Journalism

Following a wave of racial reckoning that set in after the global protests of the Black Lives Matter Movement, news organisations responded through a series of unambiguous public apologies, newsroom diversity policies, and even the payment of reparations. Attendant public and metajournalistic discourses have described these developments as operationalising ‘reparative journalism’, a reform agenda whose goal is to dismantle journalistic power structures that have promoted or enabled historical injustices in relation to colonisation, indigeneity, gender or race. While reparative journalism holds the promise of reconfiguring contemporary press accountability, there is a risk that its conceptualisation may conjure up a reductive view of the harms of journalism. This article ventilates on the reparative turn in journalism by exploring the intersections between journalistic harms/historical injustices, accountability and repair. The paper delineates ways to describe the press when implicated in harm in the age of reckoning.

Monitoring and maintaining news trust in democratic societies is important. Thus, scholars have investigated how the consumption of mainstream and alternative news can influence how the public trusts them in the long term. However, such dichotomy is difficult to apply to the liberal-authoritarian media system in Singapore, where most media outlets are under the government’s purview. To address this, the current study first distinguishes between ‘mainstream’ and ‘non-mainstream’ news media in Singapore. It then leverages the reinforcing spiral model to explore the potential reinforcing relationship between their consumption levels and trust. Growth modelling techniques were performed on a three-wave panel survey data (n = 427). The intra-individual effects revealed a paradox of engagement in mainstream news content, positive media effects of non-mainstream news consumption on their corresponding trust, and negative influence of mainstream news consumption on non-mainstream news trust. The inter-individual effects demonstrated that high levels of mainstream (vs non-mainstream) news trust can dampen the growth of trust in non-mainstream (vs mainstream) news. However, at the same time, a positive association was found between the growth of trust in mainstream and non-mainstream news media. These findings reflect their complementarity and competitive nature in people’s news repertoires.

This paper offers to cut the epistemic problem of journalism into smaller and more concrete pieces, mapping the desired journalistic knowledge in particular beats, according to both beat experts and journalists. Our case study focuses on highly knowledgeable Israeli military journalists, using in-depth interviews with 30 experts and journalists. The interviewees offered a sophisticated, dynamic and adjustable knowledge matrix assigning journalists broad agency how to implement their knowledge and embed their items in broader contexts, using three levels of analysis and four types of knowledge, while maintaining balance between knowledge breadth and depth. If similar matrixes exist in other beats, journalism studies must reimagine its epistemology as more complex, requiring both knowledge and understanding, mastering “adaptive expertise” representing higher levels of proficiency.

This paper examines the relation between news source and trust, while considering the moderating role of journalistic values and type of issue the news deals with (politicized/ not politicized). We conducted a survey experiment in the Netherlands and Sweden. Results suggest that source type indeed matters for trust in news, and that information stemming from traditional sources is much more trusted than identical information coming from alternative websites or social media. The impact of source cue is partly explained by the weight people attach to journalistic values. This effect holds regardless of the issue the news deals with.

This paper examines how Greek journalists perceive the effectiveness of new-media practices-oriented journalism education in their profession, using the retraining seminars on new media technologies conducted by the Journalists’ Union of Athens Daily Newspapers (JUADN) between 2019 and 2022 as a case study. Utilising a quantitative methodology, the study analyses data from an online questionnaire completed by 120 journalists between October and November 2022, immediately after they successfully participated in a five-cycle training seminar. It evaluates participants’ self-reported familiarity with new media tools and explores their attitudes toward lifelong learning practices. It also discusses technological determinism as a limited theoretical approach in the platform era and its impact on the perception of journalism practices. The research findings underscore the pressing need for ongoing, structured training on new media practices that cater to journalists’ needs within the platform-dominated media ecosystem. Despite acknowledging the value of the knowledge and skills acquired, the survey responders revealed that these assets only partially affected their reintegration into the labour market.

Presenting audiences and journalistic work in quantitative terms has become an established practice in news organisations. The use of audience-generated data as a measurement for journalistic performance is not without problems as questions arise about the extent to which datafied logics generate accurate representations of qualitative, complex, and pluriform journalistic work. In this article, we examine how journalists in a public service media organisation approach analytics by looking at the extent to which they engage in what we call data-related job crafting. We also study how their level of engagement with job crafting relates to their perceptions of their work environment and occupational well-being. The study is based on a survey with 121 journalists working for a Nordic public-funded media organisation. We show that in today’s datafied news media environment, opting out of the use of analytics manifests itself as a kind of private, tacit compliance; it is connected to work-related malaise but not related to the avoidance of analytics extensively at an organisational level. We argue that this reflects the institutionalisation of audience analytics in news organisations, which has made opting out more of a gesture than a real possibility. We conclude the article with a reflection on how the institutionalisation of analytics is challenging the central social justification of public service media.

With rising enrollment in Western higher education institutions (HEIs), studies show that fewer students are motivated by the intrinsic enjoyment of learning and increasingly express extrinsic motivations, such as the desire to qualify for high-income jobs. This paper examines the study motivations, knowledge orientations, and learning strategies of Norwegian journalism and communication students at one private and one public HEI. Through a mixed-methods approach combining survey data (N = 337) and in-depth interviews (N = 16), it finds that the students are intrinsically motivated and employ deep learning strategies for the practical aspects of their studies. Conversely, they are extrinsically motivated and apply surface learning strategies towards the theoretical aspects. This indicates that existing theories on student motivation, linking deep learning strategies to a preference for theoretical knowledge, and surface learning strategies to a preference for practical knowledge, need nuance: Students appear to employ different learning strategies depending on the perceived necessity of different types of knowledge. With rising enrollment levels in Western HEIs, resulting in a more heterogeneous student body, this insight is crucial to ensure an appropriate learning environment for all student groups.

Literature that critiques the mainstream news media’s portrayal of First Nations people is plentiful, spanning multiple decades and regions. This article extends this body of research to community media, examining the sources utilised by the most popular syndicated news and current affairs programs broadcast on Australian community radio, through the lens of critical whiteness theory. This has international significance as the Australian community broadcasting sector is one of the oldest and well established of its kind, often considered an exemplar model.

Disinformation has become one of the most substantial problems in modern societies. This research aims to analyze the reception of disinformation shared in digital platforms, its effects on citizens, and the formulas to combat disinformation in the context of COVID-19, as well as the sociodemographic and political factors that determine them. An online survey (n = 2803) was developed for citizens of Spain, the U.S., Brazil, and India. Results show that disinformation had a moderate effect on the users’ attitudes, generating an increase in mistrust towards the media and politicians and an increase in belief in conspiracy theories.

Extensive research has explored the evolving dynamics and influence of social media, particularly the X platform (formerly Twitter), on various aspects of political communication and journalism across borders. However, only a few studies examine trends in its use for election campaigns and journalism in sub-Saharan Africa, from the perspective of media logics and intermedia agenda-setting. To address this gap, we analyzed trends in the use of X by two presidential candidates and its integration into political reporting by three national newspapers during Nigeria’s 2019 presidential campaigns: a period when the platform was pivotal in political communication and digital journalism. Findings from the analysis of 688 X-based posts reveal the changing operational logics that facilitated the increased influence of candidates—who predominantly used X for self-promotion and party-branding—on the agendas of mainstream newspapers that utilized the platform as a tool for sourcing and disseminating political news.

This study explores how Public Service Media (PSM) innovation laboratories navigate a complex institutional environment that simultaneously constrains and demands innovation. Drawing on the concepts of isomorphic pressures and institutional logics, the study investigates strategies used by PSM innovation labs to innovate within institutional constraints. Based on interviews with editorial technologists from three PSM innovation labs in Germany, we identify five institutional logics that enable innovation despite strong normative and coercive pressures: the logics of agility, efficiency, public service, audience, and interdisciplinary collaboration. These logics function as adaptive mechanisms that enable PSM innovation labs to balance the demands of innovation with adherence to norms, regulations, and limited resources. Our findings illustrate how PSMs can manage institutional complexity and sustain innovation within constrained operational environments. Hence, this study offers a dynamic view of isomorphism, where conformity and agency coexist, and where innovation can emerge from within institutional boundaries rather than in opposition to them.

The mass media helps shape public opinion. Rice importation is a shared national issue in the Philippines and Indonesia. Yet, there has not been a study that scrutinizes media reportage of rice importation in the two countries. Of interest in this study is to explain to what extent is the mass media able to guide public opinion on rice importation. To guide our analysis, we drew insights from media professionalism and commercialization as well as media frame theories. This research is a content analysis of the stories published in the Philippines and in Indonesia in 2022 on rice importation. We found that many professionalism and commercialization issues affect rice importation framing in the two countries. Officials of the government appear to be the preferred information sources with the farmers left out in the reportage. In terms of the quality of reportage, there is some evidence of a healthy discourse in the Philippines on rice importation while the same could not be said in Indonesia. Depth issues are noted in the reportage. We advance that there is a need for the mass media entities to carefully reflect on the way they perform their raison d’etre, i.e., to guide public opinion.

This study explores Uganda’s colonial history and its influences on representation in contemporary photojournalistic practices. Using both quantitative and qualitative analyses, this study examines 10 years of visual reportage (N = 7987) by the Associated Press, Getty Images, and Agence France-Presse, comparing the news prioritizes and visual conventions of foreign photojournalists with Ugandan photojournalists. This study reveals the global news industry’s continued preference for foreign photojournalism, often prioritizing embodied vulnerability, problem-oriented reportage, and aspects of Afro-pessimistic place-making. This study is a direct comparison of insider and outsider perspectives and outlines the potential consequences of Western constructions of Uganda.

A substantial body of research exists on the management of COVID-19 by governments and the news, especially in higher-income countries. Less is known about middle- and lower-income country contexts during the global pandemic. We address this important gap in the literature by comparing the frames, topics, and tone toward the government in Mexico’s La Jornada, a center left news outlet, and Reforma, a center right business news outlet, on the Morena government’s COVID-19 vaccination strategy. Analysis of frames in the news from April 2020 to October 2022 shows that the attribution of responsibility frame was most often used overall, followed by conflict, and economic consequences. Media party parallelism or political parallelism was evident in both the framing and the tone of the news. La Jornada was more supportive and less critical of the Morena government led by President Andrés Manuel López Obrador known as AMLO, while Reforma was more critical. Other results also show notable differences in the treatment of the issue in both newspapers, including the types of items (news vs opinion pieces) on the subject, criticism of the vaccination strategy and the government, and the optimistic or pessimistic perspectives in the headlines. In conclusion, we argue that ideological bias in the news on the government’s COVID-19 vaccine strategy can undermine the neutrality and objectivity of information. We discuss avenues for future research in conclusion.