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This paper explores the proximity of local media to audiences during the COVID-19 pandemic. It is based on a case study of Italian daily L'Eco di Bergamo combining two sets of data: a list of initiatives the newspaper took in 2019 and 2020 to be closer to audiences, and interviews shedding light on how staff viewed the paper's relationship with audiences during that time. An analysis of these two datasets shows that the pandemic increased the newspaper's proximity to audiences but did not fundamentally change the way in which it related with audiences, despite significant changes in journalists' work routines. Based on these findings, the paper proposes a conceptualization of proximity as a dynamic balance between three structuring dimensions (gatekeeping, social and commercial), with a focus on audiences as a plural figure determined by news organizations' strategies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines how young people (18–24) in England who experience social inequality consumed news during the first national Covid-19 lockdown. Described as "infodemically vulnerable" due to their reliance on social media for news, I draw on 25 interviews to consider if this underresearched population was exposed to harmful information. Contrary to fears, participants maintained a constant awareness of essential Covid-19 information throughout this period. They used substantively different consumption practices as the lockdown progressed. Initially, interviewees turned to trusted information from broadcast media news, replacing their dependence on social media. This was short-lived, as participants later avoided television news due to its impact on their wellbeing and frustrations that coverage did not relate to their lived experience. The paper demonstrates how structural factors, like age and inequality, can act as catalysts for selective news avoidance. Avoidance, however, did not result in interviewees missing critical updates. They adopted a "News Finds Me" perception, whereby individuals remained informed indirectly through relatable information from trusted contacts received on private messaging applications. Rather than being exposed to an infodemic, this article shows how accidental exposure to news on social media provided information perceived as more useful and representative of their lived experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on in-depth interviews with 21 Egyptian journalists, this study offers a comprehensive understanding of how the COVID-19 pandemic has reconfigured news work and journalistic routines in Egyptian newsrooms. In so doing, the paper examines the various technical and logistical challenges encountered by Egyptian journalists as well as their changing role perceptions during the emergency health crisis. It further investigates the innovative practices adopted by newsrooms, on both the news content and newsroom levels, to overcome those challenges in terms of sourcing norms, news production routines, and storytelling formats. Findings demonstrate that Egyptian journalists struggled at the beginning of the pandemic, but started to find creative solutions to overcome the many practical and infrastructural challenges. The pandemic accelerated the digitization of editorial news production systems and the unprecedented adoption of news automation and artificial intelligence technologies. More dependence on interactive digital storytelling formats and data visualization tools was reported. Journalistic innovation occurred therefore as recombination of already existing products or services, but not new inventions. In terms of role perception, there was a shift to a more facilitative role, in which science and more quantitatively oriented forms of journalism play a central role. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The COVID-19 pandemic was a major challenge for journalism. In the case of Germany, critics very early on voiced concerns over the quality of mainstream media coverage. Mainstream media were attacked for the intensity of their coverage, for reporting too much and unnecessarily frightening audiences, for not presenting a diversity of viewpoints on the pandemic and the measures taken to mitigate it, and for being one-sided and too close to the government. Against this background, this paper examines the intensity and viewpoint diversity of the coverage of 13 mainstream and two alternative media in Germany in 2020 and 2021. Based on a comprehensive manual content analysis of almost 9000 news stories, we conclude that the mainstream media did not cover the pandemic in a fundamentally exaggerated or one-sided way. However, they did not always report intensively when the pandemic was particularly severe, and they tended to warn against the pandemic rather than criticize the measures taken. In contrast, alternative media coverage tended to be more one-sided and generally biased against government measures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Arguably the first thing that a reader notices of a news item, the headline serves the semantic function of providing pertinent information and the pragmatic function of appealing to target addressees. Moreover, it often embodies the stance of the news writer or the news agency on a particular issue and could program the reader's perception and interpretation of the ensuing news story in a pre-determined direction. In view of the distinctive significance of headlines in news discourse, in this paper, we analyze how the headlines of The Economist, an elite newsmagazine, frame China in relation to the COVID-19 pandemic. The sample of headlines was examined for their structural components, syntactic features, as well as linguistic characteristics, and compared with a selection of the outlet's headlines on COVID responses of certain other countries. Through identifying the framing patterns adopted in the headlines and unpacking the ideological overtones encoded therein, this systematic analysis has illuminated the role and effects of the tactful employment of language in constructing country image and striking a balance between purported impartiality and ideological dispositions. Its findings and implications are expected to contribute to scholarship on media framing and inform the practice of journalistic writing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines journalistic role performance in coverage of the COVID-19 pandemic, based on a content analysis of newspaper, television, radio and online news in 37 countries. We test a set of hypotheses derived from two perspectives on the role of journalism in health crises. Mediatization theories assume that news media tend to sensationalize or to politicize health crises. A contrasting perspective holds that journalists shift toward more deferential and cooperative stances toward health and political authorities in a health crisis, attempting to mobilize the public to act according to the best science. Hypotheses derived from these perspectives are tested using the standard measures of journalistic roles developed by the Journalistic Role Performance Project. Results show that the deference/cooperation/consensus perspective is better supported, with media moving away from the Watchdog and Infotainment, and toward performance of the Service and Civic roles. We also explore differences in the pattern by country. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic has become a stress test for science journalism worldwide. In this paper, we explore the under-researched topic of the perceived role enactment of science journalists in non-democratic settings in the example of COVID-19 coverage in Russia. Drawing on 23 semi-structured interviews with Russian science journalists from pro-state and independent media outlets, we examine their perceived role enactment and politicization of reporting about the pandemic in Russia. We identify three major types of limitations of a political nature reported by journalists: (1) editorial guidelines; (2) accessibility and self-censorship of sources; (3) self-censorship. Manifestation of these three types of limitations differ depending on the political orientation of media outlets as well as on the aspect of the topic. Based on the findings, we discuss the influence of universal trends and contextual factors on science journalism covering the pandemic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In contrast to the majority of European countries, at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, Swedish authorities did not put the country in lockdown, but mainly presented relatively mild recommendations to work from home and not gather in groups of over 50 persons. Thus, much of the decision-making and restrictions to prevent the spread of the virus had to occur at the organizational level, i.e., within companies. This paper reports the findings from an online survey carried out in June–September 2020 (n = 196), in which Swedish media managers were asked to focus on perceived media leadership during the COVID-19 crisis. The results indicate that Swedish media managers acted with confidence in their remote leadership and engaged in crisis management leader tasks in line with previous crisis management research. While managers learned to appreciate remote work, they stressed the difficulty of being an inspiring leader in a remote setting and the challenge of motivating creativity, one of the most important components in managing journalism and media work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over half of our news use is comprised of habits: routine behavior that is firmly ingrained in people's everyday life. Conversely, citizens who have not taken up news in their daily routines rarely form novel patterns of news use. Yet, we know surprisingly little about how news habits come into being, especially in real-life situations. Previous research suggests that considerable life changes and disruptions in daily routines can give rise to the adaptation or formation of habits. This paper asks how and to what extent citizens created novel patterns of news use or adapted existing news routines during the COVID-19 pandemic. Connecting insights from social psychology to journalism and audience studies, it analyzes which affective, social and contextual cues stimulate or hinder news habit formation. Employing a questionnaire with open-ended questions with 1293 Dutch news users, we identified 5 groups of news users whose news habits each demonstrate a different response to the COVID-19 pandemic: news avoiders, followers turned avoiders, stable news users, frequent news users and news junkies. In-depth follow-up interviews with these users (N = 22) show that differences in users' everyday context, social cues, levels of stress and anxiety, and affective cues may explain these different behaviors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores how young people used and experienced news during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic. Drawing from 22 in-depth interviews with Dutch young people (19-36), we found four successive phases in which participants used and made sense of news in distinct ways. First, before the virus reached the Netherlands, they saw it as "a problem far away" and felt indifferent toward the news. During the second phase of "shock", as COVID-19 reached the Netherlands, news use increased as participants frantically tried to make sense of the situation. Third, participants experienced "Corona-fatigue" due to informational and emotional overload and began "dosing" their intake of news. Finally, they became used to "the new normal" and returned to (perceived) regular levels of news consumption. Two new rituals stood out during the first wave: press conferences seemingly "interpellated" participants as Dutch citizens who should take their responsibility, and daily updates of COVID-19 cases were used as a gauge for how "we" were doing. Overall, participants' position could best be described as critical-but-pragmatic: even if they questioned the veracity of some news, they chose to follow measures to curtail the virus. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes news use during the COVID-19 pandemic, asking how people balance between conflicting needs for information and disconnection in an extraordinary situation. We analyze empirical data from a qualitative questionnaire study of Norwegian media users conducted in March–April 2020, a period of early pandemic lockdown. The acute lockdown context accentuated intensified monitoring of constantly updated news streams, and perceptions of news use as immersive and emotionally draining, as captured in the notion of "doomscrolling". To cope with feelings of being scared or overwhelmed, even the most connected citizens deliberately and intermittingly avoided news. Discussing these findings in light of the debate on news avoidance in journalism studies, we argue for the relevance of understanding news avoidance as a situational strategy. We conclude that the concept of news avoidance remains relevant to qualitatively understand a human experience of wanting to avoid news in particular contexts. Our analysis further outlines interconnections between different practices of pandemic news use, including a research-based conceptualization of doomscrolling as a phenomenon. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article investigates how the COVID-19 pandemic around the world is represented by the New York Times (NYT) and China Daily (CD), newspapers from two countries with long-standing political tension. The data consists of 2572 reports that are classified into three groups: reports on COVID-19 in the US, reports on COVID-19 in China, and reports on COVID-19 in other countries/regions. The reports are analyzed in terms of their discursive news values. Analysis results show that NYT represents the pandemic in the US, and CD represents the pandemic in China as the least negative, the least impactful and with the most personal accounts. NYT represents the pandemic in China, and CD represents the pandemic in the US as the most negative, the most impactful, the most severe, and the least positive and proximate. The selection and representation of other countries/regions reflect a differentiated coverage of the "Others" by both NYT and CD. The study lends support to a previous hypothesis that domestic crises tend to be presented as less negative than those in other countries, and invites contemplation on the influence of nationalism and political antagonism on the news media in times of global health crises. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Attacks on journalists and the media in Brazil have a long history but have become even more problematic through the use of social media, particularly following the election of Jair Bolsonaro as president in 2019. In times of industry restructuring and coronavirus pandemic, the systematic attacks on individual journalists and on the media by Bolsonaro and his associates are posing unprecedented challenges, and are part of a pattern of abuse to suppress media freedom and discredit journalists' work. This article focuses upon journalists' abilities to access different types of capital to anticipate, cope with, and create options to overcome perceived threats and generate positive outcomes. This study builds upon the works of Voss (Behemoth-A Journal on Civilisation 1 (3): 39–56, 2008), Obrist, Pfeiffer and Henley (Progress in Development Studies 10 (4): 283–293, 2010) and Hess' (Communication Theory 23 (2): 112–130, 2013) "mediated social capital" to advance understanding of the nexus amongst risk, vulnerability and social resilience, and examines structural inequalities in and through the media. By employing a mixed-methods approach, we combine the results of a survey and in-depth interviews with high-profile figures of leading newspapers and professional bodies in the country. The findings open up possibilities on how news media's "mediated social capital" might enhance women journalists' capacity to move from vulnerability to social resilience, improving their safety. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Journalism innovation, according to service innovation theory, is about providing new journalistic services that create value for audiences, society, and the news organisation itself. This study explores how local news media responded to the Coronavirus crisis in terms of service innovation. Based on interviews with editors and top management representatives at two local newspaper groups in Norway (N = 20), we show how local newspapers developed new digital services in response to audiences' need for guidance, overview, and a sense of togetherness, and how the media operations generated revenues in the process. Theoretically, the study identifies two key innovation dynamics in local journalism during a crisis: A social-economic value creation dynamic which captures how local newspapers appropriate their business model to accommodate new service offerings and balance social and economic value creation considerations; and a service system-audience experience dynamic which captures how innovation in journalistic offerings are linked to concurrent innovations in journalistic production processes. This research enhances the understanding of journalism innovation as a value-creating phenomenon and the factors that stimulate such value creation during crises. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study explored emotional distress and organizational support in the context of covering the COVID-19 pandemic. A survey of 222 local journalists in the US revealed covering the story was both stressful and emotionally difficult. Females and those who were younger and less experienced perceived higher levels of stress and felt the story was more emotionally difficult than their counterparts. Females also felt their supervisors were less emotionally supportive and less supportive of their attempts to balance home and work. Supervisor support of home/work balance was associated with less overall emotional stress from the story. The repetitive nature of the coverage, interacting with victims, and public backlash for their reporting were among the top stressors. Nearly 60% of participants indicated they received no stress management resources from their news organizations. Of those that did, most did not take advantage. Implications for organizational support and journalism and trauma research are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Migration has been one of the most divisive issues in global politics and media has played a significant role in how people perceive and respond to it. This study employs peace journalism and framing theory to examine how Greek media portrayed migration to Greece during a dual crisis in early 2020: a Greek-Turkish border crisis and the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. It contributes to previous literature in two important ways. First, by offering insights of news coverage of migration in the aftermath of the 2015 refugee crisis in Europe. Second, by examining the less-researched topic of media representations of migration during the pandemic. Results indicate that refugees and migrants are dehumanized in media discourse, portrayed as "enemies at the gate" of Europe and as carriers of the virus. The content analysis finds variations between different media outlets including language, approach, problem/threat definition and stereotypes. The article also identifies important similarities in news coverage; most notably, the dominance of political elites as sources across all media content, the absence of refugee/migrant voice and the focus on policies of border control and enforcement. We suggest that these patterns ultimately function to obscure the complexity of the refugee and migration issue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Before the COVID-19 pandemic, journalism and mass communication (JMC) schools were increasingly integrating online educational delivery into their programming. The pandemic then forced instructors to transition all programming almost overnight to emergency remote teaching environments. This had an acute disruption on applied courses within JMC professions. As higher education pivots toward an uncertain future amidst a likely endemic COVID-19, JMC instructors will need access to evidence-supported pedagogy that can be contextualized across modalities. This five-round Delphi study featured a panel of 24 experienced online JMC educators, who co-constructed a framework of pedagogical practices and instructional design strategies for designing, delivering, supporting, and evaluating rigorous experiential learning activities in online environments. The resulting framework—called The EXCEL Online Framework—is comprised of 36 primary and 59 ancillary practices that JMC educators can contextualize to their online courses. Analysis revealed the primary practices aligned closely with principles of the Cognitive Apprenticeship Model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Arts journalism, journalism on the arts and entertainment industries, has been primarily defined in a Western European context within Journalism Studies. Yet this neglects the globalised nature of arts and entertainment production and consumption and the mobile reporters who cover it, and the nationally contingent challenges and opportunities they face. In a world still grappling with the Covid-19 pandemic, arts reporters face a triple threat: the precarity of what is often a freelance career, the financial disruption of the global media and entertainment industries, and the biases of a media ecosystem that favours reporters from the Global North. Drawing on 24 interviews with arts journalists from 12 different countries in four continents in 2020–2021, we explore how such journalists are increasingly subsidising their work with employment beyond the media sector. Arts journalists from Europe grapple with complex issues relating to their professional and personal identities, in contrast to journalists from the Global South, where questions relate primarily to economic and structural challenges. Journalists from West Africa interviewed face increasing if sporadic interest from media organisations in global economic centres, and the emerging content possibilities of internationally funded digital and streaming platforms, mirroring broader economic flows of capital and labour. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Guided by the transactional theory of stress and coping, this study documents and examines how journalists in Singapore experienced covering the COVID-19 pandemic. Through an interview with 22 journalists, this study finds a variation in how journalists experienced covering the crisis, and how changes in their work routines shaped such experiences. Forced to work from home, many journalists experienced a blurring of work and home boundaries. An important determinant of their experience is how well they were are able to cope, and the interviewees underscored the importance of organizational support in their coping process. These experiences and coping processes, however, were also shaped by their work status. While those working for mainstream organizations received sufficient support, freelancers and those affiliated with small media startups had a different experience, as COVID-19 magnified pre-existing disparities among journalists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In March 2020, the sporting landscape was paused indefinitely due to the COVID-19 pandemic. To understand how the job function and routines of newspaper sports journalists were impacted during the initial U.S. outbreak (March to July 2020), semi-structured in-depth interviews with 23 members of United States (US) print sports media were conducted. Interviewee responses elucidated three main themes: the future of sports journalism is unknown and frightening for those working in the industry, COVID-19 illustrates the importance of interpersonal relationships to produce quality stories, and COVID-19 validates the importance of quality sports journalism. Additionally, interviewees also shed light on the impact that videoconference interviews, specifically those conducted over Zoom, have on the sports journalism field. Even though it was deemed a useful tool during the pandemic, sportswriters feared that teams will continue to limit access by relegating all interviews to Zoom, thus drastically changing the norms of sports journalism. The theoretical implications of these findings are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Investigating experience is becoming a greater concern in Journalism Studies. However, while "experience" is often mentioned, it is either never fully discussed or it is approached in terms of mere sensory or emotional response. Experience, instead, involves additionally (and simultaneously) situatedness, embodiment, and continuous re-processing over time, most of which lies beyond consciousness and is not easily articulated by words. Drawing on Whitehead's processual philosophy and Gendlin's philosophy of the implicit, this article addresses the calls in the field for "taking experience seriously." Theoretically, it tackles the ontological leap required to be able to conceive experience. Methodologically and empirically it demonstrates the potential for applying creative techniques to retrieve and express the knowledge beyond words that is not captured by established methods. It does so by sharing the author's reflection matured through long-term experimentation with creative practices in research and the creation of an embroidered collage inspired by the project "Being a foreigner at the time of the COVID-19 pandemic: The impact of news consumption on the everyday life of migrants in Norway." The article takes the form, in itself, of a collage and invites the reader to join into an experiential taster of its arguments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The coronavirus pandemic has cast a shadow over the lives of everyone in the world during the past two years. It has brought about dramatic and sudden changes in the ways we live and work across all realms of society, including in journalism. In this introductory article, we contextualise the special issue on "Global perspectives on journalism and the coronavirus pandemic." The special issue reflects the rich global diversity of responses and experiences of journalism to the coronavirus pandemic. It encompasses contributions reflecting journalists' and audiences' experiences in Belgium, Eastern Europe, Germany, Indonesia, the Netherlands, Russia, Slovenia, Sweden, and the UK. Taken together, the contributions published in this special issue demonstrate the resilience of journalism and its adaptability to change. Yet they also show that if the pandemic constituted a critical moment, it was one which amplified threats to journalism that were already present. But the pandemic also showed the continued importance of journalism, as news organisations furnished audiences with vital information and helped to facilitate cohesion and solidarity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study aims to identify and explore forms of emotional labour, that is, efforts to manage emotions that labourers perceive as experiencing in their work life, that British political journalists experienced during the Covid-19 pandemic and the perceived consequences of this labour. It is argued the examination of journalists' emotional labour matters as it can impact journalists' workplace wellbeing and mental health but also work commitment and quality of journalism. In order to answer the research question, qualitative semi-structured interviews were conducted with 34 British journalists covering politics in the spring of 2021. The findings indicate that journalists experienced a range of negative emotions working in the pandemic, with anxiety and frustration being among the most commonly reported ones but also important was the feeling of pride in their work. The inability to access established, albeit informal, support systems, tied primarily to a physical newsroom space but also other socialisation spaces, such as working on location, removed opportunities for emotion management and induced new, and often persistent, emotions of anxiety, frustration, loneliness and nervousness related to work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study adopts a comparative keyword analysis to examine a corpus of news reports (N = 1009) published in Chinese and American newspapers on SARS and COVID-19 outbreaks to uncover the hierarchy of news values and potential differences across time and cultures. The results show that the news values of "Impact", "Superlativeness", "Proximity", and "Eliteness" are often prioritized in both newspapers. For cross-cultural differences, the Chinese newspaper prefers a constructive reporting style through emphasizing "Positivity" in terms of agency, proactive measures, and favorable outcomes in fighting the outbreaks. The American newspaper prioritizes "Proximity" in terms of relevance to its audience. For diachronic changes, the Chinese newspaper has developed a unique theme to construct "Positivity" by calling for the solidarity of the international community. The Chinese newspaper also moves away from prioritizing geographic "Proximity" and government actors in constructing "Eliteness". The American newspaper, however, changes to cover more government actors. The American newspaper also changes its exclusive economic focus in constructing "Impact" to emphasize the epidemic's impact on various aspects of people's lives. This study accounts for how the sociocultural context and the different magnitudes of SARS and COVID-19 outbreaks shape newspaper reports in China and the US. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The coronavirus pandemic sent tremors throughout the news landscape. While the onset of the pandemic appeared to significantly increase news hunger, soon after, studies reported an uptick in what they termed "coronablocking": the conscious avoidance of coronavirus related news. Younger age groups in particular appeared more likely to engage in coronablocking. This article seeks to contribute to extant research by providing a textured account of how and why young news users avoid the news. To explore these questions, we conducted 25 in-depth interviews with Belgian news users under the age of 35. We propose that news avoidance practices are fluid, as news avoidance was often preceded by moments of increased news consumption, and inherently connected to the specific spatiotemporal context of users and enacted within their broader media repertoire. In our analysis, we discuss the user-identified characteristics which lead users to a 'tipping point', at which point they avoided the news to varying degrees by reconfiguring their media repertoire. Three types of reconfigurations are identified: tuning out news content, regulating the flow of information, and controlling the tone of voice, all of which underline users' agency in shaping their repertoires to avoid the news. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During pandemics, uncertainty is a given condition, as are the potential risks of which the public needs to be informed via the media. In such dire straits there tends to be a shortage of certain knowledge and an abundance of speculations that can potentially inform as well as misinform the public. In this study, we conduct a conversation analysis of the interactional dynamics of speculations between Danish journalists and health experts in televised news interviews and press conferences during the initial phase of the Covid-19 pandemic in early 2020. The analysis shows how journalists and experts construct and moderate speculations interactionally by entering both convergent and divergent roles. In conclusion, the potentials and pitfalls of such speculations are discussed, and implications are suggested for journalism practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]