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Journalism hackathons are computationally based events in which participants create news product prototypes. In the ideal case, the gatherings are rooted in local community, enabling a wide set of institutional stakeholders (legacy journalists, hacker journalists, civic hackers, and the general public) to gather in conversation around key civic issues. This study explores how and to what extent journalism hackathons operate as a community-based laboratory for translating open data from practitioners to the public. Surfaced from in-depth interviews with event organizers encompassing nine countries, the findings illustrate that journalism hackathons are most successful when collaboration integrates civic organizations and community leaders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cities act as shared social structures that shape citizen identity. These bonds are solidified through fields of care, in which residents are tied to the city by both geographic space and emotional attachment. Pre-digital scholarship established that news production acts as a field of care, strengthening relationships to the urban environment. This research revisits news production as a field of care in the digital age. Driven by an ecological approach to news production informed by the historic works of Chicago School sociologists, this study examines how New Orleans operates as a news environment to build news audiences and bond urban residents to the city. Built upon a complement of qualitative methods including 49 in-depth interviews with media practitioners, ethnographic observation, and document analysis, this work advances that the city’s news ecology rests upon notions of publicness and spectacle to connect with audiences. This study finds that even in the digital age, ties to the physical community remain essential to engaging digital news audiences within metropolitan spaces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]