How U.S. and Chinese journalists think about plagiarism

A comparison of 1,096 professional journalists in China and the United States on attitudes toward attribution and plagiarism reveals Chinese journalists were more likely to see attribution as a practice to be embraced regardless of career longevity and culture, suggesting journalistic norms are more important than a collectivist orientation. Attribution was more likely to be embraced by those who see principles as more important than expediency, affirming research that plagiarism is hardly a monolithic concept. Overall, journalists in the two nations did not vary significantly in their attitudes toward plagiarism, despite vast differences in culture and politics as well as evidence that in some other fields China is more accepting of reusing material without attribution. The data show that among journalists, attitudes toward plagiarism are shared across national boundaries, reinforcing related research showing that a journalism culture exists and is shared at least in part across national boundaries.     

Quality,Innovation, and Financial Sustainability

Entrepreneurial, independent digital media sites arose in response to disruption in the journalism industry brought on by emerging technologies. This study explores this trend in Latin America from the perspective of audiences. Based on surveys of readers of entrepreneurial digital news sites in Guatemala and Nicaragua, this mixed-methods study offers a snapshot of who these readers are and what they are interested in. Results showed readers of the Guatemalan and Nicaraguan news sites valued equally quality journalism and innovation, but differed when it came to the importance they placed on the sites’ business models. This study also illuminated a new dimension of innovation, one from the readers’ perspective. While some respondents associated innovation with use of new technologies, in general readers defined innovation as unique (to the region) and alternative (to mainstream media) ways of doing journalism; their definition, unlike that of journalists, was not necessarily technologically driven.     

Nurturing Authority

When considering the role of local journalism in a networked media environment, it is crucial to examine how audiences attribute news with the power to define social knowledge. In particular, television news programs need to appeal to audiences by reinforcing a sense of local journalistic authority to assert the parameters of who and what is worthy of coverage. This article presents the findings from interviews with a range of commercial television news viewers in Sydney, Australia. It positions viewership in the context of people’s wider engagement with news, and in relation to their interpersonal and digital social interactions. The paper argues that local audiences have conflicting attitudes to the role of television news, both contesting and re-inscribing the programs with the power to demarcate social, political, and cultural knowledge. It traces how local audiences challenge the ability of news to convey boundaries within the community through processes of exclusion, connecting the contestations to the lived experiences of the individuals. It identifies that television news programs nurture journalistic authority in terms of their local relevance, and it contributes insights on the significance of local news by engaging with the means by which audiences themselves attach social power to journalism.     

Contesting Communities

This introductory article to the combined special issue of Journalism Studies and Journalism Practice provides an overview of some of the key contemporary approaches to studying journalism and social order. It argues the need to step beyond a functionalist framework when considering the news media’s central role in shaping social connections, community and cohesion. To advance our understandings of social order, our paper suggests a greater emphasis of the significance of journalism’s relationship to the wider social sphere along with three other key considerations, including (1) a critical focus on the relationship between media, politics and social order, especially in defining and/or negotiating “anti-social” practices and social disintegration; (2) a more refined focus on the “imagined” and geographic boundaries of news audiences in digital spaces; and (3) the changing relationship to norms and conventions of journalism practice from trust and legitimacy to the role of journalists as arbiters and connectors across social spaces.     

A Follower-Centric Approach to Leadership in the Newsroom

This article analyses leadership in the newsroom of the Spanish newspaper El País as well as its impact on the craft of journalism more generally. Through 23 in-depth interviews, we try to elucidate how the newsroom constructs its leaders (in the newsroom, what does it mean to be a leader?), paying particular attention to the main skills considered to be necessary. According to our newsroom findings, not all heads of section or editors-in-chief are leaders, a fact that questions formal authority relations and proclaims expertise and know-how as discriminatory skills. This study emphasizes that the collective recognition of a leader is not an ultimate disposition, but can vary over time: consequently leaders who do not achieve the professional requirements of the newsroom can be denied the status, despite their expertise and experience. Our findings indicate that leaders at El País are those journalists (no matter what their positions) with strong capacities and skills (fundamentally experience, expertise and creativity) to manage form (relationships) and substance (contents) in the daily work of the newsroom. In short, journalists seen as leaders combine reiterated and strong qualities and merit, graphically reflected in the texts they have published for years in the newspaper.     

From Inarticulacy to Care

This article seeks to critically re-open the closed structure of news coverage of ethnic minorities by proposing a dialogical model of representation, which evokes mutual understanding across differences through well-crafted narratives of minority experiences. Informed by Mikhail Bakhtin and Charles Taylor, it explores the notion of “dialogue” within journalistic narratives and delineates two dialogical approaches, namely the evaluative articulation of moral values and the polyphonic incorporation of different voices. The former suggests that journalists should employ nuanced languages to situate ethnic minorities’ aspirations and experiences in a common “horizon of significance”. The latter challenges the hegemonic monologue of an ostensibly objective narration and accentuates the manifold voices from ordinary people, urging the journalists to rethink their positionality as narrators. Two cases are analyzed to reveal how the dialogic representation can be realized in news reporting, calling for a transition from “ethics of inarticulacy” to ethics of care in journalism practices.     

Citizen-Centered Journalism and Contested Boundaries

This article explores the existence of a “citizen-centered journalism” that sees citizens as crucial participants in the construction of news and as co-creators of their own worlds. Through qualitative case studies of three news organizations, the article examines the motivation for using a citizen-centered approach, the news routines that are required to do so, the categories of content produced, and the perceived impact of this approach. The results suggest these news organizations are working in partnership with communities and striving to give a voice to historically marginalized communities. The journalists, however, see citizen participation as complementary to professional journalistic routines that favor verifiable information, rather than assigning inherent value to it for its own sake.     

Placing Facebook

Facebook is challenging professional journalism. These challenges were evident in three incidents from 2016: the allegation that Facebook privileged progressive-leaning news on its trending feature; Facebook’s removal of the Pulitzer Prize-winning “Napalm Girl” photo from the pages of prominent users; and the proliferation of “fake news” during the US presidential election. Using theoretical concepts from the field of boundary work, this paper examines how The Guardian, The New York Times, Columbia Journalism Review and Poynter editorialized Facebook’s role in these three incidents to discursively construct the boundary between the value of professional journalism to democracy and Facebook’s ascendant role in facilitating essential democratic functions. Findings reveal that these publications attempted to define Facebook as a news organization (i.e., include it within the boundaries of journalism) so that they could then criticize the company for not following duties traditionally incumbent upon news organizations (i.e., place it outside the boundaries of journalism). This paper advances scholarship that focuses on both inward and outward conceptions of boundary work, further explores the complex challenge of defining who a journalist is in the face of rapidly changing technological norms, and advances scholarship in the field of media ethics that positions ethical analysis at the institutional level.     

Beyond “Woodstein”: Narratives of Investigative Journalism

ABSTRACT

Using a methodology inspired by structural narratology and by James Hamilton’s [2016. Democracy’s Detectives: The Economics of Investigative Journalism. Cambridge: Harvard] economic analysis of investigative journalism, this paper identifies a set of 14 recurring structural and formal elements (plot events, character types and functions, visual iconography) that constitute a fable about investigative journalism. The fable structure is applied to analyze six diverse films about investigative journalism produced in the US in the last 40 years. The films include two instantiations of successful investigative journalism (All the President’s Men, Spotlight), two cases where conflict between journalists and corporate managers diminished the impact of the investigation (Good Night and Good Luck, The Insider), and two instances of a counter-fable of failed investigative journalism (Truth, Kill the Messenger). The paper argues that the films’ representation of investigative journalism influences public perceptions of investigative journalism. It also speculates about the factors that will influence investigative journalism and its representations in the current political context in the US.