This study examines online obituary pages at nine major U.S. daily newspapers seeking to understand how these sites use new technologies, and how they publicly portray people's lives and deaths. These mainstream dailies provide a forum, and potentially large audiences, for mourners who send messages to the dead, express emotion, and tell stories. They also facilitate connections between readers and build new kindsof virtual communities. This represents a departure from traditional obituary content. Indeed, the "cyber obit" now allows the bereaved to help frame the death stories and build the memorials, liberated from the linear, non-interactive formats of the past. This study builds on work of bereavement scholars as well as literature in journalism and mass communication.
This study reports readers' perceptions of loss when the the newspaper in Humbolt, Kan., ceased publication after 129 years. Readers did not find that local media alternatives filled the void left by the newspaper's demise.
Students at a Midwestern university reported that they were much more likely to read the campus paper and other newspapers in print rather than online newspapers.
In a nascent attempt at providing citizen-produced news content, volunteers produce quality telecasts of local high school sports via a state-of-the-art multimedia production facility that opened in 2011 in Greensburg, Kansas. This study reports the results of structured interviews with Kiowa County (KS) Media Center volunteers that reveal high levels of civic engagement, strong community-oriented motivations, and enthusiastic support for producing other communityjournalism projects. The need for strong leadership emerged as a central theme.
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