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Political economy suggests that media owners try to influence the process of media production by providing career incentives to like-minded journalists and adjusting the level of professional autonomy granted to them. Accordingly, we analyze whether the political distance between editors and journalists (i.e., reporters) affects the careers of journalists in terms of rank and salary, as well as their perceived professional autonomy. We hypothesize that editors reward and allow freedom to journalists whose political viewpoints coincide more precisely with their own. Political proximity to editors should lead to a better salary and rank for reporters and to a stronger perception of editorial autonomy among reporters. We tested our hypotheses through statistical analysis using data from the Worlds of Journalism Study. We analyzed the answers of 3,087 journalists interviewed between 2012 and 2016 in six European countries: Germany, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, and the United Kingdom. The results support our hypotheses. The analysis reveals a polarization of media outlet editors, and robust results were achieved via a measure of political proximity that takes into account the particular influence of left-leaning and right-leaning editors. Such partisan leaning, however, seems less relevant in countries belonging to Hallin and Mancini’s Atlantic model.

Based on interviews with 215 conflict journalists and 315 reconstructed articles, this article explores the way conflict coverage comes into being. The study used retrospective reconstruction to in...

Journalism researchers have tended to study journalistic roles from within a Western framework oriented toward the media’s contribution to democracy and citizenship. In so doing, journalism scholarship often failed to account for the realities in non-democratic and non-Western contexts, as well as for forms of journalism beyond political news. Based on the framework of discursive institutionalism, we conceptualize journalistic roles as discursive constructions of journalism’s identity and place in society. These roles have sedimented in journalism’s institutional norms and practices and are subject to discursive (re)creation, (re)interpretation, appropriation, and contestation. We argue that journalists exercise important roles in two domains: political life and everyday life. For the domain of political life, we identify 18 roles addressing six essential needs of political life: informational-instructive, analytical-deliberative, critical-monitorial, advocative-radical, developmental-educative, and collaborative-facilitative. In the domain of everyday life, journalists carry out roles that map onto three areas: consumption, identity, and emotion.

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.

Foreign correspondents seem to have become an endangered species. They are said to be increasingly substituted by new forms of foreign correspondence. These claims are often raised by researchers studying foreign correspondence to and from the United States and the United Kingdom. We test whether assumptions about the demise and substitution of the traditional foreign correspondent also apply beyond these contexts. Particularly, the study seeks to explore the differences in the working conditions of various kinds of foreign correspondents. Based on 211 responses gathered through an online survey of a carefully reconstructed population of 721 journalists, it describes the profile and working conditions of foreign correspondents in Germany, Switzerland, and Austria. It finds that the traditional correspondent – a professional journalist working full-time for legacy media – may be more resistant to change than expected. In the perception of correspondents, there is not much substitution through parachutes, locals, amateurs, or reporting from the headquarters. Working conditions are not worsening for everyone. Rather, we find diverging worlds of foreign correspondence depending on the media type, the country of origin, and the kind of job contract journalists have.

This article presents a general framework for deconstructing and classifying conflict news narratives. This framework, based on a nuanced and contextual approach to analyzing media representations of conflict actors and events, addresses some of the weaknesses of existing classification schemes, focusing in particular on the dualistic approach of the peace journalism model. Using quantitative content analysis, the proposed framework is then applied to the journalistic coverage in the Israeli media of three Middle-Eastern conflicts: the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, the conflict surrounding Iran's nuclear program, and the Syrian civil war. The coverage is examined in three leading news outlets – Haaretz, Israel Hayom, and Ynet – over a six-month period. Based on hierarchical cluster analysis, the article identifies four characteristic types of narratives in the examined coverage. These include two journalistic narratives of violence: one inward-looking, ethnocentric narrative, and one outward-looking narrative focusing on outgroup actors and victims; and two political-diplomatic narratives: one interactional, and one outward-looking. In addition to highlighting different constellations of points of view and conflict measures in news stories, the identified clusters also challenge several assumptions underlying existing models, such as the postulated alignment between elite/official actors and violence frames

Despite having experienced rapid popularity over the past two decades, lifestyle journalism is still somewhat neglected by academic researchers. So far mostly explored as either part of wider lifestyle programming, particularly on television, or in terms of individual sub-fields, such as travel, fashion or food journalism, lifestyle journalism is in need of scholarly analysis particularly in the area of production, based on the increasing importance which the field has in influencing audiences’ ways of life. This study explores the professional views of 89 Australian and German lifestyle journalists through in-depth interviews in order to explore the ways in which they engage in processes of influencing audiences’ self-expression, identities and consumption behaviors. The article argues that through its work, lifestyle journalism is a significant shaper of identities in today’s consumer societies.

Research into journalism and gender to date has found somewhat contradictory evidence as to the ways in which women and men practice journalism. Some scholars claim that women have inherently different concepts and practices of journalism and that this has led to a feminization of journalism, others have found little evidence to suggest that men and women differ significantly in terms of their role conceptions. While numerous studies have been conducted into this issue around the world, few have taken a truly comparative approach. This article presents results from a large-scale comparative survey into gender differences in journalists’ professional views in 18 countries around the world. Results suggest that women and men do not differ in any meaningful ways in their role conceptions on either the individual level or in newsrooms dominated by women, or in sociocultural contexts where women have achieved a certain level of empowerment.

Journalism ethics theorizing is increasingly preoccupied with identifying and articulating universal norms and standards for media systems across various cultures. This study offers an empirical contribution to this topic by examining the ethical orientations of journalists in 18 countries. Country-level, or ideological, factors, rather than individual-level variables, appear to have the greatest impact on journalists’ degrees of idealism and relativistic thinking. Findings affirm hierarchy-of-influences theories regarding news work. They also raise questions about the nature of universal standards that would constitute a cross-cultural journalism ethics theory and underscore concerns about the viability of Enlightenment assumptions to serve as universal journalism ethical norms.

This article sets out to map the journalistic field as a space of struggle between distinct professional milieus. These milieus crystallize around journalists who share similar views on journalism’s function in society. By means of cluster analysis, four global professional milieus were extracted from the survey responses of 1800 journalists in 18 countries: the populist disseminator, detached watchdog, critical change agent and the opportunist facilitator. The detached watchdog milieu clearly dominates the journalistic field in most western countries, while the milieu of the opportunist facilitator reigns supreme in several developing, transitional and authoritarian contexts. In accordance with the theoretical propositions, relatively little professional autonomy was found in contexts with rather strong corporate and commercial influences. However, a more universal approach would need to go beyond corporate and commercial factors in order to account for the realities of the journalistic field in non-western countries.

This article compares the perceived importance of influences on news work across 18 societies. Evidence is based on journalists’ survey responses to a six-dimensional scale, covering political, economic, organizational, professional, and procedural influences as well as influences from reference groups. The results confirm the expectation that political and economic factors are clearly the most important denominators of cross-national differences in the journalists’ perceptions of influences. Furthermore, perceived political influences are clearly related to objective indicators of political freedom and ownership structures across the investigated countries. Economic influences seem to have a stronger impact in private and state-owned media than in public newsrooms, but they are not related to a country’s economic freedom. With respect to organizational, professional, and procedural influences as well as the impact of reference groups, the differences between the countries turned out to be much smaller.