Scooped by the town drunk”: COVID-19 as an actor in the rural journalist’s network

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.