National and Local News Consumption and Indices of Community Participation in an American Civic-Journalism News Environment

Abstract

This paper readdresses issues of the relationship of news consumption patterns to community participation in the US context, however, it looks not only at local news, but also national news. It tests the relationship of both types of news to the important measures of community conversation (both face-to-face and digitally based), and adds “attitude about community participation” to the equation. National news is surprisingly strongly related to both community conversation and attitude, and both of the latter variables are more predictive of community participation than either of the news consumption measures. The relationships are tested in a large American metropolitan area whose newspaper, operating against current trends away from civic journalism, had been actively practicing such for years before our survey was fielded.