New book The News Untold explores how local media cover (or don't cover) poverty in Appalachia

A new book by Michael Clay Carey offers "an important new perspective on media narratives about poverty in Appalachia," Abby Freeland writes for the Charleston Gazette-Mail.

The News Untold: Community Journalism and the Failure to Confront Poverty in Appalachia looks at how journalists in poor, rural areas decide what's newsworthy, contrasted with how their audiences react to that news judgment, followed by a broader comparison of how that creation-reaction process helps shape local and national understanding of the region's economic and social issues.

Carey, who spent 10 years as a newspaper reporter and editor, writes that journalists must re-examine social views and traditional approaches to newsmaking that sometimes leave the voices of the poor out of the narrative. "Critical and inclusive news coverage of poverty at the local level, Carey writes, can help communities start to look past old stereotypes and attitudes and encourage solutions that incorporate broader sets of community voices," Freeland writes.

Carey is an assistant professor of journalism and mass communication at Samford University in Birmingham, Alabama, where he researches the impact of stereotypes and the roles media play in the formation and maintenance of individual and group identity.

Order the book here.