Health Journalist Role Conceptions

Using interview methodology, this research examines the role conceptions of US health journalists. Asking journalists from different types of media to define their roles as they relate to public health, inequalities, responsibility and news values reveals the external demands on journalists as well as internal processes that shape professional identity. This paper considers professional and normative role conceptions. Interviews with experienced health journalists revealed that they do not identify with any one of these roles in particular but operate on a spectrum, navigating competing pressures resulting from individual, organizational, and societal influences. Through the process of analyzing and categorizing health journalists’ goals, responsibilities, and ideals, we explore how topics and tasks specific to covering health relate to the democratic functions of the press. The findings of this study advance knowledge about the sociology of newswork and shed light on the professional identities of health journalists.     

Nothing but the Facts?

This paper seeks to understand how journalists deal with storytelling and truth-seeking in their daily news practice. While storytelling is usually studied through texts, we approached it from a practice perspective, combining data from three ethnographic studies in which 36 beat reporters and 13 journalistic storytelling experts were extensively interviewed. Because of the emphasis journalists place on “finding out the truth” in public discourses, it is tempting for academics to present them as naive truth-seekers. However, by means of an interpretative repertoire analysis of their “practice” discourses, we seek to enlarge the discursive space to talk about the supposed tension between story and reality. Although departing from the idea that all news making is storytelling, the interviewed journalists consider news making and storytelling as distinct—and sometimes opposing—practices. These professional practices serve as the framework around which five storytelling repertoires are organized.     

“SOMEONE'S GOTTA BE IN CONTROL HERE”

Journalists explain daily happenings according to a uniform mission, agreed-upon routines, and established societal relationships. Their product—American newspaper stories in this case—helps shape the social order by controlling information dissemination in a structured environment. As a result, the press enjoys the status of a political institution that operates with some authority. When technology allows the audience to take over some control in this process, its institutional dynamics shift. This research examined the words of 35 journalists to explore how technology is causing marked evolutions in newspaper journalism's missions, routines, and relationships with sources and readers. This paper found that news considerations center on personal experience for journalists and their audiences. The evidence indicates that journalists are sharing their ability to tell the day's news with people outside of the institution. Eventually, the changes in news production will have implications for the press's ultimate authority as a societal institution.     

Social Media and Speed-Driven Journalism: Expectations and Practices

To examine how journalists use, and are affected by, social media in their pursuit for speed, this study conducted in-depth interviews with 11 journalists from various U.S. national, metropolitan, and local newspapers. Findings revealed an industry-wide expectation that journalists engage with audiences on social media. But in terms of practice, most interviewees reported that they mainly use Twitter to facilitate news work (i.e., contact hard-to-reach sources) and communicate with other journalists; audiences are rarely their focus on social media. The interviewees were also asked about their perception of how Twitter affects audiences. Most interviewees were unsure of its impact on credibility, but believed that it may promote news use, although not contribute to news organizations’ bottom line. This study offers five reasons why social media are not saving the newspaper industry, and discusses managerial implications regarding the gap between social media expectations and practices.     

The role of a local newspaper after disaster: an intrinsic case study of Ishinomaki,Japan

The city of Ishinomaki in Miyagi prefecture was devastated by the tsunami that struck Japan’s North East Coast on 11 March 2011. Drawing on fieldwork conducted in Ishinomaki, which included interviews with senior journalists from the city’s two local newspapers, the Ishinomaki Hibi Shimbun and the Ishinomaki Kahoku, this paper presents an intrinsic case study of the role a local newspaper in Ishinomaki after the Great East Japan Disaster. The evidence reveals that in the immediate aftermath of the tsunami journalists recognised how their newspaper could serve the immediate information-needs of the local community by providing essential lifeline information, describing a duty to report, despite the operational difficulties that their newspapers faced. In the longer term recovery phase, interviewees acknowledged how their newspapers have attempted to communicate a message of hope to the city and provide an alternative perspective to the national media, which sometimes gave a false impression of the state of Ishinomaki’s recovery. This paper offers some insights into journalistic role conceptions, illustrating how journalists from the two newspapers embraced the role of information-disseminator after the disaster, and also identifies avenues for further research.     

A Qualitative Analysis of the Portrayal of Young People and Psychosis in Australian News Reports

ABSTRACT

News media plays an influential role in shaping society’s understanding of mental illness and can promote perspectives ranging from those that promote help-seeking behaviour to stigmatised associations with attributes such as danger and violence. Stigma has been found to have significant negative impacts on people with psychosis. No existing studies have explored how young people with psychosis are represented in newspapers. Targeting this gap, this study analysed news articles relating to youth psychosis to determine the types of discourses used. We searched the ProQuest Australia and New Zealand Newsstream database (2011-2016) for Australian newspaper articles related to young people and psychosis. Qualitative analysis was used to identify content and these were arranged into key themes. The recurring themes evident in the 27 articles linked youth psychosis to illicit drug use, violence and professional infighting about treatment options, and thus promoted significantly stigmatised perspectives of youth psychosis. Acknowledgement of these stigmatised discourses is important for encouraging responsible media reporting and for understanding the social messages impacting on treatment and help-seeking by young people. We discuss the conflicted role of journalists in presenting information about mental illness and recommend development of a more solutions-focused approach to reporting in this area.     

Conditional Autonomy

Current developments in the Swedish news business have resulted in clashes between the professional stands of journalists and the incentives of their managers, or—from a theoretical perspective—a confrontation between discourses of journalistic professionalism and managerialism. While professionalism includes values of autonomy, self-regulation and public interest, managerialism on the other hand promotes business ideals, standardisation and organisational efficiency. Above all, it promotes a centralised management model of line control at the cost of collegial decision-making and peer review. But what does this mean in practice? In what situations does the negotiation between those discourses arise in everyday news work and how does it affect the autonomy of journalists?

This paper aims to answer those questions by focusing on the experiences of Swedish journalists working in the tension field between professional and managerial discourses. This empirical study includes observation studies as well as interviews with journalists and their managers in four Swedish daily newspapers.

The results clearly reveal a conditioned journalistic autonomy, and shows how professional ideals are tarnished. The economistic view of journalistic activities is forcefully and successfully implemented by management.     

Job Satisfaction and Gender

This study uses quantitative and qualitative survey data to examine the job satisfaction of male and female employees at Iowa newspapers. Responses to open-ended questions indicated qualitative differences in the issues men and women considered salient and in the discourses they used to talk about their work. Male respondents were more likely to use language that evoked professional efficacy and emphasized presence. Female respondents more likely to use language that related to production and emphasized position. The findings also indicate a gender discrepancy related to income and financial status; men reported higher salaries and indicated greater financial security than women. Economic environment emerged as a salient issue for both male and female employees. Overall, the findings support the use of qualitative data to explore issues related to gender and job satisfaction and suggest organizational factors play an important role in newspaper employees’ attitudes and perceptions about their work.     

Defining Journalists in Late-Nineteenth Century Britain

This article uses journalists’ memoirs, professional publications, and handbooks to show how British journalists projected images of themselves in the late nineteenth century. In a period of professional and social insecurity, journalists employed such self-presentations as a way of legitimizing their “title to be heard” in the public sphere. Rather than demand that journalism be converted into a closed profession comparable to law or medicine, journalists presented theirs as an “open profession” in which ability and hard work automatically led to success. Although such self-projections legitimized the status of elite journalists, they hampered attempts to improve journalists’ working conditions.     

Where do journalists go after newsroom job cuts?

This article explores the aftermath of job loss in journalism in 2012, a year of dramatic press industry restructuring in Australia. It reports the findings of a pilot survey of 95 Australian redundant journalists, undertaken as part of the New Beats project, a five-year, university–industry investigation of what happens to journalists, and journalism, after job loss. Three related questions drive the analysis: Where do journalists go after job cuts? How do they make sense of job loss? What happens to professional identity? In contrast to a recent study of journalists laid off from the British press, and the literature on the aftermath of job loss for older professionals, this research finds that, in practical terms, the Australian journalists had relatively better than expected post-job loss experiences. All but two of the redundant journalists seeking re-employment found some form of work within one year, and, thanks to union-enforced redundancy agreements, most left newsrooms with severance payments that cushioned the financial impact of unemployment. Yet, the majority did not resume their full-time careers in journalism, and many were emotionally traumatised not only by job loss but also career change. The article argues a sense of leaving a newspaper industry in seemingly terminal decline amplified feelings of anger and anxiety about both the future of journalism work, and lost professional identity, prompting many to leave the profession intentionally and seek jobs elsewhere.     

PREFERENCE,PRINCIPLE AND PRACTICE

Many studies reveal that quality journalistic writing in the form of well-written feature stories is one of the few true journalistic tools that help newspapers in their struggle against declining readership. In Slovenia, however, there is little acknowledgement of this. Academic research illustrates that readers want well-written sophisticated feature stories, but they are offered poorly written elementary feature stories. One of the reasons for this discrepancy might be the tradition of the latter in Slovene press; besides few practising journalists are familiar with the theory of journalistic forms, and most of them are not aware of the advantages of quality, sophisticated feature stories. Feature stories are undervalued in Slovene press to such an extent that as a genre they are rarely examined in commercial readership surveys. Thus, the readers’ preference for them remains vague and ambiguous. Such surveys do not help the newspaper publishers determine what kind of articles their readers really want and in what form/genre they want them.     

Mixed Messages

Using the tools of discourse analysis, this research identifies the competing and sometimes contradictory public discourses around the requirements for the next generation of journalists—those of journalism educators, industry accreditation bodies, and of employers and journalists in the wider media landscape. Investigating and identifying the tensions in this debate may help all the parties to reflect on how the values and aims of the professional journalist are constructed and how this may impact on potential journalists entering education and the industry.     

Playing by a Different Set of Rules

The notion that journalists in an interconnected world increasingly share values typically associated with the so-called “professional model” has gained considerable currency with scholars arguing that ideas such as a belief in journalistic autonomy, public service, objectivity, and the significance of ethics are widely espoused by journalists on a global scale. Underlying this conceptualization is a taken-for-granted assumption regarding the adoption of journalistic values that originated in Western democracies which neglects how they are embraced in non-Western contexts. This paper examines newsroom values in India’s regional television channels, which have emerged as a major news source in the country. Findings indicate that in the case of Indian regional television, local socio-political and economic factors undermine the adoption of professional norms derived from the Anglo-European model by Indian journalists who see such norms as having little functional value or relevance to their work.     

Modelling Quoting in Newswriting: A Framework for Studies on the Production of News

ABSTRACT

The Mediated Social Communication (MSC) approach considers mass media a venue for opposing and complementary societal groups to publicly negotiate socially relevant topics. This negotiation is conducted through representatives of these groups and mediated by journalists. Inspired by the MSC approach, this paper presents an empirically grounded model that structures the mediating process through the process of quoting. By identifying the key phases of newswriting as sub-processes of quoting, the paper argues that journalists (1) decide on a topical issue to be addressed (topicalisation), (2) identify groups of people who are linked to this issue (societal localisation), (3) pick some people as representatives of these societal groups (personalisation), and (4) verbalise these people's points of view, often by means of quoting, inter alia (verbalisation). The four-phase model is then operationalised into a data collection method that facilitates access to and fosters new insights into the subtle dynamics of newswriting. Hitherto, these dynamics have often remained obscure, because the craft ethos is adopted as tacit knowledge through implicit socialisation and is therefore difficult for journalists to verbalise. The paper concludes by calling for reconsideration of journalists’ role as gatekeepers who decide which issues and voices are heard in public discourse.     

CRISIS JOURNALISM AT A CROSSROADS?

The ongoing changes in journalism in Finland have forced the profession to consider its position and practices. This need for reflection was particularly clear after the recent school shooting cases in Jokela in 2007 and in Kauhajoki in 2008 that gave rise to a public debate about journalists’ actions. Using qualitative content analysis and the idea of reflective practice as its methods, this study investigates how 45 Finnish journalists reflected on their and their profession's work after the two cases. The study focuses on journalists’ views of reporting on the shooters and victims, and reveals a shift in journalists’ thinking from a strong deontological ethos towards a more teleological stance. It also highlights the need for further research to determine whether the change observed is a permanent one.     

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.     

Framing Wind Energy: Strategic Communication Influences on Journalistic Coverage

The dominance of political communication over an issue like wind energy has the power to overwhelm attempts to frame wind farming as a scientific or environmental issue in the mediated public sphere. Using regulation as the primary newsmaker, politicians instead of scientists or environmental organizations become journalists’ sources in framing the issue. Wind energy is a special issue that is framed in unique ways due to environmental, political, and industry ties. Contest framing ensues between institutional stakeholders to win favorable media coverage. Through a sociological lens, this analysis examines how contemporary political communications continue to influence the media through professional routines and relationships even in a scientifically grounded industry during a surge of public environmentalism. Comparisons of political, energy industry, and environmental advocacy communications show that political and energy industry frames dominate newspaper coverage of energy issues even when environmental and scientific issues are inherent to the story.     

Mapping Journalism Culture: A Theoretical Taxonomy and Case Studies from Indonesia

Given the persistent variation in the ways journalism works across cultural boundaries, researchers are often quick to speak of ‘journalistic’ or ‘ professional cultures’ without conceptual clarity. Consequently, ‘journalism culture’ has become an increasingly vague concept, inviting misunderstanding and theoretical ambiguity. This paper, therefore, introduces a taxonomy of journalism cultures, consisting of the territorial, essentialist, value-centered, milieu-specific, organizational and professional journalism cultures. Empirical evidence is provided for three of these cultures, drawing on data from a survey of 385 professional journalists in Indonesia. The results suggest that if culture has some kind of severe impact on journalism, it is not likely to appear on the level of the individual (micro) and organization (meso), but rather on the societal level (macro).     

Negotiation Games

This study analyzes the interpretive repertoires used by public relations (PR) advisors of Dutch politicians to describe their relations with talk show journalists. A qualitative analysis of semi-structured interviews revealed that the dominant repertoires come from the realm of play. PR advisors downplay the power struggle to position politicians on talk shows as a competitive game while at the same time they legitimize their close relationships with journalists with another play metaphor, the rehearsed stage play. Moreover, comparing politicians’ appearances on talk shows with stage performances gives them the opportunity to brush aside the contradiction between their extensive pre-broadcast preparations and the authentic appearance they attempt to emulate. Studying the interpretive repertoires of advisors working in PR and how they fruitfully combine the elements of struggle and cooperation sheds light on the structures and strategies that define journalist–source relationships. It provides insights into how PR advisors perceive and enact their own role, which often goes unnoticed both in research and by the general public.     

The Russian intelligentsia in the public sphere: The mass‐circulation press and political culture, 1860–1917

An independent, commercial mass‐circulation newspaper industry boomed at the end of the tsarist era, one analogous in most respects to that which evolved in the West during the nineteenth century. The Russian press, however, differed significantly from the Western press in the manner in which it functioned politically. Russian journalism, too, helped to open a public sphere in the autocratic environment, in concert with a series of social and political reforms in the 1860s. However, when those reforms failed to create a political order guaranteed by a constitution, the press reconstituted that sphere in a way to actually thwart the evolution of Western liberalism. The pivotal event in this process proved to be the failure of the 1905 Revolution to secure the postreform decades of incremental gains. Like most of the rest of society, journalists became so disappointed by the limited concessions exacted from the government that they lost hope that the autocracy could be reformed. Newspapers sought new political symbols in Russia's past; they found an equally disillusioned intelligentsia, whom they historicized and manipulated so as to undermine whatever substantive part they could have played in using the press as a genuinely transformative institution central to the public sphere.