Reciprocal (and Reductionist?) Newswork

This paper builds upon previous research that examines participatory forms of “reciprocal journalism” and “public communication” led by high school and college students in Miami, Florida, USA, in the fall of 2014. In this study, the students’ assessment of local and national media coverage is used to reveal greater details inherent in examining participatory methods of newswork. Collectively, students said that media coverage emphasis on local and national public officials instead of residents and community members who experience sea-level rise first-hand, combined with a lack of scientific explanation of and solutions for sea-level rise reduced the event's potential to build reciprocal relationships with younger audiences.     

Putting the Work (back) into Newswork

This case study pivots away from the technocentrism of much contemporary scholarship in journalism studies and looks at the intersections of journalism's normative functions and labor processes. Interviews with journalists at local and metropolitan newspapers in the United States reveal a deep commitment to the normative functions of journalism but a growing realization that external pressures are contributing to “normative failure”—the fear of inability to execute these functions. Findings indicate a need for further research on the role of normative functions in how journalists make sense of industry change.     

Matrix Organisation

Confronted by increased internal and external complexity, traditional forms of newswork have reached their limits. Journalistic start-ups, such as Quartz and NZZ.at, form emerging editorial teams around “obsessions” or “phenomena” to gain cross-beat perspectives of complex issues such as climate change, the financial crisis or the refugee crisis. Legacy media experimenting with cross-beat newswork see themselves confronted by challenges arising predominantly from beat structures. Consequently, this paper focuses on an example of cross-beat teamwork at a major Swiss daily newspaper, investigating the journalists’ experiences of working in a particular project. Insights from 13 interviews indicate that a matrix organisation is one way to organise cross-beat topic-focused newswork in larger newsrooms. A matrix organisation combines traditional functional hierarchy (i.e. the beat structure) with a project dimension. Based on insights from organisational studies, I compare the known advantages and disadvantages of a matrix organisation with journalists’ experiences and derive implications for the introduction and design of a matrix organisation in newsrooms.