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Research on trust in media is on the rise. However, communication scholars have addressed related concepts (e.g. media credibility) for decades, and these concepts have often been used interchangea...

Attempts to establish reliable predictors of journalists’ perceptions of the acceptability of various controversial newsgathering practices such as deception and intrusion have so far produced inconsistent results. This paper proposes an exploratory theoretical model, based on risk-taking theory, which identifies constructs that could be used to predict journalists’ use of these practices. It validates this model using data from a survey of practising journalists in New Zealand. It shows that economic and organisational influences on journalists, their role perceptions, and their ethical orientation predict the extent to which journalists see these practices as justified. Organisational influences are moderated by experience, as predicted by risk-taking theory, but seem to have significance only for mid-level experience. This has important implications for journalism practice, regulation, and education.

This paper looks at the extent to which journalistic culture in Muslim-majority countries is shaped by a distinctive Islamic worldview. We identified four principles of an Islamic perspective to journalism: truth and truth-telling (siddiq and haqq), pedagogy (tabligh), seeking the best for the public interest (maslahah), and moderation (wasatiyyah). A survey of working journalists in Africa (Egypt, Sierra Leone, and Sudan), Asia (Bangladesh, Indonesia, Malaysia, Oman, Qatar, Turkey, and the United Arab Emirates), and Europe (Albania and Kosovo) found manifestations of these roles in the investigated countries. The results point to the strong importance of an interventionist approach to journalism-as embodied in the maslahah principle-in most societies. Overall, however, journalists' roles in Muslim-majority countries are not so much shaped by a distinctively Islamic worldview as they were by the political, economic, and socio-cultural contexts. This study was made possible by the Worlds of Journalism Study, Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich; the German Research Foundation; Swiss National Science Foundation. Scopus

When the Journalism Studies Interest Group of the International Communication Association was formed in pre-Katrina New Orleans in 2004, online journalism looked very much like offline journalism. Yes, content was available on a computer screen rather than on a piece of paper or over the airwaves. But otherwise, it was much the same: produced by a news organization, dominated by text, consumed but not created by an audience. By the time the interest group became a division two years later, a hurricane had swept through the media world, and very little was the same as before. Journalism Studies as a distinct scholarly discipline has matured in this age of Web 2.0, a term that came into vogue only in late 2004 as innovators began to engage with the medium as a platform for participation and not just for traditional one-to-many publishing. As the practice of journalism has been transformed over the past decade, so too has the study of that practice. Yet practitioners and scholars both have struggled to adapt to the transformation. Journalists have moved only slowly away from the reification of old practices and toward implementation of new ones. And scholars have only tentatively begun to venture outside the comfort zone of long-standing theories as devices for understanding the nature of change. This essay looks at some of the ways in which an evolving realization of the medium’s distinctiveness has brought fundamental change to the synergistic enterprises of journalism practice and journalism studies.

This study seeks to contribute to the systematic explanation of journalists’ professional role orientations. Focusing on three aspects of journalistic interventionism—the importance of setting the political agenda, influencing public opinion, and advocating for social change—multilevel analyses found substantive variation in interventionism at the individual level of the journalist, the level of the media organizations, and the societal level. Based on interviews with 2100 journalists from 21 countries, findings affirm theories regarding a hierarchy of influences in news work. We found journalists to be more willing to intervene in society when they work in public media organizations and in countries with restricted political freedom. An important conclusion of our analysis is that journalists’ professional role orientations are also rooted within perceptions of cultural and social values. Journalists were more likely to embrace an interventionist role when they were more strongly motivated by the value t...

International media training has become popular in post-New Order Indonesia. Educational organizations have focused on training radio journalists, reflecting the accessibility of radio stations across the nation. This study investigated the training effectiveness and consequent adoption of Western journalism practices in the context of Indonesian radio journalism. Five focus groups were conducted in five Indonesian cities with distinctive media markets, populations, and city sizes. Findings illustrate that the adoption and dissemination of training materials were made more difficult by the widely differing values and backgrounds of journalists as well as a lack of funding from radio stations.

This article seeks to map systematically predictors of journalists' perceived professional autonomy. On the basis of survey responses of 1,800 journalists from 18 countries, the study tests the extent to which journalists with different backgrounds and jobs, who work for different media and organizations, under different kinds of ownerships and pressures, in democratic and nondemocratic regimes, can perform their roles as society's main providers of information. We demonstrate that predictors of professional autonomy are twofold: comprising journalists' perceived influences on news work, and objective limits of autonomy that exist beyond journalists' perceptions. The latter reside on 3 levels: the individual journalist level, the organizational level, and the societal level. Journalists' subjective perceptions of political, organizational, procedural, professional, and reference group influences proved to be strongest predictors of professional autonomy. Of the hypothesized objective determinants of journ...

Given the persistent variation in the ways journalism works across cultural boundaries, researchers are often quick to speak of ‘journalistic’ or ‘ professional cultures’ without conceptual clarity. Consequently, ‘journalism culture’ has become an increasingly vague concept, inviting misunderstanding and theoretical ambiguity. This paper, therefore, introduces a taxonomy of journalism cultures, consisting of the territorial, essentialist, value-centered, milieu-specific, organizational and professional journalism cultures. Empirical evidence is provided for three of these cultures, drawing on data from a survey of 385 professional journalists in Indonesia. The results suggest that if culture has some kind of severe impact on journalism, it is not likely to appear on the level of the individual (micro) and organization (meso), but rather on the societal level (macro).

This paper presents the key findings of the first comparative survey of online journalists in the United States and Germany. It is based on a sub-sample of the latest American journalist study and the study “Online Journalists in Germany.” The article develops the objectives of the studies and explicates the methodology, and it presents key findings on basic characteristics of online journalists, jobs and tasks in online journalism, and the professional views and attitudes of Web journalists in the United States and Germany. The comparisons show some striking differences between American and German online journalists. Their basic characteristics, levels of professionalization and role perceptions are more different than expected.

In Indonesia, 385 professional journalists were surveyed, by means of face-to-face interviews, to establish their basic demographic and social characteristics as well as their views on professional values. The findings suggest that the “typical” Indonesian journalist is young, male, well educated and earns an above-average salary. In terms of education and training, journalists of the archipelago are becoming increasingly professional. They see themselves as neutral and objective disseminators of news, not as political actors and agents of development. Indonesian journalists disapprove of unscrupulous practices of reporting, yet paradoxically many of them justify and practice corruption during their everyday work. Although the study's primary focus is on Indonesia, the analysis goes well beyond national boundaries. By subjecting the data to factor analysis, five dimensions of media roles are extracted, namely public-oriented news journalism, popular service journalism, critical watchdog journalis...

Peace journalism is defined as a special mode of socially responsible journalism which contributes to the peaceful settlement of conflicts. Although this concept has been widely discussed, there has been no assessment of its underlying philosophy from the perspective of mass communication theory. This paper argues that peace journalism draws epistemologically from a naive realism and is, according to mass communication theory, largely based on the assumption of powerful, causal and linear media effects. By contrast, the author theorizes journalism as a highly autonomous though not autarkic system whose function is to provide social co-orientation. If that is true, it cannot be the task of journalism to engage actively in the peaceful settlement of conflicts since this is the task of politics or the military. There is, however, no doubt that journalism can contribute to the peaceful settlement of conflicts, but its potential influence is limited. After discussing peace journalism for three decades many que...