These socially and geographically oriented publications have small newsrooms, typically fewer than a dozen people, and in some cases only two or three people. Subscribe. ThePhiladelphia Significant transformation will mean pushing beyond the Inquirer for All as a project, and integrating its efforts into the ongoing work of journalism at the Inquirer. The Inquirers community news desk will include a team of reporters and editors focused on underserved communities and direct community engagement initiatives. The decision to keep the desk separate from the news desk evoked fears among some that it could silo off engagement work, though managers explained that they wanted the desk to be interdisciplinary to allow it to cross-fertilize multiple desks with best practices regarding community engagement. For full access to this pdf, sign in to an existing account, or purchase an annual subscription. For our content analysis generating ratios of COVID-19 coverage to crime coverage, we follow the rigorous method outlined by Stryker et al. Philadelphia also has significant levels of socioeconomic and racial inequality (Shields & Siddique, 2020), raising the question of whether the citys news outlets equitably serve its most marginalized communities. Amy S. Rosenberg Declining advertising revenues associated with digitization have forced many newsrooms to cut staff or close entirely. With the collapse of the advertising business model, the Inquirer, like numerous other U.S. newspapers, is trying to do more with less. People are cheering them on. Male reporters, wrote Richard Cohen, a columnist for The Washington Post, have been having affairs with women they cover for as long as there have been reporters, women and spare time. And yet, he added, no man had even been chastised for it. While Philadelphia appears to have a thriving news market and has experimented with new funding models to sustain news provision (Rieder, 2017; Schaffer, 2010; Wolfson & Funke, 2014), it remains unclear to what degree these recent interventions ensure that the information needs of all residents are equitably met. (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. 30,402 talking about this. The newspaper was founded by John R. Walker and John Norvell in June 1829 as The Pennsylvania Inquirer and is the third-oldest continually operating daily newspaper in the United States. These more affluent, educated, and older demographics are found among outlets that have the largest audience size in terms of web traffic (unique monthly visitors and page views) and the largest contingents of journalists. The audit was supported with funding from the Lenfest Institute for Journalism and the Independence Public Media Foundation. Hedge fund ownership, often criticized for treating news holdings as primarily vehicles for profit rather than public service (Abernathy 2016; Kuttner & Zenger 2017), and other private investment entities are associated with low ratios of COVID-19 to crime coverage: Alden Global-owned Delaware County News is among outlets giving far lower than average attention to the COVID-19 pandemic relative to crime (1.6); Patch, owned by Hale Global, a self-described investment holding company specializing in turning around troubled companies (Bercovici, 2014), gives nearly equal attention to crime as it does to COVID-19 coverage (1.2). We interpret the strength of correlations with caution due to small samples and p-values that do not achieve statistical significance at p < .05. But adoption was far from universal, and the committee that designed the guide had plans to work with different teams to seek broader implementation. Conflict of interest: The authors declared the following potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: Timothy Neffs and Pawel Popiel's postdoctoral research fellowships were supported, in part, by the Independence Public Media Foundation. 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. Who gets to decide what language is used? The decision reminds me, in some ways, of the admirable moves by another Pennsylvania news organization, the public radio station WITF in Harrisburg. And so it played out here. Set diversity goals for 2021 regarding promotions, hiring, and representation in leadership. Excluding outliers Jewish Exponent and Philadelphia Magazine (ratios more than one standard deviation above the overall average), the average ratio is 5.5,4 meaning that on average outlets produce 5.5 times as many COVID-19 stories as they do crime stories. The newspaper asked her to resign eight months later over her conduct in her previous job, at The Philadelphia Inquirer. She was the first woman to be named political writer at the paper. Additionally, Harcup and ONeill (2001) identify the magnitude of an event as a key news value, as with a pandemic that affects very many people in many ways. Both areas of news coverage were highly newsworthy during the time period analyzed: As of early 2022, the pandemic had sickened more than 277,000 people and killed more than 4,000 in Philadelphia County (New York Times, 2022); in 2021, the city of Philadelphia saw a record 557 homicides (Palmer & Orso, 2021). Although hyperlocal, niche outlets have the potential to address some of the ensuing gaps, these are often relatively under-resourced news organizations, raising questions about their long-term sustainability. After its infamous 'Buildings Matter, Too' headline, the paper launched its 'Inquirer for All' project to rebuild to be . Timothy Neff, PhD, Pawel Popiel, PhD, Victor Pickard, PhD, Philadelphias news media system: which audiences are underserved?, Journal of Communication, Volume 72, Issue 4, August 2022, Pages 476487, https://doi.org/10.1093/joc/jqac018. as part of an investigation into Mr. Cianfrani. Set diversity goals for 2021 regarding promotions, hiring, and . In addition to stoking normative concerns, a systemic lack of quality information can undermine a communitys ability to address concrete, everyday issues vital to its ability to thrive. Longtime Philadelphia Inquirer Sports Managing Editor Pat McLoone is leaving the newspaper, confirmed here by Eagles writer Paul Domowitch:. Indeed, a large corpus of research has noted the sensational aspects of crime coverage (Adams, 1978; Ehrlich, 1996; Knight, 1989; Wang, 2012), primarily intending to capture audience attention rather than to assess the impact on a given community. While some managers suggested that it was expected that talent would be poached because the Inquirer was no longer viewed by some as a destination newspaper, other staff suggested more needed to be done to create a working environment in which BIPOC journalists felt their life experiences were acknowledged and welcomed. We also contacted each outlet in our sample via email, requesting data on the above variables to ensure we had the most recent and correct information available. WTXF/Fox29 is one of two outlets in our study that give more attention to crime than to the pandemic (3.2). Though it may lack the pandemics magnitude, crime news is popular with audiences (Delli Carpini et al., 2018). She is survived by Mr. Cianfranis daughters and grandchildren. 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. However, researchers have found demographic differences among audiences for different news formats: Local television news viewership appears to lean older and lower income and education; Internet use leans somewhat younger and male, as well as higher income and education; newspaper readership leans older and higher income and education (Althaus & Tewksbury, 2007; Althaus et al., 2009; Bucy, 2001; Gaziano & McGrath, 1987; Prior, 2007). When discussing barriers to adopting antiracist newsroom practices, one of the most frequently mentioned challenges was resource constraints and business model pressures. We gather data on income, education, and age of audiences and coverage areas for 38 news outlets in Philadelphia and conduct a content analysis to gauge how these outlets meet critical information needs related to the COVID-19 pandemic. Her father, Wilmer L. Foreman, who was known as Bill, was a journalist. harder to find in online searches. Nonprofit and publicly funded forms of ownership reduce profit pressures but sustaining these revenue modelsparticularly in the United States where public funding is relatively lowoften requires additional funding streams. 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. While Mr. Cianfrani successfully regained his status as a ward leader in South Philadelphia, Ms. Foreman, a quick and facile writer with a literary bent, went to work for Time-Life Books in Alexandria, Va. She was the author of more than 40 volumes, many of them centered on historical figures or true crimes. For this study, we first sought to identify news media outlets in the greater Philadelphia area, including the city and its suburbs. He pleaded guilty, was sentenced to five years in federal prison and was out on parole after 27 months. The Inquirer reported progress on meeting goals they set for hiring: Since the start of the year, 61% of all new newsroom positions were filled by individuals from BIPOC communities and 44% identified as women. That it was published at a moment of national reckoning over social justice prompted by the vicious 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.