News

Bugeja featured speaker at Atlanta conference

By Matt Neznanski
Greenlee Graduate Assistant

Remaking community journalism in the digital age is the focus of a Knight Fellows in Community Journalism conference at the University of Alabama in Anniston at which Greenlee School Director Michael Bugeja will be a key speaker.

The Feb. 8-9 conference is the first in a planned annual event designed to discuss the issues of the emerging influence of digital technology on community journalism.

“This is an important conference—a national dialogue, really—about the future of newspapers in a technological age,” Bugeja said. “Chris Waddle and others associated with the conference plan to continue the dialogue after this event. They are to be commended, along with the Anniston Star, for their focus on community journalism.”

Waddle is director of ComJ, the University of Alabama’s new community journalism master’s program housed at the Anniston Star.

In the fledgling program, classes are held at the newspaper. While students aren’t employees of the paper, the hope is that by surrounding them with professionals focused on community journalism, a sense of dedication to the community will evolve.

“We feel that mass communication has suffered the tortures of the damned,” Waddle said. “We’re sorry to see the big networks, broadcast radio, the movie and music industries going through the shudders and trepidations of the digital age, but we have a responsibility to our heartland journalists.”

Bugeja’s book “The Interpersonal Divide” is critical of digital technology’s tendency to separate people from each other. At the same time, it highlights the need for good journalism in the information age.

“More than anything in these complex times, readers require fact-based information about their hometowns and regions so that they can make intelligent choices on local issues,” Bugeja said. “This conference promises to strengthen our ties with the local audience, and I recommend it for publishers and educators.”

Bill Monroe, director of the Iowa Newspaper Association and president of Greenlee School Advisory Council, said in the past decade a new focus on community journalism has arisen within his organization.

As rural communities have changed, he said, the advertising base for local newspapers has suffered, limiting their access to qualified journalists.

“The first sign of trouble we heard from our community newspapers was that they were losing advertising. As Main Streets were closing, more and more of the decision makers aren’t here,” Monroe said. “Also they weren’t attracting enough qualified people.”

To help develop the talent already in place at small papers, the foundation began offering workshops and seminars for professional journalists working in rural areas, he said.

Community journalism struggles are a daily issue for Steve Moreys, publisher of Harlan Newspapers, which publishes the Harlan Tribune, a twice-weekly, 4,200-circulation paper in west central Iowa.

Readership for local coverage is steady, Moreys said. The paper has expanded its online presence to serve people who winter outside of Iowa, has developed niche publications and prints smaller community papers to pick up slack in its advertising base.

“We want to provide good coverage and you can’t always do that by hiring a housewife who’s looking for something to do,” Moreys said. “We need people with a true journalism background to handle some of the ethical questions and just know how to cover the community.”

The ComJ conference is designed to discuss exactly these questions, Waddle said.

“I think in the trade publications and many of the journalism schools, there’s more emphasis on big journalism than on Main Street journalism. We want to turn that around,” he said. “When you see your editor at the barbershop, your publisher at church, and a reporter at the rotary club, that has an impact, really a spiritual impact, that communicators are part of the community.”

Last updated: March 9, 2006
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