate, caring, and personal; it reflects the community and tells its stories; and it embraces a leadership role.

In the United States, about 97% of newspapers are classified as "community" newspapers, with circulations below 50,000. Others in the field say the circulation limit should be 30,000. However, in her book Saving Community Journalism, Penny Abernathy of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill argues that most newspapers under 100,000 should consider themselves community newspapers because their reason for being is service to a community or a group of communities.

Community journalism got its name from a Montana editor, Ken Byerly, early in his tenure as a professor of journalism at UNC-Chapel Hill in 1957-71. Although the term is relatively new, community journalism has been around since the founding fathers. He used the term as a new name for a course that had been titled "Editing the Country Weekly" because it didn't fit the suburban newspapers that had developed in the 1950s. He chose community journalism because it fit both the weeklies and small dailies of the day.

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