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Based on a study of U.S.-tagged items in a global database of fact-checked statements about the novel coronavirus throughout the first year of the pandemic, this article explores the nature of fact-checkers’ “retroactive gatekeeping.” This term is introduced here to describe the process of assessing the veracity of information after it has entered the public domain rather than before. Although an overwhelming majority of statements across 16 thematic categories were deemed false and debunked, often repeatedly, misinformation continued to circulate freely and widely.

A growing number of newsrooms are experimenting with Virtual Reality (VR) and other immersive storytelling techniques, typically supported by technology companies that see journalism as a potential...

The necessity of innovation within the newsroom, and the rise of entrepreneurial initiatives outside it, have become increasingly apparent in the past decade. A common thread in this discourse is the desire for young journalists to be “change agents” who foster innovation and thus stretch existing boundaries in the profession. Employers hope new hires, seen as attuned to their generation’s news use and as offering fresh knowledge and insights, will be able to drive new journalism initiatives that can attract a younger audience and so improve the enterprise’s odds for economic sustainability. Using a longitudinal three-wave survey among students enrolled in two leading journalism programs in Britain and the Netherlands, we explore whether students’ perceptions of innovation and entrepreneurialism are in line with this optimistic industry discourse. Do students perceive themselves as change agents who will be challenging and potentially shifting the boundaries of journalism? Or do they adhere to traditional ideas about norms and behaviors that have been ingrained in the doxa and habitus of the journalistic field over previous decades? We find that although journalism students favor the idea of “innovation” and see the value of engaging audiences, they define change predominantly in terms of technology rather than more substantive cultural transformation.

One day during the run-up to the 2010 UK General Election, Lis Howell was listening to a BBC radio news analysis of a marginal constituency. She heard one male voice after another for nearly ten minutes. Back at her desk, Howell wrote a comment piece for Broadcast magazine – and a campaign to increase the number of female authority figures appearing on air in Britain was born. Howell and her colleagues began tracking the use of women as experts on leading British broadcast news programmes. The data showed that men consistently outnumbered female experts on the nation’s flagship television and radio news shows by a ratio of about 4.4:1 – a ratio disproportionate to the actual presence in British society of female authority figures in various occupations. This study, which also incorporates interview and questionnaire data from journalists and expert women, suggests two key reasons for the disparity: journalists applying preconceived attitudes about “the best person,” and women experts fearing being seen as “pushy” – or alternatively, seeking to be wooed.

Amid ongoing disruption, discourse about journalism increasingly emphasizes innovation within the newsroom and the rise of entrepreneurial initiatives outside it. This article uses the concept of interpretive repertoires to explore how students enrolled in journalism programmes in Britain and the Netherlands understand innovation and entrepreneurialism in relation to changing industry circumstances and long-standing conceptualizations of occupational norms and behaviours. We find shared repertoires that embrace technological change, but generally within an acceptance of traditional normative practice.

Drawing on insights from field theory, this article examines journalists’ textual and discursive construction of entrepreneurial journalism from 2000 to 2014. The goal is to understand how such discursive practices contribute to the articulation and legitimation of entrepreneurial journalism as a form of cultural capital as the field’s economic imperatives change. The findings suggest that "entrepreneurial journalism" is a condensational term: it is defined broadly and loosely but generally in a positive way. Despite the potential for disruption to long-standing journalistic doxa, particularly normative stances related to the separation of editorial and commercial interests, much of the examined discourse seems to reflect a belief that entrepreneurialism is not only acceptable but even vital for survival in a digital age.

For more than 50 years, our understanding of journalism drew on theories that emerged in an environment in which the components of a mediated message could be isolated well enough to measure and track. Yet today we live in a media world that is simultaneously immersive and interconnected, instantaneous and iterative, and individualized to an extent unimaginable a generation ago. In this environment, theories positing ‘media effects’ are considerably less practical or meaningful than they once were, a topic explored in the first half of this chapter. Some of the ways that contemporary journalism scholars are actively recontextualizing the field are then outlined, followed by consideration of the proposition that our best hope for understanding the “effects” of digital journalism may be to focus on the diversity of relationships it engenders. Looking at connections and interactions can profitably guide our study of this fluid, holistic media world.

This study considers fact-checkers as innovators and entrepreneurs. It explores funding models as well as perceptions about three core aspects of a successful journalistic enterprise: audiences, value propositions, and resources. Findings indicate particular attention to media literacy and civic engagement, independence, and transparency. In addition, many fact-checkers see their role as not merely extending traditional journalism but also correcting some of its shortcomings.

This in-depth case study examines attempts to transform a traditional newsroom to one oriented around civic journalism principles, offering a unique look at the resistance toward those principles even in a digital environment that facilitates new audience relationships. Civic journalism emphasizes understanding and addressing community concerns from a citizen perspective. This study finds that journalists still struggle to integrate citizens’ contributions into newsroom practice in meaningful ways.

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.

Newswork in the early 21st century is not just changing. It is changing with unrelenting speed, unprecedented scope, and unforeseeable consequences. This chapter focuses on what sort of methodical inquiry might best inform scholarly assessment of journalistic role performance amid this turbulence. The proposition here is that just as the optimal performance of contemporary journalism involves a holistic amalgamation of inward-facing professional sensibilities and outward-facing social ones, the optimal conduct of contemporary journalism research is similarly holistic. It addresses questions that can best be answered quantitatively-questions such as who is performing which tasks, and what the results look like-and also, crucially, the “how” and “why” questions at which qualitative scholars excel. Those questions typically are dealt with in separate studies, but the suggestion here is that the segmentation is not only unnecessary but also diminishes our ability to understand what’s really going on. Although there are innumerable ethnographic studies of newsrooms, their focus tends to be on journalistic activities and practitioners’ understanding or interpretation of those activities, with little attempt to explore broader social or civic roles or the ways in which journalists perform them. There are even more surveys and content analyses, but most are also narrowly focused.

Four times as many males as females appeared as experts on flagship television and radio news programmes in the United Kingdom as of the early 2010s. This study draws on four complementary sets of data to explore the reasons behind this disparity. The findings point to a combination of journalists’ news production processes and women’s perceptions of appropriate social norms and roles. A high proportion of woman experts surveyed lack confidence, saying they fear they will be perceived as self-promoting and “pushy” for wanting to appear on air. Broadcast journalists report women need to be persuaded and wooed, acting like “princesses” and therefore making male experts less trouble to recruit.

The nature of digital media challenges the explanatory power of effects theories that rest on a transmission model of communication. As essentially linear conceptualizations reliant on identification and measurement of discrete message components, these twentieth-century theories are poorly suited to contemporary journalistic structures and forms. This article adds to the call for a more richly theorized concept of relationship effects suitable to an immersive, iterative, and interconnected environment of news producers and products.

Diffusion of innovations theory typically has been applied to the spread of a particular technology or practice rather than the interplay of a cluster of innovations. This case study of a news company undergoing significant change seeks to offer a deeper understanding of multi-faceted industry upheaval by considering the diffusion of three interdependent yet distinct changes. Findings suggest technological change faces the fewest hurdles, as journalists recognize the need to adapt their practices to newer capabilities. Changes to audience relationships face greater resistance, while responses to changes to the professional culture of journalism remain the most tepid.

A note on conflicts of interest: The media ethics world is growing, but it is still a small one. Many of us who do scholarship in the area know each other and have worked together on various projec...

This study of local British newspaper journalists focuses on three aspects of entrenched newsroom culture -- news values and norms, work routines and outputs, and occupational roles – to explore the boundaries that journalists see as distinguishing them from outside contributors. Findings suggest they view UGC from a traditional professional perspective and weigh its benefits in terms of its contribution to the journalism they produce. While most are open to its inclusion on newspaper websites, particularly as a traffic builder and supplemental source of hyperlocal information, they believe UGC can undermine journalistic norms and values unless carefully monitored – a gatekeeping task they fear cannot fit within newsroom routines threatened by resource constraints of increasing severity.

In May 2007, Scots voted into office a party and a political leader publicly committed to holding a referendum on independence from Great Britain within four years. This study analyzes nearly forty-eight hundred comments appended to stories on the scotsman.com Web site, offering one of the first detailed looks at user-generated content on a newspaper-affiliated Web site in the context of a national election. It explores the evolving nature of online political community and the ways in which newspapers are accommodating a networked environment in their political coverage, addressing issues of citizen and journalistic engagement within a communal space.

The authors explore how technology has altered the work processes and activities in news organizations. They show how story ideageneration, research, sourcing, processing, packaging, and repurposinghave changed and created needs for news skills and capabilities.

The following essays were presented at an Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication conference panel entitled: “New Media, New Scholarship: the Internet's Potential in the World of Ideas.” Panelist Mitch Stephens challenges the academic world's worshipfulness of the printed word by arguing for new understandings through the use of new technologies. Stephens posits that we should move away from our devotion to print to achieve new spatial and temporal meanings derived from the Internet. Panelist Jane Singer debates the authority of peer-reviewed print journals over what academic communities value. With the Internet, there can be new metrics for how to value content based on user-generated authority. In addition to a jury of peers, she argues for the importance of a jury of readers. She suggests that in the academy “getting published counts, but getting read should count too.”

Despite the spread of blogs in mass media and in academia, little scholarly work has explored their use within the journalism and mass communication curriculum. This study, based on incorporation of blogs in ten classes during five semesters—undergraduate and graduate, skills and conceptual—examines student use of the format in relation to theories of social and blended learning. Findings suggest that although students tend to approach blogging as yet another assignment, blogs facilitate their engagement with course material and one another.

When everyone can be a publisher, what distinguishes the journalist? This article considers contemporary challenges to institutional roles in a digital media environment, then focuses on three broad journalistic normative values -- authenticity, accountability and autonomy -- that affect the credibility of both the journalist and the content he or she provides. A set of questions that can help citizens determine the trustworthiness of the information available to them also is provided.

Online media present both old and new ethical issues for journalists who must make decisions in an interactive, instantaneous environment short on normative standards or guidelines. This user-friendly book guides prospective and professional journalists through ethical questions encountered only online. Including real-life examples and perspectives from online journalists in every chapter, the book examines the issues of gathering information, reporting, interviewing, and writing for mainstream news organizations on the Web. It considers the ethical implications of linking, interactivity, verification, transparency, and Web advertising, as well as the effects of convergence on newsrooms. It also addresses the question of who is a journalist and what is journalism in an age when anyone can be a publisher. Each chapter includes a complex case study that promotes critical thinking and classroom discussion about how to apply the ethical issues covered.

This chapter suggests that in an open media environment that presents no limits on who can publish, journalists cite norms not only as identity markers of the professional news worker but also as boundary markers between professionals and non-professionals. It considers the boundary related to social media in the more specific context of social journalism is an outward-facing one, involving relationships between journalists, sources, and publics. The chapter shows how greater newsroom efforts are playing out in relation to the rise of social media in the late 2000s and the more recent emergence of the entrepreneurial journalist. It considers two related aspects of social journalism that initially prompted journalists to declare their professional distance but that increasingly have come to be seen as at least potentially compatible with practitioner norms. The first involves content from outside the newsroom, and the second involves journalists' own activities in social media spaces.

Rapid change in the news industry and the prevalence of layoffs, buyouts, and closings have led many newsworkers to experience job insecurity and worry about their long-term futures in journalism. Our research uses a case study of employees at an independently owned media company in the United States to explore the various ways newsworkers respond to this culture of job insecurity and how their responses affect efforts to change news practices. Findings demonstrate that those who believe their jobs are at risk are unlikely to change their practices and even some who perceive job security are reticent to initiate change. As a result, the culture of job insecurity in the news industry has a limiting effect on changes to journalism practice.

In their coverage of the 2004 political campaign, editors of Web sites affiliated with major U.S. newspapers continued to emphasize their role as providers of credible information. But they moved toward seeing that information less as an end product than as a basis for user engagement, participation, and personalization. This study, which builds on a similar study conducted after the 2000 election, suggests journalists may be taking steps toward reshaping their gatekeeping role to accommodate the interactive nature of the Internet.

As media companies test and implement newsroom “convergence,” growing numbers of journalists are producing content not only for their own employer but also for other media outlets with which that employer has a business relationship. This article, based on case studies in four converged news markets, explores journalists’ perceptions of normative pressures in this new media environment, particularly in relation to the overarching concept of public service. The findings suggest that although journalists do not see convergence itself as posing significant ethical problems, they do raise concerns related to specific components of public service, including a devotion to accuracy, an avoidance of sensationalism, and independence from economic pressures.

Newsroom experiments with convergence—a sharing of news staffs, technologies, products, and geography—disrupt not just the norms and routines of newspaper news work hut, more profoundly, the professional socialization of print journalists and their perception of themselves as a distinctive kind of news worker. This article draws on case studies of four converged newsrooms to examine conceptual and sociological shifts among newspaper journalists. Findings suggest print journalists are undergoing resocialization to an expanded view of professionalism; ingrained habits and learned skills related to newsroom structure and storytelling norms are more resistant to change.

This study explores how the social dimensions of a reporter’s world shape ethical decisions through parallel surveys of daily newspaper reporters in Israel and one Midwestern US state. Through regression analysis, we found that personal factors (gender, years of education) were not related to ethical decisions nor were professional factors (professional experience, professional membership, having studied journalism). In contrast, the social context element (country of practice) was relevant for two of three ethical situations. We also found that personal, professional and social dimensions varied in their utility to ethical decision-making from situation to situation. Considering a reporter’s ethical predisposition, this study found that personal value systems may be more important for ethical decision-making than formal written codes. This study suggests that ethical foundations shared across nations can create cultural bridges – but that diverging ethical perspectives also may create journalistic barriers.