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During Hurricane Harvey, a local weather blog heavily emphasized risk and meteorological data without defaulting to disaster or human interest frames common in mainstream news coverage of severe weather. Journalists routinely articulated uncertainty, delineating what was likely and what was possible, while imagining community through personal expression and shared experience. Space City Weather's coverage of the record-breaking hurricane offers a unique case study of micro-assemblage, a process of content hybridization incorporating the acceptance and rejection of traditional journalism practices, emerging digital media techniques, unfiltered scientific expertise and media framing. Case study analysis provides a foundation for further study of local and independent weather blogs while building scholarship on micro-assemblage and hybrid digital media. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The QAnon conspiracy blends ancient and malleable anti-Semitic bigotry with modern social media. Attribute intermedia agenda setting has rarely considered conspiracy theories. Conspiracies like QAnon are not fact-based and challenge conventional agenda setting methodologies. This study explores attribute IAS among national, regional, and local media coverage of QAnon-supporting congressional candidates in Georgia and Colorado in 2020. It introduces notions of rational and irrational agenda setting domains to fully analyze the transfer of irrational attributes across diverse media agendas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2015, a national study of community newspaper websites indicated a slim majority of websites had no paywall of any kind. Five years later, nearly a third of those websites were no longer publishing - especially those without paywalls. Some such websites redirected to new pages on regional newspaper sites; many others, though, retained the original URLs but no longer published news, creating "zombie" websites that appeared functional years after ceasing publication. Other URLs redirected to foreign gambling, insurance or pornography websites. This two-wave study measures paywalls and content accessibility among community newspapers over five years and considers relationships between closure rates, paywall policies and corporate ownership structure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reddit communities focused on Christianity demonstrate significant resistance to mainstream news media attribute agendas on Christianity and Christians. This computerized content analysis of five years of news coverage and survey responses from 113 Redditors found digital community members soundly rejected mainstream news attribute agendas. Data point to the strength and independence of digital communities to meld and define their own agendas and rhetoric while affirming both a need for orientation and previous research establishing limited agenda-setting effects regarding religion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Agenda setting and community structure theories are conceptual inverses of one another that are rarely considered in tandem. This study employs DICTION 6.0 and McCombs and Funk's research design to compare news coverage of immigration and abortion over a 10-year period in national, high-demographic interest, and low-demographic interest newspapers. Although only modest support is found for inter-media, second-level agenda setting, considerable support is found for community structure effects. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Scholars and journalists are fond of contrasting podcasting with terrestrial radio. The better comparison, however, is with traditional community journalism. This almost yearlong qualitative analysis of newsroom and avocational podcasts adopt a predominate focus on specific niches and articulate traditional news values. This study argues that podcasters are better at articulating internal community with co-hosts and guests than external community with listeners and fans. For journalists, it offers suggestions for building community and embracing personal podcasting; for academics, it broadens the definition of community journalism and offers a more theoretical understanding of a booming medium. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Structured interviews with community newspaper editors and publishers build on current theoretical understandings of normative deviance and gatekeeping theory. Editors and publishers encounter a great deal of audience interaction and a clear emphasis on news about “regular people and routine events,” which offers a topical rebuttal to gatekeeping theory's assertion that journalists are attracted to news about conflict and celebrity due to a lack of dialogue with media consumers. A deeper reading of the text, however, demonstrates that “regular people” and “routine events” remain rooted in conflict and celebrity. This study suggests a theoretical broadening of normative deviance and a new model, the “CxP Typology,” to aid the theoretical expression of normative deviance. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

American community newspapers, as well as larger daily publications, do little to articulate a sense of local identity or place in the banners of their websites, or their newspaper names atop the web page. Instead, newspapers routinely articulate a professional identity above a local one – often omitting the name of the community entirely, and only occasionally offering a major visual expression of the community. This complicates Benedict Anderson’s sense of ‘imagined communities’, which argues that local identity is constructed through clear articulation by print media; if newspaper websites ignore local identity in their banners, then community newspapers today are imaging commodity rather than community. This qualitative analysis of 40 American community newspapers and 80 daily American newspapers divides that local articulation into four categories (absent identity, secondary identity, equal identity and visual identity) and explores implications for the academy and newspaper industry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]