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4 How News Circulates Online The Short, Happy News Life of the Francisville Four (June 2008) T his chapter broadens Chapter 3’s ethnographic analysis of newswork, focusing on how a single news story—the wrongful arrest of four area homeowners on trumped-up charges—diffused across the entire Philadelphia news ecosystem. Chapter 3 looked at newswork practices from the vantage point of the traditional newsrooms; the events discussed in this chapter also occurred inside the editorial nerve centers where newsroom managers, bloggers, and reporters exercised their news judgment. However, the chapter also examines how the story in question leapfrogged across different media and how different news outlets contributed original reporting, analysis, and commentary to the journalistic mix. In that sense, it fuses Chapters 2 and 3, examining how news moves and how journalists behave across the entire breadth of the local news ecosystem. How does the story of the so-called Francisville Four highlight the larger journalistic processes and tensions central to this book? First, it demonstrates how notions of “reporting the news” have become hybridized in the web era. Second, it argues that while, from a distance, the organizational boundary markers between different kinds of newswork are becoming ever more porous, the fact that a local news network was emerging in Philadelphia was more visible to the scholarly analyst than to local journalists or news editors. In other words, while the researcher could trace the manner in which a news network briefly coalesced around the story of the Francisville Four, this process was not immediately obvious to working journalists. Nor was facilitating the development of that network, or tapping into it in order to produce news, the primary concern of journalists—reporting the news was, and reporting the news as seen in a particularly traditional way. In short, the story of the Francisville Four demonstrates not only a particular reality of networked journalism, but also the manner in which that “reality” is largely irrelevant in the face of a specific institutional and professional culture. 84 Chapter 4 The Francisville Four: Emergence of the Story in the Online Political Press On Friday, June 13, 2008, at 5:19 p.m., activists with the Philadelphia-based radio activist group Prometheus Radio Project sent out an e-mail announcing that four of the city’s residents, initially identified only as “critics of the police,” had been arrested in a police raid earlier in the day. Most important, according to the release, the arrests appeared to have no reason beyond harassment by law enforcement . “Philadelphia Police descended upon . . . homeowners who have been questioning police tactics in Mayor [Michael] Nutter’s new ‘stop and frisk,’ program ,” the e-mail read. “[Four] residents were arrested in their home at 17th street and Ridge Avenue, and the police are in the process of sealing the building. The homeowners are being held at the police station, no charges have yet been filed.” One of the people arrested was Daniel Moffat, the owner of the home. The e-mail concluded by linking the arrests to larger city issues of police misconduct. “Few imagined that simple criticism of a city policy could result in the seizure of one’s home and subject residents to arrest.”1 Although Prometheus Radio’s political work is primarily national in character and centers on the rather esoteric issues of low-power radio and online spectrum access, its key members are also longtime members of the local radical community, with many living in several large collective houses in West Philadelphia .2 Word of the arrests thus spread quickly across what is known locally as the “West Philly activist scene.” About an hour later, having already heard about the raid from friends, the reporter Hans Bennett (who often contributed work to “citizen media” projects) received the e-mail from Prometheus and forwarded it to the editorial group of the Philadelphia Independent Media Center (IMC). Using the open-publishing feature of the Philly IMC website, Bennett turned the story into a website “news brief” on his own initiative. His e-mail proposed that the Philly IMC turn the brief into a full feature—meaning that it should be placed at the top spot on the website. Because a previous feature—about wireless Internet access in the city—had already been proposed but not posted, and because the Philly IMC can handle only one large feature at a time in the top slot, Bennett’s proposal attempted to find a way to balance the timing of...

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