Nonbinary student banned from prom for wearing a suit. Staff expressed concerns about retention of BIPOC staff (just under half of those who left in the six months following the audit identified as BIPOC journalists). The Philadelphia Inquirer is a public-benefit corporation that publishes a news website (Inquirer.com) and two daily newspapers (The Philadelphia Inquirer and Daily News) that serve the Philadelphia metropolitan area of the United States. Based on available data for news outlets included in this study, Philadelphias media system underserves socioeconomically marginalized communities. It furthers the University's objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide, This PDF is available to Subscribers Only. To adjust for less than perfect precision and recall, we follow Stryker et al.s method of using recall and precision rates to produce a coefficient to apply to the number of COVID-19 (multiplied by coefficient of 1.07) and crime stories (multiplied by coefficient of 1.05) surfaced by our searches to produce an estimated total number of stories in each category of coverage for each outlet during our search period. The Inquirer also has committed to establishing a community advisory council to offer perspectives on coverage, but also on the companys overall diversity, equity, and inclusion strategy and marketing. Indeed, in Beaver County, Pennsylvania, news-starved residents turned to Facebook alerts for their news needs, which fueled the rapid spread of fear, exaggerations, and falsehoods (Zadrozny, 2021). February 2, 2021 The Philadelphia Inquirer announced Tuesday that its Schuylkill Printing Plant has been sold to developer J. Brian O'Neill for $37 million, according to reporting by the. For analyses of New Jersey media systems, see the Center for Cooperative Medias Mapping Local News Ecosystems project: https://newsecosystems.org. While some noted the Inquirer was swapping out staff as fast as we can, others suggested change may be limited so long as the top level stays exactly the same. While several staffers shared this sentiment, the masthead has seen considerable change since the start of 2020, and white men are now in the minority. Strangers rallied to help. Instead of hiring the most qualified people for the job they will lower those standards for having a better mix of skin color in the newsroom. However, correlations align with prior research finding associations between socioeconomics and local news provision (e.g., Napoli et al., 2015; Stonbely et al., 2019). News values revisited (again), The media and the mayors race: The failure of urban political reporting, The watchdog still barks: How accountability reporting evolved for the digital age, Local journalism and the information needs of local communities: Toward a scalable assessment approach, Funding democracy: Public media and democratic health in 33 countries, Capital and control: Consequences of different forms of newspaper ownership, International Journal on Media Management, Democracy without journalism? Its been more than a year since The Philadelphia Inquirer launched its Inquirer for All project with the ambitious aim of transforming a newsroom that published the infamous Buildings Matter, Too headline into an inclusive and antiracist newsroom. I knew she would get a manuscript to me on time and it would require very little work.. It reports general news with a minimal bias, however, when it comes to opinion and editorial pieces, the left-center bias seeps through them. Outlets for which search strings appear to have achieved lower precision rates include Jewish Exponent (nearly half of COVID items of borderline relevance); Philadelphia Tribune, WPVI/ABC6, and WHYY (subsamples include crime items focusing on accidents or community-level aspects of crime). News outlets subject to these profit logics often face staff cuts to cost-save and, once they become unprofitable, are either shuttered or sold, often resulting in news deserts. Fox Settlement Is a Victory for Dominion. Such nonlocal crime items, regardless of subject matter, are suitable for inclusion in our counts of crime stories because they clearly are less relevant to a broad set of critical information needs in Philadelphia than information about the pandemic. To facilitate a feasible study capable of producing a fine-grained, multi-dimensional analysis of Philadelphias media system that includes analysis of news content, we do not include radio stations or low-power TV and smaller affiliate stations. These data, which are not available for all of our outlets, derive from the U.S. Census, industry and news sources, and information provided by outlets themselves either through direct correspondence or through their web sites and materials for advertisers and sponsors, often known as media kits. Availability limitations require us to draw on data from different years, but most data fall into a narrow time frame (generally 2017 to 2021, though some circulation data is as old as 2009), and therefore they do not preclude comparative analysis. email: Search for other works by this author on: Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania, Walnut Str, Philadelphia, PA 19104, How media inform democracy: A comparative approach, Political journalism in comparative perspective, Media supply, audience demand, and the geography of news consumption in the United States, Rebuilding the news: Metropolitan journalism in the digital age, The news medias influence on criminal justice police: How market-driven news promotes punitiveness. Should it be advocates, like activists who oppose abortion and insist that they should be called pro-life even if they favor the death penalty? News Voices; Media 2070; Save The Internet; Voices for Internet Freedom . According to a note to employees from Publisher Lisa Hughes, 26 . For example, based on 2019 Census calculations for its coverage area, Delaware County Daily Times audience has a (weighted average) median household income (HHI) of $78,106. Future research should include manual coding of content and additional outlets, if data are available. We are pro-democracy, he said. Hirschhorn said there wasnt a lot of internal discussion at the Inquirer about the decision, in part because it all flowed from the work of the papers excellent voting-rights beat reporter, Jonathan Lai, which provided the factual basis for the statements. Subscribers-only sports, politics, restaurant reviews & more on Inquirer.com. Jul 8, 2021. For instance, in terms of what Galtung and Ruge call frequency, individual crimes occur often, though they typically are of a short term nature, while the pandemic continues to unfold over a long time period, though with frequent events relevant to most, if not all of Friedland et al.s critical information needs. How so? Regarding RQ3 concerning how critical information needs are met by Philadelphia news outlets, our study shows that in the aggregate, COVID coverage eclipses crime coverage. Creating an antiracist work culture requires more than hiring BIPOC journalists. We begin by reviewing the literature on news gaps, identifying both their structural drivers and social consequences. In order to research patterns and gaps in news provision, scholars have used the concept of a media system, which refers to patterned relationships between multiple media outlets and their broader social, economic, and political contexts (Albk et al., 2014; Aalberg & Curran, 2012; Chadwick, 2017; Hallin & Mancini, 2004). The Philadelphia Inquirer is a daily newspaper serving the Philadelphia metropolitan area of the United States. Our research builds on this work by assessing Philadelphias media system, with a focus on the multi-dimensional influence of different factorsdifferent forms of media ownership, audience size and socioeconomics, and news formaton the production of critical news and information for the citys marginalized communities. Responding to this, the Inquirer is creating resources, guides, and tracking systems to attempt to make their work more accountable to Black, Indigenous and people of color communities and journalists. Her work included Cleopatras Palace: In Search of a Legend (1999), a detailed portrait of Egypts famous queen; and Napoleons Lost Fleet (1999, with Ellen Blue Phillips), an account of the 1798 Battle of the Nile. 10/week for 3 months. Crime coverage is subject to further criticisms: It can permanently cast a negative light on those accused of or convicted of minor crimes (Benton, 2021; Boston Globe, 2021; Wemple, 2021); overreporting crime can overrepresent the problem, creating false public perceptions of supposed crime waves and increasing public support for punitive measures such as longer prison sentences (Beale, 2006; Sharkey, 2018); the way crime news is covered can reflect and reinforce racial biases, such as more frequent reporting on criminal histories when Black victims and suspects are involved than when white victims and suspects are involved (Monroe & Wenzel, 2021); episodic news accounts of crime, often primarily using police and prosecutors as sources, can distract public attention from structural causes of crime, such as systemic drivers of poverty and racism and inadequate mental health and substance abuse services (Hechinger, 2021). Research also suggests that Black audiences consume more television news and less Internet news than white audiences and that Latino audiences are less likely than white audiences to seek out news regardless of media format (Althaus & Tewksbury, 2007; Althaus et al., 2009; Bucy, 2001). In terms of unambiguity, the level of information required to clearly understand COVID-19 may be higher, especially as official advice for staying well and reducing viral transmission develops and changes. Commissioned an Our analysis of news content, reported in Table3, shows that nearly all outlets give more attention to the COVID-19 pandemic than to breaking news of individual crimes (RQ3). She was the first woman to be named political writer at the paper. We search databases Factiva, NewsBank, and ProQuest to compare the number of news stories published between May 11 and August 18, 2021 that focus on the pandemic vs. the number of stories that focus on crime, attempting to exclude stories primarily focusing on community impacts or structural drivers of crime. The new code required staff members to report potential conflicts to their managers and to take action to remove any conflict, by changing beats, for example. Our final, closed search string for crime stories achieved 91% precision and 87% recall. Examined the Inquirer's crime and criminal justice coverage with Free Press, a nonprofit focused on racial justice in media. Understood the importance of "atta boys" to an overworked, underpaid staff. Unlimited Digital Access + Sunday Print Delivery. A lot remains to be done and there are likely challenges ahead that we cant anticipate, Hughes says. She was a big talent very perceptive, wise about all sorts of things, an excellent writer and an extremely nice and interesting person.. @PatMcLoone is the very best boss I've ever had. (2006) to develop and validate search term strings that demonstrate high levels of precision in surfacing this coverage. When I learned over the weekend about what the Inquirer was doing, I couldnt help but think about the deeply flawed media coverage that followed the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. He was careful to say that the language is narrowly tailored for these recent developments: Were not making general statements about the Pennsylvania Republican Party.. Table1 shows that the citys media system on average leans toward producing news for audiences with income and education levels higher than city medians and averages (RQ1), with an average income index of 122 and an average education index of 111. and is the same edition as the printed copy available at the newsstand. Local media systems have become critical sites of study as news outlets close and communities become news deserts that lack trusted sources of local information (Abernathy, 2016; Ardia et al., 2020; Ferrier et al., 2016; Pickard, 2020). As digital forms of news distribution emerged in the 2000s, a new wave of research found gaps in public affairs reporting, but also traced networks of emergent digital-only news outlets that potentially could fill some of these gaps (Anderson, 2013; Schaffer, 2010). When discussing barriers to adopting antiracist newsroom practices, one of the most frequently mentioned challenges was resource constraints and business model pressures. Our searches show that as of August 18, when we began this portion of the data collection, the oldest content included in Factiva for these outlets was published on May 11. Our study, which builds and applies a multi-dimensional framework for analyzing local media systems, shows that news gaps can arise when some news outlets produce substantial coverage for some audiences while neglecting others and when they provide overall inadequate coverage of vitally important issues related to public health and other critical information needs. include emergencies and public safety among their critical information needs, the authors note the negative impacts of reportage on crime, which can generate fear of crime and minorities in local communities, and they emphasize a communitys interest in fair and accurate representation (p. 11). Support responsible news and fact-based information today! as part of an investigation into Mr. Cianfrani. This study builds a multi-dimensional framework for assessing local media systems to identify potential gaps in news provision, especially among socioeconomically marginalized communities. (2012) identify eight categories of such critical information needs: Emergencies and public safety; health; education; transportation; environment and planning; economic development; civic life; political life. These findings are limited to database search results and to a subset of outlets in our study, most of them with education, income, and age indices above 100. However, news gaps undercut these processes, which lie at the very heart of healthy democracies. It also banned the widespread practice of accepting freebies from sources and others in their news coverage. Dividing adjusted numbers of COVID-19 stories by adjusted numbers of crime stories generates a ratio of COVID-19 to crime coverage for each outlet. After its infamous Buildings Matter, Too headline, the paper launched its Inquirer for All project to rebuild to be inclusive and antiracist. If you're already a paid subscriber, please sign-in. The decision reminds me, in some ways, of the admirable moves by another Pennsylvania news organization, the public radio station WITF in Harrisburg. A streetwise power broker, he was a natural source and occasional subject for the new political writer. These are not he said/she said stories there is clear, objective truth here., More plain truths from the Inquirer: In the story carrying this explainer box, the paper uses the term forensic investigation which is what the GOP wants to call it in quotation marks. Mr. Roberts soon asked the managing editor, Gene Foreman no relation to Laura to prepare a comprehensive ethics code, something few newspapers had in that era. Moreover, those that rely on paywalls bar access for those who are unable or unwilling to pay (Knobel, 2018; Pickard, 2020). (, Christians C. G., Glasser T. L., McQuail D., Nordenstreng K., White R. A. ThePhiladelphia If a journalist calls something a lie, thats a deliberate choice. Future research also should assess how journalists access to data and the availability of news sources impact these news production levels. However, Andersons (2013) research shows that even as this digital news sector emerged, longstanding journalistic practices and the large footprint of legacy news institutions such as the Philadelphia Inquirer meant that stasis was more often evident than radical change (p. 159). This is a cause for concern and further research regardless of any assessment of how different news topics represent critical information needs. It presented no evidence that masks caused serious health problems. In answering RQ4 concerning ownership impacts on critical information needs, we find that public-funded and nonprofit media produce more COVID-19 coverage relative to crime stories than their commercial counterparts. The audit was supported with funding from the Lenfest Institute for Journalism and the Independence Public Media Foundation. A sub-headline makes it clear that this effort is modeled off the months-long partisan review in Arizona, widely regarded as irrevocably flawed and unnecessary to begin with, initiated by Republican lawmakers carrying water for Trump and placed in the hands of dubious private firms. Philadelphia Business Journals income index is a clear outlier (332); when this outlet is excluded, Philadelphias media system has an average income index of 113. However, by emphasizing multiple, interacting dimensions of a media system and different production logics, Chadwicks approach suggests a framework for media system analysis that encompasses both the structural drivers of local news (audience socioeconomics; ownership structures), which influence media production (Benson etal, 2018; Napoli et al., 2015; Picard & van Weezel, 2008; Stonbely et al., 2019), and the different weight that individual outlets carry within a local media system (differences in audience size; digital-only vs. legacy outlets that combine print, broadcast and the Internet to various degrees). The system on average also produces news for older audiences, with an age index of 109. Examples of crime coverage in our analysis typically have a spectacular dimension and are less clearly critical for the daily functioning of a community, as in the case of stories with headlines such as West Philadelphia double shooting under investigation (Philadelphia Patch); Woman accused of using GoFundMe money raised for husbands cremation, funeral to pay living expenses (WTXF/Fox29); Cobbs Creek man cleared of 1984 murder by evidence that came from police file (Philadelphia Daily News). False claims about election fraud remain a problem, spreading in various places online, voting and media experts said. Set diversity goals for 2021 regarding promotions, hiring, and . harder to find in online searches. We then developed open and closed search strings to calculate precision and recall rates. For full access to this pdf, sign in to an existing account, or purchase an annual subscription. But adoption was far from universal, and the committee that designed the guide had plans to work with different teams to seek broader implementation. It said she had been romantically involved with him and that she had accepted his expensive gifts while she was covering politics. Trained staff and managers on how However, based on the Inquirers reported data for advertisers (Philadelphia Inquirer, 2018), income and education indices are higher for Inquirer audiences than for Daily News audiences. 2015 data for Al Da; all other data reported during period 2017 to 2020. The Inquirer created an Anti-Racist Workflow Guide that offers a series of questions (e.g. But her promising start at The Times exploded eight months later. Inquirer.com: Philadelphia local news, sports, jobs, cars, homes In Wildwood, the mayor and a commissioner won't resign despite indictments. Encouraging diverse forms of ownershipespecially public and nonprofit media institutionshas the potential to shield news organizations from the economic incentives to bait their audiences with sensationalistic coverage of crime and other topics. Such decisions carry weight. Forgot? Additionally, though we argue that during the pandemic a broader range of critical information needs are met by COVID coverage than by coverage of individual crime events, we acknowledge that the importance of COVID news versus crime news is an open question. Apologies were issued, a change in newsroom leadership was announced, earnest This includes the Delaware County Times, Metro (Philadelphia), and digital-only Philadelphia Patch, but not Philadelphia Tribune, which largely serves Philadelphias Black community. Get the Poynter newsletter that's right for you. Major television affiliates for ABC, CBS, NBC, and Fox also wield significant journalistic resources, but data on the composition of their audiences are unavailable. I may have done something injudicious. The Times confirmed her death through public records and with friends. Various kinds of media subsidies could increase staffing levels at outlets serving marginalized communities, both across the city and at the hyperlocal, neighborhood level, and increase the racial and gender diversity of staffing at dominant news organizations. So these journalists refuse to call GOP election meddling an audit., Exonerated man, freed after 28 years, reunites with pen pal who wrote him weekly, I wanted to face my deepest fear, so I suited up and flew to the Arctic. Sections and supplements are laid out just as in the print edition, The media spent two hours deciding whom to blame. This article was published more than1 year ago. Assessing differences in formats, we find that digital-only outlets, several of which are newer entrants in the citys media system (e.g., Billy Penn, Passyunk Post, and West Philly Local), do not appear to be significantly altering the systems socioeconomic dynamics (RQ2). Though these findings are limited to a small number of digital-only outlets due to data availability issues, they raise a concern, deserving of further research, for what might be termed digital news deserts in which online-only outlets devote their already small staffs to reaching the same higher socioeconomic audiences served by large, legacy outlets and online-only outlets reaching lower socioeconomic audiences lack the capacity to significantly change this broader trend. Who am I centering in this story?) for reporters, editors, and producers to consider at different points in the journalistic process. RQ4: How do different forms of media ownership affect the provision of news coverage that meets communities critical information needs? Correction: The Inquirer launched a community advisory council, not a community advisory board. As one manager explained, centering antiracism as a core value meant editors who were not on board with that would experience pain points that they hoped would spur shifts: Either you change or you opt out.. Looks like they have gone full "WOKE" and tossed aside what true journalism and reporting the news means. Overcoming Joel Embiids absence, Sixers take Game 1, 119-115, behind James Hardens 45 points, Ed Snider Youth Hockey & Education, the Flyers, and Flyers Charities open new street hockey rink in Kensington, Police Commissioner Outlaw is back to full duty after she was injured in a car crash, Sixers head coach Doc Rivers reflects on his time in Boston, embraces new role as 'arch enemy'.

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