Table 3 - uploaded by Carina Tenor
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Source publication
Local newspaper has been the spine of Swedish media industry for more than a century. But the last 10 years, local newspapers and local journalism has suffered hard setbacks – newsrooms have been reduced and more than one third of the local offices have been closed (Nygren and Althén 2014). Coverage of local issues is diminishing, and at the same t...
Citations
... Scholars have explored whether these hyperlocal news sites can help maintain the benefits to communities of traditional local journalism. Work on hyperlocal media has found that these services can bring clear advantages to communities by centering issues of local relevance, yet find there is a certain "de-professionalization" of content where fewer sources are cited than in traditional local media, and topics covered are less civically important or investigative in nature [21,32,55,78]. ...
... " We align ourselves with the authors' definition of Facebook neighborhood groups as "local online groups," and we study these spaces in this article. A key distinction between local journalism, hyperlocal media, and local online groups is the degree of professionalism, curation, and moderation that is embedded in content production: while hyperlocal media often involves a mix of journalists and citizen journalists [55], there is no expectation that people in local online groups are journalists. ...
... A precursor in our framework to attitude change is understanding how different local information sources are perceived in digital environments. Early studies of hyperlocal media, for example, note that hyperlocal media content is "de-professionalized, and that community-generated content is different to "traditional" media content [10,55]. Additionally, prior qualitative studies of local online groups groups have found that people are particularly wary of commercial or spam posts [44]. ...
With the steady closure of local newspapers, news consumers increasingly turn to community forums and neighborhood apps to fill the information void. This study investigates how local online groups are perceived relative to more traditional local news outlets, and compares the benefits provided by each information source. Based on prior theoretical contributions, we develop a framework for measuring the benefits of local information on individual-level pro-community attitudes (attachment, knowledge, and civic attitudes.) In a field experiment (N=170), we asked frequent Facebook users living in four U.S. cities to start following local news pages or local online groups on Facebook for one month, and compared their perceptions of source quality and changes in pro-community attitudes. We find that posts from local news pages are perceived to be of higher quality than posts from local online groups. However, following local news pages or local groups did not lead to significant changes in pro-community attitudes during our study period. We discuss implications for the future study of local news in a changing media ecology.
