This is the first and only book to focus on how to understand and conduct research in this ever-increasing field.

Contemporary journalism faces a crisis of trust that threatens the institution and may imperil democracy itself. Critics and experts see a renewed commitment to local journalism as one solution. But a lasting restoration of public trust requires a different kind of local journalism than is often imagined, one that engages with and shares power among all sectors of a community. Andrea Wenzel models new practices of community-centered journalism that build trust across boundaries of politics, race, and class, and prioritize solutions while engaging the full range of local stakeholders. Informed by case studies from rural, suburban, and urban settings, Wenzel's blueprint reshapes journalism norms and creates vigorous storytelling networks between all parts of a community. Envisioning a portable, rather than scalable, process, Wenzel proposes a community-centered journalism that, once implemented, will strengthen lines of local communication, reinvigorate civic participation, and forge a trusting partnership between media and the people they cover.

Foundations of Community Journalism is the first and only book to focus on how to understand and conduct research in this ever-increasing field. With chapters written by established journalism scholars and teachers, this book provides students and researchers with an understanding of the multiple methods applied to the study of community journalism, such as historical, social-scientific, cultural/critical, and interdisciplinary approaches. It explains what community journalism is as a research concept and offers a range of different methods and theories that can be applied to community journalism research. Although there are numerous "how-to" community journalism manuals for students and newspaper editors, none focuses on how to conduct research into community journalism. The body of knowledge in Foundations of Community Journalism would take readers months, perhaps years, of independent work to gather, making this book a "must-have" volume and reference tool for anybody who is interested in the relationships between journalism and communities.

This edited volume documents the changes taking place in local community practices globally. Digital technologies and globalization have forced evolutions in how we go about producing and consuming journalism, and these essays empirically and theoretically advance the scholarly conversations about those trends. What does it mean to serve the information needs of a community in a digitized social world where so many of our ties – weak and strong – are at least partially maintained in virtual worlds? With authors and data from all over the world, this work celebrates a fundamental connectedness to citizens and their community and renews the emphasis on home as a mandate for any locally focused news organization. The contributions to this volume explore the "flows" within both digital spaces and geographic places that are an important foreground to any conversation about what is community today. Several terms are coined and explored in the volume, including "geosocial journalism" and "reciprocal journalism" that account for the essentiality of information sharing in global public realms to inspire feelings of community belonging. Other chapters include a review of Patch.com – one of the largest grassroots, digital platforms for journalism – a survey of how Norwegian community media organizations are adapting to digital worlds, how Swedish citizen sites operate, and the ethics of community journalists to advocate for their citizenry regarding digital matters. Venturing towards both optimism and dismay, the collection argues that understandings of communal borders have expanded. So even if journalists cannot reach the current locals (such as in Africa as one chapter relates) or globally transient locals, digital technologies can help relocate fractured community into a less problematic, virtual space. This requires commitment on the part of both journalists and citizens to preserve those connections, utilize those technologies, and exercise those fundamental principles of community journalism that go back more than half a century. This book was originally published as a special issue of Journalism Practice.

In July 1997, twenty-five of America's most influential journalists sat down to try and discover what had happened to their profession in the years between Watergate and Whitewater. What they knew was that the public no longer trusted the press as it once had. They were keenly aware of the pressures that advertisers and new technologies were putting on newsrooms around the country. But, more than anything, they were aware that readers, listeners, and viewers — the people who use the news — were turning away from it in droves. There were many reasons for the public's growing lack of trust. On television, there were the ads that looked like news shows and programs that presented gossip and press releases as if they were news. There were the "docudramas," television movies that were an uneasy blend of fact and fiction and which purported to show viewers how events had "really" happened. At newspapers and magazines, celebrity was replacing news, newsroom budgets were being slashed, and editors were pushing journalists for more "edge" and "attitude" in place of reporting. And, on the radio, powerful talk personalities led their listeners from sensation to sensation, from fact to fantasy, while deriding traditional journalism. Fact was blending with fiction, news with entertainment, journalism with rumor. Calling themselves the Committee of Concerned Journalists, the twenty-five determined to find how the news had found itself in this state. Drawn from the committee's years of intensive research, dozens of surveys of readers, listeners, viewers, editors, and journalists, and more than one hundred intensive interviews with journalists and editors, The Elements of Journalism is the first book ever to spell out — both for those who create and those who consume the news — the principles and responsibilities of journalism. Written by Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel, two of the nation's preeminent press critics, this is one of the most provocative books about the role of information in society in more than a generation and one of the most important ever written about news. By offering in turn each of the principles that should govern reporting, Kovach and Rosenstiel show how some of the most common conceptions about the press, such as neutrality, fairness, and balance, are actually modern misconceptions. They also spell out how the news should be gathered, written, and reported even as they demonstrate why the First Amendment is on the brink of becoming a commercial right rather than something any American citizen can enjoy. The Elements of Journalism is already igniting a national dialogue on issues vital to us all. This book will be the starting point for discussions by journalists and members of the public about the nature of journalism and the access that we all enjoy to information for years to come.

Today’s journalists need to know both the skills of how to write, interview, and research, as well as skills that are often thought of as more intangible. This book provides a practical, how-to approach for developing, honing, and practicing the intangible skills critical to strong journalism. Individual chapters introduce journalism’s intangible concepts such as curiosity, empathy, implicit bias, community engagement, and tenacity, relating them to solid journalistic practice through real-world examples. Case studies and interviews with industry professionals help to further establish connections between concept and practice, and mid-chapter and end-of-chapter exercises give the reader a concrete pathway toward developing these skills. The book offers an important perspective for the modern media landscape, where any journalist seeking to make an impact must know how to contextualize events, hold power to account, and inform their community to contribute to a healthy democracy. This is an invaluable text for courses in journalism skills at both the undergraduate and graduate level and anyone training the next generation of journalists.