Local News and Geolocation Technology in the Case of Portugal

New projects have recently emerged to develop geolocation technology for the publication of local news in Portugal. These types of new initiatives open the possibility to explore new media perspectives, identifying emerging directions and opportunities to develop more competitive ways to publish local news. In this work, we study these ideas and to what extent they can be used to cope with the challenges that the local Portuguese press is currently facing. We provide local news editors with information to further develop their e-participation and news publishing activities. To this end, we present 10 indicators that measure geolocation technology that has been successful in providing attractive services to local consumers. Lastly, we analyze five Portuguese apps by means of the proposed guideline. Our work shows that the use of geolocation technology has a great potential for local journalism in Portugal but nevertheless we still find flaws in their implementation.

Mobile Applications Accessibility: An Evaluation of the Local Portuguese Press

The local press has always played a central role in the Portuguese society. Recently, new innovative technological projects to develop mobile applications and focus on local journalism in Portugal have emerged. These initiatives allow the development of better and more appealing services for local users. However, due to the important social role of the local press, this also brings along some responsibilities. Our main research goal is to study the accessibility issues in local journalism in Portugal. To this end, we first describe the current situation of local journalism in Portugal and some accessibility issues raised by the appearance of mobile applications. We then develop a simple checklist that allows the assessment of whether these applications have prevented social exclusion and facilitated the access of local information to a wide range of users, including disabled citizens. This tool provides the regional news publisher with information to improve its democratization of access to local information in Portugal. Using the cognitive walkthrough method, we illustrate the proposed framework by presenting case studies of five mobile applications in Portuguese local and regional press. This study concludes that despite the great potential that mobile applications showcase, several accessibility issues have not been properly addressed.

Groundwork for the Public

Public-facing research institutions and university centers have played an outsized role in collecting and disseminating knowledge about local news trends in the United States. Philanthropic support, attention by policymakers, and a sense of urgency around the crisis facing local journalism have incentivized the emergence of this particular kind of research that sits adjacent to, but not fully inside, the scholarly environment. This material is well positioned to engage and activate interventions aiming to help address the crisis in local journalism and provide empirical grist for deeper scholarly work. At the same time, however, this line of public scholarship is sometimes unmoored from theoretical considerations, highly descriptive, and exists outside of peer review systems. Many of these institutions setting the agenda for research about local journalism are bound by their own norms and cultures from making robust normative claims about how the industry should respond and adapt to their findings. This chapter traces the brief history of para-scholarly groundwork mapping local news, outlines the strengths and weaknesses of this model, and suggests collaborative practices going forward that connect this important groundwork with theory-driven and peer review practices.

Agents of sustainable transition or place branding promotors?: Local journalism and climate change in Sweden

The climate crisis concerns the whole fabric of society. Local journalism can play a key role when cities are handling the problems. In this article, I analyse local media discourses on climate change in four Swedish cities that aim to be role models in the transition towards carbon neutrality. A discourse analysis of news articles and op-eds about the climate, combined with semi-structured interviews with journalists working at four different local newspapers, shows that the climate crisis is covered in all newspapers – even if the amount and ambition varies – including the ability to fill key roles as watchdog and educator. The newsrooms’ climate focus also had to give way when the Covid-19 pandemic struck. Local decisions about transportation, food, and urban development are common topics and often debated in the local press. However, the prize-winning cities’ ambitious green plans to become climate neutral already by 2030 remain vague for the journalists and probably also their readers.