Reconceptualizing Indigenous Journalism Through Boundaries, Small Worlds, and Information Poverty
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Indigenous journalism is on the rise globally but remains understudied by communication and journalism scholars. In this paper, Chatman’s (1996) information poverty theory is utilised to analyse Indigenous journalists’ newsgathering practices and experiences in Canada because it has long been used to study marginalised groups but has not been applied to the study of Indigenous journalists or journalism. Twelve semi-structured interviews with Indigenous and non-Indigenous journalists reveal how maintaining information poverty can be a deliberate way to protect the boundaries of community information and limit engagement with outsiders that could perpetuate stereotypes and upset norms related to information disclosure. Indigenous communities are a type of ‘small world’ which prioritises containment of information from outsiders such as journalists, even if they are Indigenous, thereby emphasizing boundaries and role hybridity of journalists. Indigenous journalists, as navigators of these boundaries, which are themselves contested, shows a more fluid, porous and complex landscape of information poverty. The fact that Indigenous journalists are reluctant to report on their own communities for fear of fraying social solidarity by exposing their community to outside criticism or contributing inadvertently to lateral violence through their reporting, showed a willingness by journalists to be information poor in order to be community rich. This reluctance, alongside lack of access and limited authority, affect Indigenous journalists’ public-service and watchdog roles.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".