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When looking at journalism from a social movement perspective, there are two possible viewpoints. On the one side, the journalistic field, its rules and values, routines and practices, is external to the social movement milieu. On the other side, the very notion of journalism has always intertwined with grassroots communities of activists that rethink and reshape journalistic practices from a bottom-up perspective. In the first case, scholars investigate the interactions between social movements and journalism at large, where journalism denotes mainstream journalistic practices. In the second case, conversely, scholars research the development of so-called alternative and grassroots journalistic practices within activist communities and networks. Keywords: culture; internet and new media; political media content

Clear, impartial and engaging dissemination of engineering, technological and scientific endeavors is an important requirement for democratic societies. A massive amount of news and information is continuously available online - creating new challenges for journalists. We have developed a project-base bachelor course that introduces students to modern, professional technical journalism and advances their soft skills. Each student is required to create three features (i.e. two multimedia articles and one social media piece) that report on technology. Each created feature must contain an original multimedia component using state-of-the-art journalistic tools (e.g. videos, interactive graphics, animations). Those features that meet this requirement and fulfill journalistic standards are subsequently published online using a professional platform (i.e. WordPress). While writing in German is allowed, the use of English language is highly encouraged for crossing cultural boundaries and engaging the world-wide community. Students who are seeking a technical journalistic degree must also pass engineering courses. This concurrent technical journalism education is important for developing critical thinking and reporting. Furthermore the course increases gender-sensitivity in reporting, an important ongoing issue in a traditionally male dominated discipline.

In any discussion about a “post-truth age,” the audience is both part of the problem and part of the solution. The authority of journalism is called into question if everyone can participate in gen...

Journalism has enjoyed a rich and relatively stable history of professionalization. Scholars coming from a variety of disciplines have theorized this history, forming a consistent body of knowledge codified in national and international handbooks and canonical readers. However, recent work and analysis suggest that the supposed core of journalism and the assumed consistency of the inner workings of news organizations are problematic starting points for journalism studies. In this article, we challenge the consensual (self-)presentation of journalism – in terms of its occupational ideology, its professional culture, and its sedimentation in routines and organizational structures (cf. the newsroom) in the context of its reconfiguration as a post-industrial, entrepreneurial, and atypical way of working and of being at work. We outline a way beyond individualist or institutional approaches to do justice to the current complex transformation of the profession. We propose a framework to bring together these approaches in a dialectic attempt to move through and beyond journalism as it has traditionally been conceptualized and practiced, allowing for a broader definition and understanding of the myriad of practices that make up journalism.

Journalism is known to be culturally specific in historical terms, while cross-country studies have demonstrated differences in journalistic milieus in different political regimes. This article applies a multilevel, cross-national comparative research design to explore the patterns and sources of influence that act on the professional practices of European journalists as well as the ways they differ across different media systems. The research is more broadly framed within the mediatization approach, and it aims to explore the relationship between increased media logic and journalistic practices within specific digital mediascapes. This study also identifies the ways in which journalistic practices are influenced by both the macro level of the structural framework of the media system and the mezzo level of media organization. The institutional framework defines the digital media system/mediascape in terms of four dimensions: contemporary multimedia markets, globalization processes, cultural industry, and institutional inclusiveness. The data concerning the influences on journalism are drawn from surveys conducted in 28 Western, Central, and Eastern European countries as part of the 2012–2015 Worlds of Journalism Study. A cluster analysis produced four digital media systems. Furthermore, hierarchical multiple regression confirmed the predominant influence of structural levels on the perceptions of the influences on journalism – the mezzo organizational level and macro level of the digital media system additionally explained the variance of the contextual influences on journalistic practices beyond individual differences. Variations in the different influences are shown between media system clusters. Moreover, the study introduces new questions regarding the mediatization of journalism and the mediatized condition.

Journalists and news archivists are natural allies. Journalists require previously published reporting as context for their new stories. Archivists ensure that material is preserved for future retrieval. Local news archives serve as a cultural, legal, economic, and genealogical resource for their communities. Now, the archiving function in news organizations is relegated to information vendors with little input from journalists. Rarely are journalism and archiving coupled in programs that train future professionals. This article explores the current state of journalism and library science education globally and suggests ways to strengthen education in news archiving in these programs.

Similar to prior cycles of newsroom specialization, news organizations must integrate the expertise of data journalists. Based upon 18 in-depth interviews with data journalism leaders within American newspapers, this study examines how newsrooms are restructuring to accommodate data news work. More specifically, the research identifies four “critical junctures” by which newspapers expand data journalism operations. The interviews establish that expanding a paper’s commitment to data journalism requires reorganizing the newsroom with new layers of structural complexity.

This monograph begins a rethinking of the idea of professional journalism ethics and examines how ethics is being employed as a key differentiator between amateurs (audience members, citizen journalists, and the like) and professionals, while other once-distinguishing features of journalism have become more widely dispersed and available to the public. How do the ethics of nonprofessionals practicing journalism differ, if at all, from everyday morality? Is journalism ethics—should journalism ethics be—the exclusive domain of professionals? This monograph considers the role of ethics in defining what it means to be a professional journalist; challenges to professional journalism’s autonomy from “amateurs” and how ethics is used to maintain boundaries between them; and objectivity as a tenet of professional journalism ethics. An analysis of 2016 U.S. presidential election campaign coverage is used to explore how and why a professional journalism centered on an ethic of objectivity can fail to perform ethically.

The profession of journalism has been affected by the rapid development of new communications technologies especially after the 2000s, along with the whole media sector. In today’s world, where everyone can become an amateur journalist or a producer of information through the social media, the position of the journalist has been opened for discussion once again. Newspapers and journalism, which was traditionally considered as the carrier of truth, has become an anonymous value that can be produced and consumed by anyone with the use of mobile devices. It has become important to think about journalism not only by its current state within the press industry, but together with the contents of the journalism education. With this aim, semi-structured interviews were conducted with nine journalism students and graduates. The main focus of these interviews is the current state of the journalism education and the future of both the journalism education and the journalism profession in this context. The outcome of the study has revealed that the journalism education is inadequate when it comes to keeping up with the new communication technologies.

This paper is structured in order to determine the effect of competency, training, and motivation on the performance of the infotainment reporters at PT SWC. The research method that is used is a descriptive analysis with collecting data through literature study and observation using the questionnaires. The research is conducted among the 64 reporters of PT Shandika Widya Cinema. The survey results revealed that an effort to increase the performance of the reporter needs to improve their competencies through continuous, technical training, focused on the journalistic technique, conceptual skills, and behavior. The development focusing on the technical journalism, communication skills, and behavior among the reporter will certainly improve their performance, loyalty, and dedication, which at last will increase the performance of the company. Keywords: competency, training, motivation, performance

Major news outlets such as the New York Times and the Guardian have recently launched ambitious immersive journalism projects. Adopting the technologies and rhetoric of immersive journalism first presented by Nonny de la Pena in 2010, these news outlets seek to use virtual reality and 360 video to create deeper engagement and empathy with their audiences. Yet can immersive journalism enhance empathy? This question is unanswerable without a thorough discussion of the concept of empathy, a discussion that so far has been missing in the academic literature and popular commentary. This article addresses the gap by presenting current debates about the definition of empathy and using these debates to critically assess de la Pena’s immersive journalism projects “IPSRESS” and “Hunger in Los Angeles,” and the recent New York Times “The Displaced” and Guardian’s “6 × 9” immersive journalism projects. The conclusion is twofold: On the one hand, I will argue that some immersive journalism projects are approaching a f...

Journalism hackathons are computationally based events in which participants create news product prototypes. In the ideal case, the gatherings are rooted in local community, enabling a wide set of institutional stakeholders (legacy journalists, hacker journalists, civic hackers, and the general public) to gather in conversation around key civic issues. This study explores how and to what extent journalism hackathons operate as a community-based laboratory for translating open data from practitioners to the public. Surfaced from in-depth interviews with event organizers encompassing nine countries, the findings illustrate that journalism hackathons are most successful when collaboration integrates civic organizations and community leaders.

Data-driven journalism can be considered as journalism’s response to the datafication of society. To better understand the key components and development of this still young and fast evolving genre, we investigate what the field itself defines as its ‘gold-standard’: projects that were nominated for the Data Journalism Awards from 2013 to 2016 (n = 225). Using a content analysis, we examine, among other aspects, the data sources and types, visualisations, interactive features, topics and producers. Our results demonstrate, for instance, only a few consistent developments over the years and a predominance of political pieces, of projects by newspapers and by investigative journalism organisations, of public data from official institutions as well as a glut of simple visualisations, which in sum echoes a range of general tendencies in data journalism. On the basis of our findings, we evaluate data-driven journalism’s potential for improvement with regard to journalism’s societal functions.

This study examines the perceptions that veteran digital journalists working at news organizations, the people who traditionally have hiring power, hold concerning how new entrants into the news industry are being prepared by journalism programs. Using in-depth interviews with 29 full-time digital journalists (journalists who only publish online), this study finds that while veterans said educators are doing a good job teaching technology, there is too much focus on it to the detriment of traditional journalism skills. These findings are then discussed through the lens of the theory of disruptive innovation.

This article examines journalists’ use of social media in France and the United States. Through in-depth interviews, we show that shared practical sensibilities lead journalists in both countries to use social media to accomplish routine tasks (e.g. gather information, monitor sources, and develop story ideas). At the same time, we argue that the incorporation of social media into daily practice also creates opportunities for journalists to garner peer recognition and that these opportunities vary according to the distinctive national fields in which journalists are embedded. Where American journalism incentivizes individual journalists to orient social media use toward audiences, French journalism motivates news organizations to use social media for these purposes, while leaving individual journalists to focus primarily on engaging with their peers. We position these findings in relation to debates on the uses of technologies across national settings.

Having been neglected by journalism scholars in the past, recent years have seen renewed interest in journalism’s role in everyday life, in addition to the traditional focus on journalism’s relatio...

This study examined instructor and learner experiences in a Journalism for Social Change (JSC) Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) designed to introduce learners around the world to constructive, solutions-based journalism techniques, as well as engage learners in developing news stories promoting positive change about critical child welfare (CW) issues. Mixed-methods were used to identify five themes across instructor and learner experiences. Results suggest MOOCs have the potential to increase learners’ journalism content knowledge and to mobilize citizen journalists around social justice topics impacting communities. This study adds to an ongoing body of work investigating MOOC design for changing attitudes.

During the past, few years, the journalistic community were expecting the time that the use of drones in their day to day job would be a common place. Due to ethics and privacy considerations, as well as regulation restrictions that are applied in most countries, this moment has yet to come. However, the use of drones during conflicts, civil unrests and environmental disasters is a proof that drone-generated content can be a valuable tool to tell a story. Their cost effectiveness and data gathering capabilities let them integrate and extend existing technologies. The current study aims at outlining the wanted /upcoming Drone Journalism services and the new potentials in the various forms of Journalism. Practical considerations regarding technical expertise and know-how in operating the new equipment, ethical issues and privacy implications that are related both to the profession of Journalism and the associated regulatory framework are also investigated.

In recent years data journalism has drawn significant attention not only in academic literature but also in the media sector. Data Journalism is a new form of journalism that has gradually appeared over the last decade, driven by the availability of data in digital form. Currently a significant amount of data journalism projects are being produced all over the world. These projects vary considerably in terms of structure and visualization characteristics. As a result of the above it would be interesting to propose a taxonomy of data journalism projects that can help future data journalists to choose the appropriate type of projects that will be suitable for their needs. This classification could be based on certain characteristics of the data journalism projects. The proposed taxonomy will take into account various parameters that play an important role in data journalist projects and especially in the type and the role of the visualization.

This study helps bridge the existing divide between the knowledge on health news reporting in mainstream mass media and health reporting in media outlets serving Native American populations in the United States. The current work presents the first survey of journalists working in Native-serving media outlets to identify role conceptions, perceived importance, and actual practices of health reporting. Aided in data collection by the Native American Journalists Association, findings indicate journalists (N = 100) place a high value on their role as disseminators of culturally relevant health information. However, results conflict in regard to the prioritization of health news reporting. Although journalists recognize health news should be a top priority, they point to a general lack of will from news leadership to make it an organizational priority. Additionally, results show that although journalists have comfort and confidence in health-related reporting, access to qualified sources remains an area for op...

In the context of the ongoing financial crisis in U.S. professional journalism, philanthropic foundation-supported nonprofits are increasingly proposed as a solution to the under-provision of civic-oriented news production. Drawing on an analysis of the social composition of boards of directors and interviews with foundation officials and nonprofit journalists, this article examines both the civic contributions and limitations of foundation-supported nonprofit news organizations. Foundations are shown to place many nonprofits in a Catch-22 because of competing demands to achieve both economic “sustainability” and civic “impact,” ultimately creating pressures to reproduce dominant commercial media news practices or orient news primarily for small, elite audiences. Further, media organizations dependent on foundation project-based funding risk being captured by foundation agendas and thus less able to investigate the issues they deem most important. Reforms encouraging more long-term, no-strings-attached funding by foundations, along with development of small donor and public funding, could help nonprofits overcome their current limitations.

Journalism education in India is framed in the higher education system, comprising of programs in the universities, both government-supported and media-backed private institutions, as well as in-service and short-term courses offered by press associations and other organizations. They are offered at different levels from certificate to diploma to both undergraduates and postgraduates. Due to requirements of the media industry, there is a constant friction about the need to balance the academic and professional aspects in the curriculum. This has led to skepticism in the past about the relevance of formal journalism education. However, with globalization and growth of the media sector, there is an enhanced need for professionals. Many big media groups have launched journalism programs. Institutional and professional aspects of the programs in India and issues pertaining to curriculum, responses, and critique have been factored in this article.

The article presents a general picture of higher education institutions offering journalism undergraduate, graduate, and doctoral programs located in different parts of the Russian Federation. Monitoring websites of all the universities with journalism education discovered 150 such institutions. They are unevenly dispersed around the country, but represent a unified system financially supported and quality controlled by the government. Educational institutions mainly in state-owned but also private universities teach future journalists at undergraduate as well as graduate levels following international degree systems. Training is mainly in Russian but also in several national languages enhancing cultural pluralism. The article also discusses media revolution that is challenging journalism education in diverse market conditions.

As new actors assert their voices into global discussions, the boundaries of journalism are continuously tested and tugged at. Some, like citizen journalists and alternative community media organisations, are relatively well documented by scholars. Others present a grey area in our understanding of who makes up the perceived “in club” of journalism. One such area of emerging journalistic boundary research is about the media outputs of non-governmental organisations (NGOs), whose staff have traditionally been seen as sources for or stringers to journalists. Technological advances in information communications, increased staffing capacity and more sophisticated media strategies mean that some NGOs are now producing their own independent news as opposed to relying on journalists to tell their organisational stories. The question, however, is whether this is to be seen as more sophisticated communication strategies aimed at advocating a specific viewpoint or/and an emerging form of reporting folding into the expanding boundaries of journalism. This paper argues that one way to conceptualise advocates and NGO actors engaging in eyewitness reporting is as “Unintentional Journalists” doing the work of journalism, without intentionally meaning to do so. Following an exploratory case study of the Pacific branch of global NGO 350.org, the paper suggests that the organisation’s members who produced reports about the passing of Cyclone Pam in Vanuatu, 2015, intended to produce advocacy and, in doing so, unintentionally acted to fill a global news gap for reporting from the Pacific region.

Science journalism in print and online media is an important source of information for laypersons. While science journalists established their own professional routines and standards, different actors (and scientists in particular) often criticise science journalism for not being transparent and accurate enough. One critical point raised concerns journalists’ representation of scientific evidence. Against this background, the current study investigated which kind of information about scientific evidence is represented in science articles in German print and online media. The results of a quantitative content analysis (N = 128), in which variables were coded for the represented scientific results (N = 225), showed that scientific evidence is rarely part of science articles, and scientific findings are predominantly depicted as scientifically certain. However, information about uncertainty is more common within sections in the media specifically dedicated to science, as well as when the article has natural ...

This study examines how experience within the field of journalism affects perceptions of journalistic norms and success. Utilizing in-depth interviews with 53 digital journalists working in both le...

Previous research has found that much of the scholarship on citizen-engaged journalism cites its democratic potential. This integrative literature review builds on that work by distinguishing how scholars have defined participatory journalism and citizen journalism and by discovering why some scholars have expressed disappointment in citizens’ efforts while others have offered optimism. This study argues that these differences partly result from how researchers have disparately framed their studies and dissimilarly conceptualized how journalism serves democracy. Whereas some scholars have adopted an understanding of journalism as engaging citizens, others have adhered to the more traditional task of expertly informing the public. Prior debates over public journalism can inform these tensions and possibly illuminate future directions for research.

Journalism education started in Brazil in 1947. Today, it comes under the field of Social Communication, along with Advertising, Public Relations, Film, and Radio & TV. For almost 40 years, from 1970 to 2009, a journalism diploma was mandatory to work in a newsroom. As part of the field of Applied Social Sciences, journalism remains popular among the young generation: The demand for undergraduate bachelor’s programs has attracted fairly high levels of enrollment in the last three decades. For the purposes of this article, we analyze the application of the 2013 Guidelines for Journalism Education to verify whether bachelor’s programs in journalism include or neglect an important axis in the process of instruction: knowledge of the world and the intellectual challenges of journalistic routines, as suggested in the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization’s (UNESCO) Model Curricula for Journalism Education.

Journalists’ privileges and the perceived value of their contributions are being affected by the increasing belief that journalistic work is a product that can be produced by anyone. This perspective should prompt questions related to the conceptualization of journalistic expertise and the functions of educational institutions that assert they teach it. This research contributes to scientific knowledge by introducing an alternative scholarly approach toward defining journalistic expertise—a communication perspective. Prestige in the digital landscape is increasingly associated with the ability of communicators to package information conveying their expertise to various publics. We proposed a set of variables to assess expertise: journalism-related degree, previous professional journalism experience, affiliation, journalism awards, specialization, technical skills, journalism skills, and public service through a content analysis of public Facebook fan pages. The results revealed that journalists communicated their expertise by highlighting their affiliation, previous experience, and specialization(s).

Relying on theories of journalistic ideals and critical discourse analysis, a case study was conducted to investigate how journalism students (re)define journalism ideals in the era of social media. Data were gathered from focus group interviews with European and African students participating in a joint journalism program. The results indicate that the renegotiation of journalism occurs in the discourses of open and collaborative journalism, accountable digital journalism, and challenging and contextualized journalism ethics, where an autonomous journalism profession moves toward collaboration with citizens. An accountable and transparent news process and public awareness of the need for journalism ethics are vital.

Although technological innovations in journalism have recently received growing scholarly attention, studies have hardly questioned or explored the naturalised dominance of technology over newswork. By drawing on critical scholarship, the study aims to explore how articulations between technology and journalism are negotiated by actors engineering technological innovations for and implementing them as part of newswork. Adopting the qualitative methods of interviews and document analysis, the study explores the XLike project (Seventh Framework Programme) co-ordinated by the Jožef Stefan Institute, a Slovenian public research institution for natural sciences and, among others, partnered with the New York Times, Bloomberg Media and the Slovenian Press Agency. One of its main results is a technology that is able to extract formal knowledge from texts in different languages scattered online in a structured way. While the study indicates journalists and editors are seen as conservative and hesitant to adopt wha...

Taking a point of departure in theories about cultural (inter)mediation, this article provides a theoretical framework for explaining the pervasion of churnalism within the specialised beat of cultural journalism. Compared to other types of journalists, cultural journalists are “journalists with a difference”, since they are closely intertwined with sources, and public relations subsidies are “structurally embedded” in the beat’s professional rationales. This has intensified with the professionalisation of the culture industries’ media management during the past decades, prompting continuous critique of cultural journalists for not conforming to journalism’s norms of sourcing. However, such critical claims are typically based on the conventional ideologies of Western journalism and often sidestep the distinct nature of this particular beat. These theoretical arguments are backed by a case study of 20 the interplay of the publishing industry and the Danish press in relation to the publicising of the fourth Millennium book in 2015, a sequel to deceased author Stieg Larsson’s successful trilogy from the mid-2000s. This case exemplifies cultural journalism’s inclination towards “churnalism”, and how churnalism may, in fact, comply with the beat’s professional logics. However, it also shows that churnalism can spark critical meta-reflections among journalists on the interplay of the culture industries and the press. Taking a point of departure in theories about cultural (inter)mediation, this article provides a theoretical framework for explaining the pervasion of churnalism within the specialised beat of cultural journalism. Compared to other types of journalists, cultural journalists are “journalists with a difference”, since they are closely intertwined with sources, and public relations subsidies are “structurally embedded” in the beat’s professional rationales. This has intensified with the professionalisation of the culture industries’ media management during the past decades, prompting continuous critique of cultural journalists for not conforming to journalism’s norms of sourcing. However, such critical claims are typically based on the conventional ideologies of Western journalism and often sidestep the distinct nature of this particular beat. These theoretical arguments are backed by a case study of the interplay of the publishing industry and the Danish press in relation to the publicising of the fourth Millennium book in 2015, a sequel to deceased author Stieg Larsson’s successful trilogy from the mid-2000s. This case exemplifies cultural journalism’s inclination towards “churnalism”, and how churnalism may, in fact, comply with the beat’s professional logics. However, it also shows that churnalism can spark critical meta-reflections among journalists on the interplay of the culture industries and the press.

With the increasing penetration of mobile phones and the internet in India, citizen journalism has experienced a steady growth in recent years. This paper adds to the growing scholarship on citizen journalism by exploring the motivations of Indian citizen journalists to produce online news content. Through a Web-based survey of citizen journalists (N = 134) contributing to the leading news portals in India, this study addresses the role of traditional media experience among citizen journalists’ reporting practices. One of the key findings of this study is that, unlike American citizen journalists, Indian citizen journalists who have not worked in traditional media are less likely to work collaboratively than those with traditional media experience.

This article presents a comparison of technical, organizational, and pedagogical structures of six curriculum-related newsrooms in journalism education in the Nordic countries. The newsrooms were selected for comparison on the basis that they had permanent physical facilities and technical channels for publication, and they presented an integral part of the curriculum. To structure this comparison, the concept of the pedagogical newsroom (PN) is introduced, described, and analyzed. It is suggested that a PN is not a direct adoption of a professional newsroom but an attempt to create a critical surplus with regard to the professional newsrooms, more generally reflecting the relationship between journalism education and the professional field of journalism.

A total of 1018 English-language abstracts in the field of journalism studies, published from 2000–2011 in three internationally peer-reviewed journals, were subjected to computerized textual analysis and manual (human) discourse analysis to discover trends. The project aimed to build on previous studies and to describe what the researchers expected would be a new consensus snapshot among editors and top-level reviewers of the evolution and direction of Journalism Studies in the English-speaking world. Expected results emerged and are presented in detail: national priorities dominate two of the three journals while international and generally theoretical themes dominate the third. However, an unexpected result was that while the three journals contain identifiable themes in journalism studies over the twelve years examined, there was negligible evidence of interaction between these themes within or between the journals. Systems theory suggests that the ‘journalism’ itself, which has been the target of the ‘studies’ has been experiencing a period of stagnation and that very little, if any, overall interaction, discipline development and change has taken place. We argue that a root cause for this is the lack of professional leadership in journalism.

In 1994 Rwanda, some journalists used their power for evil when government-run media houses perpetrated genocide through what scholars termed “hate media.” Since then, however, Rwanda’s media landscape has changed dramatically and the country has seen tremendous social and economic progress. Building on the tenets of social responsibility and framing theories and on literature regarding journalistic role functions, this study utilized qualitative interviews with Rwandan journalists to discover how they view their roles today and whether they have contributed to the reconstruction and recovery of the country by practicing constructive journalism. In keeping with the social responsibility theory of the press, constructive journalism calls for the news media to be an active participant in enhancing societal well-being. Results revealed that while journalists in Rwanda aim to fulfill traditional roles like informing and educating the public, they value a unique role to promote unity and reconciliation. They c...