NEWS DISCOURSES OF REDEVELOPMENT: HOW JOURNALISTS CONSTRUCTED PLACE AND PORTRAYED CHANGE IN REPORTING ON THE PRINCE GEORGE’S COUNTY GATEWAY ARTS DISTRICT

Abstract

This dissertation examines how journalists engaged in placemaking and re/produced discourses about redevelopment in the Prince George’s Gateway Arts District and member Maryland municipalities—Mount Rainier, Brentwood, North Brentwood, and Hyattsville. I analyzed news stories published between 1999 and 2022 in regional, local, and hyperlocal outlets, and I conducted interviews with journalists about how they approach covering re/development and how they understand their role in neighborhood change. My analysis focused on how journalists articulated arts-driven redevelopment, including who was responsible for change, who was impacted and how, and whose accounts of redevelopment efforts and impacts were authoritative.

I found that journalists presented a largely exclusionary construction of place in which diverse communities were represented by a singular “community” of local leaders and homeowners, with renters and recent immigrants rendered largely invisible. Journalists deployed an arts district identity that circumscribed who and what belonged in these neighborhoods, often excluding residents and businesses with no connection to or interest in art. Interviews showed journalists were often unaware they were centering their own demographic in reporting and writing.

I argue that news coverage perpetuated the idea of the Gateway Arts District as a destination where redevelopment, arts, and artists were redeeming a previously deficient space. Journalist placemaking cast Route 1 neighborhoods as what they could become, often focused on the future instead of benefits for existing residents, including artists. Relatedly, journalists largely missed or disregarded early signs of gentrification in these long-disinvested neighborhoods. While hyperlocal outlets were more attuned to rising costs of housing in the area, news coverage of affordability issues lagged behind resident concerns as well as behind data that showed home values rising and renters struggling. Over 20 years, there was a dearth of consistent longitudinal reporting that tracked development projects from early planning stages to impacts. This made residents less equipped to follow planning and development processes, get involved in advocacy efforts, or anticipate changes that might impact them. One major cause for this uneven reporting was low newsroom capacity. This was a long-term challenge for hyperlocal outlets, but in the last decade, layoffs of local reporters and shuttering of local news outlets significantly changed the broader metro-area news landscape. How journalists constructed place and portrayed change in the Gateway Arts District was shaped by this lack of capacity but also who journalists used as sources and which residents—and news audiences—they centered.