“Scooped by the Town Drunk”: Unpacking the Effects of COVID-19 on Rural Journalism Work

Abstract

Journalists serving rural communities are crucial sources of information across the U.S.; they also face challenges and opportunities unlike those of their peers at large urban outlets. In this study, we take the COVID-19 pandemic as an opportunity to examine how these journalists define their group identities. We focus on local news creators to ask: How has COVID-19 influenced the identities of small-town and rural journalists in the U.S.? Using an approach informed by actor-network theory and social identity theory, we analyze interviews conducted during the height of the pandemic with 35 rural and small-town journalists across the Midwest, Appalachia, and Gulf South regions to understand the effects of COVID-19 on journalistic identities. We find that the pandemic disrupted the newsgathering process, depunctualizing it in a way that highlighted the centrality of relationships to the rural journalist’s identity. First, by physically distancing journalists from their sources, COVID-19 highlighted the importance of in-person connections. Second, by increasing the amount of contentious news available to report on, COVID-19 highlighted the tension between preserving news values and protecting community relationships. Our findings highlight the far-reaching effects of one actant in a network and the ways journalists in crisis situations negotiate conflicting pressures.

Keywords:

• Actor-network theory
• social identity theory
• rural journalism
• identity
• COVID-19

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 See Table A1 for a complete list of this study’s interview subjects with select demographic information.

Additional information

Funding

Manship School of Mass Communication Izard Fund for Race and Media Studies.

This study is funded by