Community Journalism

Community journalism is locally oriented, professional news coverage that typically focuses on city neighborhoods, individual suburbs or small towns, rather than metropolitan, state, national or world news. While prioritizing news stories, proximity factor is taken into consideration in community journalism.

If it covers wider topics, community journalism concentrates on their effect on local readers. Community newspapers, often but not always published weekly, also tend to cover subjects larger news media do not, such as students on the honor roll at the local high school, school sports, crimes such as vandalism, zoning issues and other details of community life. Sometimes dismissed as "chicken dinner" stories, such "hyper local" coverage often plays a vital role in building and maintaining neighborhoods.

Leo Lerner, founder of Chicago's erstwhile Lerner Newspapers, used to say, "A fistfight on Clark Street is more important to our readers than a war in Europe."

In the United States, about 97 percent of newspapers are classified as "community" newspapers, with circulations below 50,000. Their combined circulation, nearly 109 million, is triple that of the combined circulation of the country's large daily newspapers. An increasing number of community newspapers are now owned by large media organizations.

Community journalists are typically trained professional reporters and editors. Community journalism should not be confused with the work of citizen journalist, who are often unpaid amateurs, or with civic journalism although many community newspapers practice it.

Attacks on Delhi Public School, Dharan by the Maoists in the year 2003 wasn’t given major coverage in the national media but the local paper ‘Blast Daily’ had made it the main new story. People residing in and around Dharan would be more interested in knowing what has been happening around their town rather than a huge event taking place in the capital or other place.