หนังสือพิมพ์ท้องถิ่นลำปางกับการสร้างความเข้มแข็งให้ชุมชน

Abstract

                  The article titled "Lampang Local Newspapers and Their Roles in Strengthening the Community" is resulting from a research of the same subject. The research aims at studying news' presentation of different local newspapers in Lampang which is one of the provinces with strong presence of local newspapers in Thailand. The study explores how the presentation of news and news photos will help strengthen the community. A concept of roles of media in empowering the community is applied for the study.
                   The research methodology is to study the four highest circulated local newspapers in Lampang which are the Kon Muang Neua (published weekly, focus on criminal news), the Mang Moom (published weekly, focus on criminal news) the Lanna Post (published weekly, focus on economic and political news) and the Lampang News (published biweekly, focus on criminal news) published during January to June 2015. The study reviewed every page containing news and only on the front page for the photos to identify if the content would promote community's empowerment or not, at which amount, and at what direction. The analysis is in pieces and square inch.
                     The study reveals that there is 13.41% of news' coverage of Lampang local newspapers presenting news related to empowering community. The Lanna Post, which is the only quality newspaper, is ranked the highest (28.7%), followed by the Mang Moom (10.0%), the Kon Muang Neua (6.5%) and the Lampang News (5.5%) respectively.
                     Additionally, the study findsthat news promoting community's strengthening in Lampang local newspaper have covered the following subjects; civic participation (35.5%), direct public's benefits(26.4%), corruption investigation (23.2%) and combination of subjects (have more than one subjects in the same piece of sample, 14.7%). The Lampang News remarkably provides content relating to the civic partici pation. The Kon Muang Neua focuses on investigating corruptions while the Mang Moom with the emphasis on combination and the Lanna Post is distinguished in publishing equally all three subjects: civic participation, public's benefitsand corruption's scrutinizing. The coverage ratio of the samples is depending on the policy of the newspaper and number of the reporters of the editorial section. At the same time, the study also reflectsthat the readers of Lampang local newspapers pay attention to news linked to issues that close to them and beneficialto community's development.