Oral history project documenting local newsrooms during the pandemic shows how journalists are 'essential workers' - Entrepreneur Generations

The coronavirus pandemic exacerbated financial problems for local newsrooms across the U.S., resulting in thousands of layoffs and more than 70 newsroom closures. Two journalism professors set out to document the pandemic's impact on small community newsrooms in seven states and show how local journalists are truly "essential workers," Kristen Hare reports for Poynter. "Teri Finneman, an associate professor at the University of Kansas’ William Allen White School of Journalism and Mass Communications, and William Mari, an assistant professor of media law at Louisiana State University’s Manship School of Mass Communications, got funding to capture the moment from state newspaper associations in North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas and Arkansas and from their own universities."

The oral history project, hosted by Poynter, covered newsrooms in Arkansas, Kansas, Louisiana, Nebraska, North Dakota, Oklahoma, and South Dakota. "The idea was to capture history as it was happening and to grab memories while they were fresh of journalists surviving a pandemic of global proportions for the first time in a century," Mari told Hare. 

Finneman and Mari documented the big changes spurred by the pandemic. Many newsrooms "hit an inflection point with their digital presence that they hadn’t before," Hare reports. "Weeklies became dailies, at least online and through social media. And journalists that dismissed the internet saw how powerful it was for them and their communities."

Many of the newsrooms they covered are rural, and have played a vital role in their communities this past year especially. "These weekly rural community newspapers have just been a significant lifeline for people during this pandemic," Finneman told Hare, "and I don’t think that can be overstated."

Here's a few tidbits from the project:

Jill Friesz, who oversees four rural newspapers serving 2,000 people in western North Dakota, made up for lost revenue by walking 10 miles to deliver newspapers to all 44 subscribers who lived at lake cabins and offered a summer subscription. "This lake has been here for all of the time I’ve been here, but I have never gone up there and just put the work into it," Friesz said. "And maybe it’s just time that we start looking at things differently and do things differently and change the way we can serve our readers."

Amy Wobbema, owner and publisher of the New Rockford Transcript, a 1,000-circulation weekly in North Dakota. During the pandemic, there was so much news to report that she found her paper operating more like a daily, and sometimes saw a 600% increase in web traffic. "It seemed like whenever there was a breaking story that was Covid-19 related, it always happened right after the newspaper went to press," Wobbema said. "We were starting to write articles immediately after and post them on our website to keep the community informed in real time."

Cecile Wehrman, publisher of the Crosby Journal and Tioga Tribune, two weeklies in rural northwestern North Dakota, likewise saw huge online traffic spikes during the pandemic. The staff of six worked tirelessly while trying to find creative ways to keep the paper funded and afloat. "It just seems in my mind like one really long day, and I look at all those stories and I just go, 'Wow. How did we do all of this?' But that’s what we’re here for," Wehrman said. "This type of historic coverage gives us the opportunity to be the best that we can be and to show why newspapers are so important."

Read more here.

from The Rural Blog https://ift.tt/3kCbN6u Oral history project documenting local newsrooms during the pandemic shows how journalists are 'essential workers' - Entrepreneur Generations

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