INTRODUCTION

There is much in the news of late about the demise of newspapers. Steep declines in circulation and advertising revenue have forced outright closures, reductions in force, cessation of print in favor of web only editions, and frantic searches for new sources of revenue and audience. Print versions of nationally known papers, including the Christian Science Monitor, Seattle Post-Intelligencer and Rocky Mountain News have ceased production, and there are fears for papers such as San Francisco Chronicle and the Boston Globe. Speaking in 2008, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer asserted “there will be no media consumption left in 10 years that is not delivered over an IP network. There will be no newspapers, no magazines that are delivered in paper form…” (Whorisky 2009; see also Schiffman 2009).

To set some context, 2008 was one of the worst years ever for U.S. newspapers; total print and online advertising revenues dropped 16.6 percent to $37.8 billion from $45.4 billion in 2007 (National Newspaper Association 2009; see also Mutter 2008). Wall Street’s evaluation of the news business is reflected in the 80-plus percent decline in the market capitalization of newspaper major chains, and based on decreases in print ad revenues since 2006 (Chi 2009; Potts 2009; National Newspaper Association 2009). Investor Warren Buffett, a major shareholder in the Washington Post, recently stated that “For most newspapers in the United States, we would not buy them at any price…They have the possibility of going to just unending losses.” (Patterson 2009). The Papercuts website notes the closure of dozens of newspapers, and loss of nearly 16,000 newspaper jobs in 2008, and over 9000 in the first five months of 2009 in the U.S. (Papercuts 2009). Closures are not limited to North America; in 2009 the UK’s Guardian newspaper reported “a net loss of 42 titles” (Greenslade 2009).

Social and economic theories abound about why newspapers are folding (Nichols and McChesney 2009; Zuckerman 2009), often coupled with predictions about what may happen in the future (e.g., Johnson 2009). Certainly, analysts cite the loss of the quasi-monopoly status the newspapers held until the advent of Internet and other information dissemination infrastructures (Kurtz 2009). Others draw correspondences between the move from print to digital and earlier forms of technological revolution and resistance to change (Shirky 2009). Though the world of news is no longer ink on paper, there is a deeper fear that both journalism and national and local civic engagement are at stake (Haven 2009; Schulhofer-Wohl and Garrido 2007). Indeed, Starr suggests the newspaper as the authoritative news source in a democratic society may have had its moment (Starr 2004). However, information has the same, if not more value, than ever. An ethnographic, “deep dive” study conducted on behalf of the Associated Press in 2008 addressed news reading consumption practices amongst 18 people in six cities located in the US, UK and India. The study suggests consumption of news has moved to other contexts, like listening to the radio while driving to work, watching TV news in the evening, or checking headlines from work computers or through email alerts from friends or from services (Associated Press 2008).

Local newspapers present a special case of news reporting. Their audience is geographically defined, and so too are their editorial concerns. To the extent they produce their own editorial content, their information is exclusive, unlike larger papers, which often reprint syndicated material. Jonathan Knee, an investment banker and director of the media program at the Columbia Business School told Wall Street Journal blogger Heidi Moore in March, 2009 that “The most profitable [local] newspapers have tended to be monopoly markets with circulation of 20,000 to 100,000 readers….they could charge as much as they wanted for those little classified advertisements without investing anything in marketing, and even frequently getting them wrong without much fear of consequence” (Moore 2009). However, BIA/Kelsey estimated that U.S. local advertising revenues would “decline from $155.3 billion in 2008 to $144.4 billion in 2013, representing a negative 1.4 percent compound annual growth rate (CAGR)”. The decline is unevenly distributed; while papers like the Berkeley Daily Planet are in deep financial trouble, others such as the Albany Times Union in New York remain profitable. Readers seem relatively unconcerned about the disappearance of the local newspapers; a Pew Research report in March 2009 stated that only 33% of people say they would personally miss reading the local newspaper a lot if it were no longer available (Pew Research Center for People & the Press 2009).

STUDYING LOCAL NEWS CONSUMPTION

Curious about people’s attitudes to local news and about the different ways in which local news is consumed other than through print, we undertook a field-based interview study to understand more deeply what contemporary forms of content and practices around consumption of that content are emerging. We were specifically interested in the technical and strategic potential for transforming—encouraging—local news readership and participation in the production and consumption of news as reflected in innovations by both readers and news organizations

Our study was situated in the San Francisco Bay Area, at the heart of Silicon Valley, home to many large and small Internet companies. The San Francisco Bay Area covers the wine country of Napa Valley in the North to Silicon Valley and San Jose in the South. According to the government’s Bay Area census, the Bay Area has a population of over 6.7 million people in nine counties and 101 cities (Bay Area Census 1970-2007).

As a preliminary to our interview study, we compiled a list of all the local newspapers in the broader Bay Area, and analysed a week’s worth of three local newspapers (San Francisco Chronicle, San Jose Mercury News and Berkeley Daily Planet, which had recently moved to a much less frequent publication schedule) and examples of local free print publications (e.g., Noe Valley Voice and the Bay Area Guardian). From these analyses we derived a sense of the rhythm of publication for local news, its distribution and coverage, and regular content types, which we divided into: advertising; entertainment (“funnies”, crosswords, puzzles, etc); events; reviews; advice (recipes, agony columns, horoscopes); and news which we further subdivided into immediate and ephemeral (breaking news items), serial engagement (ongoing serialized content), in-depth stories (investigative journalism) and reflective/analytic frameworks (typically editorial and column content). From these analyses, we derived an interview protocol of open and closed questions, and produced a numbers of interview ‘probes’ that were shared and discussed with interviewees.

We carried out semi-structured interviews with 24 Bay Area residents. We selected interview participants using a snowball method, beginning with an email sent to local distribution lists. Interviewees were pre-screened to ensure they had lived in the Bay Area for at least a year and considered themselves to be somewhat active in their local neighborhood where we described ‘active’ to be anything from eating in local restaurants to engaged in local activism. We did not select for gender, but we did select interviewees in order to cover a broad age range (20’s-60’s) and selected for a range of educational backgrounds and self described career/job interests. Our interviewees were all Caucasian and culturally American, although two moved to America in adulthood. Only four of our interviewees were brought up in the Bay Area. All were educated to at least high school graduate; all but two had degrees and/or higher degrees. Four of our interviewees had children of school age at home. Our sample included early adopters (including developers) of Internet technologies and late adopters or “laggards”. All of our interviewees use the Internet regularly (daily), and all but one had access to computers at home. All but one of our interviewees own a cell phone, although only 8 of those that had cell phones had ‘smart’ phones such as iPhones and Blackberries.

We met people at their homes, or in local meeting places such as cafes. We invited people to bring regularly used internet-enabled personal devices and asked them to show us their regular reading sources, including bookmarks and folders of saved items, if any. Our field interviews were conversational. All interviews were audio and/or video recorded. We asked all interviewees what they considered to be areas they “kept track of”, showing them a map of the broader Bay Area area, and also which local newspapers they were aware of and/or had consulted in the previous six months. We asked people about news reading in general, about local news and about their sharing practices. Regarding content, we followed our framework outlined above, discussing feature stories, investigative stories, event listings, police “blotters”, horoscopes, recipes, cartoons, weather, finance results, puzzles and crosswords, reviews for restaurants and shows, classified advertisements, letters to the editor, advertisements and coupons and event listings. We asked what aspects of local news would be of value, and about other sources of news—radio, TV, online news sites and news aggregators, Internet search, social networking sites, email, etc. We asked more general questions about social activities in local neighborhoods, and about their general level of social activity, online and offline.

In addition to our interviews with newsreaders, we conducted interviews with two local journalists, two bloggers who write local news, and with two local news blog sites. We attended a local panel featuring prominent journalists addressing the demise of the local news industry. Finally, we conducted a focus group with 5 friends aged between 42 and 55.

FINDINGS

Although we focused much of our questioning on local news consumption, our study revealed a number of issues that pertain to news reading in general, that is to news that could be described on a continuum from hyper-local to local to regional, to statewide, to national, to international and global. We will first present some observations of news reading routines, and then address two critical issues in more detail: the disconnect between producers’ and consumers’ notions of ‘local’, and negative perceptions of quality/credibility.