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This article examines the extent to which data journalism (DJ) is being taught in Australian universities. It presents the results of interviews with 35 journalism academics about how they are incorporating data journalism into their courses. It includes details about the types of data journalism skills they are teaching, the resources they are using and the hindrances that have met or are making it difficult to teach data journalism. These hindrances include low and varied levels of quantitative literacy and math aversion among students, lack of time for upskilling and limited room in their courses for new material. The study found that at least nine Australian universities have semester-long units dedicated to data journalism and that at least a further nine are teaching it via some lectures and activities. Almost all respondents thought more should be done to incorporate data journalism into the curricula. This article lays a foundation for future exploration of how data journalism could be incorporated into journalism programmes where the staff requires upskilling.

Data visualisation is an area developing strongly in sports journalism. Via the example of football in Germany, this article presents a survey of current potentials of data journalism in sport. We have analysed the challenges of assessing and publishing data in professional online sports journalism. By means of five interviews with experts and an analysis of the content of three special-interest blogs, trends in the use of data in sports reporting, as well as the potentials and dangers, were shown. Here, we can identify, above all, the complexity of football, the incorporation of data without any context, the danger of tailoring data to a topic, as well as mistakes in entering data as problems. For sports journalists, relevant are a lack of (technical) knowledge, the increasing time pressure and growing expectations of recipients. Our analysis reveals that data must not be seen as the equivalent of objectivity. It does not seem possible to capture an entire sporting competition with data-driven journalism...

Journalism awards have been staples of professional journalism since the beginning of the twentieth century with the introduction of the Pulitzer Prizes. Dozens of awards programs have emerged since then to recognize journalists and news organizations working in print, broadcast, and online news media. This study uses data from the 1969, 1998, and 2008 editions of Awards, Honors & Prizes to consider how major journalism awards programs have advanced alongside shifts in the journalistic field overall. Considering journalism as a professionalized field, the analysis examines how journalism awards confer legitimacy for agents who are recognized while also highlighting the key players in the field, including founders, sponsors, judges, and participants, who vie for legitimacy. The findings address how the emergence and evolution of journalism awards programs mirror changes in the journalism field historically, including the education and socialization of journalists, economic and geographic shifts, and the ad...

The traditional model of journalism in western societies, dominated by legacy media outlets such as newspapers and television, has undergone fundamental change in the twenty-first century. One consequence has been significant job losses within these newsrooms. As journalists negotiate new employment post-job loss in Australia, this paper asks, how has this impacted on their professional identity? Drawing on varying conceptualisations of professional identity as a set of values and as a set of work practices, this paper presents data from a survey of 225 journalists who had been laid off between 2012 and 2014 in Australia, to explore whether and how journalists’ professional identity changed after redundancy. The results indicated that professional identity was likely to fade post-job loss, which indicates that identity may be more closely linked to a journalism work context. In addition, the paper found that the loss of institutional legitimacy may also be affecting the respondents’ current journalism pra...

There has been little empirical study of the extent to which journalists are drawing on and applying academic research and systematic knowledge, or of their sourcing routines and habits in this regard. This paper examines data from an original online survey conducted in fall 2015 with working journalists (N = 1,118). Over all, about half reported drawing on research studies frequently in their stories, and journalists expressed strong support for the idea that research can improve story quality. A multivariate analysis finds that knowledge usage is more likely to take place among journalists with some forms of academic and statistical training, with a national audience and with more coverage specialization in science-related topics. Political and television journalists are less likely to use expert knowledge.

This study analyzed journalist Andy Carvin’s live coverage on Twitter along with his discourse on journalism and social reporting. Carvin was chosen as the subject for study as he is perhaps the most prominent example of the practice of journalism based on emerging techniques of collaborative verification, transparency and co-creation. A textual analysis of 3188 tweets published by the journalist between 11 November 2014 and 21 January 2015 was conducted to investigate his techniques, particularly in terms of verification and crowdsourcing. The elements of journalism in Carvin’s discourse and practice are discussed following Kovach and Rosenstiel’s work on the essential principles for journalism practice. Findings suggest that a social media journalist can integrate both collaborative reporting and established journalistic values of accuracy, trust and verification, with the community acting as a distributed and networked newsroom. Results show the use of specific and effective techniques to overcome misi...

This study uses Bourdieu’s field theory to examine differences and similarities in digital practices among regional news organizations. Findings from interviews and field observations indicate that online journalism is fragmented in the region, with newsrooms operating on their own beliefs and interpretations. The variance can be explained by such factors as differences in managerial approaches, organizational culture, external factors, and history of the field. In addition, respondents saw online news as simplified journalism, or as a first draft of a story that has the potential to be published in the print edition. In the language of field theory, reporters do not perceive online journalism as providing cultural or symbolic capital, and there is little evidence that it offers economic capital.

Over two decades ago, Barbie Zelizer argued that journalists should be approached as an “interpretive community” in order to understand the processes through which journalists generate shared meanings around major political events. This article refocuses Zelizer’s concept in order to analyse the consequences of rapid technological transformation, fraught industry conditions, and disparate audience formations in the context of contemporary news media and journalism. Focusing on the challenges faced by professional sport journalists, we invoke the concept of “community of practice” to make sense of this fluid and commercially volatile context, using it to analyse empirically the experiences of journalists in Australia and Scotland. Informed by the interrelationship that exists between formats of news and the practices that produce it, this paper presents evidence drawn from in-depth semi-structured interviews with journalists, editors, news presenters and commentators who specialise in and/or work across newspapers, radio, television, online and mobile media. Understood as a community of practice, sport journalists are shown to be under pressure because of mutually reinforcing changes in mobile and digital media technologies, journalistic routines and institutional relations.

This article seeks to map the current position of audio within journalism curriculums at Australian and New Zealand universities, in the context of a so-called renaissance in podcasting helping to lift the profile of audio among educators and industry. Internet radio and podcasting have grown exponentially since 2004, with the worldwide monthly audience for podcasts estimated at more than 35 million listeners (Markman and Sawyer 2014). Podcasts are offered by traditional broadcast organisations, online newspapers, and non-media organisations or individuals. Yet while digital content production may have changed the competitive industry in which journalism graduates seek employment, journalism education has yet to react to that change in a comprehensive manner (Carey 2000; Hirst and Treadwell 2011). There is an acknowledged lack of research on long-form audio journalism (McHugh 2014; Panda 2014) but there is also little recent research on how journalism programs in universities are meeting this new audio demand.

Several scholars have noted that citizen journalism in the West is essentially an online phenomenon, driven by the affordability of Internet technologies. In Africa, projects such as Ushahidi in Kenya have been enabled by platforms such as cell phones and social networks. Voices of Africa, based in southern Africa, publishes on the web only. Publishing on the Internet presumes a citizenry which is relatively well educated; has familiarity with, and access to, new media as a form of social communication; and is confident in their right to participate in newly developed public spheres – particularly those online. In Grahamstown in the Eastern Cape province of South Africa, the citizen journalists recruited to work for the Iindaba Ziyafika (‘the news is coming’) project attached to the community newspaper Grocott’s Mail, came from a community in which there is 70 per cent unemployment, poor schooling and a lack of basic facilities such as running water, indoor sanitation and electricity. In the inter...

This article argues that, despite scepticism and many obstacles, a global media ethics can be realised to a significant degree. It can become a much needed and influential guide for responsible jou...

How do future-of-news experts construct accounts of the future of journalism and on what do they base these accounts? What do their methods imply about manifest and latent reasons for constructing these accounts in the first place? This exploratory study adapts a model from the sociology of work, which provides a typology of strategies that guide decision-making in ‘future work’ – that is, work that involves collective and systematic efforts to predict and legitimize predictive claims. We first examine economic literature on uncertainty and risk, which explains the extreme difficulty of making predictions in an environment of high uncertainty. We then situate journalism ‘future work’ within the literature on the social construction of the future, and using Fine’s model, outline strategies pursued in this construction. We conduct an exploratory qualitative content analysis of published predictions written by ‘future of news’ experts, examining the strategies they use to legitimize their predictive claims. Findings show mixed support for Fine’s model and some support for rival strategies for supporting claims about the future, for example, a path-dependence strategy of extending the known present into the future.

With the intercession of the new media, individuals were able to write news and publish videos through their participations on Social Networking Sites such as Facebook, Twitter and blogs. This article is centered on citizen journalism which comes from the participation of citizens in making news. The main purpose of this article is to show the relationship between citizen journalism and mainstream journalism in covering Syrian news, and how peace journalism represents in both. A questionnaire designed to analyze the content of five Syrian events on Aljazeera news channel. The five Syrian events are Al-Bayda and Baniyas, the siege of Bab Amr, al Qusair and Khalidiya in Homs, Yarmouk camp, chemical on Al Gota. Result shows that Aljazeera uses a significant number of footages and contents which came from Syrian citizen journalists; it is presented as 46.3 %. Due to shared political agendas between Aljazeera and citizen journalists, Aljazeera depends on their footages more than their own reporters while they are covering Syrian news. Majority of footages reflect Syrian opposition and the killing of Syrians which resulted from Al-Assad Regime. We suggest that news content published by citizen journalists on their blogs and YouTube should be analyzed for other studies.

Eyewitness user-generated content has dominated the study of citizen journalism in crisis and conflict zones. However, the convergence of online networked technologies, like social media, collaborative mapping and real-time information management, gives ordinary people the capacity to commit acts of journalism from afar. Networks of virtual volunteers act as digital humanitarians who rapidly assemble situational awareness at the onset of natural and human-caused disasters through crowdsourcing, data analysis and crisis mapping to aid on-the-ground emergency response. While they have been studied through the multi-disciplinary lens of information science, computation, geography and emergency management, digital humanitarians have received little attention in the journalism literature. This exploratory study contends that the knowledge-based content produced by these groups is citizen journalism akin to data-driven investigative news. Two case studies and a cross-case analysis consider this argument through...

Social media, comment threads, and other means of online communication are important to journalists’ work processes, but expand their workload and pose challenges to their professional identity. The concept of ‘engagement’ is used by news workers in New Zealand to describe the role of digitally mediated communication in their work. Engagement deserves scholarly treatment akin to concepts such as ‘participatory journalism’ because it is employed by journalists to place professional and practical limits on online interaction. Their decisions about engagement are based on professional commitments, past experiences, and the allocation of time and resources. Journalists in newsrooms that are already understaffed and under-resourced are expected to take on new tasks; like other digital laborers, journalists experience the interpenetration of work and leisure and the incorporation of affective and unpaid work. News workers have an opportunity to develop best practices for engagement and determine how and when they should engage online.

A collaborative relationship between citizen journalists and professional journalists has long been an aspiration for many media scholars. While tensions surrounding professional control are significant, scholars also have to consider the structural dynamics of content online and across social media networks, particularly in an era of the corporatized and commercialized Web. The rise of social discovery tools and algorithms is also addressed. This article aims to bring to light these concerns and moves the conversation about citizen journalism forward by proposing a model that identifies the pathway through which news organizations gather, select, package, and disseminate citizen journalism content.

There are considerable differences in the structure, content, and delivery of tertiary journalism degrees in Australia as identified in a 2014 Office for Learning and Teaching (OLT) Innovation and Development Project report on graduate qualities and journalism curriculum renewal. To address this situation, the author argues for journalism capstone units, designed by both journalism educators and news editors, to include a series of agreed criteria and standards to guide journalism educators, and for journalism students to demonstrate not only a broad knowledge base together with research and communication skills but also entrepreneurial skills to help them adapt to new media markets and jobs.

This article explores network journalism (connective journalism) and shows how citizen journalists in Syria are trained and supported through the network journalism model. The article applies three major concepts of connective journalism: engagement with social networks, negotiation, and maintaining a connection with norms and values of journalism, and suggests a fourth aspect: protection. Through a case study of the newsgathering and mentoring process leading up to stories being posted on the Damascus Bureau website (damascusbureau.org), a news site dedicated to publishing the stories of Syrian citizen journalists, we show that connective journalism is a viable model for citizens to tell their community’s story to each other and the world.

Informed, critical business journalism is vital to a well-functioning society. But students are typically reluctant to study business journalism, often finding the topic intimidating. This article outlines how the author has taught a business journalism course in New Zealand and the United States. The course uses a variety of methods to help the students learn and remain engaged with the material. The course has been successful, with students—who often have no business backgrounds—subsequently becoming business journalists. The article reports on student and industry responses to the course and reflects on what could be done to enhance it further.

Influenced by the practices of social scientists, data journalists seek to create stories that frame social reality through quantitative data analysis. While the use of statistics by journalists is not new, exponential growth in available data and a desire for source material unmediated by political and public-relations framings have seen data journalism increasingly embraced—to varying degrees—by newsrooms, and editors increasingly seek reporters who can think in computational ways. Journalism programs keen to incorporate data journalism in curricula face a unique set of issues, including a lack of scholarship on data journalism education and how to teach it. This article reports on both the pilot of an international postgraduate collaboration in data journalism education in 2015, in which postgraduate students at two universities investigated state-run gambling in Aotearoa–New Zealand, and the introduction of an undergraduate semester-long paper in data journalism at one of the universities. A visiting Fulbright specialist supported both initiatives, helping to develop staff and student data skills, kick-start a joint investigation by students, and lay the groundwork for future international collaborations. Thanks to his visit, New Zealand educators and students were able to seek support from, a global community of journalists and journalism educators working in data journalism. Set against a literature that predicts an increasing role for computational journalism, this article explores the successes and challenges of these cases of experiential journalism education. It explores the complex but not fatal issues of data competency among both instructors and students, collaboration between geographically distinct programs, access to sensitive datasets, and publication of student work.

This study explores how recent global news startups have connected freelancers with traditional news organizations. Through 10 interviews with founders and editors, the results reveal a networked marketplace of global journalism: the startups build on new technologies as well as on-the-ground evidence as their business model and de-localize the distribution of news within a digital marketplace. Supplemented by a content analysis of their edited stories (N = 226), global journalism as an outcome of this marketplace is discussed.

The broadening reliance on algorithms to generate news automatically, referred to as “automated journalism” or “robot journalism”, has significant practical, sociopolitical, psychological, legal and occupational implications for news organizations, journalists and their audiences. One of its most controversial yet unexplored aspects is the algorithmic authorship. This paper integrates a multidisciplinary theoretical framework of algorithmic creativity, bylines and full disclosure policies, legal views on computer-generated works, and an empirical study of attribution regimes in pioneering organizations that produce journalistic content automatically. Fieldwork included quantitative content analysis of automated stories on 12 websites and interviews with key figures from seven of the organizations that agreed to be interviewed, despite the general reluctance of news organizations to be identified with such an endeavor. The study detects major discrepancies between the perceptions of authorship and creditin...

This article examines the current state of science coverage in German print media. It deals with the following questions: (1) how the main characteristics of science journalism can be described, (2) whether there is a difference between various scientific fields, and (3) how different definitions of science journalism lead to differing findings. Two forms of science coverage were analyzed in a standardized, two-part content analysis of German newspapers ( N = 1730 and N = 1640). The results show a significant difference between a narrow and a broad definition of science journalism. In the classic understanding, science journalism is prompted by scientific events and is rather noncritical. Science coverage in a broad sense is defined by a wider range of journalistic styles, driven by non-scientific events, and with a focus on the statements of scientific experts. Furthermore, the study describes the specific role of the humanities and social sciences in German science coverage.

This article draws on ‘hyperlocal’ journalism scholarship to explore the civic functions of Australian local reporting in the digital age. Through place-based case studies based on interviews with media and civic leaders from three disparate communities, we find community groups are engaging with social media, particularly Facebook, to connect locals to services and community news. Community service providers are increasingly adept at using social media and, in many cases, prefer it to legacy media to gather, disseminate and exchange news. Concurrently, legacy media have lost newsroom resources that limit their practice of ‘shoe leather’ journalism and increase their dependence on official sources without independent verification. Yet, journalists are adapting to newsroom cutbacks by forming symbiotic relationships with non-media news providers, including local police. We find there are promising alternatives for fostering civic discourse and engagement through digital technologies despite less traditional local news and a reduced capacity for verified journalism.

Sports journalists have often been criticised for their casual approach to work and cheerleading content in stories. This style of journalism contrasts with the traditional norms of objectivity employed in other areas of newsrooms. It is also opposed to the critical watchdog role considered essential to objective reporting. To examine how sports journalists operate in relation to being cheerleaders or critical watchdogs, this study utilises the Australia–India Test cricket series of 2014–15 as a platform to investigate sports journalists’ views, and the content they produce. It employs in-depth interviews with 18 sports journalists from Australian and Indian newspaper organisations in conjunction with a content analysis of 1265 articles from eight Australian and Indian publications. This allows a comparison of the perceptions of the sports journalists with what they are producing in their stories. Selecting a major international event with historical importance, such as the Australia–India Test series, is...

The rise of sound-bite news is one of the most widely bemoaned findings in political communication research. Yet, the detrimental effects of this trend have been more assumed than demonstrated. This study examines one consequence of sound-bite journalism: the creation of incomplete argument, in which speakers presenting their political position in the news do not also justify it. Drawing on data about television news in Germany, Russia, and the United States, it shows that shrinking sound bites consistently reduce the probability of opinion justification across widely differing national contexts. Sound-bite journalism emerges as harmful to television news' ability to produce public justification.

Social media use has become essential for journalists. Although previous research has explored how journalists use social media, less is known about how journalism and mass communication programs incorporate social media in their coursework. Based on our survey of 323 students and 125 faculty in American universities, this study offers a comparative analysis of social media use among journalism faculty and students, both personally and in coursework. Faculty and students in our sample report using Facebook more frequently for personal reasons, whereas Twitter is the main platform required by faculty members for class assignments. We also found that students’ majors and faculty’s experience in the industry influenced not only how they evaluated the utility of social media in coursework but also how they utilized various platforms in classes.

Teachers of business and economic journalism are developing creative approaches to attracting students and educating them in a field many find daunting. To recruit, some avoid using the terms business or economic in course titles, preferring financial basics and financial literacy. Many use novel classroom techniques: to educate students about stock markets, for instance, some set up competitions where students vie to develop the most profitable portfolio. Provocative videos, cleverly developed assignments and trips to business-news sites are highlights in some courses. This article reviews approaches by a broad array of teachers.

This study utilizes interviews with 53 full-time digital journalists to understand how they construct their identity. With social identity theory as a framework, the study found that medium, organizational backing, and role conception represent characteristics essential to being a digital journalist (the in-group). While the journalists also identified blogging, social media, and citizen journalism as characteristics that, in some cases, exclude persons from calling themselves digital journalists (the out-group). These results are then interpreted through the lens of social identity theory.

This article suggests viewing journalism as a structure of public communication that is enacted through the practices of various actors at sites that go beyond the newsroom. In this practice-oriented understanding, journalists, audiences and all citizen actors in-between these traditional positions take part in the enactment of journalism. This article focuses on the “in-betweeners” of journalism: citizens who are not employed as full-time journalists yet are also not part of what is considered to be the typical audience. It explores the participatory practices of activists, freelancers, academics, local residents, artists and students who are participating in the journalistic process at three different European journalism outlets: Voima, an alternative monthly magazine (Finland); Cafebabel, a participatory online magazine (France and other European countries); and Sodra Sidan, a public journalism-style local newspaper (Sweden). The article draws on interviews with 69 actors as well as observations regard...

Various studies report that cultural journalism increasingly focuses on service and entertainment instead of serious arts coverage. The press prioritizes popular culture over traditional high arts to a growing extent. However, this shift in journalistic attention does not necessarily signify a straightforward decline in aesthetic standards, as popular cultural forms like film have developed along the lines of high art principles in the past decades. This article charts trends in American, Dutch, French, and German film journalism between 1955 and 2005. It demonstrates that coverage is typified by a serious aesthetic approach from the 1970s onwards. The principles of art are seen to steer journalists’ attention to an important degree: the review remains the predominant journalistic genre, and newspapers devote more attention to films by prestigious directors than strictly commercial moviemakers. As such, film’s prominence in the press does not seem to indicate a decline in serious cultural journalism but r...

Western media studies have largely presented the relationship between new and traditional media as adversarial, often claiming that the Internet challenges the survival of traditional journalism. Focusing on China, this article re-evaluates this relationship in a non-Western context. Relying on extensive interviews with Chinese journalists, we argue that the relationship between China’s print and Internet media is symbiotic. Although it does challenge traditional business models, the Internet also helps journalists improve their commercial competitiveness and presents new channels for resisting censorship and expanding the boundaries of permissible reporting.

This article draws on an empirical analysis of the testimonies of Chinese journalists to (re)consider the nature of professionalism in contemporary Chinese journalism. We draw on earlier work by a number of scholars to develop an analysis of the testimonies in order to trace both how professionalism is shaped by cultural, social, organizational, institutional and political influences, and how these work to shape everyday journalistic practices and outputs. We conclude that professionalization is best understood not as a shift towards an ideal version of autonomous, public service–oriented journalism, but instead as a process informed by diverse and somewhat contradictory influences, including many that are internal to China as well as some that are near universal. Not only are journalists clearly concerned to be distinguished from ‘propagandists’, but editors also engage in tactical practices and organizational strategies that allow a meaningful autonomy from the state. These are not only influenced by conflicting normative discourses of journalism but have also become both a necessity for establishing the legitimacy of individual journalists and news institutions and to facilitate their viability in highly competitive news markets.

Cross-national comparative studies of journalists generally focus on the demographic characteristics and/or the values and role-perception of journalists. Systematic studies of journalistic skills have been rare, however. This article reports the findings from a comparative study of journalists from Britain, Estonia, Germany, Italy, Poland, and Sweden. Based on an email survey of 2238 news professionals, journalistic skills can be grouped into three distinctive dimensions: reporting, editing, and networking skills. The data also show a number of similarities, but also important differences regarding the importance journalists give to different professional skills in different European countries.

Scholars, editors, and reporters have tended to treat news and journalism as synonymous. This conception has privileged a particular kind of journalism often called the Anglo-American model. This study argues journalism has been a type of news reporting for a relatively brief period. Using the concept of epigenetics, the authors argue that journalism is usefully seen as a coating on the DNA of news, which has existed for centuries. Journalism emerged as a result of special factors. As powerful as the Anglo-American model was, it was never fully realized, nor could it become the regnant model throughout the world. Journalism will carry on, but along with many other types of news, all of which carry coatings from the past.

The longstanding tension between journalists and academics is explored by analysing data from qualitative interviews with 25 journalists and scientists using an analytical framework derived from Bourdieu’s field theory. The article empirically shows how journalism and science are both constructed around the opposition between knowledge (content) and communication (form). Based on the analysis of narratives in the communication processes between the two fields, the article shows that scientists and journalists take different positions according to the existing ideals within their respective fields, revealing different science-communication habitus. The article presents a typology of proximity and distance, in which communication between the fields becomes easier or more difficult as both fields try to protect their historic professional identities.

Amid growing calls for greater collaboration between journalism and computer programming, this article examines a salient case study that reveals processes of communication, exchange, and work production at the intersection of these social and occupational worlds. We focus on a key stage of the Knight-Mozilla News Technology partnership – namely, an online ‘Learning Lab’ through which 60 individuals sought to coordinate around a shared interest in the innovation of journalism through open-source software. Drawing on the science and technology studies concepts of trading zones and boundary objects, we explore how distinct understandings about news and technology converged, diverged, and ultimately blended around three thematic ambitions: making news more process-oriented, participatory, and socially curated. This window onto boundary negotiations in journalism provides a glimpse into the future development of news and its norms and values, as programmers and their ethics assume a greater role in the journalistic field – in the very heart of some of its leading institutions.

As devices become a more visible and integral part of media practice, it is important for researchers and scholars to attend to the ways in which philosophies, professional discourses, and technical limits structure the ways these technologies are deployed. The 35mm camera is a technological waypoint between earlier large-format cameras and contemporary digital photography and offers a useful historical example for interrogating the relationship between seemingly inert technical operations and journalism’s modes of meaning production. To that end, this article offers a theoretical perspective for interrogating the 35mm camera through the lens of Latour, with the aim of developing a schema for integrating devices into the cultural study of media and communication.

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.

Sports journalism is an important part of contemporary media, but it is a sector that has not received the detailed analysis of other areas of the industry. Utilising Bourdieu’s field theory, this study locates sports journalism in the journalistic field before mapping the sports journalism field in the context of broadsheet/quality news organisations. It achieves this by examining the sports departments of six media outlets in Australia, India and the United Kingdom. In-depth interviews with 36 sports journalists and a content analysis of 4541 web and print articles are employed to focus on issues such as content, publishing applications and approaches, workloads, and commercial factors. This allows an investigation of sports journalism at national, organisational and individual levels. The results show economic capital is a dominant factor in sports journalism.

This article reviews the public and citizen journalism movements of recent years and offers some perspectives on how the current and future journalism can function to benefit democratic public life. A major argument of this article is that ‘conversation’ defines news as a process of negotiated social meaning and that it should be the organizing principle of today’s journalism. It is also argued that traditional journalistic principles such as objectivity and distance may no longer be useful to today’s citizen journalism and that we see a rise of new journalistic principles such as interactivity and transparency. Finally, borrowing from deliberative democracy literature, a bottom-up flow model to connect citizen and public journalism is discussed.

The period 2009–2010 was characterised as an industry-transforming period of economic and professional “crisis” for news journalism, involving significant journalism job losses in most developed nations. However, at the same time that media employers were laying off journalists in unprecedented numbers, they were still hiring a small amount of new recruits to work as journalists. These job advertisements therefore provide a rich source of information about how employers defined “journalism” during a period of transformation. Focusing on jobs advertised by Australian media companies, this article shows that journalism was not a high priority as they sought to restructure. Employers advertised four times as many jobs for advertising, sales and marketing staff as they did for journalists. When they did seek to hire journalists, employers retained conservative views about the nature of journalism as a trade rather than a profession. They were focused upon centralised, low-pay positions where candidates’ malle...

The paper presents the results of the monitoring of St. Petersburg newspapers held in January-May 2015. The monitoring included qualitative and quantitative study of the content and evaluation of all the materials published in St. Petersburg newspapers. Special attention was given to such sections as Society, Politics, Law, Economy. The purpose of monitoring regional press was to detect errors or misstatements in the media sources, including online media. Semantic distortion was found in 204 publications. Violations of journalism ethics give rise to the problem of information distortion and, as a consequence, useless, poor-quality information deforms the reality communicated to the audience. Systematizing the violations of ethical principles of journalism give a clear picture of the present-day Russian mass media and open up the ways to improve self-regulatory mechanisms. The study reported here is unique as it is the first research focusing on ethical violations in Russian mass media. The results of the study are used as case studies to analyze ethical conflicts, as materials to promote professional standards for journalists investigating corruption schemes, etc. The monitoring data is included in the study that will be discussed at the permanent international seminar on the ethics of journalism Ethics of Mass Communication: Research in Russia and abroad. The first seminar was held on October 3-4, 2013 at the High School of Journalism and Mass Communications, St. Petersburg State University, with the support of the German House of Research and Innovation in Moscow and the Consulate General of Germany in St. Petersburg.

Twitter has been widely adopted into journalistic workflows, as it provides instant and widespread access to a plethora of content about breaking news events, while also serving to disseminate reporting on those events. The content on Twitter, however, poses several challenges for journalists, as it arrives unfiltered, full of noise, and at an alarming velocity. Building on the results of the first national survey of social media use in Irish newsrooms, this paper investigates the adoption of social media into journalistic workflows, journalists' attitudes towards various aspects of social media, and the content and perspectives generated by these online communities. It particularly investigates how Twitter shapes the processes of sourcing and verification in newsrooms, and assesses how notions of trust factor into the adoption of the Twitter platform and content into these processes. The paper further analyses relationships between journalist profile and adopted practices and attitudes, and seeks to understand how Twitter operates in the current journalistic landscape. While this paper draws its data from a survey of journalists in Ireland, the analysis of the relationship between trust, sourcing, and verification reveals broader patterns about journalistic values, and how these values and practices may operate in the field of journalism as a whole.

This paper reports on a survey of the resources and capabilities, including infrastructure and logistics in 14 university-level Bangladeshi journalism institutions. Progress of the university journalism programmes is hampered by poorly resourced convergent news laboratory, shortage of research and teaching staff with professional media experience. It posits that university journalism programmes in Bangladesh, regardless of their ideological inclinations, should revamp their curriculum to emphasize on practical courses so as to keep pace with changing technologies in the newsroom.

Twitter has become the leading social media platform for journalists to break news, build a following, and interact with the public. Social media offer journalists and citizens a communication space, where they can discuss issues, provide context for the news, and foster community values. This study examines how expectations about journalistic practices on social media influence audience engagement with journalists, and in turn, perceptions of editorial bias. Drawing on a two-wave panel survey from the United States, we first find that expectations about the practice of “good journalism” on social media predict engagement with journalists on Twitter. Second, these personal interactions lead to lower levels of perceived bias in the news media. Finally, expectations of journalists’ performance on social media are explored as a moderator of perceived editorial bias. This study adds to the growing literature analyzing the causes and outcomes of audience engagement with journalists on social media.

This paper aims at building a conceptual bridge called Valuable Journalism between quality journalism and users’ experience of quality. To that end a questionnaire was designed, built on previous data and triangulated with the results of three simultaneously organized qualitative audience studies. The distinct dimensions of valuable journalism, as well as their interrelatedness and internal consistency, were then tested with explorative and confirmative factor analyses. The findings suggest how the resulting four dimensions—urgency, public connection, understanding the region and audience responsiveness—and 13 news subjects may provide a good starting point for journalists and news organizations who want to focus more on what users and audiences actually experience as valuable journalism.

During the past decade, great changes have occurred in journalism, many of them due to the rapid rise of social media. What has happened to American journalists in the decade since the early 2000s, a time of tumultuous changes in society, economics, and technology? What impact have the many cutbacks and the dramatic growth of the internet had on US journalists’ attitudes, and behaviors—and even on the definition of who is a journalist? To answer the questions raised above, in late 2013 we conducted a national online survey of 1080 US journalists. The survey is part of the American Journalist project, which conducted similar surveys of US journalists in 1982, 1992, and 2002. We found that US journalists use social media mainly to check on what other news organizations are doing and to look for breaking news events. A majority also use social media to find ideas for stories, keep in touch with their readers and viewers, and find additional information. Thus, journalists use social media predominantly as inf...