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Though most of the literature suggests that competition in the media market is positive, this paper argues otherwise. Drawing on a small number of studies from emerging media markets, the authors argue that the relationship between competition and the quality of the journalistic product is curvilinear, with an optimal level of competition producing a quality media product and higher levels of competition–such as the hyper-competition existing in many emerging media markets–producing journalistic products that do not serve society well. The paper examines this question empirically through use of existing data from a small sample of countries where measures of media performance and of market competition exist. The findings are consistent with the expectation of a curvilinear (inverted U) relationship between competition and the quality of journalistic products in that country. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the role of journalism in shaping the meaning and outcomes of collective reparative rituals, and the ways in which such rituals are used to negotiate and repair journalists' own cultural authority. Using the case study of the publication of the Winograd Commission Report on the 2006 war between Israel and Hizbullah, and integrating different theoretical frameworks for understanding mediatized rituals and the memory work of journalism, the paper analyzes the complex web of interactions between journalists and other social players, between competing news outlets, and among the different cultural roles of journalism. The analysis shows that while the Israeli news media built the publication of the report as a crucial historical event and worked to fill in some of the missing pieces of a successful collective ritual, it also constructed it as a doomed-to-fail, and ultimately unsatisfying, ritual. This dialectical construction allowed the Israeli news media to reconcile its conflicting roles as news provider and ritual agent; repair its own failures in covering the second Lebanon War; and position itself as better qualified than the commission to both investigate and remember the war. The paper also demonstrates how competing media players advanced different reparative narratives, collaborated with different social and political players, and invoked the memory of the war in ways which served these different interpretations. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In most democracies, the public reputation of journalists is on the decline. However, other than with attitudes towards parties and politicians, the concrete cognitive map that people have of journalists has received rather little attention. This paper describes the results of a representative telephone survey of the German population (N=1,054) that was designed to explore the public's perception of journalism. The paper contains a first analysis of these data. Our results confirm a rather negative public reputation of journalists, particularly concerning the profession's trustworthiness and here especially among the younger population. While two thirds of respondents have esteem for journalists, only a third trust journalist. We further found large gaps between the public's expectations and the public's perceptions of journalistic goals and values, characteristics of news content, as well as journalists' behavior in ethical dilemmas. In the final part of the paper we test the effects of some of these variables on trust and esteem. Our work is based on the assumption that the relationship between the people and the press deserves more research because a functioning relationship between both actors is the basis for a functioning democracy. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper provides a case study of the BBC, and the attitudes of its news workers towards Audience Material, or as it is more commonly referred to, User Generated Content (UGC). It is based on a major study of Audience Material at the BBC, co-funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council and the BBC. A team of five researchers spent ten weeks in nine different newsroom across the BBC, both in London and across the United Kingdom, and as part of these observations undertook interviews with 115 journalists and ten senior editors. A typology of the different types of Audience Material is offered, along with descriptions of the different roles they play within the BBC, the tensions which exist between them, and the different attitudes journalists hold towards them. It becomes clear that news workers are enthusiastic about certain types, and perhaps unsurprisingly, these are the types which fit the traditional model of journalism: audience footage, audience comments and experiences, and are types of Audience Material which the BBC has always received, and used. However, there are certain key people based in individual newsrooms, and some holding senior management positions, who are also enthusiastic about types of Audience Material which challenge traditional models of journalism: collaborative and truly participatory models of journalism. But while it is true that there are a number of impressive examples of collaborative and participatory journalism that exist throughout the BBC's UK operations, most news journalists perceive 'UGC' as simply another newsgathering tool. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the career and work of journalist Elmo Scott Watson, describing the role of his syndicated feature stories in standardizing discourses about American Indian people in the popular press of the early twentieth century. Situating Watson's work against the backdrop of professionalized news, I argue that it was not merely the emerging technologies which led to the reproduction of the noble and ignoble savage binary in the popular press, but the "internal logics" of such discursive formations which made them so easily reproduced. In addition, I suggest that while scholars have focused a great deal of attention on hard news stories and the ideal of objectivity, we can learn more by exploring the productivity of "entertaining" newspaper content such as Watson's stories. Watson was an agent in reproducing the standards of his discipline, and looking to his work can tell us a great deal about the exigency of his field as journalism was becoming professionalized. I argue that while Watson's stories were considered entertaining, he and others in his field believed such content served an important educational function; in particular, Watson believed he was correcting negative misconceptions about American Indian people through the noble savage identity construct. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores tehelka.com as a critical turning point in Indian investigative journalism. Tehelka.com, an independent and alternative news website, setup a fake defense deal for shedding light on how rampant corruption was devouring democracy at the highest levels. In this sting operation code named "West End" reporters from Tehelka.com contacted top army officers and politicians, by posing as traders of defense equipment.

Journalists' blogs (j-blogs) are novel journalistic practice emerging in Chinese news industry. This study is the first step in establishing what is going on in Chinese news media in terms of j-blogs and finding out how new technology would change and transform the traditional news industry in Mainland China. Content analysis was conducted to study j-blogs on Chinese newspaper websites and investigate their implications for journalism in China. Topic, format, reader comments, hyperlinks and multimedia such as video, audio and pictures in j-blog posts were analyzed. It was revealed that the most often addressed topics in Chinese j-blogs were lifestyle, politics/government/military, crime/accidents/disasters, and business/economic activity. The most frequently adopted formats in Chinese j-blogs were the straight opinion column, the rumor-mill blog, and reporter's notebook of news tidbits and incidentals. It was shown that the formats of j-blog posts varied by topics. Significant influence of topic and format were found on the number of reader comments in Chinese j-blog posts. The use of hyperlinks and multimedia also differed in j-blogs with different topics and formats. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Journalists' authority over the cultural production of truth is increasingly challenged by other cultural players, who offer their versions of culturally significant news stories in an ever-growing proximity to the actual events. This article focuses on the much disputed story of the capture and rescue of Pfc. Jessica Lynch in Iraq, and examines the ways in which the New York Times negotiated its authority vis-à-vis other cultural texts that lay claim to the story, particularly NBC's made-for-television movie Saving Jessica Lynch, and the biographical novel, I am a Soldier, Too. The analysis suggests that the Times dialectically oscillated between treating other cultural players as the "others" of journalism and as legitimate participants in a shared project of cultural production; between constructing itself as a participant in the contest over the real story and an observer of this contest; and between offering drafts and final records of the story. At a broader level, the article demonstrates the need to see the elite press as neither the other of popular culture nor its equal counterpart, and argues for a possible analogy between the ostensibly contradictory epistemologies of cultural studies and journalism. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Blogs are suggested to be a new form of grassroots journalism, which may pose a competition to traditional journalism arenas of power, as news and politics. Most Americans, nonetheless, learn about new technologies, such as blogs, from traditional media. Ironically, it is up to the press to introduce and portray the blogs phenomenon to most of the public. This study aims to explore how major US newspapers framed blogs and blogging from 1999 to 2005. Findings show that articles framed blogs typically as a positive phenomenon but, at the same time excluded them from the public arena, where traditional journalistic societal role resides. Blogging was also rarely associated with the journalistic work. By segregating blogs to the private and personal sphere, traditional media restrict public discussion on the benefits of blogs to society, as an alternative, or even completing, source for information and opinions. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

U.S. newspaper reporters and editors have heard a chorus of calls for greater transparency in recent years. Journalists are being told to lift the curtain and tell readers how the news is gathered and produced. Yet little research has shown whether journalists are heeding such calls. This exploratory study content-analyzes editor's notes at major U.S. daily newspapers and finds little evidence that they are being used to increase transparency. Although editor's notes have generally become more prevalent, that trend appears to be tapering off. Editor's notes are seldom used to explain reporting and sourcing methods. Moreover, such notes typically are written from a third-person point of view rather than taking a more conversational approach. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The media audience becomes more and more interested in participating in the news production process and the evaluation of journalistic work. Thus, participatory journalism fills imortant niches that traditional media cannot fill because of market pressure and profitability issues. Since participatory journalism can be seen as a chance for traditional media, we need to know more about it. Hence, we conducted a standardized quantitative online-survey among participatory journalists in Germany and compared our findings with results from the most recent German journalism study. Our basic research question is: How do participatory journalists differ from professional journalists, regarding their attitude towards journalistic ethics, journalistic quality, concerning motivations, perception of their identity and self-concept etc. Our study has identified significant differences but also similarities between participatory and professional journalists. Results suggest that despite significant differences between participatory and professional journalists it cannot be denied that participatory journalists contribute to public opinion building. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A "charm offensive" is a diplomatic technique in which negotiators use the power of their personal magnetism to achieve particular goals in international relations. This paper focuses on the 2015 Iranian nuclear deal negotiations with a special interest in the charm offensives of the Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif and the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. We examine the journalistic coverage of Zarif's and Netanyahu's charm offensives in the American (The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal) and the Israeli (Haaretz and Israel Hayom) press. Bringing together literatures in communication studies, sociology, political science and international relations, the paper presents preliminary definitions of "charm" and "charm offensive," it examines non- Western charm, challenging the notion that it is a characteristic of Western leadership, and finally, it analyzes the role of media, in particular the press, in constructing and presenting charm offensives in Israel and the United States. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Public life in Saudi Arabia is notably constrained due to regulatory laws on public assembly, media, and public participation (Rifai, 2014; Stenslie, 2012). This paper examines the impact of the Internet and Twitter on news production and its reception in KSA. The paper also argues that Twitter has become the space in which Saudis voice their concerns and articulate the changes they wish to see; and that citizen journalism (CJ) on platforms such as Twitter has grown since the economic crisis of 2014 following the collapse in oil prices, as it provides a space for breaking news and discussion which avoids the censorship that official media is subject to (Altuwarjiri, 2013). There is evidence of a growing freedom of opinion and expression within Saudi society and enhanced popular participation in the movement for economic reform. Social media (SM) networks have played a key role in this process, with SM accounts belonging to both mainstream media outlets and Saudi citizen journalists helping to facilitate massive public debate in this area (Roubean, 2014). The paper examines how Twitter has promoted the growth of a more democratic public arena of discussion as well as the credibility of that platform as seen by the most prominent voices in the debate. The empirical evidence on which the paper's findings are based comprises semistructured interviews with licensed professional Saudi journalists, Saudi citizen journalists, and public figures on Twitter who constitute the main voices in current economic debates on social media. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Spurred by the increasingly central role of audience metrics in the editorial process, an emerging role is being introduced in the newsroom: the engagement editor. This paper aims to understand what the role of the engagement editor is and to what extent does audience advocacy figure in the editorial choices. This paper draws from a set of 15 in-depth interviews with various engagement editors, social media editors and analytics specialists from different media systems around the world. Two major findings emerge: First, the definition of engagement is almost entirely centered on different types of metrics. Second, while the engagement editor takes part in the editorial process, its role is to help journalists negotiate between the information obtained by their metrics and their journalistic intuition to make editorial decisions. The paper contributes to a growing literature that concerns itself with the pervasiveness of metrics and quantification of journalistic processes, by offering a more nuanced understanding of a new journalistic role. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper raises questions of the democratic function of post-crisis journalism in covering 'compounded crises' related to extreme weather disaster. Through media analysis, it examines the ways debate over bushfire protection policy was framed and made culturally meaningful, thereby politically consequential, in the wake of the worst bushfires in modern Australian history, Black Saturday (2009). The fires, in which 173 people died, led to a Royal Commission and fierce debate over the use of prescribed burning to reduce bushfire hazard. Longitudinal analysis of local, state and national mainstream media coverage (2009-16) reveals blame games that targeted environmentalists and the government, which near-silenced meaningful discussion of the complexity of fire science, impacts of climate change on weather conditions, and calls for adaptation. By exploring the media's constitutive role in crisis response, the paper highlights the legacy and potency of ideological conflict that shapes the media-policy nexus in Australia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents an analytical approach for assessing the robustness of local journalism infrastructure and the extent of journalism divides - differences in the availability of journalistic resources across communities. This research grows from calls into the state of local journalism. The goal is to develop an analytical approach that can be largely scaled and feasibly implemented. The approach presented in this paper thus develops indicators that tap into the robustness of local journalism infrastructure at the market level, specifically utilizing the 210 Designated Market Areas (DMAs) in the United States, which enables the exploration of individual communities and their relationship to the robustness of local news media. The results point to the relationship between fundamental economic and demographic characteristics of local media markets and the robustness of the local news media infrastructure within those markets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Journalism's adaptation to television fundamentally changed the nature and shape of journalistic work. This paper addresses one of the ways in which journalism changed as a result of the introduction of television technology: the focus on the appearance of TV journalists. This is an element of the journalist's job that is unsettled within the American journalistic community and with which the community continues to grapple. The journalist's appearance became central to the journalist's job through the visual imagery of television, marking a departure from the attributes commonly associated with journalists more generally. Of all those practicing journalism in the television era, the struggle between the time-honored principles of print and radio journalism and these new elements introduced by television is experienced to the greatest degree by the TV news anchors themselves. The television news anchor embodies the effect of television technology on journalism through traits associated with his or her visual presence, qualities related to personalization, and other aspects of a particular kind of relay of news to audiences. Anchors are also important to consider, for when it comes to anchors, the journalistic community is schizophrenic; externally, it uses anchors for community promotion and reaps the positive benefits of power, adulation, and affirmation of authority that anchors afford. But internally, the community feels that anchors, and the appearance of anchors in particular, undermine many key journalistic values. This paper uses the anchor as a lens through which to examine the journalistic community's struggle brought on by the wedding of journalism and television technology, as manifested in discussion about anchors' appearances. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The right to tell the (right) story: Journalism authority and memory This paper explores the question of journalistic authority in shaping collective memory through the analysis of Israeli daily newspapers that were published on the Holocaust Memorial Day in the years 1948-2000. The paper seeks to find to whom is society entrusting the authority to tell its most important stories and contextualizes this question within the specific case study of Israeli journalism and Israeli collective memory of the Holocaust. The unique intersection between the sacred time (Holocaust Memorial Day) and the routine space (daily newspapers) creates Realms of Memory, which enable the exploration of the relative autonomy of journalism, as a field, and, at the same time, to explore its interrelations with the socio-cultural network within which it operates. The paper suggests five main sources for gaining authority to tell the Holocaust story in Israeli daily newspapers: biographic, official, academic, cultural and journalistic. The findings indicate that only a combination of several sources could bestow the status of a dominant writer. Furthermore, over the 50 years studied, there were changes in the “inner-hierarchy” between the different sources. The newspapers tended to give authority to external factors: survivors, politicians, intellectuals and others. The paper exposes the relatively weak autonomy of journalists in shaping collective memory and claims that the consecrated subject and the "holy" commemorative ritual delayed journalists from following the general trends of professionalism in Israeli journalism and from claiming sovereignty over their own field. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper analyzes changes that have taken place in the last ten years in TV Globo, Brazil’s most powerful media institution. More especially, the aim is to investigate the transformation of TV Globo’s News Division and situate this transformation in relation to the process of democratization of Brazilian politics and society. Based on three brief case studies about the political role of the newscast Jornal Nacional between 1995 and 2002 and on in-depth interviews with four of TV Globo’s main news editors, the paper stresses how the new conditions brought by the process of social democratization and by a more active civil society have been major forces leading to importance changes in TV Globo’s model of journalism. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Theorizations of journalism and democracy have often relied on Jurgen Habermas’ work on the public sphere and communicative action. This paper argues that, in contrast, the relationship between journalism and democracy would be best served by an ‘agonistic’ understanding of democracy, as employed in the work of Claude Lefort, and Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe. The paper argues that journalism is an integral communicative form of modernity that involves a necessary and indissoluble tension between emancipatory and governmental impulses. Journalism is involved in the production of democratic freedoms but the indeterminacy of democracy also renders society problematic and subject to governance and journalism is also central to such strategies. Journalism’s role in social organization and management is explained with reference to Michel Foucault’s account of governmentality. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on the development of interviewing and quoting in 20th century news press. The main argument is that those methods and techniques of collecting and representing others voices, have played an essential role in the establishment of what might be called modern journalism. The paper distinguishes four aspects of modern journalism: (1) Journalism as a relatively autonomous institution, (2) claims of objectivity, (3) formats and design, (4) establishment of internal journalistic discourses. An empirical study of two dominating Swedish newspapers is used to describe and analyse changes over time in relation to those four aspects. The material consists of all political news articles during the month of April in 1915, 1935, 1955, 1975 and 1995. The study demonstrates several fundamental changes in the role of interviewing and quoting during the period. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discussions about the professional parameters for the practice of journalism and public relations continue to hold a central place in academic discourse. This paper uses framing analysis and critical discourse analysis of the New York Times articles and PR Week commentaries to analyze case of Armstrong Williams, syndicated journalist who was paid through Ketchum Public Relations to promote government initiative No Child Left Behind. This case implicates both professions, that of journalists in their responsibility to their audiences, and that of public relations practitioners, in their obligation for transparency. In this paper, the ethical and moral considerations of both professions were critically analyzed. The goal of this paper, then, is twofold: to reconceptualize the academic discourse about journalism ethics and professionalism as well as public relations ethics and professionalism. This paper asks: How does public relations practice and journalism practice relate/differ in their respective practitionersÂ’ understanding of professionalism? Finally, this paper asks how does the Williams case address the professional social framework of journalistic and public relations practice? ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the interplay between journalism and in politics in relation to the radicalization of the Nazi anti-Semitism. Recent years' scholarship into the history of the Holocaust has not least drawn attention to the international reactions to the Jewish fate. To what extent were governments and public opinions cognizant as to what happened in Nazi ruled areas? To what extent did they act as gainers, helpers or indifferent bystanders? The paper tries to demonstrate the need for a media theoretically informed analysis in order to assess the significance of the contemporary reporting. Historians have described Sweden's position during the years of persecution and the first phase of the Holocaust as 'indifferent'. The focus is here on the coverage of the 'Reichskristallnacht', using a representative selection of dailies while letting the period of examination also span over the months before and after the November pogrom. Contrary to earlier beliefs recent research has showed that much information about the plight of the European Jewry was at hand in the allied and neutral countries. This investigation confirms that picture, the reporting was detailed and extensive. Thus the meaning of the reporting becomes crucial. By applying discourse analysis the paper argues that the leading newspapers from different political camps moulded a public disposition for indifference, were susceptible to increased anti-Semitism, and isolated the few dissident voices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although journalists are often thought to have a significant influence on public opinion, especially since the advent of the media effects studies of cultivation, agenda-setting, and information processing in the 1960s and 1970s, not much has been reported about how journalists generally think about public opinion or the polls regularly used to measure public opinion. Whereas there have been numerous studies of news media coverage of polls and public opinion, there has been almost no reported systematic research on journalists' opinions about public opinion and civic journalism. The purpose of this paper is to present some of the findings from these studies and to compare them across time and place where possible. In doing so, this paper hopes to add to our understanding of what journalists think about public opinion and civic journalism more generally and whether these views have changed much since the early 1980s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper tracks down the ways in which Israeli journalists of the 1950s and early 1960s comprehended and constructed social realities within the broader political and cultural contexts of their work. Through a multi-faceted search of primary and secondary data the paper offers an exploration of the process by which Israeli journalists of the State of Israel's early years forged their communal identity. It explores the ways in which Israeli journalists of that era thought and wrote about issues such as the importance of the journalistic profession; the sources of their own professional authority; reporting conventions; and their assessments of good and bad journalism and the proper ways to distinguish the two. By doing so, the paper portrays and analyzes the interplay between the stories Israeli journalists of that era told as professionals and the stories they told about their profession. At the same time, the paper also considers the stories that mainstream Israeli journalists of formative era agreed not to tell, as a way of illuminating their perception of what it meant to be a worthy Israeli journalist. Finally, the paper offers an exploration of how the fundamental tensions between ideological and professional affiliations were concretized via various journalistic "sites of contention." It indicates how debates over specific issues such as preferred journalistic writing styles, or the optimal relations between Israeli media and the military censor, could all be better comprehended within the larger context of this process of communal journalistic self-definition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is about causal explanations for the way journalists report the news. In its first part, the paper reviews traditional and current models or theories of journalists' news decisions, concentrating on news factors, institutional objectives, the manipulative power of public relations by news sources, and subjective beliefs of journalists. It comes to the conclusion that most of these approaches lack deeper explanations of the underlying processes leading to news judgments. Starting from these shortcomings and from the assumption that most of journalists' work is about perceptions, conclusions, and judgments it then attempts to apply psychological theories to news decision-making. The author holds that two general needs or functions involving specific psychological processes can explain news decisions: a need for social validation of perceptions and the need to preserve one's existing predispositions. Empirical data from several surveys among journalists is used to demonstrate the appropriateness of this approach to journalists' behavior. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Analyzing the rhetoric of trade publications that target journalism professionals in the United States, this paper examines the ways in which journalists and editors interpreted their experiences in producing news narratives on September 11 for their audiences. Conducting a feminist and semiotic analysis of stories that appeared in the American Journalism Review, Columbia Journalism Review, Communicator, Broadcast and Cable, and Quill, the paper argues that journalists' public memories of their work relied on masculine metaphors of military and sport, reproduced Orientalist images of Muslim men, and privileged empiricist tasks of knowledge production over complex processes of internal reflection and historical contextualization. Exploring the reasons for such a masculinist construction of the profession, the analysis will situate the profession of journalism within other discourses of masculine capability and public ignorance of the Muslim world. Finally, fleshing out the implications of the analysis for pedagogy, the paper will offer recommendations for the training of future journalists in the classroom. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is based primarily on communication science literature available and taught in the German-speaking world. Firstly, it should be noted that this contribution to the theme of the conference is not finalized but is an ongoing work in progress. By the actual conference date, theoretical deduction will have been complemented by first empirical results on the themes presented here. By then the respective borders referenced in this paper will also have been examined and positioned within the context of their theoretical basis. Editorial departments of newspapers in Switzerland, Germany and the USA will have been analyzed empirically, allowing for comparison. The link to the conference theme of "Communication in Borderlands" is established by presenting two borders. On the one hand, "personal borderlands" are identified as different wishes and requirements of newspaper management and newspaper staff within existing organizations. On the other hand, this paper assesses "disciplinary borderlands"; how these can be made accessible and usable for communication science. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper describes the transformation of contemporary Russian journalism in the natural dichotomy of common trends initiated and set to a great extent from the centre of power in Moscow on the one hand, and specifics pertaining in the regions, on the other. As common trends characterising the post-Soviet society and media we note capitalization, westernization, commercialization and corruption. The specific character was formed by the political and economic conditions pertaining in St. Petersburg as one of 89 subjects of the Russian Federation from the end of the 1990s to the beginning the 2000s. The paper is based on the empirical study on the city media conducted 1998-2001 in St. Petersburg and presented as a licentiate's thesis in spring 2002 at the University of Tampere, Department of Journalism and Mass Communication. The data consists of pilot interviews with eleven experts in 1998, in-depth interviews with thirty journalists in the editorial offices of the eight basic media in 1999 and a survey of eleven experts in 2001. Posing the question how the common trends are converting into the local context the paper describes the forming of the conditions for journalism and its emerging characteristics. On the one hand, the study reveals crucial changes after the decade of reforms, such as the intensive development of informational and advertising services in society and commercialization of media and journalist's labour. On the other hand, the study notes the forces of continuity constituting the past because the media and journalists formerly served rather the interests of the political and economic groups than the interests of public. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper seeks to explain catch phrases of questionable accuracy that were repeated verbatim in hundreds of print and broadcast reports in the months following the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Using the theory that journalism plays a mythological role in American society, the authors suggest that these phrases fueled an idealized scenario in which a victimized nation responded heroically. The paper then broadens the news-as-myth theory to encompass hegemony theory. Viewed through this lens, the authors suggest that the narratives underpinning these phrases played an important role in framing subsequent events. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a review of current Mexican research on media messages published in the major academic journals and books in communication in Mexico from 1990 to 2002. The review provides an overview of the principal research lines and theoretical approaches used in this field, and concludes with an evaluation of the strengths, deficiencies, and challenges for current and future research. Thirty-five Mexican content analysis reports are reviewed, and a general overview of the conceptual and thematic emphases dominant in the field is presented. The paper points out that the most abundant type of studies in the 13-year period reviewed were the ones about the flow and supply of television programming, in other words, studies not properly about the characteristics of the content but about the number of particular messages in Mexican TV according to their origin, genre, and time of transmission. Next are studies about international news inspired by the NWICO, and then content analysis of media coverage of presidential elections, and studies about media routines and professional values. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the relationship between public opinion and public policy in a regional Australian city and provides evidence to support an argument that special interest groups have the capacity to escape scrutiny from within the public sphere. It demonstrates why special interest groups fail to achieve their goals and why others -- which attain what I will refer to as "mezzanine status" -- succeed politically without reference to the Mayhewian notion of the redemption of rhetorical tokens. It follows the work of Habermas and Mayhew presenting evidence that professional communicators have the means of social influence at their disposal. It examines the role of the newspaper in the determination of sociopolitics and attempts to place in context theories of persuasion and influence as they occur at local government level. It analyses newspaper reporting of a proposal to invest in a high-risk low-yield scheme to develop commercial interests using taxpayer funding. The paper focuses on the central roles played by journalists and politicians -- acting as professional communicators -- in the Australian city of Orange in supporting unconditionally economic development. It attempts to argue that political influence is assisted by mass media and of greater intensity in regional areas. It examines government financial support based on Andsagar's (2001) proposition that interest groups attempt to shape public opinion using competing news frames. It provides an analysis of the political process of policy making at and the precedent to invest taxpayer funds in high-risk low-yield proposals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we introduce a novel method for analyzing entity framing in a large corpus of online news articles. This measure is proposed as a solution to the heretofore intractable problem of large-scale analysis of framing for particular entities within corpora too large to be reliably hand-coded and for which no document selection procedures have been devised. In this method, a semantic network is constructed from preprocessed text wherein nodes represent individual words/n-grams, and edge weights represent cosine distance between words or n-grams in high-dimensional vector space. A random walk with restart (RWR) is initiated across the graph from the node of interest, creating a list of words associated with the node which can then be analyzed using a variety of computational or manual coding techniques. We demonstrate that this method serves as a helpful tool for the analysis of latent frames for both media researchers and journalists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study explores the repercussions of news media in German science-policy by attending to the concept of mediatization and focusing on structural adaptations of organizations that are relevant stakeholders in the German science-policy constellation: political parties, advisory boards, funding organizations, universities, non-academic research organizations, and disciplinary associations. Results are based on 35 semi-structured in-depth interviews with decision makers within those organizations. This paper identifies similarities and differences considering the extent of mediatization and mediatization strategies, introducing the differentiation of progressive and defensive mediatization strategies. Results provide a typology of science-policy stakeholders and explain differences between the various types. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the normative role of constructive journalism - also called "solutions journalism" - by analyzing metajournalistic discourse about solutions-focused journalism. The findings show that constructive and solutions journalism are defined similarly: they profess traditional Anglo-Saxon journalistic norms and practices, even as they shift focus from problems to solutions. The metajournalistic discourse reveals a tension over the normative roles of journalism. Constructive journalism justifies its existence by the intensified need to solve vexing social issues. At the same time, proponents of constructive journalism distance themselves from advocating for social good, and claim to objectively cover solutions without endorsing them. This strategic rhetoric signals an attempt to draw a sharp line between constructive journalism and advocacy, and to situate constructive journalism within the boundaries of a traditional monitorial role of journalism. Metadiscourse about constructive journalism reveals reluctance to acknowledge and articulate its normative constructive role that seeks to help society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As a variety of social, political, economic, and technological influences reshape the media environment for news production and circulation, fundamental questions such as "what is journalism?" and "who is a journalist?" have become more pressing. At bottom, these are questions of boundaries--of determining how journalism comes to be demarcated from nonjournalism, journalists from non-journalists, and so on. These are more than symbolic contests for control; they also mark a material struggle over resources. Although boundary work matters, there has been a lack of conceptual cohesiveness in what scholars mean by the term "boundaries" or in how we should think about specific boundaries of journalism. This paper offers a state-ofthe- art analysis of boundary work and journalism. Most significantly, we refine a typology--of expansion, expulsion, and protection of autonomy--that organizes existing research on journalistic boundary work and highlights emerging opportunities for conceptual and empirical development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study is the first step of a larger project defining, identifying, mapping and evaluating local news ecosystems, with the goal of determining which are "healthy" and which need intervention, perhaps through policy or philanthropy. Here, we synthesize the ecosystem literature, categorizing the broad contours of existing research, and comparing the strengths and limitations of each type of study. A key contribution of this paper is the creation of a typology by which most, if not all, existing news ecosystem studies can be categorized: based on the guiding metaphor for how ecosystems are construed (environmentally or rhizomatically), how ecosystem boundaries are defined (whether organically or by government-drawn lines such as municipal borders), and by scope (case study versus a scalable approach). We conclude that the most thorough - and thus most difficult and rarely attempted - studies are rhizomatic, organic and scaled, and suggest methods for conducting such studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

PR in public institutions and the interrelationship between PR and journalism have been the focus of several studies; however, relatively little research has been conducted at a local level. This paper focuses on the local sphere, which is conditioned by institutions with less tradition in communication, journalists with poorer labour conditions, and public opinion with the greatest demand for information. We propose an exploratory comparative study between the most populated municipalities of two European regions, Basque Country (Spain) and Bavaria (Germany), using qualitative methods such as ethnography, focus groups and in-depth interviews. In it, we have analysed the structure and functions of PR in local governments, the profile of heads of communication departments, professional routines in the interaction between PR and journalists, and the influence of new technologies in this context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most research on the meaning of mediatization for journalism focuses on media-related measures that aim at attracting media attention. However, social actors may also opt for defensive strategies and try to avoid media attention. This tactic has implications for journalism as it might limit the access to events and the availability of sources. We argue that defensive measures follow the same rationale as progressive adaptations. Consequently, we conceptualize them as a further facet of mediatization. Moreover, we demonstrate the relevance of such measures by systemizing defensive adaptations on micro-, meso- and macro-levels of social fields. We test our systematization against data from different research projects conducted by authors of this paper. Theoretical considerations as well as empirical results suggest to differentiate between three categories of defensive adaptation: persistence, shielding, and immunization. We discuss these adaptations with regard to their meaning for mediatization theory and their implications for journalistic practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Climate change features as a poster case for public communication in a situation that has been labeled "post-normal". The term describes issues at the nexus of science and politics "where facts are uncertain, values in dispute, stakes high and decisions urgent" (Funtowicz, Ravetz 1993). What happens to journalism in such a situation? Do we observe the contours of post-normal journalism? Are they likely to foster or threaten a sustainable debate? This conceptual paper addresses these questions based on a review of the concept of post-normal science and on the current literature on changes in climate journalism. We argue that we witness the emergence of post-normal journalism that is fundamentally interpretive and is characterized by the blurring of institutional boundaries between journalism, science and advocacy. The effects for the sustainability of the debate are ambiguous. Conscious bridge-building efforts will be necessary on the part of journalists, re-focusing the debate away from contrarian voices who deny the existence of anthropogenic climate change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reporters' trust in their sources is crucial to explore not only in order to understand the ways different sources are given access to the news, but how in these times of change journalism can continue to provide trust-worthy, reliable information to the public. Though researches into trust of journalists in their sources are not scares, one debate into where trust is located - in sources or information - remains unresolved, and an epistemologically vital aspect of it, reporters' justifications for trust, remains understudied. Based on reconstructions of interactions between news reporters and 180 of their news sources, the paper presents qualitative categorization of reporters' justifications for doubting their sources, as well as preliminary quantitative codification of the type of sources more likely to be doubted and the news practices reporters employ differently when dealing with information that arrives from them. In the findings source-related justification for doubting sources, based on their interest or past behavior, and information-related justifications, based on contradicting information or Avoidance from engaging are explored. As to the discussion whether reporters doubt is based on source or information judgment, data shows that a mix of personal judgment of the sources and ad-hoc informational ones are executed in different cases. The findings also show that the most differentiating factor to predict sources' chances on being deemed un-reliable by journalist is their sector, possibly indicating, based on the qualitative data as well, that they perceive government and public sector to be true representative of public rather than personal interest - in accordance with some hegemony scholars theory, yet not in line with expected implications of western media's neo-liberalization processes. News practices differ with un-reliable sources being cross-checked more often, and non-reliable sources contacted in reporters' initiation as well as sources -possible indications for information related judgment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper offers a conceptual framework for understanding the journalistic contribution to framing from within a cultural constructionist approach. In this conceptualisation, framing devices and reasoning devices are presented as the building blocks of frames, and news values are perceived as their driving forces in the process of frame-building. It is argued that, in the practice of news production, journalistic news values lead to cultural news frames through the implementation of news pegs and story angles. The challenge for research is to identify the conditions that determine the adherence to news pegs and the predetermined features of story angles. Influencing factors are identified on three levels: institutional, organisational and individual. Based on the understanding of frame-building in journalism practice, this essay concludes by suggesting how journalists may contribute to frame diversity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This project outlines how classical philosophy and legal theory inform a 21sst centuryst understanding of privacy, particularly where that concept intersects with journalism, the mass media and digital technologies. It accepts that law and ethics are foundational to the concept, thus eschewing Immanuel Kant's view that law and ethics as entirely separate endeavors. The paper employs feminist epistemology to connect both domains to the role that technology now plays in how people and the machines that they program and control consider privacy. By triangulating the "issue" of privacy in this way, this effort proposes additional theorizing about how privacy might be articulated and how both responsibility and accountability for that conceptualization be understood at the institutional but non-state level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the increasing penetration of mobile phones and the Internet in India, citizen journalism has experienced a steady growth in the last few years. This paper contributes to the growing scholarship on citizen journalism by exploring the motivations of Indian citizen journalists to produce online news content. Through a web-based survey of citizen journalists (N=134) contributing to the leading news portals in India, this study addresses, among other things, the role of traditional media experience among citizen journalists' reporting practices. One of the findings of this study is that, unlike American citizen journalists, Indian citizen journalists who have not worked in traditional media are less likely to work collaboratively than those with a traditional media experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines why journalists in France and the United States use social media. Drawing on interviews with 60 journalists in the two countries, it argues that adoption occurs when new technologies are integrated into existing work routines. Such integration, it finds, matters more than other potential reasons for adoption (e.g., management directives, diffusion from tech-savvy journalists). Media system differences are also found to shape adoption. American media's greater exposure to commercial forces leads many journalists to view social media as tools for audience engagement, while lower levels of commercialism in France corresponds with journalists using social media primarily to seek peer recognition. These findings thus provide a cross-national perspective on the importance of journalistic routines and media systems in shaping technology adoption. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the way in which game mechanics and metrics are introduced in a journalistic context, how they are used to motivate journalists and enhance performance, and what are the reactions of journalists who interact with the system. By qualitatively assessing the case of Bleacher Report, it is argued that there is a growing trend in news websites that openly embrace data as a measurement for journalistic performance and that such a development endows data with an agentic quality that has potential implications for journalism. This study contributes to the current knowledge about use of data and gamification in journalistic contexts. These results show that game mechanics function as a visualization technique that generate an extended desire for metrics, and that those metrics are understood as measurement for own journalistic performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On August 8, 1978, a battle-like scene erupted in the streets of Philadelphia, where members of the controversial MOVE organization exchanged gunfire with police attempting to evict the group from their home. By the end of the confrontation, one police officer was dead, eighteen others were wounded, and the MOVE house was razed. Before the house was reduced to rubble, photographers and television cameramen captured three stakeout officers beating MOVE spokesman Delbert Africa. Through a critical analysis of visual imagery and news discourse, this paper examines the ways in which news organizations guided audiences to read Delbert Africa's body. Using the concept of "schematic racism," elaborated by Judith Butler, this paper argues that news organizations cast Delbert Africa as a "savage" who constituted a threat to Philadelphia Police specifically and hegemonic whiteness more broadly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the concept of user generated content UGC as it relates to current perspectives on participatory journalism. We argues that the extent to which user generated content serves participatory journalism depends on feature attributes as well as user orientation. Our conceptual analysis of UGC highlights three dimensions for assessing the participatory nature of UGC features. Two dimensions relate to the essence of the content: (1) Content creator: Who actually created the content, users or editorial staff? (2) Open-ended vs. closed ended UGC. What degree of liberty are users offered when contributing their content. The third dimension accounts for (3) feature usability--the combined factor of content placement, user technical capacity and participatory orientation. The paper discusses each of these dimensions to illuminate differences in the nature of UGC features found in online newspapers, and accordingly differences in their contribution to journalism and democracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1978, Gaye Tuchman encouraged sociologists and media scholars to consider journalism as a system of knowledge. In this paper, I take up her challenge with an eye toward online news. I begin by arguing that much of the classic sociological research in communication that examines journalistic practices, coming as it does from decades when the influence of mass media was at its height, has tended to focus on the manner in which journalists serve as gatekeepers, limiting public access to information. I assert that today, in the digital age, journalists are much more explicitly embedded in--and reliant on--an online information ecosystem in which many other systems of knowledge coexist and circulate information alongside the news media. I argue that media researchers would therefore do well to implement insights from science and technology studies, where sociologists and historians have developed tools for examining how systems of knowledge are constructed and how they interact. Borrowing from the sociology of scientific knowledge on the one hand and Tuchman's (1978) work on the other, I flesh out what it would mean to think of news and other centers of cultural production online as epistemic cultures (Knorr Cetina, 1999) centered around distinct systems of knowledge. Subsequently, I review several existing lenses within communication and science studies that examine how different systems of knowledge interact and trade with one another. And finally, I conclude by attempting to tie together the various literatures discussed throughout the paper into a theoretical lens for examining how the interaction of various systems of knowledge online might be considered in relation to news production, as well as the production practices of other epistemic cultures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses two trends in the debates about contemporary television journalism. Firstly, journalism is said to be increasingly subsumed an economic logic, privileging entertainment before serious journalistic practices. Most often this is framed as if entertainment is eating its way into serious journalism, affecting it negatively and thus being detrimental for the political public sphere and political reasoning. Secondly, it is often pointed to a changed relation between journalism and politicians, where the latter have lost some of their power, for example political debates. This paper relates these two trends and argue, against a field model inspired by Bourdieu, that it is not entertainment that is eating its way into journalism, but the other way around: Rather than having been absorbed by entertainment, journalism has differentiated, become more autonomous as a sub-field of cultural production, and has gradually come to dominate both factual and entertainment television. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]