Disseminator, Watchdog and Neighbor?: Positioning Local Journalism in the 2018 #FreePress Editorials Compaign

On August 15, 2018, hundreds of newspapers around the United States published editorials defending journalism against attacks by President Trump. This study examines how these editorials rhetorically represented the press's role in democracy, as well as journalists' relationships with local communities. Grounded in recent frameworks examining how journalists' role conceptions can evolve or be reinforced through metajournalistic discourse, we find through content analysis that the editorials emphasized traditional journalistic roles of objective "information disseminator" and "watchdog", while some also articulated a "good neighbor" role.