Rather than meeting together as a group this week, Shannon will meet with each of you, one-on-one, for a half-hour on either Tuesday or Thursday. Please sign up for a half-hour Tuesday or Thursday meeting via Calendly.
These meetings — which are meant to be friendly and casual! ☕— give Shannon an opportunity to better understand your backgrounds and interests, as well as your needs and aspirations for the semester. They’ll also give you an opportunity to share what you know about the local media ecosystems in your own hometowns.
To Read / Listen to Before Our Meeting:
- Read Serge Schmemann, “A Powerful Tool for Fighting Corruption Is Going Extinct,” The New York Times (November 26, 2023) [~10min]. Schmemann references the Local News Initiative’s 2023 “State of Local News” report. Please read the Executive Summary and Introduction, and skim through the rest of the report [~20min].
- Listen to “Trouble at the Baltimore Sun, and the End of an Era for Pitchfork,” On the Media (January 19, 2024) [audio: 51:09; if you’re pressed for time, stop at 34:40].
To Do Before Our Meeting: LOCAL MEDIA AUDIT
- Now, following the Local News Initiative’s example, let’s consider the “State of News” in our own hometowns. Or, if you don’t have a “hometown,” choose a place that means something to you. If most of your life experiences have unfolded within the Philadelphia area, try homing in on a specific neighborhood. Budget 60 to 90 minutes for this exercise.
- Consider the following (and to manage your workload, aim for three to five examples in each category):
- Local print and online news media: what venues exist, what topics do they cover, how frequently are they published, how are they distributed, who do they serve, do they have a particular political orientation, and who owns them? Are there any other details you deem pertinent?
- What about local radio and TV stations? Consider some of the same questions as above.
- Consider these three optional questions, some of which might not be pertinent to your locality, and some of which you might not be able to answer; I hope you’ll at least give them a shot!:
- What about web platforms, social media accounts, or podcasts unaffiliated with larger news organizations? Again, same questions.
- How else do people get local news or information in this area? What other media formats have we not yet considered?
- What venues have disappeared in recent years or decades? Perhaps you have the time and resources to conduct some online research? Maybe you can chat with relatives and friends who have a deep connection to the area? Maybe you can contact the local public library or historical society to inquire about defunct local media?
- Be sure to include relevant resources; show where you find your figures!
- Finally, please offer your brief assessment: how would you characterize the health of your local news ecosystem? What’s robust? What’s lacking? Who’s well served? Who’s poorly served? What are the implications?
- Share your findings via this collaborative Google Slide deck (you’ll have access through your upenn.edu account). Please use no more than seven slides, including a title slide with your name, the name of your location, and a map or two showing where that location is situated within the country or the world. Feel free to play around with the design of your slides, and add media — images, video, audio, infographics, etc — as you like. I welcome creativity! You’ll see that I added my own audit of my hometown, Bellefonte, PA, to serve as an example for you 🙂
- Your slides needn’t be perfect and complete (you’re welcome to revise based on our discussion!), but you should at least have made a good-faith effort to thoroughly and accurately reflect how people are served by the news media in your chosen locality (a lot is at stake for these folks!).
Supplemental Resources:
- Dan Chen, Convenient Criticism: Local Media and Governance in Urban China (SUNY Press, 2020).
- * McKay Coppins, “A Secretive Hedge Fund Is Gutting Newsrooms,” The Atlantic (October 14, 2021).
- Danny Hayes and Jennifer L. Lawless, News Hole: The Demise of Local Journalism and Political Engagement (Cambridge University Press, 2021).
- Shannon Mattern, My “Local News” Resources on Pinboard.
- Dana Scherer and Clare Cho, “Stop the Presses? Newspapers in the Digital Age,” Congressional Research Service (May 23, 2023) [on ad revenue, relationships with online platforms, antitrust, legislation, etc].
- * Natalie Jomini Stroud, Caroline Murray, Emily Graham, Yujin Kim, and Alex Curry, “The News Philadelphians Use: Analyzing the Local Media Landscape” (Center for Media Engagement, The Lenfest Institute, Independence Media, 2023).
- Margaret Sullivan, Ghosting the News: Local Journalism and the Crisis of American Democracy (Columbia Global Reports, 2020).
- Margot Susca, Hedged: How Private Investment Funds Helped Destroy American Newspapers and Undermine Democracy (University of Illinois Press, 2024).
Emergency Media
- Elizabeth Ellcessor, excerpt of Introduction: “Mediating Emergency, Maintaining Normalcy” in In Case of Emergency: How Technologies Mediate Crisis and Normalize Inequality (NYU Press, 2022): 1-18.
- Elizabeth Ellcessor, “Technologies, Bureaucracy and Disaster,” New Media & Society 22:9 (2020).
- Megan Finn, Documenting Aftermath: Information Infrastructures in the Wake of Disaster (MIT Press, 2018).
- Florian Meissner and Jun Tsukada, “Local Media and Disaster Reporting in Japan” in Agnes Gulyas and David Baines, eds., The Routledge Companion to Local Media and Journalism (Routledge, 2020).
- Paul Soulellis, “Urgentcraft,” Wendy’s Subway (July 30, 2020).
- Paul Soulellis, “Urgent Artifacts” in UrgentCraft 1.0.