Blurred Boundaries or Conflicting Epistemologies

In this article, I discuss how information activists and journalists in Egypt claimed to acquire knowledge about the world, looking particularly at the period of 2012 and 2013, during which the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces and Mohammed Morsi in turn were leading the country. Taking a point of departure in anthropological fieldwork with information activists and journalists in Egypt, I show that information activists and journalists often had very similar practices and goals, which at times made the boundaries very blurry. Yet I argue that there was a significant distinction between the epistemologies of information activists and journalists. Information activists claimed to acquire knowledge about events from being part of them, whereas journalists claimed to acquire knowledge about events from observing them without taking part. Relatedly, information activists and journalists had significantly different relationships with their audiences.     

Beyond “J-Tweeters”

Based on a survey (N?=?1613) directed to members of the Norwegian Journalist Association (NJ), this paper presents an extensive overview of the ways in which comparably older and newer online platforms have been incorporated into the professional lives of Norwegian journalists. While plenty of research is available that explores the uses of Twitter by journalists, the results presented here suggest that Facebook is by far the most frequently used platform throughout the journalistic process—from collecting information, distributing content and engaging with readers. Statistical analyses provide further insights into which variables appear to influence certain modes of usage across the studied platforms. Based on the results, the argument is made that the advantages of using Facebook as a platform for journalistic practices are obvious due to its popularity among the general public, but that this utilization of one platform over others also could be problematic. As Facebook continues to gain leverage towards the newspapers they host, questions of journalistic practices need to come to the fore.     

Protection or Participation?

Children’s status as a particularly vulnerable group in society implies a journalistic obligation to shed light on children’s stories and listen to their perspectives, but their vulnerable position also means they deserve protection from potentially harmful news coverage. Based on a close-reading of two extensively covered news serials concerning irregular migrant children facing deportation, and on in-depth interviews with journalists, editors, and key actors working on behalf of irregular migrant children, the present article sheds light on how journalists balance competing, ethical, professional, and organizational concerns when reporting on issues concerning children. The article shows that while journalists say they are aware of the ethical aspects concerning extensive media exposure of young children, they justify the reporting by foregrounding children as innocent victims of the immigration system and by highlighting the journalistic obligation of shedding light on the wrongdoings of this system. The potential burden of media exposure is relativized as less harmful than the alternative—deportation. Theoretically, the article contributes to the literature on children in the news media, human-interest stories and journalism, and the role of journalism reporting vulnerable groups.     

Trends in Cultural Journalism

Various studies report that cultural journalism increasingly focuses on service and entertainment instead of serious arts coverage. The press prioritizes popular culture over traditional high arts to a growing extent. However, this shift in journalistic attention does not necessarily signify a straightforward decline in aesthetic standards, as popular cultural forms like film have developed along the lines of high art principles in the past decades. This article charts trends in American, Dutch, French, and German film journalism between 1955 and 2005. It demonstrates that coverage is typified by a serious aesthetic approach from the 1970s onwards. The principles of art are seen to steer journalists’ attention to an important degree: the review remains the predominant journalistic genre, and newspapers devote more attention to films by prestigious directors than strictly commercial moviemakers. As such, film’s prominence in the press does not seem to indicate a decline in serious cultural journalism but rather a revaluation of a popular cultural form.     

“When I Ask a Question,They Look at me Strangely”

This study uses qualitative interviews with 66 women journalists from print, broadcast, and online media in India, to understand how women political reporters assigned to the political beat negotiate gender issues and organizational and news routines while being effective journalists entrusted to cover matters of policy and enhance political awareness among audiences. Using Shoemaker and Reese’s hierarchy-of-influences model that introduces five levels of influence on news content, this study explores how institutional, news gathering, societal procedures, and professional practices influence the functions of women journalists on the political beat and percolate into the content they produce. The results show that in India’s growing media market, organizational and news routines, as well as the contentious issue of gender, control access to beats, especially the political beat, and percolate into news content produced by women political reporters.     

Local Journalism and the Information Needs of Local Communities

This paper presents a three-level conceptual and methodological framework for assessing local journalism and the extent to which it meets community information needs. This research grows from frequent calls from policymakers, foundations, and advocacy groups for methods and measures to facilitate comparative analyses of the state of local journalism in different communities. Further, the goal here is to develop a methodological approach that can be realistically scaled to large numbers of communities in order to facilitate analysis of both the factors that affect the state of local journalism and the ways local journalism may affect the state of local communities. The methodological approach presented here focuses on infrastructure (the availability of journalistic sources), output (the quantity of journalistic output from these sources), and performance (the extent to which this output is original, is about the local community, and addresses critical information needs). An exploratory application of this methodological approach is then presented for three communities. The results indicate substantial differences in the journalism infrastructure, output, and performance across these communities and suggest possible points of focus for future research.     

News Diversity and Minority Audiences

The rapid growth of Hispanics in the United States, the parallel growth of Spanish-language media, and the difficulties that this population continues to experience in terms of important socio-demographic indicators such as education, immigration, healthcare, and criminal justice, requires research that investigates the ways in which Spanish-language news outlets are delivering the information needed by this group in terms of providing a public service and contributing to democratic notions of the press. Democratic theories of the press posit that in order for a democracy to function properly, all groups should be provided with news coverage that reflects the voices, concerns, and interests of their communities. However, it has often proved difficult for news industries undergoing rapid growth and increasing corporate concentration to serve audiences with diverse news and information needs. In order to examine the extent to which Spanish-language news outlets are providing a diverse range of news and topics relevant to their audiences, researchers used software that gathers Real Simple Syndication (RSS) feeds to archive, organize, and analyze over 10,000 news stories posted to 28 Spanish-language news websites during October 2012. The results show some diversity in the range of topics covered, but the widespread duplication of content across platforms owned by a small handful of media conglomerates found in the results raises important questions about the impact of increasing news homogenization in the digital age and the potential implications for minority audiences.     

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.     

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.     

Unravelling Data Journalism

The centrality of data in modern society has prompted a need to examine the increasingly powerful role of data brokers and their efforts to quantify the world. Practices and methods such as surveillance, biometrics, automation, data creeping, or profiling consumer behaviour, all offer opportunities and challenges to news reporting. Nonetheless, as most professional journalists display a degree of hesitancy towards numbers and computational literacy, there are only limited means to investigate the power dynamics underpinning data. This article discusses the extent to which current data journalism practices in the United Kingdom employ databases and algorithms as a means of holding data organisations accountable. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with data journalists, data editors, and news managers working for British mainstream media, the study looks at how data journalism operates within the news cycle of professional newsrooms in the United Kingdom. Additionally, it examines the innovations data journalism brings to storytelling, newsgathering, and the dissemination of news.