Notes on a hometown media census
In Champaign-Urbana, a college town home to the University of Illinois, the local newspaper has been slowly dying, its death recently accelerated with a Chapter 11 filing. We sought to figure out — if it were to shut down one day, what would happen to our community? (caveat: our local newspaper is not exactly beloved)
Part I: Print Media Census:
The highlights here: the rich bougie places that we expected to be super local were not hubs of local printed media, like the fancy grocery and health food coop and the coffee shop President Obama visited when he was in town — nary a piece of printed media to be found. The chain stores in town at best offered a local newspaper for sale, but these often stood unsold when compared to national news counterparts. We also did not find much local political information —there was limited printed material from politicians and advocacy groups. We have municipal elections coming in a few weeks.
As process, we wanted to see what exactly in print form was being published in our community. Anything was fair game in so far as news and information, though we did not count campus flyers or explicit advertising material, though we did collect coupon books, real estate guides, and so forth. We split the twin-cities into quadrants and assigned students to teams, with one student covering campus. You can see our methods and places we visited here.
What surprised us? In some places that we expected to be centers of community gathering, there was little to be found in the way of unique, local content. The Starbucks in town, for instance, didn’t have anything in terms of local news, pamphlets, etc. though there were tepid bulletin boards available. in fact, most of the chains in town, aside from the campus Pizza Hut, which had copies of the Daily Illini, didn’t feature any local news media. At one of our big grocery stores, Meijer, the local newspaper was for sale alongside USA Today; the USA Todays were gone, but the local newspaper had back issues piled up; we also saw the same situation at Walmart. Libraries are wonderful.
At ethnic restaurants, ethnic grocery stores, and one of the lower-cost grocery stores in town, non-English material was bountiful. We found newspapers and printed pamphlets, including for local health services, in French, Chinese, and Korean.
Urbana seemed to be far more paperless, while Champaign seemed to have far more material to collect, especially downtown. Maybe there is something to the two-towns, very different thing people keep telling me about, but Urbana, the hippier and more liberal of the two towns, did seem to just have less “stuff.” This seems to suggest that finding out about local info is perhaps presumed to be a digital activity. Still, not having anything printed to read at a local coffee shop to put your phone down for a sec is a bit of a bummer. Some business owners seemed frustrated at the lack of coordinated communication between the city of Urbana and the local businesses, but others argued chamber of commerce types were a little… old school. Some public spaces, like the movie theater, didn’t have anything, and while other places had content for the performance spaces and cultural centers in town, those centers themselves had little information about anything else in the community.
We all acknowledged the importance of local bulletin boards. We recorded where they were and took photos of them, paying attention to whether they were frequently updated. We found quite a haul, especially a lot of information and pamphlets targeted toward health information and community development. We then sorted our haul into categories based on Community Information Needs. You can see our initial spreadsheet here. We coded our haul as a class, with CIN as our guide. We focused on the type of CIN the content addressed but weren’t coding for the content itself specifically (e.g. is this a pamphlet about transportation? put in transportation category). For disagreements or ones we weren’t sure about (almost everything could fall in the “civic” bucket, so um…) — we ended up putting all “general interest” local news media, like the local daily and the campus daily in the civic bucket. But if you are coding by the outlet or type of content rather than the content itself , you have to make some hard calls.
You can see some of our categorizations here. All in all, community information needs offers are far more expansive way to think about how people experience their news and information environment. The benefit of an old-school print media census is that it gives you a sense of the incidental exposure of a community to news and information that one encounters via daily life, such grabbing a coke at the gas station to buying a cup of coffee to going to the library.
Stay tuned for our next stage, which is the digital media census.
