The DeWitt Wallace Center for Media & Democracy at Duke University and the Center for Sustainability and Innovation in Local Media at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill are accepting participation proposals for the 2024 Local Journalism Researchers’ Workshop, to be held March 25-26, 2024 at Duke University.
This event, organized with the support of the Knight Foundation, will bring together researchers across the academic, industry, non-profit, and government sectors whose work addresses contemporary issues confronting local journalism.
Specific topics of interest include (but are not limited to):
- Identification of new, successful modes for the production and delivery of local journalism
- Policy or regulatory proposals at the federal or state levels to strengthen local journalism
- The impact of local journalism on communities
- Structural inequalities in the production/availability of local journalism and how to address them
- Partnerships/collaborations to foster local journalism or local journalism research
- Ways to measure the sustainability and/or impact of local journalism
Interested participants should submit a participation proposal of no more than 500 words. This proposal can describe a particular research project to be presented at the workshop or a description of a key issue or challenge that the participant is engaged with and that is of relevance to local journalism researchers. The Participation Proposal should include brief biographical information about the participant.
The workshop organizers and funders are particularly interested in showcasing the work of early-career researchers and researchers from traditionally marginalized groups. Toward those ends, a limited number of $1,000 travel stipends will be available to out-of-town attendees representing traditionally marginalized groups or out-of-town attendees from under-resourced organizations. Submitters seeking to be considered for travel support should include a separate statement of no more than 250 words requesting travel support.
Timeline:
January 5, 2024: Submission deadline
January 19, 2024: Notification date
March 25-26, 2024: Workshop
Please submit your proposal here. Reach out to Jessica Mahone (jamahone@email.unc.edu) or Phil Napoli (philip.napoli@duke.edu) with any questions.
Meet the Local News Researcher Community
Q&A with local news researcher, Teri Finneman
“I was asking, why is it that after all these decades, academia has not yet helped the news industry solve this business model crisis yet?”
Q&A with public media researcher, Louisa Lincoln
“There are really brilliant folks who are working to right those wrongs and build something that’s better. I think that’s incredibly exciting.”
Q&A with community media researcher, Antoine Haywood
“How communities are interested in engaging in, producing or informing hyper-local news and information varies.”
Takeaways from the 2023 Local News Researchers’ Workshop
More than 60 researchers from industry, academia, nonprofit and government came together to share their studies about new business models, public policy initiatives and civic initiatives to help the local news ecosystem.
Q&A with Local News Researchers Matthew J. Powers & Sandra Vera-Zambrano
“So, in a sense, what we can learn from (this research) is that if we don’t take care of journalists and their conditions and their vocation, then what happens to that profession?”
Q&A with Local News Researcher Mimi Perreault
“Journalism’s alive. It is not dying. Perhaps it’s changing…the way that we practice it is changing. But maybe it needed to change for a long time.”
Q&A with Local News Researcher Damian Radcliffe
“We also need an evidence base to support interventions from a media policy perspective, or a funding perspective, be that at a federal or local level, or through philanthropic organizations, or indeed, to encourage individuals to give.”