Imagined commodities? Analyzing local identity and place in American community newspaper website banners

Abstract

American community newspapers, as well as larger daily publications, do little to articulate a sense of local identity or place in the banners of their websites, or their newspaper names atop the web page. Instead, newspapers routinely articulate a professional identity above a local one – often omitting the name of the community entirely, and only occasionally offering a major visual expression of the community. This complicates Benedict Anderson’s sense of ‘imagined communities’, which argues that local identity is constructed through clear articulation by print media; if newspaper websites ignore local identity in their banners, then community newspapers today are imaging commodity rather than community. This qualitative analysis of 40 American community newspapers and 80 daily American newspapers divides that local articulation into four categories (absent identity, secondary identity, equal identity and visual identity) and explores implications for the academy and newspaper industry.

Discourses of sameness: Expressions of nationalism in newspaper discourse on French urban violence in 2005

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FRONTLINE: Place-makers of the mind: Symbolic reconstruction of an inner city park

“…question in the 'what, where, who, why, how and when?' template of journalistic investigation is increasingly disregarded (see, for example, Buchanan, 2009;Funk, 2012), collaborating with Indigenous sources can reverse this by informing journalists about the underlying character of places. From Bourdieu, who connects his theoretical mainstay of habitus (see Mason, et al, 2016) with the notion of place, stating that habitus 'implies a "sense of one's place" and a "sense of the place of others"' (Bourdieu, 1989, p. 19) within a field of endeavour, Thomson, et al (2015, p. 141) suggest two potential benefits.…”

Expression of Culture in the Amish Press

“…(B. Anderson, 1983, p. 35) Scholars have conceptualized the mediation of imagined community as the expression of a shared social space (Funk, 2012;Gupta & Ferguson, 1992;J. Jenkins, 2016) or as a common set of values developed out of an affinity for certain types of journalistic or literary work (Delgado, 1998;Dollase, 2003;Johanningsmeier, 2004;Webb, 2006).…”