Journalism

Thirty years ago, I published an ethnographic study of four mainstream national news organizations entitled Deciding What’s News (Gans, 2004 [1979]). In a final chapter devoted to news policy, I urged that the news become more multiperspectival, that national news depend less on top down news from high level government and other official and authoritative sources. Instead, the news media should do more reporting from and about other levels and sectors of society and how these see and interpret the country and its problems.

The mainstream news media as well as the economy and polity in which the news media are embedded have changed over the past decades and the arrival of the internet offers a chance to add different kinds of news. These changes justify a revisit to multiperspectival news which focuses particularly on the journalists’ role in representative democracy.

This article explores relationships between alternative forms of journalism and political concepts such as democracy and citizenship; in the process of doing so, it explores the role and purpose of alternative media. By means of an exploratory empirical study, utilizing qualitative research methods with a sample group of alternative media practitioners within the UK, the article discusses differing concepts of alternative media, paying particular attention to the journalistic methods and outputs of such media and the ways in which they can be seen as supportive of citizenship. The findings are discussed within the context of the work of international scholars on issues such as alternative media and democratic participation. The article concludes that, although a precise and universal definition of alternative media remains elusive, there appears to be a considerable degree of agreement amongst practitioners and scholars of alternative journalism alike that such media can play a role in reflecting, nurturing and demonstrating what can be identified as active citizenship.

The three-component Maslach Burnout Inventory-General Survey was implemented to examine burnout among newspaper journalists (N = 770). With a moderate rate of exhaustion, a high rate of cynicism and a moderate rate of professional efficacy, journalists demonstrate higher rates of burnout than presented in previous work. Additionally, journalists expressing intentions to leave the profession (n = 173) demonstrated high rates of exhaustion and cynicism, and moderate rates of professional efficacy, making them ‘at-risk’ for burnout. Also, 74.5 percent of journalists 34 and younger (n = 223) either expressed intentions to leave newspaper journalism or answered ‘don’t know’. The most ‘at-risk’ to burnout appear to be young copy editors or page designers working at small newspapers.

Through an analysis of news journalism in Sweden, the development of a more adversarial, critical or interpretive news journalism is discussed in this article. A frequent form of politicians’ appearances in the news is in short-form interviews in news stories. Such interviews are often reduced to single turns or answers. The aim of this study is to identify the more communicative techniques used, when politicians’ answers are cut and incorporated into news stories, and how these techniques are related to the roles set up for politicians and reporters. What potential relationships are set up between politicians, reporters and the viewers? Swedish television data from 1978, 1993 and 2003 have been analysed. The analysis shows that in the early period, news journalism appears as a mediator or interrogator. In the latter periods, news journalism appears in an adversarial role. It becomes more of an interpreter or a critical interrogator of politician’s actions.

During recent decades, the abundance of apologies made by public actors has lent credence to the claim that we are living in the age of apology. The extensive coverage of these gestures by the press in many cases aroused heated public struggles over the norm transgressed and the future of the transgressor in the public arena. This article analyzes the reasons for the interest taken by journalists in covering and generating apology discourse, the active role played by them at each stage of what I term ‘social dramas of apology’ (SDA), and the professional implications stemming from their involvement. The study analyzes 559 SDA that emerged in Israeli public discourse from 1997 to 2004. The findings suggest that journalists’ active involvement takes various forms. Journalists (1) frame actions as transgressions, (2) play the role of instigator, or, the arbitrator, and (3) help the public to determine whether transgressors should be incorporated back into the social structure. Lastly, it is suggested that journalists’ active participation in SDA entails some challenging ethical implications.

Premised on the argument that articulating, representing, and defending local interests is one of the normative roles for the news media, this study examines what we call the primacy of local interests to the Hong Kong media and how concern with local interests relates to the politics of press freedom in the city. More specifically, on issues involving conflict of interests between the local society and its sovereign country, most Hong Kong media have demonstrated their willingness to stand by the local society even though it could mean a need to directly confront China.This study further draws on a representative journalist survey to illustrate how, in terms of Hong Kong journalists’ belief system, an orientation toward local interests is tied to liberal political attitudes, beliefs in the media’s adversarial role, and perceptions of media self-censorship. The analysis suggests how various kinds of attitudes and beliefs may cluster together to serve as an important force counteracting the pressure to conform to the power center. Implications of the findings and the generality of the notion of the primacy of local interests are discussed.

This study tested social influence theories against traditional media attribute agenda setting theory within 18 ideologically diverse political blogs, two elite traditional media entities, and the latter’s 11 political newsroom blogs across three issues in 2007. Results reveal significant correlations in left-leaning network agendas ranging from 0.64 to 0.91 through all issue periods. Social influence did not homogenize interpretative agendas within the right-leaning network through two of the three issue periods. As predicted, partisan blog networks showed insignificant correlations in attribute agendas, and unlike the left-leaning and moderate blog networks, the right-leaning blog network bore little similarity to traditional media’s issue interpretation across two of the three issues.These findings point to two significant trends: the growing power of social influence among partisan blog networks and the weakening influence of elite, traditional media as a singular power in influencing issue interpretation within networked political environments.