Radio Reverb: The Impact of “Local” News Reimported to Its Own Community

What Predicts the Game Frame? Media Ownership, Electoral Context, and Campaign News

“…The empirical record is incomplete, however, especially with regard to horse-race news. There is limited empirical evidence of the effects of local versus nonlocal ownership on news content (Schaffner, 2005), and studies that have tested the relationship between group ownership and local public affairs programming have found no general effect on news content (Hood, 2007;Wirth & Wollert, 1979). Still, the intuitive and theoretical case for the impact of ownership structure on election news seems strong.…”

“…We categorize each newspaper into a four-category media company typology. Our designed measure of ownership structure accounts for the structural characteristics that many scholars have scrutinized: single-holding local ownership (Hood, 2007;Napoli, 2002); publicly traded versus privately owned and controlled ownership (Dunaway, 2008;Hamilton, 2004); chain ownership (Hamilton, 2004;Schaffner, 2005); and nonlocal ownership (Hood, 2007;Napoli, 2002).…”

EARwitness Testimony: Applying Listener Perspectives to Developing a Working Concept of “Localism” in Broadcast Radio

“…We argue that broadcast radio consolidation and the resulting decrease of ''local'' characteristics in news content are signs of a perceived ''paradigm shift'' among station owners and managers in their perception and definition of what is ''local.'' Existing literature suggests that as a result of ''news outsourcing,'' the line between locally and remotely produced news is gradually blurring (Hood, 2007). The present study addresses the question of whether such a shift has also occurred in the perceptions of radio listeners.…”

“…What former Federal Communications Commission (FCC) member Gloria Tristani (1998) called ''outsourcing of news'' appears to be one of the biggest risks of consolidation: recent studies have shown that ''taking radio news content out of its local context changes its nature in fundamental ways'' (Hood, 2007). We argue that those fundamental changes are taking away an essential value from radio listeners.…”

“…Since most of the research in this area has been conducted before the enactment of the Telecommunications Act and the increased influence from Clear Channel Communications, Chambers (2003) calls for an update of the existing literature (p. 35). His study is focused on the effect of consolidation on programming in local radio markets, which Hood (2007) expanded to include the area of radio news. The present project looks at the changing nature of ''local'' news under the impact of radio consolidation from a listener's perspective.…”