Multi-layer research design for analyses of journalism and media systems in the global age: test case Japan

Abstract

This article introduces Japan as a test case to probe a research methodology in response to increasingly globalized journalism practices and media systems. Based on the fact that Japan, during more than 150 years of its modernization and industrialization process, has succeeded in adopting decisive elements of Western culture, while at the same time holding on to cultural traditions of its own, we wish to demonstrate how journalism is constituted as a complex of cultural/social constructs. Our methodological test case is thus to establish from empirical evidence layers embedded in the fundaments of a particular journalism culture, recognizing influences of both endogenous and foreign cultures accumulated throughout the modernization process. These layers hence embrace a spectrum that links the endogenous cultural foundations of writing and reading (in this case those nurtured in Japan) with the surface level layers that are constituted by ‘universalistic’ (or global) standards of journalism. As a result of testing the case of Japan, we present a model that relies on a culturally specified multi-layer design that can be applied to cultures of various and most diverse origins.