Challenges and opportunities of local journalism: a case study of the 2012 Korean general election

Abstract

Local journalism is a vital element for governance and civic engagement in local communities. It not only serves as an accountability mechanism for key local institutions but also enhances communities' problem solving skills by setting important agendas and opening public discussions. However, the Internet is posing serious challenges to local news outlets that lead to a significant reduction of accountability reporting and decreasing revenue. In this paper, we study the challenges and opportunities of local journalism in online communication space. We first observe the status of local journalism in online discourse by analyzing the public attention to local news outlets. Using Twitter to capture online public discourse, the study provides a large-scale quantitative analysis of the public's attention to local journalism. We also explore the potential to promote local journalism with information systems through a real deployment study. We propose a context-specific, decision-oriented design approach for local journalism, and evaluate it using Informed Citizen, a web portal to local journalistic contents of electoral districts.