Community, Culture, and Change: Negotiating Identities in an Appalachian Newsroom
A dissertation presented to
the faculty of
the Scripps College of Communication of Ohio University
In partial fulfillment
of the requirements for the degree
Doctor of Philosophy
Christina M. Zempter
December 2018
© 2018 Christina M. Zempter. All Rights Reserved.
i This dissertation titled
Community, Culture, and Change: Negotiating Identities in an Appalachian Newsroom
by
CHRISTINA M. ZEMPTER
has been approved for
the School of Communication Studies
and the Scripps College of Communication by
Devika Chawla
Professor of Communication Studies
Scott Titsworth
Dean, Scripps College of Communication
ii Abstract
ZEMPTER, CHRISTINA M., Ph.D., December 2018, Communication Studies
Community, Culture, and Change: Negotiating Identities in an Appalachian Newsroom
Director of Dissertation: Devika Chawla
Newsrooms have long been communicative spaces in which journalists negotiate various roles and identities, define professional values, debate coverage practices, and interpret events. Such spaces are increasingly significant as journalists adapt to a changing media landscape and respond to public perceptions reflected in such narratives as the characterization of responsible journalism as “fake news.” But publishers are increasingly downsizing newsrooms and outsourcing critical functions to free-lancers or editing and design hubs.
In an effort to explore the costs associated with shrinking newsrooms, I spent nearly three months observing journalists in the Charleston (W.Va.) Gazette-Mail newsroom and interviewing them about their experiences. I found that newsroom interactions were central to journalists’ socialization into their shared professional, organizational, and geographic communities and to their negotiation of shifting demands related to digital technologies and audience expectations.
iii Dedication
To Laura, who made it all possible
iv Acknowledgments
At the end of my fieldwork, Greg Moore, then the managing editor of the
Charleston Gazette-Mail and now its executive editor, noted: “It’s an axiom, largely true, that reporters don’t like to be the story.” I am incredibly grateful for the willingness of the editorial staff of the Gazette-Mail to welcome me into the newsroom despite this general aversion to the level of attention represented by a project like this. Their graciousness is particularly notable in light of the fact that I was not alone in my interest. During my fieldwork, Gazette-Mail journalists were also interacting regularly with a documentary film crew and national news organizations curious about many of the same qualities that drew me to the newspaper. Yet every journalist with whom I interacted was thoughtful and forthcoming in their responses to my questions. As a scholar, I am indebted to them for their participation in this study. As an Appalachian, I have an enormous appreciation for the important work they continue to produce in increasingly trying circumstances.
For the last four years, I have had the great fortune to call Dr. Devika Chawla my mentor. Her influence on my writing and my approach to ethnographic research cannot be overestimated. Her brilliant editing made this document far more coherent and meaningful than it was the first time it left my desk. And her conviction that everything one reads contributes to the scholarly process was a beautiful revelation to someone desperate to escape the constraints of the academic text.
The benefits I have experienced as a result of Dr. Laura Black’s commitment to the idea of community in both her research and her life have been twofold. First, her knowledge of the scholarship in this area provided me with a bounty of resources to
v frame the “Negotiating Communities” chapter. Second, her pedagogical philosophy and personal example have informed my own pursuit of an academic community.
Throughout every stage of this project, Dr. Benjamin Bates has provided thoughtful feedback that has enlarged my understanding of communication theory and its application to my research. The value to me of his broad knowledge of the field is matched only by that of his close reading of each manuscript I submit to him.
From our first encounter, Dr. Hans Meyer has gone out of his way to help me understand the developments in journalism scholarship that have occurred since I left the field. Many of the texts he shared with me as part of an independent study in online journalism have informed this dissertation. His invitation to me to work with him on his own research helped me understand connections between the theoretical conceits of those readings and practice.
My wife, Laura Harrison, was a consistent source of emotional support and intellectual engagement. Much of what you read here was first articulated and later clarified at our kitchen table. The rest of my family, particularly my parents (Gaylene and
Cliff Zempter) and my sister (Teresa Corcoran) and brother (Dan Zempter), are largely responsible for whatever I brought to the table. Their particular brand of love gave me the confidence to try almost anything and the wisdom not to take myself too seriously.
Finally, Jeff Henson did not live to see the product of this research, but he played a significant role in its development. From our first conversations as colleagues in the early 1990s to our meetings at his South Charleston home while I was completing my fieldwork in 2017, Henson’s insights influenced my understanding of my own identity as
vi a journalist as well as my conception of this project. His name also stands in for those of numerous fellow journalists who contributed to my socialization into the field and my appreciation of its significance. I am grateful to have known and worked with you.
vii Table of Contents
Page
Abstract ...... iii Dedication ...... iv Acknowledgments ...... v Preface ...... 1 I. Introduction: The Incredible Shrinking Newsroom ...... 5 II. Culture and Identity in the Newsroom ...... 13 Changing Perceptions of the Professionalism of Journalism ...... 13 Socialization and Identity Formation in the Newsroom ...... 17 Technology’s Role in Changing Journalism Values ...... 20 Community Journalism ...... 24 Theoretical Frameworks ...... 35 Defining Culture ...... 36 Journalists as Homo Narrans ...... 38 Organizational Communication Constructs ...... 42 Community Newspapers and the Public Sphere ...... 46 III. Research Practices: A Homecoming, of Sorts ...... 50 A Day in the Newsroom ...... 53 Beyond Routine Newsroom Observation ...... 64 Social Media ...... 65 Other Meetings ...... 68 Interviews ...... 71 (Beyond the Primary) Field Trips ...... 76 Navigating the Spaces Between ...... 80 Making Sense of It All ...... 84 IV. Negotiating Communities ...... 90 Defining Boundaries ...... 93 The Professional Community ...... 101 The Organizational Community ...... 106 The Geographic Community ...... 116 The Role of the Newspaper in the Community ...... 122 viii Community Connectors ...... 127 V. The Newsroom as a Multicultural Space ...... 135 Long-Timers and New Arrivals ...... 139 Newsroom “City-States” ...... 152 Generational Diversity ...... 160 Digital Perspectives ...... 170 VI. Tradition and Change at the Gazette-Mail...... 180 The Gazette Way ...... 183 Sustained Outrage ...... 191 The Insipid Press ...... 194 Innovation at the Gazette and the Gazette-Mail ...... 195 Resisting Change ...... 203 Innovation and Utility ...... 210 VII. Conclusion: What Gets Lost and Why It Matters ...... 216 The Social Value of the Community Newsroom ...... 222 An Uncertain Future ...... 229 References ...... 231 Appendix A: Interview Participants ...... 246 Appendix B: IRB Submission and Exemption Notice ...... 255 Appendix C: Semi-structured Newsroom Interview Protocol ...... 260 Notes ...... 267
ix Preface
From the earliest stages of this project, before I could even articulate exactly what it would become, I knew I wanted to study the Charleston Gazette-Mail. Among the news organizations in my home region of Appalachia, few were regularly producing the depth and quality of coverage the Gazette-Mail was publishing, and even fewer were readily accessible to me. When former Massey Energy CEO Don Blankenship was tried in 2015 for safety violations that led to the deaths of 29 miners in the Upper Big Branch
Mine, the newspaper created a special online section that contained everything from a timeline of events to court documents to profiles of the miners. In the three years or so since then, Blankenship has been convicted, served a one-year federal prison sentence, and announced a run for the U.S. Senate. All these events are documented on the
Blankenship Trial section of the Gazette-Mail’s website, which features dozens of stories and serves as a clearinghouse for information presented in a variety of forms.1
This commitment to stay with a story as it develops and to address its long-term ramifications is one of the primary reasons I wanted to base my fieldwork in Charleston.
The Gazette-Mail’s practices stood in sharp contrast to an all-too-common passive approach to reporting that relies disproportionately upon official accounts and press releases. The local knowledge that informed and contextualized accounts published in the
West Virginia daily also provided an important corrective to the parachute journalism of national news organizations suddenly interested in Appalachia in the wake of the 2016
U.S. presidential election.
1 The reporters at the Gazette-Mail could continue to pursue time-intensive accountability journalism during an industry-wide economic crisis, in part, because of the newspaper’s ownership. The Chilton family had owned the paper for more than a century when I began my fieldwork, and the fierce watchdog mentality apparent in the newsroom could be traced directly to former publisher William E. “Ned” Chilton III. Chilton died long before I arrived, but his wife, Elizabeth “Betty” Chilton, and his daughter, Susan
Chilton Shumate, had maintained his vision for the 30 years preceding this project.
The newsroom was not immune to the pressures of market forces, as I observed in my interviews with Gazette-Mail journalists. However, its staff of around 40 journalists
(closer to 50 if you included the sports staff across the hall) was remarkably robust for a newspaper with a daily circulation of less than 35,000 in 2017. I was not altogether surprised when a few staff members left and were not immediately replaced during my fieldwork and in the months immediately following it, but I was shocked and disheartened by what came later. In late January 2018, about seven months after I finished my fieldwork, I learned via Twitter that the owners had filed for bankruptcy and the Gazette-Mail would be sold. The news brought national attention. The New York
Times2 and The Washington Post3 were among the outlets who weighed in on the event and its significance.
The day before I came to the newsroom to begin my observations, statehouse reporter Eric Eyre won a Pulitzer Prize for his investigation into the distribution of opioids in the state. A few remnants of the celebration—plastic cups, a bottle of sparkling
2 grape juice—were still visible when I arrived. Nine months later, the future of the
Gazette-Mail was up in the air.
Responses to the announcement varied. In print and on social media, defenders of watchdog journalism and many members of the community expressed concern about the potential consequences of the sale. Some of the subjects of past investigations celebrated.
Coal industry attorney Robert McCluskey joked at a mining symposium about the possibility of Ken Ward Jr., the Gazette-Mail’s nationally recognized environmental reporter, receiving a pink slip.
When the sale was finalized and the dust cleared, Ward still had his job. HD
Media, the group that bought the Gazette-Mail, re-hired most of the people who were in the newsroom during my observations. But not everyone. Rob Byers, the executive editor who ultimately signed off on my access to the site for this project, was among the staff members not retained in the sale. He had spent more than a quarter of a century with the
Gazette-Mail and its predecessor the Gazette, rising through the editorial ranks from his first position as a college intern. Health reporter Erin Beck also lost her job. The native
West Virginian prized the opportunity to cover her beloved home state in a way that suited her social justice orientation. Doug Imbrogno, the assistant lifestyles editor and a passionate advocate for innovation in the newsroom, also lost his position.
Between these cuts and high levels of attrition in the months prior to the bankruptcy, the staffing of the newsroom dropped by about 20-25-percent from the levels in place when I was conducting my fieldwork. The new owners have not given any public indication that they would significantly alter the mission of the Gazette-Mail, but with
3 fewer journalists in the newsroom, the work for which the paper is known becomes increasingly difficult to produce.
I chose the Gazette-Mail as the site for my research because its journalists were still managing to do what so many other newspapers could not in 2017. They were producing meaningful work that had a powerful impact on the lives of the newspaper’s readers. Its owners were trying to maintain a well-staffed newsroom, the importance of which is a fundamental contention of this project. But even this stalwart institution could not fully withstand the effects of contemporary media economics. What is lost in all this?
How will declining newsroom populations affect the way journalism is practiced? In this dissertation, I seek answers for those questions in the specific context of journalistic identity. How, I ask, does one learn to become a journalist when the primary site of socialization is so significantly altered?
4 I. Introduction: The Incredible Shrinking Newsroom
Increased access to the Internet and the dramatic reach of social media in the last decade has coincided with a precipitous drop in newsroom employment figures to create a new relational dynamic between the press and audiences. As online news sources proliferate, traditional print and broadcast journalists are increasingly called upon to meet user demands for immediacy, engagement, and interactivity without abandoning such longstanding values as balance, accuracy, and completeness. At the same time, most traditional news outlets are trying to achieve this goal with significantly smaller staffs than they had 10 years ago.
Between 2007 and 2015, the number of editorial staff members at daily U.S. newspapers dropped by 40 percent.1 This decline has affected local and regional newspapers with circulations between 5,000 and 250,000 disproportionately, as the largest and smallest segments of the newspaper industry increased newsroom employment over that time.2 Such a disparity in investment is particularly significant in light of the role local publications in the 5,000-250,000-circulation range often play in their communities. In an article highlighting The (Charleston, S.C.) Post and Courier’s coverage of the 2015 shootings at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church,
New York Times reporter Ravi Somaiya cited this work as an example of the distinct value of local news outlets:
The Post and Courier is the latest newspaper to have a national tragedy occur on
its doorstep. And it has shown again that journalists who are intimately familiar
5 with the communities where these tragedies occur […] are often uniquely
qualified to cover the sorts of issues that arise in their aftermath.3
Even though such tragedies might bring national attention to the efforts of local journalists, the larger contribution of these news professionals comes in the form of the regular public affairs reporting that constitutes the bulk of their duties. A Pew Research
Center study found that 90 percent of residents in a three-city sample followed local news closely and that daily newspapers provided significantly more civic affairs coverage and enterprise reporting than local television stations.4 This research supports the argument of
Alex Jones, a former journalist who now heads Harvard University’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy, that newspapers account for up to 85 percent of public-interest journalism produced in the U.S.5
In an age of declining editorial investment, how can news organizations continue to produce the kind of journalism that checks political power and contributes to a well- informed electorate? The Internet has created a space for many voices, but few have the resources necessary to pursue the sustained investigations and consistent public affairs reporting that newspapers have traditionally provided. Further, the accessibility of uncritical news sources that confirm users’ existing perceptions threatens to create memory silos in which dominant ideologies go unchallenged and collective decision- making processes are compromised.6
From a communication studies perspective, newsroom downsizing and increased reliance on free-lance or staff journalists who work remotely hinder the development of a shared culture and social identity by limiting opportunities for direct interaction among
6 individual journalists. Journalism scholars David Weaver and Cleveland Wilhoit have argued that the communication that occurs within newsrooms is central to the creation of a journalism culture.7 Such interaction can be particularly important in local newsrooms, where community values and knowledge of local institutions are shared and inform journalistic culture more directly than they might in larger news organizations.
Envisioned through a symbolic convergence theory lens, the local newsroom constitutes a site in which shared interpretations or “rhetorical visions,” as SCT founder Ernest
Bormann dubbed them, of responsible journalism—both in general terms and in the context of the specific community served by the newsroom—are created, adapted, contested, and affirmed.
As journalists negotiate their roles and identities in a changing media environment, the significance of a communal space as a site for these negotiations emerges as a point of consideration. Do journalists working in a newsroom environment experience differences in support, maintenance of professional values, or interpretive processes from their counterparts who work in physical isolation from a professional community? The role of the collective newsroom in the interpretation of events and the distribution of news, the professional socialization of journalists, and the construction of norms and values inspired the following questions, which guided my research:
RQ1: How is newsroom culture created and maintained through
communication?
RQ2: How are professional and community values interpreted and
negotiated within the newsroom?
7 RQ3: How do individual differences in ideology and experience affect
newsroom practices and interactions?
RQ4: How is change negotiated in the newsroom?
In the late spring and early summer of 2017, I spent 29 days in the newsroom of the Charleston Gazette-Mail in an effort to better understand the phenomena at issue in these questions. I chose the West Virginia daily for several reasons relevant to the goals of this research. First, I wanted to explore a news organization focused primarily on local coverage. While examinations of the practices and routines of inter/national news outlets like the BBC and The New York Times8 can provide some meaningful insights into how journalists think about the news, their relationship to audiences, and their roles in public discourse, journalists in smaller newsrooms with fewer resources experience different practical considerations.
Although the circulation figures for the Gazette-Mail were among the highest in the state,9 they fell toward the low end of the 5,000-250,000 range of newsrooms most affected by downsizing. As the only daily newspaper in the capital city of a small state, the Gazette-Mail offered a newsroom large enough to facilitate observation of complex interaction among individual journalists and departments and small enough to reflect the challenges specific to local newspapers.
Second, the history and ownership of the Gazette-Mail made it an unusual case.
The newspaper traces its roots to a weekly publication started in 1872 and has been owned for more than a century by the local Chilton family. Pierre Manigault, chairman of
The (Charleston, S.C.) Post and Courier, has suggested that local, family ownership of a
8 newspaper can make a meaningful difference in resources, allowing for investment “in the newsroom without pressure from shareholders or investors.”10 In considering what might be lost as newsrooms shrink, a site (potentially) less affected by those economic pressures than its corporate-owned counterparts represents a relatively rare opportunity to study a well-resourced local newsroom.
Finally, the Gazette-Mail, as it exists today, represents the recent merger of two newsrooms, a phenomenon of particular interest in the context of understanding negotiations of cultures and related values. The former Charleston Gazette and
Charleston Daily Mail, originally independent of one another, have shared business operations since 1958, but maintained separate newsrooms until 2015. The Gazette-Mail publishes two editorial pages—“the one on the left representing the Gazette’s progressive view and the one on the right keeping the Daily Mail’s conservative view.”11 In a statement published in the newly minted Gazette-Mail, the publisher hailed the combination as a means to increase investigative reporting, online and multimedia efforts, and improve responses to breaking news.12
In the following chapter, “Culture and Identity in the Newsroom,” I construct a foundation for this research by examining the relevant literature in depth and establishing a theoretical framework for the project. I address scholarly conversations around the professionalization of journalism, the processes through which identities are formed, the effects of changing technologies on traditional journalistic values, and the distinct practice of community journalism. I further develop a critical understanding of culture that draws on James Carey’s notion of “communication as culture.” Finally, I register the
9 contributions of symbolic convergence theory and other conceptual approaches to my analysis of narratives that emerged in my fieldwork.
In “Research Practices: A Homecoming of Sorts,” I explain the methods employed in my study of newsroom culture and identity at the Gazette-Mail. I describe the daily routines that structured my fieldwork and the variations that arose over the two- and-a-half months I spent in Charleston. I discuss the impact of my prior newsroom experiences on my interactions with staff members and my interpretations of events. I chronicle the liminality of my position as a longtime journalist 10 years removed from a newsroom, as well as my reliance on an abductive approach to analysis that brought newsroom insiders into the process.
The fruits of that analysis make up the content of the next three chapters.
“Negotiating Communities” addresses individual journalists’ relationships to relevant organizational, professional, and geographic communities. I examine the ways in which boundaries were contested and defined among the Gazette-Mail journalists, as well as the variations in identification with each community that I observed. The role of the newspaper in the geographic community and the impact of individual “connectors”13 on the socialization process also emerge as meaningful findings.
In “The Newsroom as a Multicultural Space,” I explore diversity as it existed at the Gazette-Mail. Like most other news organizations, the paper lags in representation of women and racial or ethnic minorities, the traditional industry measures of diversity.
However, variations in contexts related to ideology and experience, among other things, abounded. I explore the tensions such difference created as well as the opportunities it
10 fostered. Diversity in terms of experience outside the Gazette-Mail newsroom, age, institutional roles, and digital affinity often spawned conflict, but in many cases, that conflict was resolved productively.
“Tradition and Change at the Gazette-Mail” focuses on the interaction between longstanding routines and demands for new practices. David Ryfe’s contention that journalists tend to conflate the habits of journalism with its purpose provides a foundation for the exploration of this tension in the context of identity.14 I explore the ways the well- established mission of the Gazette-Mail, rooted in former publisher Ned Chilton’s commitment to “sustained outrage,” a term that will be more fully explained in that chapter, complicates this tension. I then examine instances of resistance and the role of perceived utility in breaking down that reluctance to change.
The final chapter, “Conclusion: What Gets Lost and Why It Matters,” pulls together the key takeaways from the preceding analysis chapters to develop a clear sense of the significance of newsroom interactions in the development of journalistic identity and in the negotiation of community and change. I spell out the costs associated with the loss or downsizing of that communicative space and identify the specific social functions served by the newsroom. Finally, I provide a snapshot of efforts already in place at the
Gazette-Mail to address threats to the newsroom.
I left journalism in 2007, largely because I could no longer see a clear way forward. Layoffs were beginning at the community newspaper group where I worked at the time. Resources were dwindling as demands on journalists’ time and attention increased. Things have only gotten more difficult in the last decade, but many of the
11 journalists I encountered at the Gazette-Mail remained committed to maintaining the values of responsible journalism and the mission of holding the powerful accountable. I admired their fortitude and often wished I shared it. But I left and they stayed. In these pages, though, I hope to capture a clear picture of what they were hanging on to and why it is worth saving.
12 II. Culture and Identity in the Newsroom
The questions of what it means to be a journalist and how responsible journalism is practiced cannot be answered categorically, or even simply. Contextual considerations abound, and ideological commitments vary. In this chapter, I explore the scholarly conversations around these issues and establish a theoretical framework for my exploration of them.
I begin with a review of literature on four topics that are particularly relevant to an understanding of the role of the newsroom in the practice of local journalism early in the 21st century: a) journalism’s classification as a profession, trade, or occupation; b) socialization and identity formation; c) the role of technology in changing journalistic values and norms; and d) community journalism as a distinct practice. I open this review with an examination of the discourse around evolving perceptions of journalism and its contested status as a profession.
Changing Perceptions of the Professionalism of Journalism
The classification of journalism represents a common inconsistency in the academic literature on the topic. Many scholars refer to the practice of journalism as a profession, while others characterize it as an occupation, a craft, or a trade. The source of this disagreement can be traced, at least in part, to early 20th century discourses that led to changes in the training experiences of aspiring journalists and the development of shared ethical standards. The establishment of the American Society of Newspaper Editors in
1922 and its subsequent adoption of a code of ethics occurred in the wake of increasing calls for greater professionalization of journalism. Journalist and media scholar Walter
13 Lippmann was among the most prominent voices in this conversation, warning practitioners that journalism’s failure to self-regulate could result in government interference in the workings of the press.1
At the time Lippmann was writing, a few U.S. colleges and universities offered individual courses on the topic, but young journalists still typically entered the ranks through apprenticeships or similar on-the-job training processes, as their predecessors had done for more than two centuries. This practical approach to training established journalism as a trade and contributed to journalists’ perceptions of themselves as unfettered by the constraints imposed on professionals. A few of the more powerful editors and publishers in the industry, however, had already begun to imagine journalism schools as means to achieve the kind of standardization and self-regulation extolled by
Lippmann. Joseph Pulitzer’s $2-million gift to Columbia University in 1908 supported the establishment of one of the earliest iterations of this vision.2
Throughout the 20th century, the influence of journalism schools grew as a formal degree became an increasingly common criterion for employment in the field. By the turn of the millennium, most working U.S. journalists had bachelor’s degrees.3 However, the emphasis on classroom education continued to be contested, leading to a hybrid approach to journalism pedagogy that balanced theory with application through the employment of former journalists as instructors and opportunities for practical experience in student newsrooms and through internships.
14 Communication and culture scholar James Carey’s description of his introduction to journalism school in the late 1950s illustrates the unusually prominent place application occupied in journalism programs by the middle of the 20th century. He noted:
The curriculum attempted to duplicate the atmospherics of a newspaper,
and education was largely an old-fashioned apprenticeship carried out via
extensive laboratories that dominated the program of study, supplemented
and sometimes replaced by work at the student newspaper.4
This technical instruction was occurring then, as it is now, in concert with education in more abstract concepts like ethics and values. The conceptualization of the press as the
Fourth Estate5 and the establishment of objectivity as a fundamental methodological value contributed to the argument for recognition of the professional status of journalism as a specialized public service governed by ethical standards of neutrality even as the emphasis on practical knowledge contested that argument.6
The tensions between the practical and theoretical that continue to be negotiated in degree-granting programs may be perceived as an outcome of what journalism scholars
Howard Tumber and Marina Prentoulis call “a double dichotomy at the heart of journalism.”7 The first of these dichotomies emerges from the fact that, in an academic sense, journalism lends itself to consideration in the contexts of both the humanities and the social sciences. For the practitioner, this dichotomy represents the tension between journalism as a creative expression and journalism as a highly standardized process. The second element, the vocational/intellectual dichotomy, directly addresses the push to blend practical training with non-vocational education and research.
15 The dialectic between journalism as a professional pursuit subject to standardized training and journalism as a calling or inherent capacity can be discerned not only in academic conversations but also in debates among practitioners. Journalism scholar
Barbie Zelizer identified, among several metaphors commonly used by working journalists to describe journalism, one that characterizes reporting acumen as a sixth sense. Sometimes expressed as “a nose for news,” this argument often arises in response to suggestions that anyone can be trained to be a journalist in the professional sense.8
Weaver and Wilhoit concluded in the mid-1980s that such rhetoric, along with journalists’ ongoing resistance to many of the practices that distinguish professions like medicine and law from less standardized occupations—including licensing or certification, participation in professional organizations, and subscription to trade publications—would prevent the achievement of full professional status: “The modern journalist is of a profession but not in one […] the institutional forms of professionalism likely will always elude the journalist.”9 However, Tumber and Prentoulis, among others, have argued that the socialization into a professional culture implied by many of these practices occurs for journalists outside the bounds of professional organizations and licensure boards:
Ethical and normative values in reporting have been less the product of
common membership in professional bodies and homogenous education
and more a product of shared practices learned within the newsroom.10
This claim, affirmed by Weaver and Wilhoit’s contention that journalistic culture is a function, “almost exclusively,” of newsroom interactions,11 draws attention to the central
16 role newsrooms play in the socialization of journalists, a topic that will be addressed in the next section.
Socialization and Identity Formation in the Newsroom
In the late 1970s, organizational scholars John Van Maanen and Edgar Schein explained organizational socialization as “the learning of a cultural perspective that can be brought to bear on both commonplace and unusual matters going on in the work place.”12 In other words, just as newcomers to an organization are trained in the technical aspects of their positions, so too are they educated about the shared values and norms that guide the organizational culture and expectations of their behavior within their organizational roles. The goal of socialization is to assimilate the newcomer into the culture of the organization. However, the process entails a negotiation in which newcomers attempt to “individualize” their roles in the organization to accommodate their personal values even as organizational insiders encourage them to adopt the existing values of the organization.13
Assimilation can be complicated by multiple concurrent or cumulative socialization processes. Matthew Vorrell and Sarah Steimel’s study, “Socializing the
Nomad,” for example, revealed that substitute teachers faced with simultaneous districtwide and individual-school socialization processes found the ambiguities and occasional contradictions between the processes difficult to negotiate.14 Similar challenges can affect young professionals, including journalists, as they attempt to reconcile the values adopted during their professional socialization via higher education and professional groups with the values that guide the organizations they join as
17 employees. A study of journalism students and working journalists found, for instance, that the transition from the classroom to the newsroom accompanied a shift in the prioritization of the sometimes-competing values of autonomy and public service.15
As I will explore in greater detail in the theory section of this chapter, communicators within organizations and institutions often employ a “rhetoric of identification”16 to encourage not just a superficial acceptance of organizational norms and values but a deeper sense of belonging to the organization or professional body. For journalists who work in small newsrooms, the intensity of interaction can lead to particularly close identification with other editorial staff members and the news organization itself (or, alternately, greater interpersonal dysfunction than might be found in larger newsrooms). Community journalism scholar Jock Lauterer contended:
Small newspaper staffs resemble families much more than their
counterparts at the big-city dailies, where journalists can live in the luxury
of anonymity if they so choose. As with a family, community newspaper
staffers are thrown together in close proximity with people they did not
choose to be with, and basically they have to live with each other’s faults,
foibles and bad habits. The extent to which a newspaper staff thrives is a
function of how well they have come to terms with each other’s
individualities.17
Journalists who live and work in small communities also must negotiate their professional and organizational commitments in the context of their identification with the community. John Hatcher, also a community journalism scholar, argued that a
18 journalist’s identity as a member of the community he or she covers affects decisions made “in every phase of the news gathering process,” including choices to cover an event or issue (or not), the way that coverage is framed, and the voices included in the coverage.18
These effects can be amplified or diminished by the accessibility of the newsroom staff to members of the audience and the regularity with which journalists deliberate the role of their work in the life of the community. A 2008 case study of the relocation of the staff of a weekly newspaper serving a small Maryland town to a consolidated newsroom just 10 miles outside of town found that the move contributed to a sense of distance and a disruption of the newspaper-community relationship perceived not only by readers but also by journalists:
Furthermore, the journalists interacted in a shared office with less
frequency thanks to the move and the new media technologies that
allowed them to work from anywhere. This means journalists had fewer
conversations around the water cooler with each other and had fewer
debates at daily editorial meetings about what readers in the community
both need and want to read. This has the potential to weaken the
journalists’ sense of newsroom community, as well.19
The findings of this research indicate the challenges that emerge when newsrooms become less central to journalists’ daily practices. As the site in which journalistic culture is created and adapted to address the specific needs of the community being served, the newsroom serves a vital role in the transmission of existing values to beginning
19 journalists and the negotiation of new values. The newsroom as a site of deliberation is particularly relevant as changing technologies demand a reconsideration of journalists’ duties and their relationships with members of their audiences.
Technology’s Role in Changing Journalism Values
For much of the 20th century, efforts to professionalize journalism dictated a model of practice that promoted an objectivist methodology in which news professionals relied upon authoritative sources to gather information to be distributed to mass audiences via a one-way channel of communication. As online and mobile communication technologies have begun to challenge this unidirectional flow of information, a new model recognizing the need to address public input at all stages of the reporting process has begun to compete with this traditional model of journalism.20
Twenty-five years ago, the prospect of a dramatic shift from traditional print to online distribution of news was considered highly unlikely within the industry.21 Today online journalism is taken for granted, though its “shape” continues to be negotiated.22 A
“convergence culture”23 that emphasizes interactivity and multimedia production regularly drives contemporary newsroom practices. Convergence generally entails the co- location of print, online, and/or broadcast media operations, along with an expectation of cooperative rather than competitive behavior among the units. In practice, it often requires print or broadcast journalists to take on new duties to support the organization’s online efforts. For owners and executives, convergence often represents a means to produce more content with fewer resources.24 Journalists, however, may experience it as
20 a shift in standards dictated by technology rather than ideology that leads to redefinitions of their work and identities.25
Drawing from his 2008-2011 study of the Philadelphia “news ecosystem,” C. W.
Anderson argued that the introduction of new digital technologies and corresponding declines in readership and ad revenues left news executives and journalists struggling to
“figure out how to ‘move’ this public [readers of print editions of newspapers] online in as unified a fashion as possible.”26 Ultimately, Anderson asserted, traditional news organizations and their editorial employees would have to re-conceptualize both the audience and their own roles as journalists. He cited editors’ demands for journalists who could “do it all”—reporting, photography and videography, among other duties—in an age of smaller newsrooms and increasing demands for multimedia content from consumers, as well as the need to make news relevant to multiple niche audiences in the blogosphere.
Within this changing environment, journalists must develop new media logics, or
“assumptions and processes for constructing messages within a particular medium.”27 As the availability and utility of user-generated content increases, news organizations are faced with the task of crafting policies and practices related to the evaluation, verification, and publication of such material. In her book, Social Media at BBC News, media scholar Valerie Belair-Gagnon argued that through the creation and continued development of their user-generated content hub, the BBC has contributed to a new media logic addressing the interaction of social media and journalism, in which “actors
21 have the ability to choose and shape social meanings, allowing changes in power relations and social meanings of journalism.”28
The negotiation implied by this new logic not only gives media consumers a stronger voice in the construction of the news but also serves news organizations by providing new sources of content. Belair-Gagnon illustrated this point through several examples in which reader-generated content supplemented BBC staff reporting that would otherwise have been constrained by limited access to the sites of the stories.
Photos and eye-witness accounts submitted to the news organization via e-mail or social media contributed significantly to coverage of the 2005 London Underground bombing, the 2004 Asian tsunami, the 2009 elections in Iran, and other events.
The BBC has not been alone in this endeavor. Many news outlets have begun to experiment with new logics to address these changing dynamics. New logics bring with them new values, and online journalism has brought demands for greater immediacy, interactivity, and participation,29 evaluated in terms of social presence, friendliness, informality, co-orientation, and interactivity.30 Journalists socialized under the professional journalism paradigm that dominated the 20th century often perceive a tension between these new values and those they deem fundamental to responsible reporting, such as balance, accuracy, relevance, and completeness.31
The shift to online production and distribution of news has demanded a reconsideration of some theoretical concepts that have been widely applied in journalism research over the last several decades, including gatekeeping and agenda-setting. Axel
Bruns, a journalism scholar, has suggested that the traditional role of journalist as
22 gatekeeper in the public sphere is no longer possible as “the gates have multiplied beyond all control.”32 In today’s digital environment, journalists are better positioned to act as
“gatewatchers” who highlight the most relevant information in circulation. Agenda- setting theorists Maxwell McCombs and Donald Shaw have similarly refined their original proposition that journalists’ coverage of issues and events correlate to public perceptions of the significance of those topics.33 Working together and separately with other colleagues, they have developed a conceptualization of “agendamelding” that seeks to account for other influences on the public agenda, including that of personal reference communities such as those created through social media.34
These changing values both inform and are reinforced through new newsroom technologies and practices. News organizations have begun to shift resources from print to online publication and encourage (if not require) journalists to engage with their audiences via social media and other interactive platforms. Although a narrative of resistance is often invoked in the literature, research has indicated that journalists are generally willing to consider such changes when they perceive them to be compatible with traditional values.35 In their study of the newsroom of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch,
Peter Gade and Earnest Perry found that journalists indicated optimism about the possibility of facilitating better journalism through proposed changes, but soon lost their enthusiasm as the implemented changes proved not to have the anticipated effect.36
The core values that often drive journalists’ responses to changing technological imperatives are reinforced through the socialization processes that occur in newsrooms and inform professional identity.37 However, these socialization processes are not
23 uniform. Differences in orientation can be attributed to positions within the newsroom, tenure, personal ideologies, the size of the newsroom and the nature of the organization’s relationship to the community it serves, among other factors. Editors and beat reporters, for example, develop different relationships with sources and audiences to accommodate the priorities of their roles within the organization.38 Ideological variations include neutrality in the gathering and distribution of news versus engagement in the discovery and interpretation of information39 and perceptions of a journalist’s role in terms of disseminator, interpretive, adversarial or populist mobilizer functions.40
In the next section of this proposal, I explore how journalists at local newspapers often practice journalism differently than their metropolitan colleagues. As residents of the (relatively small) communities they cover, community journalists must adapt traditional values to accommodate more direct relationships with sources and—notably, in the context of increasing demands for access and interactivity in the digital age— readers.
Community Journalism
Although journalistic values, particularly in the context of the 20th century tradition, are often represented as a monolithic set of standards, journalism scholar
Howard Ziff articulated a cultural distinction between larger metropolitan or national news outlets and smaller newspapers more directly engaged with the local community that challenges such a representation. He labeled the approach of larger organizations as the “cosmopolitan” model of journalism and that of smaller, more locally oriented papers as the “provincial” model.41 This distinction originated, in part, as a defense against
24 charges that smaller newspapers often failed to achieve the ethical standards associated with the professional 20th century journalism paradigm.42 Ziff argued that a uniform application of these standards was neither practical nor desirable, as “a diversity of journalism enriches a democratic society.”43
Ziff’s contention is particularly relevant today as journalists negotiate the application of traditional 20th century values in a digital communication environment that demands greater interactivity and engagement with audiences. Journalists in small-town newspapers are more likely to have more complex and personal relationships with sources and audiences than their counterparts at major metropolitan newspapers. As a result, issues of privacy, confidentiality and investigative tactics must be negotiated differently, according to Ziff: “They [big-city reporters] leave the bodies where they fall.
We meet our victims face-to-face the next day in the coffee shop.”44 While journalists from larger outlets have historically been able to establish and maintain professionalized relationships with sources and relative isolation from audiences, journalists who live in the same neighborhoods or attend the same social gatherings as their sources and audiences have no such luxury.
Although criticized in the context of the more detached, professional approach to journalism that dominated pre-digital practices, the focus on community relationships central to the provincial model actually makes it more compatible with the new values of interactivity and connectivity espoused via the online paradigm. In his study of the New
Haven (Connecticut) media environment, journalism scholar Dan Kennedy noted this as a
25 benefit of the approach of the hyper-local online news outlet over that of the chain-owned daily newspaper operating under the cosmopolitan model:
The Independent is consciously covering the community on behalf of the
community, whereas the Register … was covering the community in
service to some ideal notion of objective journalism.45
Kennedy’s example indicates the complexity of the cosmopolitan-provincial dualism.
Even though the Register is based in a relatively small community, its approach to journalism is dictated, in large part, by outside corporate interests.
That complexity is also apparent in discussions of community journalism, a term used in a growing body of scholarship to refer to the work of news organizations that generally operate within the parameters of Ziff’s provincial model. Definitions of community journalism vary throughout the literature, particularly in terms of limits on the size of an organization and the understanding of community. Some scholars are more conservative than others in imposing circulation caps on publications that can be considered community newspapers, and, in some cases, frequency of publication affects categorization as a community newspaper.
Jock Lauterer, founder of the Carolina Community Media Project at the
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, acknowledged these disagreements in his textbook Community Journalism: Relentlessly Local. In providing a working definition to guide the content of the book, he proposed a relatively liberal circulation standard of
50,000 or less and did not distinguish between dailies, weeklies, or semi-weeklies in terms of their inclusion under the community journalism umbrella. He offered a similarly
26 broad definition of community as not just a geographical concept but also a social or cultural phenomenon. So, for example, community journalism would include not only newspapers serving a town or small city but also publications serving populations connected by shared racial or ethnic identities; political, religious, or sexual orientations; aesthetic sensibilities; or interests. In all cases, though, community journalism, from
Lauterer’s perspective, is guided by a local-first mentality.46
This sentiment is echoed in Bill Reader’s argument that content is a “more useful metric than size” in identifying community journalism.47 In other words, community newspapers overwhelmingly emphasize news and analysis that is particularly relevant to the communities they serve. Even if they subscribe to wire services and print stories originating outside the community, such newspapers privilege coverage of local government, schools, and businesses, features on community events and local individuals or groups, and analysis of issues directly affecting the community. That mentality also often extends to the “localization” of national or international stories in which wire copy is supplemented or replaced with text that connects the broader topic to local interests.48
The local-first approach is both a function of and a response to what Lauterer calls the first law of community journalism: “There exists a fundamental and reciprocal relationship between the paper and its town”49 (or non-geographical community). On one side of that relationship, newspapers rely upon the support of readers who see themselves as stakeholders in the community and feel a sense of ownership of the local newspaper.
On the other side, local newspapers contribute to a shared sense of community.
27 Linda Gilmore, a community journalism scholar, called the local newspaper “one of the links that connects people to each other. It is one of the ways that the community is maintained.”50 This assertion affirms journalism scholar Michael Schudson’s claim that the storytelling function of community journalism serves to remind readers of their shared history and bind them to shared values.51 Gilmore evokes Carey’s ritual view of communication, a concept that will be explored in greater depth in the theory section of this chapter, in her argument that this community-maintenance function can only be accomplished by newspapers that serve populations small enough to sustain shared interests across their readership.
Journalism scholar Wilson Lowrey and his colleagues attribute a newspaper’s capacity to build or reinforce community bonds to the reciprocity demanded by
Lauterer’s first law of community journalism. Community is formed through the negotiation of shared meaning, a process facilitated (or constrained) by the level of interactivity available through local media to members of the community.52 To foster community development, Lowrey argues, local news media must engage interactively with audience members, bringing them into the negotiation process and educating them about the existing structure of community institutions:
If we conceive of a community as continuously imagining and
reimagining its own values and norms, we may also take the normative
position that journalism plays a role in that process. The degree to which
news media foster that process of community determines the degree to
which media practice community journalism.53
28 The extent to which newspapers achieve these ideals of interactivity can be measured using a community journalism index proposed by Lowrey that consists of three key dimensions. The listening/change dimension accounts for discussion forums, letters to the editor, community blogs and other opportunities for readers to contribute their perspectives publicly. The leading/cohesion dimension addresses special series or sections on issues of local importance, staff-written editorials and other means by which the newspaper’s content reflects the staff’s effort to respond to community concerns.
Finally, the community structure dimension represents the publication’s commitment to serving as a clearinghouse for community information. Calendars, listings of government officials or other public information, and stories that explain and provide access to community facilities, organizations, and events are among the items used to measure performance on this dimension.54
Research indicates that the distinct relationship between community news organizations, particularly local newspapers, and the members of the community is reflected in readers’ reliance upon and trust in the content of local publications. In addition to the Pew Research Center study referenced in the introduction, a 2000 statewide survey of North Carolina newspaper readers found that 61% of participants considered local news the most important content of the newspaper, and a similar number said they read such news more regularly than any other content. Three-quarters of participants said local newspapers reported community information more accurately than any other source (including local broadcast and online outlets).55
29 Carolyn Kitch, a media scholar, has argued that the “keepsake function” of community newspapers—exemplified in the “softer” news of wedding and birth announcements, obituaries, high school sports coverage, and similar reports of interest solely and specifically to members of the community—could be one reason readers continued to support local newspapers even as subscriptions to national newspapers waned in the first decade of the 21st century.56 Other reasons could include the unique content and provincial approach evident in community journalism. As Lauterer explained, “Because they’re the home team, community newspapers collect, report, handle, write and package the news in a fundamentally different way from any other news medium.”57 Although it often appeals to readers, the “boosterism” implied in the phrase “home team” is one indication of the tension between local interests and professional standards that community journalists must negotiate.
Vicki Simons, the former director of the Center for Community Journalism at
Oswego (N.Y.) State University, called this negotiation the “real front line of community journalism,”58 indicating the centrality of this dialectic to practitioners’ daily decision- making process. The propensity to err on the side of local interests has drawn the attention of critics of community journalism and been the subject of many of the charges of ethical laxity referenced in the first paragraph of this section. Journalism scholar Ralph
Barney has maintained that a provincial approach to journalism “devalues truth in favor of community loyalty and conformity at the expense of individual moral development.”59
Other critics argue that rather than fulfilling the traditional Fourth Estate watchdog role emphasized in the cosmopolitan model of journalism, local news organizations often
30 serve as guard dogs, focused more on protecting local government and business interests than holding those in power accountable. However, when coverage of foreign affairs is taken into consideration, a similar tendency to emphasize national interests often can be identified in the reporting by larger news organizations.60
Supporters of community journalism argue that responsible local journalists practice a “benevolent objectivity” guided by a “complex mix of accuracy, access, compassion, responsibility and accountability that makes community journalism so important to the American media landscape.”61 Lauterer highlighted three elements of this mix—accuracy, access, and accountability—in a description of community journalism highly reminiscent of Ziff’s explanation of the provincial model: Local journalists must endeavor to report the news accurately because readers can access them easily, making them more accountable to their readership than their counterparts at larger, less locally engaged news organizations.62
This increased accountability leads to a reframing of ethical considerations that emphasizes journalists’ responsibility to consider the effects of an editorial decision on the community rather than practicing an unwavering commitment to standard professional practices.63 Lauterer insists that the relational aspect that marks effective community journalism also makes it more difficult to practice than cosmopolitan journalism:
The role of the enlightened community newspaper is far more demanding
and complex than that of the big-city paper, which can afford to be
31 detached, remote, critical, aloof, cynical and (sadly enough) at times
elitist.64
The capacity of a local newspaper to fulfill the duty of “enlightened” community journalism is contingent to some degree upon individual journalists’ ability to balance community and professional demands, but the commitment of the newspaper’s ownership to this mission is crucial. It not only sets a tone for the journalists working at the publication but also determines the allocation of resources necessary to serve the community. Jerry Brown, former editor of a local weekly newspaper, warned that “chain ownership, with its inevitable turnovers and preoccupations with profits, often, though not always, erodes this foundation”65 of institutional memory and historical knowledge typically found in locally owned newspapers.
Brown’s argument was supported by a 2001 study that found that although newspapers owned by publicly traded corporations (i.e. chains) had higher profit margins than independently owned newspapers, increases in profit correlated to cuts in full-time newsroom staffing.66 In his book The New Media Monopoly, media scholar Ben
Bagdikian cited multiple studies that found less hard news in chain-owned newspapers than those owned independently to back his argument that the most common changes made by newspaper chains upon acquiring previously independently owned newspapers were superficial “updates” to page design to distract readers from the reduction of serious news content.67
Other research has indicated that outside ownership also tends to quiet or homogenize local editorial voices. One of the earliest studies of the effects of chain
32 ownership, conducted in the mid-1970s, found that after independently owned newspapers were sold to newspaper chains, fewer editorials addressing controversial local topics appeared in the newspapers’ editorial pages.68 A later study comparing editorial positions of Gannett-owned papers to publications owned by other entities found that although newspapers owned by the chain were more likely to take positions on national questions, those positions were more consistent among the Gannett-owned papers, regardless of their location, than the positions of the non-Gannett papers.69
Similar research found that chain-owned newspapers were more likely to endorse U.S. presidential candidates than independent newspapers, but were also more uniform in their endorsements.70
In contrast, a 1993 survey of editors, publishers, and reporters at 250 daily newspapers found that corporate-run newspapers were more likely to publish staff- generated editorials on local issues than locally owned newspapers. However, the researcher, journalism scholar David A. Demers, attributed these results to the fact that, at the time, chain-owned newspapers were typically larger and better-resourced than those owned privately.71 More recently, corporate journalism has come under fire for failing to invest adequately in newsrooms as newspapers become less profitable. Robert
McChesney, along with other academics and practitioners, has called for public subsidization of journalism to offset the effects of inadequate corporate funding.72
Importantly, Demers also acknowledged a finding that corporate-owned newspapers more frequently published critical editorials likely reflected journalists’ limited
33 engagement with the community and privileging of professional values over local interests.73
Although the intensity of these effects varies from newspaper to newspaper and chain to chain, the research leaves little doubt that locally owned community newspapers represent the closest approximation to a pure provincial model of journalism. The parallels between provincial values and the priorities of digital journalism indicate that such sites provide a potentially rich source of information for researchers and practitioners exploring how journalists effectively negotiate the transition from print to online practices. However, most of the literature related to this transition has focused on larger news organizations that have traditionally followed a cosmopolitan model, leaving these sites largely unexamined.
The dominance of the cosmopolitan model in previous research is in line with a tendency in the literature to address journalism exclusively as a professional community guided by predetermined standards and values. Zelizer and Stuart Allan have encouraged application of the conceptual lenses of “interpretive community”74 and “interpretive performance,”75 respectively, to journalism research to challenge this orientation and focus attention on journalists’ collective negotiation of meaning. These approaches address the ways shared discourses and existing practices guide responses to emerging events, new sources, and changing technologies. As such, they demand that greater attention be paid to the influence of culture—as a shared resource for sense-making—on the beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors of journalists. My research is designed to meet that demand by examining newsroom interactions in a cultural context.
34 As I explain in the next section of the chapter, the understanding of culture I bring to the project is informed by Carey’s notion of “communication as culture” as well as critical scholars’ articulation of culture as contested and subject to constant re/negotiation. To facilitate a productive exploration of newsroom culture in these contexts, I will apply a theoretical framework grounded in symbolic convergence theory and other conceptual approaches to shared narratives. Organizational communication scholarship, particularly Cheney’s take on the “rhetoric of identification,” and conceits regarding community journalism’s role in the public sphere will further contribute to the theoretical orientation of my research.
Theoretical Frameworks
Much of the existing research on newsrooms continues to be social scientific with an emphasis on the values implicated therein. However, Carey and Zelizer, among others, have called for a cultural approach to the study of journalism and mass communication to fill the gaps left unaddressed by such orientations. Carey, for example, suggested that a ritual view of newspapers, in which “[w]hat is arrayed before the reader is not pure information, but a portrayal of contending forces in the world,”76 allows a researcher to explore different questions than those addressed through the more traditional transmission view of mass media. In her call for a broader discourse in journalism scholarship, Zelizer, likewise, cited ritual (along with performance, narrative, and other cultural elements) as a useful lens through which to expand our understanding of the field, its practitioners, and its audience.
35 The project I propose is grounded in an understanding of newsroom culture as a communicative construction that informs and is informed by the values and identities individual journalists bring to the site. The significance of symbols and narrative in this reciprocal process indicates the value of applying an ontological framework informed by symbolic convergence theory to my research. Further, theoretical concepts that have emerged from organizational communication scholarship and the study of community journalism’s place in the public sphere provide important considerations that will be explored later in this section of the chapter. To begin, I explain my conceptualization of culture and the role of communication in the construction of culture and identity.
Defining Culture
To understand the role of newsrooms in journalists’ negotiations of identity and values (both professional and community), I approach this study from a cultural perspective. That is, I identify culture as a contested and complex phenomenon constructed by and embodied in communication. I am guided by cultural scholar Stuart
Hall’s characterization of culture as a “site of struggle”77 where meaning is regularly contested and reaffirmed or replaced by new interpretations. Anthropologist Kathleen
Stewart eloquently expanded upon the complexity indicated in Hall’s perspective, identifying culture as “a process constituted in use and therefore likely to be tense, contradictory, dialectical, dialogic, texted, textured, both practical and imaginary, and in- filled with desire.”78 This framework focuses my attention on rituals and other newsroom interactions that offer the potential for negotiation of meaning and values.
36 Such interactions range from more formal and routinized examples, such as daily budget meetings, to casual conversations that emerge spontaneously in the newsroom.
They can reflect differences in power and position (e.g. an editor’s work with a reporter to shape a story’s focus) or more egalitarian relationships (e.g. sharing of information about sources or local institutions among reporters). Through my observation of these interactions, I sought to identify how culture emerges relationally and rhetorically in language, stories, patterns of deference and assertion, and taken-for-granted practices.
Carey’s notion of “communication as culture”79 provides an appropriate theoretical starting point for such an exploration. Drawing from his definition, I identify culture, for the purposes of this project, as representative of a system of meaning crafted through symbols, stories, rituals, exchanges, and other communicative acts. In challenging the traditional dominance of a transmission view of communication, Carey argued for foregrounding a longstanding, but rarely highlighted, ritual view “directed not toward the extension of messages in space but toward the maintenance of society in time; not the act of imparting information but the representation of shared beliefs.”80
Newsroom culture, then, both informs and is informed by the larger culture(s) within which it operates. This approach to culture is particularly appropriate in studying community journalism, given its emphasis on community-building and the need to address local values in coverage decisions. Considered from this ritual perspective, local newspapers represent mechanisms through which the shared culture of a community can be negotiated and expressed.
37 These foundational concepts generate a perspective of culture and communication as inextricably intertwined, a notion expressed in communication scholar Mark Orbe’s argument that “the ability to comprehend one concept is contingent upon understanding its relationship to the other.”81 This understanding guides my own approach to the exploration of newsroom culture as something that operates reciprocally with the communicative acts performed by journalists inhabiting this shared space, as well as those performed by other members of the community.
The work of narrative theorist Jerome Bruner in the realm of narrative and the construction of reality also contributes to my approach to culture and identity as fundamentally storied. Drawing on philosopher Paul Ricoeur’s premise that the experience of lived time can only be conveyed via narrative,82 Bruner claims that “we organize our experience and our memory of human happenings mainly in the form of narrative”83 and that these narratives are transmitted culturally. Cultural acceptance of a narrative is contingent upon its verisimilitude (characterized by Bruner as
“lifelikeness”84) and capacity to fulfill a meaningful function in the larger cultural narrative. The cultural rules that emerge to evaluate narratives, in turn, constrain the stories that we tell about our experiences. Thus, the reciprocal influence of culture and identity manifests in narrative. We become the culturally managed stories we tell about ourselves.
Journalists as Homo Narrans
This narrative approach to identity lends itself to an ontological framework grounded in Bormann’s symbolic convergence theory. Bormann situated his theory
38 within a broader movement to address “the communicative essence of human nature as homo narrans.”85 Symbolic convergence theory proposes that shared narratives and fantasies are means through which group consciousness arises and is sustained. Symbolic convergence takes place when the interpretive systems that individuals bring to bear on an object or idea overlap, allowing for what Bormann called “empathetic communion.”86
When such an overlap occurs among many individuals, the opportunity to develop a community arises.
Symbolic convergence theory provides a foundation for identifying shared consciousness as a persistent way of communicating within a group and for exploring:
the dynamic tendencies within communication systems that explain why
group consciousnesses arise, continue, decline, and disappear and the
effects such group consciousnesses have in terms of meanings, motives,
and communication within the group.87
A key element of symbolic convergence theory is the rhetorical vision, which amalgamates multiple group fantasies to develop a cohesive interpretation of some element of reality.88 In the context of symbolic convergence theory, rhetorical fantasies represent narratives employed to help group members make sense of their common experiences. These fantasies can be based in fact (e.g. stories about things that have happened in the past) or imaginative (e.g. narratives that describe an anticipated future).
However, Bormann cautions, his use of the term fantasy does not correspond to common usage indicating a phenomenon that is “not grounded in reality.”89 Rather, fantasy in the
39 context of symbolic convergence theory is directly implicated in the creation of a group’s shared reality.
A rhetorical vision organizes several fantasies around a “master analogy.”
Bormann identified The Cold War, Black Power, and the Moral Majority as examples of rhetorical visions that connected rhetorical communities.90 In the case of journalists, the idea of the Fourth Estate, or the watchdog role of the press, represents a rhetorical vision formed around a collection of shared fantasies, including Bob Woodward and Carl
Bernstein’s investigation of the Watergate break-in and the Boston Globe’s exposure of the pedophilia scandal within the Catholic Church. These stories about individual journalists or news organizations standing up to powerful institutions coalesce around the idea of an unwaveringly independent press, which in turn helps sustain journalistic values and a sense of professional community.
Zelizer’s conceptualization of journalism as an interpretive community similarly draws on the idea of narrative and storytelling as central to sense-making and identity- formation: “Journalists, in this view, come together by creating stories about their past that they routinely and informally circulate to each other—stories that contain certain constructions of reality, certain kinds of narratives, and certain definitions of the appropriate practice.” 91 She argued that reporters’ assertion of their reliance on professional standards and universal ethical codes to determine what constitutes news and how it is presented conceal the active construction of reality that occurs through these decisions. Further, she wrote, journalists use this tactic to justify their claims of expertise in determining news agendas. Yet assessments of journalistic practice through a
40 professional lens take these codes and standards for granted and fail to acknowledge the various ways in which they are negotiated.
Zelizer argued that journalists can “build authority for practices not emphasized by traditional views of journalism”92 by establishing shared interpretations of events that support such practices. This process of legitimizing alternative approaches to journalism is particularly meaningful in considering how community journalists negotiate the cosmopolitan-provincial dialectic. Zelizer emphasized the role of informal networking among journalists in the diffusion of shared interpretations of news values and practices, as well as the otherwise unspoken rules, boundaries, and understandings of appropriate journalistic behavior. She suggested that future research of journalism as an interpretive community could provide important insight into several questions that are also of interest to my own project:
• How are journalistic communities formed through cultural discussion?
• How do journalists incorporate practices of negotiation, discussion and
challenges of other journalists into their work?
• When do journalists check in with colleagues about story ideas and
approaches to reporting, and what outcomes result from these
conversations?93
Zelizer’s focus on interpretation in the context of journalism culture is reinforced in Stuart Allan’s framing of journalism as an interpretive performance. When faced with an unfamiliar situation, journalists, according to Allan, practice a disciplined improvisation akin to jazz performances. He used a case study of The New York Times’
41 publication of documents provided by WikiLeaks to support his argument. As a stateless, pseudo-journalistic organization not bound by national laws or professional considerations, WikiLeaks posed a challenge to traditional journalists accustomed to clearer distinctions between sources and journalistic partners. The decision of Times editors to identify WikiLeaks and its founder Julian Assange strictly as sources marked a necessary improvisation, given its lack of precedent, but was informed by established definitions of journalism shared by the larger community of professionals. Within this improvised framework, journalists performed the interpretive functions traditionally applied to material supplied by sources—including verification and contextualization—to establish its credibility.94
As communication technologies increase interactivity among journalists and audiences, such improvisations become more common. The reciprocal influence between rhetorical visions that guide existing journalism practices and newly necessary interpretations of audience members as sources of information or partners in the reporting process offers a potentially rich resource in the study of the evolution of newsroom culture. The fact that these interpretations occur largely within individual newsrooms indicates a need to explore the effects of some organizational communication concepts on this process.
Organizational Communication Constructs
Organizational communication scholar George Cheney’s application of Kenneth
Burke’s “rhetoric of identification” to organizational contexts provides a meaningful framework through which to examine the relationship between identification with an
42 organization or group and social interaction.95 Cheney argued that “identification arises as a communicative, cooperative response”96 to an emphasis on divisions reflected in such phenomena as organizational hierarchies and social stratification. To address these divisions, individuals pursue “corporate identities” that provide a sense of
“consubstantiality” with other individuals who share their interests, values or experiences. However, when these corporate identities conflict, the identification process can be complicated.
In the case of community journalists, for example, their identification with newsroom colleagues and the newspaper as an organization could be influenced by how well that potential corporate identity accommodates their identifications with other groups. In addition to social groups that emerge from common distinctions such as gender, race, religion, sexual orientation, political ideology, and class background, individual journalists might identify differently with professional communities or the geographic community served by the publication. Based on Cheney’s assertions, newcomers to the community with strong affiliations to professional groups that value metropolitan-style journalism could struggle to identify with a newsroom steeped in a culture of provincial-style journalism and inhabited by long-term residents of the community.
Organizations often use communication to overcome such obstacles and encourage members’ identification with their values and goals. Cheney identified three
Burkean identification strategies at play in organizational communication practices: the common ground technique, in which shared values and goals are emphasized;
43 identification through antithesis, in which a common enemy is established; and the assumed or transcendent “we,” in which corporate discourse presumes shared interests. In the context of community journalism, news organizations might implement these strategies by focusing internally on the values that bridge metropolitan and provincial journalism and the common economic and political threats to the effective practice of journalism. Additionally, the assumed “we” might be perceived in journalistic artifacts such as unsigned editorials that imply an evaluation of identified topics rooted in communal newsroom values.
Organizational communication scholars such as Dawna Ballard and David
Seibold address time as a communicative construction that both enables and constrains communication, and represents another relevant conceptual foundation for the study of a newsroom. Ballard and Siebold contend that the temporal order of an organization, as indicated in elements like daily deadlines or the work schedules of newsroom employees in different departments, are shaped by the organization’s cultural values. Once established, though, these temporal constructions exert a reciprocal influence on communication within the organization.97 As deadlines approach, for example, constraints on relational interactions might be apparent as task-based communication takes on a particular urgency.
Ballard and Siebold also emphasize the role of coordinated behavior in the cultural negotiation of organizational time.98 Without some level of agreement enacted through adherence to temporal norms, organizational processes would be hampered significantly. In the newsroom context, reporters are expected to write their stories in a
44 timeframe that allows editors to read them and address any concerns before sending them on to the layout and design phase, which must be completed by press time, allowing for the printing and delivery of the newspaper to readers at a standard time each day. When these time standards are not met, organizational members farther down the line feel their effects. If a reporter misses his or her deadline, for example, an editor might have to decide whether to run the story with minimal opportunity for editing and fact-checking or hold the story for the following day.
For more than a century, print journalists have contributed to the collective construction of a relatively standard approach to time in newsrooms that produce a daily paper. However, recent advances in communication technologies have sparked a renegotiation of those temporal elements in many newsrooms. The long-established diurnal rhythm of production for daily newspapers has been challenged as opportunities for (and expectations of) more immediate reporting and communication with readers increase. As a result, many journalists are under pressure to publish more frequently than they had in the past and to simultaneously engage the audience through reader forums, social media, or other online platforms. Ballard and Seibold proposed that increased time demands, as experienced by many journalists in the digital age, would result in declining relational communication among organizational members.99 Operating from this perspective, the impact of temporal elements on newsroom communication and culture is particularly relevant to contemporary discussions of journalism.
45 Community Newspapers and the Public Sphere
The same technologies that increase demands upon journalists’ time also call into question their long-established roles as mediators of the public sphere. Social media, blogs, online reader forums, and other online platforms that increasingly serve as sites of public negotiation of a community’s shared rules and values give individual citizens less restricted access to these conversations. Journalist and scholar Dan Gillmor references
“the former audience” to indicate the active role readers and viewers now take in the identification and distribution of news. Journalists must adapt to this new environment, he suggests, by emphasizing their capacity to provide context for information originating from other sources.100 Along similar lines, media scholar Todd Graham noted that journalists in the digital age can use their positions to identify and highlight “episodic public spheres” that emerge via user-generated content (such as online comments and e- mail submissions) and social media platforms.101
Similar to their metropolitan counterparts, community journalists must contend with readers’ increased agency in the public discussion that underlies and defines civic life. However, Hatcher has argued that local newspapers continue to play a significant role in the development of social capital or “the idea that the activities of community that create and maintain connections have value.”102 Specifically, he said, local newspapers promote civic life through the publication of the kind of content that readers clip and save, such as wedding and birth announcements, coverage of high school sports, and other examples of “good news.”
46 Lauterer further argued that community newspapers can guide the development of a community and even create community by “educating the newcomers about the social context in which they’ve chosen to live.”103 In other words, the community-building function of many smaller newspapers and the greater intimacy between community journalists and their readers complicate an understanding of journalism’s role in the contemporary public sphere based solely on studies of larger news organizations.
Local newspapers also can draw on those more intimate and reciprocal relationships with readers to negotiate their roles in the public sphere in different ways than metropolitan journalists might. By focusing on matters of immediate importance to their readers, media scholar Kevin Howley argues that:
… community journalism revitalizes the public sphere and counteracts the
apathy, disenfranchisement, and depoliticization cultivated by lackluster
press performance. In short, community media provide the opportunities
and resources for local publics to reassert journalism’s place in the
conversation of democracy.104
In a study of community radio listeners in Australia, journalism scholars Michael
Meadows, Susan Forde, Jacqui Ewart, and Kerrie Foxwell reached similar conclusions.
Although their research focused on broadcast outlets, they argued that their findings emphasized the local nature of the coverage over the medium itself. The researchers’ focus-group and individual interviews with radio listeners led them to conclude that the capacity to engage directly with complex local narratives allows community news
47 organizations to “play a crucial role in creating public consciousness, contributing to public sphere debate and, more broadly, the democratic process.”105
Community newspapers, for example, might represent a reader’s only source of information about the actions of local governments, school boards, and other entities that directly affect the reader through taxation, provision of services, educational policies, and other relevant functions. As such, the newspaper serves not only as a monitor of the ethical behavior of public servants but also as a forum for community members to learn about and respond to measures that have an impact on their daily lives. Importantly, the potentially robust role of community journalism in the public sphere is contingent upon the “local-first” mentality articulated by Lauterer. In an age of widespread chain ownership of local newspapers, the commitment to comprehensive coverage of local issues comes into question. Howley, among others, has advocated alternative funding structures that protect local news organizations from becoming beholden to outside corporate interests as ways to avoid this pitfall.106
Although economic challenges have led to the exploration of new approaches to the financing of journalism at all levels, longstanding local ownership represents a more traditional safeguard against the corporatization of local newspapers. For that reason, among others articulated earlier, I chose the newsroom of the Charleston Gazette-Mail as the site of my research. Historical and ongoing connections between the Chilton family and the Charleston and West Virginia communities inclined me to expect more meaningful investments in the coverage of local issues than distant corporate publishers were likely to provide.
48 In the following chapter, I describe in detail the practices that guided my research.
Over the course of two-and-a-half months, I spent 29 days observing interactions in the newsroom and interviewing many of the journalists who worked there. I returned once more about a month after the conclusion of my observations for a final interview with the executive and managing editors of the newspaper. As I explain in the following pages, my analysis of the data collected through these processes was shaped by the conversations I had with Gazette-Mail staff members and my own experiences as a journalist, as well as the scholarly conversations addressed in the preceding pages.
49 III. Research Practices: A Homecoming, of Sorts
The biggest challenge, it turns out, is deciding where to stop. You leave your site, but things keep happening. The bankruptcy announcement six months after my final visit to the newsroom was the most dramatic example, but it was one of many developments relevant to my research that emerged in the immediate aftermath of my fieldwork in
Charleston. The last day of my newsroom observation period was June 20, 2017—West
Virginia Day1—but I returned a little more than a month later for a final interview with executive editor Rob Byers and managing editor Greg Moore. By then, one of the copy editors I had interviewed during my fieldwork had resigned, and the editors were beginning the search for a replacement. In the following months, as I completed my transcription of the interviews I had conducted and organized my field notes in preparation for the writing stage of this project, I learned via their Twitter accounts that two reporters had left the Gazette-Mail. A third announced his departure in early 2018 as
I was finishing this chapter.
Changes were not limited to the composition of the newsroom. At the beginning of October, for example, the Gazette-Mail ceased Monday print publication,2 an increasingly common response to economic challenges in the industry. However, that discouraging news was offset by multiple reports of partnerships with outside organizations that would allow for improved coverage and/or ease some of the local publisher’s existing financial burden. The GroundTruth Project announced in September that it would fund yearlong reporting fellowships for the Gazette-Mail, West Virginia
Public Broadcasting, and the Lexington (Ky.) Herald-Leader as part of its “Report for
50 America” initiative.3 The project draws on some of the principles and practices employed by national service organizations like the Peace Corps, AmeriCorps, and Teach for
America to address the issue of understaffed newsrooms throughout the country.4
Reporter Caity Coyne, who interned with the Gazette-Mail over the summer of 2017, received a fellowship to return to the newsroom in January 2018.5
Representatives of the political fact-checking website Politifact visited Charleston in October for a public forum to explain the organization’s mission and processes as it kicked off its partnership with the Gazette-Mail to gauge and report the accuracy of statements made by West Virginia politicians through the state’s May 2018 primary.6 In
December, the paper announced ProPublica’s selection of longtime environmental reporter Ken Ward Jr. to participate in its Local Reporting Network initiative. The project, “created to support investigative journalism at local and regional news organizations, particularly in cities with populations below 1 million,”7 established a collaborative reporting relationship between ProPublica and the local newsroom. Under the terms of that partnership, the nonprofit organization committed to reimburse the
Gazette-Mail for Ward’s 2018 salary in addition to providing resources and support for his reporting throughout the year.
Beyond developments specific to the Gazette-Mail, the broader discourses around journalism and Appalachia that informed my selection of this research site continued to evolve, and they showed no signs of fading as 2017 gave way to 2018. Just a day into the new year, President Donald J. Trump continued his efforts to malign responsible journalism with a Twitter declaration that he would present “THE MOST DISHONEST
51 & CORRUPT MEDIA AWARDS OF THE YEAR” to selected journalists and news organizations the following week.8 Editorial responses and analyses of the effects of this
“fake news” campaign have accumulated on the pages, broadcasts, and websites of media organizations around the country and the world.
Similarly, an apparent obsession with rural white voters in “Trump Country” has continued to draw reporters from national news organizations to Appalachia, even as natives of the region (and others) denounce the advancement of the oversimplified
Hillbilly Elegy9 narrative and outright failure to acknowledge ideological diversity evident in this particular form of parachute journalism. New long-form texts that counter that narrative, notably Steven Stoll’s Ramp Hollow: The Ordeal of Appalachia10 and
Elizabeth Catte’s What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia11, began to emerge in late 2017 and early 2018 to supplement ongoing efforts in traditional media, the blogosphere, and social networking sites to convey the complexity of the region.
For a few months, it seemed crucial to investigate each new voice or message in these discourses to determine what effect it might have on my understanding of the newsroom and the people who worked there. I was quickly overwhelmed by the futility of such an undertaking. Yet I struggled to determine where to draw the line. As new takes on journalism and Appalachia appear, which ones must be addressed to maintain relevance in a constantly changing discursive environment? Which books must I read?
Which Twitter threads must I acknowledge? Which events will still matter when this report is written? The limits I finally established are subjective and might have been drawn differently by a researcher with other interests and priorities. My focus is on the
52 time I spent in the newsroom in the late spring and early summer of 2017. To that end, I assessed each event or text or piece of information that came to my attention after I left the site on the basis of its relationship to what I saw and heard in my observations of the newsroom and interviews with the journalists who worked there. If I believed that it contributed to the explanation, illumination, or contextualization of data from the field, I tried to account for it in my analysis of that data.
What exists on these pages is a record of a moment in the life of this publication, this region, this country, this profession, this newsroom, these people. I chose this project and this site because I believed it to be an important moment. However, moments are perpetually passing and being replaced by other moments. Heraclitus’s assertion that one cannot step into the same river twice applies. I have tried to capture the aspects of this moment that best defined it in the framework of my research questions and that inform an understanding of it in the larger scope of history. In the remainder of this chapter, I explain the processes by which I pursued this end. I begin with a general description of my routine experiences as an observer in the newsroom, followed by more detailed accounts of some specific practices and spaces central to my research process. Before concluding with an explanation of my approach to analysis, I provide some personal background to elucidate the influence of my own experiences on my understanding of what I encountered in the Gazette-Mail newsroom.
A Day in the Newsroom
Fieldwork days generally began with a 90-minute drive from my house in Athens,
Ohio, to the Gazette-Mail offices in downtown Charleston, West Virginia.12 I picked up
53 U.S. 33 East near the southeast edge of the Athens city limits and followed it to
Ravenswood, West Virginia, before hitting I-77 South for the second leg of the trip.
Traffic on 33 was consistently light, but when the highway narrowed from four lanes to two I occasionally found myself edging closer to the car ahead of me in my impatience for the road to straighten and let me pass. Most of the time, though, I appreciated the drive as an opportunity to transition gradually between home and the field even as it forced me to contend with my ambiguous sense of the border between the two.13
Most days I left home around 7:30 in the morning.14 I listened to Morning Edition on the public radio station based in Athens until the sound turned to static as I approached the bridge to Ravenswood. I paid particular attention to the local newsbreaks, which regularly cited Gazette-Mail stories, and the national stories that seemed to lend themselves to local angles. This was both a continuation of a decades-old habit of using morning drive time to catch up on the news and a preparatory practice for my fieldwork. I relied on the information I gathered from the newscasts—along with routine checks of
Twitter throughout the day—to help me navigate the shorthand references made in editorial meetings that presumed a familiarity with the latest news.
After crossing into West Virginia, I usually took a short detour into Ravenswood for breakfast. By the midpoint of my fieldwork, the women working the drive-through at
Tudor’s Biscuit World began to recognize me. Each time I ordered a small sweet tea, they met me at the window with an upsized Styrofoam™ cup: “It’s all the same price, honey, so I gave you a large.” I got the “honey” from the start, even before I became a regular. When, during an interview, one of the Gazette-Mail’s younger reporters who had
54 lived in West Virginia for only a few months expressed her irritation at the tendency of public officials to apply such terms to her, I felt a moment of defensiveness in spite of myself. She was almost certainly right to presume that the middle-aged men to whom she referred used these “endearments” condescendingly to demean and unsettle her. But those
“honeys” at the drive-through felt like a welcome home to me. On the last day of my fieldwork, I met a friend for lunch at a diner in South Charleston before driving back to
Athens. When I went to the register to pay the check and the server asked, “Everything all right, babe?” the weight of leaving hit me. I realized how much I would miss this casual intimacy, just as I would miss this brief opportunity to return to a newsroom.
About 45 minutes after my routine stop in Ravenswood, I pulled into the parking lot alongside the Presbyterian church next door to the Gazette-Mail building. On the initial day of my fieldwork, I waited at the first-floor reception desk while the receptionist called the executive editor to ensure that I was expected. On subsequent days, I just signed in at the front desk and walked upstairs to the newsroom unannounced.
Byers greeted me on that first day, gave me a brief tour of the newsroom, and directed me to an empty cubicle at the back of the area populated mostly by reporters. About a month after the start of my fieldwork, one of three summer interns moved into that cubicle, and
Byers showed me to a new spot in the copy desk area on the other side of the newsroom.
I was based there for the remainder of my fieldwork.
I went directly to my desk each day when I arrived in the newsroom. I occasionally said hello or had brief conversations with members of the staff as I walked through the room and got settled, but most days found me quietly arranging my supplies
55 within a minute or two of my arrival. I took my laptop, a notebook, and a couple of pens from my bag and placed them all on my desk. I opened a Microsoft Word document on my laptop, typed the day, date, and time of my arrival and left it open throughout the day.
I returned to that document to record detailed observations, notes from conversations with journalists in the newsroom, or preliminary analyses as they occurred to me and time allowed. Before closing it, I noted the time of my departure and the total number of hours I had spent in the newsroom that day. The collected documents came to represent a significant portion of my fieldnotes.15
The notebook was for scratch notes, which accounted for most of the writing I did in the field. I filled six-and-a-half 100-page, 9.75x7.5-inch notebooks over the course of my fieldwork. I mapped out the newsroom—where people sat, how people moved, the spatial relationships among different editorial units. I recorded the interactions I observed, naming the participants and describing the tone as well as the content if I was close enough to hear the conversation. I captured the habits of individuals and the collective routines as I noticed them. At noon each day, for instance, someone (often the city editor, though other people in the newsroom attended to it when he was away from his desk) turned on the television mounted on a back wall of the newsroom. After the midday newscast from a local station ended, the television typically remained off until the beginning of the 5 p.m. newscast. On the rare occasion someone turned it on in the middle of the afternoon, it was tuned to coverage of such events as the U.S. House of
Representatives’ vote to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act or President Donald
J. Trump’s announcement of the U.S. withdrawal from the Paris Climate Agreement.
56 I also used the notebooks to document informal conversations related to meeting schedules, events taking place outside the newsroom, and other topics. I noted the timing of arrivals and departures throughout the day, the occasional presence of newsroom outsiders. I tried to capture as much as I could of my sensory experience of the newsroom—the sound of the police scanner, the limited natural light coming from the windows in the outer offices that lined one side of the newsroom, the unusual heat that pervaded the newsroom on the penultimate day of my observations. In comparing my perceptions to the observations newsroom staffers made about the environment, I could gauge which elements of the environment were taken for granted and which were not.
The light, in particular, came up in my conversations with former Daily Mail staffers who missed the windows in their former newsroom.
The first couple of days that I spent in the newsroom were remarkably quiet, so quiet that I began to question my own recollections of a constantly buzzing workspace.
As I wrote in my fieldnotes for Friday, April 14, the second day of my observations:
I’m realizing that I might be remembering the bustle of the newsroom
incorrectly. The casual quiet of this morning feels familiar, and I can
remember now how jarring loud or sustained conversations in the
newsroom often seemed. People mostly worked, attention directed to their
screens, with occasional questions or asides to people sitting nearby. There
were certainly phone conversations, but those seemed to happen at certain
times of the day. In fact, much of what I remember as bustle was really
limited to specific elements punctuating the day.
57 Over the course of the next two-and-a-half months, through multiple conversations with members of the newsroom staff and discussions with a few of my former colleagues, I came to the conclusion that the truth was somewhere between my preliminary perspective and the one expressed in my early fieldnotes. Newsrooms had become quieter over the three decades since I’d first spent time in one. The hum of the cathode ray tube computer monitors and the noise of the AP photo wire machine, for example, had been eliminated by technological advances, and the ringing of telephones had been significantly mitigated by the availability of online communication channels such as e-mail and social media. In the Gazette-Mail newsroom specifically, digital transmission also had eliminated the need for the pneumatic tubes that had once carried pages back and forth between the newsroom and the composition room. But many of the more widespread changes had already occurred by the time I left newspapers, and my own memories were contaminated by repeated viewings of All the President’s Men and other popular culture representations of the newsroom as a hive of constant activity.
Additionally, a few factors coalesced that first week to alter what I ultimately came to know as the characteristic environment of the Gazette-Mail newsroom. My mid-
April start date coincided with spring break for the local schools, so it was a popular vacation week for newsroom staffers with school-age children. The state legislative session had recently adjourned, as well, marking a traditional lull in the temporal reporting cycle of the only daily newspaper based in the West Virginia capital. The reporters and editors who were in the newsroom when I arrived on Tuesday, April 11, were also recovering from the excitement of the Pulitzer Prize announcement the day
58 before. “Monday was crazy,” Byers told me at the end of that week, noting the presence of a documentary film crew in the newsroom for the announcement and the sudden attention from a variety of national news organizations. “Tuesday everybody was just coming to grips with it.”
In the second and third weeks of my fieldwork, I began to get a better sense of the typical rhythms of the space. Shortly after my arrival most days, I attended the daily editorial meeting of the executive, managing, city, and image editors and the digital content manager.16 The conference room where the meeting was held was situated in a back corner of the newsroom directly across from the cubicle where I sat during the first month or so of my fieldwork. It housed many of the daily or weekly meetings of various contingents of the staff as well as less formal conversations among newsroom staffers and occasional discussions with individuals or small groups from outside the newsroom.
Windows lined the wall of the conference room that ran parallel to the newsroom, allowing me visual access to those meetings even when I was sitting at my cubicle.
At the morning editorial meeting, the newsroom staffers sat around a rectangular conference table that filled most of the room, and I sat on one of a few chairs lining the outer wall near the door. From that position, I could clearly observe everyone at the table while remaining just outside the central sphere of activity. I kept informal minutes of each meeting I attended in my notebook, making headnotes of the affective elements of my observations to be recorded in my notebook or on my laptop after returning to my cubicle.
59 The discussion typically centered on stories and related photos or video expected for publication the following day or soon thereafter. However, once immediate issues were addressed, conversation sometimes shifted to longer-term projects and other general planning items. In the first meeting I attended, topics included a recent social media exchange between the executive editor and an elected official, the status of fundraising efforts for a political campaign, coverage of an out-of-town festival, and the resignation of a photojournalist. Later meetings addressed items ranging from concerns about the time costs associated with a Freedom of Information Act request to coverage of the first anniversary of a major flood that affected communities throughout West Virginia to consideration of assignments for the summer interns.
The length of those morning meetings varied. The ones I attended ran anywhere from 10 to 25 minutes, depending on the depth of conversation required, the number of topics on the (unwritten) agenda, and constraints on the participants’ time. After returning to my desk, I spent 15 minutes or so entering any observations I did not have time to record during the meeting into my notebook or the Word document open on my laptop. I included in those notes questions about the content or process of the meeting that I would address in later conversations with the executive or managing editor. The discussions that took place during those meetings also informed some of the individual interviews I conducted in the later weeks of my fieldwork.
In the weeks before I began to conduct interviews, I typically spent the next six hours or so seated in my cubicle. I rarely left for more than a few minutes at a time, maybe to walk down the hall to the break room for a can of Coke™ and a bag of Cheez-
60 Its™ to supplement the sandwich I had brought from home for lunch. Otherwise, I sat quietly at my desk, watching, listening, writing, turning over in my mind the patterns that seemed to be emerging in my observations. A few staff members stopped at my cubicle from time to time to introduce themselves, to ask how the project was going, or to invite me to events planned outside the newsroom. Others seemed to take little notice of my presence. My laptop and notebook served as camouflage in a room full of people using the same kinds of tools. When I started conducting interviews later in my fieldwork, a few people mentioned mistaking me for a new reporter in those first few weeks.
At around 4 p.m., I returned to the conference room for the daily budget meeting.
Most of the participants in the morning editorial meeting also attended this session. They were joined by several individuals on the late shift—the assistant city editor, the weekend editor, the news editor and other members of the copy desk staff responsible for the final edits of stories and layout of the next day’s paper. The meeting began with the distribution of printed copies of the local and wire story budgets. The tone of the meeting, like most of the other meetings I attended during my fieldwork, was consistently informal. The city editor, Ben Fields, typically opened the discussion with updates on the length and expected submission times of local stories. If there were questions about the relative significance of stories, other participants weighed in. After this brief preliminary discussion, Fields announced the placement order of stories on the cover and section front.
Once staff-written stories were addressed, meeting participants turned their attention to the Associated Press and Washington Post/Bloomberg wire budgets.
61 Individuals around the room made suggestions, often stressing the relationship between particular national stories and local interests. Anything that addressed the coal industry or associated environmental regulations was noted, as were stories related to the growing number of state and municipal governments filing lawsuits against pharmaceutical companies for their role in the opioid crisis. The staff also discussed stories with national and international significance, such as Trump’s proposed travel ban for immigrants from several predominantly Muslim countries or his firing of FBI director James Comey. The conversation also included references to stories not yet available through the wire services but being reported by other outlets.
Occasionally, brief debates over the significance of a story or the likelihood that it advanced new information on a familiar topic arose. Discussions were generally succinct, though. The late-afternoon meetings rarely lasted longer than 10 or 15 minutes. Friday sessions tended to be the lengthiest of the week because they addressed not only the following day’s edition, but also the anticipated content of the Sunday and Monday papers.
After the meeting, I returned to my desk and remained there for another hour or two. I spent that time observing and recording the transition of responsibilities from the early shift to the late shift. There was often a minor flurry of activity at this point in the day. Reporters checked in with the city editor, assistant city editor, or managing editor with updates on their stories. Those editors then conferred with the news editor or other members of the copy desk staff. The opinion page editors discussed page proofs with copy editors. Some of the most sustained interaction I observed over my time in the field
62 occurred in those late afternoon hours as the day wound down for one segment of the newsroom population and began for another.
Around 5:30 or 6 p.m., I noted the time of my departure and closed the document on my laptop. I returned it to my bag, along with my notebook and pens. I gathered my water bottle and bag and left the newsroom, walking down the stairs and out to the parking lot beside the Presbyterian church. My day ended as it had begun, with a 90- minute drive. I spent that time thinking through the implications of various things I had witnessed, planning follow-up conversations, and making comparisons to my experiences as a journalist. I listened to the news and to podcasts. I listened to music that carried me back to my own newsroom days.
Anthropologist James Clifford contended that “[t]he discourse of ethnography
(“being there”) is too sharply separated from that of travel (“getting there”).”17 He was writing not only of the mode of transportation, but also the broader contexts within which the field is situated, the home from which the researcher travels, and the various translations that occur in the movement between those spaces. I experienced the highways between Charleston and Athens as an extension of both the field and home, a complicated, liminal territory. No representation of my fieldwork would be complete without an acknowledgement of the “getting there.”
With that fact in mind, I have included throughout this chapter references to the
“blurred boundary areas” that often “slip out of the ethnographic frame.”18 The road between home and the field is just one of those territories. In the following section, I describe the research practices not captured in a generalized account of a typical day of
63 observation. Those practices occasionally took me outside the newsroom to peripheral zones that figured into many of the stories participants shared with me in interviews and casual conversations. Both these physical spaces and the virtual environment of social media represent extensions of the field in line with Clifford’s call to ground observations in relevant contexts.
Beyond Routine Newsroom Observation
No description of a single day could adequately capture the details of fieldwork.
Variations abound. Some days, for instance, I followed the schedule of the copy desk staff, arriving in the afternoon and remaining in the newsroom until the print edition was ready for press. The hours I spent observing the newsroom from my cubicle each day in the first month decreased later as I began to spend more time interviewing individual journalists. Visits from a documentary film crew, a pair of aspiring journalists from
Russia, and other newsroom outsiders occasionally disrupted daily routines.
In the following pages, I explain the elements of my methodological approach not captured in the previous summary of my daily routine in the Gazette-Mail newsroom.
Ethnographic research encompasses a range of practices beyond simple observation. I regularly reviewed the online and print editions of the newspaper, as well as story budgets and other documents made available to me over my time in Charleston.19 I conducted interviews with most of the journalists working at the Gazette-Mail at the time of my fieldwork. I left the newsroom to explore the wider geographical and social spaces inhabited by participants in the project.
64 Ethnographic methodology, and the “thick description”20 facilitated by such immersive qualitative research, has grounded some of the central texts in journalism scholarship over the last half century.21 In fact, journalism scholar Chris Paterson described it as the only means to “come close to providing an adequate description of the culture and practice of media production, and the mindset of media producers.”22 In pursuit of that goal, I took advantage of as many entry points to the culture of the newsroom as I could identify and access. The next several pages of this chapter supplement the previous section to convey a more holistic representation of my fieldwork.
Social Media
From the first week of my observations in the newsroom, I followed the Gazette-
Mail’s official accounts on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. I made regular visits to the homepages of those accounts to check for posts I might have missed in my daily feed and to monitor readers’ responses to posted stories or images based on likes, shares, retweets, and comments. Based on my observations, readers seemed to engage most directly with the newspaper via Facebook. Images posted on Instagram were frequently liked by dozens of followers, but comments on Facebook far outnumbered those registered on either of the other two platforms.
The content and tone of those responses varied from post to post. In some cases, the comments clearly indicated readers’ perceptions of the relationship between the
Gazette-Mail and the community. On the Facebook Live video of the newsroom’s celebration of Eric Eyre’s Pulitzer Prize victory, for instance, the digital content manager
65 can be heard announcing at the five-minute mark that it was already the account’s most- liked live video to date. The 157 comments on the video included numerous congratulations and expressions of pride in the work of Eyre and his Gazette-Mail colleagues, as well as more specific references to the newspaper’s investigative reporting tradition and its role in the community. One viewer noted that longtime publisher Ned
Chilton would be “grinning ear to ear.” Others called the paper “a state treasure” and remarked on the thanks owed by the community to Eyre and the Gazette-Mail for their coverage of the deluge of opioids into West Virginia.
Comments on other posts indicated the value of the coverage to readers more implicitly. A link to Ken Ward Jr.’s story explaining the details of a settlement in a class- action lawsuit was shared 236 times by Facebook users. The suit was brought in response to contamination of the water supply caused by Freedom Industries’ 2014 chemical spill, which affected almost a quarter-million individuals and 8,000 businesses over several
West Virginia counties. Comments on the story constituted a conversation among community members that focused on eligibility for payment and how to proceed with claims. While they did not directly engage Ward or the Gazette-Mail, the nature of the discussion inspired by the post signified the value of the information to the community and the importance of the newspaper’s Facebook site as a virtual public forum.
In addition to organizational social media accounts, I followed several individual
Gazette-Mail journalists on Twitter. I searched for accounts with bios that referenced the newspaper and followed those that belonged to people who were working in the newsroom at the time of my fieldwork. I approached these accounts as potential sources
66 for some supplemental information but did not want to devote so much time to tracking individual social media activity that I was distracted from my primary focus on face-to- face interactions. Little of what I read on Twitter while I was in the field had an immediate effect on my perceptions and analysis of what I was experiencing in the physical space. The real benefit emerged later. In the months following my departure, the platform allowed me to continue to monitor major occurrences in the newsroom virtually.
Most of the events referenced in the introduction to this chapter came to my attention via
Twitter. The Gazette-Mail account alerted me to the official partnerships with
ProPublica, Politifact, and the GroundTruth Project, but the individual accounts kept me abreast of the more personal developments, such as job changes and the death of a longtime investigative reporter for the Gazette.
Twitter also provided insights into individual journalists’ connections to readers, colleagues in the newsroom and across the profession, and politicians or other subjects of
Gazette-Mail coverage. In the wake of the bankruptcy announcement, a reporter from another news organization tweeted about a coal industry attorney making a joke about issuing a pink slip to Ward. The tweet itself indicated the attorney’s animosity toward
Ward, but the larger Twitter conversation around it included vehement defenses of
Ward’s reporting as a vital tool in holding the coal companies accountable.
My observation of social media activity complemented the various means by which I examined newsroom communication in face-to-face situations. Online interactions provided insights I might not have discovered outside the digital realm.
Social media was particularly useful in understanding relationships between journalists
67 and other members of the various communities they inhabited. However, my understanding of relationships within the newsroom is overwhelmingly the product of face-to-face communication. In the remainder of this section of the chapter, I return my focus to the physical spaces I occupied during my fieldwork and the practices that contributed to that understanding.
Other Meetings
In addition to the daily meetings described earlier, various weekly meetings occupied the conference room on regular days and times throughout my fieldwork. Those gatherings typically occurred in the mid-afternoon. On Mondays, the editors who attended the daily planning meeting in the morning met around 2 p.m. with the features editor and news editor to discuss stories and images for the coming week and longer-term projects. Over the course of my fieldwork, I attended four of these weekly planning sessions. Each lasted 30 to 40 minutes. While the implicit agenda of the meetings centered on content, the informal, open tone allowed for the introduction of wider- ranging topics. In the first meeting I attended, the discussion touched upon the relocation of the Gazette-Mail’s graphic artist to facilitate communication with the image and copy desks as well as the status of an effort to address a technical glitch in the paper’s breaking news newsletter.
On Wednesdays and Thursdays, a pair of committees composed of editorial employees met in the conference room. Both groups were formed in response to recommendations from a consultant who studied the newsroom extensively, conducting focus groups and individual interviews over the course of many months following the
68 combination of the two papers. The beats committee, led by environmental reporter Ken
Ward Jr., focused on content and met on Wednesdays. The workflow committee, led by
Gazette opinion page editor Dawn Miller, addressed processes in the newsroom and met on Thursdays. I attended one meeting of each of the committees in the latter weeks of my fieldwork.
While the beats committee included many of the reporters on the staff, the meeting I observed directly was more sparsely populated than most. Ward was away from the newsroom, as were many of the younger reporters. One of the statehouse reporters, the health and higher education reporters, the city editor, and the assistant lifestyles editor were the only members in attendance. Much of the conversation revolved around possible coverage areas for a public health beat. As specific topics arose, the committee members also discussed opportunities for collaboration among reporters. A shortage of nurses in the state, for example, could be explored together by the beat reporter and the higher education reporter in the context of college and university nursing programs. Similarly, anti-trust concerns documented in a lawsuit contesting the merger of two Huntington hospitals invited the perspective of the business reporter.
The workflow meeting I attended was more typical than the beats meeting of what
I had observed in prior weeks from my position outside the conference room and the descriptions I had gathered from committee members. The digital content manager, graphic artist, news editor, city editor, assistant news editor, assistant city editor, and weekend editor joined Miller in the conference room for the meeting. I took my usual position in the corner of the room, but then accepted Miller’s invitation to join the
69 committee at the table. Committee members shared snacks of miniature peanut butter cups and fruit as they settled in to their seats at the start of the meeting.
The three-page agenda organized the committee’s concerns in relationship to about a dozen category headings related to such broad topics as general newsroom processes, long-term planning, print and web needs, and the use of space in the newsroom. Only a few of the items could be addressed in depth during the one-hour meeting, but the agenda appeared to serve as a means to keep other items in the minds of committee members even when they were not being addressed immediately. The “Done” section that opened the agenda also reminded members of what they had already accomplished.
One element common to all three weekly meetings was a relatively long-term orientation. Although the weekly planning meeting focused primarily on the near future and projects already in the works, both the beats and workflow committees were grappling with possibilities that could produce lasting changes in fundamental editorial practices and the newsroom culture: What issues merited more comprehensive coverage?
How would that coverage be organized? How would the coverage of less pressing issues be negotiated? How would reporting and editing responsibilities be distributed? What could be done to maximize web impact without sacrificing the print tradition of in-depth reporting?
Along with the daily editorial and budget meetings, these weekly meetings provided regular opportunities to observe discussions directly related to my research questions. The nature of the beats and workflow meetings, especially, encouraged the
70 thoughtful exchange of perspectives on personal and professional values, commitments to the community, and newsroom culture. Those exchanges provided meaningful insights that directly informed my analysis of the data I collected throughout my fieldwork. They also influenced my approach to another key component of my research practices. As particularly relevant outcomes of the observation process, they contributed to my refinement of a preliminary interview protocol and the adaptation of that protocol to each interview.
Interviews
I spent the first month or so of my fieldwork focused almost exclusively on observation. I had a few casual conversations with members of the staff, but my verbal interactions with them were limited in number and typically brief. Twice during that time, I met with the executive editor in the conference room to discuss my early impressions and gauge them against his perceptions. In the second of those meetings, the managing editor also participated in the discussion. In mid-May, though, I began to shift my attention to individual interviews with members of the newsroom staff. By the final weeks of the project, those interviews often accounted for most of my time in the newsroom. The eight or nine hours a day I focused on observation in the first month of my fieldwork dropped to two or three hours between interview sessions in the last couple of weeks.
Many of the questions I used to guide these more formal discussions with
Gazette-Mail journalists were part of a semi-structured interview protocol (see Appendix
C) developed prior to the start of my fieldwork. They addressed topics related to
71 participants’ background in journalism, newsroom interactions, relationships to the community outside the newsroom, perspectives on personal and professional values, and the effects of changing technology. However, I often supplemented or revised the basic protocol with questions that emerged from my observations or conversations with other members of the staff. The responses of participants also influenced the direction of the interview. When I learned, for example, that education reporter Ryan Quinn had worked for two other family-owned newspapers before joining the Gazette in 2014, our conversation moved briefly into the realm of local vs. chain ownership. Daily Mail editorial page editor Kelly Merritt’s response to a general question about the decision to maintain two opinion pages led to a discussion of the challenges of working without the editorial board he had consulted before the combination of the papers.
Between May 15 and June 20, I interviewed 30 members of the Gazette-Mail newsroom staff. Five weeks after I finished my newsroom observations, I returned for a final interview with executive editor Rob Byers and managing editor Greg Moore. In all, the digitally recorded conversations with 32 participants ran to about 23 hours.23
Individual interview times ranged from 20 minutes to nearly two hours. By the time I met with Byers and Moore in July, I had already transcribed a significant portion of the earlier recorded interviews, and their contents informed my interview with the paper’s top editors. The transcribed interviews ultimately filled 388 single-spaced pages of text.
In line with the terms of the Ohio University Institutional Review Board’s approval of the project, I offered participants the choice of being identified by name, title, or pseudonym.24 All but one participant chose to be identified by name. Any information
72 drawn from my interview with the participant who declined to be named in the text references the individual’s position in the newsroom rather than a name or supports broad themes expressed by multiple members of the staff. Appendix A contains brief descriptions of each participant, including their positions in the newsroom and professional backgrounds.
I began the interviews with digital content manager Glen Flanagan. Because I was seated next to him throughout the first month of my fieldwork, I had been able to observe his interactions with other members of the staff closely and had identified him as something of a connector within the newsroom. In addition to participating in daily editorial and budget meetings with editors, he engaged in conversation throughout the day with reporters and other members of the staff and socialized outside the newsroom with many of the younger reporters. The responsibilities of his position and his knowledge about the digital side of production contributed to the wide-ranging communication patterns I observed, but his gregarious nature was also a factor. He warmly welcomed me each day as I settled into the cubicle next to his and was one of the few people in the newsroom who regularly initiated conversations with me. As a nexus connecting often disparate elements of the newsroom, Flanagan could provide meaningful insights into the relationships among staff members that ultimately helped shape some of my later interviews. His role also positioned him to provide an authoritative perspective on the overall response to changing digital demands.
I tried to schedule interviews strategically. At the beginning of the process, I approached Flanagan and city editor Ben Fields, largely because I had observed and
73 interacted with them throughout the first weeks of my fieldwork and saw them as individuals who could provide a broad understanding of the workings of the newsroom.
The informal discussions I had with Byers and Moore throughout the first month of my fieldwork served the same purpose. After those early interviews, I moved on to the reporters situated near the cubicle where I spent the first month of my time in the newsroom. I scheduled interviews with individuals on the copy, features, and image desks after I had observed interactions on that side of the newsroom for a few weeks.
In some cases, particularly with editors I saw in meetings throughout the day, I requested interviews in face-to-face conversations. Generally, though, I e-mailed members of the staff to request their participation. The move from one side of the newsroom to the other and a shift in the hours I spent in the newsroom to allow for more thorough observation of the routines of the copy desk made electronic communication a more convenient means of reaching reporters I saw less frequently. I also hoped this approach would limit the pressure individuals felt to agree to an interview if they had any reservations about doing so.
I invited most of the people I observed in the newsroom to participate in interviews. In a few cases, employees left the organization before I could schedule a time to meet with them. I also chose to limit interviews to staff members who worked in the newsroom daily to keep the focus on the role of consistent, regular interactions on the social processes reflected in my research questions. As a result, I did not request interviews with free-lancers or columnists who worked primarily outside the office or with members of the sports staff, which was housed across the hall from the newsroom.
74 Most people agreed to be interviewed. A few individuals did not respond to my request, and I was unable to schedule a mutually convenient time to interview a few others. The total number of people interviewed represents about three-quarters of the staff working in the newsroom at the time of my fieldwork.
I conducted a small number of interviews in the conference room that housed the daily editorial and budget meetings. Because that room was so frequently occupied throughout the day, though, it was not a convenient location for most of my one-on-one meetings. I met three participants in their private offices along the periphery of the open newsroom, but most of my interview time was spent in a conference room that opened into the former Daily Mail newsroom across the hall. Flanagan suggested the site for his interview, and its mix of proximity to the newsroom, general availability, and relative privacy made it an ideal alternative to the conference room in the Gazette-Mail newsroom.
My regular visits to the Daily Mail conference room also allowed me to take a visual inventory of the unoccupied newsroom, which informed my understanding of references to the site by former Daily Mail staffers. In discussing differences between the two newsrooms, for example, individuals noted such things as the natural light available through the windows along one side of the Daily Mail newsroom and the organization of editorial units. I made note of such physical distinctions as I entered or left the conference room through the newsroom. In a few instances, participants stopped with me at the beginning or end of their interviews to point out their former desks or clarify verbal descriptions offered during our conversation.
75 In my discussions with Gazette-Mail staffers, the Daily Mail newsroom emerged as a particularly relevant “auxiliary” space to the primary site of my observations. The situation of competing editorial staffs on the same floor of the same building as recently as two years prior to my arrival—and the ongoing efforts to negotiate a shared identity in the space formerly occupied by the Gazette staff alone—contributed to its significance in the context of my research questions. Over the course of my fieldwork, other sites salient to the culture of the newsroom and the socialization of its inhabitants also came to my attention. In the next section, I describe my exploration of a couple of these locations.
(Beyond the Primary) Field Trips
On two occasions, I expanded the scope of my observations to spaces outside the
Gazette-Mail building. In the first weeks of my fieldwork, I learned that Flanagan and features editor Maria Young were organizing an event to encourage participation in the
Online News Association of West Virginia, a professional organization with which they were both active. Young invited me to the May 8 happy hour gathering at a local sports bar, and I attended after spending the day in the newsroom. Several members of the staff were present, and environmental reporter Ken Ward Jr. was a featured speaker. When I arrived shortly after the 6:30 p.m. start time of the event, Gazette-Mail journalists were talking among themselves and with representatives of other West Virginia news organizations also in attendance.
In addition to observing these interactions, I spent the time before and immediately after the formal programming talking casually with some of the individuals from the newsroom. I was introduced to Gazette opinion page editor Dawn Miller and
76 had my first interaction with her there. Later, I had a brief exchange with a former
Gazette-Mail photojournalist about her time as a student in Athens. After a round of drinks and appetizers, Ward spent a portion of the meeting discussing beat blogging in the context of his blogs, Coal Tattoo and Sustained Outrage. Roxy Todd, a reporter and producer with West Virginia Public Broadcasting, followed with a presentation on podcasting. Todd co-produces the Inside Appalachia podcast, which recently featured a series of episodes on the “Struggle to Stay” in West Virginia experienced by many young people in the state. The notes I took on Ward’s comments helped shape some of the questions I incorporated into my interview with him regarding his approach to blogging and facilitation of online conversations. Todd’s discussion of digital tools, as well as regional culture and economics, contributed more generally to the refinement of my interview protocol.
My second outing occurred near the end of my time in Charleston. On the night before my final day of observations, I left the Gazette-Mail around 10:45 p.m. and traveled a mile-and-a-half down Virginia Street to the Red Carpet Lounge. The Red
Carpet—or simply “The Carpet”—featured in more than half the interviews I conducted and came up regularly in my less formal conversations in the newsroom. Most of the younger reporters, particularly, talked about the bar as a central spot for socializing newcomers into the communities of the newsroom and the city. Jake Jarvis, the Gazette-
Mail’s higher education reporter and one of the cadre of 20-somethings on the staff, offered this (somewhat) tongue-in-cheek explanation of the onboarding process:
77 I think usually—and it’s usually me—someone will kind of latch onto
someone and make sure they know where the Red Carpet, the bar, is. […]
That’s the important thing. You might not know the wi-fi password, but if
you know where the Red Carpet is, you will be fine in this city.
Over my time in the field, I came to understand the Red Carpet as a peripheral space that had long served a meaningful role in the life of the newsroom. It housed celebrations and goodbye parties. About six months after I left the newsroom, it was listed in the obituary of a retired long-time Gazette reporter as the site of a post-funeral reception. It appeared as “Le Carpet Rouge” in a parody edition of the paper produced by
Gazette staffers decades before my arrival.25 One of the younger reporters I interviewed described it as a place to vent about the frustrations of the job and remind each other of their successes and the significance of their work. As assistant news editor and former
Daily Mail employee Cathy Caudill explained, it also had provided a neutral ground for interaction among members of the Gazette and Daily Mail staffs before the combination of the papers:
Even though you’re sort of competing against each other, if you’re both
nice people, you just sort of get to know each other. And, like, when you
see each other at the Carpet—I’m not a big person going to the Carpet—
but I know the reporters, when they would go to the Carpet, they would
hang out with each other.
Located near the state capitol building, the bar draws journalists from a variety of organizations, as well as political figures and statehouse administrators. However, I
78 visited a few days after the special session of the legislature had adjourned, and the clientele at that time seemed to consist primarily of neighborhood regulars.
Although I did not witness the interactions so often described by interview participants, I was able to get a general sense of the space and better visualize the specifics of the situations recounted to me. The lighting, the background music, the movement of people between the bar and the back patio all had the familiar feel of dive bars I had frequented as a reporter. Even the differences (e.g., West Virginia University flags instead of Ohio State pennants, the organization of tables around the room) were just variations on a common theme.
However, my experience there also served as a reminder of the tense space I occupied as a researcher. I had spent much of my adult life as a journalist, occupying spaces like the Gazette-Mail newsroom and the Red Carpet. That experience bought me some level of credibility and allowed me to claim commonality with the individuals involved in this project. I felt increasingly comfortable and accepted in the newsroom as my conversations with members of the staff expanded and identified more shared experiences. Alone in the bar, though, I had no effective means of signaling my membership in a recognized community. The space, with its similarities to Thompson’s and the Ruckmoor and other dive bars I frequented during my newspaper days, inspired an aching nostalgia in me, but my presence did not effect a reciprocal response. I was a stranger here. This was not my bar. I knew it as soon as I ordered a double shot of bourbon and the bartender hesitated. “Have you ever drunk here before?” he asked me.
“No,” I acknowledged. “Well, our shots are doubles.”
79 It was a clear indication that he saw me as alien to this place. And it was a good reminder that, though I was treated more congenially by the people I met in the newsroom, I would never be fully incorporated into that community. Psychology scholars
Sonya Corbin Dwyer and Jennifer Buckle argued that qualitative scholars cannot help but occupy “the space between” insider and outsider regardless of their pre-existing connections to the communities they study. The immediacy of observation and interviewing bring us into connection with the participants in our work, yet our position as researchers creates a fundamental separation:
The intimacy of qualitative research no longer allows us to remain true
outsiders to the experience under study and, because of our role as
researchers, it does not qualify us as complete insiders. We now occupy
the space between, with the costs and benefits this status affords.26
I would argue that my personal history further complicated my relationship to the community I observed. Both my professional experiences and my cultural relationship to the geographic region connected me to the site of my study, even as the particulars of my background muddled those connections. In the next section of this chapter, I describe my negotiation of this liminality.
Navigating the Spaces Between
I came of age in newsrooms. As a high school senior, I participated in a countywide program that matched students with sites and mentors in professions of their choice. I chose the daily newspaper in the county seat and missed two days of school each month to visit the newsroom. Each time I arrived, the managing editor was
80 unprepared for me. As a result, I spent many of those visits driving around the county with one of the two full-time photojournalists on staff looking for wild art or being quizzed in the darkroom on which artists performed which semi-obscure 1970s rock songs. I didn’t learn much about newswriting, but I learned that the newsroom felt like home to me. And that particular newsroom did become a home for me when I returned four-and-a-half years later to join the staff as a sports writer.
I was an insider. Other than the time I spent as an undergraduate 50 miles away at
Marshall University, I had never lived outside Scioto County. I knew my way around the back roads, and my family name was familiar to most people who had lived there for more than a few years. My dad had been a high school basketball star 40 years earlier, and folks who were too young to remember that usually knew my brother or sister or went to school with one of the dozen or so cousins I had living around town. Many of my interviews included, at some point, a thorough reckoning of who “my people” were and what connections I might share with the person answering my questions.
After a little less than three years, I left my hometown paper to join the staff of a group of community weeklies two hours away in Columbus. Despite proximity, the cultural differences between the rural Appalachian space I had inhabited until then and the quintessentially Midwestern capital city were enormous. I adapted largely by connecting with fellow exiles, sharing regular dinners of beans and cornbread and contributing to group karaoke performances of “Country Roads” to bring home a little closer. Columbus would always be comfortable to me, but it would never be home, despite 20 years of living there.
81 The newsrooms there were different. I stayed with the same group of newspapers for 14 years, but our operations moved from one nondescript office park to another twice during that time, and none of those structures looked anything like the classic, brick building that had served as my introduction to newsrooms. The interiors, too, were unfamiliar. Where my first newsroom was open with a vaguely industrial appearance, these new spaces were more segmented, separating groups of people by function—the copy desk in one room, reporters in another, photo and sports down the hall—and carpeted and painted to look more like a dentist’s office than a newsroom.
There was a consistency, though, in my fundamental experiences of all these spaces. These newsrooms, like my first, felt communal and innately familiar to me. There
I learned, in experience and conversation, what it meant to be a journalist and how the theoretical tools I had amassed in college operated in the practical world. Regardless of the physical differences among the buildings, each one housed a community of journalists to which I belonged.
That sense of belonging, not only to the immediate group of colleagues in those spaces, but also to a larger professional calling, remained with me even after I left the newsroom. Ten years later, my identity as a journalist continues to feel almost as significant to me as my identity as an Appalachian. But leavings have consequences.
They demand a renegotiation of the terms of identification with the communities left behind.
My personal history and experiences provide a tentative claim to membership, something to identify me as not strictly an outsider. I can trade war stories about former
82 editors. In a conversation with one of the veteran reporters, for example, he offered an account of a manual typewriter dropped from a second-story window in a newsroom where he worked before joining the Gazette-Mail. I responded with my recollection of divots in the drywall of one of the offices I occupied as a sports writer, the results of my editor’s tendency to hurl metal pica poles. I can speak the common language of the newsroom. But I never had to contend with Twitter and only saw the beginnings of the economic and technological threats to the very existence of print newspapers that journalists face today.
And though I came back to southeastern Ohio six years ago, the place where I live now is not the home I left despite the contention of the lines drawn on the Appalachian
Regional Commission’s maps. I live in a college town, where everyone is from somewhere else and I am presumed to be, as well, until I provide some evidence otherwise. Even then, though, my membership in this community is qualified, as is my continued claim to the identity of journalist. I am at once both insider and outsider.
Dwyer and Buckle maintain that all qualitative researchers occupy this “space between.”27 I contend, though, that the space is vast and the effects of the interaction between identities is unique to each project. Failure to acknowledge the specific nature of my positionality in this study would amount to a misrepresentation of the basic premises underlying my choice of site, research practices, and my analysis of the compiled data.
Philosopher Walter Benjamin maintained that stories unavoidably bear the imprint of the storyteller.28 My metaphorical fingerprints cannot be wiped away from the analytical
83 chapters that follow. To account for this reality, I explain in the following pages my analytical practices and the epistemological influences that guided them.
Making Sense of It All
I kept coming back to the stories. I recognize the limits of narratives as constructions, impositions of meaning on “disparate images” in what essayist Joan
Didion called our attempts “to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.”29 Still, I came to agree with anthropologist Kathleen Stewart’s observation that stories are “productive” as a “mediating form through which ‘meaning’ must pass.”30
As journalists, my participants were particularly attuned to this process. The daily practice of transforming raw information into something concise and meaningful that readers can use to make sense of the events and phenomena affecting their lives demands an aptitude for narrative.31
Stories about newsroom history, experiences in college newsrooms and other work environments, and interactions with sources or readers, among other topics, often emerged in interviews. Many of these stories were structured as traditional narratives, often recounted skillfully by individuals whose livelihoods depended upon their facility with language. However, narratives did not always follow a clear, linear path. Some were fragmented or repeated or obscured within other narratives. Some became apparent only over time and across multiple conversations. Some were discernable only in relation to unspoken presumptions. Some did not take shape until I considered their elements in the context of in-person and online observations.32
84 I began the process of identifying and analyzing narratives as they emerged in the field. Following anthropologist Jean Jackson’s characterization of fieldnotes as “a preliminary stab at analysis,”33 I often incorporated tentative interpretations of the stories
I identified in my scratch notes and conversations with newsroom staff members into the fieldnotes I prepared each day of my observations. I used lulls in the newsroom cycle
(e.g. the regular midday exodus of staffers at lunch time) as opportunities to organize and translate the scratch notes in my notebook and the headnotes that had remained unwritten to that point into more formal, typewritten fieldnotes. I continued to develop these documents throughout the day and in the days between my visits, and my earliest analytical explications began to emerge there.
After finishing my newsroom observations and transcribing the interviews I conducted, I printed all my transcripts and the fieldnotes I had kept in Microsoft Word files. I read each document, along with the handwritten notes compiled in my notebooks, employing the following system of analysis:
• On this first reading, I identified the narratives I had previously noted as
well as new ones that emerged upon closer examination and more
sustained interaction with my headnotes.
• I applied specific codes intended to concisely convey the content and
significance of each narrative. Examples of preliminary labels include
“generational differences,” “boosterism,” and “digital demands.”
• Once the initial round of coding was complete, I read the narratives again
to find connections among them. Ultimately, I articulated those
85 connections as the broad themes that provide structure to the following
chapters.
• Using color-coded highlighters and sticky flags, I marked the narratives by
theme on fresh copies of my transcripts and fieldnotes and in my original
notebooks.34
• In developing outlines for each chapter, I broke the stories down again
into sub-themes, making notes on the documents about where each story
fit in the organization of the chapter.
As described above, the process appears quite methodical. The experience of it was much more chaotic. Communication scholar Devika Chawla explained the complexity of ethnographic fieldwork in the following terms: “Quite often it resembles a wrestling match between academic training, experience, the ethnographer’s history, and instinct.”35 I experienced this struggle most persistently in the analytical process.
Questions regarding how much weight to give theory and my own newsroom experiences regularly plagued me. At times I was convinced that I had gained some significant insight only to be alerted to a misalignment between my interpretations and the lived experiences of the journalists in the newsroom. I had to develop a “tolerance for ambiguity, multiplicity, contradiction, and instability,”36 a quality anthropologist Margery Wolf described as essential to the analysis of human behavior.
As an academic who has spent a significant portion of the last few years reading and absorbing theoretical conceits relevant to the phenomena I observed in the newsroom, I must acknowledge the influence of my scholarly training on my analysis. To
86 posit a purely inductive approach would be disingenuous. Yet I remained conscious throughout of anthropologist Michael Taussig’s caution that “‘theory’ gives you insight.
But it does so at the expense of closing off things as well.”37 I relied on my conversations with journalists in the newsroom to provide a workable balance. Essentially, they participated in the analytical process with me. They corrected or clarified my understanding of some of the things I observed, provided historical context, and offered alternative interpretations.
This abductive orientation provided for “the modification or development of frames that explain rich points,”38 or unexpected occurrences that emerged while I was in the field. Theory and data informed each other, and meaning was not arbitrarily imposed upon events, narratives, or other material gathered in the research process to imply consistency with a preconceived theoretical construct. It also allowed me to address communication scholars Thomas Lindlof and Bryan Taylor’s challenge to engage with both the “intellectual heritage” of the communication discipline and “local meanings” used by members of the community one is observing to interpret situations.39
Over the course of my fieldwork and analysis, three interrelated contexts emerged as particularly salient to the negotiation of personal and organizational identity in the newsroom: community, culture, and change. I explore each of these contexts in turn in the next three chapters. First, I examine identification with a set of relevant communities.
Individual journalists connected in varying ways to the organizational community of the
Gazette-Mail, the professional community of journalism, and the geographical communities of Charleston, West Virginia, and Appalachia. I explore how individual
87 journalists’ investments in each of these communities are developed (or not) and how those investments correspond to their practices and their longevity and/or intention to remain in the community/industry/newsroom.
The relationships among these communities were also subject to negotiation. I consider how the newspaper operates as a “citizen” of the geographic community, as one participant described it, particularly in the case of an avowedly liberal/progressive news organization serving an increasingly conservative readership. Further, how does the newspaper, with its historical mission of “sustained outrage,” fit into the larger journalistic community? How should the boundaries of the geographical community be drawn? Social forces in and out of the newsroom interacted with personal background and experiences to produce a range of responses to these questions.
In the following chapter, I introduce a variety of cultures operating within the newsroom and explain the tensions apparent in the interactions across those various cultures. Recurring references to the desires of younger reporters for more consistent affirmation and guidance, for example, highlighted a challenge related to communication across generational cultures. As a recently merged newsroom, the Daily-Mail also faced tensions related to the distinct cultures of the Gazette and Daily Mail newsrooms, which differed significantly in both political/editorial ideology and daily practice.
Finally, I address the tensions between tradition and change apparent in the newsroom. Since the mid-20th century, the Gazette and its successor have operated under a mission of advocacy for the community articulated by former publisher Ned Chilton as
“sustained outrage.” It continues to be reflected in Ward’s coverage of the coal industry
88 and Eyre’s Pulitzer-winning articles on the pharmaceutical industry’s role in the ongoing opioid epidemic. In a changing media landscape, the Gazette-Mail staff must negotiate ways to maintain that tradition of fierce watchdog journalism as digital demands increase.
89 IV. Negotiating Communities
I did not meet Paul Nyden during my fieldwork in the Gazette-Mail newsroom.
He retired around the time the two papers combined in 2015 after more than three decades as an investigative reporter with the Gazette. I heard about him, though. His was one of several names mentioned by longtime Gazette staffers in interviews or casual conversations about the paper’s storied history. Nyden, who earned a Ph.D. from
Columbia University in sociology before beginning his career in journalism, contributed to the Gazette’s mission of “sustained outrage” with award-winning coverage of the coal industry and government corruption. But his significance to the newsroom extended beyond the stories he wrote. As I learned more clearly in the days following his death in early 2018, Nyden played a critical role throughout his time in Charleston in the socialization of younger Gazette journalists into their professional, organizational, and geographic communities.
Ken Ward Jr. first brought him to my attention during our interview in early June
2017. When I asked Ward which people or experiences informed his ideas about how to be a good journalist, and, particularly, how to be a good journalist in West Virginia, he responded:
That’s all about Paul Nyden. You know, I wrote a blog post on my blog
Coal Tattoo about Paul when he retired. And, you know, I certainly would
not be here if it weren’t for Paul. And coming back to the Gazette after
having interned here, one of the things that really drew me here was that I
so admired the way Paul went about doing what he did, both in that he
90 really thought that journalism was a calling of trying to make the world
better and that he really had fun doing it. And he certainly didn’t get rich
doing it, but, you know, I think he’s rich in all sorts of other ways. …
Before I was married, I lived in a little apartment on Lee Street that was
two doors down from Paul’s house. And I was probably over at Paul’s
house for dinner, I don’t know, four or five nights a week, you know. And
he was just a huge, huge influence on me. … Anything at all that I have
done, it’s because I’ve been standing on Paul’s shoulders. … So, I think
that what Paul stands for as a journalist is really what all of us should
stand for.
When Nyden died on January 6, 2018, a virtual wake materialized on Twitter.
U.S. Senator Joe Manchin remembered him as a “giant,” noting that “the impact of his work was felt across #WV and Appalachia. His relentless search for truth & commitment to his craft set the bar for what responsible investigative journalism looks like.”1 Past and present Gazette and Gazette-Mail staffers joined other admirers across West Virginia and beyond in mourning the loss to journalism and to the state and region.
The personal recollections shared by many of Nyden’s former colleagues also underscored his role as a connector to the various communities they inhabited together.
Some recounted how his mentorship and advice had influenced their approaches to journalism. Others noted the regular Sunday dinners Nyden and his wife Sarah Sheets hosted for young reporters. In his obituary of Nyden, Ward quoted former Gazette reporter Gary Harki’s appreciation of those dinners: “Once you’ve been there a few
91 times, you felt like you were a part of the family. There are reporters from coast to coast that I have met just once or not at all but feel connected to because I know we have sat at
Paul’s table and listened to his stories.”2 Managing editor Greg Moore, who came to the
Gazette in the 1990s, tweeted: “I learned so much from Paul Nyden, both inside and outside the newsroom. Evenings with his crowd at Watt Powell Park were my introduction to Charleston. The world was better with him in it.”3
Many of the memories shared online and in print characterized Nyden as an intermediary of sorts, welcoming newcomers to the profession, the city, and the newsroom. In this role, he provided not only social support but also crucial guidance related to norms, values, and expectations that helped young journalists negotiate their membership in these communities. He was not alone. In my interviews, participants identified several other newsroom figures, past and present, who served similar functions.
As both gatekeepers and guides, these individuals provided access to the communities and facilitated socialization. They filled critical positions in the bi-directional process of group membership negotiation.4
Issues related to community and identification frequently arose in my observations and interviews. Individual journalists expressed a range of perspectives on their relationships to the larger field of journalism, the city of Charleston and the state of
West Virginia, and the recently combined Gazette-Mail newsroom. Often their perspectives were influenced by relationships with mentors or more experienced colleagues like Nyden. Sometimes they evolved in conversation with contemporaries at the same stage of socialization into one or more of these communities. Many of those
92 interactions extended into peripheral spaces like The Red Carpet. However, the newsroom typically represented the base from which discussions emerged and relationships developed.
In this chapter, I explore the significance of the newsroom and its inhabitants in the context of individual identification with particular communities and membership negotiation processes. I focus on relationships to professional, organizational, and geographic communities as the primary social identity groups common to the journalists in the Gazette-Mail newsroom. I further address the impact of Nyden and other
“connectors” on socialization. I chose the term “connectors,” though imprecise, because it accommodates the range of ways in which individuals enacted that role in the newsroom and related spaces. Some served as traditional mentors, others as more detached facilitators of social interactions, but all acted as conduits to the various communities inhabited by newsroom employees. First, though, I discuss the process of defining communities through boundary delineation as I observed it in the field.
Defining Boundaries
In his exploration of community as a symbolic construction, anthropologist
Anthony Cohen argued for the centrality of a relational understanding of the term, specifically referencing the idea of “the opposition of one community to others or to other social entities.”5 Essentially, he contended, we conceive our communities (and, by extension, our identities) not only in terms of what they are but also in contrast to what they are not. Boundaries represent “this sense of discrimination,”6 and are, thus, integral to a comprehension of community.
93 Journalists, particularly those working for local news outlets, must regularly consider such boundaries as they make coverage decisions and deliberate their roles in the communities served by their organizations. For national or regional newspapers with readerships that span broad segments of the country or the world, such lines may be outside the realm of daily consideration. However, local publishers, editors, and reporters must regularly address practical questions related to the limits of their communities. Does the community extend only to the city limits? The county line? The state border? Such neat margins are rarely drawn. Any boundary may be subject to variability resulting from such factors as shifting economic interdependence with neighboring communities, advances in communication technology, and individual perceptions of the shared community. Cohen emphasized the subjective nature of community boundaries, describing them as “existing in the minds of their beholders. This being so, the boundary may be perceived in rather different terms, not only by people on opposite sides of it, but also by people on the same side.”7
My experiences in the Gazette-Mail newsroom supported Cohen’s proposition.
Inconsistencies in individual perceptions of community boundaries arose explicitly in interviews and more implicitly in some of the conversations and practices I observed.
Early in my fieldwork, such a discrepancy became apparent in a conversation I witnessed between an editor on the features desk and a news-side education reporter. The editor approached the reporter with information about a STEM-based charter school scheduled to open in the fall in a West Virginia-adjacent community in Ohio. The reporter expressed his reluctance to pursue the story, in part, because the school’s location caused
94 him to question its relevance to readers. Over my time in the newsroom, I observed the invocation of similar arguments in other situations, illustrating the demand for a compelling local connection to justify coverage of events or developments outside the state. The masthead slogan in place for years prior to my arrival supported this interpretation of community boundaries. The slogan—changed to “A Pulitzer Prize-
Winning Newspaper” after Eyre’s receipt of the award—had long been “A State
Newspaper.”
However, several members of the staff articulated a perception that the boundaries of the community, in practice, were much more narrowly drawn. Ryan Quinn, the education reporter referenced in the anecdote above, noted in our interview that “while
[the Gazette-Mail] is supposed to be a state newspaper, it also is focused very much on the Charleston area.” Dawn Miller concurred that coverage had been and continued to be more geographically limited than the former motto would imply:
I’m kind of frustrated on that subject because I always have thought that
we should expand and cover more of the state more thoroughly. I always
get shouted down on that subject. Not shouted down, but I always get, you
know, pooh-poohed, “No, we’re not doing that.” And in the old days,
when you could only reach as far as your truck could go, that made sense.
But I haven’t felt that that’s made sense for a long time.
Ward expressed similar sentiments when I interviewed him. Like Miller, he advocated for broader geographic coverage, particularly in an era of digital transmission. It was a topic, he noted, with which the content/beats committee continued to wrestle:
95 There’s a kind of, argument maybe is too strong a word, but there are
differences of opinion about whether we’re really serious about being the
state newspaper or are we Kanawha County’s newspaper or Putnam
County’s newspaper.8 And to me, this is just speaking only for me, you
know, it was one thing when an editor could say to me, “Why do you want
to go to Marion County for that story? We don’t sell many papers there.”
Well, you know, we can get that story to those people in Marion County a
lot cheaper now than we could when we had to pay for trucks to haul the
paper there. So a lot of us think that that’s the growth. You know,
circulation is down in the print edition. The growth needs to be here, and it
needs to be broader, and so that’s part of what we’re trying to kind of
focus on. Exactly how far that’s going to go, where it’s going to end up,
you know, I don’t know for sure.
The question of coverage outside the Charleston area is particularly salient in a place like
West Virginia. Because of the largely rural geography of the state, population density is too low in many regions to support dedicated coverage by a local news organization.
Significant events or trends sometimes drew Gazette-Mail reporters to other parts of the state. Eyre’s Pulitzer-winning opioid coverage brought attention to the southern
West Virginia counties most affected by fatal overdoses. Ward and other members of the staff addressed mining deaths wherever they occurred. Severe statewide flooding the summer before my fieldwork led to extensive coverage of affected communities. As the only daily in the capital city, the newspaper’s focus on state government also resulted in
96 regular stories on legislation and political activity relevant to readers outside Charleston.
However, decisions to send reporters or photojournalists too far from the capital were not made lightly in the meetings I attended. The costs associated with mileage reimbursement—and lodging, for overnight stays—are not negligible to the overall budget of a publication the size of the Gazette-Mail in the current economic climate.
Further, the loss of a reporter or photographer for the extended period of time it takes to travel back and forth to distant parts of the state is felt acutely in newsrooms the size of the Gazette-Mail’s.9 The paradox of declining financial resources as technological advances open new distribution channels underlies the ongoing discussion of geographic boundaries among Gazette-Mail staffers. Given the near-ubiquity of this experience in traditional print newsrooms, one might reasonably presume that such negotiations represent a common challenge for local newspapers.
Organizationally, the delineation of boundaries at the Gazette-Mail was complicated by a rarer phenomenon—the consolidation of two formerly competing newsrooms. I arrived in Charleston two years after the Gazette and the Daily Mail were combined. Only four remaining editorial employees of the Gazette-Mail had come directly from the Daily Mail, though the numbers had been more equitable in the months immediately following the merger. The Gazette-Mail staff was housed in the former
Gazette newsroom while the Daily Mail newsroom sat unused across the hall.
Journalists still seemed to be negotiating a shared organizational identity during my time in the field. Most of the veteran staff members acknowledged the disproportionate impact of the Gazette’s legacy on the current culture of the newsroom.
97 Perceptions of that culture expressed by newcomers who had arrived after the combination further supported a sense of the Gazette-Mail as an extension of the Gazette.
However, in interviews and meeting observations, I recognized efforts to continue the conversation and bring more of the Daily Mail’s influence into the cultural mix. One concrete example emerged in the relocation of a graphic artist to a space near the copy and photo desks. His work had contributed to the Daily Mail’s reputation for good design, but many members of the staff expressed a belief that his talents had not been effectively utilized since the combination. Miller explained:
Unfortunately, I think, because of some traditional Gazette workflow
issues and, quite honestly, some traditional Gazette habits that were built
around having a lot of turnover in our graphic artist position, most of the
people who came from the Gazette just started working around the need
for graphic art. Really not an ideal situation.
Miller and other members of the workflow group identified his location in the newsroom as part of the problem. At the beginning of my fieldwork, he was situated in an isolated cubicle along a back wall in an area surrounded by reporters. By the end of my time there, he had moved to a spot next to the image editor and just behind the copy desk. As a result, he was more accessible to the people in the newsroom who addressed the design and other visual aspects of the newspaper. More significantly, at least in terms of boundary negotiation, his membership in the newsroom community appeared to solidify, as indicated by his increased participation in casual conversations with nearby co- workers after the move.
98 The deeper challenges associated with individual adaptation to new organizational boundaries were more complex and difficult to address. Journalists who identified with the Daily Mail or the Gazette often based their perceptions of the organizational community on long-standing values and ingrained practices that came into conflict when the newspapers merged. As I discuss in the next chapter, the Gazette-Mail staff continued to negotiate significant cultural differences between the two former newsrooms throughout my fieldwork.
In some cases, those differences represented boundary conflicts not only in the organizational context but also in the larger professional realm. The “sustained outrage” mission carried over from the Gazette reflected a set of values regarding the role of journalism widely held in the newsroom but firmly contested by a few individuals. Kelly
Merritt, the Daily Mail opinion page editor, deemed the Gazette’s reporting practices less objective than those of the Daily Mail, invoking a value often applied as a criterion of good journalism. Having spent much of his professional life in public relations before joining the staff of the Daily Mail in 2013, he cited his experiences with both newspapers while working for Columbia Gas:
I’ll tell you the attitudes here. I came into the Daily Mail newsroom, and,
you know, Columbia Gas was one of the largest employers in the valley,
and we had established good relationships with the press, particularly the
Daily Mail. And whenever they needed some trend, business trend,
employee, you know, social trend [story], they would call us and say, “Oh,
what’s your company doing on this?” Because they knew they’d get a
99 quick response, a quick and, you know, good response. So, we were often
the go-to source for, particularly the Daily Mail covered a lot of that stuff.
The Gazette didn’t. The Daily Mail has always had a more positive
attitude. It was always more objective. The Gazette had the sustained
outrage, which you’ve probably heard. And Columbia Gas was, you know,
public enemy number one.
In the next chapter on cultural differences within the newsroom, I explore in greater depth the various ways Gazette-Mail journalists interpreted objectivity and its connection to their responsibilities as journalists. For now, though, it is important to consider these distinct interpretations in the context of community boundaries.
Psychologists David McMillan and David Chavis asserted that boundaries provide “the structure and security that protect group intimacy.”10 When boundary conflicts arise in which members of a shared organizational community call into question their colleagues’ commitment to the values of a common professional community, such intimacy may be threatened. In cases such as the Gazette-Mail, in which a new entity emerges from the combination of two previously separate communities, it might not develop at all among individuals who resist accommodation to the new organizational culture.11 In the next section of this chapter, I focus on the professional community of journalism and the ways Gazette-Mail staffers interpreted and participated in it. As the example of boundary negotiation indicates, identification with organizational communities—both the Gazette-Mail and other newsrooms—often influenced socialization into the profession.
100 The Professional Community
A significant body of research supports the notion that a professional culture of journalism is developed and expressed “almost exclusively within individual newsrooms.”12 Though newcomers to the field often have been introduced to concepts and values associated with that culture in journalism classes, shared interpretations of those elements “have been less the product of common membership in professional bodies and homogenous education and more a product of shared practices learned within the newsroom.”13 Many of the Gazette-Mail journalists I interviewed attested to the veracity of this assertion, citing practical experience as central to the development of a meaningful understanding of professional values.
The bulk of that experience occurred in the Gazette, Daily Mail, or Gazette-Mail newsrooms. A significant number of both veteran and less experienced members of the editorial staff had come to Charleston directly from their university newsrooms. In a few cases, they arrived without even that collegiate experience. Editor emeritus Jim Haught, for instance, started volunteering in the Gazette newsroom as a teenager on his days off from his position as an apprentice in the Daily Mail print shop. Outside of a few months in 1959 spent as a press aide for U.S. Senator Robert C. Byrd, Haught has worked for the
Gazette or Gazette-Mail since 1953. He credited his experiences under publisher Ned
Chilton and editors L. T. Anderson and Don Marsh as the primary influence on his understanding of journalism:
101 That was chiefly my university, see. I never even got to college exactly.
You know, I’ve got maybe 30 hours of college or something, but that’s as
far as I made it. I was too busy learning on the job and working every day.
Jennifer Gardner also got her first practical experience in the Gazette-Mail newsroom.
She joined the staff as a full-time features writer about midway through my fieldwork but had interned as a reporter the previous summer. Prior to beginning her internship, she had not worked in another news organization. She gained more experience over the following academic year as managing editor of the Daily Athenaeum, the student newspaper at
West Virginia University, before returning to Charleston after graduation. However, her recollection of the first days of her internship speak to the role of a newsroom mentor in shaping her basic understanding of the process of journalism:
Greg Moore was the city editor at the time, and I pretty much told him the
first day that I didn’t know what I was doing. He sent me straight to a
county commission meeting. … So, he pretty much found out, I think, the
first day that I didn’t know what I was doing. … He came to me and said,
“You don’t have a lede in this.” And I said, “Greg, what’s a lede?” And he
was like, “Oh, no. This is not going to be good.” And I would ask him if I
could sit over his shoulder and watch him edit my stories or if we could
have conversations about my stories occasionally. And so, we’d, like, go
into the conference room and just sit down, and he would go over, “OK,
this is what you wrote, and this is what I edited, and this is how, and this is
why.” I mean, I did have some experience. I shouldn’t say that I didn’t
102 have any. … I’m pretty detail-oriented, so I’m a fact-checker. … And I
organize like crazy, so, you know, I have all the facts in order, it was just a
matter of how to put that into a news story that I struggled with at first.
Haught and Gardner were anomalies in that, generally, staff members started at the
Gazette-Mail with some journalism experience. Most had worked for student newspapers at their colleges or universities. Many had completed internships at professional news organizations as students. Some had begun their careers at other news outlets. But the influence of individuals and organizational culture specific to the Gazette-Mail or its two predecessors surfaced in most of my conversations with staff members about their perceptions of the professional community of journalism. Beyond the type of practical socialization apparent in Gardner’s account, many interview participants referenced their commitment to the values they associated with the newspaper’s stated mission and their desire to emulate the work of their more experienced colleagues like Eyre and Ward.
However, not everyone expressed the same level of identification with the larger community of journalism. In some cases, individuals came to the newsroom from other fields or academic disciplines and related more broadly to an intellectual or creative collective. Rafe Godfrey, a copy editor with a background in music and a degree in
English, described his perspective in the following terms:
It’s nice just to get to work with other people who are intelligent and
creative, and they consume information, they’re interested in the news,
you know. … Putting together a creative product, which, really, you know,
designing a newspaper is a creative endeavor, even if you’re working
103 within extremely rigid boundaries. And the challenge is, I guess, to kind of
be inventive and kind of explode out of those boundaries as much as you
can, you know, without pissing anybody off or breaking the wrong rules, I
suppose. I’m in school now for something else. Only, it’s kind of a shame
really, because if the industry weren’t projected to lose so many jobs in the
next 10 years, I might really think about staying, you know, and trying to
make a career in journalism. But at this point, I’m almost 40, and I can see
the writing on the wall, and it’s just not very good.
Godfrey’s assessment of the industry represents another relevant factor in newsroom interactions related to the professional community. Just as the newsroom serves as a site of socialization, it also facilitates a collective response to developments that threaten that community.
In addition to the economic challenges facing the industry, journalists must reckon with a widespread lack of public support. A 2014 survey conducted by the
Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research revealed that public confidence in the press was at an all-time low with only 7 percent of respondents indicating “a great deal of confidence” in the press.14 Beyond those general numbers, journalists in 2017 had to contend with concerted attacks from many politicians at the local, state, and federal levels, including both the governor of West Virginia and the president of the United States.
Younger reporters, particularly, tended to view their interactions with colleagues as vital means of social support. Negative public appraisals of the profession
104 compounded the stresses of daily deadlines, antagonistic sources, and low pay. Many of the people I interviewed relied on the empathy and encouragement they received from co-workers to deal with those challenges. Max Garland, a 22-year-old business reporter in his first full-time professional reporting position, explained the significance of those relationships this way:
This era isn’t fun by any stretch, [but] at the same time it really unites us.
And I think just a lot of the talks we’ve had either here in the newsroom or
at the Red Carpet [are] just being able to talk with each other about our
work and saying, like, how our work is important. … I guess the current
era, in a strange way, has helped with our camaraderie a lot in kind of just
jumping into the professional field while all this is going on, with attacks
on the media and criticism and “Is the media out of touch?” and things like
that. As young reporters, it’s like, “Oh shit, what did we get ourselves
into?” But then we’re […] all working with each other, we’re all young,
we’re all trying to figure this out, so I think that’s really kind of
therapeutic in a sense, being able to vent on all these things with each
other. So, we do talk about work a lot outside of work. It’s just kind of
what we do, which a lot of people would sigh at, but to be in this industry,
you have to have an insane passion for it in the first place. Otherwise, it’s
probably not best to be here.
Garland and some of the other young reporters noted or implied a connection between this passion and a perception of journalism as a public service. They further associated
105 that understanding of the professional community with the espoused mission of the
Gazette-Mail and, particularly, the investigative reporting conducted by some of their senior colleagues. This pattern demonstrates the close relationship between organizational culture and professional socialization. In the next section of this chapter, I focus more specifically on the newsroom as an organizational community. Interactions within that space often informed higher-level interpretations of what it means to be a journalist, even as they created more immediate local impacts.
The Organizational Community
Social psychologist Irwin Altman posited that the physical environment is “a medium, milieu or context in which personal relationships are embedded, and without which they cannot be viable. Places […] symbolize and make salient the bonds between people.”15 My own nostalgia for newsrooms is less a longing to return to a particular site than a wistfulness for the intellectual engagement and camaraderie I experienced in such locations. In interviews in which he asked journalists to describe their workspaces,
Akhteruz Zaman found that they conceived of newsrooms not only as material spaces but also as relational spaces in which “the whole world of news work comes into existence.”16
Zaman’s findings illustrate how closely the organizational community represented by the newsroom interacts with the other communities addressed in this chapter. It provides the basis from which journalists enact their roles in the communities they cover.
It also acts as a repository of the institutional knowledge necessary to perform their duties in those communities. Professionally, it is a site in which local practices are debated in
106 the context of more abstract journalistic values and responsibilities. The “newsroom as battlefield” 17 metaphor that emerged in Zaman’s interviews reflects an inherent understanding of this connection even if journalists do not articulate it explicitly.
Arguments with editors, publishers, or colleagues about the publication of a story or approaches to coverage provide opportunities for younger journalists to claim membership in the professional community by joining an ongoing negotiation of its shared values. In our interview, Ward spoke of the significance of the culture of argumentation that characterized the Gazette newsroom in terms of his development as a reporter as well as its significance to the newspaper’s responsibilities as a representative of the Fourth Estate:
I remember two stories in particular that Nyden and I used to really argue
[with editor Don Marsh] about, I mean just really argue, you know, argue
to the point of, “Ah, you’re full of it!” “No, you’re full of it!” Really
argue. To the point where people out in the newsroom were saying,
“What’s going on in there? Somebody getting fired? What’s going on?”
… There were two stories in particular that we argued with him about for
months and months and months and months. … And after [Marsh] had
retired, we invited him over to Nyden’s. … We were out in the kitchen,
just […] me and Paul and Marsh, and Marsh brought up these couple of
stories and says, “You know what? You guys were right.” And I thought
that was just so great, you know? I think that’s a great thing. And I think
Rob is trying very hard to be like that, and if you can’t argue in a
107 newsroom about how you want to cover a story, I mean, I think the
republic is sunk.
This notion that organizational practices and values have implications beyond the newsroom emerged in many of my conversations with Gazette-Mail journalists. They often noted the alignment of the newspaper’s mission with their perceptions of professional responsibility to the readership. As Garland explained it:
A thing I liked about being here was that just, “OK, look, we’re going to
make sure we’re watching out for the people. We view this as a public
service,” which I think is a really important part in a newspaper’s
philosophy. You know, this is vital to the public, the institution.
This perspective illustrates the important space that the newspaper (the institution) occupies between the community of journalism and the geographic communities of
Charleston and West Virginia. Communication within the organizational community has a significant influence on the application of professional values to local contexts.
For many staff members, particularly those with pre-existing ties to the state, the community advocacy mission implied in the “sustained outrage” motto represented a melding of professional and personal values. Health reporter Erin Beck, for instance, identified as a native West Virginian with a firm commitment to the people of the state.
After finishing a bachelor’s degree in journalism from West Virginia University, she decided to pursue a master’s degree in public health, in part because the perception of journalism she had acquired in college was incompatible with her personal solution-
108 oriented ethos. The Gazette, however, represented to her a rare opportunity to practice journalism in a way more suited to her priorities:
That’s what I was drawn to; like, that’s why I’m here. ’Cause I don’t feel
like a lot of other papers would allow me to do that. Like, I am an
advocate for West Virginia. That’s who I am as a person. So, if people are
like, “Oh, why don’t you go to a bigger paper?” I’m just like, “Why would
I?”
Many other people I interviewed expressed similar sentiments. Two common themes— both of which are suggested in Beck’s statement—arose in journalists’ explanations of their longevity in the newsroom: a sense of the local community as “home” and the opportunity to pursue stories that aligned with personal interests and values.
At the time of my fieldwork, those factors had kept Beck at the Gazette-Mail for three years, a relatively lengthy tenure among the under-35 faction of the newsroom.
Some of her older colleagues had her beat by decades, though. Haught’s 64 years was unmatched, but reporter Rick Steelhammer and image editor Kenny Kemp were notable for having experienced firsthand the Ned Chilton era that ended with the publisher’s death in 1987. Byers, Moore, Miller, and Ward came to the Gazette in the 1990s after working together at the Daily Athenaeum while they were students at WVU. All four had interned with Charleston newspapers, Miller at the Daily Mail and the others at the
Gazette. Ward was the first to join the Gazette full-time in 1991, but Miller and Byers followed soon thereafter. Moore arrived a few years later after beginning his career as an editor and project manager for a business consulting firm.
109 In my observations, the mix of seasoned veterans and recent college graduates was a central feature of the newsroom. The multigenerational nature of the population informed and complicated the overall culture and perspectives on tradition and change, as
I discuss in the next two chapters. Organizationally, this diversity facilitated ongoing coverage of local issues and institutions despite turnover in the reporting ranks. I often observed experienced editors sharing historic connections or context during check-ins with younger reporters as they worked on stories. This practice was not limited to the transmission of information but also included instruction in reporting strategies, such as how to approach combative local political figures and other potentially hostile sources.
Moore explained the conscious effort made by editors to prepare young reporters for such encounters:
It’s difficult because they are young, because in many cases they don’t
have institutional knowledge; they don’t have background. And they’re
coming into a place where, you know, the mayor’s been here for 15 years.
And the mayor, who’s very glib and a little bit of a bully sometimes, it’s
hard to challenge him, and it’s hard for a young, inexperienced reporter
who hasn’t grown up in Charleston or West Virginia, it’s hard for her or
him to do that. And that’s certainly understandable, but that is a skill that
we certainly try to teach here.
This approach to socialization, in which the more experienced members of the staff shepherded the newcomers into the organizational community, addressed practices inside the newsroom as well.
110 During my fieldwork, I observed the introduction of three interns to the newsroom, in addition to Gardner’s first weeks in her full-time position. A few other interview participants had joined the staff recently enough that they were still in the early stages of negotiating their membership in the organizational community. My conversations with them often addressed the process of adapting to the routines and practices associated with the newsroom generally as well as their particular beats or desk assignments.
Megan Vealey, a copy editor who joined the staff of the Gazette-Mail in the latter part of 2015, credited news editor Leann Ray and other more experienced colleagues with helping her transition into the newsroom community:
Well, I mean, I’ve sat by Leann the whole time I’ve worked here, and
she’s been pretty helpful with just like helping me learn the different
culture here, I guess, with like page layout and how designing pages
works. Because at the DA, which was the college newspaper, I never did
any page layout, so that was totally new to me. And, yeah, she’s been
helpful. Some people who don’t work here anymore have been helpful.
But, yeah, I mean, all of the people who have been here for a while have
definitely helped me out at some point as far as adapting to how this copy
desk works, I would say.
In addition to providing basic instructional support, Ray was one of the newsroom managers who appeared to be most invested in creating a sense of community among the staff members. She often brought fresh fruit and other food from home to share with her
111 staff on the copy desk. She regularly checked in with co-workers about their families, pets, and weekend plans. She was also instrumental in organizing the move of the graphic designer from his original spot to a space near the copy desk more conducive to interaction with his colleagues.
Longtime copy editor Chris Atkins noted that Ray’s promotion to the news editor position at the Gazette in 2014 marked a change in the culture of the copy desk. Atkins came to the Gazette in 2002 after working for about 25 years in other newsrooms around the country. He said Ray’s leadership created a significant increase in morale:
It’s a lot more fun. I mean, I’ve got a 68-mile commute. If I didn’t enjoy
this job, I wouldn’t come here. It’s a lot more fun. Leann makes it that
way; [assistant city editor] Ashley [Craig] makes it that way. Leann is the
best person I’ve worked for. Well, here anyway. So, you know, it’s just a
lot of fun.
During my observations, I noticed more frequent and sustained conversations on the side of the newsroom that housed the copy desk, the photo/video desk, and the features desk.
The physical layout of those spaces contributed something to this phenomenon. The news-side reporters and editors were spread out across half the room in cubicles or a few separate offices to allow for some level of privacy. Staff members on other desks were concentrated in smaller spaces that facilitated more spoken communication.
Proximity was not the only consideration involved in the level and tone of communication, though. In some instances, specific circumstances or personal preferences facilitated or constrained interaction. The example of the graphic designer
112 illustrates the particular challenge associated with blending the two formerly competing newsrooms. Two of the graphic designer’s former Daily Mail colleagues, assistant city editor Ashley Craig and assistant news editor Cathy Caudill, seemed to have adjusted well to their new organizational community by the time I arrived in Charleston. However,
Daily Mail opinion page editor Kelly Merritt expressed a sense of isolation in the new newsroom.
Merritt was responsible for the only content in the paper that retained the Daily
Mail label after the combination of the papers, a distinction that contributed to his experience of detachment. Immediately following the combination of the papers, he continued to consult two editors who had also come to the Gazette-Mail from the Daily
Mail staff about the page’s content. By the time I began my fieldwork, though, both of them had left the paper. When I met him, he was essentially an editorial board of one:
When Brad [McElhinny, the former Daily Mail editor and publisher] left,
Susan [Chilton Shumate, the Gazette-Mail publisher] caught me in the
hallway and says, “Kelly, I just want you to know, we are committed to
maintain two separate opinion pages,” and that was a huge relief. … So, I
mean, I would rather have an editorial writer with me, because I’m it other
than what help I get from a copy editor, and sometimes I just, you know, I
want to talk to people and say, “What do you think of this?” I want to talk
to other conservatives, but there’s not a lot of them around here. So, I
would love to have that, but I am very appreciative of the fact that
[Shumate has committed to maintaining the Daily Mail editorial page].
113 I’ve been a reader of this page for 40 years. And so, as a reader, I’m
appreciative. And as an employee, obviously, I’m very appreciative of it.
While Merritt’s experience was largely the outcome of events beyond his control, some other staff members chose to limit their interactions with co-workers.
Ali Schmitz, a reporter who moved from the Putnam County beat to the
Charleston beat during the time I was in the newsroom, said that she had been reluctant to invest too much in social relationships with her colleagues during the early months of her tenure. She joined the Gazette-Mail the day before the November 2016 general election after having graduated from the University of Florida earlier that year. She came to West
Virginia with only one personal connection to the newsroom community. She had worked with Garland in a digital news fellowship program the summer before they were hired by the Gazette-Mail. Otherwise, she had no other prior relationships with her new co-workers until one of her college classmates joined the staff shortly after her arrival.
Schmitz said she fell into the habit, common particularly among the younger reporters I interviewed, of socializing almost exclusively with colleagues. However, she quickly reconsidered the nature of her relationship to the newsroom community:
There were points where, at the beginning I was spending a ton of time
with the reporters, and then I started to, like, back away because there was
definitely a point where all of us when you move to West Virginia, you
get kind of culture shock, and you’re like, “Do I want to stay here or what
do I want to do?” And so, I definitely went through that, as well, where I
was like, “I’m just going to, you know, take a few steps back and figure
114 out what I want to do with my life before I, you know, make these people
my best friends.” But, at this point, yeah, we’re spending a lot of time
together.
Shortly after I finished my fieldwork, Schmitz left the Gazette-Mail. She took a reporting job in her home state of Florida in September 2017, just 10 months after coming to
Charleston.
In my conversations with Byers and Moore, they noted a downward trend in the length of time reporters remained with the Gazette-Mail before seeking positions in other, typically larger, cities. Whereas young journalists once routinely spent two, three, even five years with a newspaper, at the time of my fieldwork terms of less than a year were not uncommon. This shift was particularly noticeable among individuals with no prior connection to the state or region. As Schmitz stated of her own experience, some newcomers to West Virginia experienced a “culture shock” that might contribute to the pattern.
My consideration of Schmitz’s experience as an outsider continues in the next section of this chapter, in which I focus more specifically on relationships to the geographic community. A few of the people I interviewed, like Schmitz, came from other parts of the country and were still negotiating their connection to Charleston and West
Virginia. Many other individuals in the newsroom were natives of the state or had lived there long enough to develop strong ties to the community. As I noticed in my observations, interactions across these distinct newsroom populations often contributed to the socialization of newcomers into the geographic community.
115 The Geographic Community
Although the number of Charleston or Kanawha County natives was somewhat limited, the state of West Virginia was well-represented in the Gazette-Mail newsroom during my fieldwork. The only person on the copy desk who was not a native of the state,
Paul Gartner, had lived there for 40 years. Among the younger news-side reporters, both
Beck and higher education reporter Jake Jarvis had been born and raised in the Mountain
State. Haught, Moore, Miller, and Ward also were from different parts of West Virginia.
Executive editor Rob Byers grew up in southwest Pennsylvania but moved to
Morgantown for college and then came directly to Charleston in the early 1990s. He credited his experiences as a reporter covering the state with instilling in him a love for
West Virginia and its people:
A photographer here, Brian Ferguson, and I developed something called
“Talk of the Town,” and we just traveled the state and focused on a town.
It could be either, anything from a great historical feature on that town to a
murder to anything about that town. So, we did that for 120 weeks. Brian
was able to showcase some great art, and I was able to write these yarns
every week. So, it was a challenge finding something, but it was fun. And
I ended up reporting from all 55 counties in West Virginia, got to know
the state much better than I did my home state of Pennsylvania, and really
fell in love with the state. That really kind of solidified my time here,
wanting to be here and wanting to be at this newspaper that gave me those
kinds of opportunities.
116 Many of the West Virginia natives and long-time residents I interviewed expressed a similar love of the community. They often noted their connection to Charleston or the state at large as a key motivation to seek employment at the newspaper and to remain there for an extended period of time.
Assistant news editor Cathy Caudill was born in Kanawha City18 and grew up in
Charleston. She left West Virginia to attend High Point University in North Carolina but returned after completing her degree for a reporting internship with the Daily Mail. She went back to North Carolina for graduate school in Greensboro and remained there as a copy editor in a publishing house for a little more than a year. When an opening on the
Daily Mail copy desk came to her attention, she was eager to come home:
It’s my hometown. I’m so fond of it. I hate not having mountains around
me. I hate traffic. I like that I know all the back roads. I like that my
apartment is a 10-minute walk or 5-minute drive from here. I just like the
history and I just feel very rooted in it. … I love my hometown, so it’s fun
to work at a paper ’cause you get to sort of celebrate what’s going on here
and learn more about your town.
Her familiarity with the city also made her a resource for newcomers on the copy desk.
One evening I observed her in a conversation with a summer intern who had recently joined the staff. After addressing a few task-related items, Caudill asked the intern if she was getting to know her way around town. Caudill then opened Google Maps on her web browser and explained the locations of various neighborhoods to the intern, noting the location of grocery stores and other establishments.
117 Ray, who grew up less than 20 miles from Charleston in Poca, West Virginia, had collected and formalized some of the local knowledge represented on the copy desk in a handbook. The document addressed questions of style and newsroom practices as well as information specific to the geographic community. It included spellings of nearby roads, bridges, and landmarks. It featured lists of West Virginia-based companies, colleges and universities, recurring community events, and state parks. The anniversaries of significant events like the Silver Bridge collapse19 and the Marshall University plane crash20 were noted.
As journalists joined the newsroom staff, Ray shared the handbook with them.
However, she and others noted that few reporters appeared to consult it. Some individuals expressed frustration at newcomers’ failures to take advantage of the local knowledge available in the newsroom via the handbook and colleagues who were more familiar with the city and the state. Merritt mentioned a particular story in which a reporter referred to a well-known building in the city only by its address. A lack of awareness of the building’s history prevented the reporter from using the label most community residents applied to the structure:
Everybody would have known what you were talking about if you said the
B&B Loans building. But you had a young reporter from elsewhere who
didn’t know the history. … And the young reporters from elsewhere, I’m
not knocking them, I think we want them, but they don’t know what the
community knows, and so that happens.
118 I observed a related conversation between Charleston natives Caudill and Craig one evening. Discussing the coverage of an item on the agenda of the Charleston City
Council, they agreed that the reporter had not grasped the significance of the debate because “she’s not from here.”
As Schmitz’s comments in the previous section of this chapter attest, journalists from outside the state sometimes experienced ambivalence about their relationship to the community they covered. Local practices did not align with their experiences in other communities in some cases. In addition, the suspicion occasionally expressed by sources about the motives of young reporters may have reinforced self-perceptions of outsider status. Schmitz explained:
It was definitely kind of a culture shock, to say the least. … That’s the
main thing is that moving to West Virginia—I’m from a smaller town
outside of Orlando, but it’s still a lot more progressive—and so, there was
certainly a point where I moved up here and I was like, “Oh, I’m in West
Virginia now.” You know, you can’t search things on online court records.
You have to call to get something faxed over to you. They won’t even e-
mail it to you. You know, things as minor as that. [It] was definitely a big
change.
Eyre, who had worked in Florida earlier in his career, noted that the contrast between the open records laws in that state and those in West Virginia made it particularly hard for journalists from Florida to adapt to more limited accessibility.
119 Schmitz’s experience was not universal, though. Several younger members of the staff who had come to Charleston from out of state expressed a genuine fondness for the area. Anna Taylor, a features writer from southwest Kentucky, mentioned in our interview that Charleston felt “like home” to her despite her arrival just a few months earlier. The difference between her experience and Schmitz’s could be explained, in part, by the connections to the community Taylor had made outside the newsroom. She joined a church shortly after moving to Charleston, where she met her boyfriend, a native of
South Charleston. Though she left the Gazette-Mail shortly after my fieldwork ended,
Taylor remained in Charleston, taking a position with a local television station.
Like Taylor, Carlee Lammers found engagement with the community outside the newsroom central to her sense of belonging:
I do feel like I’m a part of it. It took me a long time to kind of feel like I’m
a part of it. When I moved here, I’m not one for change. My boyfriend
was also not here for several months. We were doing long-distance ’cause
he was still finishing up his last job. So, it was really hard. For about six or
seven months, I loved Charleston, but I just didn’t feel like, I wasn’t home
yet, you know? But I really do feel now, like, maybe about eight months
in, I had found a church that I really liked, I’m volunteering with a group
and, so, different things like that that I’m really excited about.
Lammers was a features writer when I started my observations but moved to a news-side reporting position about midway through my time in the newsroom. Originally from western Maryland, she attended West Virginia University and started her career at a
120 newspaper in her home state. After the initial separation referenced in her comments above, Lammers’s boyfriend joined the Gazette-Mail staff as a sports writer.
Some other reporters who were new to West Virginia perceived their relationship to the geographic community largely in terms of their professional roles. In those cases, the significance of newsroom colleagues in the socialization process was magnified.
Garland, who grew up in Tennessee, acknowledged his reliance on editors and other co- workers as he acclimated to the area:
Since I’m so young, I don’t know everything, all the ins and outs there, all
the time. But here, a lot of it, too, is just, I’ve learned a lot more about just
how to talk to sources and how to develop those relationships. And none
of these stories are just in a vacuum, essentially. There’s always context,
there’s always something that happened five years ago that’s related to
this. So, you talk to this guy or this guy. So, a lot of it here is just
navigating that and getting tips. I’ve learned a lot more in that regard and
just how to build these relationships, I guess, being so new to the area. I
don’t have those, obviously, right away.
Garland’s experience illustrates the connective role established members fill in orienting newcomers to the community. Later in the chapter, I discuss the contributions of particular members of the newsroom staff to this process. First, though, I explore the relationships among Gazette-Mail journalists and their readership community in more interactional terms.
121 The Role of the Newspaper in the Community
As a newspaper with a progressive mission in an increasingly politically conservative state, the Gazette-Mail has had a complex relationship with its readers. “I always say people love to hate us, but they also love to read us,” Byers told me on the second day of my fieldwork. Politicians and other public figures who have been the subjects of Gazette and Gazette-Mail investigative reporting have been particularly vocal in their criticism of the paper. Coal baron Don Blankenship sought to put the Gazette out of business with lawsuits and once noted his great pleasure at being “criticized by the communists and atheists of the Charleston Gazette.”21 Blankenship spent a year in federal prison after being convicted of violating mine safety standards in connection with a 2010 explosion at the Upper Big Branch mine that killed 29 miners. He was released while I was conducting my fieldwork and announced his candidacy for the U.S. Senate about six months later.
On the other hand, Byers described the community reaction to Eyre’s Pulitzer win as an expression of ownership and connection. “They’re identifying with us as their hometown paper,” he said, adding that the prize was particularly meaningful in a region
“that doesn’t win a lot.” As noted in the previous chapter, responses to the Pulitzer announcement on social media were numerous and overwhelmingly positive, supporting
Byers’s characterization.
Features editor Maria Young said that it did not take long for new reporters to recognize the significance of the Gazette-Mail to the community:
122 I think most of them understand fairly quickly because you go to church or
you go to a meeting and somebody’s like, “Oh, you work for the paper.”
… I mean, first of all, if you’re from the paper, anybody you call up for an
interview, they’re responsive. And you also can see, particularly in my
section, you write a story on a restaurant that’s opening, and they will be
bombarded. We’ve had people say, “I can’t do a story with you right now
because I’m not ready to handle the crowds.” … We’ve done stories on
people who were unprepared for the crowds, and that’s not good for them.
They were unprepared for the response. And, so, you know, there is
impact from us writing about something, and I think they see that.
One of the most dramatic examples I observed of that impact was the response to Ward’s reporting on the water contamination lawsuit mentioned in the previous chapter. I noticed more phone calls to the newsroom the day of the first story’s publication than I had on previous days, and Ward continued to field calls for several days afterward. He opened the conversations with suggestions to read the coverage in the newspaper and even offered to connect callers to the subscription desk. However, he never failed to answer all the callers’ questions in any of the conversations I overheard.
Ward’s commitment to his organizational and professional communities was reflected in his effort to convey the need for financial support of local journalism. His responses to callers also acknowledged, though, a fundamental responsibility to the members of the community served by the newspaper. For Ward and other journalists who
123 have established roots in the state, that duty is a function not only of professional demands but also their own membership in the community. As he explained:
It’s my home, and it’s, you know, I don’t know, I mean, there are places
that need journalism more than West Virginia, but, you know, there’s
people doing journalism in those places, and there’s not as many people
that want to stay here. You know, I can rattle off half a dozen people who
are West Virginia natives who came in and out of this newsroom that, if
they had found a way to stay here, or we had found a way to keep them,
we would be a lot better paper and West Virginia would be a lot better
place for the work that they’ve done. … I’m not getting rich, but it’s my
home. My wife’s here, I think my son’s enjoying growing up here, and if
you want to do good work, you can do it here.
Ward’s example was particularly meaningful to the younger reporters from West
Virginia. When I asked Beck who had shaped her ideas about journalism, she immediately responded, “Ken is my mentor.” As our conversation continued, it became clear that his influence extended beyond his considerable reporting skill and institutional knowledge to his commitment to the state.
Jarvis, a Huntington native, grew up reading the Gazette and called it the West
Virginia newspaper in our interview. Like Beck, he saw the newspaper as an opportunity to bring his sense of social responsibility to his work as a journalist. He interned with the
Gazette in 2015, the summer the two papers combined, and then returned the next year as a full-time reporter. Although he, along with several other younger staff members,
124 expressed some concerns about the state of the profession, he credited conversations with
Ward with helping him imagine a long-term future:
It's also nice to work in a place that has people who are from here and
interested in making West Virginia better and don’t just want to pack up
and leave. Talking to Ken about his time at WVU and how he’s changed
and how he’s grown here makes it easier to see a path of how I might do
something like that.
Jarvis left the Gazette-Mail in early 2018 but remained in Charleston as a government reporter for The State Journal, another West Virginia-based publication.
In some cases, commitment to the community developed in the process of reporting. My fieldwork coincided with the first anniversary of statewide flooding that killed 23 people, and the continued impact of the event on the newsroom was evident. In addition to the follow-up coverage being planned and executed, staff members often mentioned the flooding during our conversations. The experience loomed large in
Gardner’s account of her internship with the Gazette-Mail that summer. In our interview, she recalled its transformative effect on her and others in the newsroom:
There was that sense of responsibility to the state that, like, you know,
where’s the help? … We’ve got to report on how hard these people have
it. We’ve got to report on the fact that FEMA’s not covering everything.
… I always knew that journalism had this sense of responsibility to the
people that it was serving, but I didn’t quite understand, I didn’t quite see
that, I think, until the flood relief. This wasn’t a job that people here would
125 go home from and just eat their dinner and have fun with their family.
Like, this is something that we all carried out of the newsroom with us
every day. … It was really just something that no one here walked away
from. It was, like, true public service.
Jarvis also mentioned the flood coverage as a source of pride and an impetus for a unified response to the challenges facing the community:
I couldn’t say enough about the flood coverage that we did. Because the
only journalism in that part of the state, in the southern part of the state
where I mainly covered, was WVVA, which is a TV station, and the
Register-Herald, which doesn’t have our staff. And it was so cool, so cool,
to come back here to work and then to see this big disaster happen and the
entire newsroom shift focus to, “This is our state. We need to cover this
well.” That was so powerful for me to see.
The sense of collective responsibility expressed in the accounts of Gardner and Jarvis speaks not only to individual relationships to the geographic community served by the newspaper but also to the position of the publication itself in that community.
Miller described her relationship to the city and state in personal as well as institutional terms. As the editor of the Gazette opinion page, she noted the page’s capacity to serve as “sort of the conscience of the community” and the obligations associated with that role. She further explained:
The organization, the corporation, is a citizen, is a member of the
community. It doesn’t just do business, sell ads and, from this remote,
126 sterile distance, interview people and put their quotes in the paper. It is, I
think any newspaper would be this way, but especially being a long-time
family-owned newspaper, it has roots here, and it has relationships. And it
has ancestry like a family or […] like a person.
The consciousness of those roots and relationships expressed by Miller and many other long-time newsroom staffers clearly informed their personal relationships to the city and state, as well.
In the next section of this chapter, I discuss how individual connectors like Miller convey such information to newcomers as part of the socialization process into the geographic, organizational, and professional communities. Styles and strategies varied.
Some people that other newsroom inhabitants identified as mentors or facilitators of group membership did not hold formal managerial roles or sometimes even perceive themselves as such. Like Nyden, some of them influenced colleagues’ understanding of all three communities, while others filled more niche roles. But in the course of my fieldwork, several names arose repeatedly in response to questions about negotiating one’s place in these communities.
Community Connectors
Organizational scholars Caroline Bartel and Jane Dutton assert that membership in a community emerges through a series of social interactions. On one side of the interaction, newcomers make claims on membership through verbal statements or actions that indicate identification with the group. On the other side, established members of the community validate those claims through acts of membership-granting.22 In a pilot study
127 of a student newsroom in a Midwestern university, for example, I found that returning student journalists often used first-person plural pronouns and commingled relational and task-based communication to affirm first-year journalists’ membership in the organization and the larger community of journalism.
In the Gazette-Mail newsroom, particular individuals emerged as connectors to the organizational community (and, by extension, the professional and geographic communities). They welcomed newcomers and provided the socialization necessary for membership claims to be more widely accepted. In some cases, the roles were formalized in the newsroom hierarchy. Young reporters often mentioned Byers, Moore, and city editor Ben Fields as sources of information and guidance. The editors also encouraged more experienced reporters to take on the responsibility of bringing their younger colleagues into the fold through mentorship.
The consensus among editors and long-time reporters was that Eyre, particularly, was suited to the position. He seemed to welcome the opportunity to engage with younger reporters and had recently been tasked with orienting a new government reporter to the statehouse beat. However, he was frequently away from the newsroom during my observations. Interviews with national media and travel related to the Pulitzer and other award ceremonies contributed to his absence, but his move to an office in the state capitol building a few years earlier was the primary factor. “I think that Eric’s absence in the newsroom now that he works out of the building down the street is felt,” Ward told me.
“You know, I think having him in the room is helpful.”
128 Newsroom colleagues attributed Eyre’s facility for mentorship not only to his years of local experience and talents as a journalist, but also to such personality traits as patience. Rick Steelhammer, a recreation/general assignment reporter who first joined the
Gazette staff in the 1970s, noted a decline in his involvement in the socialization of newcomers in contrast to Eyre’s engagement with younger co-workers:
You know, I was better at that a while back ago. And I don’t know what it
is. I guess it’s the accelerating turnover of faces and people around here,
but I just, I don’t do it so much anymore. I don’t know if it’s I’m just
getting too selfish with my time or it’s just like, it’s kind of a blur of how
many people are in and out of here. But they turn to people like, Eric does
a good job with that. He’s got more patience than I do, I suppose. And,
and maybe some of the other older people. But I think I’m kind of
considered the, you know, the old fart that sits over there, as [opposed to]
somebody you really ask for advice.
Steelhammer’s observation illustrates the interactivity of the mentorship and socialization processes. In some cases, individuals identified by others as mentors were essentially drafted into the role by younger colleagues who approached them for guidance.
Ward, for example, noted of his relationship with Beck: “If I’m serving any sort of mentorship role with Erin, it’s because she’s sought that out and she’s welcomed that sort of help.” Beck acknowledged that she was more proactive than many of her fellow reporters in seeking advice from the veteran newsroom staffers, citing her connection to the geographic community as a motivating factor:
129 I think some of us that are from here are more likely to understand the
significance of that, the fact that, like, Rob and Greg and Ken and Dawn,
that they’ve all worked here for, like, 25 years, and if we get a news tip
about something, I’ve always been very comfortable being like, “Hey,
what do you think of this? Is this a thing?” And it seems like some of the
people that aren’t from here don’t have that, like, respect or that, like,
maybe if it’s not disrespect, maybe it’s just that they don’t fully
understand the gravity or, like, the significance of it. Like, that they have
these resources there, that they should use them. And I don’t know if it’s
just wanting to prove themselves. … But for me, it’s been helpful.
Jarvis, another West Virginia native, also indicated a willingness to approach more experienced colleagues like Miller and Ward with questions:
Dawn’s like my mother in the newsroom. I don’t know if she would say
that, but I feel like she is. She has so much good advice. And sometimes
I’ll go and say something to her or pitch an idea, and she’s like, “Yeah,
that’s not really a good idea,” and I’m like, “OK.” But then sometimes she
really pushes me. We’ll just go in her office sometimes and talk for, like,
20, 30 minutes about the week and things going on. So, Dawn’s really
great for, like, the big picture stuff and just, you know, encouraging me to
think outside what I’m used to. But Ken’s so good about practical, here’s
what you can do, ask this question, ask this or, you know, here’s where
you can find this.
130 While organizational research on the socialization of newcomers often focuses on managers as the primary insiders,23 repeated mentions of Eyre and Ward indicate the significance of fellow reporters in the process. Although they hold nominally lateral positions in the newsroom hierarchy, their greater experience and established membership in the key communities addressed in this chapter position them as informational resources and potential sources of affirmation.
Personal disposition and experience were sometimes greater indicators of aptitude for the role than any formal criteria. As an editorial page editor, Miller did not manage reporters and had no duties that required regular interaction with them. Her office, set along an exterior wall opposite the side of the newsroom where the reporters sat, was not in a particularly accessible location. Yet her prior reporting posts and longstanding membership in the organizational, professional, and geographic communities represented in the newsroom equipped her to facilitate newcomers’ transitions into those communities. As she explained:
Well, technically, my role de jure is zero because I run an editorial page
and I have absolutely no oversight of the new reporters. But my role de
facto because of my nature and my interest in the subjects they cover and
my experience is I chat with them and I, you know, try to let them know
I’m around, and I offer insight if I can. … One role is to help them have a
little confidence in the question that they’re pursuing. “Is that a good idea?
Should I ask that?” … Sometimes they need a little nudge to say, “Yeah. If
you’re puzzled by that or you’re suspicious of it, then that’s a good
131 indication that your reader might be as well. So, by all means, what’s the
document that would help you figure that out?” or “Here’s a person who
doesn’t work there anymore but who knows how the process works, and
here’s their phone number. They can explain it all to you.” … So I do a lot
of that. Share sources, sort of check thinking, give a little pep talk.
Some individuals helped new members connect to the newsroom community by organizing more extra-curricular activities. Maria Young, dubbed the office’s social director by Kelly Merritt, hosted a cookout to introduce the staff to two Russian journalists who visited the newsroom during my fieldwork. She regularly invited me to events outside the newsroom and coordinated, along with digital content manager Glen
Flanagan, the Online News Association Happy Hour event I attended.
Among the younger reporters, Jarvis seemed to fill a similar role. As a recent graduate of WVU, he had worked at the student newspaper there with a few of the younger reporters and interns in the newsroom during my observations. His familiarity with those newcomers situated him as a likely facilitator of orientation to the community.
But, like Miller, he indicated that his role as a connector was influenced by his nature as much as anything. Jennifer Gardner recalled Jarvis’s role in her introduction to the newsroom as an intern in 2016:
He messaged me on Twitter the day that I found out that I got the
internship to say, “Hey, I was in your shoes last year, and, like, we’re all
going to do this.” … Jake was like, “Yeah, we all pretty much hang out at
the Red Carpet. We all go to Timothy’s on Wednesday.” And then there
132 was one other guy, Dan, who kind of like spearheaded trivia. He would
invite people. … And then, Bill Lynch. I sat where [one of the interns] sits
now, so in the same section, features. And, so, every time I’d be like, “Oh,
I don’t know where to get groceries,” or something, he would say, like,
“Oh, there’s Gucci Kroger and there’s People’s Kroger and there’s this
Kroger.”
Like Jarvis, entertainment reporter Bill Lynch participated less in the official orientation processes and more in the informal efforts to bring younger journalists into the organizational fold.
Over the course of my observations, I watched Lynch regularly engage the younger feature writers and interns seated nearby in small talk and offer advice or information whenever the conversation warranted it. When Carlee Lammers moved from the features desk to the news desk, Lynch brought a goodbye card for the features staff to sign. A few weeks later, he brought a cake to the office to commemorate Gardner’s birthday. Lynch said these membership-affirming gestures may have arisen from an ambiguous sense of his own membership in the community:
Well, I guess partly it’s because I felt like an outsider being here since the
beginning. Most of the people who arrive here are either straight out of J
school or a year out, maybe two at the most. We don’t get a lot of older
reporters or writers. … I’ve seen a lot of people come and go. And when I
first got here, the folks who were, I guess, part of my class, they were all
mostly young writers just out of J school. And now, I fit in fairly well with
133 them for a little while, but I was 10 years younger. … As I’ve gotten older,
that difference is more and more pronounced. … So, it felt like, you know,
for a short period of time, these people are going to be here, and they’re
going to have their own little cultures, they establish them. Usually, we get
three or four or five at a time, and then we’ll have a few more come
around, and they will kind of form their own little cliques. And those of us
who are of a certain age won’t really be part of those cliques.
As this range of examples shows, community insiders in a variety of positions and statuses influence socialization and perspectives on membership and identity. These individuals help connect newcomers to their professional, organizational, and geographic communities through mentorship and example, the sharing of relevant information, and by creating social opportunities outside the workplace.
Interactions with these connectors and other insiders had a clear impact on perceptions of membership in the various communities addressed in this chapter. In the next chapter, I explore the effects of cultural differences within the newsroom community. While most of the Gazette-Mail journalists I observed identified with their communities, the extent and meaning of that identification varied and was subject to influences outside their newsroom experiences. Generational diversity, conflicting interpretations of professional values, distinct attitudes toward changing technology, and even differences in departmental cultures and practices marked the broader newsroom environment.
134 V. The Newsroom as a Multicultural Space
Despite a 40-year-old commitment from the American Society of Newspaper
Editors (ASNE) to increase representation of racial and ethnic minorities in U.S. newsrooms, journalism continues to be dominated by white men.1 Though some progress has been made, people of color accounted for only 10.8 percent of full-time journalists in the U.S. in 2013, an increase of just 2.6 percent over 20 years.2 Such modest gains indicate little hope for achieving parity with the general population, given that racial minorities already account for nearly 39 percent of all Americans and that figure is expected to continue to rise.3 Women are also underrepresented in the field, constituting a slight majority of the general population4 but holding only 37.5 percent of full-time journalism jobs.5
While many professional sectors fail to achieve equitable representation, the issue is particularly significant as it applies to the press. As collectors and conveyers of information, journalists regularly make judgments about the relevance of facts, viewpoints, events, and trends. These evaluations inevitably are informed by personal experiences and priorities. And while the gatekeeping and agenda-setting functions attributed to the media in earlier generations have been re-imagined for a digital age,6 news organizations continue to have greater influence than most individuals on the distribution and framing of information in the public sphere. Without some diversity of perspective among the newsroom staff, news organizations risk alienating segments of their readership by underestimating the salience of certain topics or framing them in ways that are incongruent with readers’ values. Even more concerning, they might fail
135 altogether to recognize issues that are crucial to communities not represented in the newsroom. Karen Magnuson, a co-chair of the ASNE diversity committee, warned fellow journalists:
If we are to accurately reflect and authentically cover the communities we
serve, we must do much better as an industry [in terms of increasing
minority and female representation] or we risk becoming irrelevant to
news consumers of the future.7
Many news organizations already have been forced to address criticism of coverage perceived to be parochial and out of touch. A recent example involving The New York
Times led to explicit calls for greater newsroom diversity, particularly in the ranks of top editors.
In late November 2017, the Times published a profile of a self-proclaimed white nationalist that highlighted the man’s wedding plans and love of Twin Peaks and Seinfeld.
The response from other news outlets and individuals on social media was swift and, in some cases, furious. The outcry was so sustained that the online version of the article now includes a preliminary note stating, “This article has drawn significant feedback, most of it sharply critical,” followed by links to responses from the paper’s national editor and the reporter.8 The “feedback” referenced in the note included charges of normalizing white supremacist attitudes and behaviors.
Many critics identified the piece as an example of the problems associated with insular newsroom thinking. Left-leaning national political writer Matthew Chapman tweeted:
136 After today, I’m convinced more than ever that the New York Times needs
more women and more minorities on their editorial board and senior
management. A human interest piece on a literal, actual Nazi would never
have made it off the drawing board in a diverse, mixed newsroom.9
During a panel discussion on the experiences of journalists from underrepresented populations, Guardian political reporter Sabrina Siddiqui offered a similar insight: “If there were more minority journalists, they would raise questions that their colleagues may not have.”10
Small staff sizes, local demographics, and economic constraints on recruitment practices can pose particular challenges to community newspapers’ efforts to increase diversity in the contexts in which it is generally measured. Such representation at the
Gazette-Mail was, perhaps predictably, limited. In terms of gender, the newsroom composition was in line with the national average at the time of my fieldwork. Racial diversity was significantly lower with just one black journalist on the staff. However,
West Virginia’s population was estimated in 2016 to be nearly 93-percent white,11 so, proportionally, the Gazette-Mail staff was no less representative of local demographics than the industry at large.
Over the course of my time in the newsroom, though, I observed several other modes of cultural difference that informed—or showed the potential to inform—coverage decisions, adaptation to changing technology, and newsroom practices, among other things. Diversity in the contexts of professional experiences and ideology, organizational roles, age, and affinity for digital technologies constituted some of the most apparent
137 examples. In some cases, editors and other established organizational members had already identified opportunities to capitalize on the distinct perspectives represented in the newsroom. Conflicts associated with such diversity, though, occasionally affected the success of efforts to harness its productive capacities.
Communication scholars Mara B. Adelman and Lawrence R. Frey, speaking more specifically of traditional categories of demographic diversity like race, contended that conflict can be particularly difficult to resolve when “common goals and ways to achieve them do not necessarily exist in the beginning but, instead, must be created.”12 In the context of the Gazette-Mail, the blending of two ideologically distinct newsrooms created such a scenario. Additionally, generational differences, as described later in this chapter, created some challenges.
In this chapter, I explore the negotiation of difference as it already exists at the
Gazette-Mail and in many other news organizations. My intention in taking this approach to diversity is not to contradict or minimize the importance of calls for more women and people of color in the news industry. On the contrary, I hope that consideration of the challenges and opportunities I observed in the negotiation of extant differences will lead readers to a better understanding of the implications of representation in more visible categories like race and gender.
I begin with a discussion of difference in the realm of organizational experience.
As I explain in the following pages, interactions among Gazette-Mail veterans and newcomers included negotiations of specific practices and organizational culture more generally. This process was complicated by the distinct newsroom cultures brought
138 together in the 2015 combination of the Gazette and the Daily Mail. Tradition, particularly that stemming from the Gazette’s history, often prevailed. However, I observed—and participants acknowledged—some changes, and ongoing conversations kept many contested issues in play.
Long-Timers and New Arrivals
When Rob Byers hired Ben Fields in the fall of 2016, it was the first time in his memory that a city editor had come from outside the Gazette or Gazette-Mail newsroom.
And Byers’s institutional memory was long. He had been associated with the papers since he interned at the Gazette in 1991 and was rooted in the traditions and organizational values that distinguished the Gazette from many other community newspapers. Byers,
Miller, Moore, and Ward were part of a generation of journalists who joined the paper after Chilton’s death but were mentored by editors who had worked closely with the former publisher. These mentors instilled in them the mission Chilton had established, and they, in turn, carried their interpretation of that mission into their socialization of newcomers.
A continued commitment to the “sustained outrage” Chilton demanded was evident not only in my conversations with staff members but also in the content of the newspaper. Coverage of the Pulitzer win, which recognized Eric Eyre’s years’-long effort to expose the exploitive practices of pharmaceutical opioid distributors in the state, brought the association between the term and the newspaper to national attention. Yet
Byers and other editors recognized the need to balance the maintenance of such meaningful elements of the culture with fresh perspectives. “We can get stuck in our own
139 ways and be resistant to other ways of doing things,” Byers acknowledged early in my fieldwork.
To counter that tendency, Byers approached Fields when Moore’s promotion to managing editor left the city editor job open. Fields had been in the same position at the
Huntington Herald-Dispatch, a daily newspaper in West Virginia’s second-largest city, for two years when Byers offered him the job. Over a total of nine years, he had served in a variety of positions at the Herald-Dispatch after working at smaller newspapers in northeastern Kentucky and southern Ohio earlier in his career. Despite a successful track record at other papers, Fields was reluctant to introduce much of his own style at the beginning of his tenure with the Gazette-Mail. “At first it was kind of, and it still can be, a little bit intimidating,” he said in our interview. By the time I arrived in the newsroom, though, it was clear that he had become more comfortable in his role. He described that process as follows:
I started looking at things and saying, “OK, how can my experience at
other places be valuable here? And what can I do that will work better
than what they’re doing now?” A lot of that had to do with all of the
young reporters that they’re bringing in. Because they don’t know the
Gazette way versus my way of doing things. You don’t have to tell Eric
Eyre or Phil Kabler13 what to do. But with the younger people, I found that
they were craving a lot more structure. And when I got here, I was a little
bit surprised at how free-wheeling it was, just how seat-of-the-pants
everything was. And, at first, I thought that was great, but then with the
140 younger people kind of struggling to find their place in things, and looking
for more of an institutional structure, I started to bring some of that in.
While I was in the newsroom, Fields updated the format of the daily budget to include more information and encourage reporters to interact with it as story elements evolved throughout the day. He also began to meet regularly with reporters. As one of the few people on both the beats/reporting and workflow committees, he could bring perspectives from each group into his weekly discussions with the members of the other group. The outcomes of that dynamic included a suggestion from the workflow group to place a chair next to Fields’s desk in the newsroom to facilitate longer interactions and deeper conversations with reporters.
Researchers have found that “empowering leadership,” which shares power with and grants autonomy to employees, correlates to greater creative behavior among newcomers in an organization, though trust in the leadership and perceived organizational support for creativity can mediate that relationship. 14 As mentioned in other locations throughout this text, longtime staff members characterize the Gazette and the Gazette-
Mail as a “writer’s paper” or a “reporter’s paper,” indicating a management philosophy in line with the principles of empowering leadership. However, management practices are not solely responsible for eliciting the benefits of bringing “new blood” into the organization. Information-seeking behavior and critical involvement by newcomers are associated with greater managerial support and assumption of “innovative role profiles” within the organization.15
141 Fields and other journalists who had worked in different news organizations also brought a particular appreciation for the resources available at the Gazette-Mail. Having come from newspapers with smaller staffs, they found that journalists who had only the
Gazette or the Gazette-Mail as a reference point did not always recognize the relative heartiness of the newsroom. Glen Flanagan noted that the size of the Gazette-Mail staff exceeded that of the newspaper in South Carolina where he had worked earlier, despite having a lower circulation:
I know we tend to get typecast as a small newspaper, but this is actually
probably the largest newsroom, in terms of actual number of reporters and
copy editors, that I’ve worked in. Being family-owned, we don’t have that
network [that chains provide], which, sometimes it’s a good thing,
sometimes it’s a bad thing. But one thing that I have noticed that seems to
be a result is we have a much more robust staff. And for the folks who
have been here for a long time or the folks who have just started here, I
don’t know if they realize that because this is all that they’ve seen. And so,
you know, they see the cuts that we’ve gone through, because we have lost
people and frozen positions, but I try to tell them, “Guys, we have a lot
more to work with in terms of manpower than you would at any corporate-
owned paper of this circulation size.”
Political reporting constituted a prime example of the Gazette-Mail’s advantages over other news outlets in the state. The paper employed three designated statehouse or political reporters while no other West Virginia newspaper had a reporter stationed full-
142 time in the capitol building. Further, their work was often supplemented by reporters on environment, education, health, and other beats as legislation related to those topics arose for consideration.
As the preceding anecdotes indicate, newcomer perspectives can influence not only the task-oriented practices of a newsroom but also the more relational elements of organizational culture. Communication scholar Jon A. Hess contended that even as newcomers are socialized into an organization, they engage in a process of personalization or individualization in which they attempt to imprint their influence on the organization in some way. Often, he wrote, they “affect both the existing social structures and task structures that existed prior to their entry.”16 Messages like the one delivered by Flanagan, for instance, seek to mitigate the effects of downsizing or similarly disheartening experiences on staff morale by situating them within a broader framework. However, Hess also noted that personal experiences influence organizational members’ interpretations of and responses to the messages they receive.17 As a result, individuals who have experienced the effects of layoffs or had more negative encounters with their current or previous organizations might respond to encouraging communication with cynicism.
In the case of the Gazette-Mail, the events of the two years leading up to my fieldwork fostered specific complications. Framed as a combination, the merger of the
Gazette and Daily Mail in 2015 was characterized by the publisher as a melding of “two newsroom staffs working in cooperation to produce the most comprehensive news product in West Virginia.”18 Initially, the new organization featured a shared leadership
143 structure in which Byers and former Daily Mail editor and publisher Brad McElhinny served as co-editors. Both papers were represented in positions across the newsroom at that time, as well. Fairly early in the transition process, though, many of the former Daily
Mail employees, including McElhinny, left the paper to pursue other opportunities. When
I arrived, only four members of the former Daily Mail staff remained in the newsroom.
Though the two papers had shared a building, interaction between Gazette and
Daily Mail journalists prior to the merger was virtually non-existent. “I’m not even kidding,” assistant city editor Ashley Craig, one of the former Daily Mail journalists on the staff, told me. “None. We didn’t talk.” Rick Steelhammer, who had reported for the
Gazette for more than 40 years, said that dynamic had existed between the editorial employees of the papers for decades:
And we competed viciously. I mean, to the point, if I heard that somebody
on my beat on their side was planning to do a story, I’d stop what I was
doing and try to get it before they did, you know. It was kind of petty,
really, but you know, that’s the way we did it back then. That’s the way
we rolled. And, even though we were, like, 50 feet apart, I didn’t really
know a lot of the people there, except the ones that went to the Carpet. I
met a few that way. So, there wasn’t much interaction at all, and we were,
you know, we weren’t hostile to each other when we did meet up, but we
wanted to beat them, and vice versa.
This long-term rivalry complicated integration efforts. Individuals like Fields and
Flanagan, who had worked at other news organizations but had no prior commitment to
144 either the Gazette or the Daily Mail, almost certainly gauged the practices and culture of the Gazette-Mail against those of their previous organizations.19 However, because they came to Charleston from other news markets, their evaluations were unlikely to be informed by the effects of direct competition. The same could not be said for the journalists who had lived through the merger.
In my interviews, staff members noted political ideology, perceptions of community boundaries, editorial practices, and newsroom culture as key areas of divergence between the Gazette and Daily Mail. Regardless of prior affiliation, most journalists who experienced the combination acknowledged the stronger influence of the
Gazette in the negotiation of those differences. As former Daily Mail managing editor
Philip Maramba wrote in a recent column, “the workflow, editorial decisions and vibe of the merged newsroom belonged more to the [Gazette] and less to the [Daily Mail]. There wasn’t going to be a perfect 50-50 blend; it’s just what happens in mergers.”20
Staff members on the copy desk faced some of the most immediate and dramatic adjustments. Not only did copy editors from each paper bring different editing practices and design approaches to the combined effort, Daily Mail employees also had to adapt to a new work schedule. While Gazette employees operated on a seven-day work week, their Daily Mail counterparts had been accustomed to a five-day week. For the first several weeks, the copy desk operated without a clear indication of who was in charge.
Gazette-Mail news editor Leann Ray, who was on the Gazette staff at the time of the combination, said that uncertainty about the management of the desk created further challenges:
145 There were days that I ran the desk, because it was a month before we
knew who would be who. So, you know, I’d run the desk my way, and
then the Daily Mail news editor, she’d run it her way. And we were like,
“You know, let’s just do each other’s thing, we’ll see what works best, and
then we’ll take the best things.” And there was just kind of resistance the
whole time. I tried really hard to be like, “OK, we can do it both ways and
just figure out what works best,” but there was a lot of Daily Mail people
being like, “Well, we want to be across the hall where there are windows,”
or “We do things this way,” and “Oh, we only work five days a week.”
And we’re like, “Well, that’s not what it is anymore. It’s a new
newspaper.” So, it was rough at the beginning, yeah.
By the time I began my fieldwork, though, the copy desk was where I saw the most evidence of the Daily Mail influence on the combined paper. This outcome can be attributed, at least in part, to the continued presence of former Daily Mail staffers on the desk.
Assistant news editor Cathy Caudill was the only person in the unit who came directly from the Daily Mail, but Craig interacted with the department extensively as the assistant city editor. Though her position was more closely aligned with the reporting function of the newsroom, her late schedule coincided with that of the copy editors and she operated as a liaison between the two departments.
Copy editor Rafe Godfrey was on the Gazette staff at the time of the merger, but he also had worked for the Daily Mail a few years earlier. In our interview, he explained
146 how the training he received from Maramba at the Daily Mail continued to influence his work:
There was really a big focus on headline-writing at the Daily Mail that
there isn’t as much of at the Gazette and now at the Gazette-Mail. And, so
I try to channel Philip a little bit and bring a little bit of that in. I spend a
lot of time focusing on headlines and working on those.
Over the years between the merger and the start of my fieldwork, former Gazette staffers and newcomers to the desk began to incorporate more of the Daily Mail practices into their routines, as well. “I think we brought some of our traditions with us,” Caudill said.
“Like, ‘Hey, you know, maybe we can do it this way.”
The Daily Mail’s imprint on the relational culture of the copy desk was even more apparent than its impact on work-related practices. Early in my observations, I noticed considerably more regular interaction among staff members on the copy desk side of the newsroom than the reporting side. The features and image desks also were located in that space and shared in the more conversational atmosphere. The difference in environment had something to do with the physical layout of the area as well as variations in management style. However, some people on the copy desk also recognized the Daily
Mail influence on the shifting culture. As Caudill explained:
We also forced them to be more chatty with us and talk about their cats
and stuff. This one time, Chris [Atkins] turned and looked at Paul
[Gartner] and he said, “Remember we never used to talk to each other?” It
was like, “Damn right, you talk to each other.” I’m not going to sit in a
147 room where everyone just stares at their computer and doesn’t talk to each
other. I really treasure my bonds with my co-workers.
Another material outcome of that influence was the regular presence of food on the copy desk. As mentioned in the previous chapter, Ray often brought snacks to share with her staff, and other staff members also contributed. It was not unusual to find fruit or cupcakes or other dessert items on the table at the end of the copy desk when I arrived in the afternoons.
Several people from both the Daily Mail and Gazette staffs mentioned regular communion around food as a central element of the Daily Mail newsroom culture. The
Daily Mail staff had “potlucks for days,” according to Craig, organizing soup and chili or hot dog lunches on the spur of the moment. Miller confirmed Craig’s characterization, noting that she occasionally benefited from the bounty available across the hall:
They had food all the time. I can testify because the former Daily Mail
editorial page editor—she’s retired now, her name is Hanna Maurice,
lovely person—she and I used to commiserate sometimes. And sometimes
it would get dark. I’d be in here working, and as the day got grayer and
darker, it would just get darker and darker and darker in here. And I
wouldn’t notice because I’m staring at this bright screen. Hanna would
peek her head in and see me sitting in the dark, and come in and say,
“You’re sitting in the dark. It’s OK. It’s going to be OK.” And then she’d
bring me a plate of food. Isn’t that great? She’d say, “Well, we always
148 have food over there. You need to eat. Nobody understands your pain like
I do,” which is totally true.
Craig credited this regular practice of meal-sharing with contributing to the convivial atmosphere of her former newsroom and the close relationships she formed with her colleagues: “I didn’t know this until I came over here, but they kind of like saw us as this cult because we were always happy all the time. It’s because we had food all the time, and windows that open!”
While many of the former Gazette staffers seemed to welcome the Daily Mail’s influence on the relational aspects of the newsroom culture, ideological differences about reporting and coverage decisions were more contested. Daily Mail opinion page editor
Kelly Merritt’s assessment of the relative objectivity he perceived in the practices of each paper, detailed in the previous chapter, represents a prominent example of such ideological conflict. Debates over the definition and desirability of journalistic objectivity abound in professional discourses—as well as scholarly literature—and philosophical differences in the newsroom did not always break along lines of prior affiliation.
Longtime Gazette copy editor Chris Atkins also noted his displeasure with what he characterized as the “activism” of some of the reporters on the staff.
Many of the former Gazette journalists, though, aligned around an ethos focused more on fairness and the responsible interpretation and contextualization of information than a strict adherence to traditional notions of objectivity. As Byers explained, “I want truth-seekers; I want storytellers. I don’t just want stenographers.” Ward asserted the futility of even aspiring to an uncritical practice of objectivity:
149 Well, you know, Hunter S. Thompson said that objective journalism is a
pompous contradiction in terms. And I wouldn’t necessarily advise anyone
to do everything else Hunter S. Thompson did, but he was certainly right
about that. And people who claim that they’re objective, who claim that
that’s the goal, I think they’re just kidding themselves and they’re kidding
their audience that that’s what they are. That’s not what they are. That’s
not what anyone is. Being fair and trying to be smart and trying to
understand the issues you’re writing about so that you can really inform
people well about them is a better goal than some false hope of objectivity.
I mean, it always seemed to me that in demanding that journalists be
objective, people were almost demanding that they not give a crap. And I
don’t know why you would want someone covering a story who didn’t
care about it.
At least one of the former Daily Mail staffers perceived the effects of such ideological conflicts on reporting as minimal. Caudill contended that readers and other observers tended to overestimate the differences between the news sections in each paper because of the politically disparate tones of the editorial pages:
I feel like both had good journalists that were doing great work, but, you
know, as far as the community sees, they really just see, like, conservative
and liberal. … My dad, you know, he’s conservative, and he thinks that
the paper’s much more skewed liberal now, and I was like, “You don’t
realize how similar it is.” Maybe headlines seem more liberal-leaning
150 sometimes if you don’t put some thought into them, so I guess I could see
it through that lens. But, for the most part, the content hasn’t changed, I
would say.
Although political ideology likely constituted the difference most apparent to former readers of both papers, newsroom insiders identified other areas that distinguished approaches to coverage, as well. Staff members noted, particularly, the Gazette and Daily
Mail’s distinct interpretations of “local” coverage.
As explained in the previous chapter, Gazette-Mail journalists were engaged in ongoing discussions about the paper’s coverage area during my fieldwork. The people I interviewed generally acknowledged a theoretical understanding of the state as the community they covered, though several of them questioned the connection between that abstract idea and the practical realities they encountered daily. The debate, as it was framed, drew upon the Gazette’s positioning of itself as “The State Newspaper” and differing opinions about whether or not coverage lived up to that motto.
In contrast to the Gazette perspective on boundaries, the Daily Mail defined community in more narrow terms. As Miller explained:
The Daily Mail had sort of carved out this idea of being intensely local,
and by intensely local, they sometimes meant local as in Charleston. When
we use the word local, we tend, I, especially, personally tend to mean
West Virginia. So, that’s one of my criteria; I’m looking for any kind of
West Virginia connection. So, obviously, we’re not going to council
meetings in Berkeley County, but the issues all over the state belong to us.
151 Among the staff members I interviewed, Merritt expressed the most nostalgia for the
“intensely local” coverage of the Daily Mail. He further characterized it as more
“upbeat,” aligning more closely to the boosterism attributed to many community newspapers than to the cosmopolitan approach indicated in the Gazette’s commitment to watchdog journalism.
Even as he expressed his disappointment in what he perceived as the loss of such coverage, though, he positively noted a front-page story about a local record store as he thumbed through copies of the Gazette-Mail published the week before our interview.
This example, among others I encountered during my observations, indicates the effect of outside perspectives. While the Gazette-Mail maintained an identity closely aligned to that of the Gazette, the habits and values journalists brought to the newsroom from their experiences in other news organizations exerted some impact on the shared culture and practices.
Newsroom “City-States”
Like many other newsrooms, the editorial workspace for the Gazette-Mail was designed in a way that would appear to encourage open communication across departments and positions. Stunted cubicle walls marked the only physical dividers in the open-floor-plan space. The doors of the few individual offices along the perimeter of the room were typically open. Even the executive editor’s desk sat unenclosed near one wall of the newsroom. Yet interactions across units—and even within some units—were limited in my observations. Douglas Imbrogno, assistant lifestyles editor, characterized the relationships among the reporting departments this way: “There have always been
152 three city-states—news, features, sports. And they have very, very, very, very little crossover.” The sports department at the Gazette-Mail was housed in a room across the hall from the newsroom. Other than the sports editor, who came over for occasional meetings and check-ins with the photo department, I rarely saw members of that department in the newsroom. The features staff and news-side reporters, however, occupied the same room and were separated by just a few yards.
My personal experiences confirm that this phenomenon is not unique to the
Gazette-Mail. Throughout my journalism career, the bulk of my conversations with colleagues were contained within whatever department I was working at the time.
Schedules, functions, organizational hierarchies, and newsroom traffic patterns often constrained opportunities to connect with co-workers in other units. Similar issues appeared to be at play in the communication patterns I noticed in the Gazette-Mail newsroom.
I did, however, observe some efforts to overcome such obstacles. The discussion in the reporting/beats committee meeting I attended included extensive deliberation about the possibility of joint reporting projects across units. Specifically, members of the committee considered the possibility of teaming news reporters with feature writers to address certain topics in more complex ways. Shortly after the meeting, Imbrogno told me that the idea had been circulating for about a year, but no concrete plans had emerged:
Honestly, I don’t know if it’s going to happen. Without strong leadership
saying things are going to happen, they don’t happen in this newspaper,
and they won’t happen. I think that you would need that gruff, Lou Grant
153 kind of character saying, “All right, Doug. You’re going to be working
with Ryan, and you’re going to do a story on charter schools. And I want
you to do feature stories and Ryan can do a news story, or you can do it
the other way around or you can do it together, but we’re going to do it.”
Imbrogno’s assessment of the situation illustrates the difficulty associated with altering ingrained habits of interaction.
The perceived barriers to communication across departments—outside regular planning and work group meetings—was apparent even in a lighthearted exchange I observed around the midpoint of my fieldwork. As Carlee Lammers prepared to leave her position as a feature writer to take over the Putnam County beat, her colleague Bill Lynch bought a going-away card for her. Greg Moore stopped at the features desk as Lynch was passing the card around to be signed, so Lynch asked him if he wanted to sign it, as well.
The managing editor replied with a laugh, “You mean a welcome card?” To which features editor Maria Young responded, “Stealing. We like to call it stealing.” Though the conversation was friendly and both retorts were tongue-in-cheek, the card itself indicates an unspoken awareness of separation among the units. Lammers would only be moving to the other side of the room, but Lynch and the other staffers on the features desk recognized that their communication with her would be altered.
Beyond the challenges to communication across departments, distinct communication patterns were apparent within various units, as well. While journalists on the features desk engaged in regular conversations about personal experiences outside the newsrooms, most interaction among the news reporters and editors focused on work-
154 related topics. Her experience on both sides of the newsroom equipped Lammers to explain the different communicative atmospheres:
It’s funny. I know so much about Bill’s life and Anna’s life, and I get over
to the news side and I just know what they’re working on ’cause I can hear
them on the phone, and that’s it. We don’t talk. I sit diagonal from Jake
[Jarvis], who’s, like, one of my best friends, and we’ll talk, but I didn’t
know about his lawnmower woes like I did with Bill or things like that.
And I think, too, with [features editor] Maria [Young] being right there, it
was easier to say, “Hey, Maria. I’m doing this.” Now I have to get up and
talk to Ben, which sounds really lazy of me to complain about, but it is,
it’s a different dynamic, I think, for sure. And it’s a bigger group, too, so I
think that kind of plays a little bit of a factor into it.
Both Lammers and Jennifer Gardner, who joined the features staff after interning on the news side the previous summer, also noted the effects of different departmental relationships to deadlines. As feature writers, they were often working on stories days or sometimes even weeks in advance. On the other side of the room, they regularly wrote for publication in the next day’s paper. These variations in time demands provide another potential explanation for news-side journalists’ tendency to limit relational communication until after-work gatherings at the Red Carpet or other regular hangouts.
Deadline-related pressures and the level of activity in the newsroom also appeared to affect communication across departments. Codi Mohr, a copy editor who regularly worked weekends, noted that the limited staffing and more relaxed atmosphere that
155 characterized the newsroom outside the standard work week allowed for more conversation:
I definitely communicate more with the people who are here on the
weekends. So, the reporters who are here on the weekend or [weekend
editor] Lori [Kersey], who is here every Saturday and Sunday. But, I
mean, most of the time, it just feels like I’m working three days a week.
Because Saturday and Sunday, nobody’s here. So it doesn’t feel like work.
It just feels like we’re coming in, putting a paper together, you know. Just
a casual kind of thing. And it’s a much more casual environment.
Generally speaking, though, the sense of separation referenced by journalists on the features desk extended to the copy desk staff, as well. News editor Leann Ray told me that few of the younger reporters came directly to copy editors to make changes to stories after they had been submitted for editing. Those who did, like Erin Beck and Ryan
Quinn, had been in the newsroom for a few years and likely had more opportunities over that time to develop relationships across departmental lines. But Ray said that most of the newcomers avoided the copy desk altogether: “I only see them when they come back and talk to [image editor] Kenny [Kemp]. And I’m like, I don’t know if they know who I am.”
She acknowledged, though, that social interactions outside the newsroom had increased somewhat over her time with the newspaper:
When I first got here, when people would hang out outside of the
newsroom, reporters would always hang out together, and copy desk was
156 completely separate. Like, they never got invited to anything. But then, as
I’ve been here longer, there have been people on copy desk who went to
college with people who are reporters, so I feel like copy desk is a little bit
more socially invited to things now. Yeah, everyone’s kind of connected.
But, I mean, professionally, I’m sure there are some reporters that still
don’t know who copy editors are.
As Ray indicated, shifts in communication across units were often attributed to pre- existing relationships between individuals in the departments. Several people mentioned college friendships or dating relationships that crossed units as stimuli for more social interaction.
I also observed efforts by people on both sides of the room to bridge the divide and stimulate more regular conversations within the newsroom. Ray’s compilation and distribution of the style guide mentioned in the previous chapter represented one such endeavor. Craig, who worked closely with both the copy desk and the reporters in her role as assistant city editor, also encouraged reporters to go directly to the copy editors with changes to their stories rather than routing them through her:
I keep telling the reporters, “You need to get them on your side,” and
“You need to be nice to them because they control your stuff, man.
They’re the ones that actually put it on the page and make sure your name
is spelled right.” Respect copy desk. Buy them pizza. But, it’s important,
you know, because I don’t catch everything, I can’t catch everything. I’m
reading it too fast. So, you need them. And copy desk, they kind of also
157 need to see the reporters’ side of things. But, I’m working on building
relationships.
Ray’s mention of Beck and Quinn signified that while challenges to newsroom communication remained, the nature of existing relationships across departments was not universally limited. Individuals like Craig and Kersey worked closely with staff members on both sides of the room as a function of their positions. Other individuals seemed more naturally gregarious or comfortably familiar with colleagues outside their unit.
The divide also seemed less pronounced among the copy, features, and image desks. The physical proximity of these units to each other created more opportunities for engagement. Ray and Kemp sat back to back, for instance, and regularly blended work- related conversation with anecdotes about their families, pets, vacation plans, and other personal fodder. Writers and editors on the features desk had to take just a few steps to check in with the copy editors designing their pages and packages.
Kemp and the other photojournalists in his department occupied something of a liminal relational space. Their physical workspaces were located on the end of the newsroom farthest from the reporters’ area, but most of their time was spent outside the newsroom on assignments that often brought them into contact with the journalists writing about those events. As Ray noted, reporters also occasionally visited their side of the newsroom to talk with Kemp about assignments or provide information relevant to cutlines. Yet even with these expanded opportunities for interaction, Kemp noted some communication challenges that remained.
158 Photo assignments submitted by reporters and editors, he said, were often vague.
And while the veteran photojournalists on the staff typically worked out the details for themselves or in direct consultation with the reporter or editor, younger members of the department expected Kemp to seek clarifications. While he accepted the responsibility to facilitate those conversations, he also recognized the loss associated with such mediated communication:
Part of that is left up to the photographer to talk to reporters and find out
things, too. And I’m a big proponent of that. In other words, you can tell
me what you want, and I can then go tell the photographer what you want.
But a lot of times in that translation, things get skewed or they don’t
understand the directions very well. So, you know, I like people to go talk
face to face. If you and I are going to go on an assignment, then I should
be talking to you. You know, and I want the photographers to do that.
This example speaks not only to the ways different departments communicated but also to the effects of another form of difference on these patterns—generational diversity.
In the following section, I explore in greater depth the relationship between generational differences and newsroom interactions. I observed some individual variations, but general distinctions in terms of organizational commitment and expectations related to management practices emerged in line with previous research on the topics. In some other areas, including attitudes toward changing technology in the newsroom, age appeared to play a more ambiguous role in determining factions.
159 Generational Diversity
One of the most visible examples of difference within the newsroom population was age-based. The Gazette-Mail staff consisted mainly of concentrations of 20- somethings and individuals in their late 40s and early 50s. A few people fell between the two largest groups in age, and a few others were nearing traditional retirement age. At 85,
Jim Haught was well past that age but still writing editorials in his office every day of my fieldwork.
Many of the Millennials were stationed in the reporters’ bullpen at the back of the newsroom. Veteran reporters Eric Eyre and Ken Ward used to sit among them, but Eyre had relocated to the statehouse a few years before my arrival and Ward had more recently moved to a private office on the periphery of the reporters’ area. The younger journalists on the features and copy desk were more integrated with their older peers and editors, but that was, in part, a function of smaller staffs and more concentrated work spaces.
Organizational research indicates that such generational diversity can present both challenges and opportunities.21 Age-related differences in engagement, expectations regarding communication and management style, and attitudes toward technology are among the areas identified as potential sources of conflict. This conflict can be productive, though. As younger employees enter workplaces, they bring skills and perspectives that encourage their older colleagues to question the status quo and consider cultural changes that could have widespread benefits.22
Employers must find ways to keep younger workers in the organization long enough to achieve those benefits, though, and that is increasingly difficult. On average,
160 Millennials remain in their first jobs for less than half the time members of preceding generations did.23 In more than one conversation, editors at the Gazette-Mail remarked upon the higher turnover rate among young journalists in the last few years. While discussing the resignation of the youngest photojournalist on the staff during a meeting at the beginning of my fieldwork, Kemp remarked, “The younger crew is different. People don’t stay like they used to.” Byers and Moore echoed that sentiment in my final interview with them. Moore explained:
It used to be that you could pretty much count on keeping them here for a
couple of years right out of school. And so, you put the resources in to
train them and to teach them and to help them learn the area and learn
their beat, and you felt good about getting a decent return on it. And now,
I mean, they may not stay a year. They may only stay eight months. And
that, that is different.
Economics are part of the problem. Community reporting jobs were notoriously low- paying even before this generation joined the industry. Many of my former colleagues left newspapers in the 1990s and early 2000s for better paychecks in corporate or government communication positions after just a few years in the field. Today’s young journalists, though, face even tighter newsroom budgets. They also carry significantly greater student loan debt on average than preceding generations did,24 further affecting their willingness to remain in low-paying jobs when more lucrative opportunities arise.
In an interview published on the Poynter website, Eyre mentioned compensation as a significant obstacle to keeping young people in community journalism: “You’ve got
161 to pay people at least enough, and it’s never about the money, I mean my gosh I get paid nothing hardly, but you’ve got to be able to live.”25 He noted in the interview that while shopping on weekends he had discovered colleagues working second jobs in the retail and service industries. This response to the economic challenges associated with working in the field arose in my own conversations, as well. During an interview, a younger journalist mentioned that she had recently applied for a part-time position in a nearby store to supplement her income.
As a Millennial with job duties that regularly brought him into conversations with top editors, digital content manager Glen Flanagan recognized the motivations of his peers but also struggled with the consequences of their decisions to leave:
Part of it is the pressure of the industry. You realize that, you know, I’m
not going to get a raise staying at one paper. They can’t afford to give
reporters raises. So, if I want to get a raise, I have to job hop. And that
comes back to, I think, a difference between Millennials and older
generations. Every time I move, my parents are horrified. You know, “It’s
going to look terrible on your résumé.” But all of my friends are doing the
exact same thing. I certainly understand the editors’ frustration, and, I
mean, hell, I share it too because [the departing photographer] was one of
the folks on the photography staff who I knew gets digital. It’s difficult to
lose those points of contact, you know?
In expressing their disappointment about the photographer’s resignation, both Kemp and
Byers also lamented the loss of her insights regarding digital practices and strategies.
162 They had hoped, they said, to learn more from her and see her skills and knowledge shared across the newsroom.
Human resource scholars Sanghamitra Chaudhuri and Rajashi Ghosh advocate for the upsetting of traditional organizational hierarchies to encourage Millennials to share their expertise on topics less familiar to older colleagues through such reverse mentorship processes. In their research, they note its potential to improve engagement and commitment across age groups. 26 Such practices further facilitate adaptation to changing technologies and consumer expectations, a demand that is particularly pressing in the news industry.
Kemp said he realized the need to bring younger perspectives to the photo staff in early 2015 when he had to replace a colleague who died after working more than 50 years for the Gazette. As he considered the remaining staff, all of whom were veteran photojournalists, he recognized the value of bringing in someone more familiar with social media and digital technologies:
We were all in the same boat. We knew how to do things. We certainly
knew how to take photos and how to go on assignments. We knew where
everything was at. We were very reliable. … So, what [the younger
photojournalists] brought to the table was bringing us into the 21st century
and, in Twitter and other software things, just opening up our eyes to
things that I, that all of us weren’t really using. You know, Instagram. So,
you know, hiring them hasn’t been a bad thing by any means. It’s pushed
us forward.
163 The correlation between age and technological aptitude and affinity was most evident in the photo department. On other desks, as I will explore more fully in the next section of this chapter, innovators emerged across generations.
A more consistent relationship appeared between age and organizational longevity. Most of the over-40 segment of the newsroom population had spent several years or even decades with the Gazette or Daily Mail. In contrast, editors identified even three-year tenures as unusual among Millennials. Ryan Quinn, one of the few young journalists to reach that three-year mark, explained that increased turnover among his generational peers was a function of a variety of factors:
I have enough money to survive off of the salary I’m paid. And sometimes
I’ve had financial issues when I’ve used a credit card too much and my
car’s broken down, and my grandfather bailed me out. Now, some people
can’t get that. And so, I believe, people leave because they have low
salaries, they leave because their beats may not be like mine. If you don’t
feel that there’s a lot to cover on your particular beat, you may be more
incentivized to leave. And, you know, some people feel while there’s a lot
of freedom of what to write about here, they’re not getting the direction or
the help that they want from the management of the newspaper, so they
may go somewhere else to try to get that peer mentoring that would
actually help them out.
Quinn’s mention of the desire for more structure and mentorship represents a common theme that emerged in my interviews and observations. More experienced journalists,
164 many of whom were socialized to operate more independently, struggled to accommodate
Millennials’ expectations of greater support.
In their review of popular and scholarly literature on Millennials in the workplace, organizational communication scholar Karen Myers and her co-author Kamyab
Sadaghiani found evidence that older supervisors and co-workers often perceived
Millennials’ need for more frequent and affirming messages as “burdensome.”27
Generational scholars attribute this divide to distinct formational experiences. As
“latchkey” kids, many members of Generation X grew up with significantly less supervision than older or younger Americans. As a result, they tend to prefer autonomy in their work lives and expect less guidance and support. Millennials, though, grew up with significantly more parental involvement. Management consultant Bruce Tulgan attributed this shift in parenting style to large-scale school shootings and similar threats that became more prominent around the turn of the millennium.28 As a result, adults who came of age in that cultural climate were socialized to expect more opportunities for interaction with supervisors and more supportive communication.
Kemp was not the only supervisor in the newsroom aware of the shift. Moore acknowledged his own efforts to adapt to the changing needs of young reporters:
In the 15 years I’ve been an editor, I’ve certainly noticed that. The
younger people we used to get in here, I mean, you could just point them
and they would go. And there was always variation. I mean, some people
would need more hand-holding than others. … And some people, anytime
they talk to an editor they feel it’s five minutes wasted they’ll never get
165 back. But, certainly, I think it’s true that the younger reporters need more
of that, and just speaking personally, it’s been a change for me, and it’s
been a struggle for me to try to do that. And so, that’s certainly true. I
think that’s probably true most places.
Moore and several other individuals in management roles displayed an awareness of the challenges created by generational differences and employed a variety of strategies to address the communication needs of younger journalists.
Moore regularly came to reporters’ desks to check on stories and volunteer additional background or context. In my interviews with them, the younger feature writers mentioned the coaching and interactive editing provided by editor Maria Young and Imbrogno. Both Fields and Flanagan made an effort to convey positive feedback shared within budget or planning meetings that might not otherwise have reached younger reporters. Byers acknowledged that daily demands often interfered with intentions to praise reporters directly:
I’ll see a story and I’m like, “I need to talk to that reporter because this
was a good story,” and the next thing I know, the day’s gone. And two
days later, “I should still talk to him about that,” and the opportunity feels
lost, and that’s something that I need to work on.
As the newsroom’s top editor, he also recognized the need to engage more experienced reporters in mentorship roles with their younger colleagues. When a new political reporter joined the staff shortly before the start of my fieldwork, Byers dropped him at
166 the statehouse and asked Eyre to help him “get a feel for the place and learn the basics about West Virginia politics.”
Byers told me that he had tried to encourage all the veteran reporters to be more proactive in communicating with newcomers, but some accepted the charge more eagerly than others. Several people noted Eyre’s disposition as being particularly suited to the task, and he was almost constantly engaged in conversation with co-workers on the few occasions he visited the newsroom during my observations. “But some people are just never going to be mentors,” Byers conceded.
Ward counted himself among those less inclined to take on such a role, but I witnessed several meaningful exchanges with younger reporters during my observations.
Many of his junior colleagues mentioned him as a source of local knowledge and professional insight. On multiple occasions, I noticed 20-something reporters standing in the doorway of his office or seated in the chair next to his desk debating various issues or seeking advice. In many of those instances, the younger reporter initiated the conversation, which illustrates a communicative style based in responsiveness. Ward attributed such conversations to a willingness to ask questions that only a few of the
Millennials in the newsroom exhibited. He contrasted the tendency to his own habit of seeking information wherever he could find it, particularly as a novice reporter working with experienced colleagues like Paul Nyden.
Difference in habits, experiences, and values can complicate intergenerational work relationships and “may diminish the effectiveness of employers’ efforts to increase engagement,”29 according to business communication scholar Nancy Schullery. The
167 expectations of younger reporters for more structure and guidance seemed to be in tension with veterans’ desire to maintain a culture of independence. Many longtime reporters cited the freedom to pursue stories of their choosing with little interference from editors as a crucial component of the newspaper’s identity. As Ward explained:
In my time here, the Gazette has always been a reporter’s paper in that if
you came here and you worked hard and you had ideas for good stories,
and you were able to do them, they would get in the paper and they would
get good play. And you would be kind of left alone to go pursue important
topics and stories that you wanted to do, as opposed to editors deciding,
“Here’s what we’re going to do today,” which is the way a lot of
newspapers, especially our size and smaller, and to some extent, bigger,
work still today. And that’s really good if that’s what you want. And that’s
what I want.
Thus, editors faced a dilemma about how to balance the freedom in which reporters like
Ward thrived with Millennials’ desire for more mentorship, collaboration, and motivation.30 Byers acknowledged that the situation called for a more individualized management style:
It kind of dawned on me, I don’t know how long ago, that every person in
the newsroom needs to be managed differently. And when you figure out
how to manage each person, then you’re ahead of the game. Of course,
then you’ve lost this person and that person, and you’ve got new people to
figure out.
168 So editors, already stretched thin by downsizing and consumer demands for greater interactivity, were constantly being called upon to adapt their communication styles to the needs of newcomers as turnover increased.
Staffing instabilities also took a toll on morale across the newsroom. Moore’s earlier comment about investing training and resources in young journalists only to lose them in less than a year reflected a clear disappointment in the apparent lack of commitment. Moore, Byers, and their contemporaries at the Gazette-Mail were notable for their endurance in an industry in which low pay and high levels of stress have long been associated with driving individuals into other professions. The fact that many of them had spent their whole careers pursuing the demanding “sustained outrage” mission specific to the Gazette reflected an even deeper commitment to the institution. “There’s a lot of caring and dedication that you see among some people here that’s pretty special,”
Byers observed.
Journalists so invested in their newspaper must have experienced the increase in turnover as particularly disheartening. Rick Steelhammer, a Gazette and Gazette-Mail reporter for four decades, commented on “the blur of how many people are in and out of here” during our interview. Early in my fieldwork, Byers acknowledged the frustration among senior members of the staff: “I’ve taken some heat from some of the older people because we can’t keep people. … I do worry about the next generation.”
Long-time staffers recognized the role of economics and circumstances particular to the merger in some departures but expressed bewilderment about others. “I don’t understand any of it,” Eyre said of the recent departure of two of the younger
169 photographers. “I would think this would be like a dream job.” Many of the veterans seemed baffled by the Millennials’ limited appreciation for the autonomy they so valued.
Such perceptions of generation-based value differences can exacerbate challenges already present in intergroup communication dynamics. Older journalists who question the commitment of younger colleagues to their common endeavor will be less likely to invest the resources and time Millennials seek in those relationships. The veterans also will have fewer opportunities to benefit from the skills and insights their junior colleagues bring to the organization. Those skills often include an aptitude for newer technology, but as I explain in the next section, digital affinity did not always follow generational lines.
Digital Perspectives
The tension between traditional print news practices and demands to adapt to changing technology created another context for ideological diversity at the Gazette-
Mail. Many of the staff members I interviewed perceived the paper’s historic focus on in- depth, investigative reporting in conflict with demands for greater attention to multimedia production and interaction with readers via social media. Others—often but not exclusively newcomers to the organization—expressed a sense of frustration regarding what they experienced as resistance to digital opportunities. In the next chapter, I explore this tension in more historic and structural terms. In the conclusion of this chapter, though, I turn my attention to interactions among individuals and the effects of varied perspectives on the larger newsroom culture.
170 Ali Schmitz studied broadcast journalism and completed a fellowship with a digital news organization committed to multimedia reporting before joining the Gazette-
Mail staff. That background provided an orientation toward immediacy, interactivity, and participation, values journalism scholar Nikki Usher associated with online journalism.31
Her use of social media and other digital strategies reflected that orientation. As she explained:
There have definitely been situations where, if I’m covering a breaking
news story, I’m definitely more likely—and this is something that I had to
fight for at the beginning—where I’ll post a story and then update and
update and update. That’s the way I learned, and, honestly, that’s not
something that happens here as often. There’s a lot of, “No, don’t post it.
It doesn’t matter if we’re first,” you know? Just like, “Wait a while and
we’ll have the best story. That’s all that matters.” And, honestly, it does
matter, don’t get me wrong, but I mean I love just going and writing
whatever I have and updating, hit republish over and over again, and that’s
not something that happens here as often, unless it’s a major breaking
story. But I can see it just working so well with so many other things.
For colleagues with longer tenures in the newspaper industry who had developed habits built around the cycle of daily print production, such practices did not come as naturally.
Imbrogno, one of the Gazette-Mail journalists who came of age before the digital era, credited younger colleagues like Schmitz with bringing new ideas and approaches to the newsroom. However, he noted that a lack of institutional support for such innovation
171 often discouraged the pursuit of digital-oriented strategies. He speculated that it also might have contributed to a decrease in organizational engagement among many young journalists:
They’re digital natives as opposed to our generation. We have passports to
digital land while we still have one foot in the old-school, letter age. So
younger reporters are much more willing to tweet. They tweet a lot, maybe
too much sometimes because they often tweet outside their beats. Though
I do that, too. … And we had a Millennial photographer who started up the
paper’s first Instagram account, which was pretty popular as far as these
things go for a paper our size, had like 5,000 followers. There was really
no buy-in or support for that. She just did that as a kind of a personal
passion project and did well with that. But she left, and I think she
probably left because she wasn’t feeling, I don’t know, that there was a
cohesive vision for transitioning to whatever a newspaper is supposed to
be in this age.
The ambiguity in Imbrogno’s phrasing reflects a crisis that extends well beyond the walls of the Gazette-Mail newsroom. Community newspapers, in particular, continue to struggle to develop digital plans that offer reliable outcomes and address the specific needs of their varied readerships. This ongoing challenge illustrates the significance of interactions among journalists who are comfortable with digital technologies and colleagues with longstanding connections to the community in the negotiation of changing practices.
172 In many cases, this division follows generational lines. Imbrogno’s characterization of Millennials as digital natives indicates the presumption that younger journalists are generally more eager to pursue new technologies. More experienced staff members, in turn, are likely to have a clearer sense of the needs of the community they cover than newcomers. However, such generalizations did not always hold true in my observations. Some of the younger journalists in the newsroom had spent their whole lives in West Virginia and had a native’s understanding of the state. At the same time, a few of the most committed advocates for multimedia reporting and a greater online presence were among the older members of the newsroom community.
Imbrogno was one of those more seasoned “web evangelists,” as he described himself. Inspired by an Internet-savvy city editor at his previous paper, he created a
Buddhist-themed web magazine in the late 1990s and has been blogging for years. “I kind of got intrigued by this new, developing, almost like an extension,” he told me. “I mean, I think that the Internet is kind of an extension of human consciousness into this connected world.” His interest in exploring the possibilities of the medium situated him as one of the key newsroom advocates for a more digital-friendly approach to news production.
Digital content manager Glen Flanagan identified Imbrogno as an illustration of the relatively limited connection between age and technological affinity at the Gazette-
Mail:
Yeah, the generational thing is not as big a deal here. I mean, there’s
some, to some extent. You bring in younger folks, of course they are a
173 little bit more fluent in things like Instagram, but, no, here it tends to break
down more into kind of philosophy.
Flanagan’s position and experience in previous news organizations contributed to a philosophy that emphasized page views and other web metrics in the development of reporting strategies. Other journalists in the newsroom found less value in those figures and argued for greater reliance on reporters’ experience and local knowledge in determining what to cover and how to cover it.
Flanagan characterized Imbrogno as an ally in his effort to increase attention to digital opportunities:
Doug and I tend to get along very well on this. You know, he’s asking me
frequently, “How much money are we making off of video?” Because he
would like to be able to take this to the editors and say, “OK, we made this
much off video. Let’s reinvest this, you know, and maybe get some new
mics or maybe get some podcasting equipment or whatever.” But at the
same time, you’ve got, like, maybe Erin [Beck]’s a good example. She’s
one of the younger generation, but tends to fall into that camp of, “Well,
we decide what’s important. We don’t go out and cover something just
because, you know, there’s a lot of social media interest in it,” or whatever
the case may be.
While Beck and others might not have embraced some aspects of a digital news culture like the reliance on social media metrics to guide coverage, responses to other elements were often a matter of perceived utility. Individual roles regularly figured into the
174 philosophical divide Flanagan referenced. As prior newsroom research has shown, journalists are generally open to change to the extent that it appears to support their professional values.32
The opportunity to supplement print stories with video, photo galleries, and other multimedia products appealed particularly to feature writers and editors like Imbrogno.
These digital tools offered clear means to enhance a storytelling style of writing, but their capacity to contribute something original to more straightforward news reporting was less evident. Yet even those staff members who resisted calls to shoot more video or become more active on social media expressed interest in other possibilities associated with digital technologies.
Beck, for example, was identified by Flanagan as less digitally engaged than many of the other younger journalists in the newsroom, but she expressed a real interest in online reporting in our interview. Specifically, she discussed how conversations with
Ward helped her recognize the Internet as a platform for the kinds of longer, more detailed stories she wanted to write:
You know, people say that journalism is dying, but there is a place for,
like, long-form journalism. The Internet is actually a really good place for
long-form, investigative, in-depth journalism. A lot of people want to,
since everybody gets their news online now, they want to focus on video
and things like that. And that’s fine, but it makes me more excited to think
about what kinds of long pieces I can write on the Internet, you know, and
not having to worry about space.
175 Beck’s comments indicate the effectiveness of appealing to journalists’ goals and values in encouraging greater use of digital technologies.
Some of the initially reluctant converts also found ways to apply their own spin on the use of these tools upon adopting them. Ward described his uncommon approach to beat blogging at the Online News Association happy hour I attended early in my fieldwork. In Coal Tattoo, one of two blogs he maintained on the Gazette-Mail website,
Ward applied a painstaking process of comment curation to limit the spread of unsubstantiated information:
There was a lot of bad conversations going around in the world about
climate change and coal, and it’s kind of like the doctor’s oath about doing
no harm. I didn’t want to make it worse. And I, probably foolishly,
thought if we have a conversation where people kind of have to show their
work and explain where they got some information and treat each other
with just a tiny little modicum of respect, maybe people would kind of
come to understand each other a little better.
Ward was not altogether pleased with the response to his experiment. Rather than adapting to the rules of engagement he set forth, many readers just stopped participating in the conversation:
I’m not so sure that I think that really worked. As I became more
convinced that the conversation needed curated in some ways and that
people, if they’re out of line, they needed to be kicked off, or they needed
to be made to show where they were getting things, the number of
176 comments really dropped. I mean, just dramatically. And it was clear there
were lots of other places where people could, you know, yell at the people
they disagreed with and be comfortable in their echo chamber.
Such outcomes illustrate the difficulty of applying long-held journalistic values to a digital public sphere, where journalists no longer have the same gatekeeping function they once had. The challenges associated with such an endeavor likely contributed to a general reluctance to apply limited personal resources to projects perceived as outside basic reporting requirements.
Ryan Quinn attributed his lack of multimedia production to a combination of factors. Working in newsrooms with fully staffed photo departments, an increasingly rare phenomenon, had largely spared him from demands for such output. It had also left the digital skills he acquired in college atrophied. But he also found that solid reporting practices left little time for other projects:
Some reporters have come in and they’ve done timelines and things like
that, but I just never, I never find the time to do them because I’m so
caught up in trying to just get the story straight and do the investigation
right. And there’s so much flying at me at once that I don’t have time to
make a supplementary graphic to explain something when I feel that my
time would be better spent doing far more traditional journalistic work.
Quinn was not alone. Many journalists, even some who were more philosophically open to digital tools, found the increasing demands associated with a digital media environment difficult to balance with more traditional expectations of journalists.
177 Jennifer Gardner’s educational background in visual journalism equipped her with many of the skills necessary to create multimedia packages. As a recent college graduate, she also came into the industry at a time when newcomers were expected to be what she called a “journalism unicorn” or someone who can create high-quality written, photographic, and video content. Even in the early stages of her work as a feature writer at the Gazette-Mail, she was discovering how difficult it was to take on those multiple roles:
I realize that this newspaper is trying to move toward a more digital-first
front. You know, we’re trying to prove that we can do all of those things.
But as someone who’s trying to do all those things, it’s hard to know if
that’s possible to do well and be respected for it.
In an era of downsizing, journalists around the country contend with the same conundrum. Fewer journalists are expected to produce more content and master more skills than ever.
Diversity in the Gazette-Mail newsroom appeared in a variety of forms, though not the ones typically measured. Differences related to organizational roles, outside experiences, age, and digital aptitude resulted in a range of perspectives on both practical and ideological matters. While conflicts arose around these differences, benefits also emerged. Newcomers brought fresh ideas, and long-time staff members brought institutional knowledge and stability, for instance.
In the next chapter, I explore in greater depth how the Gazette-Mail newsroom as an institution is trying to address this demand for change without sacrificing its
178 commitment to watchdog journalism and the community it serves. Newspapers around the country face similar negotiations, but the specific traditions inherent to the longstanding mission of the Gazette and now the Gazette-Mail add another layer to the process. Finally, this effort to adapt to a digital realm is further complicated by the state’s aging population and limited connectivity.
179 VI. Tradition and Change at the Gazette-Mail
The connection between the provincial model of journalism and community newspapers, while apparent in many cases, takes a more complicated form in others.
Journalists at the Gazette-Mail, as well as other local newspapers notable for investigative reporting, regularly balance their close ties to the community with a mission to hold powerful members of that community accountable. Their capacity simultaneously to fulfill the watchdog function associated with a cosmopolitan model and to engage in complex interpersonal relationships with readers and sources demands a reconsideration of the provincial-cosmopolitan binary.
Mass communication scholar Elizabeth Blanks Hindman described a more nuanced understanding of provincial “boosterism” in her study of an inner-city neighborhood newspaper. Rather than uncritically advocating for the community at large in a way that perpetuated existing hierarchies, some local journalists perceived a responsibility to try to correct those power imbalances:
Some of these newspapers see giving power to the powerless as a main
goal. People in inner cities across the country often feel left out of the
political process. Their views and needs often are ignored by government
and media, which focus on society’s wealthier populations. Inner-city
alternative media try to change that by offering a voice to those usually
not represented in the mainstream press, acknowledging conflict and
trying to solve the problems underlying it, and providing space for truly
local discussion of issues. In other words, these inner-city alternative
180 newspapers try to create and maintain both community and
communication to be truly democratic institutions.1
Observers have identified such a corrective mission in the work of many community news organizations that serve marginalized populations. Journalism scholar Isabel Molina
Guzmán noted the “oppositional relationship” between ethnic and general-market media and the capacity for publications representing specific communities to provide
“alternative narratives.”2 Historian John D’Emilio characterized the gay press as crucial to the advancement of the movement seeking equal rights and legal protections for members of the LGBT community.3
I saw an ethic similar to that described by Hindman at work in the Gazette-Mail newsroom. As the most economically distressed state in the nation,4 West Virginia faces challenges in line with those associated with the communities referenced above. Its residents must contend with ongoing exploitation by local and outside interests, as well as limited representation in public discourses that address issues particularly salient to their community. Many of the Gazette-Mail journalists I interviewed acknowledged an obligation to advocate for the most vulnerable elements of the population they covered.
Jennifer Gardner’s description of the sense of responsibility she felt while covering flood-ravaged areas of the state reflected this orientation. As did Dawn Miller’s development of a children and family beat during her reporting days to address topics like foster care and the impact of drug use on families. And Eric Eyre’s Pulitzer-winning reports on the opioid crisis. Ken Ward, who was credited with “fierce” reporting on the
181 coal industry and an “unwavering” commitment to justice in a Columbia Journalism
Review profile,5 captured the sentiment in this explanation of his reporting philosophy:
I don’t know what the point of journalism is if it’s not to try to make
things better and, you know, to try to defend people who don’t have
anybody else defending them. Stand up for truth and facts and, you know,
nonsense like that.
I heard Ward’s perspective echoed by many of his colleagues. Rob Byers spoke of the newspaper’s charge to do the kind of provocative work that “nobody else is going to do.”6 This longstanding commitment has informed not only the work of the journalists in the newsroom but also the expectations of their readers. Byers illustrated this point with an anecdote about an exchange in which a source approached him with potentially damaging information about a West Virginia college. The informant came to Byers because he believed the Gazette-Mail was more likely to pursue an investigation than other news organizations in the state.
This more critical approach to community journalism, which remains grounded in a close relationship with readers, is a central element of what Byers and others identified as “the Gazette way.” Rooted in the journalistic philosophy of Ned Chilton and carried down through generations of editors and reporters, “the Gazette way” represented the powerful force of traditions specific to the newsroom I was observing. Regular references to Ned Chilton and other historic Gazette fixtures—as well as the ideas they espoused— contributed to an organizational narrative that distinguished the Gazette and Gazette-Mail from other newspapers.
182 While the Gazette-Mail is no more immune to the impact of technological advances and shifting market forces than any other publication, widespread identification with newsroom tradition complicated journalists’ responses to change. For example,
Ward’s commitment not to contribute to the “bad conversations” occurring around climate change led him to apply stricter standards to comments on his blog than journalists generally enforce. Many reporters also indicated a reluctance to sacrifice time they would otherwise spend on traditional reporting processes to develop more interactive elements to enhance the digital product.
Journalism scholar David Ryfe has argued that “the practice of journalism is tightly bound to its purpose”7 for reporters. In other words, their professional identities are deeply informed not only by the values they claim but also by the habits they develop in pursuit of those values. Thus, demands to overhaul daily routines to accommodate changing technology might challenge the fundamental understanding some individuals have of what it means to be a journalist. In this chapter, I explore the tension between tradition and change in this context, focusing particularly on the specific identity journalists draw from the Gazette tradition. I begin with a deeper examination of “the
Gazette way” and its constituent parts.
The Gazette Way
While some of the former Gazette journalists allowed for the possibility that the
Daily Mail influence could benefit the combined newspaper in certain ways, the editorial philosophy that had guided reporting practices at the Gazette was not up for negotiation.
183 Both editors and reporters closely identified with the longstanding commitment to investigative journalism that constituted the heart of “the Gazette way.”
Individual journalists used this term (or some variant) in a variety of contexts, but a few constant features emerged over the course of my observations and interviews. Two key phrases attributed to Chilton featured prominently in the general understanding of
“the Gazette way”: sustained outrage and the insipid press. I discuss both concepts in greater depth later in this section and provide some first-hand accounts of Chilton’s influence on the newsroom during his lifetime. First, though, I explore the notion of freedom frequently mentioned as a central aspect of the Gazette culture.
In interview after interview, long-time Gazette staff members noted the significance of personal autonomy and the privileging of reporters’ instincts to their longevity with the paper. Appreciative references to the Gazette as a reporter’s paper or a writer’s paper pepper my transcripts. Dawn Miller provided one of the most comprehensive explanations of the idea:
We have always been known as a writer’s newspaper. And I didn’t really
quite know what that meant when I got here, but it is a place for people
who are curious and [have] just kind of a bulldog mentality and [are] go-
getters and just curious, just relentlessly intellectually curious. That’s what
the place is for. Because the editorial attitude here has been, the editor
who doesn’t go to the council meeting is not the eyewitness, right? ... So,
we very much have this attitude of it’s the reporter who is closest to the
sources, closest to the beat, closest to the people and the topics, who are
184 reading the reports and visiting the places. So, absolutely, that has very
much been the culture all along. I don’t know that I would have lasted if
that were not the case.
While younger reporters often expressed a desire for more guidance and feedback, as discussed in the previous chapter, none appeared to wish for it at the expense of the freedom they associated with the organizational culture.
Ryan Quinn, for example, said that one of the reasons he had stayed with the
Gazette and Gazette-Mail for as long as he had was the opportunity to pursue the ever- increasing list of story ideas he had accumulated on his beat. Higher education reporter
Jake Jarvis expressed similar sentiments. He spoke specifically of the support he received for his investigation of a for-profit community college’s loss of accreditation and pursuant shutdown. The school’s enrollment was only a little more than 100 students and it was located about 170 miles from Charleston, but editors expressed confidence in his judgment:
I get the sense that they really trust a reporter’s gut, and so, with this West
Virginia Business College [story], I was really fired up about it, and I
think I told Greg [Moore] about it. Because Greg was still the city editor, I
think, when this first happened. And I told Greg, and he was like, “Yeah,
go for it. Let’s do it,” you know. I think most of that comes from editors
trusting reporters.
Gazette-Mail editors could entrust reporters with that kind of freedom, in part, because they were also largely free from outside interference.
185 Ben Fields cited this freedom as one of the reasons he was drawn to the paper.
Many community newspapers, he noted, missed important stories because of pressure from publishers or other managers outside the newsroom to stay “in the middle.” The
Gazette-Mail offered a rare opportunity to pursue the kind of aggressive reporting he saw other community news organizations avoiding:
This is one of the few examples of a smaller newspaper that has its eye on
the bigger picture. You know, most newspapers this size are looking
inward and kind of closing their geographical range and the types of
stories they’ll do. Not only because of depleted staff, but also because of
conflicts with advertising, you know. That’s just the way the business is.
And this is one of the few places that, I think, still gives people a great
amount of freedom and encourages that type of work.
Journalists working in the newsroom generally acknowledged the centrality of local ownership to that freedom. It is highly unlikely that any corporate chain would have matched the continued commitment of Betty Chilton and Susan Chilton Shumate to Ned
Chilton’s vision for the Gazette.
Beyond the support for editorial freedom, Eric Eyre credited the Chiltons with the kind of investment in newsroom resources and loyalty to staff rarely observed in chain newspapers. He noted that the contributions of other staff members to the coverage of the statehouse, his primary beat, allowed him the time to conduct the opioid investigation that brought the paper a Pulitzer Prize. And in an era of dramatic staffing cuts, he added,
186 the Gazette owners had managed to avoid layoffs from the beginning of his 18-year tenure with the company until the merger with the Daily Mail.
In the wake of the Pulitzer victory, interviewers and other observers regularly questioned Eyre about the relationship between his ability to report the stories that led to the award and the newspaper’s ownership. At a speaking engagement in Pittsburgh, he said, an audience member asked if he could have done the same caliber of work at a paper owned by Gannett or Gatehouse or another chain:
And I said, “I wouldn’t have been able to do it because I don’t think I
would have had a job, because I’m 51.” I mean, I’ve got friends at Gannett
papers, and it’s like, nobody there’s older than 35. That’s, like, a senior
reporter. So, yeah, I do think it makes a difference ... I’m sure not every
family-owned newspaper has that same mission. I’m sure some are about
pleasing the advertisers and things like that. But I do think it was highly
beneficial, the local ownership.
Eyre’s comments illustrate the connection between the Chilton family, specifically, and the newspaper’s capacity to continue to pursue the aggressive reporting mission reflected in “the Gazette way.”
Although the family had owned the Gazette since the early years of the 20th century, Ned Chilton’s ascension to publisher in 1962 marked the beginning of an evolution in the ideology that drove editorial practices. Early in his tenure, the newspaper became a voice for stricter environmental regulations, racial equality, and the removal of
U.S. troops from Vietnam.8 In the 1970s and ’80s, Gazette investigations led to several
187 criminal convictions of corrupt politicians and other public figures. Jim Haught, who conducted many of those investigations,9 joined the staff a decade before Chilton’s term as publisher began and witnessed the transformation of the newspaper:
We were always a Democratic newspaper, but back then Democrats were
more like Dixiecrats, you know. I remember, before Ned, we endorsed
Richard Russell for president, one of the Dixie politicians, and it was the
days of segregation, and the newspaper was not nearly so liberal when I
very first came here. But after, ... L.T. Anderson and Don Marsh worked
on [Ned] and converted him to flaming liberalism. And the Gazette
became a much more hard-driving, left-wing, progressive paper under
Ned. Under Ned, Don and Andy, those three.
Haught referred to the trio as “the holy trinity of the Gazette back in my day” and noted their influence on his own political perspectives.
While Chilton’s name is certainly the one most closely associated with “the
Gazette way,” Anderson’s editorial articulation of the philosophy in a variety of contexts and Marsh’s newsroom leadership often came up in my conversations with long-time insiders. Haught, having worked closely with all three men, offered the clearest insights into the influence Anderson and Marsh had on Chilton and on the ideology that continued to guide the paper’s mission:
They [were] just crusading liberals. Don Marsh came from a coal camp in
Logan County and the UMW [United Mine Workers] labor mentality. And
Anderson, his father was a railroad engineer in Hinton. And he, Anderson,
188 was more the H. L. Mencken cynic, laughing at everything in the world.
And Marsh was more the dedicated social crusader, trying to save
humanity, in spite of everything.
Chilton, as owner and publisher of the newspaper, had both the wherewithal and the conviction to establish and sustain their shared vision for the Gazette.
In the implementation of that vision, Chilton inhabited a fierce persona that often struck fear in the hearts not only of the subjects of Gazette investigations but also of the reporters charged with carrying out those efforts. Rick Steelhammer, who joined the
Gazette staff in the 1970s, described his relationship with Chilton in the following terms:
I was a Saturday person in charge for the news side, and so I was always
in here. Ned was here every weekend and every day of the week, too. And
he made a lot of impromptu, kind of impossible assignments to do on
Saturday, you know. He’d come over and say, “You wanna stick a rocket
up somebody’s ass and light it?” And I’m thinking, “Not really,” you
know. You’d do what he said, do the best you can. You often ended up
staying there later than you planned to or whatever, or passing it off to the
Sunday guy. But, you didn’t really negotiate with Ned. You gave it your
best shot and then that’s all you could do, really.
Even newsroom veterans like Haught were not immune to Chilton’s whims. The editor emeritus recalled regularly having to accommodate the publisher’s last-minute demands:
Everyone misses Ned now and thinks what a great paper it was under him,
and how he was, but, at the same time, it was a frenzy of, you know, you
189 would sweat all day, struggling to write an editorial, and Ned would come
in, “Ah, to hell with that. Let’s go jump on this instead.” So, at 8 o’clock
at night, you’re shelving the first one and writing a new one.
Chilton’s habits contributed to a general newsroom atmosphere marked by tension, according to longtime copy editor Paul Gartner. “Oh my God, when I first came here, you could have your ass handed to you,” he told me.
Both Byers and Moore practiced a significantly more subdued management style in my observations. “He could be a real hard-ass,” Byers said of Chilton. “There was a lot of yelling in the newsroom back in those days.” In contrast, the newsroom I witnessed was generally quiet. Editors addressed reporters in even tones, and ideological or practical debates among journalists never became noticeably heated. According to
Moore, the shift began long before he and Byers moved into their positions. He told me that even Chilton disciples like Marsh, Haught, and Patty Vandergrift Tompkins (the city editor of the Gazette when Byers and Moore joined the staff and later the managing editor) were significantly more restrained than the publisher had been:
They were people of forceful opinions, and they weren’t shy about telling
you what they thought, but again, they’d call you in or they’d stop by your
desk and talk to you in a calm, reasonable manner.
While Chilton’s communication style did not outlive him in the newsroom, his vision for the paper certainly did. In the remaining portion of this section of the chapter, I explain the significance of two phrases—sustained outrage and the insipid press—coined by
Chilton to articulate the Gazette’s mission.
190 Sustained Outrage
In a speech to the Southern Newspaper Publishers Association in 1983, Ned
Chilton admonished his industry for a general failure to live up to its responsibilities as the Fourth Estate. In so doing, he also introduced the two-word motto that continued to guide the editorial sensibility of the Gazette-Mail when I visited the newsroom:
The hallmark of crusading journalism is sustained outrage. I’m not talking
about spurts of indignation or vituperative anger. We all relieve ourselves
from time to time with that. I’m talking about sustained outrage over basic
injustices and fundamental idiocies.10
That idea of sustained outrage directed not only the content of the newspaper but also the practices of the journalists working there.
The stories that won Eyre the Pulitzer resulted from three years of dedicated research and more than a decade-and-a-half of ongoing reporting on problems stemming from prescription drug abuse in the state. Ken Ward’s dogged efforts to hold mining executives accountable for environmental and safety violations that have had devastating consequences for West Virginians build on years of previous reporting. The commitment of both reporters reflects a longstanding tradition in the newsroom that can be traced to the orientation articulated in Chilton’s speech.
In the mid-1970s, Haught described Chilton’s expectations of his reporters in an interview with John Behrens:
My publisher doesn’t want quickie investigations-by-telephone. He keeps
pushing for research into tough things such as the competence of judges or
191 the efficiency of charities. These jobs wear you out because you have to
go to many, many records and sources. But they usually produce better
original work.11
Chilton demanded something much more assertive than passive reporting practices that relied on official statements and easily accessible documents. He regularly filed open- records lawsuits, including ones that required the state bar association and board of medicine to release information about complaints filed against doctors and attorneys practicing in West Virginia.12
Another component of Chilton’s philosophy of sustained outrage was reflected in the frequency with which he published stories on a particular topic. Image editor Kenny
Kemp, who joined the Gazette staff a few years before Chilton’s death in 1987, explained that part of the publisher’s strategy was to hammer away at a problem in the pages of the paper until it was resolved:
Ned was a big person where he wanted the little guy taken care of, and if
he felt government was in the way or politicians were in the way, it meant
nothing, it didn’t bother him to write the same story every day and have it
on the front page. Every day. ’Til something changed. He’d just browbeat
people ’til they did things, you know.
The material outcomes of this philosophy range from the criminal convictions that emerged from Haught’s reporting to the spate of lawsuits against drug manufacturers and distributors that followed Eyre’s investigation.
192 The “sustained outrage” motto serves as something of a lodestar within the newsroom, and not only in connection to major reporting projects by veteran journalists.
Many of the younger reporters expressed attitudes toward their work that aligned with
Chilton’s philosophy. Jarvis called his investigation of West Virginia Business College
(WVBC), referenced earlier in this chapter, his “instance of sustained outrage.”
For about a year leading up to our interview, Jarvis had been publishing stories about the school’s accreditation issues and its potential effects on students. Over that time, the department of education ceased to recognize the agency that had accredited the college, leading to the withdrawal of WVBC’s permit to operate in the state. Jarvis’s interest in the case stemmed from the lack of transparency around the process and its potential effects on students:
It’s a really kind of sketchy situation, and the general manager there really
tried to throw me off and has said some kind of inappropriate, rude things
to me and tried to squash it. And that just made me want to cover it more.
I said, “Are you going to tell students that you lost your permit to operate?
Are you going to tell students you lost your accreditation?” And he said,
you know, “We’re looking forward to more years of operating.” [So I
said,] “You’re not addressing the question. Are you going to tell students
you’re going to close in a couple of months?”
Jarvis’s pursuit of the story extended well past the end of my fieldwork.
These examples of relentless investigation and others distinguished the work of the Gazette and the Gazette-Mail from that of the publications Chilton derided in his
193 1983 speech. That distinction, too, was central to “the Gazette way.” The publisher had no patience with “toothless” journalism that failed to challenge powerful figures in the community. His disdain was so strong that he ordered a series of stories on the failings of other West Virginia newspapers. In the next few pages, I explore his ideas about what he called the insipid press.
The Insipid Press
Chilton’s sense of the public responsibility of the press extended well beyond his own newsroom, and his frustration with journalists who did not appear to share his attitude led to one of the more memorable of his crusades. In 1980, the publisher assigned
Haught to write a series of articles on West Virginia newspapers that were not holding public figures in their communities accountable. Unhappy with Haught’s first take on the topic, Chilton ordered a second round of stories a few months later. As Haught explained the situation:
I wrote a series of articles on failings of little papers like that, and it ran in
the paper while Ned was away on a trip. When he came back, he was just
furious: “God damn it, Haught. That’s not what I wanted. I wanted you to
show how they’re spineless and they won’t expose the corruption in their
town.” So, I went back, and it was phase two of the series.
The second part of the series focused more directly on Chilton’s contention that a “weak press” was responsible for rampant corruption in the state.13
In keeping with the idea of sustained outrage, Chilton returned to the issue in
1986, this time putting another reporter on the story because Haught had moved on to
194 editorial writing.14 This round of stories had less of an impact than the earlier ones. It
“was really not much of a successful series,” Haught said. “It was just lackadaisical, and I think they gave up after that.” That series was, however, notable for its title, The Insipid
Press. The phrase became shorthand for journalism that lacked the integrity and commitment to accountability Chilton demanded.
Some of the longtime staff members continued to use the term to contrast their work to that of other news organizations. In some cases, the idea was presented in different language, such as Byers’s contention that if the Gazette-Mail didn’t follow up on the tip mentioned earlier in this chapter, no other paper in the state would. Byers also cited L. T. Anderson’s appreciation of “the role of the paper to get the peoples’ blood boiling in the morning” as a principle that continued to guide editorial practices.
The commitments to sustained outrage, aggressive watchdog journalism, and the other elements of “the Gazette way” developed under Chilton’s watch remained evident during my time in the newsroom. The weight of tradition was apparent. However, as I explore in the next section of this chapter, the maintenance of such traditions did not always come at the expense of change. In some cases, particularly when technology presented a clear benefit to reporting, the journalists at the Gazette-Mail welcomed it.
Innovation at the Gazette and the Gazette-Mail
Given the demands so often associated with digital technology in newsrooms today, it can be difficult to recall the great opportunity it represented a few decades ago before it upended the economic model newspapers had relied upon throughout the 20th century. It took some time before “papers started realizing that this Internet ain’t what we
195 thought it was going to be,” Eyre noted in our conversation. “I think when the Internet first started, everybody was like, ‘Oh, it’s going to be a boon for the news industry.’”
Haught recalled the coming of the Internet as “a colossal breakthrough.” Instead of having to travel from the newsroom to the public library down the street to conduct background research, suddenly he could just log in and find the information online. In the earliest days of Internet access, though, he had to wait his turn. The newsroom initially had just one computer with an Internet connection, so reporters and editors shared it. But, as Haught explained, even such limited access constituted an improvement on the process of digging through files of clippings in the morgue:
Well, that’s what computerization does. It just makes astounding things
easily attainable. Then in 1985, we started our own memory bank. And
now we’ve got 32 years of memory bank of all the Gazette just at our
fingertips. We don’t have to go dig through packets of old clippings or
microfiche. And we don’t have to run to the library anymore. Google does
the national, and our own memory bank does the local, so I can produce
writing 50 times faster than I used to. It’s just so easy, I can do my day’s
work in an hour most of the time.
The electronic clip library Haught referenced was an early innovation several staff members mentioned in my conversations with them.
Since the mid-1980s, each story published in the Gazette, and now the Gazette-
Mail, has been stored as a digital file in a computer-accessible archive. Before Google— or even earlier search engines like Lycos or AltaVista—a few keystrokes connected
196 reporters to years’ worth of historical information about their beats. Even now that stories are posted and archived on the Gazette-Mail website, Dawn Miller noted that her familiarity with the search operations of the digital library often made it easier to find information there: “If you know our computerized archive and how it works, you’ve sort of evolved with it and know how to search it. It brings up what you’re looking for and not all this other stuff that you’re not looking for.”
For Miller and others who came to the Gazette in the days before widespread
Internet access, the electronic library was the kind of resource rarely found in community newsrooms. In addition to the stories themselves, the person maintaining the archive at the time appended any later corrections to the file. As Miller told me, it was an invaluable tool, particularly for newcomers to the community:
That was one of the nicest things when I first got here and when I was here
as an intern. You were sent out to do a story on something, you know,
you’re the new kid, literally the newest kid in town, and before you run
out there, you run it through the library and, well, see, that was 1988, ’89,
so then there were three or four years’ worth of stories. Now there’s 30.
The forward thinking reflected in the early development of the archive, when contrasted against instances of resistance to digital demands, illustrates the newsroom’s complex relationship to technology.
As Peter Gade and Earnest Perry found in their study of the St. Louis Post-
Dispatch, journalists’ responses to change are influenced by their perceptions of its utility in the context of improving the quality of journalism or the efficiency of related
197 practices.15 In line with that finding, Gazette-Mail staff members expressed enthusiasm about many of the ways online journalism and other digital tools could enhance their reporting capacities. I observed particular interest in the idea of data journalism. Online access to statistics and technological advances in analytic tools facilitate the reporting of many stories that would have taken significantly longer to investigate in the past. Eyre, for one, has taken advantage of such tools in his reporting. And during my fieldwork, a few journalists in the newsroom expressed a strong interest in developing the skills to incorporate data journalism into their repertoires.
Reporters seemed to make a distinction between digital presentation tools and digital investigation resources. While a few of them mentioned a desire to be better trained in data mining and digital methods of analysis, they were generally less eager to spend time augmenting the presentation of that information with video and other multimedia tools. It is significant to note that this phenomenon applied specifically to reporters. The utility of investigative tools relative to presentation tools is greater for journalists charged with the gathering and reporting of information. Those journalists whose roles were more focused on the presentation of that information— the digital content manager and the members of the copy desk, for instance—appeared to perceive the balance differently.
In the time between the combination of the papers and my fieldwork, the Gazette-
Mail management brought a consultant in to help develop a holistic approach to implementing change without abandoning the central values of the organization. Digital content manager Glen Flanagan explained it this way:
198 There’s the idea that to transition to a better business model for the digital
age, we need to kind of come up with a definite plan of action, you know.
It was in motion before I got here, and Gazette-Mail 2.0 is what they’re
calling it. ... They brought in a consultant to look at, OK, these are some
ways you can restructure.
The consultant’s suggestions led to the development of the beats and workflow committees as well as efforts to schedule the publication of online content more effectively.
Flanagan praised efforts of the workflow group to improve use of the newsroom’s content management system. Rather than continuing to publish feature stories and opinion pieces at midnight on the day of print publication—when few readers are online—the system now schedules those items for release throughout the day. “That has been a lot better as far as getting eyes on the homepage,” Flanagan noted.
The committee’s work also led to a deadline change for the features desk. Copy editors already designed the Sunday Life & Styles page earlier in the week, but by moving content deadlines up another day, they anticipated improved readership as well as opportunities for greater staffing efficiency. Dawn Miller, the head of the workflow group, said that the features desk had adapted well to the shift and that results were already evident:
One of the things the copy desk identified is that if they would get feature
content a day earlier, it would ease up their deadlines later in the week. It
might lead to some staffing changes they could make that would then feed
199 these digital needs. They’ll be able to spread the content out throughout
the week, and the feature content will get better read. Because it all goes
up about the same hour at, I don’t know, midnight or 2 a.m. on Saturday.
It all goes up in a glut and it doesn’t get read. ... They haven’t gotten all
the way there, but everything the copy desk anticipated happened. It did
ease up their work schedule, and the readership on those stories went
straight up.
Assistant lifestyles editor Douglas Imbrogno identified the increased capacity to catch errors before they appeared in print as another benefit to early online publication. He said that while reading a travel story on the web page mid-week, he noticed some problems.
Because of his familiarity with the site profiled in the story, he recognized issues that might not have been apparent to the writer and editors who read the story before it was published on the web page. However, because it was still days away from print, he could ensure the corrections were made before it appeared in the following Sunday’s newspaper.
Tangentially, Cathy Caudill also perceived the workflow committee’s empowering effect on the copy desk as a positive outcome. Copy editors were well- represented in the group, and she said the influence of the committee had helped them push through ideas that had achieved little traction in earlier conversations:
These were things that we wanted to do all along, but we’d be like, “Hey,
we want to do it like this.” They’d be like, “Oh, I don’t know.” And now
200 we’re like, “We’re in the workflow committee, and this is the way we’re
doing it!” They’re like, “OK. Fine.”
Another recommendation that had been implemented was the shift in responsibility for uploading more immediate web content from the city desk to the copy desk. Whereas the city or assistant city editor had previously uploaded content directly to the web, by the time I arrived in the newsroom it went through the web editor or his proxy on the copy desk before being posted online.
This new process gave the city desk editors more time to focus on editing and interacting with reporters. It also added another layer of editing for each story. After leaving the city desk, the story was edited by the web editor and a copy editor before being published in the print edition. Another benefit, assistant city editor Ashley Craig said, was that the web editor and other people on the copy desk were more experienced in writing headlines designed to draw web traffic.
Outside regular workflow practices, I observed a few other newsroom efforts to adapt to a more digital environment. Management had begun to pay reporters a monthly stipend to encourage them to shoot more cell phone video. The Gazette-Mail also had invested in a video-editing bay and podcasting equipment, and reporters were being trained in the basics of multimedia production. Carlee Lammers and Anna Taylor, both feature writers when I started my observations, had begun a fashion and beauty blog and accompanying video series called Fashionably Awkward. Lammers described the project as a way to figure out what possibilities the digital landscape might offer:
201 Glen [Flanagan] has been doing a lot of stuff and trying a lot of different
things, and we’ve been kind of experimenting with stuff and seeing what
we can do. I think Fashionably Awkward has kind of been a little bit of
trying to see, “Well, what can we do with this? And what kind of things
can we do in a video? What kind of things can we do with a blog and a
video series?” Things like that. So, that’s definitely something new that
we kind of get to be a part of, which is cool.
Imbrogno was another figure at the center of these innovative efforts. He was very involved in video production and investigating potential best practices for multimedia and social media activity.
One of his most popular multimedia projects, created in response to the statewide flooding in the summer of 2016, taught him the importance of strategic online practices:
I told all the photographers, “Give me your best flood photographs.” So, I
did a five-minute video, just as kind of fading in and out, with a really
strong soundtrack, and we uploaded it to YouTube. It had, I think, 200
views. Friday night, I uploaded it to Facebook Live. By Saturday, it had
100,000 views; by Monday or Tuesday, it had 700,000 views.
The increased audience response to a video native to the social media site provided a lesson in how to distribute content effectively that continued to guide Imbrogno’s practices.
The examples described in this section indicate a willingness to accept and even embrace aspects of change. In our conversations, Byers’ commitment to maintaining the
202 reporting traditions of the Gazette did not manifest as a general resistance to new ways of doing things. He acknowledged shifts in the habits of some news consumers and the necessity to adapt:
I try to think of it in terms of having two readerships, and both are equally
needy, so we want to give you everything online, put everything on
Facebook, draw all this traffic, but still have this nice-looking print
product for all the people that want to read that. We’ve taken big strides in
putting more online quicker. I mean, it was only a few years ago when we
were still like, “Oh, let’s hold that. We don’t want to put that out yet.”
Across desks, among both editors and reporters, change was embraced when it was seen as contributing to an individual or collective mission. Later in this chapter, I explore the connection between utility and acceptance of change in greater depth. First, though, I discuss examples of resistance to change and the motivations behind it.
Resisting Change
Journalism scholar David Ryfe identified three elements of professional and organizational cultures that inhibit change in the industry: habits, investments, and definitions. He contended that changes in habit, particularly, could “trigger an identity crisis”16 among journalists because their perceptions of “being” a journalist are closely associated with their established practices of “doing” journalism. Similarly, Sue
Robinson attributed journalists’ anxiety about shifts toward the privileging of the digital product to “philosophical understandings about their professional identity.”17
203 As the previous section of this chapter illustrates, journalists at the Gazette-Mail often embraced digital tools when they recognized their utility to the work they were already doing. However, they were much more skeptical about broader changes to accommodate the values associated with online journalism. In my interviews and observations, resistance to change often was tied to concerns about maintaining the journalistic traditions of the newsroom, indicating a perceived threat to professional identity. Maria Young articulated those concerns in the following terms:
You know, I think there is a fear that if we start doing digital and video
and all of this stuff that, you know, we’re going to end up with a really
crappy kind of content. And there is a lot of pride in the depth of this
content, that we have deep roots in this community. You know, we have
the Pulitzer Prize, but beyond that, we have really good, strong
investigative pieces. We have really good, hard-hitting pieces from the
statehouse. We have, obviously, rock-solid stuff from Ken Ward with
environment. And none of the TV stations can touch that. And so I think
there’s a fear of turning to video and losing the depth, and losing the
quality. I think that that fear can be met and faced down. I think that there
is a way to do a quality product that is digital, but I think that is where a
lot of the resistance comes in. It’s a fear of the unknown, and also right
now the unknown is not paying jack shit, so why should we kill ourselves
to do that?
204 Young also mentioned that the Gazette-Mail’s readership constituted something of a buffer against demands for an immediate transition to a digital-first mentality.
West Virginia’s aging population18 and limited Internet connectivity19 have created an audience that continues to rely on the physical newspaper to a greater extent than readers in most communities do. Young was not alone in connecting this fact to a general reluctance to adopt significant changes to practices and routines. Flanagan offered a similar observation:
We’ve been insulated to some extent from the pressures that other papers
have been facing because we’ve got a much larger print readership, I
think, because West Virginia has an older population. And so, you know, I
think part of the reason that we can sometimes be resistant to change or
spend time debating change is because we’re still, in large part, supported
by our print product.
Routines in the Gazette-Mail newsroom remained bound to the print cycle, a phenomenon media scholar Nikki Usher also observed in her study of The New York
Times. Work schedules and daily meetings, for example, were organized around deadlines for the print product, which “occupied the value system that was most dear to traditional journalists.”20
A significant factor in journalists’ reluctance to adapt to a more digital-friendly schedule is the fact that “there is very little indication that online journalism is inherently better journalism for all its interactive and in-depth potential,”21 according to media scholar Chris Paterson. One reason for this phenomenon, particularly among smaller
205 community newspapers, is the fact that these new digital obligations are being added at a time when newsrooms are shrinking, not expanding. As a result, fewer people are being asked to take responsibility for more work.
Several reporters in the newsroom said that they resisted these growing demands on their time to avoid compromising their commitment to sound journalism. Others discussed the costs of extreme multi-tasking in service to those demands. Rick
Steelhammer offered an example that bordered on the absurd:
Gosh, I remember one story I went on, I was doing a story on research on
these animals called the Allegheny wood rats. And I was with some
biologists in the New River Gorge, and I carried a [still] camera, a video
camera, a tape recorder, and notepad and was, you know, climbing down
this really, really rocky area, and a big thunderstorm happened and I had
to get notes, had to get photographs, had to get video, and I had to, you
know, try to remember what the story was. That was kind of a shock. It’s
not quite that bad anymore, but, ordinarily, before I would have just gone
down there and taken notes and the photographer would have taken care of
the pictures.
In recent years, though, some of the work traditionally performed by staff photographers had shifted to reporters as the photojournalists took on more responsibility for multimedia content. Kemp, for one, expressed concern about the outcomes of these shifts:
People are asked to do extra things for the digital product that we didn’t do
15 years ago, even 10 years ago. And those take time, you know. To
206 produce a good video takes time, and if your staff isn’t any bigger, then
something has to suffer. And a lot of times I think the newspaper suffers,
the actually print product suffers because of digital. We don’t spend as
much time shooting things as we should, getting the best photos that we
can.
The demands on the photo department were particularly heavy during the period of my fieldwork. The resignations of a photojournalist and videographer early in my observations knocked staffing down from five to three people. The photojournalist was replaced on my last day in the newsroom, but the videographer’s position remained unfilled.
While many staffers expressed resistance in the context of their own practices and responsibilities, a few registered broader concerns about the impact of a changing media landscape on the viability of existing practices. Arts and entertainment writer Bill Lynch lamented the effects of digital habits on readers’ attention and journalists’ writing practices:
It feels like more material’s required but almost less content, so to speak.
It’s like we have to generate a lot of really small things, but, you know,
it’s a constant kind of feeding of the goat. Longer things, you know, it’s
harder to get those eyes on it. I don’t see people reading a 2,000-word
piece on their phone. That’s not going to happen. Maybe the New York
Times will say different, but I think for small papers like us, no. So, you
207 have to think in terms of squeezing it down when you can. And, I think
that sacrifices some of our longer-form storytelling.
For many journalists, in the Gazette-Mail newsroom and elsewhere, such sacrifices call into question their ability to continue to work in a way that honors their fundamental professional values.
Many of the responses staff members offered to my questions about digital demands and associated changes reflected the kind of identity crisis described by Ryfe.
No one seemed to perceive these shifts as simple inconveniences. Advocates of the changes deemed them necessary steps to adapt to a new communicative reality. Skeptics noted their potential to undermine the quality of journalism produced by the Gazette-
Mail. Ward suggested that a day of reckoning was at hand and the paper’s response to it would have profound implications:
We seem to be stuck in this rut that, you know, multimedia or digital is
video and that’s it, as opposed to some neat graphics, as opposed to
posting more documents and annotating the president’s speech about coal.
Or doing things like that, that are kind of value-added. ... You know, I
think we’re in a moment here, probably the media in general, but we
definitely are in a moment here where we are going to decide whether
we’re going to chase clicks ... whether we’re amoral about how we get our
clicks, or whether or not we’re able to still be journalists.
Some research indicates that the presence of journalists like Ward, staunch defenders of critical reporting and news judgment, can protect news organizations to some extent from
208 threats to their integrity. In his study of the Philadelphia “news ecosystem,” media scholar C. W. Anderson found that a strong organizational culture “could mitigate against the dominance of a website management strategy based on clicks.”22 In other words, newsrooms rooted in traditions like those espoused by the staff of the Gazette-Mail are less likely to succumb to pressure to judge newsworthiness in terms of web traffic.
No one I interviewed expressed a willingness to sacrifice journalistic values to satisfy web metrics. Alternately, no one argued that the demands of a digital public sphere could be ignored. The debate arose from conflicts about how to achieve a reasonable balance. And it was complicated by a general consensus that no clear template for achieving that balance had emerged in professional discourses. Lammers noted the distinct approaches of media organizations like USA Today and Tronc: “They all do things so differently. And I just don’t know if anybody’s really figured it out.”
Even staunch supporters of digital efforts like Imbrogno acknowledged the uncertainty associated with any available strategy:
And, and to grant some space to, you know, the editor and the managing
editor and the city editor, it’s a really tough call. It’s like nobody knows
where to place a bet these days, ’cause the whole business could founder
by placing a wrong bet. So, I completely understand resistance, well, I can
understand it intellectually, resistance to making the bigger bet on video
and making that a required part of a reporter’s and the city desk’s mission.
Because they just won a Pulitzer by kicking ass. So, they want to win
more prizes like that. They want to be known for that kind of change
209 reporting, and so they don’t see, number one, they don’t see impact from
video or audio or podcasting, and number two, they don’t see income from
it. So, why do it?
That question—Why do it?—guided many of the conversations around potential changes in the newsroom.
Even beyond those shifts associated with technology, utility served as a central criterion in the evaluation of innovation. When Byers looked outside the newsroom for a new city editor, it was because he saw the need for fresh perspectives. When the workflow committee implemented new deadlines for feature content, it was because they anticipated higher web traffic and opportunities for more efficient copy desk staffing. In the final section of this chapter, I explore the effects of perceived usefulness on Gazette-
Mail journalists’ responses to potential changes.
Innovation and Utility
Tradition loomed large in the Gazette-Mail newsroom. The values associated with
Chilton’s philosophy of sustained outrage figured prominently in the newspaper’s reporting and the socialization of newcomers. Such strong organizational culture served to create a sense of purpose and identity for many of the journalists working there.
Alternately, as many people acknowledged, it contributed to a tendency toward stasis. As
Eyre noted, “it’s hard to move the needle.”
For individuals like Flanagan, whose role was largely defined by demands to shift the culture, those traditions created real challenges:
210 As far as getting people to use new technology, I’d say it’s been fits and
starts, you know, because you have folks who are excited about it, you
have folks who aren’t. You have times where, you know, people see it
could be useful, and you have other times where people say, “Oh, I don’t
have time for that. Just let me do my job. Let me report on this,” you
know.
That notion of utility emerged as a theme in both individual and collective responses to change in the newsroom.
Staff members on the features desk, for instance, seemed generally more inclined to pursue multimedia projects than news-side reporters because the benefits of such audio-visual representations were clearer in the context of the human-interest elements of their stories. Journalists engaged in more accountability reporting, in turn, tended to see greater value in digital investigative tools like data analysis than digital presentation tools. Resistance to one aspect of change rarely indicated complete intransigence.
Flanagan cited Ward’s selective approach as an example of how perceptions of compatibility with journalists’ goals and practices often drove responses to technology:
You know, for example, Ken’s proven himself to be very, very willing to
blog, which not a lot of reporters here are. Because he’s found a way that
it’s useful for his watchdog journalism. And, so, you know, folks are
certainly willing to try new things if they see a value to it.
Multiple journalism scholars have found that the ability to answer this question of value is central to the success of efforts to shift newsroom practices and cultures. In addition to
211 the Gade and Perry study mentioned earlier, Brian Ekdale and his colleagues found that journalists’ belief that new routines and ideologies are not compatible with quality journalism posed a major obstacle to cultural change.23
The innovations that seemed to enjoy widespread acceptance in the Gazette-Mail newsroom were those that most clearly offered a benefit without imposing a significant cost. The digital archive that dated back to the 1980s constituted a prime example. Many reporters and editors at the paper perceived the in-house library exclusively in terms that supported traditional practices. Moore noted its utility in a newsroom where “we’ve always expected reporters to be self-driven, moreso than a lot of places, I think.” The archive served that function by providing accessibility to the background information necessary for new reporters to cover their beats well. Generally, Moore added, operations of the contemporary newsroom are not that different from those of its pre-digital counterpart: “What difference there is is more a difference of what tools are available rather than a deep-seated paradigm shift.”
The significance of conversations around utility appeared not only in terms of resistance to change but also in some digital natives’ reconsideration of practices they had long embraced. Ali Schmitz, whose background in broadcast and digital media equipped her with many of the skills and habits highly prized in online journalism, came to question the appropriateness of applying those skills in some situations:
If I were on a different beat, like, if I were a crime reporter, I would be
that crime or public safety reporter who went out to the scene every single
time, no matter what, if it was within driving distance, and I would just get
212 video. That’s just who I am. But no one wants to see my shoddy video of a
city council meeting. No one cares about that. And so that was definitely a
change, where I was like, “You don’t need to capture visuals all the time.
You don’t need to capture audio. No one cares about what [Charleston
Mayor] Danny Jones is wearing that day.” And so, yeah, it was definitely
a big change.
Schmitz and other advocates for greater digital consideration in the newsroom acknowledged the value of a more thoughtful application of tools like video, but they generally approached the question of utility in broader terms than those used by their colleagues.
Journalists more heavily invested in traditional practices generally evaluated digital obligations and resources discretely in terms of their individual impacts. Web and multimedia proponents, on the other hand, perceived a more deep-rooted cultural shift as not only useful but essential to the newspaper’s very survival. Imbrogno explained:
I think that if any newspaper is going to survive, they have to see
themselves, we have to see ourselves, in a way that we haven’t seen
ourselves before. The newspapers that don’t survive are going to be the
ones that are stuck in the old-school model of a newspaper. That model
doesn’t exist anymore. Now, the anxiety about, “I don’t want to do user-
generated copy; I don’t want to interact with the audience, I don’t want to
take ideas from the readers,” you know, you can go too far in the other
direction, but it’s really hard to figure out what a newspaper is these days
213 and what it should be. And I think that maybe the most important framing
for that is, as opposed to, “Oh my God! The newspaper industry is dying,”
is to flip that around to say, “Oh my gosh! The newspaper industry is
changing. What an interesting time. How should we change with it?”
The capacity to embrace the uncertainty Imbrogno referenced often determined openness to such widespread changes and it was most apparent among some of the younger journalists in the newsroom.
Lammers’s approach to the blog and video series she did with Taylor, described earlier in this chapter, reflected a more general enthusiasm for the opportunity to join the profession at such a turning point in its existence:
A lot of people, when I was going to college, and they would say,
“Really? You want to work for a newspaper?” Like, that would just piss
me off to no end because it’s like the most exciting time, I think. Scary,
but also the most exciting because you kind of get to be part of the future
of something. So that’s what has always kind of driven me. I love
newspapers. I’m very passionate about the design and things like that, but
I also think that there’s a lot of digital opportunities. I just don’t think
anybody’s mastered it yet. I don’t know what the answer is, but I think it’s
cool to be part of this generation that’s trying to figure that out.
Longer tenures in the field and greater investment in traditions specific to the profession or the Gazette and Gazette-Mail complicated responses to such an ambiguous future.
214 For long-time staff members, the possibility of a “wrong bet,” as Imbrogno put it, constituted more than the loss of their livelihoods. It represented a threat to their identities. Many of them perceived themselves not just as journalists but specifically as
Gazette journalists, bound by the mission and practices that distinguished their employer from other community newspapers. Their dedication to preserving the tradition of fierce watchdog journalism and honoring the efforts of Chilton and other newsroom legends was apparent in conversation after conversation. So, it was not surprising to see greater caution, if not outright resistance to change, among this population.
In the following conclusion, I reiterate the key findings of this project in an effort to articulate the significance of the newsroom as a communicative space. For community journalists, in particular, my observations and conversations with members of the
Gazette-Mail staff confirm that newsroom interactions serve vital functions related to the socialization of newcomers as well as the negotiations of relationships to multiple communities and demands for change.
215 VII. Conclusion: What Gets Lost and Why It Matters
On the first day of my fieldwork, one of the most-discussed topics in the newsroom was an all-male dance revue scheduled a week later at a bar in Putnam
County. The impetus for the discussion was a vote by county commissioners to increase fines for violation of a longstanding ordinance that regulated the location of adult-only establishments in the county. As it turned out, the commissioners’ decision was unlikely to affect the event in question because the county attorney had determined that the description of the revue did not indicate a violation of the original measure, despite the fact that the revue inspired the commissioners’ 2017 decision.
When the reporter covering the story returned to the newsroom that afternoon, she went directly to the digital content manager’s desk to tell him about the “weirdest meeting” she had ever had on the beat. They discussed a quote to be used with the
Facebook tease of the story, and then she went to the managing editor’s desk to discuss the meeting. Over the next few hours, I observed several conversations between the reporter and various colleagues. At one point, a reference to the proximity of the bar to a local church was posited as factor in the county’s response. Editors came to the reporter’s desk at regular intervals to check on the status of the story and discuss which sources she had reached.
In the grand scheme of the work being done by the Gazette-Mail, the story was a minor one that conveyed very little about the editorial policies and practices that distinguished the paper from other community news organizations. But as I looked back on it at the end of my time in the newsroom, I came to see it as significant for a different
216 reason. The reporter was young, in her first full-time job after graduating from college, and a recent transplant to West Virginia. Those conversations with her fellow reporters allowed her to gauge her response to the events she was covering in the context of their reactions and their perspectives on the community’s values. The editors’ questions and suggestions guided her application of a general understanding of journalism to the specific incident at hand. When one of the commissioners harassed her about the story at a later meeting, she was able to process her feelings about the experience in conversation with her colleagues and access their empathy and support. And though some of those outcomes might have been achieved through mediated communication, it is highly unlikely that all of them could have been achieved so effectively outside the shared space of the newsroom.
The notion of community, in the contexts of the newsroom as well as the profession of journalism and the geographic spaces of Charleston and West Virginia, constituted a recurring theme in my observations and interviews. Specifically, the experience of belonging (or not) to those collectives emerged frequently in the narratives that developed. This experience is central to an understanding of community, according to community development consultant Peter Block, both in the sense of being a part of the collective and feeling ownership and responsibility for it.1 The challenges associated with developing this experience of belonging are evident in the varied responses of former Daily Mail staffers to the combined newsroom. The more common motif of successful socialization into these communities was represented by Jennifer Gardner’s emotional description of her coverage of the statewide 2016 flooding.
217 In a 2004 consideration of some of the foundational newsroom ethnographies that had guided academic thinking about journalism since the 1970s, Barbie Zelizer cautioned against the overuse of the newsroom as a research site.2 Focusing on the work of Gaye
Tuchman,3 Herbert Gans,4 and Mark Fishman,5 whose findings on journalistic routines, news values, and the impact of organizational bureaucracy on the ideological tone of content had been incorporated into journalism curriculum for decades, she noted the common limitations of their studies. They all explored journalism in large urban settings, and, at the time of her writing, none had been updated to address changes in the media landscape since their initial publication.
Further, she wrote, their focus on newsrooms had contributed to a tendency to conflate those spaces with journalism writ large, creating one of the most “overused frames”6 in scholarly research on the news industry. While I largely agree with Zelizer’s points in relationship to the size of the newsroom and community and the need to consider new technological realities, I do not share her conclusions about the newsroom.
My observations of the Gazette-Mail newsroom and my conversations with its inhabitants have confirmed to me that the current state of the industry demands a reconsideration of that important space, particularly in the context of smaller community news organizations.
Her call to update the findings of those classic newsroom ethnographies to address changes in technology and practice have been heeded. A new generation of ethnographic researchers has studied metropolitan “news ecosystems,”7 responses to user-generated content,8 and value shifts to accommodate digital demands,9 among other
218 topics. However, most of these more recent projects continue to focus on journalism as it is practiced in large, metropolitan news organizations. Community newsrooms have remained largely ignored by researchers committed to long-term observation and other ethnographic research practices.
Journalism, at its best, arms citizens with the information necessary to participate meaningfully and responsibly in a democracy. It holds powerful individuals and offices accountable. It facilitates public discourse around our shared interests. Community news organizations face a particular pressure to achieve these ends because their work is so rarely supplemented by other news sources. Questions of national and international concern are generally pursued by a multitude of journalists. But corruption in the municipal government of a small town, for instance, likely would go unaddressed without the diligence of local reporters.
The significance of the newsroom to local newspapers that often provide the primary—if not sole—coverage of a community must be considered in distinct contextual terms. In explicating her proposition of journalism as an interpretive community, Zelizer identified informal networking outside the newsroom as a means by which “reporters absorb rules, boundaries, and a sense of appropriateness about their actions without ever actually being informed of them by superiors.”10 Her description of such networking implied opportunities for interaction with reporters from organizations other than one’s own. While journalists working for larger news organizations or covering beats of interest to large communities might regularly engage with colleagues from other outlets,
219 individuals working in smaller communities have much more limited access to such opportunities.
Even in a city like Charleston, which is the largest in West Virginia, most journalists’ professional interactions involve newsroom co-workers almost exclusively.
Political reporters and other journalists working on projects of interest across the state or region might occasionally engage in conversation with representatives of other news organizations in town to cover the legislature. They might also engage in debate and discussion with other journalists on social media. However, most Gazette-Mail staff members spent their time covering local issues and events that rarely drew outside media attention. My interviews indicate that even when the city had competing dailies, communication between journalists from the Gazette and the Daily Mail was practically non-existent. When reporters referenced communication in external sites like the Red
Carpet, they almost always did so in terms of the extension of newsroom relationships into those peripheral spaces.
In this ethnography, the newsroom emerged as a meaningful community for most of the people I interviewed. Personal and professional relationships often overlapped, and several participants discussed the value of those relationships to their development as journalists and members of the various shared communities they inhabited with their co- workers. While some of the more senior members of the staff expressed little attachment to the physical space (Eyre and Phil Kabler, another statehouse reporter, spent most of their time in the statehouse office), its importance to newcomers was clear. This finding aligns with the contention of organizational scholars Caroline Bartel, Amy Wrzesniewski,
220 and Batia Wiesenfeld that face-to-face communication is particularly important as new organizational members negotiate membership and identification.11
They noted that previous research indicated that organizational members communicated less frequently for shorter periods of time when restricted to mediated channels rather than in-person interactions, and the information shared in those interactions was less rich and featured less social content.12 With time and experience, studies have shown that veteran members can adapt to those limitations,13 but Bartel and her colleagues argued that newcomers may not be able to access the kinds of social interactions that help them identify as members of the organization. The absence of face- to-face communication inhibits membership-claiming behaviors on the part of the newcomers and makes it more difficult for them to identify membership-granting behaviors from established members.14
The implications of this contention should inspire genuine concern among those of us interested in the fate of community journalism. In an era of downsizing and de- emphasis of a centralized work space, young journalists have fewer opportunities to develop the kinds of relationships with colleagues that I observed in the Gazette-Mail newsroom. The obvious cost of the dramatic drop in the number of professional journalists working in news organizations across the country is a corresponding decline in local news organizations’ capacity to provide comprehensive coverage of their communities. This is a vital issue and is rightly at the center of professional and scholarly discourses about the current state of journalism. But there is a secondary cost, a loss of social resources, that must not be ignored in our efforts to address the challenges
221 associated with changing technologies and shifting economics. Newsrooms are vital spaces in which journalists develop identities, share resources, and shape collective responses to the demands they face. Any proposed solution to the economic crisis in journalism that fails to acknowledge the significance of the newsroom as a communicative space puts community news organizations and young journalists at particularly disadvantage. In the following section of this chapter, I spell out some of the crucial functions of the newsroom I identified in my study of the Gazette-Mail.
The Social Value of the Community Newsroom
At the start of this project, I asked four research questions, all in service of the larger question of why newsrooms matter:
RQ1: How is newsroom culture created and maintained through
communication?
RQ2: How are professional and community values interpreted and
negotiated within the newsroom?
RQ3: How do individual differences in ideology and experience affect
newsroom practices and interactions?
RQ4: How is change negotiated in the newsroom?
What I found was that the Gazette-Mail newsroom supported a range of social functions critical to the practice of responsible local journalism. It was a site in which newcomers gained access to their organizational and geographic communities and refined their understanding of their professional community. It was where people came to “belong” to
222 these communities and negotiate values and practices, as well as the demands of change and tradition.
The Gazette-Mail newsroom is not unique among community newspapers, but it is certainly unusual in the current era of journalism. Its local ownership, relatively robust staffing and commitment to investigative journalism separate it from many of its local counterparts across the nation. But the basic lessons that emerged over the course of my research in Charleston can be applied more generally. As managers outside newsrooms continue to respond to economic challenges by cutting editorial staff and decentralizing reporting and editing processes, journalists—particularly newcomers to the profession or the geographic community—lose important social resources. And without those resources, they are ill-equipped to serve their readers.
The level and type of communication I observed over the course of my fieldwork varied along temporal, departmental, and individual lines. On particularly quiet days, journalists sometimes noted how boring they thought their day-to-day routines must seem to an outside observer like me. I was never bored. Even when nothing of note appeared to be happening, the atmosphere hummed for me, inspiring memories of my own experiences and allowing time to reflect upon the ways newsrooms shaped me and the impact of this particular newsroom on its inhabitants.
As communication patterns emerged and as informal conversations and interviews helped me contextualize those patterns, I began to see more clearly the range of functions served by newsroom interactions. Beyond explicitly facilitating the production of the newspaper and related tasks, they fulfilled several social functions in
223 more implicit ways. In the following pages, I provide a brief overview of the social significance of the community newsroom as I observed it.
Newsroom interactions contributed significantly to the socialization of newcomers into organizational, professional, and geographic communities. Frequent references to the mentorship of individuals like Paul Nyden and some of the current newsroom veterans supported the claim of many scholars that journalistic identity is a product of the newsroom. Journalists’ interpretations of the roles and responsibilities associated with their positions were strongly influenced by messages they received from senior colleagues. In turn, opportunities to make claims and arguments of their own in the relatively safe environment of the newsroom contributed to younger journalists’ sense of membership in their professional and organizational communities.
The capacity to foster community, which is facilitated by the physical space of the newsroom, is important for several reasons. In their examination of public policy and neighborhood preservation, Roger S. Ahlbrandt Jr. and James V. Cunningham argued that a sense of community contributes to individual commitment to the collective and satisfaction with the group.15 It is further correlated to problem-focused coping behaviors in response to threats to the community, according to Kenneth M. Bachrach and Alex J.
Zautra.16 As this study shows, it also facilitates socialization into the local geographic community. For newcomers to the state or city, the newsroom provided a store of local knowledge that helped them contextualize their reporting and adapt to their new home.
Newsroom interactions provided a means of social support. As Max Garland explained in the “Negotiating Communities” chapter, the relationships formed in the
224 Gazette-Mail newsroom and extended into peripheral spaces like the Red Carpet helped young reporters negotiate the challenges of their new profession. When sources refused to return phone calls and deadline pressures mounted, they found empathy among their co-workers. When they became discouraged by anti-media public discourse, their colleagues helped them rally with reminders of the value of their work.
In the weeks following the announcement of the newspaper’s bankruptcy, a time of particular uncertainty, members of the newsroom staff took to social media to express their support for one another. Bill Lynch posted a series of photos of his colleagues on
Facebook along with sincere, though often silly, appreciations of them in the captions.
Ken Ward tweeted a series of links to stories in the Gazette-Mail with introductions that asked questions like, “What if @wvgazettemail didn’t have a reporter assigned to cover
West Virginia’s education system as a full-time beat? That’s what @RyanEQuinn does.”17 Although the messages were expressed on digital platforms, they emerged from and interacted with face-to-face relationships developed in the newsroom.
Newsroom interactions brought distinct perspectives and experiences into conversation with each other. While the Gazette-Mail experienced the same challenges many other news organizations face in creating a representative newsroom in terms of race and gender, the value of diversity as it existed in other areas was clear. Editors and more experienced reporters passed on the meaningful traditions of the newsroom, as well as their accumulated institutional memory, while younger or more tech-savvy colleagues led efforts to adapt to new digital demands.
225 Difference routinely breeds conflict, but the newsroom offers a space in which that conflict can be resolved productively. Sustained communication allowed the copy desk staff to overcome the challenges associated with the 2015 combination of the
Gazette and Daily Mail and develop congenial relationships and shared practices that drew from the traditions of both papers. Difference also fosters a culture of debate, something Ward characterized as vital to a strong newspaper. As newsroom populations decline, so does diversity—demographic, ideological, and otherwise. That loss of difference leaves news organizations less equipped to address the needs and concerns of their communities. Without a representative range of voices in newsroom conversations, important stories and perspectives often are missed. Differences in ideology and experience also contribute to other functions of the newsroom, including negotiations of change and its relationship to institutional values.
Newsroom interactions facilitated change. Even in tradition-bound institutions like the Gazette-Mail, journalists welcomed new technologies when they perceived them as resources that served the newspaper’s overall mission. The early adoption of an in- house digital clip library exemplified that phenomenon. When journalists perceived the costs of adoption as outweighing the benefits, though, they tended to resist change. The key to overcoming that resistance was often the ability of colleagues to effectively advocate for the change by presenting previously unconsidered benefits to shift the balance.
Erin Beck’s perspectives on digital journalism changed after conversations with her mentor, Ken Ward, brought to light the opportunities for online long-form journalism.
226 Ward, in turn, credited his colleague Doug Imbrogno with influencing his thinking on other digital tools. When Imbrogno announced his departure from the newsroom in
March 2018 following the change in ownership, Ward tweeted:
Very discouraging news here. This guy talked me into trying my hand at
blogging, and “Coal Tattoo” was born. A constant voice for trying new
stuff in the newsroom – kind of voice we need so badly going forward.18
Fellow newsroom veteran Rick Steelhammer also responded to the news with a tweet that expressed his appreciation of “the way he [Imbrogno] embraces and absorbs new technology and put it to use.”19
Newsroom interactions enabled continuity. A commitment to longstanding organizational and professional values often drove initial reluctance to embrace new technologies and practices. This tension between tradition and change served as a check on impulses to pursue innovation at the expense of the newspaper’s fundamental mission.
The fact that some of the younger journalists in the newsroom were as resistant as many of their senior colleagues speaks to the notion of the newsroom as a communicative space in which values are imparted from one generation to the next. Individual staff members interpreted those values through their own ideological and experiential frames, but people in the newsroom embraced them in a general way. Regular references to Ned Chilton and his conceptions of “sustained outrage” and “the insipid press” indicated a widespread familiarity with the central tenets of “the Gazette way” and a desire to keep them at the center of the Gazette-Mail’s mission.
227 In the case of a blended newsroom like that of the Gazette-Mail, the idea of continuity becomes more complicated. Journalists must determine which aspects of each newsroom will be preserved, particularly when significant cultural distinctions exist.
There was no question that the ideology and interpretation of journalistic values that guided the editorial mission of the newspaper remained in line with those of the Gazette.
The influence of the Daily Mail culture could be seen most clearly in social elements like the relational communication among newsroom staff members, particularly on the copy desk.
Newsroom communication facilitated continuity not only in an ideological sense but also in a more practical way. Editors and veteran reporters provided historical background to help newcomers to the paper take into account aspects of the story they might not otherwise have considered or even known. While some level of contextualization arguably occurs in standard assignment and editing practices, much of the relevant communication described in my interviews with journalists occurred outside these traditional channels. Dawn Miller, for example, had no formal role in these processes, but Jake Jarvis and other younger members of the staff identified her as an important source of background and guidance. Along similar lines, Carlee Lammers sought information from co-workers who had previously covered Putnam County to better orient herself to her new beat.
Responsible journalism requires historical grounding that acknowledges complexity. The modes of communication that characterize a strong newsroom help journalists grasp that complexity and convey it to their readers. As staffing cuts threaten
228 the vitality or even existence of these spaces, reporters—particularly those less experienced in the field or less familiar with their communities—lose a valuable resource. And, ultimately, the communities that rely on their reporting pay the price. I conclude with a brief consideration of the Gazette-Mail’s particular circumstances.
An Uncertain Future
Work produced by journalists from the Gazette and Gazette-Mail over the last half-century has had an undeniable impact on endeavors to hold powerful figures accountable. Eyre’s Pulitzer-winning reports preceded a slew of state and municipal lawsuits against opioid manufacturers. The investigative efforts of Haught and Nyden in the 1970s and 1980s led to criminal convictions of two West Virginia governors, Wally
Barron and Arch Moore. Ward’s coverage of environmental and safety issues related to mining have kept questionable coal industry practices in the public eye for decades, providing support for multiple prosecutions on regulatory violations.
These achievements speak not only to the quality of the newspaper’s reporting but also to the desperate need for such dogged commitment to “sustained outrage” in a place largely ignored by national media until an event like Trump’s election inspires a spate of parachute journalism. Concerns about the institution’s ability to maintain that commitment under increasing economic constraints were evident during my fieldwork, and the sale and subsequent downsizing of the newsroom earlier this year almost certainly exacerbated them. The Gazette-Mail’s partnerships with ProPublica and Report for America mark attempts to relieve some of the financial pressure experienced by the editorial staff and represent promising opportunities available to other community news
229 organizations. However, such collaborations offer limited assistance. They might fund a single journalist for a limited period of time, but without the support of a robust editorial staff and a store of local knowledge, the productive capacities of that individual are tightly circumscribed.
Since the initial round of layoffs associated with the change in ownership in
March of 2018, newsroom staffing has remained relatively stable. However, the current numbers are already down significantly from the summer of 2017, and industry trends do not bode well for long-term stasis. The journalists of the Gazette-Mail continue to produce important stories, and personal commitments to the traditions that stem from
Ned Chilton’s “sustained outrage” mantra remain clear. But each position cut, each departing reporter not replaced, spreads each remaining journalist a little bit thinner. With less time and fewer colleagues, journalists have fewer opportunities to avail themselves of the social and professional resources represented by the newsroom. And the ultimate cost of what gets lost is steep.
230 References
Adams, Nancy Ray. “Charleston Gazette-Mail.” e-WV: The West Virginia Encyclopedia, last modified August 12, 2015, http://www.wvencyclopedia.org/articles/1100/.
Adelman, Mara B., and Lawrence R. Frey. The Fragile Community: Living Together with AIDS. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1997.
Agar, Michael H. The Professional Stranger: An Informal Introduction to Ethnography. San Diego: Academic Press, 1996.
Ahlbrandt, Roger S. Jr., and James V. Cunningham. A New Public Policy for Neighborhood Preservation. New York: Praeger, 1979.
Akhavan-Majid, Roya, Anita Rife, and Sheila Gopinath. “Chain Ownership and Editorial Independence: A Case Study of Gannett Newspapers.” Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly 68, no. 1-2 (1991): 59-66.
Allan, Stuart. “Journalism as Interpretive Performance: The Case of WikiLeaks.” In Rethinking Journalism: Trust and Participation in a Transformed News Landscape, edited by Chris Peters and Marcel Broersma, 144-159. London: Routledge, 2013.
Althiede, David L. “Media Logic and Political Communication.” Political Communication 21 (2004): 293-296.
Altman, Irwin. “Dialects, Physical Environments, and Personal Relationships.” Communication Monographs 60, no. 1 (1993): 28-34.
American Society of Newspaper Editors. “2015 Census.” American Society of Newspaper Editors, July 28, 2015, http://asne.org/content.asp?contentid=415
Anderson, C. W. Rebuilding the News: Metropolitan Journalism in the Digital Age. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2013.
Bachrach, Kenneth M., and Alex J. Zautra. “Coping with a Community Stressor: The Threat of a Hazardous Waste Facility.” Journal of Health and Social Behavior 26, no. 2 (1985): 127-141.
Ballard, Dawna I., and David R. Seibold. “Time Orientation and Temporal Variation Across Work Groups: Implications for Group and Organizational Communication.” Western Journal of Communication 64, no. 2 (2000): 218-242.
Bagdikian, Ben. The New Media Monopoly, 20th ed. Boston: Beacon Press, 2004.
231 Barney, Ralph D. “Community Journalism: Good Intentions, Questionable Practices.” Journal of Mass Media Ethics 11, no. 3 (1996): 140-151.
Bartel, Caroline, and Jane Dutton. “Ambiguous Organizational Memberships: Constructing Organizational Identities with Others.” In Social Identity Processes in Organizational Contexts, edited by Michael A. Hogg and Deborah J. Terry, 115-130. Philadelphia: Psychology Press, 2001.
Bartel, Caroline A., Amy Wrzesniewski, and Batia Wiesenfeld. “The Struggle to Establish Organizational Membership and Identification in Remote Work Contexts.” In Identity and the Modern Organization, edited by Caroline Bartel, Steven L. Blader, and Amy Wrzesniewski, 125-139. New York: Psychology Press, 2012.
Bastien, David T. “Change in Organizational Culture: The Use of Linguistic Methods in a Corporate Acquisition.” Management Communication Quarterly 5, no. 4 (1992): 403-442.
Bauer, Talya N., and Stephen G. Green. “Testing the Combined Effects of Newcomer Information Seeking and Manager Behavior on Socialization.” Journal of Applied Psychology 83, no. 1 (1998): 72-83.
Behrens, John C. The Typewriter Guerrillas: Closeups of 20 Top Investigative Reporters. Chicago: Nelson-Hall, 1977.
Belair-Gagnon, Valerie. Social Media at BBC News: The Re-making of Crisis Reporting. New York and London: Routledge, 2015.
Belden Associates. North Carolina Statewide Readership Survey. Raleigh: North Carolina Press Services, 2000.
Benjamin, Walter. “The Storyteller: Reflections on the Works of Nicolai Leskov Critical Essays.” In Illuminations, edited by Hannah Arendt, 83-109. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Jovanovich, 1968.
Block, Peter. Community: The Structure of Belonging. San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc., 2008.
Bormann, Ernest G. “Symbolic Convergence Theory: A Communication Formulation.” Journal of Communication 35, no. 4 (1985): 128-138.
Bormann, Ernest G. “The Symbolic Convergence Theory of Communication: Applications and Implications for Teachers and Consultants.” Journal of Applied Communication Research 10, no. 1 (1982): 50-61.
232 Brack, Jessica, and Kip Kelly. “Maximizing Millennials in the Workplace.” Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Kenan-Flagler Business School, 2012. http://www.kenan-flagler.unc.edu/executive-development/custom- programs/~/media/files/documents/executive-development/maximizing- millennials-in-the-workplace.pdf/.
Branscome, James. “Review: Lamenting ‘Hillbilly Elegy.’” The Daily Yonder, August 3, 2016. http://www.dailyyonder.com/review-lamenting-hillbilly- elegy/2016/08/03/14622/.
Brashear, Ivy. “Response to ‘Hillbilly Elegy.’” The Young Kentuckian (blog), Kentucky Student Environmental Coalition, April 3, 2017. http://www.kystudentenvironmentalcoalition.org/ksec-blog/response-to-hillbilly- elegy.
Brown, Jerry. Introduction to Community Journalism: Relentlessly Local, 3rd ed., by Jock Lauterer, xiv-xv. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006.
Bruner, Jerome S. Actual Minds, Possible Worlds. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986.
Bruner, Jerome S. “The Narrative Construction of Reality.” Critical Inquiry 18 (1991): 1- 21.
Bruns, Axel. “The Active Audience: Transforming Journalism from Gatekeeping to Gatewatching.” In Making Online News: The Ethnography of New Media Production, edited by Chris Paterson and David Domingo, 171-184. New York: Peter Lang, 2008.
Bruns, Axel. Gatewatching: Collaborative Online News Production. New York: Peter Lang, 2005.
Burke, Moira, Robert Kraut, and Elisabeth Joyce. “Membership Claims and Requests: Conversation-Level Newcomer Socialization Strategies in Online Groups.” Small Group Research 41, no. 1 (2010): 4-40.
Carey, James W. Communication as Culture: Essays on Media and Society. New York and London: Routledge, 1989.
Carey, James W. “Some Personal Notes on US Journalism Education.” Journalism 1, no. 1 (2000): 12-23.
Carey, Michael Clay. The News Untold: Community Journalism and the Failure to Confront Poverty in Appalachia. Morgantown: West Virginia University Press, 2017.
233 Catte, Elizabeth. What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia. Cleveland: Belt Publishing, 2018.
Chaudhuri, Sanghamitra, and Rajashi Ghosh. “Reverse Mentoring: A Social Exchange Tool for Keeping the Boomers Engaged and the Millennials Committed.” Human Resource Development Review 11, no. 1 (2012): 55-76.
Chapman, Matthew. Twitter post, November 25, 2017, 4:33 p.m., https://twitter.com/fawfulfan/status/934580755509981184/.
Charmaz, Kathy. Constructing Grounded Theory: A Practical Guide Through Qualitative Analysis. London: Sage, 2006.
Chawla, Devika. Home, Uprooted. New York: Fordham University Press, 2014.
Cheney, George. “The Rhetoric of Identification and the Study of Organizational Communication.” Quarterly Journal of Speech 69 (1983): 143-158.
Chilton, William E. III. “Hallmark of Crusading Journalism Is Sustained Outrage.” Charleston Gazette, November 18, 1983.
Chokshi, Niraj. “A West Virginia Newspaper Won Journalism’s Top Award. Now It’s Filed for Bankruptcy.” The New York Times, February 2, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/02/business/media/west-virginia-newspaper- charleston.html/.
Clifford, James. “Traveling Cultures.” In Cultural Studies, edited by Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, and Paula Treichler, 96-116. New York: Routledge, 1992.
Cohen, Anthony. The Symbolic Construction of Community. Chichester, UK: Ellis Horwood Limited, 1985.
“Confidence in Institutions: Trends in Americans’ Attitudes Toward Government, Media, and Business.” The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, accessed February 19, 2018. http://www.apnorc.org/projects/Pages/HTML%20Reports/confidence-in- institutions-trends-in-americans-attitudes-toward-government-media-and- business0310-2333.aspx#recordlows/.
Cunningham, Brent. “Sustained Outrage: Ken Ward Jr. Stayed Home to Make a Difference.” Columbia Journalism Review, November/December 2011, https://archives.cjr.org/feature/sustained_outrage.php/.
“Daily Mail, Gazette to Become the Charleston Gazette-Mail.” Charleston Gazette-Mail, July 19, 2015, https://www.wvgazettemail.com/business/daily-mail-gazette- 234 become-the-charleston-gazette-mail/article_1edb9229-d7d6-5e7b-8bdc- 66dd143c2d24.html/.
Daft, Richard L., and Robert H. Lengel. “Organizational Information Requirements, Media Richness and Structural Design.” Management Science 32, no. 5 (1986): 554-571.
Daft, Richard L., Robert H. Lengel, and Linda Klebe Treviño. “Message Equivocality, Media Selection, and Manager Performance: Implications for Information Systems.” MIS Quarterly 11, no. 3 (1987): 355-366.
Demers, David. “Corporate Newspaper Structure, Editorial Page Vigor, and Social Change.” Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly 73, no. 4 (1996): 857- 877.
D’Emilio, John. “The Leading Edge of Change: The LGBT Press in the 1970s.” Forward to Gay Press, Gay Power: The Growth of LGBT Community Newspapers in America. Edited by Tracy Baim, 9-10. Chicago: Prairie Avenue Productions and Windy City Media Group, 2012.
Didion, Joan. “The White Album.” In The White Album, 11-47. New York: Pocket Books, 1979.
Doctor, Ken. “The Halving of America’s Daily Newsrooms.” Newsonomics, July 28, 2015, http://www.niemanlab.org/2015/07/newsonomics-the-halving-of-americas- daily-newsrooms/.
Domingo, David. “Introduction: The Centrality of Online Journalism Today (and Tomorrow).” In Making Online News Volume 2: Newsroom Ethnographies in the Second Decade of Internet Journalism, edited by David Domingo and Chris Paterson, xii-xx. New York: Peter Lang, 2011.
Donahue, George A. Phillip J. Tichenor, and Clarice N. Olien. “A Guard Dog Perspective on the Role of the Media.” Journal of Communication 45, no. 2 (1995): 115-132.
Dwyer, Sonya Corbin, and Jennifer L. Buckle. “The Space Between: On Being an Insider-Outsider in Qualitative Research.” International Journal of Qualitative Methods 8, no. 1 (2009): 54-63.
Edy, Jill. “Collective Memory in a Post-Broadcast World.” In Journalism and Memory, edited by Barbie Zelizer and Keren Tenenboim-Weinblatt, 66-80. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014.
Ekdale, Brian, Jane B. Singer, Melissa Tully, and Shawn Harmsen. “Making Change: Diffusion of Technological, Relational, and Cultural Innovation in the Newsroom.” Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly (2015): 1-21. 235 Economic Innovation Group. “The 2017 Distressed Communities Index.” N.d. http://eig.org/dci/.
Elliott, Deni. “Essential Shared Values and 21st Century Journalism.” In The Handbook of Mass Media Ethics, edited by Lee Wilkins and Clifford G. Christians, 28-39. New York: Routledge, 2008.
Ellison, Allison M., Sushil S. Nifadkar, Talya N. Bauer, and Berrin Erdogan. “Newcomer Adjustment: Examining the Role of Managers’ Perceptions of Newcomer Proactive Behavior During Organizational Socialization.” Journal of Applied Pscyhology 102, no. 6 (2017): 993-1001.
Emerson, Robert L., Rachel I. Fretz, and Linda L. Shaw. Writing Ethnographic Fieldnotes. 2nd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011.
Fausset, Richard. “A Voice of Hate in America’s Heartland.” New York Times, November 25, 2017, last accessed March 17, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/25/us/ohio-hovater-white- nationalist.html?_r=0/.
Fishman, Mark. Manufacturing the News. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1980.
Federal Communication Commission. “2016 Broadband Progress Report.” January 29, 2016, https://www.fcc.gov/reports-research/reports/broadband-progress- reports/2016-broadband-progress-report/.
Gade, Peter J. “Newspapers and Organizational Development: Management and Journalist Perceptions of Newsroom Cultural Change.” Journalism and Communication Monographs 6, no. 1 (2004): 3-55.
Gade, Peter J., and Earnest L. Perry. “Changing the Newsroom Culture: A Four-Year Case Study of Organizational Development at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.” Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly 80, no. 2 (2003): 327-347.
Gandolfo, Daniella, and Todd Ramón Ochoa. “Ethnographic Excess.” In Crumpled Paper Boat, edited by Anand Pandian and Stuart McLean, 185-188. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017.
Gans, Herbert. Deciding What’s News: A Study of CBS Evening News, NBC Nightly News, Newsweek and Time. Chicago: Northwestern University Press, 1979.
“Gazette, Daily Mail Become the Charleston Gazette-Mail.” Charleston Gazette-Mail, last modified July 19, 2015, http://www.wvgazettemail.com/article/20150719/GZ01/150729990
236 “Gazette-Mail to Eliminate Monday Print Edition.” Charleston Gazette-Mail, August 21, 2017. https://www.wvgazettemail.com/business/gazette-mail-to-eliminate- monday-print-edition/article_175dde41-b91b-51c9-8b0d-17e5dbf15a71.html/.
“Gazette-Mail Chosen for ProPublica Local Reporting Project.” Charleston Gazette- Mail, December 8, 2017. https://www.wvgazettemail.com/news/gazette-mail- chosen-for-propublica-local-reporting-project/article_0de75331-3032-5867-bbb4- 7a6d3acf80e2.html/.
Gertz, Matt. “Stagnant American Newsroom Diversity in Charts.” Media Matters for America (blog), June 25, 2013. https://www.mediamatters.org/blog/2013/06/25/stagnant-american-newsroom- diversity-in-charts/194597/.
Ghiglione, Loren. “Smalltown Journalism Has Some Big Ethical Headaches.” In Questioning Media Ethics, edited by Bernard Rubin, 171-179. New York: Praeger, 1978.
Gillmor, Dan. We the Media: Grassroots Journalism by the People, for the People. Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly Media, 2006.
Graham, Todd. “Talking Back, But Is Anyone Listening? Journalism and Comment Fields.” In Rethinking Journalism: Trust and Participation in a Transformed News Landscape, edited by Chris Peters and Marcel Broersma, 114-127. London and New York: Routledge, 2013.
Griffith, Terri L., John E. Sawyer, and Margaret A. Neale. “Virtualness and Knowledge in Teams: Managing the Love Triangle of Organizations, Individuals, and Information Technology.” MIS Quarterly 27, no. 2 (2003): 265-287.
“GroundTruth Announces Journalists for Report for America Pilot.” Charleston Gazette- Mail, December 22, 2017. https://www.wvgazettemail.com/news/groundtruth- announces-journalists-for-report-for-america-pilot/article_f0e95459-c2a5-50ae- 8596-42f55e3f7cde.html/.
Groves, Jonathan, and Carrie Brown-Smith. “Stopping the Presses: A Longitudinal Case Study of the Christian Science Monitor Transition from Print Daily to Web Always.” International Symposium on Online Journalism 1, no. 2 (2011): 86-128.
Guzmán, Isabel Molina. “Competing Discourses of Community: Ideological Tensions Between Local General-Market and Latino News Media.” Journalism 7, no. 3 (2006): 281-298.
Hall, Stuart. “Cultural Studies: Two Paradigms.” In Media, Culture, and Society: A Critical Reader, edited by Richard Collins, 57-72. London: Sage, 1986.
237 Hare, Kristen. “For Local Journalists, Money Isn’t Everything—‘But You’ve Got to Be Able to Live.” Poynter, March 7, 2018, https://www.poynter.org/news/local- journalists-money-isnt-everything-youve-got-be-able-live/.
Hare, Kristen. “Report for America Aims to Get 1,000 Journalists in Local Newsrooms in Next 5 Years.” Poynter, September 18, 2017. https://www.poynter.org/news/report-america-aims-get-1000-journalists-local- newsrooms-next-5-years/.
Harris, T. Brad, Ning Li, Wendy R. Boswell, Xin-An Zhang, and Zhitao Xie. “Getting What’s New from Newcomers Empowering Leadership, Creativity and Adjustment in the Socialization Context.” Personnel Psychology 67, no. 3 (2014): 567-604.
Hatcher, John A. “A View from the Outside: What Other Social Science Disciplines Can Teach Us About Community Journalism.” In Foundations of Community Journalism, edited by Bill Reader and John A. Hatcher, 129-149. Los Angeles: Sage, 2012.
Haught, James. “Corruption Result of Weak Press.” Charleston Gazette, September 22, 1980.
Hess, Abigail. “Here’s How Much the Average American in Their 20s Has in Student Debt.” cnbc.com, June 14, 2017, https://www.cnbc.com/2017/06/14/heres-how- much-the-average-american-in-their-20s-has-in-student-debt.html/.
Hess, Jon A. “Assimilating Newcomers into an Organization: A Cultural Perspective.” Journal of Applied Communication Research 21, no. 2 (1993): 189-210.
“Hillbilly Elegy: Another Generalization of Appalachia.” The Homesick Appalachian (blog), March 5, 2017. http://www.thehomesickappalachian.com/hillbillyelegy/.
Hindman, Elizabeth Blanks. “Community, Democracy, and Neighborhood News.” Journal of Communication 48, no. 2 (1998): 27-39.
Ho, Karen K. “Diversity in Newsrooms Has Been Bad for Decades and It Probably Won’t Get Better: Study.” Columbia Journalism Review, August 16, 2017. https://www.cjr.org/business_of_news/diversity-newsrooms-asne-study.php/.
Howley, Kevin. Understanding Community Media. Los Angeles: Sage, 2010.
Jablin, Frederic M. “Organizational Entry, Assimilation, and Disengagement/Exit.” In The New Handbook of Organizational Communication, edited by Frederic M. Jablin and Linda L. Putnam, 732-818. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2001.
238 Jackson, Jean E. “‘I Am a Fieldnote’: Fieldnotes as a Symbol of Professional Identity.” In Fieldnotes: The Makings of Anthropology, edited by Roger Sanjek, 3-33. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990.
Jenkins, Henry. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: New York University Press, 2006.
Johnson, Brad. “Blankenship Calls Critics ‘Communists,’ ‘Atheists,’ and ‘Greeniacs.’” Think Progress, November 24, 2008. https://thinkprogress.org/coal-baron- blankenship-calls-critics-communists-atheists-and-greeniacs-9701043e4b96/.
Johnstone, John W. C., Edward J. Slawski, and William W. Bowman. “The Professional Values of American Newsmen.” Public Opinion Quarterly 36, no. 4 (1972): 522- 540.
Jones, Alex S. Losing the News: The Future of the News That Feeds Democracy. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009.
Kennedy, Dan. The Wired City: Reimagining Journalism and Civic Live in the Post- Newspaper Age. Amherst and Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2013.
Kitch, Carolyn. “Making the Mundane Matter.” In Foundations of Community Journalism, edited by Bill Reader and John A. Hatcher, 237-239. Los Angeles: Sage, 2012.
Kiesler, Sarah, and Lee Sproull. “Good Decision Making and Communication Technology.” Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes 52, no. 1 (1992): 96-123.
Kock, Ned. “The Psychobiological Model: Towards a New Theory of Computer- Mediated Communication Based on Darwinian Evolution.” Organization Science 15, no. 3 (2004): 327-348.
Lacy, Stephen, and Alan Blanchard. “The Impact of Public Ownership, Profits, and Competition on Number of Newsroom Employees and Starting Salaries in Mid- Sized Daily Newspapers.” Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly 80, no. 4 (2003): 949-968.
Lauterer, Jock. Community Journalism: Relentlessly Local. 3rd ed. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006.
Lindlof, Thomas R., and Bryan C. Taylor. Qualitative Communication Research Methods. 3rd ed. Los Angeles: Sage, 2011.
Lippman, Walter. Liberty and the News. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Howe, 1920.
239 Louis, Meryl Reis. “Surprise and Sense Making: What Newcomers Expect in Entering Unfamiliar Organizational Settings.” Administrative Science Quarterly 25, no. 2 (1980): 226-251.
Lowrey, Wilson. “The Challenge of Measuring Community Journalism.” In Foundations of Community Journalism, edited by Bill Reader and John A. Hatcher, 87-108. Los Angeles: Sage, 2012.
Lowrey, Wilson, Amanda Brozana, and Jenn B. Mackay. “Towards a Measure of Community Journalism.” Mass Communication and Society 11 (2008): 275-299.
Lynch, Amy J. “ROI on Generation Y Employees: Best Practice Human Capital Management of Generation Y.” Bottom Line Conversations, LLC, April 2008, https://www.knoxvillechamber.com/pdf/workforce/ROIonGenYWhitePaper.pdf/.
Manchin, Joe. Twitter post, January 6, 2018, 8:13 a.m. https://twitter.com/Sen_JoeManchin/status/949675321657384961
Maramba, Philip. “Reflections on the Daily Mail Newsroom.” Charleston Gazette-Mail, March 23, 2018, https://www.wvgazettemail.com/opinion/daily_mail_opinion/daily_mail_columni sts/philip-maramba-reflections-on-the-daily-mail-newsroom-daily- mail/article_f776d067-529f-56a7-a79d-1289ea7e6662.html/.
Marchionni, Doreen M. “Journalism-as-a-Convergence: A Concept Explication.” Communication Theory 23 (2013): 131-147.
McChesney, Robert W. “Farewell to Journalism? Time for a Rethinking.” Journalism Practice 6, nos. 5-6 (2012): 614-626.
McCombs, Maxwell E., and Donald Shaw. “The Agenda-Setting Function of Mass Media.” Public Opinion Quarterly 36, no. 2 (1972): 176-187.
McCombs, Maxwell E., Shaw, Donald L., and Weaver, David H. “New Directions for Agenda-Setting Theory and Research.” Mass Communication and Society 17, no. 6 (2014): 781-802.
McDevitt, Michael, Bob M. Gassaway, and Frank G. Pérez. “The Making and Unmaking of Civic Journalists: Influences of Professional Socialization.” Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly 79, no. 1 (2002): 87-100.
McMillan, David W., and David M. Chavis. “Sense of Community: A Definition and Theory.” Journal of Community Psychology 14, no. 1 (1986): 6-23.
240 Meadows, Michael, Susan Forde, Jacqui Ewart, and Kerrie Foxwell. “Making Good Sense: Transformative Processes in Community Journalism.” Journalism 10, no. 2 (2009): 155-170.
Michael, Kay. “Ned Chilton.” In e-WV: The West Virginia Encyclopedia, October 4, 2012, https://www.wvencyclopedia.org/articles/1164/.
Mignery, James T., Rebecca B. Rubin, and William I. Gorden. “Organizational Entry: An Investigation of Newcomer Communication Behavior and Uncertainty.” Communication Research 22, no. 1 (1995): 54-85.
Moon, Grace. “On the New York Times Neo-Nazi Profile and Why We Can’t Normalize Hate to Preserve Objectivity. LinkedIn (blog), December 4, 2017, https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/new-york-times-neo-nazi-profile-why-we-cant- afford-normalize-moon/.
Moore, Greg. Twitter post, January 6, 2018, 8:59 a.m. https://twitter.com/gregmoorewv/status/949686953318010889.
Mufson, Steven. “A West Virginia Newspaper Is in Bankruptcy. The Powerful Coal Industry Celebrates.” The Washington Post, February 16, 2018. https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/a-west-virginia-newspaper- is-in-bankruptcy-the-powerful-coal-industry-celebrates/2018/02/16/f0e3d4e4- 085c-11e8-8777-2a059f168dd2_story.html?utm_term=.1507da238656/.
Myers, Karen K., and Kamyab Sadaghiani. “Millennials in the Workplace: A Communication Perspective on Millennials’ Organizational Relationships and Performances.” Journal of Business and Psychology 25, no. 2 (2010): 225-238.
Orbe, Mark P. Constructing Co-Cultural Theory: An Explication of Culture, Power, and Communication. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1998.
Orlikowski, Wanda J., JoAnne Yates, Kazuo Okamura, and Masayo Fujimoto. “Shaping Electronic Communication: The Metastructuring of Technology in the Context of Use.” Organization Science 6, no. 4 (1995): 423-444.
Paterson, Chris. “Introduction: Why Ethnography?” In Making Online News: The Ethnography of New Media Production, edited by Chris Paterson and David Domingo, 1-11. New York: Peter Lang, 2008.
Pew Research Center: Journalism & Media Staff. “Local News in a Digital Age.” Pew Research Center, March 5, 2015. http://www.journalism.org/2015/03/05/local- news-in-a-digital-age/
241 Reader, Bill. “Community Journalism: A Concept of Connectedness.” In Foundations of Community Journalism, edited by Bill Reader and John A. Hatcher, 3-19. Los Angeles: Sage, 2012.
“‘Report for America’ Pilot Project Begins in Appalachia.” Charleston Gazette-Mail, September 26, 2017. https://www.wvgazettemail.com/news/report-for-america- pilot-project-begins-in-appalachia/article_f8e356cb-73db-5f5b-8fb0- 7c245918f4b5.html/.
Ricoeur, Paul. Time and Narrative. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984.
Robinson, Sue. “‘Beaming Up’ Traditional Journalists: The Transition of an American Newspaper into Cyberspace.” In Making Online News Volume 2: Newsroom Ethnographies in the Second Decade of Internet Journalism, edited by David Domingo and Chris Paterson, 31-44. New York: Peter Lang, 2011.
Ryfe, David M. “Broader and Deeper: A Study of Newsroom Culture in a Time of Change.” Journalism 10, no. 2 (2009): 197-216.
Ryfe, David M. Can Journalism Survive? And Inside Look at American Newsrooms. Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2012.
Saldaña, Johnny. The Coding Manual for Qualitative Researchers. 2nd ed. Los Angeles: Sage, 2013. Kindle edition.
Salmon, Phillida, and Catherine Kohler Riessman. “Looking Back on Narrative Research: An Exchange.” In Doing Narrative Research, 2nd ed., edited by Molly Andrews, Corinne Squire, and Maria Tamboukou, 197-204. Los Angeles: Sage, 2013.
Sanjek, Roger. “A Vocabulary for Fieldnotes.” In Fieldnotes: The Makings of Anthropology, edited by Roger Sanjek, 92-136. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990.
Schudson, Michael. “The Objectivity Norm in American Journalism.” Journalism 2, no. 2 (2001): 149-170.
Schudson, Michael. “Preparing the Minds of the People: Three Hundred Years of the American Newspaper.” Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society 100, no. 2 (1991): 421-443.
Schullery, Nancy M. “Workplace Engagement and Generational Differences in Values.” Business Communication Quarterly 76, no. 2 (2013): 252-265.
Shoemaker, Pamela J., and Stephen D. Reese. Mediating the Message in the 21st Century: A Media Sociology Perspective. New York and London: Routledge, 2014. 242 Simpson, Edgar C. “‘Sustained Outrage’: Owner/Publisher W. E. ‘Ned’ Chilton and the Charleston (West Virginia) Gazette, 1962-1987.” Master’s thesis, Ohio University, 2009. https://etd.ohiolink.edu/!etd.send_file?accession=ohiou1256223199&disposition= inline.
Singer, Jane B., Alfred Hermida, David Domingo, Ari Heinonen, Steve Paulussen, Thorsten Quandt, Zvi Reich, and Marina Vujnovic. Participatory Jorunalism: Guarding Open Gates at Online Newspapers. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011.
Somaiya, Ravi. “At Charleston Newspaper, Cover the News, and Choking Back the Tears.” The New York Times, June 24, 2015, https://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/25/us/charleston-newspaper-brings-local- perspective-to-shooting.html
Stewart, Kathleen. A Space on the Side of the Road. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996.
Stoll, Steven. Ramp Hollow: The Ordeal of Appalachia. New York: Hill and Wang, 2017.
Taussig, Michael. I Swear I Saw This. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011.
Thrift, Ralph R. Jr. “How Chain Ownership Affects Editorial Vigor of Newspapers.” Journalism Quarterly 54, no. 2 (1977): 327-331.
Trump, Donald. Twitter post, January 2, 2018, 8:05 p.m. https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/948359545767841792.
Tuchman, Gaye. Making News: A Study in the Construction of Reality. New York: The Free Press, 1978.
Tulgan, Bruce. Not Everyone Gets a Trophy: How to Manage Generation Y. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2009.
Tumber, Howard, and Marina Prentoulis. “Journalism and the Making of a Profession.” In Making Journalists, edited by Hugo de Burgh, 58-74. London and New York: Routledge, 2005.
Quandt, Thorsten, and Jane Singer. “Convergence and Cross-Platform Journalism.” In Handbook of Journalism Studies, edited by Karin Wahl-Jorgensen and Thomas Hanitzsch, 130-144. Oxford, UK: Routledge, 2008.
United States Census Bureau. “Quick Facts: United States,” accessed March 17, 2018. https://www.cjr.org/business_of_news/diversity-newsrooms-asne-study.php/. 243 United States Census Bureau. “Quick Facts: West Virginia,” accessed March 17, 2018, https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/WV/.
United States Census Burea. “Quick Facts,” accessed May 2, 2018, May 2, 2018, https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/PA,VT,ME,FL,WV/PST045217/.
Usher, Nikki. Making News at The New York Times. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2014.
Vance, J. D. Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis. New York: HarperCollins, 2016. van Maanen, John, and Edgar H. Schein. “Toward a Theory of Organizational Socialization.” Research in Organizational Behavior 1 (1979): 209-264.
Vered, Amit, ed. Constructing the Field: Ethnographic Fieldwork in the Contemporary World. London and New York: Routledge, 2000.
Vorrell, Matthew S., and Sarah Steimel. “Socializing the Nomad: Problematizing the Socialization of Profession-Specific Temporary Workers.” Ohio Communication Journal 50 (2012): 151-179.
Wackman, Daniel B., Donald M. Gillmor, Cecilie Gaziano, and Everette E. Dennis. “Chain Newspapers Autonomy as Reflected in Presidential Campaign Endorsements.” Journalism Quarterly 52, no. 3 (1975): 411-420.
Walther, Joseph B. “Interpersonal Effects in Computer-Mediated Interaction: A Relational Perspective.” Communication Research 19, no. 1 (1992): 52-90.
Ward, Ken Jr. “Nyden Remembered as Crusading Reporter, Loyal Friend and Mentor, Great Storyteller.” Charleston Gazette-Mail, January 6, 2018. https://www.wvgazettemail.com/news/nyden-remembered-as-crusading-reporter- loyal-friend-and-mentor-great/article_141953f8-53cc-5b91-bb78- c925e829f8a5.html/.
Weaver, David. H. “Who Are Journalists?” In Making Journalists, edited by Hugo de Burgh, 44-57. London and New York: Routledge, 2005.
Weaver, David H., Randal A. Beam, Bonnie J. Brownlee, Paul S. Voakes, and G. Cleveland Wilhoit. The American Journalist in the 21st Century: US News People at the Dawn of a New Millennium. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 2007.
Weaver, David H., and G. Cleveland Wilhoit. The American Journalist: A Portrait of U.S. News People and their Work. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986.
244 Weaver, David Hugh, and G. Cleveland Wilhoit. The American Journalist in the 1990s: U.S. News People at the End of an Era. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1996.
Willnat, Lars, Weaver, David H., and Wilhoit, G. Cleveland. The American Journalist in the Digital Age. New York: Peter Lang, 2017.
Wolf, Margery. A Thrice-Told Tale: Feminism, Postmodernism, and Ethnographic Responsibility. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1992.
Wotanis, Lindsey L. “When the Weekly Leaves Town: The Impact of One Newsroom’s Relocation on Sense of Community.” Community Journalism 1, no. 1 (2012): 11- 28.
Zaman, Akhteruz. “Newsroom as Battleground: Journalists’ Descriptions of their Workspaces.” Journalism Studies 14, no. 6 (2013): 819-834.
Zelizer, Barbie. “Journalists as Interpretive Communities.” Critical Studies in Mass Communication 10 (1993): 219-237.
Zelizer, Barbie. Taking Journalism Seriously: News and the Academy. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2004.
Ziff, Howard M. “Practicing Responsible Journalism: Cosmopolitan versus Provincial Models.” In Responsible Journalism, edited by Deni Elliott, 151-166. Los Angeles: Sage, 1986.
Zuckerman, Jake. “Politifact Partners with Gazette-Mail to Fact-Check WV Politicians.” Charleston Gazette-Mail, October 17, 2017. https://www.wvgazettemail.com/news/politics/politifact-partners-with-gazette- mail-to-fact-check-wv-politicians/article_1639fd72-7dcf-5914-8f52- a2bbc72ab2b3.html/.
245 Appendix A: Interview Participants
In the following pages, I provide brief descriptions of each of the 32 journalists in the newsroom who participated in interviews as part of this project. Each description includes information about the individuals’ position in the newsroom at the time of my fieldwork and his or her professional and educational history. I have organized the participant profiles in terms of the departmental desks they occupied to provide a better sense of their relationships to each other and to the newsroom at large.
NEWS DESK
Robert J. (Rob) Byers, Executive Editor
Byers, a native of southwestern Pennsylvania and a graduate of West Virginia University, joined the staff of the Gazette as a reporter in 1991. As a student, he had interned with the
Gazette. For the next 20 years, he worked in a variety of reporting and editing positions for the Gazette before becoming the executive editor in 2011.
Greg Moore, Managing Editor
Moore, a native of Morgantown, W.Va., and graduate of West Virginia University, spent the first few years of his career in an internal communications position with a consulting firm in West Virginia and California. He returned to the Gazette, where he had interned as an undergraduate, in the mid-1990s as a copy editor. He worked in a variety of reporting and editing positions for the Gazette before becoming managing editor in 2016.
James A. (Jim) Haught, Editor Emeritus
Haught began his newspaper career as a teenager in the print shop of the Daily Mail in
1951. He joined the staff of the Gazette as a reporter in 1953. Outside of a brief stint in
246 1959 as press aide for Robert C. Byrd, the late U.S. senator from West Virginia, he had worked for the Gazette or the Gazette-Mail ever since then. Throughout the1970s and into the early 1980s, Haught was a nationally recognized investigative reporter. He served for several years as the editor of the Gazette, becoming editor emeritus when the two newspapers combined.
Ben Fields, City Editor
Fields, a native of northeastern Kentucky and a graduate of Purdue University, worked at small daily newspapers in southern Ohio and northeastern Kentucky before spending nine years in a variety of positions at the Huntington Herald-Dispatch, another West Virginia daily. Fields joined the Gazette-Mail staff in the fall of 2016.
Ashley B. Craig, Assistant City Editor
Craig, a native of Charleston and graduate of West Virginia University, worked at the
Daily Mail as a cops reporter and assistant city editor before the two papers combined.
She was one of four people working in the Gazette-Mail newsroom during my fieldwork who came directly from the Daily Mail in the combination in 2015.
Glen Flanagan, Digital Content Manager
Flanagan, a native of southwestern Virginia and a graduate of Radford University in
Virginia, joined the Gazette-Mail staff in 2016. For the two-and-a-half years between college graduation and joining the Gazette-Mail, he worked as a public safety reporter for newspapers in North Carolina and South Carolina.
Erin Beck, Health Reporter
247 Beck grew up in Doddridge and Ritchie counties in West Virginia and has two degrees from West Virginia University. She worked at a newspaper in north-central West
Virginia for about a year-and-a-half before joining the Gazette as a crime reporter in
2014.
Eric Eyre, Statehouse Reporter
Eyre, a native of the Philadelphia area and a graduate of Loyola University New Orleans and the University of South Florida, worked at newspapers in Alabama, California,
Pennsylvania, and Arizona before joining the staff of the Gazette in 1998. He was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting in April 2017 for his coverage of the role of pharmaceutical companies in the opioid crisis in West Virginia.
Max Garland, Business Reporter
Garland, a Tennessee native and graduate of Elon University in North Carolina, joined the staff of the Gazette-Mail in the fall of 2016, a few months after his graduation from
Elon.
Ted Geisel, Politics Reporter
Geisel, a native of the Chicago area and a graduate of Ohio University, covered agriculture, courts, public safety and politics at a small newspaper in Virginia for about a year before joining the staff of the Gazette-Mail as a politics reporter in the spring of
2017.
Jake Jarvis, Higher Education Reporter
248 Jarvis is a native of Huntington, West Virginia, and a graduate of West Virginia
University. He joined the staff of the combined newspaper in 2016 and was employed as a Gazette intern in the summer of 2015, when the combination of the papers took place.
Carlee Lammers, Putnam County Reporter
Lammers, a native of northwestern Maryland and graduate of West Virginia University, came to the Gazette-Mail in the late spring of 2016 after working for a year at a newspaper near her hometown in Maryland. When I began my fieldwork, she was working as a features writer, but she transitioned to a new role as Putnam County reporter about halfway through my time there.
Ryan Quinn, Education Reporter
Quinn, a native of South Carolina and a graduate of the University of South Carolina, covered public safety and local government at a Kentucky newspaper for about a year- and-a-half before joining the Gazette in 2014. After covering Putnam County for a little less than a year, he moved into his current education beat.
Ali Schmitz, City of Charleston Reporter
Schmitz, a Florida native and 2016 graduate of the University of Florida, came to the
Gazette-Mail newsroom in the fall of 2016 as the Putnam County reporter. She moved into the City of Charleston beat in May 2017, about halfway through my fieldwork in the newsroom. Schmitz left the Gazette-Mail in September 2017.
Rick Steelhammer, Recreation Reporter
Steelhammer grew up in Oregon and graduated from Antioch College in Ohio. He joined the staff of the Gazette in the 1970s as a reporter. Four years after he started, he left for
249 two-and-a-half years, during which time he worked on a lobster boat and as a tree planter as well as for a small weekly newspaper in Oregon. Then he returned to the Gazette and has been with the organization since then.
Ken Ward Jr., Environment Reporter
Ward, a native of Mineral County, W.Va., and a graduate of West Virginia University, joined the staff of the Gazette as a reporter in 1991 after interning there as an undergraduate. He is a nationally recognized reporter on the coal industry, focusing on environmental and workplace safety issues.
EDITORIAL
Dawn Miller, Gazette Editorial Page Editor
Miller, a native of Berkeley County, West Virginia, came to the Gazette in 1991 after graduating from West Virginia University. As a reporter, she covered a variety of beats, including healthcare, higher education, local government, foster care, and adoption. She took over the editorial page in the mid-2000s.
Kelly Merritt, Daily Mail Editorial Page Editor
Merritt spent most of his childhood in Texas and Louisiana before moving to the
Charleston area at 14. After graduating from Marshall University, he spent about three decades working in public relations and communications positions for energy companies and educational institutions and agencies in Texas and West Virginia. He joined the staff of the Daily Mail as opinion page editor in 2013.
250 FEATURES
Maria Young, Features Editor
Young, a Louisiana native and graduate of Louisiana State University, spent much of her career in broadcast journalism, working as a producer and on-air reporter. Prior to joining the staff of the Gazette in 2014, Young spent several years in Washington, D.C., working with the Associated Press, free-lancing for some broadcast networks and serving as web producer for the International Center for Journalists.
Douglas (Doug) Imbrogno, Assistant Lifestyles Editor
Imbrogno grew up in southwestern Ohio and graduated from Miami University. He worked at the Huntington Herald-Dispatch for about eight years before joining the
Gazette staff in in the mid-1990s. He left the newsroom to start a digital web magazine about 10 years later but returned around 2010.
Jennifer Gardner, Features Writer
Gardner, the daughter of a military family, was born in England but grew up primarily in
Washington, D.C., then moved to Parkersburg, W. Va., as a 13-year-old. She joined the staff of the Gazette-Mail in May 2017 immediately following her graduation from West
Virginia University. She had interned with the Gazette-Mail the previous summer.
Bill Lynch, Entertainment Reporter
Lynch, a native of southwest Virginia and graduate of Concord College in West Virginia, was a free-lance writer for the Gazette for about three years before joining the staff full- time in the mid-2000s. In addition to his work at the Gazette-Mail, he hosts a music program on West Virginia Public Broadcasting.
251 Anna Taylor, Features Writer
Taylor, a native of southwest Kentucky and graduate of Murray State University, came to the Gazette-Mail newsroom in January 2017 after working at a daily newspaper in
Kentucky for two-and-a-half years. She left the Gazette-Mail newsroom shortly after I concluded my fieldwork there.
COPY DESK
Leann Ray, News Editor
Ray, a native of Poca, W.Va., and two-time graduate of West Virginia University, worked as a reporter for another West Virginia newspaper for a few years between earning her bachelor’s and master’s degrees. She joined the Gazette as a copy editor in
2013 and became the Gazette’s news editor in 2014.
Catherine (Cathy) Caudill, Assistant News Editor
Caudill, a native of Charleston and graduate of High Point University in North Carolina and the University of North Carolina-Greensboro, worked at a publishing house in North
Carolina for a little over a year before returning to Charleston in 2015 to work as a copy editor for the Daily Mail. She was one of four people working in the Gazette-Mail newsroom during my fieldwork who came directly from the Daily Mail in the combination.
Chris Atkins, Copy Editor
Atkins, a West Virginia native and graduate of West Virginia University, started his newspaper career in 1977 and has worked in newsrooms in California and Iowa, as well
252 as other newsrooms in West Virginia and with Stars and Stripes in Washington, D.C., and Germany. He came to the Gazette in 2002.
Paul Gartner, Copy Editor
Gartner, a native of northern Ohio, moved to West Virginia in the 1970s. After working in a variety of non-editorial positions at other newspapers (including paste-up work and press-cleaning), he joined the staff of the Gazette in the mid-1980s as a copy editor.
Rafe Godfrey, Copy Editor
Godfrey is a native of Charleston and a 2003 graduate of West Virginia University. He was on the staff of the Daily Mail from 2010 to 2012, then moved to Chicago before returning to West Virginia and joining the copy desk at the Gazette in 2014.
Codi Mohr, Copy Editor
Mohr, a native of Huntington, W.Va., and a graduate of Marshall University, came to the
Gazette-Mail newsroom in the fall of 2015, a few months after completing her bachelor’s degree at Marshall.
Chris Slater, Copy Editor
Slater, a native of Mercer County, W.Va., and a graduate of Concord University, free- lanced for several years before spending 15 months as a reporter at a small weekly newspaper in Virginia. He came to the Gazette-Mail newsroom in March 2017, about a month before I began my fieldwork there.
Megan Vealey, Copy Editor
Vealey, a native of Morgantown, W.Va., and graduate of West Virginia University, worked at a bank for about a year-and-a-half after graduating from WVU before joining
253 the copy desk at the Gazette-Mail in 2015. Vealey left the Gazette-Mail in the summer of
2017, shortly after I completed my fieldwork there.
VISUALS
Kenny Kemp, Visuals Editor
Kemp was born in Pennsylvania but moved to the Charleston area as an 11-year-old. He joined the photography staff of the Daily Mail in 1981 and moved to the Gazette four years later and has remained in the Gazette (and now Gazette-Mail) organization since then. He was the chief photographer at the Gazette at the time of the combination.
254 Appendix B: IRB Submission and Exemption Notice
This research project is designed to explore the role of the newsroom in socializing journalists both professionally and as members of a local community. I will spend several months in the newsroom of the Charleston Gazette-Mail, a daily newspaper that has served the West Virginia capital for more than a century. Over the course of this observation and through interviews with editorial staff members, I hope to gain a better understanding of how journalists' interactions in newsrooms contribute to their understanding of professional values and identities and how those values are negotiated in the contexts of both changing technologies and the values of the local community. For instance, how do individual journalists' associations with the community itself and the larger Appalachian culture influence the ways they practice journalism? Also, how do social media and other technologies that give community members more visibility in public conversations about the topics the journalists cover affect the ways journalism is practiced.
The focused study of this particular newsroom will be supplemented with oral history interviews of long-time community journalists working in other newsrooms to identify any peculiarities specific to the Gazette-Mail and to broaden my understanding of newsroom experiences and journalist-community relations.1
The primary research methodology will be ethnography, which will incorporate long-term participant observation and semi-structured interviews. I plan to spend two to five days per week in the newsroom over the course of several months, observing interactions among staff members and the routines of news coverage. My observations
255 will include informal interactions throughout the day as well as more structured interactions as they occur in regular meetings of editors or the staff at large. In addition to my observations, I plan to conduct semi-structured interviews (likely 30-60 minutes in length) with those members of the staff who are willing to participate in interviews. As the interview protocol indicates, the interviews will focus on participants' perceptions of newsroom interactions, their relationships to the communities they cover and the role of technology in the newsroom.
A secondary portion of the research will consist of oral history interviews with five long-time community journalists about their newsroom experiences. As the interview protocol for this element of the research indicates, these interviews will also focus on newsroom interactions, community relationships and technology but will allow for more in-depth exploration of these issues through narrative examples, for instance. I anticipate that each of these interviews will last two to three hours.
Participants in the oral history and semi-structured interviews will be audio- recorded if they agree to such a recording method. Any audio files will be stored on a password-protected laptop and/or an external hard drive that will be stored in a locked cabinet with no markings that connect it to this particular research. All audio files will be destroyed after being transcribed (by approximately January 2018).
Participants will be permitted to choose the level of confidentiality at which their information is stored. As journalists, they operate as public figures in a sense, given that their work is directly connected to their identities through bylines in the print and online editions of the newspaper as well as the masthead listings of editors that are readily
256 available in print and online. However, if any participants prefer greater confidentiality, I will record any data involving them using job titles or pseudonyms, depending upon their stated preference. Additionally, any members of the newsroom staff who choose not to participate in the research project will not be referenced at all in any records of observational or interview data.
Two interview protocols will be used as part of this research project:
1. Semi-structured interview protocol for 30-60-minute interviews with journalists
working in the newsroom that is the primary site of the study
2. Oral history interview protocol for longer (two- to three-hour) interviews with
long-time community journalists working in other newsrooms.
At the beginning of the ethnographic observation process, I will introduce myself and explain the research project during a meeting of the staff. At this time, participants will have the opportunity to ask any questions they might have, and they will be given the option to decline participation. If any editorial staff members decline to participate, no reference will be made to them in any records of data from the project. I will further provide a general schedule of when I will be at the site, and encourage staff members to come to me at any time with any questions or concerns. I will provide a copy of the consent form to be posted in a common location within the newsroom so all staff members, including those who might be absent from the initial meeting, have access to information about the project and contact information for me, my advisor and the Office of Research Compliance. As I approach individual members of the staff to request interviews, I will again go over the consent form and obtain their signatures before
257 beginning the interviews. If a participant opts not to complete an interview but is willing to be represented in the record of my observations, I will obtain a signed consent form from him or her, as well.
In the case of the oral history interviews, I will set aside a few minutes before beginning each interview to explain the project and consent form, allow for any questions from the participant and obtain a signature.
Project Number 17-E-100
Project Status APPROVED
Committee: Office of Research Compliance
Compliance Robin Stack ([email protected]) Contact:
Primary Christina Zempter Investigator:
Project Title: Culture and Socialization in a Local Newsroom
Level of Review: EXEMPT
The Ohio University Office of Research Compliance reviewed and approved by exempt review the above referenced research. The Office of Research Compliance was able to provide exempt approval under 45 CFR 46.104(d) because the research meets the applicability criteria and one or more categories of research eligible for exempt review, as indicated below.
IRB Approval: 03/23/2017 1:15:56 PM
Review 2 Category:
258 Waivers: N/A
If applicable, informed consent (and HIPAA research authorization) must be obtained from subjects or their legally authorized representatives and documented prior to research involvement. In addition, FERPA, PPRA, and other authorizations / agreements must be obtained, if needed. The IRB-approved consent form and process must be used. Any changes in the research (e.g., recruitment procedures, advertisements, enrollment numbers, etc.) or informed consent process must be approved by the IRB before they are implemented (except where necessary to eliminate apparent immediate hazards to subjects).
It is the responsibility of all investigators and research staff to promptly report to the Office of Research Compliance / IRB any serious, unexpected and related adverse and potential unanticipated problems involving risks to subjects or others.
This approval is issued under the Ohio University OHRP Federalwide Assurance
#00000095. Please feel free to contact the Office of Research Compliance staff contact listed above with any questions or concerns.
259 Appendix C: Semi-structured Newsroom Interview Protocol
Description of Study: The purpose of this study is to better understand the influence of newsroom interactions on journalists’ professional identities and practices. These interviews supplement my long-term observation of the newsroom and allow me to compare and contrast my perceptions to those of the journalists experiencing these interactions.
Demographic Questions
Age:
Sex:
Race:
Name:
Pseudonym:
Educational background (degree, institution, major/discipline):
1. I would like to begin by talking about your journalism background.
a. How long have you worked as a journalist?
b. In what other newsrooms have you worked? In what positions?
c. How long have you worked in this newsroom?
2. I would like to get a sense of your experience in the newsroom or newsroom
interactions.
a. How much time do you spend in the newsroom each week?
i. Probe 1: How is your time generally divided throughout the
week?
260 ii. Probe 2: How much of the time you spend in the newsroom is
spent in editorial meetings or other scheduled interactions?
iii. Probe 3: How much time do you spend talking through stories
or coverage with other staff members in less formal
interactions? b. Tell me about your interactions with your newsroom co-workers, both
in and out of the office.
i. Probe 1: With whom do you interact most frequently?
ii. Probe 2: What sorts of things do you discuss?
iii. Probe 3: How frequently do you socialize or spend time
outside the newsroom with other newsroom employees? Give
me some examples of what you do with co-workers outside the
office. c. Are there specific people inside or outside the newsroom you rely on
for guidance or consultation about how to cover stories, work with
sources or address issues related to your readership?
i. Probe 1: Can you give me a few examples of incidents where
you have relied on guidance for specific stories or ideas? d. Have you worked in other newsrooms before?
i. Probe 1: If this is your first journalism job, did you work in a
college newsroom or have an internship that placed you in a
professional newsroom?
261 ii. Probe 2: How does your experience here compare to your
experiences in other newsrooms?
3. I would like to talk to you about your relationship to the community.
a. How long have you lived here?
b. Do you feel connected to the community?
i. If yes, what makes you feel connected to the community?
ii. If no, why do you think you don’t feel connected to the
community?
c. As a journalist, describe how you see your role in the community?
d. In what ways, if any, have your ideas about the role of the journalist
and the practice of journalism changed over your time in this particular
community?
i. Probe 1: What incidents or experiences have caused you to
rethink those ideas?
ii. Probe 2: To what do you attribute the changes in your
perspective?
4. I want to talk a little bit about professional values in journalism.
a. What values do you see as fundamental to the responsible practice of
journalism?
i. Probe 1: What are your thoughts on such values as objectivity
and neutrality?
262 ii. Probe 2: What are your thoughts on such values as interactivity
and immediacy with your readership?
b. How do you apply those values to your work in the context of this
community?
i. Probe 1: Give me some examples that illustrate how these
values show up in your work here.
c. Have you found any challenges specific to the expectations of this
community?
i. Probe 1: Give me some examples of situations in which you
have had to negotiate the role of your professional values and
specific local values in your coverage.
ii. Probe 2: How do you determine what to prioritize in such
situations?
d. Describe the ways in which your values as an individual correspond to
the values that guide newsroom practices generally?
i. Probe 1: Give me some examples of how you see your values
at work in specific practices.
ii. Probe 2: Describe any conflicts you see between your personal
values and newsroom practices?
iii. Probe 3: How do you address these conflicts?
5. I want to now talk to you about the role of technology in the newsroom and
any effects it may have had on newsroom practices.
263 a. In what ways, if any, have changing technologies affected your
reporting/editing practices?
i. Probe 1: If your practices have changed, give me examples of
how they have changed.
ii. Probe 2: If they have not changed, why do you think that is?
iii. Probe 3: If you have incorporated some new practices but
largely maintained your pre-digital approach to journalism,
give me some examples of how the old and new practices
interact in your work.
b. In what ways, if any, has the capacity of the audience to interact with
your stories via comment sections and social media affected your
approach to reporting?
6. I want to focus now on professional values and their interaction with community
values:
a. Have you seen changes in the prioritization of journalistic values like
accuracy, objectivity, and responsiveness over your years in newsrooms?
i. Probe 1: If so, give me some examples that illustrate how these
priorites have shifted over time.
ii. Probe 2: If you have seen changes, to what do you attribute them?
b. How have conflicts among those values generally been negotiated in the
newsroom?
264 i. Probe 1: How much influence have individual journalists had on
the negotiation processes you’ve witnessed? Give me some
specific examples.
c. How have interactions with readers or sources in the community
influenced your approach to journalism?
i. Probe 1: How do you perceive your role in the community as a
journalist?
d. To what extent, if any, do you see the values of the community reflected in
newsroom practices or standards?
i. Probe 1: Give me some examples of how you have seen the
influence of community values in newsrooms.
7. Now I would like to discuss how your personal values and practical
considerations have developed over time:
a. To what extent, if any, has your understanding of what it means to practice
responsible journalism changed over your career?
i. Probe 1: How has changing technology affected your approach to
journalism?
ii. Probe 2: How have the values of the communities where you
worked influenced your approach to journalism?
iii. Probe 3: How have your interactions with other journalists over
the years influenced your approach to journalism?
265 b. Describe the interactions or experiences that have most profoundly
contributed to your understanding of good journalism and your
responsibilities as a journalist.
8. Closing: As we wrap up our conversation, I would like to address anything
you see as important that hasn’t been discussed.
a. Is there anything I haven’t mentioned that you would like to discuss or
anything I’ve missed that would enhance my understanding of
newsroom interactions?
b. Do you have any questions of me?
266 Notes
Preface 1 See https://www.wvgazettemail.com/news/special_reports/blankenship_trial/. 2 Niraj Chokshi, “A West Virginia Newspaper Won Journalism’s Top Award. Now It’s Filed for Bankruptcy,” The New York Times, February 2, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/02/business/media/west-virginia-newspaper- charleston.html/. 3 Steven Mufson, “A West Virginia Newspaper Is in Bankruptcy. The Powerful Coal Industry Celebrates,” The Washington Post, February 16, 2018, https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/a-west-virginia-newspaper-is-in- bankruptcy-the-powerful-coal-industry-celebrates/2018/02/16/f0e3d4e4-085c-11e8-8777- 2a059f168dd2_story.html?utm_term=.1507da238656/.
Introduction: The Incredible Shrinking Newsroom 1 American Society of Newspaper Editors, “2015 Census,” American Society of Newspaper Editors, July 28, 2015, http://asne.org/content.asp?contentid=415 2 Ken Doctor, “The Halving of America’s Daily Newsrooms,” Newsonomics, July 28, 2015, http://www.niemanlab.org/2015/07/newsonomics-the-halving-of-americas-daily- newsrooms/ 3 Ravi Somaiya, “At Charleston Newspaper, Covering the News, and Choking Back Tears,” The New York Times, June 24, 2015, http://www.nytimes.com/ 4 Pew Research Center: Journalism & Media Staff, “Local News in a Digital Age,” Pew Research Center, March 5, 2015, http://www.journalism.org/2015/03/05/local-news-in-a- digital-age/ 5 Alex S. Jones, Losing the News: The Future of the News That Feeds Democracy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009). 6 Jill A. Edy, “Collective Memory in a Post-Broadcast World,” in Journalism and Memory, eds. Barbie Zelizer and Keren Tenenboim-Weinblatt (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 66-80. 7 David H. Weaver and G. Cleveland Wilhoit, The American Journalist: A Portrait of U.S. News People and Their Work (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986). 8 Valerie Belair-Gagnon, Social Media at BBC News: The Re-making of Crisis Reporting (New York and London: Routledge, 2015), and Nikki Usher, Making News at The New York Times (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2014). 9 Nancy Ray Adams, “Charleston Gazette-Mail,” e-WV: The West Virginia Encyclopedia, last modified August 12, 2015, http://www.wvencyclopedia.org/articles/1100 10 As reported in Somaiya, “At Charleston Newspaper.” 11 “Gazette, Daily Mail Become the Charleston Gazette-Mail,” Charleston Gazette-Mail, last modified July 19, 2015, http://www.wvgazettemail.com/article/20150719/GZ01/150729990 12 “Gazette, Daily Mail.”
267
13 I use the word connector for lack of a more precise term that would accommodate the varied ways in which I saw this role enacted by individuals within the Gazette-Mail newsroom. In Chapter IV, I provide a more detailed explanation of this variety. 14 David M. Ryfe, “Broader and Deeper: A Study of Newsroom Culture in a Time of Change,” Journalism 10, no. 2 (2009): 197-216.
Culture and Identity in the Newsroom 1 Walter Lippmann, Liberty and the News (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Howe, 1920). 2 James W. Carey, “Some Personal Notes on US Journalism Education,” Journalism 1, no. 1 (2000): 12-23. 3 David H. Weaver, “Who Are Journalists?” in Making Journalists, ed. Hugo de Burgh (London and New York: Routledge, 2005), 44-57. 4 Carey, “Some Personal Notes,” 13. 5 “The Fourth Estate” is a term often applied to the media to indicate its unofficial role in the checks and balances of official power. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the first use of the term in reference to the press has been attributed speculatively to 18th- century Irish statesman Edmund Burke. 6 Howard Tumber and Marina Prentoulis, “Journalism and the Making of a Profession,” in Making Journalists, ed. Hugo de Burgh (London and New York: Routledge, 2005), 58-74. 7 Tumber and Prentoulis, “Journalism and the Making of a Profession,” 69. 8 Barbie Zelizer, Taking Journalism Seriously: News and the Academy (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2004). 9 David H. Weaver and G. Cleveland Wilhoit, The American Journalist: A Portrait of U.S. News People and Their Work (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986). 10 Tumber and Prentoulis, “Journalism and the Making of a Profession,” 71. 11 Weaver and Wilhoit, The American Journalist, 172. 12 John van Maanen and Edgar H. Schein, “Toward a Theory of Organizational Socialization,” Research in Organizational Behavior 1 (1979): 209-264. 13 Frederic M. Jablin, “Organizational Entry, Assimilation, and Disengagement/Exit,” in The New Handbook of Organizational Communication, eds. Frederic M. Jablin and Linda L. Putnam (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2001), 732-818. 14 Matthew S. Vorell and Sarah Steimel, “Socializing the Nomad: Problematizing the Socialization of Profession-Specific Temporary Workers,” Ohio Communication Journal 50 (2012): 151-179. 15 Michael McDevitt, Bob M. Gassaway, and Frank G. Pérez, “The Making and Unmaking of Civic Journalists: Influences of Professional Socialization,” Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly 79, no. 1 (2002): 87-100. 16 See the adaptation of Kenneth Burke’s original idea in George Cheney, “The Rhetoric of Identification and the Study of Organizational Communication,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 69 (1983): 143-158.
268
17 Jock Lauterer, Community Journalism: Relentlessly Local, 3rd ed. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 295-296. 18 John A. Hatcher, “A View from the Outside: What Other Social Science Disciplines Can Teach Us About Community Journalism,” in Foundations of Community Journalism, ed. Bill Reader and John A. Hatcher (Los Angeles: Sage, 2012), 129-149. 19 Lindsey L. Wotanis, “When the Weekly Leaves Town: The Impact of One Newsroom’s Relocation on Sense of Community,” Community Journalism 1, no. 1 (2012): 11-28. 20 Deni Elliott, “Essential Shared Values and 21st Century Journalism,” in The Handbook of Mass Media Ethics, eds. Lee Wilkins and Clifford G. Christians (New York: Routledge, 2008): 28-39. 21 Pamela J. Shoemaker and Stephen D. Reese, Mediating the Message in the 21st Century: A Media Sociology Perspective (New York and London: Routledge, 2014). 22 David Domingo, “Introduction: The Centrality of Online Journalism Today (and Tomorrow),” in Making Online News Volume 2: Newsroom Ethnographies in the Second Decade of Internet Journalism, eds. David Domingo and Chris Paterson (New York: Peter Lang, 2011), xii-xx. 23 Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (New York: New York University Press, 2006). 24 Thorsten Quandt and Jane Singer, “Convergence and Cross-Platform Journalism,” in Handbook of Journalism Studies, ed. Karin Wahl-Jorgensen and Thomas Hanitzsch (Oxford, UK: Routledge, 2008), 130-144. 25 Sue Robinson, “‘Beaming Up’ Traditional Journalists: The Transition of An American Newspaper into Cyberspace,” in Making Online News: Volume 2, eds. David Domingo and Chris Paterson (New York: Peter Lang, 2011), 31-34. 26 C.W. Anderson, Rebuilding the News: Metropolitan Journalism in the Digital Age (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2013), 16. 27 David L. Altheide, “Media Logic and Political Communication,” Political Communication 21 (2004): 293-296, 294. 28 Valerie Belair-Gagnon, Social Media at BBC News: The Re-making of Crisis Reporting (New York and London: Routledge, 2015), 30. 29 Nikki Usher, Making News at The New York Times (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2014). 30 Doreen M. Marchionni, “Journalism-as-a-Conversation: A Concept Explication,” Communication Theory 23 (2013): 131-147. 31 See, for example, Usher, Making News at The New York Times; Peter J. Gade, “Newspapers and Organizational Development: Management and Journalist Perceptions of Newsroom Cultural Change,” Journalism and Communication Monographs 6, no. 1 (2004): 3-55; Jonathan Groves and Carrie Brown-Smith, “Stopping the Presses: A Longitudinal Case Study of the Christian Science Monitor Transition from Print Daily to Web Always,” International Symposium on Online Journalism 1, no. 2 (2011): 86-128;
269
and Jane B. Singer, Alfred Hermida, David Domingo, Ari Heinonen, Steve Paulussen, Thorsten Quandt, Zvi Reich, and Marina Vujnovic, Participatory Journalism: Guarding Open Gates at Online Newspapers (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011). 32 Axel Bruns, “The Active Audience: Transforming Journalism from Gatekeeping to Gatewatching,” in Making Online News: The Ethnography of New Media Production, eds. Chris Paterson and David Domingo (New York: Peter Lang, 2008), 171-184. 33 Maxwell E. McCombs and Donald Shaw, “The Agenda-Setting Function of Mass Media,” Public Opinion Quarterly 36, no. 2 (1972): 176-187. 34 See, for example, Malcolm E. McCombs, Donald L. Shaw, and David H. Weaver, “New Directions in Agenda-Setting Theory and Research,” Mass Communication and Society 17 (2014): 781-802. 35 Brian Ekdale, Jane B. Singer, Melissa Tully, and Shawn Harmsen, “Making Change: Diffusion of Technological, Relational, and Cultural Innovation in the Newsroom,” Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly (2015): 1-21. 36 Peter J. Gade and Earnest L. Perry, “Changing the Newsroom Culture: A Four-Year Case Study of Organizational Development at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch,” Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly 80, no. 2 (2003): 327-347. 37 Michael Schudson, “The Objectivity Norm in American Journalism,” Journalism 2, no. 2 (2001): 149-170. 38 Herbert Gans, Deciding What’s News: A Study of CBS Evening News, NBC Nightly News, Newsweek and Time (Chicago: Northwestern University Press, 1979). 39 John W. C. Johnstone, Edward J. Slawski, and William W. Bowman, “The Professional Values of American Newsmen,” Public Opinion Quarterly 36, no. 4 (1972): 522-540. 40 David H. Weaver, Randal A. Beam, Bonnie J. Brownlee, Paul S. Voakes, and G. Cleveland Wilhoit, The American Journalist in the 21st Century: US News People at the Dawn of a New Millennium (Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 2007). 41 Howard M. Ziff, “Practicing Responsible Journalism: Cosmopolitan versus Provincial Models,” in Responsible Journalism, ed. Deni Elliott (Los Angeles: Sage, 1986), 151- 166. 42 Loren Ghiglione, “Smalltown Journalism Has Some Big Ethical Headaches,” in Questioning Media Ethics, ed. Bernard Rubin (New York: Praeger, 1978), 171-179. 43 Ziff, “Practicing Responsible Journalism,” 154. 44 Ibid., 155. 45 Dan Kennedy, The Wired City: Reimagining Journalism and Civic Life in the Post- Newspaper Age (Amherst and Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2013), 118. 46 Lauterer, Community Journalism. 47 Bill Reader, “Community Journalism: A Concept of Connectedness,” in Foundations of Community Journalism, ed. Bill Reader and John A. Hatcher (Los Angeles: Sage, 2012), 3-19; 15. 48 See, for example, Lauterer’s explanation of tensions between expectations of non-local coverage and the local-first imperative in Community Journalism, 31-33.
270
49 Lauterer, Community Journalism, 261. 50 As quoted in Lauterer, Community Journalism, 27. 51 Michael Schudson, “Preparing the Minds of the People: Three Hundred Years of the American Newspaper,” Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society 100, no. 2 (1991): 421-443. 52 Wilson Lowrey, Amanda Brozana, and Jenn B. Mackay, “Toward a Measure of Community Journalism,” Mass Communication and Society 11 (2008): 275-299. 53 Wilson Lowrey, “The Challenge of Measuring Community Journalism,” in Foundations of Community Journalism, ed. Bill Reader and John A. Hatcher (Los Angeles: Sage, 2012), 87-108. 54 Lowrey, “The Challenge of Measuring Community Journalism,” 97. 55 Belden Associates, North Carolina Statewide Readership Survey (Raleigh: North Carolina Press Services, 2000). 56 Carolyn Kitch, “Making the Mundane Matter,” in Foundations of Community Journalism, ed. Bill Reader and John A. Hatcher (Los Angeles: Sage, 2012), 237-239. 57 Lauterer, Community Journalism, 99. 58 As quoted in Lauterer, Community Journalism, 26. 59 Ralph D. Barney, “Community Journalism: Good Intentions, Questionable Practice,” Journal of Mass Media Ethics 11, no. 3 (1996): 140-151, 140. 60 George A. Donahue, Phillip J. Tichenor, and Clarice N. Olien, “A Guard Dog Perspective on the Role of Media,” Journal of Communication 45, no. 2 (1995): 115-132. 61 Lauterer, Community Journalism, 98. 62 Ibid. 63 Reader, “Community Journalism.” 64 Lauterer, Community Journalism, 261 65 Jerry Brown, introduction to Community Journalism: Relentlessly Local, 3rd ed., by Jock Lauterer (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), xiv-xv. 66 Stephen Lacy and Alan Blanchard, “The Impact of Public Ownership, Profits, and Competition on Number of Newsroom Employees and Starting Salaries in Mid-Sized Daily Newspapers,” Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly 80, no. 4 (2003): 949-968. 67 Ben Bagdikian, The New Media Monopoly, 20th ed. (Boston: Beacon Press, 2004). 68 Ralph R. Thrift Jr., “How Chain Ownership Affects Editorial Vigor of Newspapers,” Journalism Quarterly 54, no. 2 (1977): 327-331. 69 Roya Akhavan-Majid, Anita Rife, and Sheila Gopinath, “Chain Ownership and Editorial Independence: A Case Study of Gannett Newspapers,” Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly 68, no. 1-2 (1991): 59-66. 70 Daniel B. Wackman, Donald M. Gillmor, Cecilie Gaziano, and Everette E. Dennis, “Chain Newspapers Autonomy as Reflected in Presidential Campaign Endorsements,” Journalism Quarterly 52, no. 3 (1975): 411-420. 71 David Demers, “Corporate Newspaper Structure, Editorial Page Vigor, and Social Change,” Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly 73, no. 4 (1996): 857-877.
271
72 Robert W. McChesney, “Farewell to Journalism? Time for a Rethinking,” Journalism Practice 6, nos. 5-6 (2012): 614-626. 73 Demers, “Corporate Newspaper Structure.” 74 Barbie Zelizer, “Journalists as Interpretive Communities,” Critical Studies in Mass Communication 10 (1993): 219-237. 75 Stuart Allan, “Journalism as Interpretive Performance: The Case of WikiLeaks,” in Rethinking Journalism: Trust and Participation in a Transformed News Landscape, eds. Chris Peters and Marcel Broersma (London: Routledge, 2013), 144-159. 76 James W. Carey, Communication as Culture: Essays on Media and Society (New York and London: Routledge, 1989), 20. 77 Stuart Hall, “Cultural Studies: Two Paradigms,” in Media, Culture, and Society: A Critical Reader, ed. Richard Collins (London: Sage, 1986), 57-72. 78 Kathleen Stewart, A Space on the Side of the Road (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 5. 79 Carey, Communication as Culture. 80 Ibid., 18. 81 Mark P. Orbe, Constructing Co-Cultural Theory: An Explication of Culture, Power, and Communication (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1998), 1. 82 Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984). 83 Jerome S. Bruner, “The Narrative Construction of Reality,” Critical Inquiry 18 (1991), 1-21; 4. 84 Jerome S. Bruner, Actual Minds, Possible Worlds (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986), 11. 85 Ernest G. Bormann, “Symbolic Convergence Theory: A Communication Formulation,” Journal of Communication 35, no. 4 (1985): 128-138. 86 Ernest G. Bormann, “The Symbolic Convergence Theory of Communication: Applications and Implications for Teachers and Consultants,” Journal of Applied Communication Research 10, no. 1 (1982): 50-61. 87 Bormann, “Symbolic Convergence Theory: A Communication Formulation”: 130. 88 Ibid. 89 Bormann, “The Symbolic Convergence Theory of Communication”: 52. 90 Bormann, “Symbolic Convergence Theory: A Communication Formulation.” 91 Zelizer, “Journalists as Interpretive Communities”: 223. 92 Ibid., 224. 93 Ibid. 94 Allan, “Journalism as Interpretive Performance.” 95 Cheney, “The Rhetoric of Identification”: 143-158. 96 Ibid., 145. 97 Dawna I. Ballard and David R. Seibold, “Time Orientation and Temporal Variation Across Work Groups: Implications for Group and Organizational Communication,” Western Journal of Communication 64, no. 2 (2000): 218-242. 98 Ballard and Seibold, “Time Orientation.”
272
99 Ibid. 100 Dan Gillmor, We the Media: Grassroots Journalism by the People, for the People (Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly Media, 2006. 101 Todd Graham, “Talking Back, But Is Anyone Listening? Journalism and Comment Fields,” in Rethinking Journalism: Trust and Participation in a Tramsformed News Landscape, edited by Chris Peters and Marcel Broersma (London and New York: Routledge, 2013), 114-127. 102 John A. Hatcher, “A View from Outside: What Other Social Science Disciplines Can Teach Us About Community Journalism,” in Foundations of Community Journalism, eds. Bill Reader and John A. Hatcher (Los Angeles: Sage, 2012). 103 Lauterer, Community Journalism, 88. 104 Kevin Howley, introduction to Understanding Community Media (Los Angeles: Sage, 2010), 5. 105 Michael Meadows, Susan Forde, Jacqui Ewart, and Kerrie Foxwell, “Making Good Sense: Transformative Processes in Community Journalism,” Journalism 10, no. 2 (2009): 155-170, 158. 106 Howley, Understanding Community Media.
Research Practices: A Homecoming of Sorts 1 West Virginia Day is the anniversary of West Virginia’s statehood, established in 1863. 2 “Gazette-Mail to Eliminate Monday Print Edition,” Charleston Gazette-Mail, August 21, 2017, https://www.wvgazettemail.com/business/gazette-mail-to-eliminate-monday- print-edition/article_175dde41-b91b-51c9-8b0d-17e5dbf15a71.html/. 3 “‘Report for America’ Pilot Project Begins in Appalachia,” Charleston Gazette-Mail, September 26, 2017, https://www.wvgazettemail.com/news/report-for-america-pilot- project-begins-in-appalachia/article_f8e356cb-73db-5f5b-8fb0-7c245918f4b5.html/. 4 Kristen Hare, “Report for America Aims to Get 1,000 Journalists in Local Newsrooms in Next 5 Years,” Poynter, September 18, 2017, https://www.poynter.org/news/report- america-aims-get-1000-journalists-local-newsrooms-next-5-years/. 5 “GroundTruth Announces Journalists for Report for America Pilot,” Charleston Gazette-Mail, December 22, 2017, https://www.wvgazettemail.com/news/groundtruth- announces-journalists-for-report-for-america-pilot/article_f0e95459-c2a5-50ae-8596- 42f55e3f7cde.html/. 6 Jake Zuckerman, “Politifact Partners with Gazette-Mail to Fact-Check WV Politicians,” Charleston Gazette-Mail, October 17, 2017, https://www.wvgazettemail.com/news/politics/politifact-partners-with-gazette-mail-to- fact-check-wv-politicians/article_1639fd72-7dcf-5914-8f52-a2bbc72ab2b3.html/. 7 “Gazette-Mail Chosen for ProPublica Local Reporting Project,” Charleston Gazette- Mail, December 8, 2017, paragraph 2, https://www.wvgazettemail.com/news/gazette- mail-chosen-for-propublica-local-reporting-project/article_0de75331-3032-5867-bbb4- 7a6d3acf80e2.html/.
273
8 Donald Trump, Twitter post, January 2, 2018, 8:05 p.m., https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/948359545767841792 9 J. D. Vance’s bestselling book Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis (New York: HarperCollins, 2016) came to embody for many people, myself included, the frustrating habit of outsiders to uncritically apply a “culture of poverty” lens to the region and its people and the failure to acknowledge historical and ongoing structural realities. Examples of critiques of Vance’s book by native Appalachians include Ivy Brashear, “Response to ‘Hillbilly Elegy,’” The Young Kentuckian (blog), Kentucky Student Environmental Coalition, April 3, 2017, http://www.kystudentenvironmentalcoalition.org/ksec-blog/response-to-hillbilly-elegy; “Hillbilly Elegy: Another Generalization of Appalachia,” The Homesick Appalachian (blog), March 5, 2017, http://www.thehomesickappalachian.com/hillbillyelegy/; and James Branscome, “Review: Lamenting ‘Hillbilly Elegy,’” The Daily Yonder, August 3, 2016, http://www.dailyyonder.com/review-lamenting-hillbilly-elegy/2016/08/03/14622/. Brashear’s blog post was re-published by the Huffington Post on April 10, 2017. 10 Steven Stoll, Ramp Hollow: The Ordeal of Appalachia (New York: Hill and Wang, 2017). 11 Elizabeth Catte, What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia (Cleveland: Belt Publishing, 2018). 12 On two occasions during my fieldwork, I stayed overnight in Charleston at a hotel a few blocks from the Gazette-Mail building. As a result, my commute time on the following mornings was reduced to about five minutes. 13 As ethnographic research increasingly addresses sites with which the researcher is already well-acquainted, traditional understandings of home and the field are complicated. In Constructing the Field: Ethnographic Fieldwork in the Contemporary World (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), editor Amit Vered argued that historical efforts to distinguish home from the field via travel-based metaphors are “undone as much by the cognitive and emotional journeys which fieldworkers make in looking at familiar practices and sites with new ethnographic lenses as by the transnational organization of many academics’ lives.” (p. 8). 14 Most of my observations were made between the hours of 9 a.m. and 6 p.m., the times when reporters and editors were most likely to be in the newsroom. However, on seven of the 29 days I spent observing the newsroom, I arrived in the early afternoon and remained until at least the deadline of the first edition around 9 p.m. to better observe employees on the copy desk and others working that later schedule. I remained in the newsroom until production of the final edition was wrapping up at approximately 11 p.m. on two occasions. 15 In her interviews with fellow anthropologists, Jean E. Jackson found a precise definition of the term “fieldnotes” to be elusive and that the definitions provided by her participants reflected highly personal relationships to the data and the process of compiling it. See “‘I Am a Fieldnote’: Fieldnotes as a Symbol of Professional Identity,” in Fieldnotes: The Makings of Anthropology, ed. Roger Sanjek (Ithaca, NY: Cornell
274
University Press, 1990), 3-33. Roger Sanjek contends that fieldnotes are “written, usually, for an audience of one” meant “to produce meaning through interaction with the ethnographer’s headnotes.” See “A Vocabulary for Fieldnotes,” in Fieldnotes: The Makings of Anthropology, ed. Roger Sanjek (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990), 92-136; 92. I use the term generally to encompass all documentation of my research practices (any typed or handwritten notes, maps or drawings, interview transcripts, printed material shared with me by participants, or mental notes made throughout the process). To distinguish among these varied items, I apply the term “scratch notes” to jottings meant to quickly capture events as they occurred and “headnotes” to those impressions captured mentally. My definitions of these terms are in line with those provided by Robert L. Emerson, Rachel I. Fretz, and Linda L. Shaw in Writing Ethnographic Fieldnotes, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011). 16 These meetings typically were held between 9:30 and 10 a.m. Monday through Thursday, so I did not attend on days when I arrived later to the newsroom, and no meetings were held on the Fridays I spent in the newsroom. On some days, one or more of the editors did not attend the meeting because of other commitments (e.g., the image editor occasionally had to shoot a photo assignment at that time) or time off. 17 James Clifford, “Traveling Cultures,” in Cultural Studies, ed. Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, and Paula Treichler (New York: Routledge, 1992), 96-116; 99-100. 18 Ibid., 99. 19 Other documents included an agenda for the meeting of the workflow group described later in this chapter and clippings from the Gazette and Gazette-Mail archives provided to me by editor emeritus Jim Haught. 20 Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973). 21 Herbert Gans’s Deciding What’s News: A Study of CBS Evening News, NBC Nightly News, Newsweek and Time (Chicago: Northwestern University Press, 1979) and Gaye Tuchman’s Making News: A Study in the Construction of Reality (New York: The Free Press, 1978) are examples of early ethnographies that continue to inform scholarship on journalism. More recent ethnographies include Valerie Belair-Gagnon, Social Media at BBC News: The Re-making of Crisis Reporting (New York and London: Routledge, 2015) and Nikki Usher, Making News at The New York Times (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2014). 22 Chris Paterson, “Introduction: Why Ethnography?” in Making Online News: The Ethnography of New Media Production, ed. Chris Paterson and David Domingo (New York: Peter Lang, 2008), 1-11; 2. 23 In the transcription process, I did not record vocal disfluencies (e.g. “uh” and “um”) but I did record all other verbal elements of the conversations. I have edited some responses used in this text for length or to eliminate repetitions, false starts, or other content that could produce confusion. 24 See Appendix B for details of my IRB submission and exemption notice. 25 I came across a copy of this edition in one of several scrapbooks editor emeritus Jim Haught showed me during my interview with him near the end of my fieldwork.
275
26 Sonya Corbin Dwyer and Jennifer L. Buckle, “The Space Between: On Being an Insider-Outsider in Qualitative Research,” International Journal of Qualitative Methods 8, no. 1 (2009): 54-63; 61. 27 Dwyer & Buckle, “The Space Between.” 28 Walter Benjamin, “The Storyteller: Reflections on the Works of Nicolai Leskov Critical Essays,” in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Jovanovich, 1968), 83-109; 92 29 Joan Didion, “The White Album,” in The White Album (New York: Pocket Books, 1979), 11-47; 11. 30 Kathleen Stewart, A Space on the Side of the Road (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), 29. 31 Anthropologists Daniella Gandolfo and Todd Ramón Ochoa called stories the “very lifeblood” of ethnography in “Ethnographic Excess,” in Crumpled Paper Boat, ed. Anand Pandian and Stuart McLean (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017), 185-188; 187. Qualitative communication scholar Johnny Saldaña identified narrative analysis as “particularly suitable for such inquiries as identity development; psychological, social, and cultural meanings and values” in The Coding Manual for Qualitative Researchers, 2nd ed. (Los Angeles: Sage, 2013), Kindle edition, loc. 3430. These examples represent a larger body of support for a focus on narrative in the study of culture and identity. 32 In my analysis, I adhere to Phillida Salmon and Catherine Kohler Riessman’s treatment of narrative as a more expansive phenomenon than traditional notions of constructed accounts that follow an easily recognizable format allow. Narrative, as I use the term in this chapter, takes a wide range of forms but consistently represents an attempt to construct meaning, and may emerge from a single source or across a broader discourse. See “Looking Back on Narrative Research: An Exchange,” in Doing Narrative Research, 2nd ed., ed. Molly Andrews, Corinne Squire, and Maria Tamboukou (Los Angeles: Sage, 2013), 197-204. As Salmon wrote: “A fundamental criterion of narrative is surely contingency. Whatever the content, stories demand the consequential linking of events or ideas. Narrative shaping entails imposing a meaningful pattern on what would otherwise be random and disconnected.” (p. 197) 33 Jean E. Jackson, “‘I Am a Fieldnote’: Fieldnotes as a Symbol of Professional Identity,” in Fieldnotes: The Makings of Anthropology, ed. Roger Sanjek (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990), 3-34; 7. 34 My process generally followed the basic rules prescribed for grounded theory coding. See Kathy Charmaz, Constructing Grounded Theory: A Practical Guide Through Qualitative Analysis (London: Sage, 2006). However, my practices did not conform to grounded theory’s demand for a strictly inductive analysis. Rather, I took an abductive approach, as explained later in this chapter. 35 Devika Chawla. Home, Uprooted. (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014), 22. 36 Margery Wolf, A Thrice-Told Tale: Feminism, Postmodernism, and Ethnographic Responsibility (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1992).
276
37 Michael Taussig, I Swear I Saw This (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 6. 38 Michael H. Agar, The Professional Stranger: An Informal Introduction to Ethnography (San Diego: Academic Press, 1996), 35. 39 Thomas R. Lindlof and Bryan C. Taylor, Qualitative Communication Research Methods, 3rd ed. (Los Angeles: Sage, 2011), 242.
Negotiating Communities 1 Joe Manchin, Twitter post, January 6, 2018, 8:13 a.m., https://twitter.com/Sen_JoeManchin/status/949675321657384961 2 Ken Ward Jr., “Nyden Remembered as Crusading Reporter, Loyal Friend and Mentor, Great Storyteller,” Charleston Gazette-Mail, January 6, 2018, https://www.wvgazettemail.com/news/nyden-remembered-as-crusading-reporter-loyal- friend-and-mentor-great/article_141953f8-53cc-5b91-bb78-c925e829f8a5.html/. 3 Greg Moore, Twitter post, January 6, 2018, 8:59 a.m., https://twitter.com/gregmoorewv/status/949686953318010889. Watt Powell Park was the home stadium for several Charleston-based minor league baseball teams from the mid- 1900s to the early 2000s. 4 See the following sources for support for the notion that socialization and group membership negotiation are bi-directional processes: Caroline A. Bartel, Amy Wrzesniewski, and Batia Wiesenfeld, “The Struggle to Establish Organizational Membership and Identification in Remote Work Contexts,” in Identity and the Modern Organization, ed. Caroline Bartel, Steven L. Blader, and Amy Wrzesniewski (New York: Psychology Press, 2012), 125-139; Talya N. Bauer and Stephen G. Green, “Testing the Combined Effects of Newcomer Information Seeking and Manager Behavior on Socialization,” Journal of Applied Psychology 83, no. 1 (1998): 72-83; and Moira Burke, Robert Kraut, and Elisabeth Joyce, “Membership Claims and Requests: Conversation- Level Newcomer Socialization Strategies in Online Groups,” Small Group Research 41, no. 1 (2010): 4-40. 5 Anthony P. Cohen, The Symbolic Construction of Community (Chichester, UK: Ellis Horwood Limited, 1985), 12. 6 Cohen, The Symbolic Construction of Community, 12. 7 Ibid., 12. 8 Charleston is located in Kanawha County. Putnam is a neighboring county. 9 The absence of photojournalists represented a particularly steep cost for the Gazette- Mail during my time there. Two photojournalists, one primarily a still photographer and the other primarily a videographer, left the newspaper relatively early in my fieldwork. As a result, the photo/video staff consisted of only three employees, including the image editor, for most of the time I was in the newsroom. A fourth member joined the staff the last day I was there. 10 David W. McMillan and David M. Chavis, “Sense of Community: A Definition and Theory,” Journal of Community Psychology 14, no. 1 (1986): 6-23; 10.
277
11 David T. Bastien found in his study of the acquisition of an equipment leasing firm by a regional financial institution that accommodation to a new organization does not occur uniformly. As some members of the “minority” organization adapt to their new environment, those individuals who resist accommodation differentiate themselves not only from the members of the “majority” organization but also from their colleagues who have committed to the new organization. See “Change in Organizational Culture: The Use of Linguistic Methods in a Corporate Acquisition,” Management Communication Quarterly 5, no. 4 (1992): 403-442. 12 David Hugh Weaver and G. Cleveland Wilhoit, The American Journalist in the 1990s: U.S. News People at the End of an Era (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1996), 172. 13 Howard Tumber and Marina Prentoulis, “Journalism and the Making of a Profession,” in Making Journalists, ed. Hugo de Burgh (London and New York: Routledge, 2005): 58-74; 71. 14 “Confidence in Institutions: Trends in Americans’ Attitudes Toward Government, Media, and Business,” The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, accessed February 19, 2018, http://www.apnorc.org/projects/Pages/HTML%20Reports/confidence-in-institutions- trends-in-americans-attitudes-toward-government-media-and-business0310- 2333.aspx#recordlows/. 15 Irwin Altman, “Dialects, Physical Environments, and Personal Relationships,” Communication Monographs 60, no. 1 (1993): 28-34; 31-32. 16 Akhteruz Zaman, “Newsroom as Battleground: Journalists’ Descriptions of their Workspaces,” Journalism Studies 14, no. 6 (2013): 819-834; 824. 17 Zaman, “Newsroom as Battleground.” 18 Kanawha City is a neighborhood in Charleston. 19 The Silver Bridge, which connected Point Pleasant, West Virginia, and Gallipolis, Ohio, collapsed in 1967, killing 46 people. 20 In 1970, a plane carrying most of the Marshall University football team and coaching staff, along with some boosters and members of the media, crashed near the Tri-State Airport in Huntington. All 75 people on board were killed. The film We Are Marshall is based on the aftermath of the crash. 21 Brad Johnson, “Blankenship Calls Critics ‘Communists,’ ‘Atheists,’ and ‘Greeniacs,’” Think Progress, November 24, 2008, https://thinkprogress.org/coal-baron-blankenship- calls-critics-communists-atheists-and-greeniacs-9701043e4b96/. 22 Caroline Bartel and Jane Dutton, “Ambiguous Organizational Memberships: Constructing Organizational Identities with Others,” in Social Identity Processes in Organizational Contexts, ed. Michael A. Hogg and Deborah J. Terry (Philadelphia: Psychology Press, 2001), 115-130. 23 See, for instance, Talya N. Bauer and Stephen G. Green, “Testing the Combined Effects of Newcomer Information Seeking and Manager Behavior on Socialization,” Journal of Applied Psychology 83, no. 1 (1998): 72-83.
278
The Newsroom as a Multicultural Space 1 In 1978, ASNE committed to achieving racial representation in the industry on par with that of the general population by 2000. When that goal was not met, the organization set 2025 as a new deadline, but recent studies show little progress has been made. See Karen K. Ho, “Diversity in Newsrooms Has Been Bad for Decades and It Probably Won’t Get Better: Study,” Columbia Journalism Review, August 16, 2017, https://www.cjr.org/business_of_news/diversity-newsrooms-asne-study.php/. 2 Lars Willnat, David H. Weaver, and G. Cleveland Wilhoit, The American Journalist in the Digital Age (New York: Peter Lang, 2017). 3 This figure is based on 2016 estimates. See United States Census Bureau, “Quick Facts: United States,” accessed March 17, 2018, https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/US/RHI125216#viewtop/. 4 U.S. Census Bureau, “Quick Facts: United States.” 5 Willnat, Weaver, and Wilhoit, The American Journalist in the Digital Age. 6 See, for example, Maxwell E. McCombs, Donald L. Shaw, and David H. Weaver, “New Directions in Agenda-Setting Theory and Research,” Mass Communication and Society 17, no. 6 (2014): 781-802, and Axel Bruns, Gatewatching: Collaborative Online News Production (New York: Peter Lang, 2005). 7 Matt Gertz, “Stagnant American Newsroom Diversity in Charts,” Media Matters for America (blog), June 25, 2013, https://www.mediamatters.org/blog/2013/06/25/stagnant- american-newsroom-diversity-in-charts/194597/. 8 Richard Fausset, “A Voice of Hate in America’s Heartland,” The New York Times, November 25, 2017, last accessed March 17, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/25/us/ohio-hovater-white-nationalist.html?_r=0/. 9 Matthew Chapman, Twitter post, November 25, 2017, 4:33 p.m., https://twitter.com/fawfulfan/status/934580755509981184/. 10 Grace Moon, “On the New York Times Neo-Nazi Profile and Why We Can’t Normalize Hate to Preserve Objectivity,” LinkedIn (blog), December 4, 2017, https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/new-york-times-neo-nazi-profile-why-we-cant-afford- normalize-moon/. 11 United States Census Bureau, “Quick Facts: West Virginia,” accessed March 17, 2018, https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/WV/. 12 Mara B. Adelman and Lawrence R. Frey, The Fragile Community: Living Together with AIDS (Mahweh, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1997), 39. 13 Kabler was another longtime Gazette-Mail reporter based at the statehouse. 14 See T. Brad Harris, Ning Li, Wendy R. Boswell, Xin-An Zhang, and Zhitao Xie, “Getting What’s New from Newcomers: Empowering Leadership, Creativity and Adjustment in the Socialization Context,” Personnel Psychology 67, no. 3 (2014): 567- 604. 15 See Allison M. Ellis, Sushil S. Nifadkar, Talya N. Bauer, and Berrin Erdogan, “Newcomer Adjustment: Examining the Role of Managers’ Perceptions of Newcomer
279
Proactive Behavior During Organizational Socialization,” Journal of Applied Psychology 102, no. 6 (2017): 993-1001; and James T. Mignerey, Rebecca B. Rubin, and William I. Gorden, “Organizational Entry: An Investigation of Newcomer Communication Behavior and Uncertainty,” Communication Research 22, no. 1 (1995): 54-85. 16 Jon A. Hess, “Assimilating Newcomers into an Organization: A Cultural Perspective,” Journal of Applied Communication Research 21, no. 2 (1993): 189-210; 194. 17 Hess, “Assimilating Newcomers.” 18 “Daily Mail, Gazette to Become the Charleston Gazette-Mail,” Charleston Gazette- Mail, July 19, 2015, https://www.wvgazettemail.com/business/daily-mail-gazette- become-the-charleston-gazette-mail/article_1edb9229-d7d6-5e7b-8bdc- 66dd143c2d24.html/. 19 Organizational scholar Meryl Reis Louis observed that individuals regularly contrast their experiences in new settings to those they acquired outside those settings: “For instance, the newcomer may evaluate aspects of the new role using old-role experiences as anchors on internal comparison scales. Or the newcomer may try to incorporate aspects of the old into the new role or resist the new role in favor of the old role.” See “Surprise and Sense Making: What Newcomers Expect in Entering Unfamiliar Organizational Settings,” Administrative Science Quarterly 25, no. 2 (1980): 226-251; 237. 20 Philip Maramba, “Reflections on the Daily Mail Newsroom,” Charleston Gazette- Mail, March 23, 2018, https://www.wvgazettemail.com/opinion/daily_mail_opinion/daily_mail_columnists/phili p-maramba-reflections-on-the-daily-mail-newsroom-daily-mail/article_f776d067-529f- 56a7-a79d-1289ea7e6662.html/. 21 See, for example, Sanghamitra Chaudhuri and Rajashi Ghosh, “Reverse Mentoring: A Social Exchange Tool for Keeping the Boomers Engaged and the Millennials Committed,” Human Resource Development Review 11, no. 1 (2012): 55-76. 22 Karen K. Myers and Kamyab Sadaghiani, “Millennials in the Workplace: A Communication Perspective on Millennials’ Organizational Relationships and Performances,” Journal of Business and Psychology 25, no. 2 (2010): 225-238. 23 Amy J. Lynch, “ROI on Generation Y Employees: Best Practice Human Capital Management of Generation Y,” Bottom Line Conversations, LLC, April 2008, https://www.knoxvillechamber.com/pdf/workforce/ROIonGenYWhitePaper.pdf/. 24 At the time of my fieldwork, individuals in their 20s with student loan debts owed, on average, more than $22,000. Average monthly payments for borrowers in their 20s was $351, nearly $150 higher than the median monthly payment. See Abigail Hess, “Here’s How Much the Average American in Their 20s Has in Student Debt,” cnbc.com, June 14, 2017, https://www.cnbc.com/2017/06/14/heres-how-much-the-average-american-in-their- 20s-has-in-student-debt.html/. 25 Kristen Hare, “For Local Journalists, Money Isn’t Everything—‘But You’ve Got to Be Able to Live,’” Poynter, March 7, 2018, https://www.poynter.org/news/local-journalists- money-isnt-everything-youve-got-be-able-live
280
26 See Chaudhuri and Ghosh, “Reverse Mentoring.” As the authors explain in the article, the basic idea is credited to former General Electric CEO Jack Welch. 27 Myers and Sadaghiani, “Millennials in the Workplace,” 229. 28 Bruce Tulgan, Not Everyone Gets a Trophy: How to Manage Generation Y (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2009). 29 Nancy M. Schullery, “Workplace Engagement and Generational Differences in Values,” Business Communication Quarterly 76, no. 2 (2013): 252-265; 252. 30 See Jessica Brack and Kip Kelly, “Maximizing Millennials in the Workplace,” (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Kenan-Flagler Business School, 2012), http://www.kenan-flagler.unc.edu/executive-development/custom- programs/~/media/files/documents/executive-development/maximizing-millennials-in- the-workplace.pdf/. 31 Nikki Usher, Making News at The New York Times (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2014). 32 See Brian Ekdale, Jane B. Singer, Melissa Tully, and Shawn Harmsen, “Making Change: Diffusion of Technological, Relational, and Cultural Innovation in the Newsroom,” Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly (2015): 1-21; and Peter J. Gade and Earnest L. Perry, “Changing the Newsroom Culture: A Four-Year Case Study of Organizational Development at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch,” Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly 80, no. 2 (2003): 327-347.
Tradition and Change at the Gazette-Mail 1 Elizabeth Blanks Hindman, “Community, Democracy, and Neighborhood News,” Journal of Communication 48, no. 2 (1998): 27-39; 28. 2 Isabel Molina Guzmán, “Competing Discourses of Community: Ideological Tensions Between Local General-Market and Latino News Media,” Journalism 7, no. 3 (2006): 281-298; 292. 3 John D’Emilio, “The Leading Edge of Change: The LGBT Press in the 1970s,” forward to Gay Press, Gay Power: The Growth of LGBT Community Newspapers in America, ed. Tracy Baim (Chicago: Prairie Avenue Productions and Windy City Media Group, 2012), 9-10. 4 According to the 2017 Distressed Communities Index developed by the Economic Innovation Group from 2011-2015 U.S. Census Bureau data, only 3.1 percent of West Virginians lived in prosperity as opposed to 47.4 percent of the residents of Utah, the most prosperous state in the country. See http://eig.org/dci/. 5 Brent Cunningham, “Sustained Outrage: Ken Ward Jr. Stayed Home to Make a Difference,” Columbia Journalism Review, November/December 2011, https://archives.cjr.org/feature/sustained_outrage.php/. 6 I noted a clear distinction between the reporting philosophy and practices of the Gazette and the Gazette-Mail and those of the three Appalachian newspapers studied by Michael Clay Carey in his book The News Untold: Community Journalism and the Failure to Confront Poverty in Appalachia (Morgantown: West Virginia University Press, 2017).
281
Carey stated that in his research, “local journalists’ approaches to poverty combined with readers’ interpretations to reinforce” (p. 4) a culture of poverty ideology. The work being done at the Gazette-Mail explicitly challenged that ideology and clearly addressed the historic and structural factors famously absent from culture of poverty narratives. 7 David M. Ryfe, “Broader and Deeper: A Study of Newsroom Culture in a Time of Change,” Journalism 10, no. 2 (2009): 197-216; 211. 8 For a comprehensive examination of Ned Chilton’s philosophy and impact on the Gazette, see Edgar C. Simpson’s thesis, “‘Sustained Outrage’: Owner/Publisher W. E. ‘Ned’ Chilton and the Charleston (West Virginia) Gazette, 1962-1987” (master’s thesis, Ohio University, 2009), https://etd.ohiolink.edu/!etd.send_file?accession=ohiou1256223199&disposition=inline. 9 Haught’s work was profiled alongside that of Carl Bernstein, Sy Hersh, and other well- known journalists of the 1970s in John C. Behrens’ book, The Typewriter Guerrillas: Closeups of 20 Top Investigative Reporters (Chicago: Nelson-Hall, 1977). 10 William E. Chilton III, “Hallmark of Crusading Journalism Is Sustained Outrage,” Charleston Gazette, November 18, 1983. 11 Behrens, The Typewriter Guerrillas, 119. 12 Kay Michael, “Ned Chilton,” in e-WV: The West Virginia Encyclopedia, October 4, 2012. https://www.wvencyclopedia.org/articles/1164/. 13 James Haught, “Corruption Result of Weak Press?” Charleston Gazette, September 22, 1980. 14 Simpson, “Sustained Outrage.” 15 Peter J. Gade and Earnest L. Perry, “Changing the Newsroom Culture: A Four-Year Case Study of Organizational Development at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch,” Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly 80, no. 2 (2003): 327-347. 16 David M. Ryfe, Can Journalism Survive? An Inside Look at American Newsrooms (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2012), 20. 17 Sue Robinson, “‘Beaming Up’ Traditional Journalists: The Transition of an American Newspaper into Cyberspace,” in Making Online News Volume 2: Newsroom Ethnographies in the Second Decade of Internet Journalism (New York: Peter Lang, 2011), 31-44; 38. 18 In July 2017, the U.S. Census Bureau estimated that nearly 19 percent of West Virginians were 65 or older, the third-highest percentage among U.S. states. See “Quick Facts,” accessed May 2, 2018, https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/PA,VT,ME,FL,WV/PST045217/. 19 The Federal Communication Commission’s “2016 Broadband Progress Report” showed that 30 percent of West Virginians and 48 percent of state residents living in rural areas lacked broadband services, making the state 47th out of 50 in terms of connectivity. See https://www.fcc.gov/reports-research/reports/broadband-progress-reports/2016- broadband-progress-report/. 20 Nikki Usher, Making News at The New York Times (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2014), 122.
282
21 Chris Paterson, “Why Ethnography?” introduction to Making Online News: The Ethnography of New Media Production, ed. Chris Paterson and David Domingo (New York: Peter Lang, 2008), 1-11; 6. 22 C. W. Anderson, Rebuilding the News: Metropolitan Journalism in the Digital Age (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2013), 137. 23 Brian Ekdale, Jane B. Singer, Melissa Tully, and Shawn Harmsen, “Making Change: Diffusion of Technological, Relational, and Cultural Innovation in the Newsroom,” Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly 92, no. 4 (2015): 938-958.
Conclusion: What Gets Lost and Why It Matters 1 Peter Block, Community: The Structure of Belonging (San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc., 2008). 2 Barbie Zelizer, Taking Journalism Seriously: News and the Academy (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2004). 3 Gaye Tuchman, Making News: A Study in the Construction of Reality (New York: The Free Press, 1978). 4 Herbert Gans, Deciding What’s News: A Study of CBS Evening News, NBC Nightly News, Newsweek and Time (Chicago: Northwestern University Press, 1979). 5 Mark Fishman, Manufacturing the News (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1980). 6 Zelizer, Taking Journalism Seriously, 68 7 C. W. Anderson, Rebuilding the News: Metropolitan Journalism in the Digital Age (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2013). 8 Valerie Belair-Gagnon, Social Media at BBC News: The Re-making of Crisis Reporting (New York and London: Routledge, 2015). 9 Nikki Usher, Making News at The New York Times (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2014. 10 Barbie Zelizer, “Journalists as Interpretive Communities,” Critical Studies in Mass Communication 10 (1993): 219-237; 221. 11 Caroline A. Bartel, Amy Wrzesniewski, and Batia Wiesenfeld, “The Struggle to Establish Organizational Membership and Identification in Remote Work Contexts,” in Identity and the Modern Organization, eds. Caroline A. Bartel, Steven L. Blader, and Amy Wrzesniewski (New York: Psychology Press, 2012), 125-139. 12 Bartel, Wrzesniewski, and Wiesenfeld cited Richard L. Daft, and Robert H. Lengel, “Organizational Information Requirements, Media Richness and Structural Design,” Management Science 32, no. 5 (1986): 554-571; Daft, Lengel, and Linda Klebe Treviño, “Message Equivocality, Media Selection, and Manager Performance: Implications for Information Systems,” MIS Quarterly 11, no. 3 (1987): 355-366; Terri L. Griffith, John E. Sawyer, and Margaret A. Neale, “Virtualness and Knowledge in Teams: Managing the Love Triangle of Organizations, Individuals, and Information Technology,” MIS Quarterly 27, no. 2 (2003): 265-287; and Sara Kiesler, and Lee Sproull, “Group Decision Making and Communication Technology,” Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes 52, no. 1 (1992): 96-123.
283
13 Bartel, Wrzesniewski, and Wiesenfeld cited Ned Kock, “The Psychobiological Model: Towards a New Theory of Computer-Mediated Communication Based on Darwinian Evolution,” Organization Science 15, no. 3 (2004): 327-348; Wanda J. Orlikowski, JoAnne Yates, Kazuo Okamura, and Masayo Fujimoto, “Shaping Electronic Communication: The Metastructuring of Technology in the Context of Use,” Organization Science 6, no. 4 (1995): 423-444; and Joseph B. Walther, “Interpersonal Effects in Computer-Mediated Interaction: A Relational Perspective,” Communication Research 19, no. 1 (1992): 52-90. 14 Bartel, Wrzesniewski, & Wiesenfeld, “The Struggle to Establish Organizational Membership.” 15 Roger S. Ahlbrandt Jr. and James V. Cunningham, A New Public Policy for Neighborhood Preservation (New York: Praeger, 1979). 16 Kenneth M. Bachrach and Alex J. Zautra, “Coping with a Community Stressor: The Threat of a Hazardous Waste Facility,” Journal of Health and Social Behavior 26, no. 2 (1985): 127-141. 17 Ken Ward Jr., Twitter post, February 8, 2018, 6:00 a.m., https://twitter.com/Kenwardjr/status/961600516701720576 18 Ken Ward Jr., Twitter post, March 28, 2018, 2:54 a.m., https://twitter.com/Kenwardjr/status/978933254685450240 19 Rick Steelhammer, Twitter post, March 28, 2018, 8:09 a.m., https://twitter.com/rsteelhammer/status/979012723869708288
Appendix B: IRB Submission and Exemption Notice 1 Although I conducted two oral history interviews with journalists who had no connection to the Gazette-Mail at the beginning of the research process, I ultimately chose to focus solely on my observations and interviews in the Charleston newsroom. Within the first few weeks of my fieldwork, I recognized that the incorporation of data from outside interviews would unnecessarily distract from the richness of the data emerging in my primary case study.
284 ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! !
Thesis and Dissertation Services ! !