Newspapers - Care For Your Community

The media must recruit from within their own communities if they want to keep their local audiences.

That’s the view of Online Journalism Review writer Robert Niles, who takes the opportunity in his latest post to advocate hiring reporters from the communities they will be writing about.

Niles states: “Journalism is not the business of reporting, writing and publishing newspapers ... or websites. It’s the business of community building.”

Therefore he believes that journalists ideally need to be recruited from within that community – whether it is defined by geography, interest or profession.

He asserts that this is where there has been a break within the media as “in a drive to professionalise the journalism industry (and, then, to cut costs), we’ve cut our publications off from the communities they are supposed to represent”.

Niles takes geographic communities as an example and notes that it has become established practice among newspapers to hire journalism graduates straight out of university who have top grades but little or no knowledge of the neighbourhood they’ll be covering.

“The result often is shallow, indifferent coverage that gives readers fewer compelling reasons to pick up their local paper each day.”

He concludes: “We’re not in the publishing business. We’re in the community business. And to do so successfully, we must build our businesses from within our own communities.”

The full post – “Journalism is the business of building communities - so newsrooms must hire from within those communities” – is available on Online Journalism Review.

[Picture - Community by Niall Kennedy on Flickr.]