Punditry as a reward system: audience construction and the logics of the punditry sphere

The article explores the relationship between the punditry sphere and democracy by analyzing how pundits and media organizations think about their audience. It also examines the role of punditry in the political environment in which the media organizations operate. Using Portugal as an example, the study draws on data gathered from interviews with pundits, journalists and news editors. Findings suggest that pundits and media organizations construct a punditry sphere that revolves around the circles of power. The article argues that this conception of the punditry sphere reflects the reward system under which pundits and media organizations work. Punditry seems to be a field primarily oriented to pundits themselves and to managing their stakes in the public arena while operating as a sphere where media organizations rework their relations with and within established powers, where politicians hold a special place. This construction reflects the co-dependence between media organizations and circles of power in Portugal and offers organizational-structural understanding of the logics of the punditry sphere and the role pundits play in public communication.     

Audience Engagement,Reciprocity, and the Pursuit of Community Connectedness in Public Media Journalism

In light of the media industry’s growing focus on audience engagement, this article explores how online and offline forms of engagement unfold within journalism, based on a comparative case study of two American public media newsrooms. This study addresses gaps in the literature by (1) examining what engagement means for public media and (2) applying the concept of reciprocal journalism to evaluate the nature of reciprocity (direct, indirect, or sustained) in the give-and-take between journalists and their communities. Drawing on direct observation and in-depth interviews, this article shows how this emerging focus on engagement is driven by public media journalists’ desire to make their relationship with the public more enduring and mutually beneficial. We find that such journalists privilege offline modes of engagement (e.g., listening sessions and partnerships with local organizations) in hopes of building trust and strengthening ties with their community, more so than digital modes of engagement (e.g., social media) that are more directly tied to news publishing. Moreover, this case study reveals that public media organizations, in and through their engagement efforts, are distinguishing between the communities they cover in their reporting and the audiences they reach with their reporting.     

Exploring Participatory Journalism in Mediterranean Countries

Digital media have rapidly adopted mechanisms for transforming their audience into active content providers. Various studies have shown that the main motivation for developing audience participation is financial in nature and that journalists are striving to retain their role as gatekeepers. Nevertheless, “participatory journalism” opens up the public arena to citizen debate. The main aim of this article is to examine how 20 media, two from each of 10 countries on both sides of the Mediterranean, have integrated user-generated content, and to identify whether the forms of participation offered by these media are conditioned by national political and media systems. The results show that in democracies the opportunities for participation are greater than in countries with autocratic regimes. However, significant internal differences were identified.     

WHO'S GOT THE POWER?

Over the last decades, media environments have become radically transformed. Among the most significant changes is the rise of interactive media technologies, which raise new questions about how influence over media content has changed. At the same time, changes in media technologies and how they may change the influence over the news should not be understood in isolation from other changes in media environments. Against this background, the purpose of this paper is to investigate how much influence journalists ascribe to different sets of actors; how they perceive changes over time; and whether journalists working with online publishing differ in these respects from other journalists. Among other things, the study shows that the most influential group is perceived to be journalists, followed by the audience and media owners. The group that is perceived to have increased their influence the most is media owners. All investigated groups—except journalists—are perceived to have increased their influence at least somewhat. The results are discussed in the light of research on how interactive media technologies may reshape the influence over the news.     

THE JOURNALIST IS MARKETING THE NEWS

This study, based on case studies of three online newsrooms, seeks to understand the patterns of how journalists use social media in their news work. Through 150 hours of observations and interviews with 31 journalists, the study found that journalists are normalizing social media while also reworking some of their norms and routines around it, a process of journalistic negotiation. They are balancing editorial autonomy and the other norms that have institutionalized journalism, on one hand, and the increasing influence exerted by the audience—perceived to be the key for journalism's survival—on the other. In doing so, journalists are also seeing a reworking of their traditional gatekeeping role, finding themselves having to also market the news.     

MANAGING CREATIVITY IN CHANGE

This article is concerned with the management of creative journalistic work in a media organisation. It reports and analyses a case study conducted in one of Europe's largest media corporations: the focus of the study was a development team of journalists set up and charged with creating and producing a new multi-platform media service and its content. The article discusses the ways in which the creativity of media professionals is supported and managed under the constantly changing conditions of media work and journalistic practices. The study contributes to research on creativity in the media industry, particularly the management of creativity in journalism and media work. The findings identify the key motivations and constraints in relation to creative journalistic work in the media industries under digital transformation. Specifically, media professionals are motivated by the opportunity for developing new skills and competencies as well as chances to create new journalistic products and practices. The article suggests that the skills of change management, communication management and project management are crucial for creative media work.     

The new Norm

This article examines how one Central Florida newspaper used emerging media technologies to communicate and engage better with a newly active audience during its coverage of two high-profile court trials. Through a series of in-depth interviews with participating journalists, the author demonstrates how the Orlando Sentinel disrupted traditional newsgathering and dissemination methods during reporting of the Casey Anthony and George Zimmerman trials, and in doing so, challenged long-standing gatekeeping media theories and exemplified emerging participatory journalism models. Findings show that audience demands for live and continuous information throughout the development of the Casey Anthony and George Zimmerman stories and resulting court proceedings were a driving force in changing outdated journalism paradigms that led to the adaptation of a new norm by the Orlando Sentinel newsroom and journalists.     

Intrapreneurial Informants

As newspapers continue to wrestle with diminishing resources, they have, in part, turned to freelance journalists to help fill holes in content production. In light of this amplified reliance on freelancers, some media scholars have examined the ways in which they fit into the news process, arguing that they have the potential to override traditional journalistic norms in ways that can enhance news work and audience engagement while possibly breathing new life into news organization business models. Semi-structured interviews with 19 freelance journalists and nine newspaper editors in the United States help reveal that freelancers are harnessing social media to engage with and build audiences and individual brands. Freelancers frequently immerse themselves in social media experimentation that editors monitor and often incorporate into organizational strategies that may help inform newsroom practices and audience engagement. This hints at a shift for freelance journalists from the timeworn role of newsroom outsider to one of “intrapreneurial informant.”     

Assessing Collaboration in One Media Ecosystem

This case study explores relationships among news organizations in one media ecosystem to determine how willing journalists may be to form a more collaborative information network. A three-step, mixed methodological approach is employed: the ecosystem was “mapped”; an ongoing dialogue with journalists was initiated, and in-depth interviews were conducted with journalists and community storytellers to understand existing news flow in this region. Preliminary findings suggest a willingness to collaborate; however, legacy media may have more reservations about collaboration than journalists at community newspapers, public broadcasting stations, and entrepreneurial startups.     

Gatecheckers at the Visual News Stream

Over the past 65 years, scholars have reframed the original model of gatekeeping to reflect the changing dynamics of news creation, distribution, and curation. In recent years, communication technologies have opened digital news gates to a proliferation of images captured by professionals and amateurs alike. Anyone with a camera or cell phone can shoot and distribute photographs and videos on the internet. Social media facilitates audience-to-audience sharing through tools such as Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Vine, and Snapchat. This stream of visuals, along with the ease with which citizen journalists, bloggers, and tweeters can create and publish content, has changed the gatekeeping process. Few scholars, however, have addressed the impact that visuals have on the gatekeeping model, which was developed using text and broadcast stories. To address the changing role of the visual journalist and the audience, the authors conducted two studies. First, qualitative elite interviews with key visual decision-makers in Europe and the US provided questions for further exploration in the second study—an online cross-sectional survey of visual journalists who belong to three leading US organizations. The questions in this quantitative survey were also influenced by Shoemaker and Reese's hierarchy of influences and Bennett's multigated model. Findings indicate changes in the way visual journalists conceptualize their role and that of the audience. Based on these changes, this article proposes a new model of visual gatekeeping—the twenty-first-century visual news stream where “gatecheckers” select, verify, and curate visuals but no longer solely control their distribution the way traditional gatekeepers did.     

Precarious Balance

This article explores how journalists negotiate notions of autonomy in their daily exchanges with politicians. Based on qualitative data analysis of semi-structured interviews conducted in Chile, this article argues that, when analysed from the perspective of journalists, notions of autonomy appear to be negotiated in three distinct dimensions. First, a professional narrative built upon news values firmly grounded in commercial considerations; second, an organizational narrative that rests upon editorial lines that occasionally become explicit editorial biases, and third, a sense of belonging to an encapsulated community inhabited by journalists, politicians and communication officers. Data analysis suggests that core claims of autonomy in political reporting stem from values of newsworthiness greatly influenced by a commercial logic of audience maximization. This professional autonomy, though, has to be upheld at the organizational and the relational level, and appears tensioned by the appearance of new media and political actors who push journalists towards a public-oriented role. The implications of these findings for journalistic practice are discussed.     

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.     

Changes in U.S. Journalism

During the past decade, great changes have occurred in journalism, many of them due to the rapid rise of social media. What has happened to American journalists in the decade since the early 2000s, a time of tumultuous changes in society, economics, and technology? What impact have the many cutbacks and the dramatic growth of the internet had on US journalists’ attitudes, and behaviors—and even on the definition of who is a journalist? To answer the questions raised above, in late 2013 we conducted a national online survey of 1080 US journalists. The survey is part of the American Journalist project, which conducted similar surveys of US journalists in 1982, 1992, and 2002. We found that US journalists use social media mainly to check on what other news organizations are doing and to look for breaking news events. A majority also use social media to find ideas for stories, keep in touch with their readers and viewers, and find additional information. Thus, journalists use social media predominantly as information-gathering tools and much less to interview sources or to validate information. Our findings also indicate that most journalists consider social media to have a positive impact on their work. Of particular value, it seems, was the fact that social media make journalism more accountable to the public. However, only about a third of the journalists also think that social media have a positive influence on the journalistic profession overall. One of the most common negative perceptions was that online journalism has sacrificed accuracy for speed. Overall, then, it appears that most journalists do see the benefits of social media, but fewer are convinced that these new forms of digital communication will benefit journalistic professionalism.     

Accessing the Audience Community: How Newspapers Connect with Audience Communities in Finland,Japan, and Korea

The article contributes to the research on media management by approaching the audience as consisting of communities, instead of considering it a mass audience. By developing audience community as a concept in media management and audience research and investigating mainstream newspapers’ perceptions and practices of audience community relations, the study aims to provide a future outlook for the changing community nature of audiences. Newspaper organizations are starting to perceive the audience as a more concrete network of people, and journalistic processes can increasingly consist of generating platforms and practices for communication and communal activities with and among the audience. In the article, these processes are studied empirically by means of a qualitative study carried out in Finnish, Japanese, and Korean newspapers. Interestingly, the findings indicate that audience communities do not, after all, play an important role in the daily practices of the newspapers. The engagement with audience communities in social media is only occasional, intermittent, and by no means systematic. By contrast, interaction with offline communities seems to be more familiar and considered more valuable than connecting with audience communities in social media.     

Passive Accomplice or Active Disruptor

Mediatization of politics in the institutional perspective is commonly taken to refer to the interactions between political actors and media actors, where the first become increasingly governed by media logic and the latter become increasingly independent from other institutions. Even though we could picture the relations between the different constituents as a triangle with audience, media and political actors as equally important corners, the institutionalist perspective does not give equal attention to the audience as actor in the process. In this article, I ask to what extent audience participation in news production affects our understanding of the process of mediatization of politics. I discuss both how audience participation can be seen as a challenge to media's role in politics (challenging the current conceptualization of mediatization of politics) as well as how the theory of mediatization can be seen to be confirmed by currently dominant audience participation practices. In the first understanding, we can argue that audience participation challenges independence of institutional media actors (to give more power to both audiences and politicians). In the latter understanding, audience participation can be seen to be governed by the same commercial interests as other media production and in addition that both mainstream and alternative media are subject to search engine logic. This article then calls for a critical examination of our understanding of mediatization of politics to do justice to the multiplicity of logics informing media practices, the multiplicity of actors producing news and, crucially, the interaction between those logics and actors.     

Stabbing News

There is a comprehensive body of scholarly work regarding the way media represent crime and how it is constructed in the media narrative as a news item. These works have often suggested that in many cases public anxieties in relation to crime levels are not justified by actual data. However, few works have examined the gathering and dissemination of crime statistics by non-specialist journalists and the way crime statistics are gathered and used in the newsroom. This article seeks to explore in a comparative manner how journalists in newsrooms access and interpret quantitative data when producing stories related to crime. In so doing, the article highlights the problems and limitations of journalists in dealing with crime statistics as a news source, while assessing statistics-related methodologies and skills used in the newsrooms across the United Kingdom when producing stories related to urban crime.     

And Deliver Us to Segmentation

Non-profit news publishers, a small but growing piece of the news media environment, often explicitly attempt to build strong ties with their audiences. Many assume this approach differs from that of legacy newsrooms, which have historically kept the audience at arm’s length. In this article, I argue that this distinction has blurred. In-depth interviews with reporters and editors at a daily newspaper (The Chicago Tribune) and a local news non-profit (City Bureau) reveal that: (1) both organizations are pursuing a more collaborative relationship with their audiences; and (2) this pursuit is ill-suited for the traditional mass audience approach to news production. I conclude that journalists aspiring to work more closely with the audience find greater success when that audience is narrow to begin with.     

如何实现“信任性真实”:社交媒体时代的新闻生产实践——基于对25位媒体从业者的访谈

社交媒体时代受众的主体性地位逐渐凸显,新闻真实性可以理解为一种“信任性真实”,即受众所相信的真实。依据德国社会学家卢曼的分类,并结合对25位新闻从业者的深度访谈,本文从“系统信任”和“人际信任”两个维度对新闻的“信任性真实”进行了分析。笔者发现,“可视化”以及“交朋友”策略是社交媒体时代形塑传受之间“人际信任”的重要路径,不过需要指出的是,“信任”是完整实现新闻真实性的重要环节,但是新闻真实并不依赖于受众的信任,事实真实仍然是衡量新闻真实性的终极性标准。     

The Evolving Journalistic Roles on Social Media: Exploring “Engagement” as Relationship-Building between Journalists and Citizens

ABSTRACT

Scholarly and pragmatic definitions of the term “engagement” vary drastically. This article attempts to capture the nuances of the term by exploring journalists’ roles on social media where “engagement” is supposed to be particularly prevalent. Using in-depth interviews, we gauge the attitudes of traditional political journalists as well as those who think of themselves as “engagement specialists” about their responsibilities in interactive spaces. In addition, we analyze what kinds of engagement are happening in these spaces, and how citizens’ expectations are being articulated, in terms of journalist-audience relationship—an organic resultant of engagement. We found that journalists are taking on new kinds of roles in social spaces—often in the name of “engagement”—but that work is not always particularly interactive with citizens; rather, content is engaged with. In contrast, citizens look to journalists to play a number of roles that range from civic guide to therapist. Thus, relationship building happens sporadically. Furthermore, engagement level is dependent on the platform and its affordances. This research offers a continuum of social media engagement conceived as relationship building that can reconcile the disparities in how we define engagement, and suggests newsrooms appreciate the nuances via a series of recommendations.     

Investigative Reporting in the Networked Media Environment

The internet and social media sites are used extensively by violent extremist actors, providing new areas of inquiry for journalists reporting violent extremism. Based on 26 in-depth interviews with Norwegian media professionals, the present article describes how journalists monitor, assess, and make use of online information in investigative reporting of violent extremist groups in today’s networked media environment, characterized by complex interaction patterns, a plurality of voices, and blurred boundaries between private and public communication. While existing research on journalists’ use of social media as a source has tended to emphasize breaking news, the present article focuses on longer-term investigative efforts of journalists. The article gives insights into journalistic investigative practices in the networked media environment, in general, and in reporting violent extremism, in particular.