An interesting study recently published in the journal Political Communication studies the level of civic engagement following the closure of daily newspapers in Seattle and Denver. The paper, Dead Newspapers and Citizens Civic Engagement, by Lee Shaker asserts that civic engagement in Seattle and Denver dropped from 2008 to 2009 after the Seattle PI and Rocky Mountain News closed their doors.
It is an interesting research effort that uses data from the Current Population Survey (CPS) conducted by the United States Census Bureau to analyze year over year participation in activities such as visiting a politician or attending a community organization meeting, such as a PTA or neighborhood watch group.
Reading the study I was struck by all the ways in which communities are connected with their local newspaper, and how the internet — and social media sites — have possibly drawn people away from their local news.
Thinking back to 2008 and 2009, there was significant discussion among my transportation colleagues about the shifting sands of media, and concerns we shared about how best to reach an audience the seemed to be moving away from printed publications. Marshall McLuhan, a noted communication theorist, declared in the 1960s the famous line, “the media is the message.” I began to tell my colleagues that if McLuhan was right, then “we are the media.”
Of course McLuhan was talking about media in the context of the technology that delivered the information. But I was suggesting that each of us, as individual persons and as a community of transportation communicators, was now a content producer. The messages were no longer limited by the technology.
The point is that as we have seen newspaper circulation decline, the content feeding those newspapers has moved too. It was not only that readership declined, the communications professionals hunting those readers began to look for new places to deliver our news. It was no longer enough to send a reporter or newspaper a standard news release. We had to embrace new information delivery channels and opportunities.
Perhaps what we see in the 2008-2009 in Seattle and Denver was more than just a decline in civic engagement due to shuttering of newspapers. It quite possibly was also a communications profession that had no other choice but to find how to reach their key audiences without the help of those newspapers.
If people did not know about the meeting — whether it was for the PTA, neighborhood watch or the local transportation planning project — they probably were not going to attend. Was that because the newspaper closed or was that because we, as transportation communicators, had not figured out how to reach them?
Talking Transportation 
Have we figured out how to reach them yet. Participation declined in 2008 and 2009. Is that a symptom of the papers shuttering or the economy crashing? And has participation in those areas recovered since?
Good question. The paper’s author suggests that more research is needed to determine whether the engagement levels recover. I think from a public engagement standpoint that we need to be asking the same question, “where have the people gone?” If they are not reading the paper, they are gathering for community connections somewhere – or even MANY some wheres.
Lloyd…. The decline in news is due more to the consolidation of news venues (print and broadcast) by fewer and larger corporate owners. I spent 22 yard as a broadcast journalist and most of the past 14 in public and media relations in both the public and private sector, so I’ve sen this from both sides of the microphones, cameras and notepads. I saw the devolution of the news business first-hand and it’s not over.
What should give all of us pause is that we are now (as communication professionals) challenged by trying to not only get our messages heard, but heard and told accurately. Unfortunately, we are having to deal with far less experienced reporters and editors, or ones who are so overwhelmed by being overworked in shrinking newsrooms, that if our message gets told at all, it is told either incompletely or out of context. Witness the recent story about a young man being hailed as a “hero” for pushing his girlfriend off some railroad tracks and losing his own life in the process. Barely reported in the story was the fact that both teenagers were trespassing on a busy railroad, walking “in the gauge” of the tracks. It is a small example, but it is illustrative of how much of a job we face to educate “the new media” about transportation issues. And that doesn’t even cover the almost total lack of editorial checks and balances on so-called Internet media and bloggers.
What that means is that it is now on us as communicators to make sure what we are putting out there is accurate, full-fledged and clear.
Well said, Stu. The number of transportation reporters in any medium is shrinking. I’ll add that even when there are transportation beat reporters covering a story, they sometimes are so busy that a news release is basically rewritten without any original reporting. That’s great if it is my release because I want my story told. But sometimes there are stories that deserve multiple perspectives and points of view. We are losing that kind of skeptical eye and balanced storytelling that journalists should be able to bring to a piece.