Journalism

The academization of journalism is reliant on the development of the field founded in scholarship demonstrated through the publication of research in peer-reviewed specialist journals. Given the profile of journalism faculty, this means inducting practitioners into a culture of critical research. In Australia at least, this cohort of neophytes is predominantly comprised of middle-aged women who were surveyed about their personal attitudes to research. They were mostly open to the idea of becoming researchers but were inclined to proceed cautiously without necessarily severing their ties with practice. There was evidence to suggest that a generally positive orientation to research was not capitalized on and that they remained uncertain about the role of research. On the other hand, they appeared not to have adopted the orthodoxy of implacable opposition to scholarly inquiry. The change in gender composition in the academy may provide, contrary to historical, but more in line with contemporary, evidence, a renewed impetus to the project of academizing the field.

Robert Merton’s theory of cumulative advantage posits that the initial status advantages one acquires can successively lead to greater opportunities in career advancement. This study examines the cumulative effect of individual and institutional factors on the likelihood of one’s success in international reporting, an area commonly considered as the mark of an ultra-elite in journalistic stratification. Analyzing a sample of 814 Pulitzer winners whose life courses and career progressions are reconstructed using various archival data, our study shows that international reporting winners, compared with local reporting awardees, are more likely to be male, foreign born, cosmopolites, and Ivy League graduates. These initial advantages, however, mainly improve their chances of joining top news organizations in the first place. Being selected by those news organizations boosts disproportionally their successive probability of winning the Pulitzers. The process of advantage accumulation in journalism accentuates the social stratification in society at large.

In many newsrooms, journalistic work has increasingly been reorganized in ways that make it more flexible, multi-skilled and assertive, or even ‘liquid’. Empirical studies on liquid journalism, however, are scarce. This article examines how the rise of liquidity can be seen in the work-related ethos of Finnish political journalists. The article is based on 25 in-depth interviews of political journalists. In the findings, three generational groups – the solid moderns, the liquefying moderns, and the liquid moderns – emerge divided roughly by age. These differences reflect a more general change, whereby the organizations of the solid industrial modernity have been flattened and decentralized and, in many professions, the expertise and career prospects have been questioned. In the course of this change, political journalists are developing an anti-institutional and flexible ethos accentuated by opinionated assertiveness – in effect, an ethos of liquid revolutionaries.

This article reports a pilot study which investigated the relationship between regional journalism and social capital in two regional locations in the Australian state of South Australia, and one in the Canadian province of British Columbia. The study aimed to explore the role of local media in facilitating community communication and understanding, and, through this, to shed light on their possible contribution to regional social capital. Although social capital is a contested notion, the article argues that most definitions can be placed into one of three broad categories, and that the results of the study suggest that local media facilitate connectivity in terms of each of these understandings.

A number of themes emerged during the study which help to clarify and illuminate the role of regional media in setting the communication context for social capital. At the same time, however, the ways in which local journalists approached their work raised a number of professional and ethical issues. The article concludes that, despite these difficulties, local media at the sites studied appear to facilitate communication between different sections of the community to the benefit of that community, and to contribute to the development of social capital.

The discussion about the relationship between globalization and journalism has stressed the westernization of information flows, contra-flows, and the globalization of news practices. Beyond information flows and news practices, it is important to examine the impact that globalization has on news narratives. With the emergence of the extra-national WikiLeaks, it is possible that the ‘national narrative’ through which journalists interpret information is eroded and replaced by an increasingly autonomous journalism. This study tests this possibility by examining how an Israeli newspaper and an Australian newspaper incorporated leaked documents into news coverage and how they framed WikiLeaks’ contribution to journalism. It finds that the papers in each country mined the leaks for geopolitical relevance to their respective countries, but did so in a way that facilitated debate about what the national interest should be. In doing so, the papers reframed WikiLeaks from a problem for the state to a whistleblower against their countries’ and US officials. By extension, the papers positioned themselves as whistleblowers and democratic facilitators. A ‘national lens’ continues to inform newswork, but the ‘national narrative’ has eroded.

Since its US launch in the Washington, DC, market in July 2009, Al Jazeera English (AJE), like other news organizations, has engaged in activities to shape and promote its journalistic values and practices for itself and the public. Using the theoretical framework of journalists as interpretive communities, this article examines American media coverage of AJE through its first seven months of broadcasting in the DC market. The study finds that AJE’s attempts to shape and modify its image for an American audience have been mostly successful, although limited. The analysis indicates a gradual move towards acceptance of the network in the USA by its journalistic peers (other American journalists).

The internet poses, in certain ways, a problem for journalists: on the one hand, it is evidently a marvellous tool for investigative work, for the rapid dissemination of information, and for creating new news platforms with new constituencies; on the other hand, these constituencies, habituated to the real time coordinates of internet communication, are impatient with the old rhythms of the news cycle, and impatient with forms of journalistic authority that were formed in the era of one-way mass medias. The very status of the journalist as reporter or opinion maker has been put into question as the bar to entry for creating a mass media audience has lowered dramatically – which was first noticed when bloggers of all types rose to prominence. This article presents an account of journalism that relates thematically to the idea that the future of journalism lies primarily in the journalist as editor, moderator and curator. We suggest, however, that these accounts need a twist in order to incorporate the critical ethos of journalism. Journalists should not be thought of merely as those who edit, moderate and curate already ongoing dialogues. Journalists should also help to show the blank spots of ongoing dialogues, in order to make the silent voices heard. Journalists should facilitate an awareness of which voices are not heard in the ongoing dialogues. To show this, we articulate a Derridean deconstruction of the situation of journalists, hereby showing that the founding aporias of journalism (the aporia of giving and denying voices) have been replaced by an aporia of giving and denying room for dialogue.