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International non-governmental organizations (INGOs) are known to employ freelancers to produce multimedia and to pitch it for them to mainstream news outlets. So it seems odd that research about the blurring of news organizations and INGOs has been largely focused upon the practices of full-time staff at these kinds of organizations. To help fill this lacuna, this article constructs a model capable of interrogating the multiple forms of structure and agency at the heart of such forms of freelancing by blending Critical Realist theory with work by Bourdieu. It then uses this model to analyse semi-structured interviews with six freelancers who were involved in the production of media items about sub-Saharan countries. All of them were found to erode the distinction between INGOs and news organizations through different kinds of commissioning and syndication practices. But this article's main critical contribution lies in its efforts to illuminate why freelancers chose to engage in such liminal work; for the legitimating rationales they employed enabled them to avoid the “inter-role conflicts” experienced by freelancers who work for news outlets and commercial public relations organizations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses two interactions between journalists and their public relations sources captured on video during ethnographic fieldwork in newsrooms in New Zealand. Through analysis of verbal and non-verbal actions, the paper demonstrates the mixture of resentment, distrust and need that characterises journalists' relations with public relations practitioners (PRPs). It highlights journalists' increasing difficulties in accessing information, even in publicly funded organisations, without going through public relations spokespeople. We already know this is problematic for the quality of the news product. However, this research provides new evidence that it may also be problematic at an individual level for journalists and PRPs, requiring them to adopt a working mode of opacity and duplicity in their dealings. The paper provides empirical evidence of the practice of what a PRP told the researcher was “telling the truth to journalists, but telling it rather creatively”, and how it manifests in actual interactions, both written and verbal. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The aim of this article is to contribute to the ongoing discussion about the critical potential of tabloid journalism. It does so through a comparison of two popular journalism campaigns: the “Maiden Tribute” campaign in the London newspaper the Pall Mall Gazette in 1885 (dealing with underage prostitution), and the “naming-and-shaming” campaign in the News of the World in 2000, concerning child abuse and paedophilia. The main research question is whether any or both of these campaigns can be viewed as contributions to an alternative public sphere, as defined using concepts from Örnebring and Jönsson (2004) and Atton (2002). Three aspects of the campaigns are compared: (1) How they discursively frame the issue at hand, (2) How they discursively frame the key actors present in the texts, and (3) What mode of address is employed. The purpose of this comparison is to examine whether the campaigns open up alternative possibilities in how they frame and present the issue and the actors, and in how they address and give space to their audiences. The main result is that the Pall Mall Gazette campaign has the greater claim to being a contribution to an alternative public sphere in terms of how it frames the issue and the actors. The article further argues that while there is a distinct potential of tabloid journalism to contribute to an alternative public sphere in certain circumstances, this potential should not be overstated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In an analysis of news conventions used by 19th-century American newspapers, I show that the news of this time period took much the same form. Across geography, size of paper, and kind of paper (associational, commercial, partisan), newspapers shared the same conventions. I explain this uniformity in terms of James Carey's notion that the news expresses a form of public life. In this case, I argue that 19th-century news expressed a form of public life that was deeply imbued with values of association, affiliation, and partisanship. As newspapers expressed these values, they ritually reinforced a particular image of public life. I argue that this cultural approach to news conventions accounts for the available evidence in ways that may help the field move beyond functionalist explanations of news. In so doing, it opens new directions for understanding the relationship between news generally, and the public life in which it is situated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cross-national conflict shifting was introduced to the public relations academic community by Molleda and Connolly-Ahern (2002). They derived this concept from German scholars of international management. Molleda and Quinn (2003, 2004) expanded the theory with a series of presuppositions, some of which this study tests through a content analysis of news coverage of a bribery scandal that occurred in the southern African nation of Lesotho, which diffused worldwide because of the transnational nature of the parties involved. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]