In May 2020 at the height of Australia's first national COVID lockdown, NewsCorp Australia announced that more than 125 regional newspapers would either be closed or become available online-only. Queensland was hit hard with 22 regional and 20 community newspapers shifting to online formats, and 15 community newspapers closing. Yet within months of the NewsCorp changes, a significant number of new print newspapers were being announced to fill the ‘news deserts’. Broadly welcomed by those in these local communities, the new publications suggest a reinvigoration of long-standing norms and tenets, many of which are specific to regional print news media, such as community-centred, locally-shaped news values and high reliance on ‘micro-ads’ (i.e. classifieds) and hyper-local business revenue. But given the dire prognostications about print business models, what are the aims and intentions of these start-ups (n = 22), and how do they translate their notions of community-centric news into business models they perceive as viable? Drawing on Hanitzsch and Vos framework for the discursive constructions of journalists’ role in society, we find these newspaper start-ups both reassert and claim more vigorously the normative values associated with community journalism as ‘social glue’, while also developing ‘lean start-up’ business models that capitalise on the sense of a local newspaper's ‘social good’ functions through an affective rationale. We argue this represents a shift to a new ‘hybrid’ model, with strong elements of a traditional and still feisty monitorial news values fusing with a more ‘morale-enhancing’ and explicitly social cohesion-centric role conceptions. We call it a ‘community cohesion model’.

2020 年 5 月，在澳大利亚首次全国 COVID 封锁高峰期，澳大利亚新闻集团宣布将关闭超过 125 家地区性报纸或仅在线提供。昆士兰受到重创，22 份地区报纸和 20 份社区报纸转为在线形式，15 份社区报纸关闭。然而，在新闻集团发生变化后的几个月内，大量新的印刷报纸被宣布填补“新闻沙漠”。这些新出版物受到这些当地社区的广泛欢迎，表明重新振兴长期存在的规范和原则，其中许多特定于区域印刷新闻媒体，例如以社区为中心、当地塑造的新闻价值观和高度依赖“微广告（即分类广告）和超本地业务收入。但考虑到印刷商业模式的可怕预测，这些初创企业（n = 22）的目标和意图是什么，他们如何将以社区为中心的新闻理念转化为他们认为可行的商业模式？借鉴 Hanitzsch 和 Vos 对记者在社会中角色的话语建构的框架，我们发现这些报纸初创企业既重申并更有力地宣称与社区新闻相关的规范价值观是“社会粘合剂”，同时也发展了“精益创业”。 up' 商业模式，通过情感原理利用当地报纸的“社会公益”功能。我们认为这代表了向新的“混合”模式的转变，具有传统且仍然充满活力的监控新闻价值观的强大元素，融合了更加“鼓舞士气”和明确以社会凝聚力为中心的角色概念。我们称之为“社区凝聚力模型”。