Newspapers In Community Service

Widely acknowledged as one of our most insightful commentators on the history of journalism in the United State, David Paul Nord offers a lively and wide-ranging discussion of journalism as a vital component of community. In settings ranging from the religion-infused towns of colonial America to the rrapidly expanding urban metropolises of the late nineteenth century, Nord explores the cultural work of the press.

This report delves into the implications for communities at risk of losing their primary source of credible news. By documenting the shifting news landscape and evaluating the threat of media deserts, this report seeks to raise awareness of the role interested parties can play in addressing the challenges confronting local news and democracy. The Expanding News Desert documents the continuing loss of papers and readers, the consolidation in the industry, and the social, political and economic consequences for thousands of communities throughout the country. It also provides an update on the strategies of the seven large investment firms--hedge and pension funds, as well as private and publicly traded equity groups--that swooped in to purchase hundreds of newspapers in recent years and explores the indelible mark they have left on the newspaper industry during a time of immense disruption.

Though much has been said about Japanese-American incarceration camps, little attention is paid to the community newspapers closest to the camps and how they constructed the identities and lives of the occupants inside. Dependent on government and military officials for information, these journalists rarely wrote about the violation of the evacuees’ civil rights. Instead, they concentrated on the economic impact the camps—and the evacuees, who would replace workers off to enlist in the military and work for defense contractors—would have on the areas they covered. Newspapers like the Cody Enterprise and Powell Tribune in Wyoming, the Lamar Daily News, and the Casa Grande Dispatch regularly published overly optimistic updates on the progress of construction, the size of the contractor payrolls, and the amount of materials used to build the camps. Ronald Bishop and his coauthors reveal how journalists positioned the incarceration camps as a potential economic boon and how evacuees were framed as another community group, there to contribute to the region’s economic well-being. Community Newspapers and the Japanese-American Incarceration Camps examines the rhetoric and journalistic approach of the local papers and how they informed the communities just outside their walls. This book will appeal to scholars of history and journalism.

Newspaper Reference Methods was first published in 1933. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.