Emerging Journalistic Verification Practices Concerning Social Media

The verification of social media content and sources are increasingly critical to journalists and news organisations. In this study, we report on findings from qualitative interviews conducted with 24 journalists working with social media in major news organisations in Europe. Our findings contribute to new knowledge on journalists' social media working practices. We find that social media content are often used as the primary news source, and journalists use several different verification strategies to verify social media content and sources. Journalists are also found to have various competences in verifying social media content, in particular visual content. Moreover, our study suggests user requirements for future innovations in tools to support the verification of social media content. To avoid trade-offs between verification and fast-paced publishing, journalists will need efficient and easy-to-use support both in the verification process and in structuring and organising an overwhelming amount of social media content.     

IMAGINARY DARKROOM

What are the current working conditions and future prospects of Latino journalists working for any type of news media outlet? This question has not been addressed in any national study since Federico Subervi's 2004 research on behalf of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists. This paper revisits the same subject matter seven years after (2011) the original work was produced, updating the figures and expanding the study by incorporating Latino journalists working for ethnic media, as well as those working for general market media. The results indicate that the dominant “motivation” factors present in 2011 that influenced US Latino journalists' job attitudes were work itself, advancement, and growth. The leading “hygiene” factors that influenced US Latino journalists' job attitudes were salary and relations with peers. Survey respondents agreed that opportunities to obtain professional training would significantly increase the likelihood of keeping their job and their preference for a training topic was digital/multimedia reporting. Journalists suggested three elements to assure a better coverage of the Latino community—a Hispanic/Latino supervisor, an educated supervisor, and media owned by Hispanic/Latino person/family. Additionally, news staff feel underpaid and dissatisfied with promotion opportunities as well as opportunities to increase their salary. They have felt job discrimination based on race.     

The Dynamics of Professional Identity

The aim of this article is to analyse how journalists' professional identity is related to their attitude towards PR. The focus is how—and to what extent—journalistic ideology, organizational belonging and the individual's social position influence journalists' perception that other journalists working with PR lower the trustworthiness of journalism. The analyses rest on data from the Swedish Journalist Survey 2011, which is a national representative survey of Swedish journalists. The results show that journalists in general embrace a hostile attitude towards journalists who start working as PR practitioners. However, those who have worked as a journalist for fewer years or have journalistic ideals promoting the amusement function of journalism, or have worked as a freelance, or been employed in an organization producing newsletters, as well as female journalists, weaken this posture. The article concludes with a discussion on how the results could be understood in relation to recent changes in journalism's power and prerequisites, and how a professional identity might function as a form of resistance.     

THE COMMUNICATIVE ACTION OF JOURNALISTS AND PUBLIC INFORMATION OFFICERS

Public information officers (PIOs) represent a type of communications professional distinct from public relations practitioners (PRPs). From a structural functionalist viewpoint, journalists and PIOs share goals: both see themselves as facilitating the information flow into the public sphere. Habermas' communicative action models defining journalists as committed to revealing the “whole truth” to the public, but PRPs as enmeshed in advocating private interests, do not adequately describe PIOs. Although journalists' and PIOs' goals are similar, barriers exist to inhibit their cooperation in achieving those mutual goals. Such barriers arise from academic ideal types fostering inaccurate perceptions of each other, perceptions reinforced by adaptive structuration within their respective organizations' cultures. Empirical data support that PIOs' and journalists' divergent attitudes about their professional praxis combine with ideal-type constructions and organizational cultures to produce communication disconnects between the two.     

“Moving” the Pyramids of Giza: Measuring the Effects of Ethics Education in a Visual Communication Curriculum

As mass communication scholars and educators, we should be greatly concerned about how we teach ethics to our students. This research posits improving the quality of mass communication education with the intention of producing top-notch journalists who are dedicated to raising the credibility of the profession. Specifically, the research assesses the effects of integrating ethical content within a visual communication course, focusing on two critical and timely issues in visual journalism: the acceptability of graphic photographs and image manipulation. Findings showed significant differences in how participants viewed selected ethical issues in visual journalism from time 1 to time 2.     

Determinants of Journalists' Professional Autonomy: Individual and National Level Factors Matter More Than Organizational Ones

This article seeks to map systematically predictors of journalists' perceived professional autonomy. On the basis of survey responses of 1,800 journalists from 18 countries, the study tests the extent to which journalists with different backgrounds and jobs, who work for different media and organizations, under different kinds of ownerships and pressures, in democratic and nondemocratic regimes, can perform their roles as society's main providers of information. We demonstrate that predictors of professional autonomy are twofold: comprising journalists' perceived influences on news work, and objective limits of autonomy that exist beyond journalists' perceptions. The latter reside on 3 levels: the individual journalist level, the organizational level, and the societal level. Journalists' subjective perceptions of political, organizational, procedural, professional, and reference group influences proved to be strongest predictors of professional autonomy. Of the hypothesized objective determinants of journalists' autonomy, ownership, editorial rank, and professional experience had the highest predictive value.     

JOURNALISTS AT WAR

This article looks closely at the issue of unionization among a sample of Arab journalists working in transnational media. Although divided geographically, these media share the same trait of addressing Arab audiences all over the Arab region and indeed the whole world. The main question addressed in this article is how those journalists perceive the role of unions and whether there are differences among those who work in Europe, particularly London, vis-à-vis those in the Gulf. The article is based on interviews with 25 journalists from such outlets, who were asked about their membership and views of journalism unions in their local or host countries. I argue that journalists who work in London and who have joined the British National Union of Journalists (NUJ) see the NUJ as part of the British political scene and consider it to be a powerful potential tool in defending journalists' rights when reporting inside the Arab region.     

MANAGING VULNERABILITY

The notion that journalists can develop emotional problems after being exposed to violent or traumatic events has only recently become part of the dialogue about sound newsroom management. This study, based on a national survey of 400 US news people, examines issues related to journalists' coverage of tragic events. It also explores their views about management attitudes toward news workers who are experiencing profound emotional reactions after covering violent or traumatic events. It finds that when journalists see managers as empathetic on these matters, job satisfaction and perceived morale are higher, and journalists also are more likely to remain committed to their careers.     

Chinese-style pragmatic objectivity in war reporting

China plays an increasing role in the wars and conflicts around the world with its expanding political and economic interests overseas and its diplomatic role in international affairs. More and more Chinese journalists go to the frontlines overseas to cover distant conflicts for domestic audiences. Based on semi-structured in-depth interviews with 16 Chinese correspondents who have covered conflicts outside China, this study examines Chinese journalists' perceptions and reflections on objectivity in the war zones. The author adopts a term of Chinese-style pragmatic objectivity to mean that objectivity is a convenient approach for Chinese journalists to do war journalism in the field. At the level of objectivity-as-a-value, objectivity is defined as a pragmatic value and a practical ritual for Chinese journalists to do news within the scope they can reach, to protect themselves from criticisms, and to justify their version of the truth. It promotes allegiance and patriotism. At the level of objectivity-as-a-practice, objectivity in war coverage is compromised by China's foreign policies, military constraints, the press's political orientations and editorial polices, and journalists' personal experiences and values. Chinese journalists use Chinese-style objectivity to negotiate their roles in the power struggle with the state, foreign militaries, the newsroom, and journalists.     

The relationships of online journalists' emotional responses to competitors with job satisfaction,workload, and perception of the quality of the news website

An e-mail survey of online journalists reveals that online journalists' emotional responses to their competitors' coverage are significantly correlated with their job satisfaction, workload, and the perceived quality of their news website. The more negatively online journalists feel when they get scooped by their competitors, the more unsatisfied they are with their jobs. The more negatively the journalists feel about getting scooped, the more the workload the journalists feel that they have. The more positively online journalists feel when they scoop their competitors, the more positively they perceive the quality of their news website. In addition, the greater the workload the journalists consider that they have, the more unsatisfied they are with their jobs. The more positively the journalists perceive the quality of their news organization, the more satisfied they are with their jobs.     

REPORTING ON FAIRNESS IN CIVIC LIFE

Drawing on procedural justice research from social psychology, this study explores the role that journalistic practice plays in telling community members about whether local politicians are behaving fairly. Qualitative interviews with 24 community journalists working in cities in Upstate New York are used to answer the following research questions: (1) how does content regarding authority fairness find its way into news stories, and (2) what facets of justice—whether distributive, voice, or relational—do journalists emphasize. The interviewed journalists said that they often used their evaluation of local politicians’ fairness in deciding whether to pursue a story. In doing so, these journalists highlighted questions of whether politicians were listening to community members and the degree to which they appeared to take the best interest of citizens to heart. There was little agreement among journalists about the degree to which citizens could adequately make fairness judgments based on local news coverage, although the television reporters believed that television's visual component provided key information about the fairness of local politicians.     

A comparative study on source credibility and use in multinational nuclear talks

This study examines US and South Korean journalists' use of sources and their perceptions of source credibility in covering the six-party talks on North Korea's nuclear ambitions. In particular, this study analyzes the relationship between journalists' perceptions of source credibility and the media's source use in terms of the aggregate and individual levels. Results of content analysis of US and South Korean newspapers are compared with data from a survey of US and South Korean journalists who covered the six-party nuclear talks. Government officials are dominant sources in media coverage of the talks because of their high level of accessibility and credibility. US and South Korean journalists assigned the greatest credibility to government officials of their own country. The two groups showed significant differences in their perceptions of credibility of South Korean officials, North Korean officials, Japanese officials, and Japanese experts. Moreover, this study finds that individual journalists' perceptions of source credibility were as strongly correlated with their individual use of sources as with the news media's aggregate use of sources. Implications of the findings are discussed in the context of media sociology, in particular gatekeeping.     

The Portrayal of Public Relations in the News Media

This study explored the meanings and connotations of public relations in news stories carried by major newspapers and network television. The findings suggest that the term public relations was primarily used to suggest image building, reputation management, and persuasion efforts. News story interpretations of public relations terms were likely to refer to publicity, image, campaigns of persuasion, and marketing efforts to promote an organization's claims. The results reveal that negative connotations of public relations prevail in journalists' stories discussing the practice of public relations. The results imply that public relations practitioners trying to pitch their clients' stories need to understand how journalists will likely perceive the stories' news value. Two-way communication should begin with media relations via an understanding of journalists' viewpoints.     

The Tyranny of the Empty Frame

This study explores the notion of the “tyranny of the empty frame” within the online departments of the two leading Slovenian newspapers, Delo and Dnevnik, where online journalists—newsworkers with little or no training or experience in photojournalism—are required to provide each news item with at least one photograph. By adopting newsroom observation and in-depth interviews with online journalists working for Delo and Dnevnik, we investigate paradoxes associated with this imperative. Despite often being faced with a desperate search for “any image,” online journalists at both institutions are reluctant to use citizen-produced photographs—their use appears to be an aberration rather than a norm. Instead, they frequently resort to using what they refer to as a “symbolic photograph” to overcome the lack of visual material originating from the reported event. This move from indexical–iconic nexus to metaphoric visual communication signals challenges to the dominant paradigm of press photography. At the same time, we suggest that we should not view the phenomena of citizen photojournalism as a radical break with the past but as the latest development in a series of interrelated processes, intellectual projects of modernity, such as ocularcentrism, journalism, capitalism and the nation state.     

One Profession,Multiple Identities: Russian Regional Reporters' Perceptions of the Professional Community

Drawing on perspectives on occupation and identity, this study examines Russian regional journalists' perceptions of their professional community. Different journalistic values derived from a fierce professional competition contributed to reporters' view of the community as disjointed and polarized. The study also found that type of ownership influenced journalists' identity and the way they conceptualize practice. Although journalists of private newspapers believe a newspaper should be a profit-generating enterprise, state owned/supported newspapers' reporters think a quality paper should inform citizens regardless of profit concern. In this province, state-owned or supported newspapers have well-defined missions, whereas the paper that struggles to survive as privately owned lacks clearly articulated goals.     

Mediatization,Legal Logic and the Coverage of Israeli Politicians on Trial

This paper investigates the characteristics that point to the mediatization of legal coverage in Israel, and the adoption of media rather than legal logic in the coverage of five trials of key political figures between 1961 and 2012 in two leading Israeli newspapers. Using insights from the literature on the mediatization of political coverage, our analysis focused on the changes over time in the type of dramatization of trial news; in the nature of criticism expressed in the press; in the forms of journalists' interventions and judgments; in the context of the meta-coverage of media advisors and media initiatives by legal actors; and the media's own reflections about these interventions. We found that the mediatization of the legal sphere resulted in a “trial by media” where journalists pass judgments on defendants and present media alternatives to legal procedures. Moreover, meta-coverage of the media strategies of legal actors was accompanied by “counter-interventionism”, i.e., journalistic criticism of their own role in cooperating with the media interventions of legal actors. We suggest that this “counter-interventionism” is tied to the defense of the legal sphere by legal journalists.     

Journalism and Critical Engagement: Naiveté, Embarrassment,and Intelligibility

This article explores the possibility of journalists acting as custodians of critical engagement, drawing on Rancière's conception of dissensus as organized disagreement over the conditions of understanding. It begins by assessing the status that worthiness and naiveté have as negative symbolic capital in the journalistic field, before asking whether journalists' ambivalent detachment from the objects of their inquiry hinders their ability to engage critically with experts in other fields. It argues that journalism's role in marshaling dissensus amounts to making clear the limits and absences of intelligibility in journalism and other fields, in distinction to disseminating knowledge as such.     

Media Coverage of Public Health Epidemics: Linking Framing and Issue Attention Cycle Toward an Integrated Theory of Print News Coverage of Epidemics

Using framing and issue attention cycle as theoretical frameworks, this study examined how print media frame public health epidemics, such as mad cow disease, West Nile virus, and avian flu. We found that “action” and “consequence” were the two frames journalists employed consistently to construct stories about epidemics in the New York Times, the newspaper used for this case study. The prominence of other frames varied with diseases. We also found different attention cycle patterns for each disease. Coverage of public health epidemics was highly event based, with increased news coverage corresponding to important events such as newly identified cases and governmental actions. We found that media concerns and journalists' narrative considerations regarding epidemics did change across different phases of development and across diseases. This suggests that journalists emphasize different narrative considerations at different stages of the issue development cycle, based on the specificity of each disease.     

Time's up. Or is it? Journalists’ Perceptions of Sexual Violence and Newsroom Changes after #MeTooIndia

ABSTRACT

The #MeToo movement, which engulfed much of India's news and entertainment industry in October 2018, was projected by many as a watershed moment for Indian journalism. Driven largely through social media activism, it created significant public discourse and outcry, leading to the “outing” and resignation of many journalists. This paper explores the perception of #MeTooIndia in regional and national newsrooms. Drawing on Manuel Castells's ideas of networked social movement, we consider the origins of #MeTooIndia, including its mediation on private and social networks. We then draw on 257 semi-structured interviews with journalists working in 14 languages across India to explore the “cause” of the campaign—the prevalence of sexual harassment and sexual violence in workspaces—before turning our attention to the impact, or potential for impact, that journalists saw in it. We find most journalists felt the movement was “good”, but did not think it influenced their environment or newswork in any meaningful manner. Regional journalists expressed more pessimism about the #MeTooIndia, men more so than women.     

JOURNALISTS' MORAL JUDGMENT ABOUT CHILDREN

This study used a controlled experiment to examine the ethical decision-making of 99 professional journalists in the United States to see if they held different attitudes, made different decisions, and used different levels of moral judgment when stories involved children than when they involved adults. It found that these journalists were significantly more concerned with protecting children's privacy, keeping them from harm, and ensuring informed consent than they were for adults. But they did not use significantly higher levels of moral judgment for children than adults, nor did they withhold children's photographs significantly more often than adults'. The journalists in this study believed they were protecting children from harm but did not carry through with those beliefs. It is important that the news media treat children well because having children's voices in news stories is vital to understanding their worlds and reporting on injustices against them.