This study on news coverage of highly visible company types in a Dutch daily quality newspaper (NRC Handelsblad; N = 14,363), during the economic crisis (2007–2013), shows that attention to banks (and to a lesser extent also to the automobile and components industry) had a structural negative influence on media agenda diversity. The majority of the other salient company types had a significant positive impact on diversity. These results suggest that banks attracted attention at the expense of more varied, diverse coverage during the crisis. Our findings extend knowledge of agenda-building dynamics in relation to organizational news by considering characteristics of the broader media agenda. We discuss our findings in light of causes and consequences of media coverage of salient businesses.
This study disentangles national and transnational influences on international journalism by distinguishing convergent issue framing from nationally specific narrative in news texts. In a comparative quantitative content analysis of the newspaper coverage in five democratic countries (Brazil, Germany, India, South Africa, and United States) during four United Nations climate change conferences from 2010 to 2013, both textual-visual framing and narrative features were studied simultaneously for the first time. The narrative dimension consisted of variables that gauge (1) the degree of narrativity in an article, (2) the type of narrative (i.e. stories of catastrophe, conflict, success etc.), and (3) narrative roles of victims, villains, and heroes. Hierarchical cluster analysis was used to identify both the prevailing issue frame in an article and its dominant narrative. Results show that issue frames converge more strongly across countries while narratives are more closely related to the cultural context and political particularities of each country. Investigating issue frames and narratives concurrently helps to reveal country-specific patterns of narrative coloring even for the same issue frame.
Turkey has been experiencing events with major impacts on almost all areas of life, including journalism, since the failed coup attempt of 15 July. Since then, the public’s access to healthy news by the public and news making by journalists/news organizations have become increasingly crucial, yet complex operations. This article focuses on the 2 months after failed coup attempt, from the events that took place in the very first hours of the coup attempt, which are presented and discussed from media and communication perspective. This is followed by a detailed critical examination of consequently declared state of emergency in relation to news and news organizations. Then, post-coup attempt situation in Turkey is contextualized in a global tendency, namely, increasing complexity in sense making as journalistic institutions’ public service roles deteriorate.
This article explores the relationship between journalists and civil society actors in promoting the Freedom of Information right in Bulgaria. It emphasizes the importance of civil society as influential actors in the media agenda-building process and presents a new approach to conceptualizing the journalist/non-governmental organization relationship from a cooperative rather than power-distance perspective. The alliance between the Freedom of Information-promoting non-governmental organization and journalists in Bulgaria resulted in (1) increased public awareness of the Freedom of Information rights, (2) increased Freedom of Information law use by citizens and journalists, (3) improved governmental transparency, and (4) enhanced quality of journalistic output. The theoretical and practical relevance of these findings is discussed.
This article presents a content analysis of five very different examples of participatory journalism. The goal of this study is to examine the, largely untested, assumptions that news organizations and journalists have about audience input (audience material for instance being trivial, personal, emotional and sensational). We systematically ask how the contents of the five projects might be characterized in relation to conventional quality journalism as a particular genre by examining the contents against two criteria that have been critical to this genre: ‘objectivity’ and ‘diversity’. Second, given the core role that a notion of professional ‘control’ plays in discussions on participatory journalism, we examine whether these manifestations on objectivity and diversity are associated with the degree to which professional journalists have control over the participatory content published within these projects. By doing so, we aim to better understand what the participating audience produces in order to get an idea of what, according to participants, ‘counts’ as journalism and to determine whether and how this differs from conventional quality journalism. The results are explained in terms of ‘boundary work’.
This article explores frame building in Scottish television coverage of the 2014 independence referendum. It uses content analysis of news and current affairs coverage and semi-structured interviews with broadcasters and their sources to explain how factors internal and external to the media may be specifically connected to the prominence of generic issue and game frames in the coverage. It argues that broadcasters’ perception of their role in this event and the powerful influence of political sources were factors that encouraged policy-focused coverage, while the journalistic routine of balance and media organizations’ perceptions of what would attract audiences favoured the strategic game frame.
Journalism researchers have tended to study journalistic roles from within a Western framework oriented toward the media’s contribution to democracy and citizenship. In so doing, journalism scholarship often failed to account for the realities in non-democratic and non-Western contexts, as well as for forms of journalism beyond political news. Based on the framework of discursive institutionalism, we conceptualize journalistic roles as discursive constructions of journalism’s identity and place in society. These roles have sedimented in journalism’s institutional norms and practices and are subject to discursive (re)creation, (re)interpretation, appropriation, and contestation. We argue that journalists exercise important roles in two domains: political life and everyday life. For the domain of political life, we identify 18 roles addressing six essential needs of political life: informational-instructive, analytical-deliberative, critical-monitorial, advocative-radical, developmental-educative, and collaborative-facilitative. In the domain of everyday life, journalists carry out roles that map onto three areas: consumption, identity, and emotion.
Influenced by British journalistic traditions, Reuters is a global news agency embracing impartiality as a corporate norm rather than a professional standard. This impartiality, reflected in a careful choice of vocabulary, is meant to satisfy all of Reuters’ subscribers. However, our study of Reuters’ archives demonstrates that this corporate objectivity is not an absolute principle, but the subject of internal debates and tensions, often provoked by subscribers’ reactions to particular news items. This is especially so in the case of the long-lasting and highly demanding coverage of the Arab–Israeli conflict. Focusing on the 1967–1982 period, when the internal debates at Reuters proved to be particularly tense, our archival research revealed that discussions between the London headquarters and the Middle East offices revolved around four major issues, which are the focus of this article: (1) emotive wording, (2) naming of borders and capitals, (3) use of the term ‘Palestinian’ and (4) the ‘terrorist’ and ‘guerrilla’ labels. Analysis of the real-time recording of editorial difficulties faced by Reuters over the Arab–Israeli conflict in the 1960s and 1970s demonstrates how crucial, yet Quixotic, is Reuters’ ambition to reach consensus on a language of objectivity.
This study examined the interplay among readability, literacy, story type, and demographics in regard to the complexity of local newspaper content. Literacy data were derived from the US Census Bureau’s 2014 American Community Survey and readability data were derived from a content analysis of a random sample of 400 county level newspaper articles in Texas. Readability was measured dually by the Flesch–Kincaid grade reading level and the Flesch reading ease scale. On average, the news articles were written at an 11.63 grade level and a 47.78 ease level. With a 77 percent high school attainment level among residents in the population under study, these readability levels mean that the news articles were written at a level marginally comprehensible to a majority of potential readers. Additionally, business news was written at a 12.32 grade level making it even less comprehensible to a majority of potential readers. Hard news was the second most complex story type with an 11.98 grade level. Overall, residents age 65 and over had the lowest comprehension threshold, despite being the most likely to read newspapers on a daily basis. The author also discusses the implications to local news readability.
This article presents a review of communication research on user-generated content with a special focus on studies which include a content analysis. The trends of research on this comparatively new and rapidly developing subject are systematically discussed and desiderata are identified. The evaluation is based on a content analysis of pertinent approaches in nine relevant international peer-reviewed journals published from 2004 to 2012. From the results, the article concludes that user-generated content is approached by scholars from a variety of perspectives and offers scope for interdisciplinary cooperation but also notes that several of the challenges posed by the continuously changing nature of the content are not fully met.
The Paralympic Games are one of the world’s most important multisport events, maybe second only to the Olympic Games. However, research conducted to date shows that the media do not devote as much space to them as would accordingly be expected. This article proposes, through a case study, a new way of approaching this hypothetical discrimination by comparing the attention that the London Paralympic Games received from the Spanish print press with the attention that other sports received (football, basketball, tennis, cycling, motor sports and other minority sports) while those Games were being held. The main finding of our study is that over the period analysed, the Spanish press devoted less space to the Paralympic Games than to any other sport.
This study investigates how Burmese refugees were framed by Fort Wayne’s The Journal Gazette located in one of Indiana’s cities where refugee resettlement has taken place over the last two decades. We analyzed 335 stories and 286 accompanying images to identify salient textual and visual frames. Results show that the human interest and attribution of responsibility were most salient textual frames, while the visual frame of exotic was dominant. Feature stories were more likely to have a human interest frame and, if an image is included, to reflect the visual frame of Burmese as being exotic. As a global refugee crisis continues to unfold, this study presents implications for how media coverage of future refugees in the United States will evolve based on public opinion.
This article examines how the Rana Plaza disaster, the deadliest garment factory accident in history, was covered in four newspapers in Bangladesh and Norway. It discusses the role of journalism in producing connectivity between audiences and victims within and across national borders and uses Roger Silverstone’s concept of ‘proper distance’ and Lily Chouliaraki’s hierarchy of proximity to examine mediated social relationships in newspaper coverage of the disaster. This study suggests that turning suffering into practical action requires the combination of local and global perspectives. Many of the journalistic stories analysed do not fall fully within the scopes of traditional labels such as ‘local’, ‘national’ or ‘foreign’ news stories. This article, therefore, argues that elements of ‘glocal journalism’ are required to fully capture transnational phenomena such as global trade.
This study investigates to what extent audiovisual infotainment features can be found in the narrative structure of television news in three European countries. Content analysis included a sample of 639 news reports aired in the first 3 weeks of September 2013, in six prime-time TV news broadcasts of Ireland, Spain, and the Netherlands. It was found that Spain and Ireland included more technical features of infotainment in television news compared to the Netherlands. Also, the use of infotainment techniques is more often present in commercial, than in public broadcasting. Finally, the findings indicate no clear pattern of the use of infotainment techniques across news topics as coded in this study.
Apartheid South Africa created a society of deep-seated inequalities divided along race, class, and gender lines. The promotion of socioeconomic rights and redistributive justice is thus an important element in the country’s on-going transformation. This article analyzes the framing of stories on socioeconomic rights by three South African national newspapers. Using a combination of framing analysis and critical political economy insights, we show that although the newspapers foreground the importance of socioeconomic rights and recognize voices of the marginalized, the majority of the stories contain gaps and silences on critical issues concerning the structural causes of inequality and socioeconomic injustices in South Africa. The argument concludes by motivating a rethinking of the country’s normative media frameworks for the development of a journalism practice that would resonate in a country characterized by social polarization and material inequalities.
GamerGate is a viral campaign that became an occasion, particularly from August 2014 to January 2015, to both question journalistic ethics and badger women involved in game development and gaming criticism. Gaming journalists thus found themselves managing a debate on two fronts: defending the probity of gaming journalism and remediating attacks on women. This study explores how gaming journalists undertook paradigm maintenance in the midst of the controversy. This was analyzed through interviews with gaming journalists as well as a discourse analysis of the texts responding to GamerGate that were produced by their publications. Although gaming journalists operate within a form of lifestyle journalism, the journalists repaired their paradigm by linking their work to traditional journalism and emphasizing a paternal role.
This qualitative study of influences on a purposive sample of Afghan journalists was carried out in the year after the US military mission was declared over. After more than a hundred million dollars of Western government funding had been invested in development of liberal democratic journalism, the study found the paradox of news media ‘capture’. We conceptualize this phenomenon further into political, bureaucratic, foreign-donor, and violent-actor capture. The study concludes that in countries with heavy foreign intervention, where imported journalism values are layered upon previous and continued institutional arrangements and where violence and instability continue unabated, news media work is prone to ‘capture’ by a variety of actors outside media organizations. We suggest that future research could refine a typology with six distinct forms of capture – economic, political, cultural, legal, bureaucratic, and societal.
As the unipolar military world order has shifted to a multipolar economic world order, China and India have emerged as major actors in global geopolitics. While there is substantial scholarship available in areas of political science and finance about the relationship between China and India, little research has been conducted comparing the two countries’ journalism and media content and practices. This study provides a comparative analysis of how globalization, commercialization, and massive expansion of quasi-governmental media (in China) and privately owned media (in India) have impacted ethics of journalism practices. Interviews with Chinese and Indian journalists reveal that the two most important ethical issues for journalists in the two countries are corruption in media signified by practices of red envelope journalism in China and paid news in India and media’s declining credibility.
This article examines the use of personal narratives in two tabloid newspaper campaigns against a controversial welfare reform popularly known as the ‘bedroom tax’. It aims first to evaluate whether the personal narratives operate as political testimony to challenge government accounts of welfare reform and dominant stereotypes of benefits claimants, and second to assess the potential for and limits to progressive advocacy in popular journalism. The study uses content analysis of 473 articles over the course of a year in the Daily Mirror and Sunday People newspapers, and qualitative analysis of a sub-set of 113 articles to analyse the extent to which the campaign articles extrapolated from the personal to the general, and the role of ‘victim–witnesses’ in articulating their own subjectivity and political agency. The analysis indicates that both newspapers allowed affected individuals to express their own subjectivity to challenge stereotypes, but it was civil society organisations and opinion columnists who most explicitly extrapolated from the personal to the political. Collectively organised benefits claimants were rarely quoted, and there was some evidence of ventriloquisation of the editorial voice in the political criticisms of victim–witnesses. However, a campaigning columnist in the Mirror more actively empowered some of those affected to speak directly to politicians. This indicates the value of campaigning journalism when it is truly engaged in solidarity with those affected, rather than instrumentalising victim–witnesses to further the newspapers’ campaign goals.
While the issue of citizens’ declining trust in journalists has received much attention in both research and public discourse, relatively little research has examined how individuals’ evaluations of the accuracy of media coverage of events they witnessed personally may have long-term effects on the level of trust in journalists. Using the responses of Israeli adults (n = 405) to an online survey, this study explored various predictors of public trust in journalists and found that perceived correspondence between direct personal experience and news reports was the strongest predictor of trust in journalists and the only one that remained significant when controlling for all other factors. In addition, general levels of public trust in journalists were found to be in small decline. These findings suggest that declining levels of trust in journalists may be associated with actual evaluations of the quality of media performance by individuals, thus refocusing the question of trust on journalistic practice rather than on audience attributes. At the same time, the fact that personal and possibly anecdotal evidence may have significant long-term effects on audience levels of trust is potentially problematic from a democratic standpoint. We discuss the implications and limitations of our findings.
Although narrative journalism has a long history in the Netherlands, it is in recent years being promoted as a ‘new’ genre. This study examines the motives underlying this promotional tactic. To that end, we analyze how narrative journalism is framed in (1) public expressions of the initiatives aimed at professionalization of the genre and (2) interviews with journalists and lecturers in journalism programs. Results indicate that in public discourse on narrative journalism, the genre is framed as moving, essential, and as high quality journalism. These frames indicate that the current promotion of narrative journalism as ‘new’ can be seen as a strategy that journalists apply to withstand the pressures they are facing in the competition with new media. These frames are deepened in the interviews with lecturers and practitioners, who frame narrative journalism as a dangerous game, a paradigm shift, and as the Holy Grail. These frames indicate that narrative journalism is regarded as the highest achievable goal for journalists, but that its practice comes with dangers and risks: it tempts journalists to abandon the traditional principles of objectivity and factuality, which can ultimately cause journalism to lose its credibility and authority. We discuss these findings in terms of boundary work and reflect on implications for narrative journalism’s societal function.
War correspondents work within a networked media environment characterised not only by an explosion of information but also a wide range of actors producing competing narratives and viewpoints. This study examines the ways in which war correspondents enact their professional roles when tweeting from within a conflict zone. The analysis sheds light on the conditions of modern information warfare in the context of reporting from within the Ukraine conflict. It also identifies the emerging social media practices of war correspondents and the different role categories that journalists are adopting on Twitter.
News value theory aims to predict a story’s chance of being selected for publication based on news factors and ascribed news values. News values can also predict the coverage of corporate press releases. For news decisions, a newspaper’s revenue model may force editors to consider whether the source of a press release is an advertising client, despite the ‘separation of church and state’. In addition, for business journalism, corporate press releases have become an increasingly important news source. This study combines news values and advertiser weight to predict news coverage of press releases of banks in the news of partly and fully advertising-funded newspapers in Switzerland. Results show that advertiser importance can explain press release coverage concerning article length and tone in few cases, but has no universal news value. Public relations material is also not used as editorial subsidy for news. Larger companies are more successful in terms of press release uptake. However, their articles consist of a greater share of non-public relations material. Thus, our findings confirm editorial independence instead of copy-paste or obsequious journalism.
How do future-of-news experts construct accounts of the future of journalism and on what do they base these accounts? What do their methods imply about manifest and latent reasons for constructing these accounts in the first place? This exploratory study adapts a model from the sociology of work, which provides a typology of strategies that guide decision-making in ‘future work’ – that is, work that involves collective and systematic efforts to predict and legitimize predictive claims. We first examine economic literature on uncertainty and risk, which explains the extreme difficulty of making predictions in an environment of high uncertainty. We then situate journalism ‘future work’ within the literature on the social construction of the future, and using Fine’s model, outline strategies pursued in this construction. We conduct an exploratory qualitative content analysis of published predictions written by ‘future of news’ experts, examining the strategies they use to legitimize their predictive claims. Findings show mixed support for Fine’s model and some support for rival strategies for supporting claims about the future, for example, a path-dependence strategy of extending the known present into the future.
In 2014, President Barack Obama made history by only calling upon women journalists during a domestic news conference with the White House press corps. To capitalize on and examine this critical first in journalism, this study analyzed the potential influence of a journalist’s gender in White House press corps news conferences with President Obama a year before and a year after the all-female conference. The content analysis examined what political issues journalists emphasized in presidential news conferences and whether these issue emphases varied (a) by journalists’ gender and (b) before and after the all-female conference. Results revealed that, to some extent, men and women emphasized different issues. Furthermore, there were marked shifts after the all-female conference. First, women were called upon more often. Second, women emphasized several issues more than men. In particular, women became predominant on questions dealing with so-called ‘masculine’ or ‘hard news’ issues, for example, macroeconomics and foreign trade. This work suggests that gender, in all of its permutations – be it the journalist’s gender, the gendering of issues, or the gendering of occupational spaces – matters and may affect journalists’ lines of questioning.
Social media, comment threads, and other means of online communication are important to journalists’ work processes, but expand their workload and pose challenges to their professional identity. The concept of ‘engagement’ is used by news workers in New Zealand to describe the role of digitally mediated communication in their work. Engagement deserves scholarly treatment akin to concepts such as ‘participatory journalism’ because it is employed by journalists to place professional and practical limits on online interaction. Their decisions about engagement are based on professional commitments, past experiences, and the allocation of time and resources. Journalists in newsrooms that are already understaffed and under-resourced are expected to take on new tasks; like other digital laborers, journalists experience the interpenetration of work and leisure and the incorporation of affective and unpaid work. News workers have an opportunity to develop best practices for engagement and determine how and when they should engage online.
In an increasingly multicultural, multiethnic, and multilingual media environment, ethnic media are an important part of the public sphere, and the process in which ethnic discourse is produced deserves attention. This article advances Husband’s work on ethnic media as communities of practice by exploring ethnic media of young diaspora. Just as ethnic communities are heterogeneous across ethnic groups, depending on immigration history, demographics, and communication infrastructure, among other factors, ethnic media as communities of practice are never homogeneous and lineal practices. The case of Korean media in Vancouver and Los Angeles, one of the most rapidly growing ethnic media sectors in North America, suggests two new identities – cultural identity and institutional identity – in addition to the journalists’ subjective identities, which Husband discussed. These two identities that are specific to Korean media confirm diversity within communities of practice and suggest the variations to be considered in the broader discussion of ethnic media as communities of practice.
Based on a 4-year longitudinal analysis of social media and mobile phone users in a Midwest US market, this study differentiates news content engagement from news medium engagement, proposes four levels of news engagement, and compares how social media and mobile media differ in their effects on engagement in news content and news medium between the general population and college students. The analysis shows a steady decline in the interest in political news but not in other types of news. Total news consumption time gradually declined among the general population, and the gap between general population and students diminished over time. Social media use positively predicts total news consumption time. Predictors of news engagement differ for different levels of news engagement.
A survey of Pakistani journalists, members of the policy community and media academics found that the mediatization of Pakistan is having a mixed effect on the stability of the country’s fragile democracy. Members of the policy community generally have a more positive view of the impact of the media on Pakistani society than those who work in the profession and say they take media reaction into account before making decisions, although all groups said the media are still unable to fulfill its watchdog role without fear of retribution. The results are in line with studies in the developed world that found that the more politicians believe in a stronger media effect, the more susceptible they become to media agenda setting. The findings also bolster the ‘co-evolution’ theory that argues media gain influence as democracy stabilizes in post-autocratic environments.
In the scholarly debate, ideals of original reporting are commonly contrasted against the churnalistic reproduction of source content. However, most news making lies between these poles: Journalists rely on but transform the available source material, renegotiating its original meaning. In this article, we define journalistic transformation as those interventions journalists make in their use of third-party textual material in the pursuit of crafting a news story. Journalists (1) select contents from available source texts, (2) position these contents, (3) augment them with further information, and (4) arrange all to craft characteristic news narratives. To investigate journalistic transformation practices, we compare source materials used in the news (e.g. press releases, speeches) to the resulting Israeli, Palestinian, and international coverage of the abduction and murder of four youths in summer 2014. We identify five kinds of journalistic transformation – evaluative, political, cultural, emotive, and professional – each of which actualizes a different journalistic function and contributes to rendering the news relevant to the respective audiences in distinct ways.
Media organizations throughout the Western world struggle to adjust their practices to rapidly changing conditions. Initially, online journalism was celebrated for potentially revolutionizing political reporting due to its new technological possibilities: According to this, it is able to (1) increase transparency by providing hyperlink sources, (2) increase understanding by providing further background information, and (3) add to deliberation and follow-up communication by providing a platform for interactive exchange. A comparative content analysis of 48 news websites from six countries (France, Italy, Germany, Switzerland, Great Britain, and United States) examines the degree to which these three potential strengths are fully exploited. By mapping the different news outlets in relation to the digital functions, we identify three models prevalent in different countries and organization types. The first model contains outlets promoting the usage of links to make their sources transparent to the reader (‘transparency model’), outlets focusing on the provision of background information to enable their audiences to gain a wider understanding of the reported topic (‘background model’), and outlets that mainly avoid the adoption of new technologies (‘print-oriented model’). These findings show that different structural developments and professional orientations lead to the adaption of different technologies in digital journalism.
This article examines shifts in one marker of professionalism for journalists as reflected in the police press pass system. Credentials can be interpreted both as a mark of occupational membership and as token that grants journalists access. Based on a census of 100 American police departments and interviews with representatives from those departments, we find that police credentialing policies are changing, in part because the new media environment has blurred journalism’s professional boundaries. Our analysis draws from Pierre Bourdieu’s field theory, which suggests that institutional practices such as police department credentialing reproduce social hierarchies and power structures. Using this lens, we argue that credentials are losing their value as professional status symbols while becoming increasingly important for geophysical access.
This article reconsiders the concepts of balance and impartiality in journalism, in the context of a quantitative content analysis of sourcing patterns in BBC news programming on radio, television and online in 2007 and 2012. Impartiality is the cornerstone of principles of public service broadcasting at the BBC and other broadcasters modelled on it. However, the article suggests that in the case of the BBC, it is principally put into practice through juxtaposing the positions of the two main political parties – Conservative and Labour. On this basis, the article develops the idea of the ‘paradigm of impartiality-as-balance.’ This paradigm prevails despite the news organisation’s commitment to representing a broader range of opinion. The paradigm of impartiality-as-balance means that only a narrow range of views and voices are heard on the most contentious and important issues. Further, it results in reporting that focuses on party-political conflict, to the detriment of a journalism which provides much-needed context.
This article contributes to a more systematic understanding of the role of newspaper ownership in deliberative processes by analyzing how inclusive local newspapers are of diverse perspectives on the Terri Schiavo case. Drawing on a content analysis of 1182 stories, we use multinomial logistic regression to analyze how ownership affects what ideas are included in the discussion as well as the tone with which they are discussed. We find that ownership indeed matters. Independently owned newspapers cover controversial ideas more often – even on the opinion pages. We also find that geography matters. Newspapers closest to the event epicenter include more stories and a broader range of perspectives regarding the Schiavo case. We discuss the implications of this research for understanding the role of economics in deliberative processes.
The purpose of this study is to examine how economic journalism – news about economic issues – has changed over the past 20 years under pressure of the financial crisis experienced by newspaper companies in South Korea. A content analysis of 2442 articles published in South Korea’s three daily newspapers with the greatest circulation showed that between 1994 and 2014 the news topics and sources of economic issues changed significantly. Findings revealed that articles addressing broad issues about the economy-in-general (economic news) that are likely to be of public concern, such as unemployment and government policies, dropped from 53 to 32 percent, while news about individual businesses, which are current or potential purchasers of newspaper advertising, rose from 17 to 30 percent. Likewise, there was significant increase in the use of corporate spokespeople used as news sources, while government and independent spokespeople decreased. An additional source analysis demonstrated that articles about individual businesses highlighted the interests of individual corporations: only 10 percent of news articles about corporations challenged the perspectives of corporations. Findings suggest an imbalance of news coverage about economic issues that may limit the information that the public needs in order to make informed decisions about a wide range of economic issues.
Despite the social media’s agenda-setting power, the literature provides little understanding of how social media agendas survive and last long enough to trigger substantial public discussions. This study investigates this issue by tracking the ice bucket challenge campaign over an 18-week period. This article claims that the pattern of the intermedia process evolves over time along with the issue-attention cycle. We observed a round-trip intermedia agenda setting where the direction is reversed as the agenda waxes and wanes. Both social and mainstream media continued to generate a heightened level of issue attention after the buzz was cooled down.
During World War II, Black journalists sought to shape United States’ domestic and international policies to fight Jim Crowism and fascism. This article demonstrates how Claudia Jones, a Trinidadian-born journalist, placed ‘superexploited’ voices at the center of a conversation about nationhood, race, and war politics. Employing a historical and thematic analysis of Jones’ editorials in the Young Communist League’s Weekly Review from 1938 to 1943, the author highlights three themes. This analysis demonstrates how Jones promoted US intervention in World War II by linking Jim Crowism to fascism and promoting military service and transnational solidarity. In centering ‘superexploited’ voices, Jones employed an imperial ‘we’ discourse that intersected racial justice with the Communist Party of the USA’s Popular Front platform. Her journalism complicates historical narratives about alternative journalism, illustrating how voices like Jones at times contributed to the growth of US global power, even while they critiqued its policies.
This study examines the framing of the bailout-related news in Cyprus, adopting a critical analytical perspective. The examination of the actors’ associations with the main framing components (actors, causes, solutions and effects), as presented in the Cypriot elite press, revealed the dependency, the (non)liability and the economistic frame. These frames reproduce the hegemonic neoliberal discourse over the crisis, while disconnecting the responsibility for the crisis from the agents involved, protecting, thus, the legitimacy of their actions and of their authority. The media studied advocate the implementation of neoliberal policies (expressed in harsh austerity and protection of the banking system), legitimating them as the optimal model not only of the economy, but also of politics and social practice.
Rumor is customarily considered a taboo element in contemporary journalism; its use is roundly condemned in many official quarters. And yet, its actual persistence in everyday journalistic practice also suggests a need to reexamine its various functions. This essay considers the manifold uses of rumor in the journalism of The New Yorker author Calvin Trillin – specifically, his Noir essays on accidental death and murder in mid-size American towns and cities collected in Killings (1984) and American Stories (1991). Originally published as part of his ‘US Journal’ and ‘American Chronicles’ series for The New Yorker, these essays use rumor to reconstruct the private doubts and public opinions of its profiled towns – and as such, reveal Trillin’s debts to a Noir critique of the public sphere. Moreover, both as fieldwork and rhetorical tool, the marshaling of rumor plays a role both in Trillin’s own self-fashioning as a mid-American everyman and in The New Yorker’s larger claim to speak not only about such towns but also for them.
When White reporters cover issues involving race, they often fall back on traditional, passive practices of objectivity, such as deferring to official sources and remaining separate from communities. Using in-depth interviews and focus groups combined with textual analysis in a case study of one Midwestern city, we explore the ethical tensions between the commitment to neutrality and the need for trust building in communities. This essay suggests that the current practices by White reporters may be unethical and argues for an active objectivity focused on loyalty to all citizens. This statement about the clashing of ethics explores a middle ground for reporters in historically White-dominated communities caught between long-time norms and the demands of an increasingly diverse society.
Drawing from psychological research, the study examines how story form influences reader reaction to news accounts of mass violence in Africa. An online survey with embedded experimental conditions was administered to a US Internet panel (n = 638). Results show that how the story is told affects reader emotional response and, indirectly, charitable giving. Story personification had the strongest influence, followed by stories with photographic images. Use of statistical and mobilizing information had only a small effect on reader response. The straight news story – the predominant form of news reporting – evoked the weakest emotional response. The findings underscore that simply ‘reporting the news’ is often insufficient to arouse audience response. The reader needs empathetic connection, especially when dealing with large-scale distant suffering. Applying psychological principles to practical journalism, the study is intended to guide media practitioners and activists as they seek better ways to bring attention to the world’s most deplorable conditions.
The quality of information from communication media is a topic that has been dealt with by various theorists through the analysis of the final products of information. This research work offers an analysis model of the quality of information of printed news media by the use of three indexes of categories and structured dimensions that will allow for the assessment and evaluation of the quality of information from the media, and the identification of the incidence of political-economic conditions of the journalistic environment’s macro-environment. For this, an experimental test of two Venezuelan media outlets was performed. Their use allowed us to conclude that political polarization and discourse of social confrontation, as well as economic factors such as inflation and pay scales had a proportionally direct effect on the quality of information products.
This study investigates the impact of digitalization on the photojournalistic profession and its transformation during the last two decades. The development of digital technology and the Internet by the end of the 20th century has brought several questions to the field of photojournalism and impacted the entire process of photojournalistic material production. Taking the example of the Czech Republic, we examine how photojournalists and photo editors perceive the changes brought on by the adoption of digital technology and how news routines, photojournalistic practices, image content, and professional identity have been reshaped. We conducted in-depth interviews and surveys with 48 photojournalists and photo editors from different Czech news media and magazines. The findings show how Czech photojournalists evaluate the state of their profession after digitalization. We also discuss a new way of image taking, so-called ‘cinematic shooting’, the ‘myth of acceleration’, and new responsibilities laid upon visual news professionals.
This article examines journalists’ curatorial practices with regard to linked and embedded sources on three news media platforms: the online version of a legacy news medium, a native online explanatory news medium, and an online citizen news medium. Our goal is to explore the curatorial practices in online journalism, and the continuity and changes in journalistic gatekeeping in the online environment. Our results demonstrate that established journalistic traditions are still prevalent in online news. Meanwhile, links to digital archives are widely used to contextualize news subjects. Explanatory journalism and citizen journalism do exhibit characteristics of what Herbert Gans calls ‘multiperspectival’ news, which covers a wider variety of social institutions. We discuss differences in the prevalence of the curatorial treatments of various types of linked sources in relation to journalists’ views of their roles, and the online news media’s organizational and technological natures.
In the changing news environment, young adult audiences, often dubbed ‘the Internet generation’, have increasingly gravitated toward online sources of news and information, raising questions about the nature and amount of news consumed. This study joins many others in looking at the emerging processes of news consumption among, in this case, college students, using focus group interviews to further examine how they go about obtaining news. Drawing upon literature in the areas of news consumption, media habits, generational change and news repertoire, this study identifies an emerging three-stage process of consumption that includes the following: routine surveillance, incidental consumption, and directed consumption, each conditioned by various forms of new media use. It suggests continued research in the interaction of a changing media ecology with generational adoption of news habits and the implications of this interaction for news and news engagement.
This article takes a historical approach to the analysis of changes in the gathering and display of documents and data by journalists. It stands as an attempt to tease out the underlying epistemological changes implied by these transformations. The transition from the 19th to the 20th century would see the rise of the so-called survey movement, itself tied to the emergence of the progressive movement and concomitant with the growth of new techniques for collecting and visualizing social data. Alongside the emergence of the social survey, and oddly related to it in a number of intriguing ways, this time period would also see the invention of public relations as a technique of press management. To this end, this article chronicles the social movement known as the ‘Men and Religion Forward Movement’, discussing its pioneering combination of data collection, information display, and aggressive publicity strategies in service of the cause of social reform. The article examines the materiality of the Men and Religion Forward Movement’s information collection procedures, its charts, graphs, and other display devices, and the processes by which these ‘representations of the collective’ did or did not manifest themselves in newspaper coverage of the movement.
Professional autonomy has usually been defined in terms of journalists’ perceptions of their control over their work vis-à-vis organizational supervisors. Using surveys of journalists in Colombia and Mexico, we identify two dimensions of perceived autonomy: first, control over story development tasks (the traditional understanding of autonomy in empirical studies); second, the ability to actually publish news on a range of subjects associated with different levels of material or cultural power. We then identify predictors of both dimensions of autonomy. Physical threats, overlapping forms of inequality, and clientelism characterize pressures on autonomy in these two democracies. Journalists can carve out more space for autonomy by gaining professional experience or by creating new organizational arrangements and supporting analytical, change-oriented norms. By examining professional autonomy empirically in a broad range of contexts, we demonstrate that autonomy is more complex, situational, and historically contingent than previously believed.
This article analyses the role of central editors in constructing a national debate in the Norwegian media after the 2011 Oslo terror attacks. A broad literature has documented that after crisis, mainstream media move away from their everyday critical function to a ritual type of journalism that fosters adherence to shared values and support for national authorities. Based on in-depth interviews with debate editors, this article analyses how this type of national crisis discourse is substantiated and guarded through editorial decisions and policies. Second, it gives insights into how changes in the perceived climate of opinion and increasingly vocal critical voices gradually affect editorial practices and challenge consensus. Theoretically, the article combines perspectives from a critical approach (the media as channels for political authorities during crisis) and a cultural approach (the media as constitutive for resilience and recovery) to contribute to the understanding of crisis journalism in a multi-platform, multi-directional media landscape.
This article discusses elements of hybridisation in political interviewing within the contemporary environment of broadcast news. Beginning from a conversation analytic perspective, four types of political interview programmes are described in terms of their different approaches to questions and answers; opinions and arguments; and neutrality, agency and advocacy. The analysis then turns to the different ways in which ‘tribuneship’ is manifested in different types of interview, comparing the representation of the public interest as found in both neutralistic and adversarial interviewing with the type of personalised and ‘non-neutral’ tribuneship found in hybrid political interviews.
Comparative research across the world has shown that nation-level variables are strong predictors of professional roles in journalism. There is, however, still insufficient comparative research about three key issues: cross-national comparison of journalistic role performance, exploration of how – or whether – organizational variables account for variation in role performance across countries, and the performance of specific journalistic roles that prevail in regions with post-authoritarian political trajectories. This article tackles these three issues by comparatively measuring journalistic performance in five Latin American countries. Based on a content analysis of 9841 news items from 18 newspapers, this article reports findings from Brazil, Chile, Cuba, Ecuador and Mexico, by analyzing the presence of the ‘interventionist’, ‘watchdog’, ‘loyal’, ‘service’, ‘infotainment’, and ‘civic’ roles. Results show that the region is far from homogeneous and that while ‘country’ is a strong predictor for most of the roles, other variables such as ‘media type’, ‘political orientation’, and ‘news topic’ are also significant predictors to varying levels.
Particularly in the context of American television, hybridity has become the defining feature of contemporary broadcast journalism. Hybridity itself manifests on multiple levels – the textual, systemic, and discursive. Together, these three levels of hybridization challenge traditional conceptions of journalism while at the same time enabling the emergence of new forms of journalistic truth-telling. This essay explores three examples of ‘public affairs narratives’, long-form fictional dramas that sit, in different configurations, at the intersections of news and narrative. It concludes that in an age of complexifying distinctions between the factual and the fictive, hybrid public affairs narratives have the potential to play a valuable journalistic function, orienting audiences to critical, but often under-explored, socio-political realities.
As devices become a more visible and integral part of media practice, it is important for researchers and scholars to attend to the ways in which philosophies, professional discourses, and technical limits structure the ways these technologies are deployed. The 35mm camera is a technological waypoint between earlier large-format cameras and contemporary digital photography and offers a useful historical example for interrogating the relationship between seemingly inert technical operations and journalism’s modes of meaning production. To that end, this article offers a theoretical perspective for interrogating the 35mm camera through the lens of Latour, with the aim of developing a schema for integrating devices into the cultural study of media and communication.
This study focused on the phenomenology of covering a natural disaster by documenting the lived experience of 12 national and local journalists who covered Typhoon Haiyan when it hit the Philippines in November 2013. Studies that focused on journalists who covered natural disasters have identified their experiences as either journalists trying to balance their norms or as victims dealing with trauma. Our analysis brings these experiences together for a more holistic description of the experience of covering a natural disaster, arguing that one aspect of the experience cannot be understood without the other. Through an interpretative phenomenological analysis, this study found that the journalists experienced the storm as journalists, leaders, victims, and as community members. Such experiences were marked by liminal gaps, with one experience affecting the other.
Political journalists rely heavily on their occupational status and reputation. This article addresses how political journalists negotiate their standing and enforce their legitimacy on Twitter amidst the online environment that directly challenges them. So far, practice-oriented studies have only looked at journalists in general. Studies have also tended to investigate the content published to journalists’ Twitter feeds, neglecting other aspects of the Twitter profile that can affect the perceived image of journalists. This exploratory study examines the Twitter profile pages of 20 political journalists who work for the top broadsheet newspapers in the United States. It uses the conceptual framework of personal branding to identify patterns and trends of how and where political journalists actively communicate their presence on the platform. This process is delineated by three complementary and co-existing brand identities – the organizational, the professional, and the personal – as well as a digital media skills-based dimension that political journalists use to position their journalistic brand on Twitter. Findings suggest that it could be most appropriate to think of political journalists’ Twitter profiles as digital business cards or digital portfolios, deliberately crafted to differentiate the journalist and establish competitive superiority.
Cross-national comparative studies of journalists generally focus on the demographic characteristics and/or the values and role-perception of journalists. Systematic studies of journalistic skills have been rare, however. This article reports the findings from a comparative study of journalists from Britain, Estonia, Germany, Italy, Poland, and Sweden. Based on an email survey of 2238 news professionals, journalistic skills can be grouped into three distinctive dimensions: reporting, editing, and networking skills. The data also show a number of similarities, but also important differences regarding the importance journalists give to different professional skills in different European countries.
Ekström and Kroon Lundell, Ekström and Hutchby refer to hybridity in political news interviews as the mix of activities or the systematic shifting between speech exchange systems otherwise associated with non-interview settings. In their examination of journalists’ mixed interactional activities, both Hutchby and Ekström discuss how hybridity is explored as an interactional resource to question politicians and/or create an argumentative environment, breaching the neutralistic role of the broadcast news journalist. In this article, I examine instances of journalists’ breaching neutralism not through their hybrid questioning practices but through their listening practices in one-on-one interviews conducted during the 2012 Greek general election campaigns. In my data, journalists use hybrid listening practices to co-produce politicians’ arguments and to answer their own questions. Findings indicate that journalists’ hybrid listening practices provide political actors with new ways to mainstream and appropriate their manifestos to the public.
This contribution discusses the content and characteristics of celebrity news as a hybrid news genre by means of a quantitative content analysis of a random sample from 1 year of celebrity news as published in two elite and two popular Flemish newspapers, and two Flemish celebrity gossip magazines. To this end, a theoretical framework is developed that combines insights from celebrity studies regarding the characteristics of the celebrity as a mediated construct with insights from research on (the decline of) journalistic quality, as well as insights from genre studies on hybridity. Different from what the literature suggests, the results indicate a certain dominance in celebrity news of the public over the private and a distinct attention to public interest next to human interest news, although results differ according to type of medium. The results also show clear indications both of original but sensationalized reporting in magazines and of a high level of ‘churnalism’ in (elite) newspapers. In the conclusion, the article suggests a need to pay more attention to ‘regular’ rather than exceptional celebrity news and a reconsideration of what is ‘wrong’ with celebrity news as indicative of what is ‘wrong’ with journalism in general, and shows that celebrity news is a hybrid genre in three different ways.
In October 2006, Charles Carl Roberts IV walked into a one-room Amish schoolhouse in West Nickel Mines, PA, USA, brandished a handgun, and killed five female students who were all under the age of 13. Through an analysis of 215 news articles published in 10 local, regional, and national newspapers in 2006 and 2007, this article examines news characterizations of Roberts that cast him as a ‘Monster’. We explore interdisciplinary notions of pure evil to expand current literature of news myth to include a form of explanation that appears in news when no other current mythical archetype will suffice. This study complicates current perspectives on news myth by expanding the ideological tools to examine the nature of evil in loss through the example of the Amish shootings.
The powerful and interesting mixture of Vice Media Inc. – youth, (cool) lifestyles, and journalism within a diversified global media company – has, naturally, attracted a considerable amount of both hopeful and critical journalistic commentary. Vice Media Inc. has, however, attracted little scholarly attention. This article seeks to address this through a contextual reading of Vice News’ coverage of the events in Ferguson (from 12 August to 28 September 2014). This coverage largely alternates between minute-by-minute, long-form video coverage and incensed, media-reflexive analysis and thus mixes amateur aesthetics, immersive approaches, and ethics of witnessing with commentary. This mixture, it will be argued, in certain ways mirrors the collaborative flow found on social media. The article employs an analytical framework that revolves around aspects of hybridity – from the systemic to the textual – and also draws on notions of cosmopolitanism in relation to the global audience of Vice.
The article argues that through explorations of differing identity formation among journalist groups according to socio-cultural contexts, Peace Journalism has to test the applicability and acceptability of its normative frameworks in different settings. The article identifies lessons Peace Journalism can include from other academic sub-fields to understand the professional life-worlds of journalists in post-conflict societies. The study proffers a meso-level investigation framework of journalists’ awareness of and negotiation with the circulation of ‘flaks’, ‘frames’ and ‘myths’ through the ‘feedback loop(s)’ they work within and re-categorizes micro-level findings from a study conducted in Kenya with this meso-level framework as an illustration.
This paper introduces the Special Issue’s central theme of ‘hybridity and the news’, defining the scope and setting the scene for the multiple issues and debates covered by the individual contributions in this collection. Opposing both relativist positions that discard hybridity as an analytically useless concept, and preconceived notions that construe hybridity as intrinsically negative or positive, it is argued to move beyond binary thinking and to approach hybridity as a particularly rich site for the analysis of forms and processes of experimentation, innovation, deviation and transition in contemporary journalism. In order to profoundly understand these developments, which come in many forms, manifest themselves on different levels, and serve multiple purposes, a comprehensive, multi- and interdisciplinary perspective is needed. The Special Issue aims to contribute to this research agenda by looking closely into blending categories and interaction patterns in journalistic forms, genres, and practices, encompassing theoretical frameworks and methodological approaches from various disciplinary backgrounds including political and communication sciences, sociology, linguistics, cultural studies, and history. While taking different angles on the subject and being variously located on the macro and micro levels of analysis, the articles assembled here all engage in a careful assessment of ‘hybridity and the news’ through profound conceptualizations and empirical analyses, connecting with and shedding new light on long-standing debates about the nature and meaning of journalism.
This article presents a study of what affects professional knowledge creation when journalism students have their periods of internship in legacy, yet highly digitized newsrooms. A total of 16 Norwegian j-students are interviewed and 30 internship reports analysed in order to detect the different actors – both humans and non-humans – that matter when students learn through practice in such newsrooms. Through this analysis, this article aims at understanding some of the tensions between legacy and digital culture that many newsrooms today are marked by and how these tensions affect professional knowledge creations for the journalists of tomorrow. The study is framed by sociomaterial perspectives on learning and journalistic practice and argues that two types of materiality are especially important for j-students’ professional knowledge creation during periods of internship: the structure and layout of the newsroom and the software applications in use at the newsroom.
This article examines some of the cultural differences between news ‘fixers’ and foreign reporters, focusing specifically on the expectations and experiences of the fixers, rather than the correspondents whose own perspectives have already been fruitfully explored. Drawing upon qualitative, semi-structured interviews I conducted with 21 news fixers, I will answer three research questions: (1) How do fixers understand and value the work they do? (2) How do fixers view the cultural, ethnic, or racial differences that inevitably play into the professional relationships between local news staff and foreign news outlets? (3) How do these cultural differences impact the safety of foreign correspondents and fixers, most especially at sites of conflict? The study ultimately shows that fixers take issue with foreign journalists’ lack of background on the countries they visit and with journalists’ lack of attention to disparate cultural mores in the newsgathering process. Furthermore, the inattention to cultural difference in the field can endanger the lives of the foreign reporters as well as the lives of the fixers.
This article sets out a teaching philosophy of journalism education in South Africa based on four assertions: re-affirmation of the role of journalism in democratic processes, the need for comparative studies and research-led teaching, journalism as active citizenship and journalism as a reflexive practice. These assertions are considered within the context of the role of the news media in a young democracy, with a particular focus on South Africa and post-colonial societies in the global South. As such, I hope to contribute to a debate around journalism education grounded in local realities rather than imported Western normative conceptualizations of the role and function of the news media and what the study of the news media in this particular context can offer not only the context that it serves but also the discipline itself.
This study examines how repetitive news publishing on the Internet has changed evaluations of the credibility of the press and news aggregators. The temporal and spatial characteristics of the Internet have facilitated repetitive publishing of almost identical news content by the same news companies. The mechanism of repetitive news is based on the interplay between journalistic and algorithmic curations, which coexist on news aggregation sites. Based on a nationwide survey in South Korea, we found that the repetitive-news block was the strongest (and negative) predictor of the credibility of both the press and news aggregators. The more frequently people are exposed to repetitive news and the more they perceive it as being problematic, the less likely they are to regard the press and news aggregators as credible. These results have implications for online news flow and credibility research.
The use of strategic game framing is predominant in mainstream news reporting of politics. Nevertheless, systematic research on the specific antecedents of strategic game framing – especially in non-electoral periods – is scarce. Against this background, this quantitative content analysis of print, TV and online news investigates the antecedents of strategic game framing in a non-electoral context in two Western European countries – Austria and Switzerland. The study focuses on media type, online versus offline editions, and content-related variables as antecedents of the media’s framing of political news. Findings reveal that the highly competitive online environment, opinionated story types and issues focusing on the functioning of democracy fuel the use of the strategic game frame in political news coverage in non-electoral times. Furthermore, the results indicate that content-related predictors moderate the influence of media-related antecedents such as newspaper type. Implications of these findings are discussed.
As gatekeepers, journalists have the power to select the sources that get a voice in crisis coverage. The aim of this study is to find out how journalists select sources during a crisis. In a survey, journalists were asked how they assess the following sources during an organizational crisis: news agencies, an organization undergoing a crisis, and the general public. The sample consisted of 214 Dutch experienced journalists who at least once covered a crisis. Using structural equation modeling, sources’ likelihood of being included in the news was predicted using five source characteristics: credibility, knowledge, willingness, timeliness, and the relationship with the journalist. Findings indicated that during a crisis, news agencies are most likely to be included in the news, followed by the public, and finally the organization. The significance of the five source characteristics is dependent on source type. For example, to be used in the news, news agencies and organizations should be mainly evaluated as knowledgeable, whereas information from the public should be both credible and timely. In addition, organizations should not be seen as too willing or too eager to communicate. The findings imply that, during a crisis, journalists remain critical gatekeepers; however, they rely mainly on familiar sources.
This article offers an empirical examination of the power of independent news blogs to expand the boundaries of public debates, through their capacity not only to host volumes of information but also to frame it in unique packages. Despite the scholarly attention given to blogs as a counterforce to traditional news media, there are unanswered questions regarding the discrepancy in the qualitative characteristics of the debates promoted by these two realms. We aim to offer an empirical test of this potential gap with an innovative content analysis that draws on framing research and corpus linguistic techniques. This is performed in the context of Greece, where a rapid increase in the volume of blogging has created a new platform for political debate. Through a computer-assisted qualitative frame analysis of partisan newspapers and independent news blogs, we find differences in the breadth of certain frames that could prove significant for audiences’ understanding of current affairs.
This article analyzes a journalism student’s multimedia news storytelling project in the format of audio slideshows as required by an introductory course on online journalism. Combining classroom ethnography, semi-structured interviews, content and textual analysis, the study focuses in detail on how the student designs a character-driven, audio-visual story through the theoretical lens of digital literacies and multimodality. The findings reveal the complexity of multimodal and generic design made by the journalism student. It is also found that the design process helps her to assert an authorial stance as an emergent online journalist who negotiates heterogeneity of journalistic professional Discourses. This article proposes a genre-aware, semiotic-aware, critical framework informed by digital literacy studies and embeds a case study in the theoretical framework in order to understand the ‘literacies’ as required and performed in multimedia news storytelling. Theoretical and pedagogical implications are also discussed at the end of the article.
Reflecting international trends, Ireland’s local newspaper industry has suffered steep circulation and advertising revenue falls since the late-2000s and has struggled to reshape traditional business models for the digital era. In harsh trading conditions, local titles are operating on reduced editorial resources and are weakened in their capacity to fulfil their traditional watchdog and informed-citizenry functions. Perhaps, no company better encapsulates the industry’s recent difficulties than UK media group Johnston Press. In 2005, it paid more than 200m to acquire 14 local titles in Ireland, but 9 years later sold them for just 8.5m. The article draws on this case study to consider wider issues related to the corporatisation of local news provision, the sustainability of local news industries in small media markets such as Ireland’s and the increasing disconnect between local journalism’s commodity value and its public good value.
In this article, we present a theoretical approach to conceptualizing the global news arena as a structure of relations formed across media systems worldwide, relations mapped by hyperlinked connections across online news platforms, including professional news sites, blogs, and other social media. Specifically, we argue that bridge blogs serve as the ‘weak ties’ (in Granovetter’s terms), linking cultural spheres formed by the ‘strong ties’ among traditional national media. Using China as the national context, we provide an overview of the phenomenon of bridge blogs, presenting an illustrative example to show how bridge blogs are positioned to provide contextual information and interpretation of events and issues in China to be better understood by overseas audiences.
This article is about the unique word–image relations as these appear in international news production. This is achieved by analysing the labour of a particular team – the keyword team – in the news picture production routine at the powerful Thomson Reuters international news agency. By analysing the daily work of keyworders at Thomson Reuters, I explore how the word–image problem is demonstrated, and settled, in international news production. Similar to the picture categorising mechanisms in the stock business, I argue that word and image relations in news media can also be productive, serving as a cultural practice that helps extending the shelf-life of archived pictures, thus increasing news picture sales worldwide.
We conducted an online experiment to study people’s perception of automated computer-written news. Using a 2 x 2 x 2 design, we varied the article topic (sports, finance; within-subjects) and both the articles’ actual and declared source (human-written, computer-written; between-subjects). Nine hundred eighty-six subjects rated two articles on credibility, readability, and journalistic expertise. Varying the declared source had small but consistent effects: subjects rated articles declared as human written always more favorably, regardless of the actual source. Varying the actual source had larger effects: subjects rated computer-written articles as more credible and higher in journalistic expertise but less readable. Across topics, subjects’ perceptions did not differ. The results provide conservative estimates for the favorability of computer-written news, which will further increase over time and endorse prior calls for establishing ethics of computer-written news.
Drawing from 420 surveys addressed to news media practitioners, 30 in-depth interviews with media executives and 6 focus groups, this article focuses on the institutional dimensions of ethics in journalism and explores the way in which ethical standards are perceived by journalists and other representative groups involved in Spanish news media. The data show that participants ascribe moral obligations to journalistic institutions. Interviewees emphasise the predominance of market-driven interests over ethical values as one of the main threats to journalism. However, differences between the perceptions of journalists and media executives reveal that the latter believe that journalistic ethics pertain to individual journalists.
This study tackled the remediated notion of consensus that the state-run media in China seek to reach with the online public through using Weibo – the Chinese equivalent of Twitter – as a platform for distribution and user interaction. The microblogs of three major state media outlets were sampled and the posts were categorized. All were found primarily to disseminate information and pronounce organizational opinions rather than promote their offline offerings. Against the backdrop of Goffman’s theory of region behavior, our analysis showed that the state media ritually embraced Weibo’s interactive technical features and selectively used netizens as information sources to distance themselves from their offline parents and to make audience visible on the front stage. Further analysis assessed whether these strategic efforts had been successful by examining how audience responsiveness correlates with a post’s content and format characteristics. Results suggested that audience participation does not necessarily translate into any gate-keeping power. The offline logic of Communist Party journalism appears to have been carried over to the new medium.
Between 2007 and 2011, the number of registered juvenile suspects declined by 44 percent, but the Dutch public did not feel any safer. In this research, we study media coverage of youth crime and interview journalists and their sources in order to investigate the relationship between journalists, their sources, and the possible effects on the public with respect to fear of crime. We find an overrepresentation of youth crime in news coverage, especially in the popular press, and a stronger episodic focus over time. All media focus increasingly on powerful sources that focus on repressive framing, but this is especially found in the elite press. We conclude that news coverage in all media groups, although in different ways, does contribute to the fear of crime in society and the idea that repressive measures are needed. The fact that this fear of crime is also caused by news coverage is acknowledged, but neither journalists nor politicians are able or willing to change this.
This study analyzes journalistic discourse about journalism’s gatekeeping role in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The intent is to understand how the notions of newsworthiness, news selection, and news judgment came to be expressed in normative terms in the journalistic field. The study finds discursive strategies that explained news judgment in terms of a special skill that journalists possessed, that downplayed judgment while shifting focus to the external qualities of events, and that explained news judgment in terms of the social and economic values of the information provided. The findings demonstrate how journalistic capital is formed in the context of professionalization efforts.
The high-profile appearance of Chinese media organizations in Africa has attracted considerable attention. How Chinese correspondents in Africa actually go about their work is, however, little understood. A posting in Africa gives journalists at Xinhua News Agency or China Central Television a degree of freedom not experienced in China combined with greater local visibility than a posting in the West and more market opportunities. At the same time, it carries the rather heavy responsibility to act as a pioneer of a new, distinctive global voice for China envisaged by the Chinese government. Based on interviews and observation at several Chinese media organizations in three African locations and in Beijing over the course of 3 years, this article suggests that Chinese correspondents in Africa are unable to make use of the opportunities their postings offer. While the greater investments of Chinese media in Africa have been framed to date as a challenge to their struggling competitors, in reality, journalists working for Chinese media not only feel some of the constraints that have characterized international journalism in the past decade but also face additional ones: the problem of finding and communicating a clear identity; of remaining relevant in a space where national media are growing fast and becoming more professional; of testing new styles without appealing only to a niche.
Travel journalists cannot know each traveller for whom they write, so they must imagine what a reader wants. The subsequent journalism influences how tourists travel and engage with a foreign country and its inhabitants. This article uses an independent/connected framework of tourist behaviour to identify how travel journalists imagine their readers’ interests. Through content analysis of texts in newspapers from Asia and the West, we find that the reader is more often imagined as independent and adventurous than connected and concerned with tourist sights. However, the latter were more common in Asia, which suggests that travel writers across the globe imagine readers differently. It suggests that in an increasingly globalised world, the post-colonial power dynamic that has been a stalwart of scholarly thought on travel writing may be outdated and could be more usefully replaced by one that considers the financial privilege of tourism, seen in texts from both hemispheres.
This content analysis investigated whether Photos of the Day online galleries from The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, and the Washington Post present the world outside the United States in a negative manner. This study compared the results to previous content analyses of the winning images of the Pulitzer Prize and Pictures of the Year International contests. A composite month sample of 738 photographs from all three papers was coded according to themes. The findings were that Photos of the Day galleries depicted more feature and general news photos and fewer images of war and social problems than the Pulitzer Prize–winning and Pictures of the Year International–winning images. Therefore, it is argued that Photos of the Day galleries expand the newsworthiness criteria for pictures of events abroad, redefine excellent international photojournalism, and are a rare space in US photojournalism where international news is presented in a more balanced and nuanced manner.
Do journalism subjects invariably feel betrayed and misrepresented by journalists, as Janet Malcolm claims in her seminal 1990 book The Journalist and the Murderer? If not, what explains the ongoing appeal of her now famous conclusion? Based on interviews with 83 people who were named in newspapers in the New York City–area and a southwestern city, this article takes up these questions by putting journalism subjects’ own descriptions of their experiences with the journalistic process in dialogue with Malcolm’s central argument. I conclude that Malcolm’s conman–victim model for the journalist–subject relationship fails, in some key ways, to describe journalism subjects’ experiences; and yet, Malcolm does capture important emotional truths at the heart of the journalist–subject encounter. In the end, the hyperbolic versions of the journalist and subject she portrays may continue to resonate not because they are strictly accurate, but because they play a role in journalistic boundary work, simultaneously probing and reinforcing the boundaries of acceptable journalistic practice.
This study compared two reporters at the New York Times, who had the same news assignment, to examine whether personal backgrounds and interests of the journalists had an impact on the news content they created, especially in the non-time sensitive feature coverage. Employing a mixed-methods approach, findings in this study indicate that personal characteristics do play a role in shaping news content, contrary to what most previous gatekeeping studies have found. Individuality becomes more pronounced when one controls for the type of news, between time-urgent straight news and non-straight news such as features. There is strong indication that among individuals’ largest contributions to content is making topical suggestions.
This article examines how Fox News’ top-rated programs attempted to reshape the ‘collective memory’ of the Great Depression during the Great Recession. In their retelling of the Depression’s history, Fox News hosts proclaimed their kinship with the Depression generation and strove to present themselves as its modern standard bearers. Fox News’ rhetorical strategy involved shifting modes of analysis when treating past and present crises. On one hand, the principles of the Stimulus Act were presented as antithetical to the ‘producer ethic’ and values of the Depression generation. On the other hand, this same generation’s reliance on New Deal policies were de-politicized and turned into a technical question about the efficacy of Keynesian policy solutions. This article offers a multi-modal, textual analysis to reveal how Fox’s top shows executed this double-move to imply the recipients of stimulus aid in the Obama era are fundamentally different from ‘the Greatest Generation’.
This study examines the news selection practices followed by news organizations through investigating the news posted on social networking sites and, in particular, the Facebook pages of four foreign Arabic language TV stations: The Iranian Al-Alam TV, Russia Today, Deutsche Welle, and BBC. A total of 15,589 news stories are analyzed in order to examine the prominence of references to countries and political actors. The study reveals that social significance and proximity as well as the news organizations’ ideological agenda are the most important elements that dictate the news selection process.
Compared to its Western counterpart, China’s media culture has its uniqueness. The relationship between Chinese media and media users presents ‘Chinese style’ characteristics, especially with the rise of participatory journalism online. Based on critical reflections on the agenda-setting theory and existing research work on participatory journalism, this essay proposes three models of participatory journalism in the Chinese context. Depending on the interaction between media agenda and audience agenda, the three models are as follows: (1) the incompatible model, (2) the negotiatory model, and (3) the unconventional model. This essay aims to use these three models to demonstrate the notion of ‘journalism as process’ proposed by Robinson and the significance of the socialization and politicization of audience understanding.
This study explored the use of quotations in offline (the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal) and online (Huffington Post and Newsmax) newspapers in terms of verb objectivity and source qualification (transparency and credibility). Individual analyses showed offline papers relatively focused more on verb objectivity, whereas online papers concentrated on source qualification. On analyzing verbs and sources together, the study found better journalistic performance in online papers. While offline papers employed verb objectivity as a sole standard for desirable quotation usage, online papers utilized source qualification and verb objectivity as leverages. More transparent-credible sources outnumbered less transparent-credible sources and objective verbs outnumbered unobjective verbs in online papers, but offline papers only had more objective than unobjective verbs and ignored desirable source use.
This article discusses the news coverage of a highly mediatised protest action which took place in early May 2011 in Flanders, Belgium. A social movement called the Field Liberation Movement rallied against a field trial of a scientific research project testing genetically modified potatoes. Seeking to understand how implicit patterns associated with the protest paradigm influence media representations of this ‘Big Potato Swap’, this article discusses the results of a qualitative content analysis of news coverage by two Flemish quality newspapers and one alternative news website. We conclude by discussing to what extent strategies assigned to the protest paradigm are in fact a product of normative journalistic routines. Different journalistic approaches to coverage of protest may be interpreted as distinct journalistic paradigms. As a result, any criticism of protest paradigm mechanisms in news reporting should be seen as part of a broader critique of prevailing journalistic formats and practices.
Drawing on theoretical insights from science and technology studies, this historical analysis addresses how late 19th century American science journalism helped translate the X-ray, as a new media technology, from the physics laboratory into the public sphere. Described as a form of light, the X-ray was given the moral and physical agency to see into concealed spaces and reveal and cure the ailments within, whether of the body or the body politic. As part of a general epistemological framework distinct from photographic realism, these assumptions about the possibilities of knowing can also be seen across public culture at the turn of the 20th century from politics, to journalism, to philosophy, to popular culture. Ultimately, this study highlights how newspaper coverage helped construct the X-ray as a heterogeneous public object while contributing to a larger set of understandings about what can be known and done in public life.
This essay rethinks the relationship between news media and the universal notion of the ‘common good’ as a key foundational concept for journalism studies. It challenges dominant liberal democratic theories of the press linked to the idea of the ‘public good’ to offer a new way of conceptualizing news media’s relationship to civic life that incorporates power and legitimacy in the changing media world. In doing so, it argues current understandings of journalism’s relationship to the common good also require some re-alignment. The essay draws on Pierre Bourdieu to contend the common good can be understood as a global doxa – an unquestionable orthodoxy that operates as if it were objective truth – across wider social space. How this is carried out in practice depends on the specific context in which it is understood. It positions the common good in relation to news media’s symbolic power to construct reality and argues certain elites generate and reinforce their legitimacy by being perceived as central to negotiating understandings of the common good with links to culture, community and shared values.
Research indicates a crisis in the journalistic field due to economic, technological, institutional and cultural shifts. This seems to have led to a paradigm shift in arts journalism, from a cultural to a journalistic focus, and a loss of autonomy for culture departments in the Swedish press. This article investigates how arts journalists’ professional values are affected by this presumed autonomy loss, the paradigm shift and insecure working conditions due to managerial control and economic pressure. The research material consists of interviews and articles by editors and critics debating their profession. The results show that the ideal-typical values traditionally associated with journalism in Western democratic society are under pressure. This prompts a redefinition of the profession and debate about the future of arts journalism and its threatened role of promoting cultural heritage and participation in an autonomous cultural public sphere.
Scholars, editors, and reporters have tended to treat news and journalism as synonymous. This conception has privileged a particular kind of journalism often called the Anglo-American model. This study argues journalism has been a type of news reporting for a relatively brief period. Using the concept of epigenetics, the authors argue that journalism is usefully seen as a coating on the DNA of news, which has existed for centuries. Journalism emerged as a result of special factors. As powerful as the Anglo-American model was, it was never fully realized, nor could it become the regnant model throughout the world. Journalism will carry on, but along with many other types of news, all of which carry coatings from the past.
This research is an attempt to discover diachronic trends in the presentation of Greek non-governmental organizations in two of the most influential contemporary hard-news newspapers in Greece, Kathimerini and To Vima. Drawing heavily on theories of media coverage and their relation to the non-governmental organizations, this article combines quantitative content analysis and critical discourse analysis so as to designate the crucial role of the media to the presentation of the non-governmental organizations in Greece. The research covers a wide period of 10 years (2004–2014), including several years before and during the financial crisis. Which are the main characteristics of the non-governmental organizations’ representations by the Press? Which alterations has the crisis context brought to these representations? What new forms of voluntarism has the crisis created? How does the Press ‘react’ toward the ‘insurgents’ of the non-governmental organizations field? These are some of the questions seeking answers in an under constant transformation media field.
Informal chatter has always been part of the scientific community, but with the emergence of online blogs these casual debates have become public. Here, I present a case study of how blog information influenced the online news frames during the December 2010 coverage of the arsenic-based life study. The results show how media frames were homogeneous and transformed abruptly from a positive ‘Gee Whiz’ frame towards a critical frame and lastly to a meta media frame over the course of a few days. From beginning to end, the blogosphere heavily influenced the news content, use of sources and spread of information between news outlets. Such rapid and uncontrollable influence of blogosphere information on online news coverage can be explained theoretically as an example of science grapevine communication.
This article is an attempt to offer a model for the analysis of a journalistic argument. The model of analysis applied in this research is the result of a combination of two theoretical models: Van Dijk’s model of editorials and the model of argument developed by Toulmin. Although the article – conceptualized as a comparative media study – tested the offered model of analysis on newspaper editorials, the model is designed as a master template, flexible enough to accommodate requirements for the analysis of a journalistic argument delivered via different media platforms. The proposed model of analysis is applied to editorials on the Yugoslav conflicts of the 1990s published by two newspapers, the American The New York Times and the Serbian Politika. The results of the analysis will contribute to a better understanding of how journalists conceptualize justice in times of conflicts and the role a journalistic argument plays in the wider public debate on armed conflicts.
Due to its peculiar nature, the economic and financial press, throughout history, has had a particular liberty of action in times of tight media controls imposed by the authorities. Both the type of content that it spreads – technical information useful for markets and businesses – and its limited public visibility – with tiny, but influential, audiences – have facilitated this media’s carte blanche to influence elite public opinion in moments of profound political and economic change. This phenomenon can be analysed in some detail around the processes of the political transitions experienced in many authoritarian and totalitarian regimes in the last third of the 20th century. As discussed in this article, economic publications played an important role in changing the mindset of the ruling classes in Argentina, Spain, Russia, China and South Africa, before and after political changes, during times when freedom of the press was restricted for other media.
Foreign correspondents seem to have become an endangered species. They are said to be increasingly substituted by new forms of foreign correspondence. These claims are often raised by researchers studying foreign correspondence to and from the United States and the United Kingdom. We test whether assumptions about the demise and substitution of the traditional foreign correspondent also apply beyond these contexts. Particularly, the study seeks to explore the differences in the working conditions of various kinds of foreign correspondents. Based on 211 responses gathered through an online survey of a carefully reconstructed population of 721 journalists, it describes the profile and working conditions of foreign correspondents in Germany, Switzerland, and Austria. It finds that the traditional correspondent – a professional journalist working full-time for legacy media – may be more resistant to change than expected. In the perception of correspondents, there is not much substitution through parachutes, locals, amateurs, or reporting from the headquarters. Working conditions are not worsening for everyone. Rather, we find diverging worlds of foreign correspondence depending on the media type, the country of origin, and the kind of job contract journalists have.
Guided by the framework of field theory, this study analyzes how traditional news organizations perceived, defined, and represented BuzzFeed, a website that rose to online fame through aggregation of funny memes and cat videos but has since started producing investigative and long-form journalism pieces, heralding its formal entry into the journalistic field. Four themes emerged from the analysis. First, traditional news organizations demonstrate ambivalence in defining BuzzFeed. Second, traditional news organizations invoke journalistic doxa in their representations of BuzzFeed, to some extent demonstrating how they recognize BuzzFeed as having entered the journalistic field. This is consistent with the third theme, where traditional news organizations problematize BuzzFeed’s forms of economic and cultural capital. Finally, despite some degrees of uncertainty, traditional news organizations seem to positively welcome BuzzFeed’s entry into the journalistic field, both as a transformative force and as a potential ally for preservation.
Both within journalism and academia it is argued that citizen voices should have a greater prominence in news to counterbalance the virtual monopoly of elite sources. This study extends previous studies – showing increased presence of citizens in news – by investigating relevant but unanswered questions, namely, (1) whether there has been a change in their prominence relative to elite and civil society sources and (2) in which capacity citizens have been present in the past two-and-a-half decades. Moreover, (3) citizens’ contribution to different story topics is explored. In this study, 1425 television news stories broadcast between 1990 and 2014 (N = 2413 sources) are analyzed. Results show that citizen sources became more prominent at the cost of elite sources. However, elite sources still remain the primary definers in news. Citizens do not get a more substantive, relevant voice as they are primarily used as vox pops, regardless of story topic.
Journalists apparently maneuver between their inability to validate every single bit of information and the ramifications of publishing unverified reports. This study is the first attempt to uncover and characterize the reasoning which underlies the journalistic journey from skepticism to knowledge. We draw on the philosophical field of the ‘epistemology of testimony’ and analyze a robust data set. Data consist of detailed cross-verification measures – a reification of journalistic skepticism – underlying a large sample of individual news items in Israeli print, radio, online, and television news (N = 847), following a reconstruction of work processes. Far from being passive recipients of second-hand information, we theorize that reporters make systematic use of ‘evidence of (sources’) evidence’ – a common but previously unarticulated evidence type.
This article explores conceptions of creativity in the media industry, specifically among professionals of journalism working in the magazine industry. It contributes to the development of the theory of creativity from a media industry perspective and produces new conceptual knowledge about creative media work. The article finds that in the magazine industry, journalistic creativity is understood as a practical and multidimensional concept that can be interpreted and applied in many different ways. The different conceptions of creativity reflect both the traditions of the journalistic profession and the challenges now faced by the media and the magazine industry. It is concluded that creative work in the magazine industry is typically goal driven, commercially minded and collaboratively oriented. Also, creative work in the magazine industry is characterized by ongoing processes of gradual reinvention. Other major creative challenges include the development of new ways of working, new media products and new commercial solutions.
Despite infant weaning being one of the most challenging aspects of parenting, there is uncertainty about the right time to start. This research aimed to understand the impact of newspaper reporting of weaning on parents, in particular, focussing on the coverage of a scientific report published in the British Medical Journal in 2011. Using a media analysis of weaning articles from UK national newspapers and the ‘Mumsnet’, Internet discussion forum, the analysis was able to explore how forum members had reacted to the reporting and embellished the communication of the weaning issue by adding their own personal advice and experience. The case study shows the role of discussion forums in science communication and how they can provide a new arena for studying audience effects.
This article identifies changes in gender patterns in New Zealand journalism by focussing on print newsrooms between the national census in 2006 and 2013. Apart from a significant drop (61%) in print journalists over the 7-year period, the ratio of males-to-females in newsrooms remained virtually the same, at around 50:50. In contrast, the article also analyses enrolments by gender at the largest journalism programme in the country. The results highlight a marked discrepancy between the number of females enrolling in journalism courses (76% on average between 2005 and 2015) and the numbers of females in newsrooms. The statistical analysis of the 2013 data indicates that males are more likely to be employed as print journalists, to earn more and achieve senior positions. The chasm between the number of female students and working print journalists reinforces the need for more comprehensive data gathering to monitor gender patterns in the New Zealand media industry and address this inexplicable gap.
Despite claims of continuity, contemporary data journalism is quite different from the earlier tradition of computer-assisted reporting. Although it echoes earlier claims about being scientific and democratic, these qualities are understood as resulting from better data access rather than as being something achieved by the journalist. In the context of Big Data in particular, human subjectivity tends to be downgraded in importance, even understood as getting in the way if it means hubristically theorising about causation rather than working with correlation and allowing the data to speak. Increasing ‘datafication’ is not what is driving changes in the profession, however. Rather, the impact of Big Data tends to be understood in ways that are consonant with pre-existing expectations, which are shaped by the broader contemporary post-humanist political context. The same is true in academic analysis, where actor–network theory seems to be emerging as the dominant paradigm for understanding data journalism, but in largely uncritical ways.
While recent decades have seen the rise of a vast body of work on war reporting, there have been few sociological explanations of why journalists deal with challenging situations in particular ways. This article contributes to bridging the gap between practice-based studies of war reporting and general sociological studies of journalism as a profession, by providing a systematically sociological account of the factors that influenced how the Syrian conflict was covered by Dutch and Flemish reporters working for a wide range of media. In doing so, this article draws on 13 in-depth interviews with those reporters, which is informed by a content analysis of their work, and Pierre Bourdieu’s concepts of economic, social and cultural capital on both an institutional and an individual level. In addition, it is argued that Bourdieusian analyses may be developed further by distinguishing between endogenous and exogenous forms of cultural capital.
This article starts from the observation that the concept of objectivity, along with its twin sentries ‘balance’ and ‘impartiality’, is generally regarded as a cornerstone of journalism and, consequently, of journalism research. The aim of this article is to show that the analytical ideal of objectivity, instead of enabling, in fact inhibits media pluralism research. The first section focuses on unveiling the ideological nature of this ideal by relating it both socio-historically and analytically to a post-ideological and consensual understanding of society. Since we find this ideal only allowing for the evaluation of journalism within the limits of social consensus (pluralism ‘within the box’), the second section seeks for alternative analytical concepts to evaluate journalism about and beyond the limits of social consensus (pluralism ‘outside the box’). To illustrate the difference between both approaches, the popular concept of partisan media bias is juxtaposed to the alternative framework of de/politicization.
The representation of women in so-called mainstream media has been well studied; however, less is known about this representation in ethnic media, especially in North America where the ethnic media sector is constantly growing. Ethnic media’s unique news sourcing strategy – that is, a mix of news locally produced by local staff writers, news outsourced from local mainstream media, and news internationally imported from the country of origin – suggests that the underrepresentation of women in mainstream media can spill over to and be reproduced in ethnic media. A content analysis of Korean news media in Vancouver and Los Angeles finds an interesting interplay between the transnational effect and the local effect. That is, while a pervasive influence of mainstream media from the country of origin is evident (transnational effect), strong female leadership in the local community and the active roles of these leaders as news sources and actors contribute positively to overall representation of women (local effect).
Public service broadcasting is the terrain par excellence within today’s media systems on which political power and media logic interact and overlap. This study will argue that public service broadcasting politicization arising in certain democratic regimes cannot be effectively explained if attention is uncritically paid to the same theoretical grounds upon which media scholars rely to study the corresponding phenomenon in the West. By relying on content and legal analysis of the proceedings concerning five terrestrial channels by the Broadcasting Complaint Commission of South Africa between 1994 and 2014, and on three interviews with civil society representatives, the article will discuss the concept of entrenched politicization as a more proper analytical tool to assess subtler forms of media politicization.
Rolling Stone ignited a debate in July 2013 when it published a cover featuring alleged Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. The online version of the cover story drew comments expressing criticism and support of the cover. A qualitative analysis of comments posted within the first week of the cover story shed light on the image’s institutional meaning for Rolling Stone and cultural meaning for readers. Assessing this cover as a critical incident, this study shows how readers, through their comments, participated in the ongoing boundary work in the journalistic field, joining journalism’s interpretive community in defining professional roles, norms, and routines.
Researchers have explored the role of organizational and personal branding in journalism, paying particular attention to digital media and social network sites. While these studies have observed a rise in the incorporation of branding practices among journalists, they have largely avoided questions about the implications such shifts in practice may have on the personal identities of journalists. This study addresses that gap, drawing on interviews with 41 reporters and editors from US newspapers. The findings suggest that as reporters incorporate branding into their routines, they may feel as though they are sacrificing the ability to simultaneously maintain a personal identity online. For their part, editors seem to sympathize with journalists’ loss of personal identity but defer to organizational policies.
The study seeks to examine gender portrayal of Israeli women politicians, and specifically that of candidates for Israel’s parliament on televised news and in print in the elections of 2013. The study is based on an interpretive analysis of all news items wherein the women candidates are mentioned during the month preceding the elections. This study joins recent studies that point to a change in how women politicians are portrayed in the media. Leading contenders succeed in influencing their coverage, and commensurately usually enjoy nonstereotypically gendered portrayal. Moreover, they occasionally seek to make use of hegemonic cultural norms to benefit what they perceive as structuring their positive gendered portrayal. In contrast, the coverage of peripheral contenders suffers from traditional patterns of sidelining. It emerges that peripheral contenders who gain relatively high exposure are portrayed as exceptional based either on their extraordinary other-ness or on the newsworthiness of their campaigns.
This article seeks to understand the genesis of frame-building based on the early coverage of the Belgian Syria fighters in the four leading newspapers in Flanders, the Dutch-speaking part of Belgium. For a period of 6 weeks, a frame analysis of news stories was linked to reconstruction interviews with reporters and supplemented by newsroom observations and in-depth interviews with superiors. The findings show that the framing of ‘new’ events on the public agenda stems from familiar frames about related events. More than being only a selection criterion, news values are equally added to the news story in retrospect, in line with the applied frame, which implies that the newsworthiness of the story may be increased by the way it is told. When journalists report an exclusive story, they remained closer to the frame as it is presented to them by their main sources.
This article analyses 12 cases of investigative journalism in Sub-Saharan Africa. The reporters all claimed to have contributed to change processes by influencing government policy, action by state administration, supporting the uptake of scientific solutions or provoking public debate. An assessment of these processes shows that in 10 cases, the journalists indeed helped to trigger change and in two cases they failed to do so. The cases are evaluated through an explorative approach inspired by the dynamic models for communication on public issues developed by Rucht and Peters. Different types of investigative stories in Sub-Saharan Africa are identified and hypotheses are developed on key factors that were important in investigating and publishing the stories as well as in achieving change. A decisive element of investigative journalism in Sub-Saharan Africa seems to be the involvement of and the interaction with other societal non-journalist actors.
This study examined how child abuse and neglect were reported in a sample of 459 newspaper articles between 2003 and 2013 in England and Wales. The results were compared with data on child abuse and neglect over the same decade. Sexual abuse was by far the most commonly reported, in both tabloid and broadsheet newspapers. Although neglect and emotional abuse are the most common causes of child protection plans in England and Wales, neglect and emotional abuse are relatively invisible in newspaper articles, as is physical abuse. Possible explanations for this disproportionate focus on sexual abuse, which has also been found in Australia and the United States, include the fact that sexual abuse cases reach the criminal courts more often than other forms of child victimisation. Although broadsheet papers were more likely than tabloid newspapers to comment on causes and solutions beyond the individual perpetrator committing a crime, the majority of articles in broadsheet papers still did not frame either the causes or the solutions in broader terms. It seems possible that the notion of the decontextualised ‘evil’ perpetrator serves to distance journalist and reader alike from the pervasiveness and pain of child abuse. The article concludes with ideas to improve the accuracy and utility of the coverage of child abuse and neglect in newspapers.
The longstanding tension between journalists and academics is explored by analysing data from qualitative interviews with 25 journalists and scientists using an analytical framework derived from Bourdieu’s field theory. The article empirically shows how journalism and science are both constructed around the opposition between knowledge (content) and communication (form). Based on the analysis of narratives in the communication processes between the two fields, the article shows that scientists and journalists take different positions according to the existing ideals within their respective fields, revealing different science-communication habitus. The article presents a typology of proximity and distance, in which communication between the fields becomes easier or more difficult as both fields try to protect their historic professional identities.
The news increasingly provides help, advice, guidance, and information about the management of self and everyday life, in addition to its traditional role in political communication. Yet, such forms of journalism are still regularly denigrated in scholarly discussions, as they often deviate from normative ideals. This is particularly true in lifestyle journalism, where few studies have examined the impact of commercial influences. Through in-depth interviews with 89 Australian and German lifestyle journalists, this article explores the ways in which journalists experience how the lifestyle industries try to shape their daily work, and how these journalists deal with these influences. We find that lifestyle journalists are in a constant struggle over the control of editorial content, and their responses to increasing commercial pressures vary between resistance and resignation. This has implications for our understanding of journalism as a whole in that it broadens it beyond traditional conceptualizations associated with political journalism.
Journalistic news coverage plays an essential role for providing an audience with a diverse, multifaceted perspective upon public affairs. However, in the scholarly debate, most measures of viewpoint diversity do not distinguish between statements raising commensurable interpretations, and contributions that construct different meaning in a consequential sense. We provide an operationalization of viewpoint diversity that builds upon a tradition of identifying distinct interpretations through framing analysis. Going beyond frame diversity, we then distinguish between equivalent, complementary and competing, diverse interpretations: we consider as commensurable those frames that derive from the same ‘interpretative repertoire’, a notion borrowed from discourse studies. We propose a strategy for operationalization and the measurement of viewpoint diversity. Our focus on meaningfully different interpretations contributes to advancing research into journalism, political opinion formation, audience elaboration, and other important fields of study.
Letters to the editor published by two Colombian newspapers during 1999–2008 were examined. Most addressed themes, domestic politics and the citizens’ affairs, were analyzed herein to describe emotions from a qualitative perspective. Findings showed that the internal armed conflict was the main driving force to express the individual’s emotions and judgments. Significant events triggering a wide range of emotions were identified. Two units of meaning emerged: patriotism under siege, to account for people’s love for the nation regardless of their affliction; and fear, the predominant emotion, to explain public distress caused by this intractable conflict. Being aware of the public’s emotional condition questions whether it is worth considering the paradigm of objectivity as an ethical ideal in the journalistic field. It also encourages reporting conflicts through the perspective of peace journalism, emphasizing possible solutions. Since Colombia is currently moving to a post-conflict phase, this could help to heal the social issue.
This article explores the question of whether we are seeing the end of newspaper-based TV critics as we know them and, if so, what might be taking their place? The first part of this work explores the role of the (TV) critic and raises the question of what might be missed if they disappear. The second part of the article analyses the impact of new forms of digital communication on newspaper-based TV critics and the emergence of new forms of critical debate about television. The article concludes by arguing that the critic still has a role, but a new balance is appearing, one in which the public will play a more important part. ‘The TV critic is dead. Long live the TV critic!’
This article explores how different meanings of ‘participation’ are developed in the intersection between local journalism and social media. The study is based on qualitative interviews with media professionals working in community media organisations in northern Sweden. Three key themes are identified: participation as marketisation, participation and production, and participation and democracy. This article discusses how these three different forms of participation contribute to the constitution of journalistic identities in a local context and to its meanings within the media sphere in general. This article argues that the emergence of new digital media has not so much renewed the role of the media professional as it has led to a cementing of their professional identity. Social media are a necessity for the development of journalism and are celebrated for their potential to include audiences; yet journalists paradoxically seem to consider these same technologies of participation as a threat, not only to journalism but also to democracy.
This article looks at the challenge posed to the liberal field of journalism by Tea Party populism and Fox News’ attempt to claim the cultural capital of journalism. The Tea Party have defied expectations of a political and rhetorical normalization, declaring liberalism and the New York Times as iredeemable enemies of the populist people. The Times’ coverage of the Tea Party, analyzed in this article, assumes an importance beyond merely covering a political story as it articulates the present state of the field and its understanding of the political. What this author finds is a normative liberal universalist interpretation of the Tea Party movement between the pessimissm of Lippmann or the redemptive humanism of Dewey. The populists are either treated as irrational pseudo-political actors or the credibility of the field is bestowed upon them as the redemptive embodiment of democracy. Neither approach is able to explain populism’s immutable antagonism at an ontological level or the persistence of the Tea Party’s fetishized notion of an America reconciled in private property.
This national survey conducted in 2012–2013 (N = 504) examines demographic characteristics of the Kenyan journalists. Findings indicate that the typical Kenyan journalist is male (66%), married (57%), and in his mid-30s (M = 34 years). He tends to have a Bachelor’s degree (46%) and has received college-level training in journalism or communication (91%). However, when it comes to majoring in journalism or communication, most of the journalists were trained at the level of associate degree (45%), followed by Bachelor’s degree (38.5%) and Master’s degree (13.6%). Thirty-three percent of the Kenyan journalists work in daily newspapers, with 73 percent of them employed on full-time basis. In ethnic grouping, about a quarter (24.9%) of Kenyan news people belong to the Kikuyu tribe, followed by Luhya tribe (20%). The results also indicate that the majority of the journalists are from the Rift Valley province (21.4%) – Kenya’s largest administrative unit – followed by Western (19.5%) and Central (15.5%). By religion affiliation, 62.3 percent of the journalists are Protestants and 22.5 percent Roman Catholic. While the majority of the Kenyan journalists (22%) fall in the monthly salary bracket of $375–$625, a significant number of them (17%) earn less than $375 a month.
Cumulative prospect theory, one of the major contributions to behavioral economics to explaining decision-making under uncertainty, is used to analyze two perspectives on punishment for professional misconduct, in one developing and one developed journalistic professional world. Using cumulative prospect theory, this article aims to explore why Romanian journalists show greater support for a liability model, compared to their Swiss counterparts, who favor an answerability model of accountability. To this end, several semi-structured interviews with experts in both countries were conducted. The discussions started from data gathered in a previous survey, called MediaAcT. The cumulative prospect theory of Kahneman and Tversky is based on a framing hypothesis, but has not been used before by media scholars. The approach proves to be fruitful, as it allows for a better understanding of journalists’ attitudes to accountability and responsibility.
On newspaper websites, journalists can observe the preferences of the audience in unprecedented detail and for low costs, based on the audience clicks (i.e. page views) for specific news articles. This article addresses whether journalists use this information to cater to audience preferences in their news selection choices. We analyzed the print and online editions of five national newspapers from the Netherlands with a mixed-method approach. Using a cross-lagged analysis covering 6 months, we found that storylines of the most-viewed articles were more likely to receive attention in subsequent reporting, which indicates that audience clicks affect news selection. However, based on interviews with editors we found that they consider the use of this information for news selection to conflict with professional norms. We elaborate on the implications of this discrepancy in the norms and behaviors of journalists, and project directions for future studies.
In the risk society that has resulted from modernization, power rests with those who define risks. In the midst of uncertainties and controversies surrounding unpredictable risks, the news value of objectivity becomes a key justification for news organizations and journalists narrating speculation of social risks in news discourses. I shed light on the theorization of ‘media template’, and construct a three-step model to examine how highly unknown social risks are constructed as social facts in the process of news-making. News discourse first represents a simplified and distorted ‘lesson learnt’ from a past exemplary event of concerned social risk. Second, it marginalizes meanings other than those constructed by that exemplar. Last, the news discourse ‘repairs’ its narration when contradictory evidence emerges. I explicate the model by demonstrating how Hong Kong’s news discourse about the Swine Flu pandemic in 2009 drew upon the exemplar of the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome epidemic in 2003. I also discuss the implications of media template to news construction of social risks with reference to the theoretical underpinnings of risk society.
This article analyzes intermedia agenda-setting processes during a national election campaign of 38 newspapers, online news sites, TV news programs, as well as a wire service, through semi-automatic content analysis and time series analysis. The theoretical assumption was that intermedia agenda-setting is determined by the production structures of certain media types, the opinion-leader role of specific media outlets, and issue-specific characteristics. The findings suggest that, despite previous evidence to the contrary, intermedia agenda-setting also occurs during election campaigns, with a short time lag of 1 day. Additionally, a medium’s opinion-leader role depends strongly on issue-specific characteristics, such as obtrusiveness and proximity, mediating the intermedia agenda-setting process. And the traditional role of print media as intermedia agenda-setters is found to be challenged by online news sites.
This article sheds light on the framing of Edward Snowden in four newspapers in three different countries. The authors analysed online editions of a major American daily (The New York Times), one prominent European newspaper (The Guardian), one mouthpiece of the Chinese Communist Party (The People’s Daily) and The South China Morning Post. The study seeks to explore how the role of Edward Snowden was framed and how digital whistleblowing was descripted by newspapers with different levels of Internet control, perception and culture on whistleblowing. The research is based on the framework proposed by a recent study of the framing of Bradley Manning. The results of a content analysis will present to what extent the press supported or criticized the role of Edward Snowden and his revelations. This article used four out of its five categories (‘Hero’, ‘Victim’, ‘Villain’, ‘Whistle-Blower’) plus a new addition of ‘Mole’, proposed by the authors. The findings provide evidence of the differences in the framing of Edward Snowden and the rhetoric behind reporting about whistleblowers and Internet governance.
Western media studies have largely presented the relationship between new and traditional media as adversarial, often claiming that the Internet challenges the survival of traditional journalism. Focusing on China, this article re-evaluates this relationship in a non-Western context. Relying on extensive interviews with Chinese journalists, we argue that the relationship between China’s print and Internet media is symbiotic. Although it does challenge traditional business models, the Internet also helps journalists improve their commercial competitiveness and presents new channels for resisting censorship and expanding the boundaries of permissible reporting.
This article examines the role of national and international journalism practices during and after the Holocaust transitional justice process, based on a comparative study of press agency coverage of Switzerland’s neutrality during World War II investigated from the mid-1990s. By studying the transitional justice process (1995–2002), and the 11 years following it (2002–2013), one can observe the media’s capacity to create a dedicated domain where previously written historical narratives may be discussed and re-aligned with the updated historical data. What emerges from this analysis is threefold. On one hand, the polarization of the coverage, as well as resistance from the national Swiss press agency and Swiss society to adopt an updated narrative concerning its role during World War II, is identified. On the other hand, the failure of local newswire services to provide a domain where public debate could take place at the end of the transitional justice process is exposed. Finally, the consequences of a monopoly on the national news while reporting on civil initiatives towards unofficial reconciliation and adaptation of the narrative, after the completion of the transitional justice process, are identified and questioned.
The purpose of this study is to investigate whether journalists in South Korea use Twitter as a public sphere and what factors may be associated with journalists’ Twitter use. Combining a content analysis and an additional survey of Korean journalists, this study examines to what extent journalists talk about public affairs on Twitter and interact with others, and what factors influence their Twitter use. A content analysis of journalists’ tweets shows that more than half of the tweets (62%) were topics related to public affairs and more than half (56%) were related to journalists’ interaction with the public. However, journalists’ Twitter use differed depending on the political ideology of the news outlets where the journalists worked: journalists from liberal newspapers were more likely to interact with the general public on Twitter, talking about public affairs. An additional analysis of survey of Korean journalists reconfirmed that journalists’ political ideology is one factor associated with journalists’ Twitter use. This study demonstrates the possibility that Twitter can be used as an online public sphere but also that possibility can be limited by political ideology.
The United Kingdom was one of four countries to open its labor market to Polish workers post-European Union enlargement in 2004. In this study, we analyze the articulation of discourses of neoliberalism and nationalism through examination of mediated representations of Polish immigrants in four British newspapers. We argue that within the coverage analyzed, across format and political orientation, neoliberal values were promoted and the seeming tension between the two ideologies was articulated in ways that could be discursively mobilized to further particular political, economic, and media objectives. Polish immigrants were constituted as discursive pawns employed by various political and media entities toward these contrasting agendas.
This article explores the influence of family socialisation on journalistic practice in Ethiopia, a country in transition to democracy that suffers from a persistently authoritarian media system and weak journalistic professionalism. Drawing on Shoemaker and Reese’s pioneering model for assessing the hierarchy of influences on media content, it argues family socialisation is an important but neglected influence that predisposes Ethiopian journalists to adopt dysfunctional newsgathering and reporting practices, prioritise political allegiances ahead of responsibilities to either the public or professional colleagues and wait for state intervention to bring about change in the media system. This argument is empirically grounded in the recent mixed methods research on Ethiopian journalists’ role perceptions and practices. An important task for future research on the sources of influence on journalistic professionalism in repressive media milieus is to investigate the influence of journalistic agency at both the individual and collective levels.
The goal of advocacy is commonly used to distinguish journalism from public relations practice. At the same time, there is a strong tradition of advocacy reporting in journalism that weakens this point of distinction. In an attempt to reconcile this apparent contradiction, this article draws on the concept of a continuum to explain extremes in journalism practice and ‘contingency theory’ in public relations, which posits a range of variables can influence the degree of advocacy adopted by public relations practitioners when dealing with an organization’s target publics. This article contends that the degree and type of advocacy present in journalism is also dependent on a range of macro, organizational, journalism production, source and personal factors. It argues that each work of journalism falls along a continuum of advocacy, ranging from subtle displays at one end to overt at the other, where some stories might be hard to distinguish from public relations.
Since the inception of second wave feminism, feminists have placed female bodies at the centre of the equality discourse. The female body is a contested site for feminist scholars who have identified the under- and mis-representation of sportswomen’s bodies in the media. This article investigates how surveillance techniques are employed in British Sunday newspapers as a function of hegemonic power to influence gendered notions of sport and the display of female bodies in line with normative femininity. Data stem from a semi-longitudinal study which analysed the quantitative and qualitative representation of sportswomen in British print media during January 2008–December 2009. Foucault’s analysis of the Panopticon and Mulvey’s concept of ‘gaze’ are used to interpret the data through the lens of surveillance. Findings demonstrate how the surveillance of female sporting bodies occurred in four distinct ways. The categories, which emerged from the data, include the body as (1) trivialised, (2) secondary, (3) commercial and (4) feminine.
This article uses critical discourse analysis to investigate audience criticism of the news media’s marginalization of ethnic minority members in New Zealand through the use of the words ‘New Zealand passport holder’. Following my presentation of a case study where a group of readers objected to these words being used to describe a New Zealander with Kurdish origins, I examine the meaning and use of this descriptor at a time of increased diversity. Analysing a selection of news stories from the beginning of the new millennium, I consider aspects of journalistic practice (namely, news values and the sourcing of information), as well as the wider sociocultural context in which the articles were embedded. I argue that the media, rather than creating prejudice by using ‘New Zealand passport holder’, reproduced and legitimated the political and public discourse of elite groups that disassociated immigrant groups from mainstream New Zealanders. I conclude by emphasizing the ongoing need for journalist training to include an understanding of how the reproduction of the language and discourse of elite groups in news stories can have a negative effect on the representation of minorities.
Based on 4 years of work experience in a newsroom, this article analyses in detail how news interviews are produced at the business desk of a Dutch daily newspaper. It focuses on the power dynamics, multiple social interactions and reciprocal exchanges which govern its production. The main case is an interview conducted with the president of the European Central Bank. Decomposing the production process in three stages (arranging an interview, conducting and publishing it), the article ‘follows the story’ from the beginning to end. In particular, it shows how the power balance between journalist and source shifts during the production process, how the outcome of the interview is governed by a range of relations other than the one between interviewer and interviewee and how conflicts over interview authorization are solved and social ties reproduced through opportunistic reciprocity between the journalist and his source.
Journalists have incorporated hyperlinks (i.e. linking) into their professional practice since the early stages of digital news expansion. Media scholars and professionals have continually championed their use, yet little is known about the perceptions and uses of links in journalism practice on a broad journalistic scale. Drawing on an analysis of metajournalistic discourses, this study finds that links in news resonate with different aspects of newsmaking: the transparency of news production processes, the user experience, and the economic context. While journalists and other news media experts may indeed see value in linking, that optimism is tempered by levels of caution and worry, suggesting a need for media scholars, journalists, and news organization to re-evaluate the deployment of links within the news process.
This research is based on an ethnographic investigation of foreign press correspondents working in Israel–Palestine. It strives to understand how the work of these correspondents is linked to a network of changing and overlapping collective identities, be they national or ethnic, for both journalists and their audiences. This is analyzed at three levels: (1) just as the Western world is politically divided in respect to this conflict, so too is the journalistic world, where suspicion of pro-Palestinism or pro-Israelism is voiced, albeit mezza voce or off the record; (2) the journalists feel professionally challenged when their impartiality is questioned due to their own religious or ethnic identities; and (3) finally, audiences have changed, through a revival of ethnic and religious identities, overlapping political involvement in the conflict, and technology which makes surveillance and ‘media monitoring’ much easier. This form of ‘diasporic nationalism’ puts increasing pressure on journalists.
This study examines the changes and challenges of China’s newspaper industry by focusing on the popular press sector that has dominated the daily newspaper market since the early 2000s. Specifically, the study investigates three key issues: (1) the dramatic expansion of the popular press sector at the expense of the Party organ sector in the early and mid-2000s, (2) the stagnation of the popular press sector since then despite its efforts to experiment with a so-called mainstream press in the second half of the decade and (3) this study’s call for a ‘broadloid’ press approach in response to this stagnation.
This study examines the actions of readers as press critics and, therefore, as potentially powerful shapers of journalism’s cultural capital. An analysis of 2 years’ worth of online reader comments on the ombudsman columns of three national news organizations reveals readers’ support of – and even nostalgia for – mainstream journalism values such as objectivity, echoing earlier research suggesting the stability of the journalistic field in the face of challenges from new players such as bloggers. But commenters’ critiques of journalistic performance also employed social, and not only professional, values, representing a potential challenge to journalist autonomy.
Editors at city and regional magazines face the same competing loyalties as other local journalists, including sharing information about their cities while considering the interests of their organizations, readers, and advertisers. This study used in-depth interviews with city and regional magazine editors (N = 11) around the country to explore how they navigate public and private interests affecting their work and the implications of these negotiations for their journalistic identity and the perceived functions of their publications in communities. The results shed light on how the editors negotiate a focus on private-service content, which attracts readers and revenue, and public-service content, which serves the magazines’ journalistic role.
Sports journalism is an important part of contemporary media, but it is a sector that has not received the detailed analysis of other areas of the industry. Utilising Bourdieu’s field theory, this study locates sports journalism in the journalistic field before mapping the sports journalism field in the context of broadsheet/quality news organisations. It achieves this by examining the sports departments of six media outlets in Australia, India and the United Kingdom. In-depth interviews with 36 sports journalists and a content analysis of 4541 web and print articles are employed to focus on issues such as content, publishing applications and approaches, workloads, and commercial factors. This allows an investigation of sports journalism at national, organisational and individual levels. The results show economic capital is a dominant factor in sports journalism.
This article takes a considered look at the debates surrounding the notion of ‘the crisis in political communications’ as it applies, in particular, to the United Kingdom. The article begins by seeking to make the Habermasian notion of the public sphere relevant to contemporary political communications in the United Kingdom. It then goes on to detail the evolution of the argument that there is a crisis, by tracing it, mainly but not exclusively, through the works of Jay Blumler and his collaborators. It places these arguments within the context of the changes in the relations between politicians and the media as set out by both scholars and through the author’s reflections on his own professional practice. The article suggests that despite what some have described as a deterioration in the political communications system, the dramatic changes that have been, and are, taking place in the increasingly digital public sphere, an argument can be sustained that we are moving into a period when, because the public (or its online component) have greater access to political information and debate, the crisis, if it ever existed in the first place, is passing and we are now moving towards an enhanced and healthier digital public sphere.
While in the case of the Arab Spring the focus of research and debate was very much on the role of social media in enabling political change both during the uprisings and in their immediate aftermath, the impact of traditional national mass media and journalism on framing this political change has been less addressed. In this article, we investigate the role of Egyptian journalists in shaping Egypt’s complex and fast-moving political transition. Based on a thematic analysis of in-depth interviews and a conceptual framework building on Christians et al.’s normative roles of the media, it can be concluded that the monitorial and facilitative roles, which were prevalent in the early stages of the post-Mubarak era, were quickly overturned in favor of a radical and collaborative role. Egyptian journalists working in private media thus demonized their political adversaries, mainly the Islamists, transforming this political ‘other’ into the ultimate enemy. At the same time, the new military regime was being revered and celebrated. This arguably contributed to further destabilize the fragile transition to democracy. It is furthermore concluded that for democracy to succeed in an Egyptian context, antagonistic political conflicts need to be transformed into agonistic ones both at the level of political culture and media culture.
As society’s storytellers, journalists often draw upon a standard set of archetypal forms to convey all of the day’s news to their readers. This study considers the practice of commemorative sports journalism, in particular how (and by whom) the stories surrounding Title IX’s 40th anniversary were constructed at two of the nation’s leading sports news outlets. Drawing from a combination of narrative and critical discourse analysis grounded in hegemonic theory, we contend that ESPN and Sports Illustrated shifted away from the traditional battle-of-the-sexes narrative; the end result was a celebratory women-centric model, one that offered progressive ways of understanding Title IX but sometimes fell prey to flaws associated with what White has called the ‘content of the form’.
Historically, impartiality has been imposed as the norm of professional journalism. Yet, be it conceived in terms of non-partisanship or balance, it offers a limited approach to the evaluation of the quality of news. This article revises the traditional approach to bias: As neutrality is impossible and truth does not lie in the middle, accuracy is better served by fairness than by a delusive position of impartiality. An alternative model promoting fairness is thus proposed, which is based on the criteria of consistency and justification of position-taking. Based on the work of socio-linguist Labov, this model is not without methodological challenges. We apply the model to a newspaper article for illustrative purposes and as a starting point for discussion, showing that, unlike impartiality, fairness is altogether an attainable and desirable standard.
This article reviews the public and citizen journalism movements of recent years and offers some perspectives on how the current and future journalism can function to benefit democratic public life. A major argument of this article is that ‘conversation’ defines news as a process of negotiated social meaning and that it should be the organizing principle of today’s journalism. It is also argued that traditional journalistic principles such as objectivity and distance may no longer be useful to today’s citizen journalism and that we see a rise of new journalistic principles such as interactivity and transparency. Finally, borrowing from deliberative democracy literature, a bottom-up flow model to connect citizen and public journalism is discussed.
A comparative analysis of Euroscepticism explores what it means in two nations and what is then articulated in specific newspapers. The theoretical terrain, Italy’s and Britain’s post-war relationships with the European Union, the countries’ media structures and the specific context of Il Giornale (owned by Silvio Berlusconi’s family) in Italy and The Times in the United Kingdom (owned by Rupert Murdoch) are mapped out. Some 21 interviews were conducted with relevant journalists and politicians (including reporters covering Europe for the aforementioned) offering further context. A critical discourse analysis of news stories and commentaries then spans the last decade. Although there is some Euroscepticism in Il Giornale, it has historically been localised, yet now seems to be growing in intensity. In The Times, however, the Euroscepticism conveyed is more pervasive and deeper. Its fact-based news can actually be very persuasive – ironically more akin to the commentary-laden news of Il Giornale – as the debate looms ahead of the planned 2017 UK referendum on European Union membership.
Over time, research on the ‘immigrant press’ in the communication field has been subsumed by other theoretical concepts, particularly ‘ethnic’ and ‘transnational’ media. This article reevaluates the relevance of the ‘immigrant press’ as a theoretically distinct concept as articulated by Park in his foundational book The Immigrant Press and its Control. Drawing on 27 interviews with editors, journalists, and publishers in three areas of the United States with different immigration histories and profiles, we conclude Park’s defining characteristics of the immigrant press – an emphasis on the specificity of the first-generation immigrant’s experience, serving as a cultural and civic translator while facilitating national identity, and being an aid to assimilation – are all applicable today, more so than the major themes expressed in literature on ethnic and transnational media.
Miami-Dade County, Florida, has 2.5 million residents, with more than half (52%) born outside of the United States. Catering to these immigrant populations is a rich landscape of community media outlets focusing on the multiple Hispanic immigrant communities in this region. Drawing on the confluence of these geographic and socio-cultural factors, as well as the growing political influence of Hispanic populations, this study presents the results of a content analysis of election articles (N = 398) produced by four Hispanic immigrant media outlets in Miami-Dade over the course of a year. The results show an emphasis on covering elections in the home country, and contribute to the growing body of research on the increasingly transnational lives of immigrant populations and provide new insights into how these media outlets shape the coverage of elections that impact these communities.
Where criticism of a government could be punishable, political cartoons are used to make critical social commentary in a less direct way. In this study, political cartoons published in four Kuwaiti newspapers during Arab Spring protests were analyzed. Most of the 261 cartoons linked negative attributes to Arab Spring and Kuwaiti politics, society and economy despite certain press restrictions. Newspapers established after a change in press regulations in 2006 were remarkably similar to older newspapers. Liberal and conservative papers both published mainly negative messages but provided starkly different issue agendas; of the 89 cartoons depicting the Arab Spring, only 8 appeared in conservative papers. Conservative papers concentrated on topics relating to Kuwaiti society, economy, and politics.
Schumpeter’s trope of ‘creative destruction’ aptly describes current transformations of news media whose business models are adjusting to the twin challenges of digitization and the Internet. While most production studies focus on the journalistic labour process, based on current empirical research in the UK press and access to key decision-makers, this article presents case studies of the strategies pursued by the Financial Times and The Telegraph in migrating from print to digital. It shows how new conceptions of the news business are being articulated by managements and how production is being reshaped and increasingly driven by data analytics, and poses questions about the impact of these changes on journalistic practices.
The ways the New York Times has incorporated citizen videos from the Syrian conflict into its live blog, The Lede, is explored in this article. The analysis reveals the creation of a new journalistic element – the Collaborative News Clip – in which ordinary people are now producing immersive, emotional, multidimensional self-created videos that news outlets cooperatively incorporate into online content. The Collaborative News Clip is created through joint framing and shared gatekeeping by a tier of citizen-activists working with a professional news organization.
Scholarship in literary journalism often focuses on matters of technique and style, and on the ethical challenges of immersion reporting. In some contexts, however, literary journalism may also take on a sense of moral purpose, as when reporters assert the importance of their interpretations, or readers attribute special meaning to a particular style of writing. The New Journalism of the 1960s and 1970s offers a revealing example of how magazine and book publishing markets and writer–editor relations inevitably shape journalists’ interpretations and lend them a sense of social significance. The New Journalism did not stand alone and apart from the larger profession, but took root within a network of writers, editors, and publishers, and grew out of a wider, ongoing debate over the nature of journalists’ interpretive responsibilities.
Crises tend to be crucial political events with the ability to determine the public’s faith in political actors. If well managed, crises provide windows of opportunities for political actors to show action, strengthening credibility and pushing through new policies. This article explores one such instance of successful crisis exploitation: the Swedish government’s management of the financial crisis in 2008. During the worst turbulence, the government was able to successfully frame the event, without being challenged by contrasting frames, as a crisis managed with great competence and in the best interest of ordinary citizens. We explain this phenomenon through journalistic styles and standards. The article concludes by discussing the findings where we propose that issue framing, in combination with descriptive journalism, contributes to portraying political actors as credible crisis managers rather than tactical politicians, with the result being that they appear more trustworthy and competent. Moreover, due to unbalanced coverage, actors who are framed as competent crisis managers succeed in further strengthening their positions.
Freelance journalists who are also occupied in public relations have to deal with contrary expectations. Working as a journalist means contributing to the ‘public duty’ of journalism. When doing public relations work, journalists have to represent the particular interests of their clients. If journalists cannot fulfill these contradictory expectations, they experience inter-role conflicts. What are the consequences of these role conflicts? We conducted a quantitative online survey with German freelance journalists who also do public relations work. We observed that participants are often troubled by inter-role conflicts. They feel tense and uncertain whether they see themselves as journalists or as public relations practitioners. Having internalized a normative perception that journalists must not do public relations work, they experience even more intense inter-role conflicts and consequently feel more stressed at work. Moreover, even if their job satisfaction on average remains moderate, when facing inter-role conflicts freelance public relations journalists feel less satisfied with their job situation in general.
Much research examining the mediated construction of national identity is qualitatively focused, exploring limited factors, asserting that exclusion/inclusion is essential for its formation, and based within the host country. This study creates a framework of micronarratives to quantitatively measure the constructed national identity of a small Pacific Island from three geographically distinct news outlets. This study suggests that the mediated creation of a national identity does not necessarily depend upon the exclusion of others and that future research should reconsider the mediated construction of national identity for cultures that celebrate different values.
Why would anyone want to write about dying of cancer and why would anyone want to read about it in a newspaper? Until recently, accounts of dying were by and large confined to literature while first-person accounts of those last months and days were shared with intimates. Now, people regularly chart their demise in newspapers or personal blogs. The article looks at how these narratives of illness, especially cancer, belong to the wider phenomenon of confessional journalism, which can be understood as a subset of literary journalism. These accounts should be seen as constructed narratives with stylistic conventions shaping what is said and what is not said, sharing many of the formal generic aspects of confessional journalism.
We present the results of a 5-day, observation and interview-based, multi-sited field study of the 2012 Democratic National Convention. We combine literatures on journalistic and political fields with scholarship on performance theory to provide a framework for understanding conventions as contemporary media events. Through analysis of field notes, photographic documentation, and interview data, we detail the layered production of performance in the journalistic and political fields, revealing how performances were directed both internally and across fields for strategic advantage, as well as for co-present spectators and the public at-large. We argue that conventions provide ‘boundary spaces’ where actors from different fields gather and perform distinct democratic roles, as well as mediated, integrative spaces for the polity. Media events provide occasions for networked practices of ‘active spectatorship’ that offer citizens a means of control over the publicity of elites.
Health-related industries use a variety of methods to influence health news, including the formation and maintenance of direct relationships with journalists. These interactions have the potential to subvert news reporting such that it comes to serve the interests of industry in promoting their products, rather than the public interest in critical and accurate news and information. Here, we report the findings of qualitative interviews conducted in Sydney, Australia, in which we examined journalists’ experiences of, and attitudes towards, their relationships with health-related industries. Participants’ belief in their ability to manage industry influence and their perceptions of what it means to be unduly influenced by industry raise important concerns relating to the psychology of influence and the realities of power relationships between industry and journalists. The analysis also indicates ways in which concerned academics and working journalists might establish more fruitful dialogue regarding the role of industry in health-related news and the extent to which increased regulation of journalist–industry relationships might be needed.
This study explores the boundary work of the Korean independent newsroom Newstapa. Newstapa creates its own logic of journalism, which is a combination of the core of professional journalism and of participatory journalism. Newstapa journalists, who previously worked in mainstream media, open the boundaries of professional work by embracing the nascent norms and practices of participatory culture. The use of digital media helps provide greater transparency to citizens. Newstapa defines truth-telling as a conversational process through which journalists work with citizens. Although this process causes journalists to relinquish their professional autonomy to citizens, it leads to a reconstruction of the professional exclusivity of being more accountable journalists who serve only citizens through truth-telling and are free from any other external forces. Newstapa’s logic also helps create a normative border separating Newstapa from other journalists. By adapting this logic, Newstapa challenges the social authority of mainstream media.
This study examined how The New York Times and The Times (London) framed the liberation war of Bangladesh. This study looked comprehensively at the framing, the tones, and sources of news in the newspapers. The results suggest that both newspapers used three frames most frequently: military-conflict frame, prognostic frame, and human-interest frame. The findings also show that both newspapers published news stories with more neutral tones than with positive and negative tones. The New York Times and The Times (London) relied mostly on official sources as their primary sources.
Have the nature of printed news stories changed in competition with new media? Our content analysis of Norway’s largest morning newspaper Aftenposten in four time cuts between 1950 and 2008 revealed that the length of news stories had increased until 2008 when the newspaper had changed to the tabloid format with a mixture of both brief and lengthy articles. News stories tended to have broader time frames in more recent years. The frequency of simpler forms of news stories like reports of meetings and social events had diminished considerably. In the last 20 years, journalists have also become more visible in the text. We will look at these findings against a historical background.
If there is a single thing that distinguishes literary journalism from other forms of reporting, it is the use of narrative rather than expository prose. This involves the dramatisation of actions that have consequences. In the case of nonfiction storytelling, the consequences are not invented but real; or at least, verifiable. As a result, an engagement with literary journalism often leads to a struggle to reconcile the twin demands of truth and beauty. The long-running debate about how to do so is heavily influenced by Aristotle’s classical texts, The Art of Rhetoric and the Poetics. It is productive to return to those early statements of principle, which provide a blueprint not only for practice in the art of dramatised storytelling, but also for reflection about its ethical dimensions. Because of its specific character, literary journalism therefore puts itself at the heart of a foundational discussion. The tantalising possibility arises that the choice is not between ethics and aesthetics, but ethics therefore aesthetics; and by the same measure, aesthetics therefore ethics.
The discrepancies between a biography about a decorated Soviet agent and the authenticated facts of her life illustrate the inherent difficulties and ethical dilemmas of researching intelligence history. Kitty Harris was among the few women named in the KGB’s official history because of her role as double-agent Donald MacLean’s controller and in running couriers from Mexico to Los Alamos in the late 1940s. Harris’ biographer, the former KGB agent Igor Damaskin, presents an example of a source who is an unreliable narrator that demands trust in his interpretations, rather than in the printed sources and spoken testimony that he cites as indeterminate. This paper explores the difficulties of constructing scholarly literary journalism or history in the field of intelligence when interview sources and official records may prove less reliable and more susceptible to bias than others.
This article explores how narrative journalism challenges dominant assumptions about objectivity by taking the mediating subjectivity of the reporter as a structuring principle for stories. By comparing the coverage of the Middle East conflict by British award-winning reporter Robert Fisk and Dutch novelist/reporter Arnon Grunberg we show how overt subjectivity is displayed in different manners and how this affects the persuasiveness of reporting. Fisk adopts a personal–engaged subjectivity that fits in with the tradition of ethnographic realism and in that respect abides by the fundamental maxims of traditional journalism. Conversely, Grunberg displays a personal–ironic subjectivity that resembles cultural phenomenology and constantly calls into question whether journalism is able to represent reality univocally. We argue that both approaches fit in with a broader cultural development that disputes the possibility of objective truth and questions the corresponding epistemological procedures. Nevertheless, the latter approach particularly raises doubt among readers and critics because it subverts the profession’s claim to truth.
The use of the first-person narrator is one of the rhetorical devices that distinguishes literary journalism with its qualities of immediacy, intimacy and spontaneity in the pursuit of truth-telling. But how do the particular qualities of the narrator’s style relate to specific effects and what are the differences between an ‘implied’ and a ‘dramatised’ narrator? Through the writings of British columnist and author, Ian Jack, and through the work of the late Gitta Sereny, this article explores how these qualities convey different meanings and whether one appears more authentic (and therefore, more ethical) than the other. While Jack employs a witness narrative, reflecting and analysing the impact of the subject upon him, Sereny’s narrator is more distanced, a technique employed to address difficult moral issues. Through these examples, the article asks how writers can avoid the inherent danger that self-revelation will collapse the distinction between the creation and creator.
In his second book, The Number, literary journalist Jonny Steinberg examines prison gangs in a bid to understand the violence which has engulfed post-apartheid South Africa. Steinberg seldom conducts a straightforward relationship with his primary sources/characters and in this book he repeatedly lays on the page a doubtfulness that is personal and professional – narrative acts which, in a genre fundamentally about relationships between people, incur ethical consequences. This article seeks to tease out some of the issues raised by Steinberg’s construction of himself as a reliable narrator in The Number, a work of literary journalism in book form but which features a confessional mode made familiar more recently by digital platforms. This has a particularly South African resonance: the dominant post-apartheid understanding of personal narrative harks back to testimony offered and received at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. As such, it becomes difficult to locate the subject of the narrative.
This article applies a discourse analytical approach to the reporting of speech and thought in order to explore the parameters of core ethical quandaries in literary journalism, focusing in particular on the reconstruction or re-imagining of dialogue and thought. It thus focuses on the journalists’ duties, firstly, towards their sources (specifically, to both the propositional content and the verbatim words of their subjects’ truth claims), and, secondly, their perceived obligations towards their readers (regarding narrative accessibility, drama, resolution and lucidity). It then proceeds to discuss recent book-length examples of literary journalism from Spain and France. The article’s central claim is that an alternative approach to such issues is identifiable in Spanish journalist Javier Cercas’s work, in particular in his widely acclaimed re-exploration (2009) of the attempted coup d’etat in Madrid in 1981. Cercas’s text, like many notable examples of literary journalism, is informed by a comprehensive set of interviews and by exhaustive archival research. Cercas goes further, however, in the thoroughness and rigour of the attribution of his reconstructions of speech and thought. The book incorporates, moreover, many explicit or implicit markers of a reported idea’s dubitative or tentative status, a concern which continually shapes the text’s overall representational choices, and which can be seen as a timely response to calls for writers working within a literary journalism tradition to develop a form of implicit ethical contract with their readers.
Kenneth Tynan was one of the most celebrated, controversial and prolific journalists in both the US and UK during the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s. As a theatre reviewer, the appearance of his writings became as much events as the productions he dissected. Amongst his vast journalistic oeuvre was an extraordinary series of profiles, mainly of prominent figures in the worlds of theatre, film and arts. This paper considers the ethical aspects of both his writing and profiling techniques – with particular reference to Janet Malcolm’s critique of journalists’ conventional relationships with their sources. Stuart Allan’s notions of the journalist as an ‘interpretative performer’ and ‘stylistic improviser’ will be seen as crucial to both analysing and appreciating Tynan’s eclectic range of reporting techniques. In addition, the ‘exploitative’ dimensions of Tynan’s display of literary skills will be explored. The paper concludes with the argument that Tynan deliberately confounds the ethics of conventional profiling with the special ‘intimacy’ and collaborative nature of his portraits
In this paper the validity and limits of the news flow theory are examined, utilizing a large digital corpus of 35 popular news sites in 10 different languages over a three-year period. Three key variables were identified: GDP, foreign population and conflict intensity, collectively accounting for more than 70% of the variance of country prominence in the news. After offering a robust model, over-represented and under-represented countries are listed and divided based on their different characteristics and news trends.
Findings show that conflicts tend to be visible only if they are in the Middle East. Over-represented regional centers in West Europe and Asia overshadow the under-represented regional peripheries in East Europe and the Middle East. Finally, the US and Africa serve as a global center and a periphery respectively. The implications of these findings are discussed in order to invite scholars to further expand the theory and the explanatory model accordingly.
As a form of communication that can inspire solidarity through appeals to democratic ideals, literary journalism can play a constitutive role in social and political struggles for justice and freedom in democratic societies. In 1963, at a pivotal moment in the US Civil Rights Movement, James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time helped many Americans, including those in the highest offices of the federal government, understand the moral good of the goals of the African American freedom struggle and the democratic imperative to enact and protect the civil rights of all Americans. In this way, Baldwin’s work, along with other key historical forces, helped to expand the civil sphere and build a more just and democratic society in the United States. Civil sphere theory helps explain the role of such communication in social struggles for democracy.
This study presents an empirical, qualitative investigation into the practices of Venezuelan journalists in South Florida. The Venezuelan population in the United States has more than doubled in the past decade, making it the fastest growing sub-population of Latinos in the country, and a majority of these new arrivals have settled in South Florida. Given the rapid changes this community has undergone in the previous 10 years, the results of this investigation provide a more complete picture of global journalism and transnational migration in the digital media era through the recognition of the complexities inherent in the work of immigrant journalists, offering new contributions to conceptualizations of immigrant assimilation as non-linear and providing an updated framework for understanding the production of Spanish-language, immigrant media in the United States. Three models of immigrant journalism are presented and discussed as a final result of the research.
This study, based on a content analysis of television news and survey in eleven nations, explores the split between those who see the media as politically alienating and others who see the media as encouraging greater political involvement. Here, we suggest that both positions are partly right. On the one hand, television news, and in particular public service television news, can be very effective in imparting information about public affairs and promoting a culture of democracy in which news exposure, public affairs knowledge, sense of democratic competence and political interest feed off each other. On the other hand, the views represented in public affairs news are overwhelmingly those of men and elites, which can discourage identification with public life.
Twitter has been cited as a key factor behind a number of recent protest movements. Through interviews with heavy users of the #wiunion hashtag, this study examines the motivations and perceptions behind its usage during the 2011 Wisconsin labor protests. Findings suggest these users see a blurred boundary between citizen journalism and activism, but that their Twitter behavior is driven in part by distrust of traditional news sources and a desire to present an alternative. Notably, most do not see themselves as citizen journalists because they see journalism as an institutional, rather than individual, practice. Their orientation toward information credibility also diverges from traditional journalism, relying on interpersonal trust and the availability of visual evidence. These findings are discussed in the broader context of protest mobilization through information gathering and sharing.
This article examines the response of Chinese mainstream journalists towards their citizen counterparts, through an analysis of how journalists constructed a discourse of ‘netizens’ and journalism in the case of Deng Yujiao. The analysis is mainly drawn from a discourse analysis of the newspaper coverage of this case in the Southern Metropolitan Daily (SMD) and the relevant journalists’ reflexive articles on the same topic published in the Journal of Southern Media Studies (JSMS). The discourse analysis is supplemented by interviews with 60 journalists in 2011 concerning their views of netizens in general and of the conflict between journalism and netizens in this particular case. Based on these three elements of analysis, this article offers an account of how institutionally-shaped journalistic norms and values have been used to set up and maintain the occupational boundaries of Chinese journalism, in an attempt to defend journalistic legitimacy by making a clear distinction between ‘amateur netizens/them’ and ‘professional journalists/us’.
The Internet has radically increased the opportunity for the public to take part in debate and deliberation, challenging the hegemonic position of the established media as the facilitators of such debate. As new forums for participation have entered the market, traditional players in television, radio and the press have also transformed their services, strategically aiming to facilitate new forms of participatory services where citizens can engage in discussions. In this article we explore how the participatory trend raises important questions concerning how editorial standards and editorial control are maintained in online newspapers. Based on a mapping of the available services, surveys of newspaper executives, and in-depth interviews with online editors, we investigate attitudes and practices with regard to editorial control and its attempt to balance the new ideals of participation in the online world with maintaining the editorial standards of print media.
Individuals interacting with society possess multiple roles, and yet the study of journalistic role conceptions, based on the assumption that role conceptions influence journalistic outputs, has not addressed the idea that journalists possess multiple roles inside and outside the journalistic field. A peculiar arrangement in Missouri is the appointment of journalists to serve as media coordinators for the courts. Using a symbolic interactionism framework, we explore how media coordinators experience this duality of roles.
On 12 September 2001, as Hans-Peter Feldmann documented in his 2002 installation 9/12 Front Page, the front pages of newspapers from 151 countries showed similar photographs of a plane crashing into the World Trade Center. Despite this cross-cultural agreement on the most salient image at the time, in the decade since, distinct visual narratives of 9/11 have emerged in newspaper anniversary journalism.
This paper examines how The New York Times (US) and Le Monde (France) have used photographs, advertisements, and editorial cartoons in 9/11 anniversary journalism. Using theories of collective memory and photography, along with demographic data of 9/11 victims, I examine how photographic representations of the victims have changed, offering a less complex story of events. I document the images that have been recirculated and discuss why the emergence of visual icons matters to our collective memory of 9/11. And I explore how the papers’ proximity to the events influenced their visual anniversary journalism.
Professional ideals are crucial in terms of guiding and committing journalists in modern media organizations. But what happens if there are discrepancies between the journalists’ professional ideals and their daily working practice? Research suggests negative consequences, such as withdrawal of commitment, but until now these assumptions have never been empirically examined. This article provides new knowledge of the relationship between professional ideals and daily practice in journalism by describing the contours of the existing discrepancies in the generation of news in Denmark. In addition it examines the journalists’ reactions to discrepancies in relation to their organizational commitment. The results suggest that discrepancies do have a negative impact on journalists’ commitment. Further implications for research and practice of the findings are discussed.
The article investigates evolutionary trends in online news presentation and delivery in the light of convergence dynamics. The case study of Greece is an example of how convergence ideas are ‘normalised’ in the actual content due to countering forces exercised by the dominant professional culture and organisational models in the news business. The findings provide evidence that the outcomes of this new culture of high interconnectivity that come along with convergence cannot be ignored even in countries with no advanced employment of its potentialities. At the same time, questions on whether, under conditions of scarce resources and a weak journalistic culture, convergence affordances actually create spaces for a more open and inclusive journalism or are used mainly as vehicles for economic survival, smothering any other potential, are raised.
This study examined the relationship between two mechanisms of online participation – clicking and commenting – as well as the characteristics of heavily clicked versus highly commented-upon news items. Based on 15,431 items from a popular Israeli website, correlations between clicking and commenting were calculated for 12 separately analysed months from 2006 to 2011. In addition, overlap rates were determined, showing that 40–59% of the heavily clicked items in any given month were different from the highly commented-upon items. A subsequent content analysis indicated that while sensational topics and curiosity-arousing elements were more prominent among the heavily clicked items than among the highly commented-upon items, political/social topics and controversial elements were more prominent among the highly commented-upon items. The study contributes to deepening our understanding of the role of user comments in constructing social/group identity and offers a new perspective on a prolonged controversy surrounding audiences’ news preferences.
The study explores 33 occupational life histories of current and former Israeli journalists. By doing so, it enables us to better understand how the fundamental changes that the journalistic profession underwent during recent decades shaped and influenced the occupational progression of Israeli journalists. Our interviews validate previous work on the partial professional standing of journalism showing that individuals enter journalism in a protracted and uneven manner. In addition, the analysis of modes of reasoning for entering journalism charts the informal boundaries of overt journalistic political identification. Finally, an exploration of self-narrated occupational highs and lows shows that career highs are always identified as personal achievements while career lows are mostly narrated as outcomes of larger organizational or institutional constraints. The current chaotic nature of journalism organizations, as reflected in our life history corpus, illustrates an environment in which there is a clear disconnect between actions and rewards.
In recent years, a growing literature in journalism studies has discussed the increasing importance of social media in European and American news production. Adding to this body of work, we explore how Indian and foreign correspondents reporting from India used social media during the coverage of the Delhi gang rape; how journalists represented the public sphere in their social media usage; and, what this representation says about the future of India’s public sphere. Throughout our analysis, Manuel Castells’ discussion of ‘space of flows’ informs our examination of journalists’ social media uses. Our article reveals that while the coverage of the Delhi gang rape highlights an emerging, participatory nature of storytelling by journalists, this new-found inclusiveness remains exclusive to the urban, educated, connected middle and upper classes. We also find that today in India, social media usage is rearticulated around pre-existing journalistic practices and norms common to both Indian reporters working for English-language media houses and foreign correspondents stationed in India.
This paper discusses the importance of transnational communication and civic practices of indigenous Mexican immigrants in the US. Using a content analysis of El Tequio, a magazine produced by a pan-ethnic and multi-sited organization called the Indigenous Front of Binational Organizations, it shows what Alexis de Tocqueville deemed to be the fundamental relationship between the production of media and civic participation. El Tequio is the expression of transnational communicative action and the creation of self-representation and civic advocacy journalism among marginalized communities. Stories in El Tequio are not only a "bilocal" connection between immigrants’ sending and receiving communities, but part of a transnational dialogue of global voices. This analysis demonstrates how communication practices across borders have helped in the development of bonding and bridging social capital, and have enabled the participation of marginalized minorities in at least two national public spheres through communicative action executed through immigrant networks.
This article examines the amateur photographer as a common figure in contemporary news photographs, focusing on how the amateur’s gestures signify in journalism’s coverage of media events. Drawing on theories of photography as performance and ritual, I argue that the presence of the non-professional in the news photograph destabilizes journalistic discourse by challenging the role of the professional photographer and by redefining the event and its meanings. This is especially critical in coverage of catastrophic events, when the amateur’s gestures become a form of witnessing from a participant’s perspective, carrying both private and collective meanings for how the event will be understood in the future, and undermining the authority of journalism.
As online publications increasingly serve as professional entry points into journalism, online journalists are being trained in a professional environment markedly different from traditional publications. Through in-depth interviews with online journalists, this study investigates the professional identities of this new cohort of media workers. We find they respect some established norms but participate in a mutual shaping of the processes of creating news as new technologies are adapted into existing newsroom practices and environments. They are also forming new norms, emphasizing transparency, individualism and risk taking. Overall, a "new normal" appears to be coalescing.
As techno-environmental controversies increasingly confront us with tremendous democratic challenges, it is imperative to investigate which discursive strategies and processes in media discourses facilitate or impede democratic debate and citizenship. This paper puts forward an approach combining the risk conflicts perspective with the analytical framework of critical discourse analysis to analyse how two Belgian elite newspapers discursively (re-)define and interpret four controversial events in the debate on genetically modified crops and food. The analysis identifies two distinct ideological cultures. Driven by an unproblematized idea of scientific consensus, one ideological culture is found to repeatedly take up the defence of the status quo and to continuously enact processes of de-politicization to impede democratic debate. The other is found to facilitate democratic debate by repeatedly challenging existing power relations, in terms of revealing competing sets of assumptions, values and interests underlying opposing responses to scientific uncertainty.
This study offers insights into articulations between the normative and the empirical in online journalists’ self-negotiations concerning their roles in people’s assimilation of information, the daily provision of news and their institutional status in online departments. In-depth interviews with online journalists from two leading newspapers, Delo in Slovenia and Novosti in Serbia, are used to investigate their negotiations with respect to their societal role. The analysis reveals troubled negotiation processes among interviewed online journalists when they consider what is regarded as "true" journalism, news production requirements and their institutional status. This indicates that rearrangements of political–economic relations in both post-socialist societies have increased journalism’s responsibility to the media owners and power holders and surpassed its normatively defined responsibility to the public. Both case subjects are compared through the prism of the processes of negotiation of normative principles of journalism in the social, national and institutional contexts of the two newspapers.
Scientific knowledge in the area of journalism has been predominantly a reflection of research on journalists from elite publications rather than journalists from smaller publications. This research seeks to create a foundation for future research through a web survey of online community journalists in the USA. This study measured the extent to which their perceptions and publications reflect organizational traits such as a reliance on routine sources, income derived from publication and employment of news staff. This descriptive research also found that most online community journalists had a degree, but not a degree in journalism and communication. Suggestions are put forth to further theory and research on community journalists.
References to the concept journalism-as-a-conversation abound in audience-centered literatures. Largely missing, though, are clear operational definitions. This exploratory study sought to help close that gap by finding a way to measure conversational journalism in terms of key socio-psychological and technological dimensions, then to test it on perceived credibility and expertise in newspaper sites. Findings suggest conversational journalism is powerful but nuanced. Conversation features most predictive of credibility and expertise were audience members’ perceived similarity to a journalist and that journalist’s online interactivity with the audience.
This article presents the results of a study analysing the perceptions held by both Spanish public service television (TVE) news professionals and viewers as regards the main challenges faced by Spanish public service broadcasting (PSB), some of which are also common to European PSB. The global changes of the last decade have created a new social, economic, political and technological context to which PBS channels must adapt. Achieving the pluralism demanded by public institutions, differentiating themselves from commercial channels and forging a closer relationship with their audiences are three of the chief hurdles that must be overcome. PSB channels in the Mediterranean region are faced with a further obstacle: maintaining their independence from government, an issue that has led TVE to implement a number of reforms and counter-reforms in the period from 2006–2012. Regarded as a symbol of the public service duty of state-owned broadcasters, news programmes are central to achieving these goals. Therefore, this work intends to contribute to a research agenda, linking audience research to production studies and analysing the broader media policy context (Livingstone, 1998: 2–5), by approaching the complex dynamics between communication policies and specific interpretations of media discourses in Europe. In the case of Spain, this analysis shows that in the period from 2006–2011, PSB news professionals highly valued their new-found independence. However, the seemingly modest increase in viewers’ support does not bode well for the healthy development of PSB in Spain in a scenario in which institutional support is weak.
Traditional news sourcing practices that favor official, male voices have been widely documented over time and across media. But do these patterns persist in today’s social media environment, where women outnumber and spend more time than men? This study explores news sourcing and gender on Twitter by analyzing more than 2700 tweets from reporters at 51 US newspapers. Guided by hegemony and set within the framework of social networking technology, the research examines quoting practices and interaction with sources by gender, beat, newspaper size, and live coverage. The analyzed tweets show a severe underrepresentation of women in quotes, indicating perpetuation of the status quo. The data also suggest a conformity mechanism may be at work in larger newspapers, where female reporters quoted fewer women than their counterparts in smaller news organizations. But at the same time, the research offers evidence that both male and female reporters are using the technology to engage with a more diverse community via @mentions and to share conversations by retweeting those messages to their networks.
This study provides a snapshot of the hierarchy-of-influences model in the new media environment through examining the effects of audience web metrics on editors. Surveying 318 gatekeepers, the study found that audience metrics influence editors in gatekeeping. Editors’ likelihood to monitor web metrics is affected by their journalism training. Gatekeepers who attach the importance of high readership to economic benefits are more likely to have different news decisions based on web metrics. The study suggests a revision of the hierarchy-of-influences model with more emphasis being placed on the role of the audience.
In the US, a dominant narrative about news and democracy claims that democracy depends on a knowledgeable citizenry and that knowledge stems from news consumption. News and politics are said to positively correlate; the political democracy’s vibrancy depends upon the strength of both. This qualitative examination of ‘news resisters,’ people who purposefully limit their news consumption, turns the news-democracy narrative on its head by arguing that decreased news consumption positions resisters to participate in public life. Informed by practice theory, evidence about news resistance sheds light on the specific ways news resisters relate to news and on the social norms around news consumption against which they conceptualize and forge their own practices. News resisters articulate the benefits of limited news consumption – greater calm and purpose, a constructive attitude toward the present and future, a willingness to work with others – qualities that enable news resisters to engage in meaningful political participation.
Community radio is often theorized as being (1) independent from political and economic influence and (2) a platform for the meaningful engagement of marginalized populations traditionally excluded by its private and commercial cousins. Contrasting this theoretical model against the reality of practice, this study argues that the theorized benefits of community radio are unlikely to be realized given the reality of donor, rather than community, funding structures. Voices from 64 in-depth interviews reveal a community radio environment in East Africa that is significantly influenced by the interests – both political and economic – of external donors. Rather than engendering meaningful participation in media-making, this study also demonstrates that donor funding has caused some communities to assume recipient roles in the communication process.
A qualitative sample of newspaper articles covering Israeli commandos’ killing of passengers aboard a pro-Palestinian cargo ship was examined to discern how direct and indirect quotation modes function as propositional re-assertion. Using a linguistic-semiotic perspective, journalistic quotation was conceptualized as a series of verbal speech-act signs of three types: direct, free-indirect, and standard indirect quotation. These three essential quotation modes are shown to conform to the semiotic icon, index, and symbol, respectively, and at the linguistic level to entail either relatively neutral, ‘non-subjectivized’ re-assertion, or evaluative, ‘subjectivized’ re-assertion on the reporter’s part. Newspaper quotation segments are related to each variety of quotation, drawing out these co-occurring semiotic and linguistic characteristics to show how each quote mode performs as either a source or writer-centered double-duty speech act, allowing journalists within the traditional objectivity norm to variously provide relatively neutral or highly interpretive re-voicings of propositional assertions originally uttered by news sources.
A new news disseminator has emerged to revitalize the profession of information gathering – the non-profit news organization. Adopting a framework of community trust, this article begins a scholarly response to the questions: Who are these non-profit journalists and what do they aim to accomplish? A rhetorical analysis of nearly 50 mission statements and ethnographic work on two case studies revealed a commitment to rebuilding public trust, to reclaiming community journalism, to re-emphasizing the "ordinary" citizen, and to pioneering collaborative news work by means of digital technologies. Our analysis demonstrated that many of these organizations, in considering news as a public good, work to re-conceptualize the industry for citizens, but depend upon a level of funding that might not be viable in the long term. However, this research posits that little in the way of true community trust can be achieved until these organizations discover a sustainable business model.
This study analyses the discursive framing of the British government’s economic policies by BBC News Online. Specifically, it focuses on the coverage of the government’s Comprehensive Spending Review in 2010, in which the details of the Chancellor of the Exchequer’s broader ‘austerity’ agenda were released. Using frame analysis informed by critical theory, we analyse three online BBC features and compare their framing of the economic crisis – and the range of possible policy responses to it – with that of the government’s.
In addition, we analyse editorial blogs and training materials associated with the BBC’s special ‘Spending Review season’; we also situate the analysis in the historical context of the BBC’s relationship with previous governments at moments of political and economic crisis.
Contrary to dominant ideas that the BBC is biased to the left, our findings suggest that its economic journalism discursively normalises neoliberal economics, not necessarily as desirable, but certainly as inevitable.
In order to assess the impact of cost-cutting and digitalization on the expansion or contraction of the mediated public sphere, we developed a quantitative and longitudinal content analysis focused on sourcing practices for foreign news reporting in four Belgian newspapers (1995–2010). The results show little to no shift in the news access of different types of sources. Political sources dominate foreign news output, but ordinary citizens also play a significant role. Although it becomes clear that Belgian journalists often do not explicitly mention their use of news agency copy, recycled news articles or PR material, our findings indicate that concerns about cost-cutting in newsrooms or sanguinity about the democratic potential of Web 2.0 seem exaggerated, at least in the Belgian context.
Environmental journalists have historically struggled between journalistic objectivity and environmental advocacy. But the roles they embrace are based not only on their individual conceptions but also on their perceptions of what their organizations expect from them. Thus, journalistic role conceptions are the melding of individual and organizational role conceptions. These roles do not always correspond, especially for environmental journalists who must compete for space and attention with more sensational and more accessible political, crime or entertainment stories that organizations in search for profit might prioritize. This study finds that such role inconsistencies exist and are influenced by both individual and organizational factors.
With professional journalism facing vigorous competition over its jurisdiction in information production from online aggregators and networked forms of journalism, this article examines how journalists publicly construct their own reporting work in opposition to a networked alternative and argue to the public for its value. It does so through a qualitative analysis of discourse from mainstream journalistic sources regarding the document-leaking group WikiLeaks, identifying distinctions journalists made to differentiate their work and its professional value from that of WikiLeaks. The analysis suggests that journalists assign less importance to the sociocultural conventions and objects of evidence that have traditionally constituted professional newswork – documents, interviews, and eyewitness observation – and more significance instead to the less materially bound practices of providing context, judgment, and narrative power. In doing so, journalists cast themselves fundamentally as sense-makers rather than information-gatherers during an era in which information gathering has been widely networked.
Almost 60 million Americans regularly get their news and other information from ethnically targeted television, radio, newspapers, and websites (Allen, 2009). However, there is little research on ethnic media producers. Data collected in group discussions with media producers serving a variety of immigrant populations in Los Angeles were analyzed to investigate how they negotiate and develop their professional identities. Husband’s (2005) work on ethnic media newsrooms as communities of practice provided an explanatory framework for how respondents managed professional constraints resulting from their managers’ priorities and limited institutional resources. Moreover, though, we found that respondents were deeply influenced by ecological forces beyond their workplaces – specifically, by their encounters with mainstream media producers and organizations, mainstream society institutions, and the ethnic communities they serve. How respondents negotiated challenges to their professional identities sheds light on changes in the US media landscape and civil society.
The Monash University shooting which occurred in 2002, in Melbourne Australia, is analysed using claims-making theory and the four-stage natural history model of social problems. As Spector and Kitsuse argue, social problems ‘are what people think they are’ rather than objective problems. This incident – a shooting of two classmates by a mentally ill offender who suffered from persecutory delusions – was framed as a gun problem rather than a socially or psychologically related crime. In doing so, journalists made claims or emphasised the claims of selected voices in order to promote a specific social problem over others and, in turn, reinforce political arguments for tougher gun laws and policy measures. The implication with this type of coverage is that it results in not addressing appropriately the real causes of the problem; in this case violence as a coping mechanism by a mentally ill offender. This study offers a useful model to study media reporting of a claimed social problem and its influence in the policy process, decision and development.
Construction and meaning-making are central to the process of communication. Studying the way media frame a public health issue gives insight into how people are likely to perceive the information on that issue. Death is considered as the most significant contributory factor of fear in any public health crisis. In this article we analyze the H1N1 death coverage in The Times of India, the largest circulated English daily published from India. We describe and analyze the framing of H1N1 by reviewing 62 death-reporting news stories that appeared in the daily in 2009. Our analysis yielded four dominant frames: fear-panic, attribution of responsibility, action and human interest. We conclude that the newspaper framed H1N1 as a deadly disease and its coverage presented death in such a manner as to produce fear and panic.
Indigenous news media have experienced significant growth across the globe in recent years, but they have received only limited attention in mainstream society or the journalism and communication research community. Yet, Indigenous journalism is playing an arguably increasingly important role in contributing to Indigenous politics and identities, and is worthy of closer analysis. Using in-depth interviews, this article provides an overview of the main dimensions of Indigenous journalism as they can be found in the journalism culture of Māori journalists in Aotearoa New Zealand. It argues that Māori journalists see their role as providing a counter-narrative to mainstream media reporting and as contributing to Indigenous empowerment and revitalization of their language. At the same time, they view themselves as watchdogs, albeit within a culturally specific framework that has its own constraints. The article argues that the identified dimensions are reflective of evidence on Indigenous journalism from across the globe.
Talkback radio in Australia has primarily been conceptualized as a space where populist meta narratives are constructed and, through repetition, entrenched. However, little attention has been paid to talkback that occurs beyond populist programs. This article focuses on the contributions non-populist talkback programs make to local news and community. It examines commercial and non-commercial talkback programs’ facilitation of the sharing of audiences’ mini-narratives and their provision of hyper-local news. Drawing on data from a study of 12 Australian talkback radio programs, the article identifies that these programs provide one of the few available sources of hyper-local news in an increasingly globalized media market. The article examines the type of hyper-local news the study participants gain from talkback and how they use that information.
The article starts with observations about an increasing marginalization of professional journalism in public communication. This development is mainly driven by two factors, decreasing interest in the public sphere and increasing selective exposure. Based on these observations, the author develops a definition of the core societal functions of journalism, that is, validation and shared reality. Assigning to professional journalism the role of the ‘new knowledge profession’ he looks for areas of competence that would need to be taught in academic programs to furnish the profession with the necessary skills and make journalism a ‘de facto profession’. Finally, he discusses constraints on such a strategy in educational philosophies, the trade, and the changing demand of professional news.
This article examines, through a systematic study of the German, Swiss and Austrian media framing of nanotechnology, whether the concept of a journalistic negativity bias applies to the media coverage of nanotechnology. According to this objectivist approach of risk communication, the media coverage of emerging technologies used to be comparatively too negative. However, the concept has been debated through studies revealing a positivity bias and approaches focusing on contextual elements of journalism. A standardized content analysis of German, Swiss and Austrian print media from 2000 to 2009 analyzes whether negativity bias applies to the media coverage of nanotechnology. We find the media coverage to be predominantly very positive with barely any critical coverage opposing this one-sided perspective of progress. The hypothesis of journalistic technophobia and negativity bias is not supported by the media coverage of nanotechnology. Rather, the results suggest that the media are promoting new technologies.
Studies of how non-official challenger sources engage with the media have, for analytical reasons, often distinguished between ‘over-determined’ and ‘under-determined’ explanations of news production processes (Greenberg et al., 2006; Ryan, 1991), and furthermore have tended to assume that activists’ understandings of the workings of the media will largely shape the media relations strategies they pursue. This article, which examines how the local branches of the anti-war movement in Britain assessed and understood the workings of local newspapers, challenges the simple binarism between the ‘over-determined’ and the ‘under-determined’ to present an alternative, intermediate model that I develop here and have labelled the ‘conditional paradigm’. Activists whose understandings of the media chime with the tenets of the ‘conditional paradigm’ conceptualise the pursuit of favourable and advantageous coverage as being dependent upon: a) their own actions and pronouncements – they were, for example, aware of how unruly behaviour and extravagant rhetoric at demonstrations could often lead to negative press coverage; and b) a series of factors largely outside their control, such as the fluctuating levels of interest in their cause and the state of public opinion. The article also presents evidence to suggest that activists’ understandings of the workings of the media – and in particular whether their position could best be described as ‘over-determined’ or ‘conditional’ – bore a complex and merely loose relationship to the extent to which they prioritised their dealings with local newspapers.
This article analyzes expertise in the digital age through an ethnography of an increasingly valorized form of newswork – ‘serious, old fashioned reporting’ – and its purported occupational opposite, news aggregation. The article begins with a content analysis of the 4 March 2010 Federal Communications Commission workshop in which journalists tried to draw a sharp boundary between reporting and aggregation. In the second section the article explores the actual hybridized practices of journalistic aggregation. The empirical investigation serves as a scaffolding on which to build a theory of digital expertise that sees the nature and struggle over that expertise as networked properties. Expertise, according to the argument advanced in the final section, is neither a fixed property that can be ‘claimed’, nor is it simply the inevitable outcome of a clear occupational struggle over a particular jurisdiction. Specifically, the networks examined here coalesce around different conceptions of ‘what counts’ as a valid form of journalistic evidence under conditions of digitization.
The objective of this article is to analyze the role played by researchers in news media. The method is a quantitative content analysis of 640 newspaper articles combined with two surveys: of journalists (N = 362) and researchers (N = 342) respectively. The conclusions are that researchers from the soft disciplines mainly contribute to hard news or background items, where their role is to comment on daily events as public experts. They do this because they consider it career enhancing. The journalists who use them as sources are often inexperienced journalists. However, they set the agenda. Both parties perceive the cooperation positively although researchers tend to be more reserved than the journalists.
Credit attribution for journalists represents a crucial development in journalism, with numerous organizational, legal, political and literary implications. This article explores the rise of bylines and authorship in the French press during the last 250 years, as an alternative to the Anglo-American model, on which studies have focused. Findings show that bylines not only emerged much earlier in France but also represent different driving forces, functions and dynamics. While the Anglo-American rise of bylines reflected an occupational and organizational phenomenon, in which bylines were considered professional rewards, in the French case, the evolution of bylines was dependent on exogenous factors, mostly political forces that tried to discipline adversarial writers. Thus, in contrast with the quasi-linear progress of Anglo-American bylines, the French case is characterized by ebbs and flows, due to the continuous power struggle between the emerging journalistic field and the literary and political fields.
Islam is a religion, but it is also a philosophy. An analysis of surveys in the Arab world, Indonesia and Pakistan reveals that the mission and values of journalists in those Muslim-majority regions closely track Islamic obligations to tell the truth, seek justice and work toward the public interest. This article provides empirical data to bolster the argument that the values of Islam are the prism through which journalists in Muslim-majority countries approach their profession. Those findings add to the body of research supporting the theory that journalistic norms are contextual, shaped by a hierarchy of influences that include global standards and local values such as culture, political climate and religion. But the findings also indicate that in regions where a professional journalistic culture is in the process of emerging, the influence of personal versus professional values is in reverse proportion to those found in more mature journalistic markets.
Kevin Rudd’s political ascendancy moved celebrity personae and celebrity media closer to the central terrain of Australian politics. This tended to diminish the authority of political journalists, and presented a directed challenge to the power of bureaucrats and activists in the Australian Labor Party (ALP). Rudd’s engagement with celebrity culture, and his instantiation of ‘audience democracy’ can be understood in the context of Australia’s ‘post-broadcast democracy’, the competitive, co-adaptive dynamic between political actors and journalists, and the increasing celebritisation of contemporary culture. In responding to Rudd’s strategies, political journalists resorted to the ‘scourging’ tactics familiar from celebrity journalism. Rudd’s brief Prime Ministership raises questions about the future of politics and journalism in celebritising, post-broadcast democracies, that have global ramifications.
Celebrity has developed into a particularly powerful and pervasive trope for contemporary culture. It works at organising what we perceive as significant and this is made evident through its permeation of what constitutes news. Similarly, celebrity has been well documented in terms of its capacity to shape our entertainment: stardom is at least one of the cultural economies in which our stories and fictions are selected or read and recreated in popular culture. This article argues for the development of persona studies, where research on the celebrity is a subset of a wider study of how the self and public intersect and produce versions and identities that in some way continue to support the wider demands of our work economies.
Worldwide, people follow global celebrities’ lives almost in real time, while communities create their own celebrities, of great local fame but unknown internationally. Examining the People (USA), Heat (UK), and HLN (Flanders) websites, this article provides a quantitative framing-based content analysis of a sample of online celebrity news and the accompanying audience responses. General results show that media focus on celebrities’ professional and love lives, while audiences cover more superficial topics (appearances). Further, media tend to be less and readers more judgmental in discussing celebrities. Examining global/local distinctions, HLN articles are shown to focus on global celebrities, while readers comment more on local stars. Reactions also cover more personal topics when discussing local celebrities, and both HLN articles and reactions judge global celebrities more negatively than locals. Finally, most positive parasocial relationships are maintained with local and most negative with global celebrities. The cultural proximity hypothesis can help explain these differences.
In asking if celebrity news really is news as we know it, this article turns to an examination of the modes of production characteristic of celebrity news. Celebrity news is highly dependent upon the services of the publicity and promotions industries, and upon the provision of visual material from an increasingly well-organized set of paparazzi agencies. With the importance of the visual in today’s competitive media market, and the fact that most news organizations are now choosing to compete on the basis of entertainment rather than information, celebrity news has developed new modes of production that differentiate its practices and assumptions from many of the practices and assumptions underlying traditional versions of news and of newsgathering. Among the results, the article argues, is the redefinition of gossip as news, as it moves out of the social pages and onto the front pages.
Debate about the ideal content or purpose of journalism is as old as print itself. The messy characteristics of popular culture have always intruded into the high principles and purposes of the communication of politics and journalism’s intentions to provide information of importance for the public. In the intensity of the contemporary media era it is necessary to reconsider the interplay between celebrity news and journalism: beyond oxymoron and towards the appreciation of a paradox. This contribution seeks to explore some of the forms and functions of celebrity news in contemporary British culture and speculates on the increasing relevance of celebrity to the future of journalism.
Jade Goody was publicly diagnosed with cervical cancer in 2008, and prior to her death in 2009 she remained a permanent presence in the celebrity and tabloid press. And although popular commentary refers to the ‘Jade Effect’ whereby young women, who otherwise would not have gone for testing, are seeking out cervical screening programs after the death of Jade Goody, it is important that we understand the ways in which tabloid readers engage with celebrity news stories. With this in mind this article draws on focus group discussions with young female OK! readers to explore the ways in which they make use of, find comfort in, or take umbrage at the news coverage of celebrity illness, concluding that readers were at best frustrated and at worst angered by a lack of authenticity and candid imagery, which is surprising given the ‘airbrushed’ and ‘orchestrated’ nature of their chosen publication.
This article looks empirically into how audience members evaluate celebrities in journalism; whether and how celebrities help them to envisage their relationship to politics and media and consequently regard themselves as citizens. The analysis generates a broad and audience-based understanding of celebrities in nine focus group discussions, wherein more than 50 citizens in Finland discussed their favourite celebrities. The discussions revealed three interpretative frames explaining what the celebrities represent to the participants: normative, critical and alternative. In the first two, the groups impose a critical view on celebrities, whereas only the latter one comes close to the optimistic view on democratizing the potential of celebrities. Empirically, however, it emerges ‘behind’ the normative and critical frames and proves to be the weakest. This suggests that celebrities’ potential as a means to address alternative or implicit politics is recognized but not actively utilized by citizens.
This article investigates a rapidly expanding branch of journalism innovation in online news media. The umbrella term computational exploration in journalism (CEJ), embraces the multifaceted development of algorithms, data, and social science methods in reporting and storytelling. CEJ typically involves the journalistic co-creation of quantitative news projects that transcend geographical, disciplinary, and linguistic boundaries. Drawing on extensive empirical data, this article provides a conceptual overview of the field by identifying three main pathways of computational exploration in journalism: the newsroom approach, the academic approach, and the entrepreneurial approach. Implications for changing journalistic practice are discussed, and the theorizing is summed up in a triplex proposition about changing mindset processes coming out of CEJ. The study indicates that the computational exploration not only leads to innovative uses of the technology, but also to innovative ways for journalists to think and behave; journalism innovation leads to innovation journalism.
Drawing on empirical data from Channel 4 (C4) regarding the broadcasting of violent war imagery, and positioned within Goffman’s notion of the interaction ritual (1959, 1967), this article investigates how C4 negotiate potentially competing commercial, regulatory and moral requirements through processes of discretionary decision-making. Throughout, the article considers the extent to which these negotiations are presented through a series of ‘imaginings’ – of C4 and its audience – which serve to simultaneously guide and legitimate the decisions made. This manifestation of imaginings moves us beyond more blanket explanations of ‘branding’ and instead allows us to see the final programmes as the end product of a series of complex negotiations and interactions between C4 and those multiple external parties significant to the workings of their organization. The insights gleaned from this case study are important beyond the workings of C4 because they help elucidate how all institutions and organizations may view, organize and justify their practices (to both themselves and others) within the perceived constraints in which they operate.
The power and the promise of the genre of graphic journalism (or graphic non-fiction) resides not simply in the form’s juxtaposition of text and image, but in the manners in which such juxtaposition is able to create an emotive immediacy and a visceral impact that is the aim of the best of literary journalism. Further, when certain subjects, especially those of a serious nature such as Israeli/Palestinian violence or the drug-related carnage of Juárez, Mexico, are represented via this medium (as in Joe Sacco’s Palestine and Charles Bowden’s Dreamland, respectively), this immediacy and impact are accomplished through certain formalistic devices that the genre is particularly suited to deliver. This article seeks to show the way in which one such example, Dreamland, is instructive in creating a powerful journalistic representation of a subject via this image/text relationship.
This article explores the representation of the Cyprus problem by the Turkish Cypriot press. Studying the news content of Turkish Cypriot daily newspapers from three periods of time, it highlights the discourses, strategies and practices deployed in the selection and treatment of events relating to the Cyprus issue. It produces a picture of current journalism practices that is characterised by lack of diversity, dependence on official sources and the dominance of nationalist discourses. The article goes on to question whether the Turkish Cypriot media can play a role in establishing a democratic, pluralistic society in North Cyprus and, as the peace process continues on the island, what role they might play in promoting peace between the bifurcated communities of the island.
The dependency of journalists on their news organisations seriously questions whether they can maintain their professional autonomy when they face organisational goals that conflict with their own professional goals. This article studies journalists’ sense of professional autonomy by looking at their relationship with their superiors and at their sense of independent discretion. A large-scale survey of Danish journalists (N = 1083) shows that the relationship to superiors is better characterised by consensus and agreement than by adjustment and conflict, and that journalists have substantial independent discretion. However, the sense of professional autonomy varies across different types of news organisations and is limited by gaps between journalists’ own goals and values and the goals and values of their organisation – especially when it comes to conflict on economic goals. Time constraints from the organisation also significantly decrease the sense of professional autonomy.
A content analysis of 6525 randomly sampled political news stories from national, regional and weekly newspapers in six western countries between 1960 and today examines to which degree discursively defined reporting styles correspond to conceptual typologies of media systems and historical classifications of journalistic traditions. Univariate and multivariate analyses of three key indicators (opinion-orientation, objectivity, negativity) reveal three approaches to newsmaking: a US-led model of rational news analysis, an Italian-led model of polarized reporting, and a Germanic model of disseminating news with views. Merging a historically informed institutionalist approach with systematic content analysis, the study’s main contribution to comparative communication research is to clarify our understanding of divergent models of journalism, contextualize existing media-system typologies, and revise assumptions about the affiliation of individual systems to certain models.
As the size and scope of the commercial media shrink, some veteran journalists are picking up the mantle of socially responsible journalism by establishing nonprofit news websites. Numerous reports have noted the potential of these outlets to fill gaps in public affairs reporting and serve vital information needs in American democracy. The economic sustainability of these startups is tenuous, however. While some scholars have called for more government intervention to ensure community journalism survives, the Internal Revenue Service has questioned the nonprofit eligibility of news outlets. The purpose of this study is to determine how leaders of these civic journalism startups view the government’s role in ensuring their survival. Findings show the online news managers view their nonprofit status favorably. Most are not open to direct government subsidies, but have not ruled out assistance in the form of advertising, contracts for services, and payments in kind.
Critical debates about whether it is possible to formulate a ‘global media ethics’ have now become pressing given the increasing blurriness between some kinds of media practices, the transnational implications of the News International phone-hacking scandal, and the existence of a range of serious transnational problems, such as conflict, climate change and the recent global economic crisis. This article attempts to question Couldry’s recent assertion that the neo-Aristotelian virtues of ‘accuracy, sincerity and care’ can and should provide the normative foundation for all forms of media ethics.
To do this, I draw on my own experiences, as well as those of other journalists to argue that prescriptive, rule-based approaches are necessary to cope with the organisational complexity involved in some kinds of news organisations. I then outline the concerns I have about Couldry’s ability to construct a model of ‘good’ media practice on ‘minimally normative premises’, before proposing an alternative, utilitarian approach based on the work of Elliott, Sen and Hare.
In crisis and disaster situations the accuracy, scope, credibility and timeliness of media information depend on relationships between journalists and emergency managers. In the chaos of an unfolding disaster this relationship relies heavily on trust. This specific area has received sparse research attention. Accordingly, we reviewed and synthesized literature on trust, and used qualitative analysis of interviews to examine how elite practitioners viewed the importance of trust in the relationships built up with one another both prior to and during disasters. Two main findings emerged: that there was a need to develop shared definitions of trust and articulation of common goals; and that institutional and personal relationships need to be nurtured in the periods between disasters rather than solely during crisis events. These findings warrant dissemination among both media and crisis managers and further research into establishing shared concepts of trust that both partners could use in more effective collaboration.
This study, based on interviews with journalists representing major news organizations in Finland and Sweden, explores how the professional ideology of journalists is shaped by the international trend of citizen witnessing. Citizen-created photographs and videos that have become a routine feature of mainstream news coverage are approached as a potential force of change that transforms professional imaginaries of journalism vis-a-vis crisis events. From journalists’ lines of thought three interpretative repertoires were identified: resistance, resignation and renewal. Our results hint at a rethinking of the professional norms and roles of journalists.
This article investigates the extent to which Australian journalists considered the potential conflicts of interest of expert sources during their reporting of the 2009 H1N1 (swine flu) pandemic. The study found that asking about conflicts of interest was not a routine practice for most, though various indirect methods of ascertaining such information were discussed. Journalists’ views and practices in relation to conflicts of interest were shaped by factors related to the story, their sources, audiences, the medium, and personal beliefs. The article elaborates on these findings with reference to key areas of debate relating to conflicts of interest, and considers the extent to which they are products of the context of an emerging infectious disease or characteristic of health reporting more broadly. We conclude that a legacy of the pandemic in Australia appears to be heightened journalistic sensitivity to the conflicts of interest of experts and policy advisors, especially in relation to large-scale public health issues.
The task of journalism education has been defined in relation to both the professional needs of the journalism industry and the need to educate well-informed citizens. A key part of journalism education involves introducing students to what Deuze (2005) terms the professional ideology of journalism, which includes commitments to public service, commitments to impartiality or objectivity, and a belief in the ideal of journalistic autonomy. Deuze has argued that this professional ideology has shifted in response to multiculturalism and new media. This article therefore sets out to explore the implications of these changes for journalism education and for the formation of the worldview of student journalists. The article considers a case study of a project involving critical service learning in an introductory class for journalism students. The article proposes that media activism, public journalism, and critical service learning may be drawn upon in journalism education as resources in the formation of an emergent journalistic worldview. Exploring student responses to this project through a framework of Youth Participatory Action Research, the article argues that such efforts can help journalism educators to achieve the pedagogical goal of enabling students to critique existing arrangements of power and develop a globally sensitive perspective while producing news stories across media platforms that reflect a deep appreciation for learning about and understanding the diverse communities they serve.
In addition to power struggles over representation, negotiations between journalists and news sources represent complex boundary problems. Journalists’ efforts at asserting autonomy and offsetting instances when they give it up all provide valuable insights into their understanding of professionalism. The state house, where political actors attempt to influence media representations every day, provides a strategic research site (Merton, 1987) for studying professionalism in source relations. This ethnographic analysis of the Albany press corps looks at professional meanings that are expressed in these negotiations. In interviews conducted for this study, journalists define and distinguish themselves from each other primarily in terms of their understandings of what dealing with source negotiations professionally means. This article introduces the concept of boundary performance to explore how news workers express journalistic professionalism symbolically in action.
This article focuses on two main questions that frame the status of contemporary Italian media: What happens when the democratic potential of the media is smothered by the cemented ties between television and politics? And how do alternative media initiatives in Italy engage this rapprochement of media and citizenship in the 21st century? This article addresses these issues by examining the origins and ramifications of one such initiative known as Telestreet project. The first part of the analysis traces the history and objectives of Telestreet as a bottom-up approach to broadcasting; in the second section, I focus on a Neapolitan street TV project, Insu^Tv, as a successful case in point of this activist approach to local media making; the last section of the article focuses on in-depth interviews with the activists behind Insu^Tv and their efforts to create independent communication tools and reclaim an active and activist role in the Italian media flows.
Media coverage of the 2011 UN Climate Summit in Durban makes evident the blurring of the lines that once separated participants, reporters, activists, and networked publics. While journalists look to media activists for sources, breaking news, and reporting tactics that tap into the new potential of the mobile and networked environment, contemporary media activists devised new ways to do some of the work traditionally ascribed to journalism. This article, based on semi-structured interviews and discourse analysis of coverage from three NGOs, the New York Times and USA Today, documents various notions of public good manifest in activist media and newspaper coverage. In the broadest sense, the study addresses the questions: Where do legacy and activist news media differ and where do they overlap, both in terms of content and professional norms? And what are the implications of the emergence of new activist media for the field of journalism?
This article explores media activism in the Muslim context by focusing on the blog, Muslimah Media Watch. It analyzes the significance of blogging as an activist tool used by a group of Muslim women to influence an ongoing and contested process of social change in Islam. Through interviews with the founder and bloggers of the site and a textual analysis of the blog posts, the author focuses on the aesthetic forms and discursive practices of digital Muslim activism and argues that projects such as Muslimah Media Watch should be evaluated not in terms of a revolutionary subversion of hegemonic discourse on gender in Islam, but rather as part of small but consistent disruptive flows of dissent which are significant precisely because of the nature of their intervention and the tactics of their resistance. The blog has also become a prime discursive and performative space where young Muslims debate and contest what it means to be modern in transnational settings.
By delving into the detailed account of the Tunisian uprising, this article offers an explanation that sets the 2010 uprising apart from its precursors. The 2010 uprising was successful because activists successfully managed to bridge geographical and class divides as well as to converge offline and online activisms. Such connection and convergence were made possible, first, through the availability of dramatic visual evidence that turned a local incident into a spectacle. Second, by successful frame alignment with a master narrative that culturally and politically resonated with the entire population. Third, by activating a hybrid network made of the connective structures to facilitate collective action – among Tunisians who shared collective identities and collective frames – and connective action – among individuals who sought more personalized paths to contribute to the movement through digital media.
The US newspaper the Catholic Worker (CW) is an instructive example for developing a key concept in communitarian journalism theory: the common good. The principal question to be examined in this article is: how can communitarian journalists make constructive use of the inherent tension between particular common goods and the common good? To answer this question, I will refer to the experience of the CW in negotiating two particular tensions: the tensions between spiritual/temporal and between Catholic/American. A secondary question to be explored is: how can communitarian journalism move beyond liberal tolerance in responding to difference in pluralistic societies? To answer this question, I will elaborate on the CW’s practices of hospitality, which have allowed staffers to remain faithful to the paper’s particular conception of the common good while actively engaging with, and learning from, their non-Catholic neighbors.
Since the 1990s, the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) and the Security Service (MI5) have developed formal links with most major UK news organisations in an effort to improve the agencies’ media presentation. This article discusses the impact and inherent problems of these relationships, including whether the news media can have official, formal but non-attributable links with these agencies without compromising their role as the fourth estate.
Utilising epistemologies for crime reporting and news sources, this article proposes an initial framework to analyse these institutional relationships. It also takes as a case study the controversy over whether MI5 deliberately played down their prior knowledge of 7/7 suicide bomber Mohammed Sidique Khan. The author was one of the journalists briefed by MI5 on Khan and has here taken the Khan controversy as a case study to investigate the Security Service’s information flow and whether the agency misled, and indeed intended to mislead, the media and the public.
The rise of citizen journalism and widespread use of multimedia technology via Web 2.0 is a growing field of research. Yet the impact on local newspapers in the UK has received limited attention from scholars. At the time of this study, Northcliffe Media’s flagship newspaper the Leicester Mercury was piloting a project with community reporter network Citizens’ Eye to incorporate reader content into the newspaper and its website. This article explores the nature of this experimental relationship and the economic motivations behind it. It identifies that citizen journalists have a variety of fluid roles which flow between source, resource and collaborator. However, the key to the success of the project is the creation of distinctive boundaries between low level reporting carried out by community reporters and investigative journalism carried out by employed, trained staff. The research was conducted via a case study incorporating interviews and observation.
While research shows that ethnic minority entrepreneurs make a relevant contribution to economies, academic studies often convey a rather negative image of their entrepreneurship as necessity- rather than opportunity-driven, and with little innovation. This study examined the US newspaper coverage of these entrepreneurs during the five years before the economic downturn. It found that only one-tenth of the articles were negative, while two-thirds were positive. Two-thirds of the articles mentioned assistance programs that could help entrepreneurs. The vast majority of the articles presented positive frames of minority entrepreneurs and their contributions. This study found that newspapers can be important sources for ethnic minority individuals interested in becoming entrepreneurs and provide information useful in formulating public policy.
Many journalists and other observers remember the 1960s as a watershed moment in American journalism. Do they remember correctly? This essay reviews relevant empirical studies on how US newspapers have changed since the 1950s. There is strong existing evidence that journalists have come to present themselves as more aggressive, that news stories have grown longer, and that journalists are less willing to have politicians and other government officials frame stories and more likely to advance analysis and context on their own. Based on content analysis of the New York Times, Washington Post, and Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, this study finds that the growth in ‘contextual reporting’ has been enormous – from under 10 percent in all three newspapers in 1955 to about 40 percent in 2003; ‘conventional’ news stories on the front page declined from 80–90 percent in all three papers to about 50 percent in all three papers in the same period. What this study calls ‘contextual reporting’ has not been widely recognized (unlike, say, investigative reporting) as a distinctive news genre or news style and this article urges that it receive more attention.
Episodes of journalistic deviancy become moments of reflection for the journalistic interpretive community, at times assuming international proportions. This study examines the construction of appropriate journalistic norms through reactions to the phone hacking scandal that led to the abrupt closure of the British Sunday tabloid the News of the World on 10 July 2011. A comparison of reactions in US and UK newspapers reveals how boundary work articulates appropriate practices through defining deviant behavior. Rather than isolating the troubles to a single newsroom, what emerges is a form of synecdochic deviancy in which the significance of the scandal expands to larger normative questions among journalists in both nations.
In this essay I argue that a better understanding of the basis of journalistic professionalism lies in the combination of two ideological formations. First, we have the process of professional socialization of journalists, leading to a delimited range of voices and self-censorship. This formation alone is insufficient, however, as occasional self-criticism and scepticism of journalistic professional norms is needed. I argue that Zizek’s concept of ideology as fetishistic disavowal (that is, being able to actively admit the limitations of one’s ideology as long as one still follows it) is a necessary complement to the idea of ideology as indirect control. This is done with an examination of the discourses used by 20 US and UK-based political journalists to answer seven different interview questions.
Coverage of contentious socio-political issues in the news media often involves the creation of ‘shadow publics’ that facilitate journalistic framing strategies. These publics are not easily identifiable but exert significant persuasive power by virtue of the authority ascribed to them. This article explores how the media create and legitimize certain shadow publics which then go on to influence public policy. The findings of the article come out of an examination of the extensive newspaper coverage of two highly debated issues – immigration and genetic modification – in New Zealand between 1998 and 2002. Although the coverage of the two issues was dramatically different, it was apparent that particular sections of the population were given greater voice over others in newspapers via the seemingly neutral yet strongly opinionated and influential shadow publics.
This article examines the relationship between citizen journalism and professional journalism by means of a theoretical discussion combined with empirical data gathered through focus group interviews with students of international journalism. The article discusses the process and ongoing struggle within journalistic practice of keeping up the idea as well as the practice of journalistic objectivity. Working on from Schudson (2003), Schudson and Anderson (2009) and Tumber and Prentoulis’ (2003) analyses of journalistic professionalism, the article develops the idea of journalistic objectivity as it is faced with the technological advances that support citizen journalism. The interviews focus on the ways in which the students understand the tension of the changing relationship between professional journalism and citizens, brought about by citizen journalism or User Generated Content (UGC), and focus further on the question of how the students address and react to this paradigmatic shift.
This article examines Johan Galtung’s concept of peace journalism. First it examines the fields out of which peace journalism was born – peace studies and conflict analysis – and the current viability of this framework. These theories are then applied to a case study of the American coverage of the war in Iraq, itemizing and explaining each of the peace journalism tenets and contrasting them with the dominant style of war reporting.
This article presents and discusses the results of an experiment, which gathered audience responses to television news coded as war journalism and peace journalism respectively, in two countries, Australia and the Philippines. From the peace journalism model, evaluative criteria were first derived as a set of headings for content analysis of existing television news as broadcast in each country. The test material was then coded to fall within the upper and lower peace journalism quintiles of the ‘idiom and range’ of local television journalism in each case. Distinctions under the headings were particularized for individual stories by critical discourse analysis, to disclose potential sources of influence transmitted into audience frames. Data about emotional responses, gathered from self-reporting questionnaires, were combined with a textual artefact, with participants completing a ‘thought-listing protocol’ as they watched. Focus groups also viewed the material and provided more in-depth narrative responses. Watching peace journalism left people less angry and fearful, and more hopeful and empathic. Peace journalism viewers were also less inclined to apportion ‘blame’ to one ‘side’, and more likely to think about cooperative solutions to the problems presented.
This article reports on research that explores whether Australian newspaper sport journalists use Web 2.0, the second generation of the internet, in their work and, if they do, how. Semi-structured in-depth interviews were conducted with 27 newspaper sport journalists, three from each of the nine Australian daily newspapers with the highest circulation. The research found that the most common Web 2.0 platforms used by Australian newspaper sport journalists in their everyday work practices were Twitter, fan forums and Facebook. While each is used differently for reporting, sourcing and researching news, and for interacting with readers, this study found that most sports journalists used this technology within the boundaries of traditional journalistic practices and norms.