Louisa Lincoln

An emerging body of literature has documented a recent collaborative turn across the journalism industry. Given the current economic circumstances plaguing the field — conditions that are heightened in rural newsrooms — journalistic collaborations can be understood as an effort to maximize increasingly scarce resources. Despite this, there is limited scholarship exploring collaborative practices among rural journalists, in the United States or globally. Building on existing literature at the intersection of collaboration, rural journalism, and local news, the present study aims to contribute to this gap. Through the lens of field theory, we explore how and why self-identifying rural journalists ( n = 28) in the U.S. collaborate with other journalists, and further, how they conceptualize the practice of collaboration. Our findings indicate that journalists in rural America generally express positive sentiments about journalistic collaborations, and that they engage in a variety of both formal and informal collaborative practices. Moreover, this study contributes to growing calls for research on journalism in regions distanced from cultural, economic, and political power, and offers implications regarding the value of collaboration for working journalists today.

As the state of U.S. local journalism continues to deteriorate, contributing to growing news deserts and the proliferation of mis- and disinformation, alternative models for sustaining local news are increasingly paramount. One such alternative to the failing commercial model that deserves more attention, we argue, is the American public media system. While less robust than its international counterparts, the U.S. public media system tends to be less reliant on market support, less subject to commercial pressures, and more devoted to a universal service mission. This study explores to what extent the American public media system may serve to lessen the severity of the local journalism crisis. Drawing on interviews and conversations with two dozen public media practitioners and analysts, our research examines how public media could be reimagined and repurposed to better serve local information needs. We conclude that a renewed investment in the existing system in tandem with structural reforms presents a possible pathway towards a more sustainable future for local news.

In the increasingly precarious world of work (Kalleberg 2009), the journalism industry has been hit especially hard (Deuze 2007), partially due to the ongoing economic crisis in local journalism (P...