Get contact information for Philadelphia Inquirer and Philadelphia Inquirer journalists by joining Muck Rack. Who gets to decide what language is used? newspapers are fighting for their survival. 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). The politician, State Senator Henry J. Cianfrani, who was known as Buddy, went to jail on unrelated charges of corruption. As our content analysis does not involve human coding, precision is the most important measurement for assessing our database search strings (Stryker et al. 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. Robert L. Mooney/The Philadelphia Inquirer By Katharine Q. Seelye Published July 23, 2021 Updated July 26, 2021 Laura Foreman, a reporter for The Philadelphia Inquirer in the 1970s, was. While they are continuing to hash out the best approach to integrate source tracking into their workflow, their stylebook audit is in progress, and they have already launched the Content Consult channel. That amounts to 23% of the 210 people who started 2021 in the newsroom. If a journalist calls something a lie, thats a deliberate choice. Subscribe to the Philadelphia Inquirer Instead of hiring the most qualified people for the job they will lower those standards for having a better mix of skin color in the newsroom. First, we developed decision trees to guide our discussion of the types of stories to include and exclude from our database searches. COVIDs relevance for a broad swath of news topics creates many borderline cases of relevance that reduce search precision. After its infamous Buildings Matter, Too headline, the paper launched its Inquirer for All project to rebuild to be inclusive and antiracist. Established a formal process that will allow certain types of stories to be rendered False claims about election fraud remain a problem, spreading in various places online, voting and media experts said. News outlets subject to these profit logics often face staff cuts to cost-save and, once they become unprofitable, are either shuttered or sold, often resulting in news deserts. Public media organization WHYY has a television audience education index (102) close to the Philadelphia average, based on a media kit citing 20132014 figures (WHYY, n.d.). The decision reminds me, in some ways, of the admirable moves by another Pennsylvania news organization, the public radio station WITF in Harrisburg. 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. To facilitate a feasible study capable of producing a fine-grained, multi-dimensional analysis of Philadelphias media system that includes analysis of news content, we do not include radio stations or low-power TV and smaller affiliate stations. We also thank our reviewers for their insightful comments and criticisms, which were invaluable in revisions to this article. WTXF/Fox29 is one of two outlets in our study that give more attention to crime than to the pandemic (3.2). We conduct this content analysis for all outlets in our sample that are available in these databases (23 out of 38, or 61%). ThePhiladelphia and is the same edition as the printed copy available at the newsstand. In answering RQ4 concerning ownership impacts on critical information needs, we find that public-funded and nonprofit media produce more COVID-19 coverage relative to crime stories than their commercial counterparts. Marketing Automotive Awards(April 5, 2023, NYC), Creative Media Awards(February 2, 2023, NYC), Agency of the Year(January 25, 2023, NYC), MediaPost All Stars(January 25, 2023, NYC), Lauren N. Williams Named Deputy Editor for Race at Guardian US, Musk Settles Defamation Case Over Claim Made In An Email, Former USA Today EIC Nicole Carroll To Launch Local News Initiative, Lee Enterprises Plans To Reduce Print To Three Days A Week: Report, Keep up-to-date with media, marketing and advertising news, Invitations to exclusive industry events and research. In late January, the station posted an explanatory story stating that they would be regularly reminding their audience, in day-to-day coverage, that some state legislators signed a letter urging Congress to vote against certifying the Pennsylvania election results, and that some members of Congress had voted against certifying the states election results for President Biden, despite no evidence to support their election-fraud claims. She was a very talented political reporter, one of the best I have ever known, Mr. Roberts, who became managing editor of The Times after he left The Inquirer, said by email. Aggregated Audience Size, Staffing, and Format by High/Low Indices. Crime coverage is subject to further criticisms: It can permanently cast a negative light on those accused of or convicted of minor crimes (Benton, 2021; Boston Globe, 2021; Wemple, 2021); overreporting crime can overrepresent the problem, creating false public perceptions of supposed crime waves and increasing public support for punitive measures such as longer prison sentences (Beale, 2006; Sharkey, 2018); the way crime news is covered can reflect and reinforce racial biases, such as more frequent reporting on criminal histories when Black victims and suspects are involved than when white victims and suspects are involved (Monroe & Wenzel, 2021); episodic news accounts of crime, often primarily using police and prosecutors as sources, can distract public attention from structural causes of crime, such as systemic drivers of poverty and racism and inadequate mental health and substance abuse services (Hechinger, 2021). The EIN for the organization is 59-1630423. Regarding RQ3 concerning how critical information needs are met by Philadelphia news outlets, our study shows that in the aggregate, COVID coverage eclipses crime coverage. At the Inquirer, they are trying to do this by first recognizing that their practices around sourcing and editing have historically overrepresented white men, particularly those with power, and that their editing choices (framing, style, etc.) 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. She is survived by Mr. Cianfranis daughters and grandchildren. 26 Philadelphia Inquirer employees accept buyout package - Philadelphia These data, which are not available for all of our outlets, derive from the U.S. Census, industry and news sources, and information provided by outlets themselves either through direct correspondence or through their web sites and materials for advertisers and sponsors, often known as media kits. Availability limitations require us to draw on data from different years, but most data fall into a narrow time frame (generally 2017 to 2021, though some circulation data is as old as 2009), and therefore they do not preclude comparative analysis. The economic interests generated by different forms of media ownership, such as stock market-traded, private, nonprofit, and public ownership, can produce significant variations in commitments to producing public service-oriented news (Benson et al., 2018; Picard & van Weezel, 2008). Now you can read The Philadelphia Inquirer Digital Edition anytime, anywhere. She went to The Times in January 1977, arriving in Washington with the new Carter administration. a Community News Desk to address shortcomings in how the paper portrays Philadelphia communities, which have often been stigmatized by coverage that over-emphasizes crime, Hughes This was an unprecedented assault on the fabric of American democracy, the statement said. Philadelphia Inquirer Media Kit by TransamericaDigital - Issuu Corresponding author: Timothy Neff, School of Media, Communication and Sociology, University of Leicester, Astley Clarke Building, Leicester LE1 7RH, UK. Inquirerhas made changed its coverage of race, after a year-long review of its practices. He was a naval officer during World War II and in 1948 moved the family to Memphis, where he worked in public relations and advertising. 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. Findings indicate that Philadelphias news media system underserves communities with lower levels of income and education and that this structural gap generates a measurable gap in the provision of news content meeting the critical information needs of these communities. 2015 data for Al Da; all other data reported during period 2017 to 2020. These include, among other things, creating a community desk, developing community engagement goals for performance reviews, creating a community advisory council, and holding accountability conversations with external community stakeholders. Their list of values was still under development, but they hoped to connect values with related practices and policies and to initiate a larger discussion within the newsroom. But she was among the first to have that romance, with a powerful politician, blow up into a public scandal. Inquirer.com: Philadelphia local news, sports, jobs, cars, homes In Wildwood, the mayor and a commissioner won't resign despite indictments. Philadelphia Inquirer | Philadelphia PA - Facebook After the man died, his former wife and Ms. Foreman became good friends, and she was with Ms. Foreman at her death. In Table2, we aggregate circulation, web traffic, and staffing figures by high-/low-income indices, as well as by digital-only sites. Inequities in news provision in Philadelphias media system have been noted by prior researchers. The Inquirer often covers crime against the backdrop of concerns over high homicide rates in Philadelphia. Perhaps offering an additional counterweight, many niche news and information sources in Philadelphia specifically serve marginalized communities, such as Impacto, Al Da, Philadelphia Tribune, and Telemundo and Univision affiliates. However, by emphasizing multiple, interacting dimensions of a media system and different production logics, Chadwicks approach suggests a framework for media system analysis that encompasses both the structural drivers of local news (audience socioeconomics; ownership structures), which influence media production (Benson etal, 2018; Napoli et al., 2015; Picard & van Weezel, 2008; Stonbely et al., 2019), and the different weight that individual outlets carry within a local media system (differences in audience size; digital-only vs. legacy outlets that combine print, broadcast and the Internet to various degrees). This byline is mine, but I want my name removed. Reporting on rising homicide rates arguably meets a communitys critical information needs, but in this case and in many others the focus remains on short, breaking news-style coverage of crime incidents rather than on larger structural issues of inequality and justice, even as the Inquirer has attempted to move away from brief, ledger style crime coverage (Monroe & Wenzel, 2021). 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. Theres a simple but powerful idea behind the Philadelphia Inquirers recent decision not to use the word audit when referring to an effort by the state GOP to investigate the 2020 election: The words that a news organization chooses to tell a story make a difference. This subset excludes the Camden Courier-Post newspaper and other outlets in New Jersey that serve an area that partially overlaps with Philadelphia. The combination of unavailable data and limited availability of outlets in databases only allows correlation analyses for subsets of the 38 outlets in this study, and most outlets in these subsets have above average income, education, and age indices (12 outlets for correlations with income indices, 10 with indices above 100; 11 outlets for correlations with education indices, 8 with indices above 100; 9 outlets for correlations with age indices, all with indices above 100). Among subsamples for crime stories, we find many instances of nonlocal coverage, including news accounts of celebrity trials. Research also suggests that Black audiences consume more television news and less Internet news than white audiences and that Latino audiences are less likely than white audiences to seek out news regardless of media format (Althaus & Tewksbury, 2007; Althaus et al., 2009; Bucy, 2001). Should it be politicians like those in Arizona and Pennsylvania whose forensic investigations are motivated not by any democratic impulse but by a purely partisan agenda? Search strings were developed through a rigorous testing process (for details of methodology, see appendix), but these subsamples enable us to conduct additional assessments of the relevance of items returned by our search results. In addition, some expressed a sense of tension between aims of cultivating new readers from BIPOC and other historically marginalized communities, and of appealing to an existing audience of white suburban subscribers. It furthers the University's objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide, This PDF is available to Subscribers Only. Media Kit; Policy Library; More Projects. Weve released a progress report on the Inquirers efforts to date, drawing on conversations Ive had with more than 40 staff members. Local TV news, where we would expect to find lower income and education indices (though we lack the data to produce these indices), does not appear to help close these gaps, as most COVID-to-crime news ratios at local TV affiliates are low, occasionally even negative. For more by Margaret Sullivan visit wapo.st/sullivan, More than six months after the 2020 presidential election, Arizona Senate Republicans are leading an audit of the 2.1 million ballots cast in Maricopa County. Forgot? For some outlets, indices have been calculated for coverage or distribution areas, based on medians or average medians (income and age indices) or percentages (education indices), weighted by Census ZIP Code Tabulation Area populations, and do not necessarily reflect reader or viewer demographics. These socially and geographically oriented publications have small newsrooms, typically fewer than a dozen people, and in some cases only two or three people. (2006) to develop and validate search term strings that demonstrate high levels of precision in surfacing this coverage. Assessing differences in formats, we find that digital-only outlets, several of which are newer entrants in the citys media system (e.g., Billy Penn, Passyunk Post, and West Philly Local), do not appear to be significantly altering the systems socioeconomic dynamics (RQ2). Because Philadelphia news outlets have different weights in terms of audience size (using print circulation and TV viewership numbers if available and web traffic if not; weekly and monthly figures adjusted to daily estimates by dividing by 7 or 30, respectively), we conduct an additional analysis using weighted average indices. Sections and supplements are laid out just as in the print edition, It's not an 'audit,' so this Pennsylvania newspaper wont use that word Our searches show that as of August 18, when we began this portion of the data collection, the oldest content included in Factiva for these outlets was published on May 11. The conversations focused on crime and justice coverage with the hopes of informing the Inquirers newsroom guidelines and building relationships with impacted communities. This is $31,000 (rounded) above Philadelphias median HHI of $47,474, creating an income index of 131, as we divide all income data points by 1,000 to assist readability. We interpret the strength of correlations with caution due to small samples and p-values that do not achieve statistical significance at p < .05. For example, based on 2019 Census calculations for its coverage area, Delaware County Daily Times audience has a (weighted average) median household income (HHI) of $78,106. One friend, Paul R. Lawler, the executor of her estate, said the cause of death was uterine cancer. With the exception of magazine-style outlets attracting affluent audiences (e.g., Philadelphia Business Journal, Philadelphia Magazine, and Philadelphia Weekly), commercial, privately held outlets tend to show low ratios of COVID-19 to crime coverage. Media ownership and public service news: How strong are institutional logics? He was released in 1979, and he and Ms. Foreman were married in 1980. Surveys of Philadelphia residents find that crime news is popular but that what residents desire the most is news and information of a highly personal nature that they can put to use in their day-to-day lives (Delli Carpini et al., 2018, p. 8). Her mother, Virginia (Sims) Foreman, was a homemaker. Inquirer.com: Philadelphia local news, sports, jobs, cars, homes As Ms. Foremans world collapsed, Mr. Cianfrani, at the peak of his power, was indicted by a federal grand jury on 110 counts of racketeering, bribery, obstruction of justice and tax evasion. The United States stands out globally for how little it invests in its public media, amounting to merely $1.40 of federal spending per person, which is a fraction of what most other developed democracies around the world spend on public media (Neff & Pickard, 2021). However, research on news values indicates that journalists may not deem pandemics and crimes as equally newsworthy (Galtung & Ruge, 1965; Harcup & ONeill, 2001, 2017). Ms. Foreman, who at one point supervised a staff of about 20 people at Time-Life, also freelanced for Discovery Publishing, which produced illustrated books to accompany television specials, and for other publishers. If printing those words in 72-point type had occurred in a vacuum, it would have been a grievous and unpardonable offense, writesElizabeth H. (, Ferree M. M., Gamson W. A., Gerhards J., Rucht D. (, Friedland L, Napoli P, Ognyanova K., Weil C. (, Napoli P. M, Stonbely S, McCollough K., Renninger B. Now, all they need is Embiid. Our selection excludes New Jersey news outlets east of Philadelphia. However, news outlets supply news that fulfills critical information needs in ways that are related to audience demographics: Among outlets included in our content analysis, wealthier, more educated, and older audiences are associated with a stronger news focus on COVID-19 pandemic versus crime. The Afghan debacle lasted two decades. Get the Poynter newsletter that's right for you. Next, we outline our methodological approach to assessing multiple dimensions of Philadelphias media system: Audience socioeconomics; audience size; news staffing levels; media ownership structures; and news platforms (more recent digital-only entrants in the media system vs. older, legacy outlets that generally combine platforms such as print, broadcast, and digital). Been in this biz 45 years. The Philadelphia Inquirer is a daily newspaper serving the Philadelphia metropolitan area of the United States. The latter may include subscriptions, corporate underwriting, or donor and foundation support, which may encourage news production that does not prioritize a communitys information needs (Benson, 2018; Browne, 2010). And a number of them worked in the Twin Towers. headquarters in New York before being transferred to Atlanta. The Philadelphia Inquirer & Daily News e-Editions, including archives. Treating citywide figures as an index of 100, we add or subtract outlet-level audience data to create income, education, and age indices. First, we determine the geographic coverage area of an outlet, as identified by the outlet in their published materials or emails to us, or as determined by print subscription availability. An open string attempts to gather all relevant items by opening the search as widely as possible, which also will gather many irrelevant items (high recall, low precision). RQ4: How do different forms of media ownership affect the provision of news coverage that meets communities critical information needs? As one manager at the Inquirer reflected, trying to transform a legacy news organization into an antiracist news organization was inherently challenging and uncomfortable work, and news leaders considering this road should buckle in.. Income and education correlations do not achieve statistical significance at p < .05, which should be taken into account when extrapolating findings beyond included outlets. We then use Census ZIP Code Tabulation Area (ZCTA) data for median household income, education (percentage of people with bachelors degrees), and median age for these areas, weighting calculations by population per ZCTA. Staying in the Washington area, Ms. Foreman re-established herself at Time-Life Books. When these roles are fulfilled, media can inform different publics that their interests are at stake in political processes and help mobilize them to assert and defend those interests (Baker, 2002). 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. According to a note to employees from Publisher Lisa Hughes, 26 . For analyses of New Jersey media systems, see the Center for Cooperative Medias Mapping Local News Ecosystems project: https://newsecosystems.org. Acknowledging this power and being transparent about those choices is exactly what the Inquirer did the other day when it embedded within a news story a bit of explanatory text, under the headline: Why Were Not Calling It an Audit., In clear language, the paper explained that its because theres no indication that this effort, which follows months of demands from Donald Trump alleging baselessly that the election was rigged, would follow the best practices or the common understanding of an audit among nonpartisan experts.. The AP set off to learn their identities. The Philadelphia Inquirer Archive - Newspapers.com The Philadelphia Inquirer: Media Bias And Factual Reporting Analysis (Video: Erin Patrick O'Connor/The Washington Post), Words matter. A 2020 diversity audit found that the Philadelphia Inquirer, the dominant print and online news outlet in the city's media system, underrepresents people of color in its content and that its staff is overwhelmingly white (74.3% of newsroom staff; Monroe & Wenzel, 2021, p. 22). He divorced his estranged wife in 1979 and on July 14, 1980, Mr. Cianfrani, 57, and Ms. Foreman, 37, were married in Falls Church, Va., where she lived. Unlike our assessment of average income, education, and age indices, ratio averages include major commercial TV affiliates, which generally have large audiences but low COVID-to-crime coverage ratios and thus have a systemwide suppression effect on average ratios. While some noted the Inquirer was swapping out staff as fast as we can, others suggested change may be limited so long as the top level stays exactly the same. While several staffers shared this sentiment, the masthead has seen considerable change since the start of 2020, and white men are now in the minority. Spearmans rank-order correlations used due to non-normal distributions for ratios of COVID and crime stories. February 1, 2021 The Philadelphia Inquirer announced today that it will remove reader comments from most stories posted on Inquirer.com. Congress may be about to help local news. More sports media news on a Friday afternoon. Imagining an "older, whiter, and wealthier" print reader is hurting The
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