“Rural journalism is very important to the way that a society functions in that journalists can provide context for sometimes complex issues,” says Dr. Mildred Perreault, associate professor in the Zimmerman School of Advertising & Mass Communications in the USF College of Arts and Sciences. “But, because there are less rural journalists, they are sometimes stretched thin to do their work.”
Dr. Mildred “Mimi” Perreault. (Photo by Corey Lepak)
Perreault and colleagues recently examined how rural journalists living in small U.S. communities —those with populations of less than 6,000 —think about their work and how, to an extent, being in rural and more close-knit communities impacts their reporting.
Drawing from interviews with 61 journalists working across the U.S., Perreault and colleagues from USF, Louisiana State University, University of Nebraska, and University of Pennsylvania, examined how these rural journalists decide what to cover. They found that journalists often make choices based on community connections and content familiarity when reporting on topics such as health, diversity, government, and environment.
Their research, “What is Rural Journalism? Occupational Precarity and Social Cohesion in US Rural Journalism Epistemology,” has been published in Journalism Studies.
“What we were very surprised about was how these journalists do so much with so little, but also what they avoid covering,” Perreault explained. “They talked about how they reframe topics order to report them a more relevant and engaging way for their audiences.”
Perreault explained that rural journalists are often placed in challenging situations because of the nature and geography of their professions.
“Given the recent focus on news poverty and gaps in local journalism, rural journalists would seem to have a challenging job,” she added. “This study seeks to understand the novel experiences and challenges of journalists who cover rural communities and how they conceptualize their knowledge-building practices.”
Perreault and her colleagues utilized in-depth interviews to investigate how rural journalists situated their knowledge-building process.
“Rural journalists identified as being rural in that they practiced in rural communities, but also thought of their knowledge-building as tied intimately to their rural communities,” she explained.
“Rural journalism, hence, is defined as journalism that keeps a record of what is happening, but also provides a connection to their community.”
This connection to the community impacts their reporting, according to their findings, with rural journalists wanting to report on stories that people in their communities will feel connected to.
"You're looking at smaller stories that have a direct impact on a smaller amount of people,” one respondent told them.
Perreault and her colleagues also found rural journalists faced many obstacles including a lack of community willing to speak to them—with many in the town knowing them on a first-name basis.
Journalists said that some rural residents’ general distrust in the media lead them to avoid converge of topics that might make residents uncomfortable.
Perreault spent her formative years in rural communities and has experience living in many rural communities since then.
“Rural communities are often close knit and the people there possess deep ties to the people and geography of where they live,” she explained. “This means they are often more in tune with issues or concerns that people living in larger communities, but it also means they might be apt to overlook things that make them uncomfortable.”
She adds that much of the current research on journalism has focused on larger urban, national, and regional news organizations, where this research aims to examine papers that often are underrepresented in journalism and mass communication scholarship.
“Journalism can provide access to valuable information which helps people know what is happening where they live, and this is just as relevant for rural communities as it is for urban communities,” she added.
Perreault plans to take this a step further and explore rural and local journalism across the globe.
“I have loved working with people all over the U.S. because it helped me learn so much about other parts of the country, now I have that opportunity to gain deeper knowledge of how journalism in smaller communities is providing information access and shaping social engagement in other countries,” she said.
Scholars from the Rural Journalism Research Group contributed to this research, as well Dr. Greg Perreault, associate professor also with the Zimmerman School.