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Journalism is known to be culturally specific in historical terms, while cross-country studies have demonstrated differences in journalistic milieus in different political regimes. This article applies a multilevel, cross-national comparative research design to explore the patterns and sources of influence that act on the professional practices of European journalists as well as the ways they differ across different media systems. The research is more broadly framed within the mediatization approach, and it aims to explore the relationship between increased media logic and journalistic practices within specific digital mediascapes. This study also identifies the ways in which journalistic practices are influenced by both the macro level of the structural framework of the media system and the mezzo level of media organization. The institutional framework defines the digital media system/mediascape in terms of four dimensions: contemporary multimedia markets, globalization processes, cultural industry, and institutional inclusiveness. The data concerning the influences on journalism are drawn from surveys conducted in 28 Western, Central, and Eastern European countries as part of the 2012–2015 Worlds of Journalism Study. A cluster analysis produced four digital media systems. Furthermore, hierarchical multiple regression confirmed the predominant influence of structural levels on the perceptions of the influences on journalism – the mezzo organizational level and macro level of the digital media system additionally explained the variance of the contextual influences on journalistic practices beyond individual differences. Variations in the different influences are shown between media system clusters. Moreover, the study introduces new questions regarding the mediatization of journalism and the mediatized condition.

Journalism hackathons are computationally based events in which participants create news product prototypes. In the ideal case, the gatherings are rooted in local community, enabling a wide set of institutional stakeholders (legacy journalists, hacker journalists, civic hackers, and the general public) to gather in conversation around key civic issues. This study explores how and to what extent journalism hackathons operate as a community-based laboratory for translating open data from practitioners to the public. Surfaced from in-depth interviews with event organizers encompassing nine countries, the findings illustrate that journalism hackathons are most successful when collaboration integrates civic organizations and community leaders.

Data-driven journalism can be considered as journalism’s response to the datafication of society. To better understand the key components and development of this still young and fast evolving genre, we investigate what the field itself defines as its ‘gold-standard’: projects that were nominated for the Data Journalism Awards from 2013 to 2016 (n = 225). Using a content analysis, we examine, among other aspects, the data sources and types, visualisations, interactive features, topics and producers. Our results demonstrate, for instance, only a few consistent developments over the years and a predominance of political pieces, of projects by newspapers and by investigative journalism organisations, of public data from official institutions as well as a glut of simple visualisations, which in sum echoes a range of general tendencies in data journalism. On the basis of our findings, we evaluate data-driven journalism’s potential for improvement with regard to journalism’s societal functions.

In the context of the ongoing financial crisis in U.S. professional journalism, philanthropic foundation-supported nonprofits are increasingly proposed as a solution to the under-provision of civic-oriented news production. Drawing on an analysis of the social composition of boards of directors and interviews with foundation officials and nonprofit journalists, this article examines both the civic contributions and limitations of foundation-supported nonprofit news organizations. Foundations are shown to place many nonprofits in a Catch-22 because of competing demands to achieve both economic “sustainability” and civic “impact,” ultimately creating pressures to reproduce dominant commercial media news practices or orient news primarily for small, elite audiences. Further, media organizations dependent on foundation project-based funding risk being captured by foundation agendas and thus less able to investigate the issues they deem most important. Reforms encouraging more long-term, no-strings-attached funding by foundations, along with development of small donor and public funding, could help nonprofits overcome their current limitations.

In many communities across the United States, substantive local news is a rare commodity. For areas long stigmatized and associated with high levels of violence, crime, and poverty, negative reporting may be the only local news available. Drawing from communication infrastructure theory and literature on local news audiences and civic journalism, this study explores how a local solutions journalism project is received by members of an underrepresented and stigmatized community. Solutions journalism stories focus on responses to social problems, usually exploring problem-solving efforts that have the potential to be scaled. This case examines how participants in six focus groups with 48 African-American and Latino South Los Angeles residents responded to solutions-oriented stories produced by a local media project. Study findings illustrate how residents navigate and critically interpret local media coverage, and how their response to ‘solutions journalism’ is largely positive but tempered by concerns regarding structural inequalities.

Changes in journalism spurred by technological shifts and industry restructuring have left observers questioning both the nature of the profession and what educators ought to do in order to prepare aspiring journalists. Despite attempts to rethink what it means to be a journalist and the educational experience needed to prepare students, few qualitative studies have emerged that track how learners are negotiating professional values. This article does precisely that by providing a case study of how students in an undergraduate Canadian university’s journalism program are conceptualizing the profession against the backdrop of changing practices and principles. Based on the data generated from 96 open-ended reflections, this investigation offers some important findings about the student professional identity experience within a 4-year program. More precisely, the results indicate that the ideals of ‘high modernism’ (especially those surrounding objectivity, the role of the public watchdog, and ethical practice) are being negotiated by journalists in training in important and meaningful ways.

The article makes a case for foregrounding ‘event’ as a key concept within journalism studies before, during, and after the digital age. The article’s first part presents an overview of the existing research on events in philosophy, sociology, historiography, and journalism studies, arguing that the concept of ‘event’ has not received sufficient attention in journalism studies. The article’s second part demonstrates the need to consider ‘event’ as an essential concept of journalism studies through an empirical case study: the news coverage of the disappeared Malaysian Airlines plane MH370 (8 March 2014) in four American news outlets, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal and CNN. This article argues that journalists employed two strategies in their coverage: (1) they created and/or covered what the article calls ‘substitute events’, defined as minor events in the present that journalists perceived as new happenings and that led to further reporting and (2) turned to the past and the future for events in their reporting, extending the scope of coverage from the relatively eventless present. Overall, the case study shows that journalists are limited in their narration by the power of events, and they are eager to construct and cover events, even when events are not readily available.

One of the main debates within journalism research during the last decade has been the role of citizens as contributors or, conversely, as threats to the practice of journalism. While participation has been explored from many different theoretical, empirical, and methodological perspectives, one perspective remains noticeably underexplored – the perspective of the citizens themselves. Using social contract theory as a backdrop, this study draws on a representative survey ( N = 2091) and focus groups ( N = 82) in Sweden. The results show that although citizens do not bring up participation as an important element of journalism, they become more skeptical the more participation affects journalism. Furthermore, they expect journalists to moderate citizen contributions according to established journalistic standards. From the perspective of social contract theory, participation in journalism appears to be more of a problem than a benefit to citizens.

As US news organizations have faced twin crises in funding and authority in recent years, innovation has become a key concept and ideal driving many interventions aimed at saving journalism. Often, ahistorically and uncritically deployed notions of innovation elide questions of digital journalism’s democratic aspirations in favor of market-oriented solutions. To critically examine the discourse around innovation, this article interrogates documents produced by think tanks and non-profit institutes researching the future of journalism: the Knight Foundation, the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University, Harvard’s Nieman Foundation, and the Shorenstein Center at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, among others. A post-industrial vision for journalism emerges with an overriding and celebratory focus on innovation. We argue that this discourse marginalizes normative concerns about journalism’s democratic purpose and rests on an entrepreneurial logic that seeks to dictate digital journalism’s broader public virtues.

Based on a national survey and a qualitative content analysis of US daily news editors’ understanding of citizen journalism, we identify key ideas associated with the concept of Citizen Journalism Complexity. Patterns related to those dimensions that may impact editors’ conceptions of the phenomenon at the individual and organizational levels are examined. A total of 10 core ideas emerged in the aggregate discussion, but a majority of the participants defined the concept simplistically focusing on one- or two-dimensional definitions. Arguments from journalistic professionalism (occupational roles), audience engagement/collaboration (normative values), and behavioral practices are represented. This article discusses the extent to which citizen journalism is defined and guided by demographic variables, individual journalistic experience, and organizational characteristics.

A survey ( N = 1318) evaluated US newspaper journalists’ attitudes toward c ontextual reporting – stories that go beyond the immediacy of the news and contribute to societal well-being. Results indicated that journalists highly value professional roles associated with contextual reporting. Responses revealed new journalistic role functions, including the ‘Contextualist’, who placed high value on being socially responsible and accurately portraying the world. Analyses showed that younger journalists and female journalists highly valued three genres of contextual reporting: constructive journalism, solutions journalism, and restorative narrative. Additionally, a journalist’s belief in activist values such as setting the political agenda and pointing to possible solutions predicted more favorable views of all three forms of contextual journalism, while belief in an adversarial attitude predicted less favorable views of restorative narrative.

This mixed-methods study using a national, random sample of journalism students explores their motivations for majoring in journalism and conceptions of the roles of journalists. It showed many similarities among students today and yesterday and some differences between students and professionals. Students’ ranking of the importance of roles compared to professionals showed no significant correlation. They still recognize the same four main roles of journalists, but rank them in a different order and define them differently. These future journalists see ‘soft news’ as being on equal footing, if not more important, than traditional ‘hard news’. They consider it fair game for journalists to join the conversation about important issues of the day. They see citizen journalists as not only taking over more of the adversarial duties of journalists but also increasing the amount of information and opinion that people have access to, making the interpretive role of journalists more necessary as someone needs to sift through all this information and let people know what is valid. Suggestions for educators are discussed.

This study of American investigative reporting from 1976 to 2012 examines a random sample (N = 757) of prize contest entry materials created by journalists. This novel data source and methodology allow for analysis of the dynamics of journalistic process rather than relying on assumptions drawn from published news content. The results provide a fuller and more sophisticated explanation of how investigative journalism is related to democratic governance, including fresh insight into journalist/source relationships, story triggers, policy outcomes, and agenda-building relationships among journalists, sources, and policymakers. A model for predicting policy agenda-building in investigative journalism is proposed and tested based on attributes of the reporting process, policy results, and other actions by public officials produced by journalists’ investigations. While the analysis indicates a key role for sources in the origination of investigative news stories, it also reveals a more prominent place for journalistic enterprise than previously acknowledged. At the same time, investigative stories that are initiated by tips from sources and that have a more diverse array of sources are more likely to achieve substantive policy results. Overall, the findings point to a greater degree of interdependence among investigative reporters and policymakers that challenges conceptions of journalists as passive recipients of information but also reveals the limitations of news organizations’ ability to independently spark policy change.

How do future-of-news experts construct accounts of the future of journalism and on what do they base these accounts? What do their methods imply about manifest and latent reasons for constructing these accounts in the first place? This exploratory study adapts a model from the sociology of work, which provides a typology of strategies that guide decision-making in ‘future work’ – that is, work that involves collective and systematic efforts to predict and legitimize predictive claims. We first examine economic literature on uncertainty and risk, which explains the extreme difficulty of making predictions in an environment of high uncertainty. We then situate journalism ‘future work’ within the literature on the social construction of the future, and using Fine’s model, outline strategies pursued in this construction. We conduct an exploratory qualitative content analysis of published predictions written by ‘future of news’ experts, examining the strategies they use to legitimize their predictive claims. Findings show mixed support for Fine’s model and some support for rival strategies for supporting claims about the future, for example, a path-dependence strategy of extending the known present into the future.

Social media, comment threads, and other means of online communication are important to journalists’ work processes, but expand their workload and pose challenges to their professional identity. The concept of ‘engagement’ is used by news workers in New Zealand to describe the role of digitally mediated communication in their work. Engagement deserves scholarly treatment akin to concepts such as ‘participatory journalism’ because it is employed by journalists to place professional and practical limits on online interaction. Their decisions about engagement are based on professional commitments, past experiences, and the allocation of time and resources. Journalists in newsrooms that are already understaffed and under-resourced are expected to take on new tasks; like other digital laborers, journalists experience the interpenetration of work and leisure and the incorporation of affective and unpaid work. News workers have an opportunity to develop best practices for engagement and determine how and when they should engage online.

Western media studies have largely presented the relationship between new and traditional media as adversarial, often claiming that the Internet challenges the survival of traditional journalism. Focusing on China, this article re-evaluates this relationship in a non-Western context. Relying on extensive interviews with Chinese journalists, we argue that the relationship between China’s print and Internet media is symbiotic. Although it does challenge traditional business models, the Internet also helps journalists improve their commercial competitiveness and presents new channels for resisting censorship and expanding the boundaries of permissible reporting.

Cross-national comparative studies of journalists generally focus on the demographic characteristics and/or the values and role-perception of journalists. Systematic studies of journalistic skills have been rare, however. This article reports the findings from a comparative study of journalists from Britain, Estonia, Germany, Italy, Poland, and Sweden. Based on an email survey of 2238 news professionals, journalistic skills can be grouped into three distinctive dimensions: reporting, editing, and networking skills. The data also show a number of similarities, but also important differences regarding the importance journalists give to different professional skills in different European countries.

Scholars, editors, and reporters have tended to treat news and journalism as synonymous. This conception has privileged a particular kind of journalism often called the Anglo-American model. This study argues journalism has been a type of news reporting for a relatively brief period. Using the concept of epigenetics, the authors argue that journalism is usefully seen as a coating on the DNA of news, which has existed for centuries. Journalism emerged as a result of special factors. As powerful as the Anglo-American model was, it was never fully realized, nor could it become the regnant model throughout the world. Journalism will carry on, but along with many other types of news, all of which carry coatings from the past.

The longstanding tension between journalists and academics is explored by analysing data from qualitative interviews with 25 journalists and scientists using an analytical framework derived from Bourdieu’s field theory. The article empirically shows how journalism and science are both constructed around the opposition between knowledge (content) and communication (form). Based on the analysis of narratives in the communication processes between the two fields, the article shows that scientists and journalists take different positions according to the existing ideals within their respective fields, revealing different science-communication habitus. The article presents a typology of proximity and distance, in which communication between the fields becomes easier or more difficult as both fields try to protect their historic professional identities.

As devices become a more visible and integral part of media practice, it is important for researchers and scholars to attend to the ways in which philosophies, professional discourses, and technical limits structure the ways these technologies are deployed. The 35mm camera is a technological waypoint between earlier large-format cameras and contemporary digital photography and offers a useful historical example for interrogating the relationship between seemingly inert technical operations and journalism’s modes of meaning production. To that end, this article offers a theoretical perspective for interrogating the 35mm camera through the lens of Latour, with the aim of developing a schema for integrating devices into the cultural study of media and communication.

The news increasingly provides help, advice, guidance, and information about the management of self and everyday life, in addition to its traditional role in political communication. Yet, such forms of journalism are still regularly denigrated in scholarly discussions, as they often deviate from normative ideals. This is particularly true in lifestyle journalism, where few studies have examined the impact of commercial influences. Through in-depth interviews with 89 Australian and German lifestyle journalists, this article explores the ways in which journalists experience how the lifestyle industries try to shape their daily work, and how these journalists deal with these influences. We find that lifestyle journalists are in a constant struggle over the control of editorial content, and their responses to increasing commercial pressures vary between resistance and resignation. This has implications for our understanding of journalism as a whole in that it broadens it beyond traditional conceptualizations associated with political journalism.

Sports journalism is an important part of contemporary media, but it is a sector that has not received the detailed analysis of other areas of the industry. Utilising Bourdieu’s field theory, this study locates sports journalism in the journalistic field before mapping the sports journalism field in the context of broadsheet/quality news organisations. It achieves this by examining the sports departments of six media outlets in Australia, India and the United Kingdom. In-depth interviews with 36 sports journalists and a content analysis of 4541 web and print articles are employed to focus on issues such as content, publishing applications and approaches, workloads, and commercial factors. This allows an investigation of sports journalism at national, organisational and individual levels. The results show economic capital is a dominant factor in sports journalism.

This article reviews the public and citizen journalism movements of recent years and offers some perspectives on how the current and future journalism can function to benefit democratic public life. A major argument of this article is that ‘conversation’ defines news as a process of negotiated social meaning and that it should be the organizing principle of today’s journalism. It is also argued that traditional journalistic principles such as objectivity and distance may no longer be useful to today’s citizen journalism and that we see a rise of new journalistic principles such as interactivity and transparency. Finally, borrowing from deliberative democracy literature, a bottom-up flow model to connect citizen and public journalism is discussed.

Drawing from 420 surveys addressed to news media practitioners, 30 in-depth interviews with media executives and 6 focus groups, this article focuses on the institutional dimensions of ethics in journalism and explores the way in which ethical standards are perceived by journalists and other representative groups involved in Spanish news media. The data show that participants ascribe moral obligations to journalistic institutions. Interviewees emphasise the predominance of market-driven interests over ethical values as one of the main threats to journalism. However, differences between the perceptions of journalists and media executives reveal that the latter believe that journalistic ethics pertain to individual journalists.

Drawing on theoretical insights from science and technology studies, this historical analysis addresses how late 19th century American science journalism helped translate the X-ray, as a new media technology, from the physics laboratory into the public sphere. Described as a form of light, the X-ray was given the moral and physical agency to see into concealed spaces and reveal and cure the ailments within, whether of the body or the body politic. As part of a general epistemological framework distinct from photographic realism, these assumptions about the possibilities of knowing can also be seen across public culture at the turn of the 20th century from politics, to journalism, to philosophy, to popular culture. Ultimately, this study highlights how newspaper coverage helped construct the X-ray as a heterogeneous public object while contributing to a larger set of understandings about what can be known and done in public life.

Journalism education has tended to respond slowly to developments in digital journalism, such as data journalism, despite or because of close links with the industry. This article examines the obstacles to innovation in journalism education with particular reference to data journalism, drawing on the literature, a review of stakeholders and course documents, and the author’s reflections on developing a data journalism module as part of a new MA programme. It highlights the complexities linked to the particular demands of data journalism, and identifies critical issues around student satisfaction; reputation and job/career outcomes; relevance, currency and appeal; programme management; and coherence. Rather than holding it back, more specialized socialization could assist journalism education to innovate effectively, the author suggests.

As governments throughout the world transition to storing and releasing vast amounts of numerical information digitally, journalists are increasingly using digital data reporting as an investigative tool to report on issues in the public interest and to hold government – elected officials and bureaucracy – to account. Through a series of qualitative interviews with 26 data journalists in 17 countries, this article examines the impact that digital data reporting is having on the traditional role of journalism as a fourth estate. Findings suggest the emergence of digital data reporting as a key tool in accountability journalism. Data journalism is seen as a new method of investigating and telling stories in ways that can inform and engage the public on a larger scale. However, the failure of popular ‘tabloid’ journalism to engage with data journalism means that a new technologically adept and data-informed elite class might be on the rise, with important implications for democratic processes in advanced societies.

Since The New York Times published Snow Fall in 2012, media organizations have produced a growing body of similar work characterized by the purposeful integration of multimedia into long-form journalism. In this article, we argue that just as the literary journalists of the 1960s attempted to write the nonfiction equivalent of the great American novel, journalists of the 2010s are using digital tools to animate literary journalism techniques. To evaluate whether this emerging genre represents a new era of literary journalism and to what extent it incorporates new techniques of journalistic storytelling, we analyze 50 long-form multimedia journalism packages published online from August 2012 to December 2013. We argue that this new wave of literary journalism is characterized by executing literary techniques through multiple media and represents a gateway to linear storytelling in the hypertextual environment of the Web.

Media ethics generally recommends that journalists should avoid accepting any form of gratification in order to maintain their objectivity and professional integrity. This study investigated the application of this ethical injunction in Kuwait. It surveyed and interviewed Kuwaiti journalists on their attitude toward gratification. Results indicate a breach of this ethical recommendation. Reasons for this include lack of media ethics education and training among journalists and the absence of ethical guidance by media owners. In addition, for a number of Kuwaiti reporters, journalism is a part-time job.

This article, applying the philosophy of Martin Buber, argues in support of personal journalism, because it is a form of journalism that provides for a productive and empowering dialogue with the public, as opposed to impersonal journalism’s monologic voice as that of the observer-knower expert that views sources as objects to be observed, mapped, and categorized. It builds on Matheson’s embrace of Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics to explain and analyze James Agee’s personal journalistic approach in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. This analysis shows that Agee defends the use of personal reporting with epistemological and ethical arguments and contributes the notion of reflexivity as a necessary condition for personal journalism. Agee adopted a personal approach consciously and reflexively as more ethically and epistemologically sound than impersonal, objective journalism and in doing so developed a strong argument for personal journalism being an imperative for American journalists.

In light of the problems traditional news organizations are facing in many countries, it has been suggested that journalism’s relevance as the sole provider of news in an increasingly networked society is decreasing and that the Internet has given rise to new kinds of amateur, citizen, and participatory forms of content production, changing the nature of traditional journalism and threatening its institutions. The study presented here suggests otherwise. Taking a look at the German local news market and presenting a survey of the alternative news websites that have entered this market in recent years, it suggests that it is not so much journalism’s standards and practices – its institutional characteristics – that are changing, but its organizational framework.

Using Twitter, journalists may pass along comment from other users without, at least ostensibly, taking accountability for that message. Minimizing responsibility and editorial oversight, as is the case with retweets, allows a different view of individual journalists as gatekeepers. Through a qualitative textual analysis, this study finds that journalists are challenging norms of objectivity and independence on Twitter. Journalists frequently pass along subtle interpretation and analysis rather than strong opinions. Many retweets are humorous, sometimes even at journalism’s expense. Journalists also retweet many messages about themselves, working to build a personal brand and relationships with their audience. Implications for journalists, their industry, and the audience are discussed.

This article provides an overview of what an “object-oriented” approach to journalism studies might look like, based on a survey of articles collected for this special issue on journalism and materiality. We argue that focusing on the objects of journalism, rather than limiting or trivial, can provide scholars with insights into the social, material, and cultural context that suffuses our technologically obsessed world. The article pushes back against a dominant perspective in the Actor-Network Theory literature that sees the major value of that theory in studying technological innovation, calling instead for a theoretical approach open to questions of historical change, power, and symbolic practices.

While global financial journalism has grown substantially in recent decades, little is known about journalists’ perceptions of the key players in this news ecosystem. This study draws from research into social group hierarchies and prestige media to explore this question within the United States, the largest market for financial journalists. A national survey of financial journalists ( n = 349) shows that The Wall Street Journal and Andrew Ross Sorkin of The New York Times are perceived as the most influential financial media outlet and journalist, respectively. However, financial journalists are not a monolithic entity in terms of their perceptions of the leaders in the field. Some differences exist among the respondents as a function of their demographic and work-related characteristics. The theoretical and practical implications are discussed.

Scholarship in literary journalism often focuses on matters of technique and style, and on the ethical challenges of immersion reporting. In some contexts, however, literary journalism may also take on a sense of moral purpose, as when reporters assert the importance of their interpretations, or readers attribute special meaning to a particular style of writing. The New Journalism of the 1960s and 1970s offers a revealing example of how magazine and book publishing markets and writer–editor relations inevitably shape journalists’ interpretations and lend them a sense of social significance. The New Journalism did not stand alone and apart from the larger profession, but took root within a network of writers, editors, and publishers, and grew out of a wider, ongoing debate over the nature of journalists’ interpretive responsibilities.

This study explores the boundary work of the Korean independent newsroom Newstapa. Newstapa creates its own logic of journalism, which is a combination of the core of professional journalism and of participatory journalism. Newstapa journalists, who previously worked in mainstream media, open the boundaries of professional work by embracing the nascent norms and practices of participatory culture. The use of digital media helps provide greater transparency to citizens. Newstapa defines truth-telling as a conversational process through which journalists work with citizens. Although this process causes journalists to relinquish their professional autonomy to citizens, it leads to a reconstruction of the professional exclusivity of being more accountable journalists who serve only citizens through truth-telling and are free from any other external forces. Newstapa’s logic also helps create a normative border separating Newstapa from other journalists. By adapting this logic, Newstapa challenges the social authority of mainstream media.

This article applies a discourse analytical approach to the reporting of speech and thought in order to explore the parameters of core ethical quandaries in literary journalism, focusing in particular on the reconstruction or re-imagining of dialogue and thought. It thus focuses on the journalists’ duties, firstly, towards their sources (specifically, to both the propositional content and the verbatim words of their subjects’ truth claims), and, secondly, their perceived obligations towards their readers (regarding narrative accessibility, drama, resolution and lucidity). It then proceeds to discuss recent book-length examples of literary journalism from Spain and France. The article’s central claim is that an alternative approach to such issues is identifiable in Spanish journalist Javier Cercas’s work, in particular in his widely acclaimed re-exploration (2009) of the attempted coup d’etat in Madrid in 1981. Cercas’s text, like many notable examples of literary journalism, is informed by a comprehensive set of interviews and by exhaustive archival research. Cercas goes further, however, in the thoroughness and rigour of the attribution of his reconstructions of speech and thought. The book incorporates, moreover, many explicit or implicit markers of a reported idea’s dubitative or tentative status, a concern which continually shapes the text’s overall representational choices, and which can be seen as a timely response to calls for writers working within a literary journalism tradition to develop a form of implicit ethical contract with their readers.

The article starts with observations about an increasing marginalization of professional journalism in public communication. This development is mainly driven by two factors, decreasing interest in the public sphere and increasing selective exposure. Based on these observations, the author develops a definition of the core societal functions of journalism, that is, validation and shared reality. Assigning to professional journalism the role of the ‘new knowledge profession’ he looks for areas of competence that would need to be taught in academic programs to furnish the profession with the necessary skills and make journalism a ‘de facto profession’. Finally, he discusses constraints on such a strategy in educational philosophies, the trade, and the changing demand of professional news.

Debate about the ideal content or purpose of journalism is as old as print itself. The messy characteristics of popular culture have always intruded into the high principles and purposes of the communication of politics and journalism’s intentions to provide information of importance for the public. In the intensity of the contemporary media era it is necessary to reconsider the interplay between celebrity news and journalism: beyond oxymoron and towards the appreciation of a paradox. This contribution seeks to explore some of the forms and functions of celebrity news in contemporary British culture and speculates on the increasing relevance of celebrity to the future of journalism.

This article investigates a rapidly expanding branch of journalism innovation in online news media. The umbrella term computational exploration in journalism (CEJ), embraces the multifaceted development of algorithms, data, and social science methods in reporting and storytelling. CEJ typically involves the journalistic co-creation of quantitative news projects that transcend geographical, disciplinary, and linguistic boundaries. Drawing on extensive empirical data, this article provides a conceptual overview of the field by identifying three main pathways of computational exploration in journalism: the newsroom approach, the academic approach, and the entrepreneurial approach. Implications for changing journalistic practice are discussed, and the theorizing is summed up in a triplex proposition about changing mindset processes coming out of CEJ. The study indicates that the computational exploration not only leads to innovative uses of the technology, but also to innovative ways for journalists to think and behave; journalism innovation leads to innovation journalism.

As the size and scope of the commercial media shrink, some veteran journalists are picking up the mantle of socially responsible journalism by establishing nonprofit news websites. Numerous reports have noted the potential of these outlets to fill gaps in public affairs reporting and serve vital information needs in American democracy. The economic sustainability of these startups is tenuous, however. While some scholars have called for more government intervention to ensure community journalism survives, the Internal Revenue Service has questioned the nonprofit eligibility of news outlets. The purpose of this study is to determine how leaders of these civic journalism startups view the government’s role in ensuring their survival. Findings show the online news managers view their nonprofit status favorably. Most are not open to direct government subsidies, but have not ruled out assistance in the form of advertising, contracts for services, and payments in kind.

The task of journalism education has been defined in relation to both the professional needs of the journalism industry and the need to educate well-informed citizens. A key part of journalism education involves introducing students to what Deuze (2005) terms the professional ideology of journalism, which includes commitments to public service, commitments to impartiality or objectivity, and a belief in the ideal of journalistic autonomy. Deuze has argued that this professional ideology has shifted in response to multiculturalism and new media. This article therefore sets out to explore the implications of these changes for journalism education and for the formation of the worldview of student journalists. The article considers a case study of a project involving critical service learning in an introductory class for journalism students. The article proposes that media activism, public journalism, and critical service learning may be drawn upon in journalism education as resources in the formation of an emergent journalistic worldview. Exploring student responses to this project through a framework of Youth Participatory Action Research, the article argues that such efforts can help journalism educators to achieve the pedagogical goal of enabling students to critique existing arrangements of power and develop a globally sensitive perspective while producing news stories across media platforms that reflect a deep appreciation for learning about and understanding the diverse communities they serve.

Media coverage of the 2011 UN Climate Summit in Durban makes evident the blurring of the lines that once separated participants, reporters, activists, and networked publics. While journalists look to media activists for sources, breaking news, and reporting tactics that tap into the new potential of the mobile and networked environment, contemporary media activists devised new ways to do some of the work traditionally ascribed to journalism. This article, based on semi-structured interviews and discourse analysis of coverage from three NGOs, the New York Times and USA Today, documents various notions of public good manifest in activist media and newspaper coverage. In the broadest sense, the study addresses the questions: Where do legacy and activist news media differ and where do they overlap, both in terms of content and professional norms? And what are the implications of the emergence of new activist media for the field of journalism?

The rise of citizen journalism and widespread use of multimedia technology via Web 2.0 is a growing field of research. Yet the impact on local newspapers in the UK has received limited attention from scholars. At the time of this study, Northcliffe Media’s flagship newspaper the Leicester Mercury was piloting a project with community reporter network Citizens’ Eye to incorporate reader content into the newspaper and its website. This article explores the nature of this experimental relationship and the economic motivations behind it. It identifies that citizen journalists have a variety of fluid roles which flow between source, resource and collaborator. However, the key to the success of the project is the creation of distinctive boundaries between low level reporting carried out by community reporters and investigative journalism carried out by employed, trained staff. The research was conducted via a case study incorporating interviews and observation.

Many journalists and other observers remember the 1960s as a watershed moment in American journalism. Do they remember correctly? This essay reviews relevant empirical studies on how US newspapers have changed since the 1950s. There is strong existing evidence that journalists have come to present themselves as more aggressive, that news stories have grown longer, and that journalists are less willing to have politicians and other government officials frame stories and more likely to advance analysis and context on their own. Based on content analysis of the New York Times, Washington Post, and Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, this study finds that the growth in ‘contextual reporting’ has been enormous – from under 10 percent in all three newspapers in 1955 to about 40 percent in 2003; ‘conventional’ news stories on the front page declined from 80–90 percent in all three papers to about 50 percent in all three papers in the same period. What this study calls ‘contextual reporting’ has not been widely recognized (unlike, say, investigative reporting) as a distinctive news genre or news style and this article urges that it receive more attention.

This article presents and discusses the results of an experiment, which gathered audience responses to television news coded as war journalism and peace journalism respectively, in two countries, Australia and the Philippines. From the peace journalism model, evaluative criteria were first derived as a set of headings for content analysis of existing television news as broadcast in each country. The test material was then coded to fall within the upper and lower peace journalism quintiles of the ‘idiom and range’ of local television journalism in each case. Distinctions under the headings were particularized for individual stories by critical discourse analysis, to disclose potential sources of influence transmitted into audience frames. Data about emotional responses, gathered from self-reporting questionnaires, were combined with a textual artefact, with participants completing a ‘thought-listing protocol’ as they watched. Focus groups also viewed the material and provided more in-depth narrative responses. Watching peace journalism left people less angry and fearful, and more hopeful and empathic. Peace journalism viewers were also less inclined to apportion ‘blame’ to one ‘side’, and more likely to think about cooperative solutions to the problems presented.

Journalism, understood as the discipline of news, has been defined in many ways. The hegemonic western model of journalism, which has dominated normative discussions for the past century, derives from a set of relationships and practices formed around relatively monopolistic daily newspapers and wire services at the end of the 19th century. This model assumes that news organizations are relatively autonomous from the state and that individual journalists are independent agents engaged in an agonistic relationship to power while representing the people by, among other things, giving expert accounts of affairs of public importance. It assumes that journalists’ capacity for independence is provided by the media organizations that employ them. This model of journalism never described more than a sector of the news environment, especially outside the West. At the end of the 20th century, its usefulness in the West diminished with the erosion of the bottlenecks that had enabled some news organizations to acquire significant autonomous power, and with the rise of a new news environment with new news practices. These changes have opened the possibility of the redefinition of journalism, along with a rethinking of the relationship between journalism and democracy.

In posing the question ‘How much democracy does journalism need?’, much depends on the definition of journalism. This article suggests that journalism should be viewed not in terms of media systems but instead using journalism practice as the main frame of reference, as this allows for an appreciation of journalism beyond the confines of western democratic countries. The analysis of historical and current examples shows that journalism offering accurate and verified information resting on independent news judgement also happens in places that are deemed semi- or non-democratic. This article argues that it is not the political form of democracy that is essential to journalism but the freedom of expression and relative journalistic autonomy afforded to media workers. Democracies, as compellingly shown in recent years, may offer the legal framework for freedom of speech but they do not offer protection for journalistic services which have to be largely financed privately. The dependency on media owners is no less in many democratic nations than it is in non-democratic countries. Most importantly, journalism needs supporters who see value in independent information provision and credible news judgement.

This article relies on interviews with business journalists at The New York Times, Marketplace public radio, and TheStreet to understand how journalists retrospectively considered their responsibilities following the 2007–2009 financial crisis. Watchdog journalism is looked at through a variety of scholarly perspectives to understand the disconnect between theory and practice as journalists across all these outlets distance themselves from the events leading up to the crisis. This article provides the first account of how business journalists in the USA responded to the crisis, and the data suggest two important concerns: the first, a serious lack of media accountability; the second, the need for clearer normative expectations for watchdog journalism.

Many professional journalists and journalism scholars consider the increasing attention paid to audiences as one of the causes of the gradual loss of journalistic quality. They reason if ratings, circulation figures, hits and shares determine the content of journalism, the core values of journalism become jeopardized. This article argues how and why studies of journalistic quality should take the actual readers, listeners and viewers of journalistic texts seriously. It reports on a different kind of research for measuring the public's news interests and preferences; one that concentrates on value - what makes journalism precious for people and how news organizations can provide this. By zooming in on the professionals' and public's experience of quality information instead of their views on the topic, the article shows how pleasing the audience might be compatible with producing excellent journalism. © The Author(s) 2012.