Definitions What Is a Small-Market Newspaper?
The focus of this study is small-market newspapers. There is no agreed-upon definition of what constitutes a “small,” “medium,” or “large” newspaper. For the purposes of our research we have chosen to define a small-market newspaper as a daily or weekly print publication with a circulation of under 50,000.
This is consistent with the literature on community newspapers and community journalism, the most closely related academic fields.45 It also allows us to exclude the major national and metro newspapers, and the emerging cadre of online hyperlocal news sites, as both of these platforms have received substantial and comprehensive coverage from researchers of late (see the Knight-Temple Table Stakes Project and the Free Press’s New Voices: New Jersey project).46