Tyler Nagel is a journalism instructor at the Southern Alberta Institute of Technology in Calgary, Alberta. He is also an associate faculty member at Royal Roads University in Victoria, B.C.
Nagel is currently pursuing a PhD in Media Studies at the University of Groningen in The Netherlands.
As part of our series on local news researchers, CISLM Student Employee Kathryn DeHart interviewed Nagel via Zoom. This interview was published Nov. 12, 2024 and has been edited for length and clarity.
Center for Innovation and Sustainability in Local Media: What’s a recent research project you’ve done that has helped us understand the challenges facing local news?
Tyler Nagel: As a part of my PhD research, I have been studying how local news works, especially in rural and remote areas. There’s been a lot of work done on local news, but often it’s in an urban or suburban context. What really interests me is how journalism works in isolated, rural or remote communities.
In the last few years, I’ve been spending time in rural communities and remote areas and talking to journalists about how they do their work, and with community members about how they perceive journalism and their local news organizations specifically.
My area of study is in the Canadian Province of Alberta and the Northwest Territories.
CISLM: What were the key findings from your research?
TN: A few things have come through loud and clear. The first thing is that rural news itself, the practice of it especially, is distinct from other forms of journalism. Rural journalism has its own set of norms and practices and viewpoints. It’s more integrated with the community. Where most journalists can go home at night and switch the phone off, a rural journalist will be lining up at the supermarket with the same people that they’ve written stories about and interviewed.
Also, there’s a whole set of ethical standards that can be different from what we’re used to with urban journalism. For example, it’s not very uncommon for a rural newspaper owner or even reporter to be a member of the town council, which is something that’s abhorrent in most other journalistic contexts, but in some small towns actually makes a lot of sense. Also, we’ve been seeing that community members view their local journalism in a different light than they view national journalism. And while they might be suspicious of a national outlet like the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, they feel like their local newspaper owner is a pretty good guy or the local reporter is someone they feel they can trust. It’s almost as if they have a completely different conception of their local news organizations than national ones.
But the biggest thing that we’ve seen, and it confirms what a lot of researchers have found with local news in general, is that rural news is really struggling. The business model has changed. There’s fewer ads, lower numbers of subscriptions, and there are increased costs, especially around printing. Before it was quite common to have more than one newspaper, even in small towns. Now there’s only one newspaper and what is remaining of those single-town newspapers are, in many cases, being regionalized, especially in the case of chain newspapers.
On a happier note, the last thing that I found is that print is still really important in rural communities. While we’ve been seeing other newspapers move away from the printed product, it seems that rural people really value the printed newspaper in a way they don’t value digital products.
I had somebody tell me, “I can’t put that on my wall when it’s online, you know?” I think that permanence and presence in the community of a printed newspaper is something that just can’t be replaced. It’s also a good push back against social media because of the ephemerality of social media, community members perceive a printed product as more trustworthy because you can’t go back and edit it. It’s done, it’s on paper, it’s in ink.
CISLM: What should non-academics — local journalists or civically engaged community members — learn from that research?
TN: I think news, by default, is important to non-academics. It’s not an obscure topic. We’re researching something whose entire purpose is to be in the hands of the public. I do love that engagement. I think it really is important for people to consider how they get their information.
For local residents, having a reporter at an event legitimizes the event for the community. It’s a symbol that the event is important when the reporter is there and writes a story about it. But regardless of the opinions of the day-to-day coverage — the soft news, the feature stories and that kind of thing — I like to think of local journalism almost as a fire department. Most of the time, the fire department is rescuing cats out of trees and helping test smoke alarms for senior citizens, but when a fire breaks out, that’s when it’s especially important to have a fire department.
For that reason, I think that people need to be concerned with the robustness of their local news. Issues do happen in communities, and when an issue happens in the community without a newspaper it can be really challenging to provide unbiased information to the community.
CISLM: What’s a recent research project in local news that you admire?
TN: Wow, there’s just so many wonderful academics that are doing such hard work. I think in Canada, one of the most notable is the Local News Research Project, which is run by April Lindgren out of Toronto Metropolitan University. It’s just done an unparalleled job in mapping the changes to local news across Canada and it’s an interactive map where you can literally go and see where the closures happened, almost in real time.
I think that another really interesting thing that I’ve done — without blowing my own trumpet too loudly here — is some initial work in using libraries as almost a reporting tool on understanding what newspapers are still in communities. We can very easily contact a local librarian, because that information is quite readily available, and use them to report back on the presence or absence of local media in their community. It was really amazing because I went to a couple of conferences, and there were some other researchers doing the very same thing, probably better than me. April Lindgren in Canada, again, but also Kristy Hess in Australia, in more sort of formal and wide-ranging inquiries, and I’m really excited to see if that methodology can be used nationally, internationally to figure out where the papers are and where the gaps exist.
CISLM: Why does local news research matter?
TN: If we don’t understand the situation, we can’t do anything about it. I think that anyone in the research community can clearly see that local news is in trouble. Without research to support those assertions, action to address the problem can’t be taken — whether that action is improved funding or improved public perception of the situation, or improved perception of even community members on what exactly their newspaper is doing and what the community might look like without a paper.
CISLM: What excites you about the future of local news?
TN: I’ve got to look for those little silver linings in the clouds, because there definitely are a lot of clouds, but there’s some cool stuff happening as well. I think that one of the things that we’re seeing is some new types of funding coming on stream for local news in Canada. We have something called the Local Journalism Initiative that funds reporter positions in local news from the federal government. It’s got some challenges, to be sure. The funding is year to year and the criteria aren’t always fully transparent, but I think there’s an increasing public appetite for tax dollars to be spent to support local news, and I think that’s exciting.
We’re also seeing some neat funding models through crowdsourcing and some newspapers have — and again, this goes to some of the unique aspects of rural journalism — but some newspapers have been able to strike funding deals with their local county or town that covers some of the not reporting costs, but distribution costs of the newspaper, getting the newspaper into the hands of residents. But, of course, that poses its own raft of ethical challenges.
I think another exciting thing is that there have been some new start up publications to fill gaps in local news. We’ve seen that a few times in Alberta, and it’s exciting when you see community members get engaged and say, “Wow, my paper, my town doesn’t have a paper anymore. What can I do about that? I’m going to start a new media outlet.”
CISLM: What helps you get through a long day of work?
TN: I just have so much support from my family. My wife is amazing. I’ve got two kids, 11 and 13. With a PhD, especially, and research in general, the unsung heroes are the family members and the sacrifices and support they make to make it all happen. I feel like there should be a whole other credential just for family members. When somebody gets the PhD, the family needs to get something too.
That and espresso. I love a good coffee.
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