Air mail: NPR sees "community" in letters from listeners.

But middle-class intellectuals were not the target audience of NPR pioneer William Siemering, who wrote the original NPR mission statement and served as the network's first program director. Siemering wanted NPR to be a vehicle for diverse views from all of America's cultural corners, not just college towns where affiliated stations would be based (Engelman, 1996, p. 116). An overarching goal was to have NPR serve as a forum for multiple and differing points of view--Siemering envisioned "a structured approach for direct people-to-people communication, eliminating some of the middle information brokers. We would ... facilitate connections of ideas and form networks of unions of common interest...." (Siemering, 1979, p. 35-37). Whereas some saw that communitarian ideal come to life via NPR's programming, during policy debates in Washington many critics accused NPR of skewing toward certain demographics, with self-proclaimed liberals accusing NPR of appealing too much to White, middle-class men, and conservatives accusing NPR of being too deferential to "Great Society forces that had been seen as undermining traditional U.S. economic and spiritual values" (Rowland, 1986, p. 262). Rowland (1986) noted that political pressures coupled with technological advances pushed public broadcasting toward trying to reach wider audiences with programming that would have national appeal. Over the years, NPR shifted from primarily broadcasting locally produced programs to the nation to producing many popular national programs to be broadcast through local stations--as such, NPR has changed its approach from connecting geographically dispersed communities to attempting to serve a nationwide community based on shared interests and values of NPR listeners (Stavitsky, 1994). In selecting and reading letters from listeners, NPR could be applying those same principles.

Theory: News Work and Imagined Community

The theoretical framework of this study melds two well-studied frameworks-imagined community and news work--to make predictions about why and how NPR presents and constructs its letters from listeners segments. Simply put, this study predicts, first, that NPR's goals for the letters segments are to create a sense that NPR is a community of listeners, and, second, that NPR ends up constructing an imagined community that reflects the journalists' own professional values rather than any shared goals or values of those who submit the letters. Past research supports those predictions.

Crafting audience forums is part of the news work, or "news making," process studied by Gaye Tuchman (1978), Michael Schudson (2003), Dan Berkowitz (1997), and others. News-work research can help explain the subjective nature of gathering, packaging, and disseminating information to "enable geographically dispersed individuals to know something about one another, one another's ethnic and neighborhood groups, and events in group life" (Tuchman, 1978, p. 4). Although letters forums differ from news sections, their production is still a journalistic process subject to common constraints on news media, including professional standards used in gatekeeping and agenda setting, limitations of time and space, and organizational norms used to recruit, train, and manage journalists (Donohue, Olien, & Tichenor, 1989). All of those constraints apply to letters to the editor for example, editors value letters that are short and to the point, that are well-written, that reference current news, and that are signed by the writers (Kapoor, 1995; Reader, 2005; Wahl-Jorgensen, 2002).

Journalists sometimes interpret letters to be representations of shared views within their broader audiences (Hynds, 1992; Pritchard & Berkowitz, 1991). As such, letters segments also can be seen as exemplars of imagined communities, which Benedict Anderson defined as collectives in which "the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion" (Anderson, 1991, p. 6). Anderson's focus was on the creation of national identities, but he noted that a daily collection of news reports in a newspaper also exemplifies his theory, as a newspaper takes varied and dispersed independent events with nothing in common (except for when they occurred), and "the arbitrariness of their inclusion and juxtaposition ... shows that the linkage between them is imagined" (Anderson, 1991, p. 33). Several scholars have built upon Anderson's theories to view news media as both members of and facilitators of imagined communities, from the biases they reveal as they cover immigration issues (Vukov, 2003)to their assumptions about race and culture in coverage of the O. J. Simpson murder trial (Silberstein, 2003) to how journalists, through shared discourse, come to see themselves as a coherent community of like-minded professionals (Zelizer, 1993). The concept also has been applied specifically to the idea that radio is used in developing nations as a tool for community building by providing a forum for public discourse (Hartley, 2000).

Taken together, these two frameworks can suggest that imagined community isn't just an outcome of a news-making process--such as a letters segment for NPR--but is actually an integral part of that very process. For example, NPR producers might see letters segments as recognizing the NPR "community" of listeners and as ways to connect to their audience. But in constructing those segments, NPR producers likely employ their own professional values much as they would when making other editorial decisions, such that the community depicted in those segments is based more on the journalists' professional values than on the goals or values of the listeners who write. By extension, the community the journalists construct would likely appear to be more like the journalists themselves than the "true" audience.

Research Questions

To explore the above theory using NPR's letters segments, the study employed the following research questions, to be explored via interviews with producers:

[RQ.sub.1]: How do NPR producers manage their letters segments?

[RQ.sub.2]: What are the goals NPR producers have for those segments?

The analysis applied to those questions were then used to formulate two additional questions, to be answered via textual analysis:

[RQ.sub.3]: To what extent do NPR's letters segments express the journalistic values of balance, accountability, and accuracy expressed by the producers?

[RQ.sub.4]: To what extent do NPR's letters segments use inclusive language to express a sense that NPR listeners are members of the NPR community?

Method

The mixed-methods approach of this study is similar to that used in several notable gatekeeping studies, particularly the foundational study by White (1950) of a single wire editor, "Mr. Gates." In that study, White analyzed the wire content of the newspaper in question, and then compared those findings to statements made by the editor regarding why and how he made his selections. White found that the choices made by "Mr. Gates" were largely subjective and were based on his personal preferences and his assumptions about his readers rather than on any real understanding of the goals and values of those readers (White, 1950). White's method was directly replicated by Snider (1967) and Bleske (1991), who discovered similar findings--when making editorial choices, journalists rely more on their own (individual or shared) values than on any serious effort to really understand the values of their audiences. Berkowitz (1990) used a more robust combination of content analysis and qualitative interviews to study the gatekeeping procedures of a single television news station in Indianapolis, and found that the gatekeeping process was susceptible to many other factors than an individual's preferences, such as group dynamics, aesthetic considerations, and resource limitations--but, again, the process was influenced more by journalists' own considerations than on any real attempt to understand audiences.

Methodologically, those studies first analyzed the content quantitatively, then used qualitative interviews to further explain the results of the content analysis. This study uses qualitative methods only and reverses the process, using interviews to identify and explain journalists' "values" which were then applied to a textual analysis of the letters segments those journalists constructed. The approach seemed appropriate for this study, as the goal was to, first, explore the ways NPR producers consider their imagined communities in their gatekeeping roles, and, second, to examine how those considerations of community are articulated via the selection, packaging, and presentation of letters from their audiences.

Questionnaires and Telephone Interviews

Questionnaires and telephone interviews were used to gather information from producers responsible for managing letters at the three news shows. This part of the project focused on [RQ.sub.1] (how letters segments are managed) and [RQ.sub.2] (NPR's goals for letters segments). In the summer of 2004, the three producers were first sent questionnaires asking for general information about how letters are managed, then each was interviewed during the winter of 2004-05 via telephone to allow them to clarify or expand their written responses. The questions related to this study were intentionally broad to allow for unprompted expressions, and none of the research concepts were mentioned in the questionnaire. Follow-up questions during telephone interviews were derived only from responses to the questionnaire.

Textual Analysis