Journalism and American Democracy

When I first heard of the assignment to analyze wedding announcements, I was skeptical about how much it could actually reveal about a newspaper. To put this skepticism to the test, I decided to check my local newspaper’s wedding and milestone announcements because I have a fairly thorough understanding of the paper’s target audience. Choosing a random date for announcements in the Coeur d’Alene Press, led me to some fascinating findings.

For starters, I was instantly reminded of how small and well connected the Coeur d’Alene community really is. I had some sort of connection to both the wedding announcements and the only engagement announcement. For the weddings, I learned that a girl I grew up with as a family friend was married this summer and that a son of my dad’s coworkers also got married. The engagement announcement was for the son of my high school Spanish teacher who also happened to play on the same baseball team as my older brother. This connectedness in and of itself reveals that the audience of the paper is not only quite small, but quite connected to one another. The substance of announcements also reveals details about the audience. Almost all of the announcements emphasize the high school that each person attended, which further shows the connectedness of the community. Many of the announcements focus on military service and religion, which gives insight into the values of the paper’s readers. Both of these items reveal a more conservative constituency through the glorification of both church and military service. All of these details fit in with my preconceived understanding of the Coeur d’Alene Press’s audience.

In order to get a comparison I chose to look at a similarly small paper from San Juan Island, Washington where I interned two summers ago. After reading some wedding announcements in the San Juan Islander, it became much more obvious how much information about target audience can be found in wedding announcement. The San Juan Islander announcements all emphasized the local, small community as well with a focus on high schools and discussion of how each person is involved in the community. Another common theme in the wedding announcements was the type of employment each person was involved in. Most of the announcements mentioned employment by a local marine or aquatic store and some sort of environmentally focused career. These two facts reveal that the readers of the newspaper are nautically focused and environmentally concerned. While the political leanings are not as obvious as they were in the Coeur d’Alene Press, there are still subtle hints of the Islands’ left-leaning nature. One announcement in particular mentions the groom’s participation at the Catholic Worker House in South Bend (as an ND grad student, whom I met last winter), one of the radically liberal wings of the Catholic Church.

CDA Press Announcements: http://www.cdapress.com/lifestyles/article_1c40d353-499c-5ce3-b7a8-20d5c54db8f8.html

San Juan Islander Announcements: http://www.sanjuanislander.com/island-newshome/announcements/weddings

While trying to brainstorm two newspapers that can be used to compare wedding announcements, I found myself looking back to my experience in Idaho and how different that area was from my hometown, Chicago. This summer I
Interned with the Nez Perce Reservation near Lewiston, Idaho and I discovered in my old backpack a weathered copy of the reservation newspaper, known as the Tac Tito’oqan. During my time there I had written several articles relating to the region’s environmental and social concerns and read it whenever I could. The Tac Tito’oqan differed greatly from my “hometown” newspaper, the Chicago Tribune. This becomes most evident when reading the wedding announcements. In the Tac Tito’oqan, wedding announcements submitted by the readers are long, detailed and personal. Essentially, they are mini biographies about the two people coming together to be married. A small newspaper with limited readership has the room for such detailed announcements because of lack of potential advertisers and writers. The newspaper itself is very personal, less focused on professionalism. The reservation is large for most reservations but the population is still around 5,000. Everyone knows everybody and the few publics that make up the reservation all overlap. When looking at the wedding announcements I wasn’t surprised to see that every couple was not only Native American but they were all Nez Perce Indian. Non-natives do live on the land but their relationship with the tribe is very stressed and therefore they would never read a native newspaper. Compare all of this to the Chicago Tribune. The first noticeable difference is the length of the announcements. All are very short, factual and to the point. It is also important to point out that I read the wedding announcements in the Tribune on their own web page. Not only does the Tac Tito’oqan lack a separate page for wedding announcements, they lack an entire website. The paper is also distributed monthly. The weddings you see are after an entire month has passed by – the immediacy of information is not as vital. As far as those represented in the announcement, the Tribune displays a diverse constituency. The first three announcements are about a Columbian-american couple, a teacher and a venture capitalist, and a national guardsman marrying his high school sweetheart. The Chicago Tribune is a national, metropolitan newspaper and its readership is very large. It represents thousands of different publics. The Tac Tito’oqan represents small, secluded publics that all interrelate within a culturally separate nation.