Communicating Effectively about the Four Types of Journalistic Communities

Those that have been following this website should have noticed that there have been no postings for a year. The reason for the silence from me is due to an opportunity that came up in April 2018. There were several book publishers at the Broadcast Education Association annual conference in Las Vegas. One of them was interested in my methods for teaching journalism. This series of discussions lead me to write a proposal for the Journalism Breakdown. After working with several editors and a few publishers, the book will see the light of day October 15th.

One of the themes left out from the book’s various edits was a chapter on how to communicate effectively about communities to the audiences that journalists serve. The plan was to include this lesson as one of the bootcamps in the second part of the book. When I attempted to write that section of the book, I realized that it didn’t lend itself well to the bootcamp format. I needed to create an exercise based on the lesson and a means to access that work. 

I decided to share that work because I feel it is essential to define the various communities that journalists write about in a meaningful way and give reporters guidance on covering communities that reflect some of the sociological and cultural elements often left out of traditional national coverage of local events. I refer to a concept that I called “narrative flattening” that essentially came from my reading of Stephen D. Reese’s (2010) article entitled “Journalism and Globalization.” Reese makes the argument that “If ‘global’ means giving ‘dialogic’ voices a chance to speak to each other without reproducing national ethnocentrism, then the world’s media still fail to measure up” (pg. 346). I have extended that argument from that quote and other claims within the writing to state that as a story moves away from a given community that the complexity of the narrative becomes simplified for the reporter to make the aspects of the story more modular to fit the workflows and content formats of national and international media organizations. This flattening makes it challenging to cover local events for a national audience in a significant way. The following section is the central concept of that chapter. I have decided to make it shorter than the original 4,000 words that I would devote to the subject.

Crafting Journalistic Content

The following categories are general descriptions of communities that a journalist will cover regularly. It is important to remember that community members can be part of the audience. Journalists should attempt to provide mental distance between the concept of the community that they are writing about and the audience they are writing for. This mental distance comes from how a journalist crafting those experiences so that the audience has a better understanding of those communities. The first mode of crafting those community experiences is by understanding the narrative associated with those experiences. Reporters should realize narratives  [with all apologizes to Nathan Lilly] as the synthesis of events that one could give orally. This understanding is vital as it allows the reporter to capture those experiences in the community’s voice. Capturing experiences in the narrative format enable the reporter to get the overall story. In this discussion, stories are narratives placed in their proper cultural and social context and drive all reporters’ content. Stories become articles when they follow the aesthetic and critical standards and practices of journalism. Multimedia journalists turn articles into posts after transforming them using a template set by either a journalistic organization or a content management system. Understanding this informal process better equips the journalist to connect the community experiences to the audience’s awareness of the world. 

Connecting the Community Experiences to the Audience’s Awareness of the World

The first part of the Journalism Breakdown goes over the four different audiences and communities that journalists will typically interact with regularly. The chapter mentions:

“The journalist will need to change the nature of communication between themselves and those various groupings. It is also important to note that there can be an extensive overlap between those two populations. A community of place, a community of location, or a local audience typically has a similar set of “shared social experiences” reflected in geography, institutions, and social structures of a given region of the world that the community or audience has some permanence or semi-permanence to that given area. Your hometown is a community of place, and the local newspaper serves the local audience (Kemmis, 1992). 

A community of convenience or an audience of convenience form from an impromptu gathering of people where none of them are “bound” to the group for an extended period. Attendees of a weekend-long festival would represent a community of convenience. Those that can not attend the festival but want to know more about what is happening at the festival would be an audience of convenience (Pool, 1983). 

A community of interest or an audience of interest promotes the passions, knowledge base, and mutual respect of the criteria that define a hobby or pastime. Baseball card collectors would be a community of interest. Fans of baseball that watch as much of the sport as they can represent the audience of interest (Swales, 2016). 

A professional community or a professional audience formally believes in a common set the ethical standards, training, and best practices to maintain the status quo and advancement of an occupation. Medical professionals would be the community, while those reading up the specific branches of medicine would be professional audiences (Wenger, 1998). 

The audience depends on journalists to craft a solid narrative that provides a new perspective about the actors, actions, places, cultures, and societies referenced in the story. Narratives like this are only successful if the journalist creates a reliable flow within the story. Flow allows the audience to forget they are reading a story and absorbed by the narrative within the mediated work (Rogers, 2019 July 3rd). “

These four categories are useful as they help the journalist begin a reasonable progression of the narrative that matches the community’s reality and experiences. Journalists need the means to get to the heart of what the audience needs to know about their cover subjects. Most of the time, this connection between the community and audience is explicitly written in the given media platform’s mission statement. 

If the audience is mostly in line with the community being covered by the media platform, the creation of a Writing Progression is considerably more manageable. The journalist should take some comfort in the idea that both groups should share: 

• the same subjective sense of reality, 
• a standard set of experiences, 
• a common language used to present the news of the day,
• a developed definition of what is newsworthy, and 
• a reasonable understanding of what makes up the community’s voice and spirit.

It is when there is a shift away from the commonality between the same community and audience that issues will arise in the connective elements listed above. There are few examples of those shifts listed below.

---

Communities / Audiences	Local	Convenience	Interest	Professional
Place or local	A hometown newspaper read by a citizen of that town about the decisions that the city council made the night before.	WhereTraver is a series of magazines for tourists, distributed at hotels, convention centres, regional malls and other tourist areas.	A magazine that covers a local museum.	Walt Disney World’s Eyes and Ears in the magazine for cast members at Walt Disney World
Convenience	Austin Chronicle producing a special edition for the local community covering South-by-Southwest, a local festival.	A festival zine that gets published every morning for the festival goers to find out the events of the today.	South-by-Southwest produces a monthly magazine called SXSWorld that “gives an in-depth look into the interactive, film, and music industries while also breaking down all things SXSW.”	A magazine that focus on the business interactions and deals that occur during SXSW.
Interest	Virginia Craft Brew magazine that focuses on Virginia’s craft-beer industry	Any special edition of a magazine that is distributed during a conference or convention.	Baseball Cards Magazine is baseball card collector magazine that has the value of different cards and news about the hobby.	A magazine for baseball card retail shops and auctioners
Professional	A newsletter covering the local hospital in terms of health event on their campus, tips for improving community health and all of its new procedures.	A health magazine produced for those sitting in the waiting room of a hospital.	Card Player magazine is an industry publication and web portal specializing in poker media, poker strategy and poker tournament coverage	AMA Morning Rounds is a newsletter produced by the American Medical Association covering the latest practices and research for the benefit of the profession.

---

The previous table aims mainly to guide journalists and other interested parties about the shifts between communities and audiences in a semi-practical way. Real examples listed in the table are included to show that the shifts are more than theoretical. All of the listed platforms need to judge if every story they publish connects the community with the audience based on the shared conceptual comprehension of realities, experiences, language, newsworthiness, and voices.

Quo Vadimus?

This discussion is the conclusion of two separate threads. Thread one came from a Facebook posting I wrote last year looking for this type of categorization of the different audiences and communities that would use memes in online communication. I decided to incorporate into this textbook as it would help journalists conceptualize the aspects of the communities that need to be reported about within a given posting and the audiences that would be reading the various posting from the reporter. 

The second thread is the end of the rope for a five-year-long struggle. I found notes I wrote in 2015 proposing one of the chapters that found its way into the book that will be published next month. The Kindle version of the book is ready for pre-order. A paperback version of the book will be available for order next month.