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The COVID-19 pandemic brought along with it concerns about anxiety, racial bias, and pushback against public health recommendations, all of which are intensified by the news and social media. This study investigated the effects of constructive journalism in the context of this crisis, by randomly assigning 492 subjects to view simulated social media news updates with different headlines and images. The results showed positive and constructive headlines led to less anger and anxiety than negative headlines. The sanitization of graphic images decreased anger, anxiety, COVID-19 risk perceptions, and anti-Chinese sentiment���a relationship that was mediated by anger and anxiety. These findings suggest constructive journalism can be useful in times of crisis, and that its visual aspect warrants more scholarly attention. Further, these results shed new light on the effects of news exposure via social media in times of crisis, and how this impact depends on specific attributes of the headlines and images of the content being shared. The findings are discussed in relation to the theory of affective intelligence and recent concerns about how news and social media influence the public in times of crisis.

This article compares how the Swedish public and journalists assessed the ethical aspects of harmful exposure and dissemination of unverified information in news reporting of the 2017 terrorist att...

Since the media industry, due to a constantly developing media landscape, demands rapid and regular innovation of empirical methods, methodological innovation become a more compelling problem in industry compared to academic journalism research. This paper exemplifies methodological innovation in industry journalism research by means of a case study: NeuroJour, an industry pilot research project focusing on brain processing of digital journalism. The NeuroJour project involved testing four different psychophysiological methods: Primarily EEG, and eye tracking supplemented by EDA and facial coding–all of which are viewed as promising, innovative approaches to studying the complex and dynamic ways in which audience effects occur. Based on NeuroJour, this paper offers insight into the opportunities and pitfalls of applying psychophysiological measures in industry research on digital journalism, but also into how methodological innovation in industry and academic journalism research can cross-fertilize.

Utilizing the theory for disruptive innovation, this study endeavors to better understand how working self-identified digital journalists conceptualize innovation and perceive the impact of technol...

The term “innovation” carries a large burden in journalism. It has been weighted with both the promise and expectation that new technologies, actors and practices might finally be the solution to t...

This paper sheds new light on collaborative journalism and investigates how this innovative newsroom practice affects the news production process and product. More particularly, we focus on a collaborative project on air pollution involving a newspaper, university, and environmental government agency and examine how journalists and professionals within the fields of science and policy-making interact within this collaboration. We draw on linguistic ethnographic fieldwork behind the scenes of the collaborative project as well as a comparative multimodal discourse analysis of news items produced within the collaboration and similar news items produced a year earlier outside the collaboration. In our study, we analyse how the act of collaborating blurs boundaries between the traditional professional identities for the three categories of actors involved and urges them to reflect on their own and each other's discursive practices. Our study demonstrates the added value of a linguistically sensitive analysis of both the discursive processes behind the scenes of the news production process as well as the news product itself, in revealing how innovative newsroom practices like collaboration between journalists and expert sources shape the (language of) news.

The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted an important paradox: it has reminded us of the importance of the news media and the central place it occupies in the public space in times of crisis. At the s...

At a moment when many U.S. news organizations are reckoning with their relationships with communities of color and attempting to build relationships of trust, this engaged research project uses a c...

Existing research on media and the COVID-19 pandemic is largely based on quantitative data, focused on digital media, limited to single-country studies, and often West-centred. As such, it has limited capacity to provide a holistic account of the causes and consequences of audience engagement with COVID-19 news, or to consider the impact of systemic political and media factors. To compensate for that, we examine a large set of qualitative interviews and media diaries collected in four eastern European countries during the first wave of the pandemic. We show that changes in news consumption – including the resurgence of television and decline of print consumption – were not driven solely by audience demand for up-to-date information, but also by practical constrains of home-bound life in lockdown, and the introduction of live briefings. Our findings underscore disruption and uncertainty as key elements of audience experiences and highlight the markedly privatized and depoliticized nature of public debate in the early phase of the pandemic. We argue that the pandemic was an unpredictable, open-ended, and exhausting media event with high potential for divisiveness and polarization, especially in contexts marked by low levels of media freedom, declining democratic standards, and elite-led politicization of the crisis.

This survey-based case study explored members’ motives for using a closed Facebook group specifically for women journalists. Particularly, we explored a motivation based on the feminist ethics of c...

This study examines how the moderation of reader comments influences journalism practice. Through in-depth interviews with journalists working at both organizations that perform in-house comment mo...

Journalists, across the world, are ever more at risk of surveillance from state and non-state antagonists. However, to work safely in a monitored environment is a substantial challenge for journali...

Expert voices in media coverage facilitate a well-functioning democracy by informing public debates about policy issues. Experts can fill knowledge gaps in reporting, fact-check statements, refute ...

Reporting on public opinion is an important task of journalists in democracies. There are several ways in which journalists can portray public opinion: (1) opinion polls (2) inferences to public opinion (3) vox pops (4) covering protest and (5) social media references. These public opinion displays vary in how explicitly they refer to public opinion, how representative they are of the larger population and how active the role of citizens is. Based on an extensive content analysis of all public opinion displays in Flemish print and television news, this paper analyzes when and how public opinion is represented in the news and under which circumstances which representations are more likely to be used. Our results show that in routine news, journalists most often turn to general inferences to public opinion in print news and vox pops in television news. Elections strongly influence how public opinion is portrayed in the news, with a large increase in the reporting of polls. However, more implicit public opinion displays based on journalists’ own interpretation of news events still comprise a significant part of public opinion coverage.

The aggregation of people and information on the Internet has caused individual journalists to forge self-employed and self-branded social entrepreneur careers, an endeavour that combines commercia...

This study analysed media agenda-building and intermedia agenda-setting in the context of IPOs, a news setting that is considered highly routinised and standardised, to shed light on both the direc...

Journalism scholars have acknowledged the importance of innovation in journalism. A common finding is that journalism has difficulty adapting to change and uses multiple coping mechanisms, includin...

Contains fulltext : 219428.pdf (Publisher’s version ) (Open Access) Thorough understanding of how "outside the box" ideas in the newsroom can be triggered and fostered is fundamental to grasp innovation in journalism, but is still largely uncharted territory. Comprehension of its key elements would enable news organisations to reinvent themselves and improve chances for survival. In this article we develop an instrument to investigate if and how newsroom workers and management perceive an Innovative Learning Culture (ILC). This survey enables us to locate which aspects of ILC are bottlenecks or foster creativity and innovation processes. First we focus on how the different aspects of ILC are perceived: which aspects are experienced to foster or hinder an overall ILC. In a second step we analyse how respondent characteristics influence perceptions of these processes. In combining these two steps, the survey can be used as a key to "unlock" the newsroom with respect to its creative and innovative potential. We validated the survey in the newsrooms of two Dutch national quality newspapers, each with a different history, culture, audience and size. Findings show that they have similar perceptions of which ILC-aspects typically foster or hinder ILC in their newsrooms. We discuss the outcomes and provide suggestions for future research. 19 p.

Newsroom collaborations are growing increasingly common as news organizations struggle in tough economic times. This project explores one newsroom collaboration in Philadelphia, notable for its siz...

Online journalists are often believed, not least in the industry itself, to follow different professional standards from their print and broadcast colleagues. There is, however, little empirical evidence to support or to refute this perception. This paper intends to help fill that gap by investigating whether offline and online journalists differ in their professional principles and practices. Drawing on previous conceptual research by Deuze, we operationalize the concept of journalism as an ideology comprising four ideal professional values: public service, objectivity, autonomy, and ethics. Using survey data from the Worlds of Journalism Study we compare professional principles and practices among online, offline, and multiplatform journalists in nine Western and Eastern European countries (N = 6,089). We find, contrary to previous research, that principles and practices among online and offline journalists broadly conform. However, we also find that online journalists are more likely than their offline colleagues to find justification for publishing unverified information and less interested in holding politicians to account, despite reporting that they have more freedom to select and frame news stories. We also find important differences between our samples of Western and Eastern European journalists.

News avoidance is considered an increasing problem for the news industry and democracy at large. As news companies lose consumers, democracy loses the informed foundation for an engaged citizenry. Meanwhile, research on news avoidance is hampered by the lack of a common understanding of the phenomenon. In this conceptual study, we first review and discuss extant conceptualizations and operationalisations of news avoidance. Second, we present a model distinguishing two types of news avoidance—intentional and unintentional—depending on the underlying causes leading people to tune out. Third, we argue that different solutions apply to the two types of news avoidance. To engage intentional news avoiders, the news selection and news presentation must to be changed. To engage unintentional news avoiders, the opportunity structures provided in the media system must be more favourable towards inadvertent news exposure.

This paper readdresses issues of the relationship of news consumption patterns to community participation in the US context, however, it looks not only at local news, but also national news. It tes...

On the surface, it seems that journalists are more publicly accessible than ever before, largely thanks to the popular microblogging website/ app, Twitter. But determining who is interacting with j...

This essay introduces the special issue entitled Reporting Globalwhile being local: Local sources of news for distant audiences. Itdiscusses the rationale behind this special issue’s focus on localnewsworkers who contribute their labour to international news-reporting and reviews research conducted on the work andworking conditions of these newsworkers to date. The article thengoes on to describe the articles that appear in the special issue.

Knowledge brokers play a crucial role in improving the likelihood that scientific research informs public policy and professional practice, and journalists are well-positioned to serve in this role...

Investigative journalism’s value to democracy is straightforward: it provides useful information to citizens by exposing wrongdoing and holding powerful institutions accountable. But its financial ...

The media’s capacity to maintain its role as an institution for public knowledge is growingly dependent on its capacity to verify information effectively, especially in times of growing mis/dis and...

The U.S.-based Solutions Journalism Network (SJN) defines its mission as supporting and connecting journalists interested in “rigorous reporting on responses to social problems” that can “strengthe...

This study assesses the roles played by journalism support organizations or “ancillary” organizations – professional associations, training centers, foundations, labs – in the dynamics of journalis...

This exploratory study introduces a human security framework to examine the challenges that journalists face from daily professional and societal constraints and pressures when attempting to fulfill their role to inform the public in areas of conflict. The research focuses on the influences on Palestinian journalists in one of the most challenging regions in the world for independently reporting the news. Our framework includes seven dimensions of human security: personal, organizational, community/societal, economic, political, geographic, and infrastructural. Our study found that the Palestinian media are military targets, and journalists face direct and indirect censorship by the Israeli government as well as the Palestinian Authority and Hamas. Although we have adapted this framework for the Palestinian case in particular, the spheres of these influences on human security would likely pertain to other insecure situations for journalists. Applying this framework to journalism studies could open new avenues of academic discovery to analyze human security beyond violence, safety, and risk. Our main contribution, we suggest, is building out a human security framework for academic journalism studies in contested, conflict-prone, and post-conflict areas around the world.

From the 1980s onwards, the biomedical sector has become intricately interwoven within academic, industrial, state, and media structures. Against a backdrop of biomediatization theory which concept...

Accreditation is a topic that is sure to spark lively debates among faculty of journalism programs. And it has for years. Several prominent journalism programs in the United States recently let the...

Transparency has emerged as an ethical principle in contemporary journalism and is contended to improve accountability and credibility by journalists and scholars alike. However, to date, few attempts have been made to record the public’s views on transparency. This study enriches current knowledge by using data from an experiment, survey and focus groups in Sweden collected between 2013 and 2015. Overall, the results suggest that the respondents are not particularly moved by transparency in any form; it does not produce much effect in the experiments and is not brought up in the focus groups. While that is the key finding of this study, it should also be noted that various forms of user participation are evaluated negatively, while providing hyperlinks, explaining news selection and framing, and correcting errors are viewed positively. Implications for journalism practice and research are discussed.

The crisis affecting news organisations, along with their struggle to find a sustainable online business model, have challenged journalists’ professional autonomy, as economic and commercial pressu...

This study examines the corporate annual reports of three leading UK legacy newspaper publishers (Guardian Media Group, Daily Mail and General Trust, and Trinity Mirror) across fifteen financial years from 2002. It tracks how the publishers reshaped their corporate frameworks and business and product portfolios in responding to market, consumer and technological shifts in the digital era. In particular, the study addresses the implications of digital and market upheavals for the corporations’ traditional roles as custodians of and operational contexts to journalism’s values paradigm. It evaluates the extent to which the corporations sought to protect news’s commodity value and journalism’s public interest norms within their digital transition strategies, which became increasing sites of managerial focus and resource allocations from the mid-2000s.

Most research on journalists’ role perceptions and journalistic culture remains Western-focused, and is limited to mainstream media. This quantitative study uses a survey to fill two gaps in the literature by examining differences in role perceptions and journalistic culture among mainstream and alternative media journalists in Brazil. Results indicate significant differences in role perceptions, as mainstream media journalists place more importance on traditional ethics, while alternative media journalists value their normative responsibilities more.

Ethnic media’s dual role of delivering news about both “here”, the country of settlement, and “there”, the country of origin, is well known. While ethnic media studies generally confirm an integrative role of ethnic media, concerns over their leaning toward “there” rather than “here”, as seen in the significantly higher coverage of “there”, have been simultaneously raised, considering the potential civil society role of ethnic media within and across communities “here”. But is the number of news stories an appropriate indicator for ethnic media’s editorial orientation? This study examines ethnic media as business ventures in order to understand the impact of the commercialization of the news industry on ethnic media, especially in their role as media for less-desirable audience segments in the advertiser-driven market. The focus is on the media logic behind local news production and how ethnic media deal with financial challenges in pursuing local news production. The findings from a case study of Korean ...

This study investigates the agenda-building process as it involves multiple information sources. Next to traditional news media like television newscasts and newspapers, the study considers online news sites and news agencies in the agenda-building process. Furthermore, the policy agenda is differentiated into the agenda of governing and opposition parties. The scope is to give a compressive overview of the agenda-building process during election campaigns as it involves several information sources and occurs within the 24-hour news cycle. Additionally, this study aims to conceptualize the agenda-building potential of various information sources by discussing their features, i.e. channel characteristics. Therefore, we focus on the impact of two specific characteristics, namely stability and flexibility in the agenda-building process. To test the theoretical assumptions, a semi-automatic content analysis of 15 policy issues in 14 online news sites, 18 newspapers, nine newscasts, wire copy and press release...

As new actors assert their voices into global discussions, the boundaries of journalism are continuously tested and tugged at. Some, like citizen journalists and alternative community media organisations, are relatively well documented by scholars. Others present a grey area in our understanding of who makes up the perceived “in club” of journalism. One such area of emerging journalistic boundary research is about the media outputs of non-governmental organisations (NGOs), whose staff have traditionally been seen as sources for or stringers to journalists. Technological advances in information communications, increased staffing capacity and more sophisticated media strategies mean that some NGOs are now producing their own independent news as opposed to relying on journalists to tell their organisational stories. The question, however, is whether this is to be seen as more sophisticated communication strategies aimed at advocating a specific viewpoint or/and an emerging form of reporting folding into the expanding boundaries of journalism. This paper argues that one way to conceptualise advocates and NGO actors engaging in eyewitness reporting is as “Unintentional Journalists” doing the work of journalism, without intentionally meaning to do so. Following an exploratory case study of the Pacific branch of global NGO 350.org, the paper suggests that the organisation’s members who produced reports about the passing of Cyclone Pam in Vanuatu, 2015, intended to produce advocacy and, in doing so, unintentionally acted to fill a global news gap for reporting from the Pacific region.