Cuts in newspaper staffs change meeting coverage

As newspapers have cut thousands of jobs as a result of technology and economic woes,1 the industry has been forced to redefine its assumptions of what is news and how to cover it. Scores of newspapers have closed outlying bureaus2 and ended circulation to areas outside their central market area.3At same time, even as staffs were cut, management has cited the need to focus on covering local news.4 While there appears to be no count of industrywide cuts by type of job or news beat, the effort to retain locally focused coverage may mean that reporters who cover the core municipal governments of a newspaper's coverage have been more likely to keep their jobs than have other journalists.Nevertheless, to cut costs, news organizations have hired freelancers and tried novel ways to cover government such as allowing readers to "crowdsource" government meetings or documents to find newsworthy items.5 In 2007, Pasadenanow.com went so far as to hire reporters living in India in hopes of increasing "the quality of journalism at the local level without the expense."6As newsgathering organizations cut jobs and change newsgathering procedures in response to economic, competitive and technological pressures, it is useful to study the impact of changes on the journalists who do the work. This study explores local coverage of public meetings through interviews with reporters in the Southeastern United States. The goal is to understand better how journalists at a range of daily newspapers view the state of current coverage of local public meetings.Literature ReviewThe term "public meeting" can be used synonymously with terms such as "public hearings" to describe the range of activities that government decisionmakers use to let citizens speak directly to decision-makers and fellow citizens.7 A central purpose of public meetings, as enshrined in "sunshine" laws, is to encourage government transparency. Siebert's "Libertarian Theory of the Press" highlights the journalists' battle to "duly inform the public what took place in Parliament,"8 while Peterson's "Social Responsibility" theory emphasizes the additional need for the media to enable citizen discussions.9 Critics may argue that traditional views of the press may overemphasize the role of the news in informing citizens,10 but few would argue against the key role that journalists have traditionally played in reporting on such meetings in recent American history.While some meetings produce nothing of interest, many local governmentsponsored meetings warrant coverage because they satisfy enough of Shoemaker and Reese's six news values-prominence/importance, human interest, conflict/ controversy, the unusual, timeliness and proximity.11 Other factors that might lead to coverage include journalists' time constraints, preference for "official" sources and reliance upon predictable events to routinize reporting.12 Indeed, four standard journalism textbooks discuss public meeting coverage alongside basic coverage of news conferences and speeches.13 This study addresses the literature on news practices by asking the following questions:Research QuestionsRQ1:What do journalists view as their role when it comes to covering the range of public meetings and hearings that take place in their communities?Decisions about public meeting coverage are being made in the context of shrinking newsrooms. Pew's 2008 State of the Media said that: "Reporters who once concentrated on one beat or specialty now frequently have two or three."14 This report also noted that a 2007 Pew survey found that nearly 80 percent of journalists felt that cuts were hurting the scope of coverage and that editors were asking journalists to push content online, rather than into print editions. The current study expands on these findings in the context of meeting coverage.RQ2:What changes do journalists see in public meeting coverage?Any study looking at changes that journalists see in the coverage of public meetings should be guided by research on what works to engage the public. …