Journalism

Indigenous news media have experienced significant growth across the globe in recent years, but they have received only limited attention in mainstream society or the journalism and communication research community. Yet, Indigenous journalism is playing an arguably increasingly important role in contributing to Indigenous politics and identities, and is worthy of closer analysis. Using in-depth interviews, this article provides an overview of the main dimensions of Indigenous journalism as they can be found in the journalism culture of Ma¯ori journalists in Aotearoa New Zealand. It argues that Ma¯ori journalists see their role as providing a counter-narrative to mainstream media reporting and as contributing to Indigenous empowerment and revitalization of their language. At the same time, they view themselves as watchdogs, albeit within a culturally specific framework that has its own constraints. The article argues that the identified dimensions are reflective of evidence on Indigenous journalism from across the globe.

A new news disseminator has emerged to revitalize the profession of information gathering – the non-profit news organization. Adopting a framework of community trust, this article begins a scholarly response to the questions: Who are these non-profit journalists and what do they aim to accomplish? A rhetorical analysis of nearly 50 mission statements and ethnographic work on two case studies revealed a commitment to rebuilding public trust, to reclaiming community journalism, to re-emphasizing the “ordinary” citizen, and to pioneering collaborative news work by means of digital technologies. Our analysis demonstrated that many of these organizations, in considering news as a public good, work to re-conceptualize the industry for citizens, but depend upon a level of funding that might not be viable in the long term. However, this research posits that little in the way of true community trust can be achieved until these organizations discover a sustainable business model.

The study explores 33 occupational life histories of current and former Israeli journalists. By doing so, it enables us to better understand how the fundamental changes that the journalistic profession underwent during recent decades shaped and influenced the occupational progression of Israeli journalists. Our interviews validate previous work on the partial professional standing of journalism showing that individuals enter journalism in a protracted and uneven manner. In addition, the analysis of modes of reasoning for entering journalism charts the informal boundaries of overt journalistic political identification. Finally, an exploration of self-narrated occupational highs and lows shows that career highs are always identified as personal achievements while career lows are mostly narrated as outcomes of larger organizational or institutional constraints. The current chaotic nature of journalism organizations, as reflected in our life history corpus, illustrates an environment in which there is a clear disconnect between actions and rewards.

When covering foreign events, journalists bring resonant cultural meanings to an otherwise little-understood occurrence. From a cultural perspective, we analyzed “Steve Jobs fever” in five publications of a progressive neo-liberal media group in China. The media texts allowed us to understand society’s neo-liberal narratives. The media re-crafted Jobs’ death into a story about Chinese society: the first theme foreshadowed the greatness and necessity of having Steve-Jobs-style genius; the second theme raised the question why not having an equivalent Steve Jobs and immediately answered it; finally, the third theme logically provided the solution to solve this social crisis. This story fits into the enduring narratives of national salvation through technological consumption and further Westernized liberalization. The study attempts to move research on Chinese media beyond the Chinese context by making a conceptual contribution for understanding journalism in a global environment.

This study offers insights into articulations between the normative and the empirical in online journalists’ self-negotiations concerning their roles in people’s assimilation of information, the daily provision of news and their institutional status in online departments. In-depth interviews with online journalists from two leading newspapers, Delo in Slovenia and Novosti in Serbia, are used to investigate their negotiations with respect to their societal role. The analysis reveals troubled negotiation processes among interviewed online journalists when they consider what is regarded as “true” journalism, news production requirements and their institutional status. This indicates that rearrangements of political–economic relations in both post-socialist societies have increased journalism’s responsibility to the media owners and power holders and surpassed its normatively defined responsibility to the public. Both case subjects are compared through the prism of the processes of negotiation of normative principles of journalism in the social, national and institutional contexts of the two newspapers.

A qualitative sample of newspaper articles covering Israeli commandos’ killing of passengers aboard a pro-Palestinian cargo ship was examined to discern how direct and indirect quotation modes function as propositional re-assertion. Using a linguistic-semiotic perspective, journalistic quotation was conceptualized as a series of verbal speech-act signs of three types: direct, free-indirect, and standard indirect quotation. These three essential quotation modes are shown to conform to the semiotic icon, index, and symbol, respectively, and at the linguistic level to entail either relatively neutral, ‘non-subjectivized’ re-assertion, or evaluative, ‘subjectivized’ re-assertion on the reporter’s part. Newspaper quotation segments are related to each variety of quotation, drawing out these co-occurring semiotic and linguistic characteristics to show how each quote mode performs as either a source or writer-centered double-duty speech act, allowing journalists within the traditional objectivity norm to variously provide relatively neutral or highly interpretive re-voicings of propositional assertions originally uttered by news sources.

In recent years, a growing literature in journalism studies has discussed the increasing importance of social media in European and American news production. Adding to this body of work, we explore how Indian and foreign correspondents reporting from India used social media during the coverage of the Delhi gang rape; how journalists represented the public sphere in their social media usage; and, what this representation says about the future of India’s public sphere. Throughout our analysis, Manuel Castells’ discussion of ‘space of flows’ informs our examination of journalists’ social media uses. Our article reveals that while the coverage of the Delhi gang rape highlights an emerging, participatory nature of storytelling by journalists, this new-found inclusiveness remains exclusive to the urban, educated, connected middle and upper classes. We also find that today in India, social media usage is rearticulated around pre-existing journalistic practices and norms common to both Indian reporters working for English-language media houses and foreign correspondents stationed in India.

This study presents an empirical, qualitative investigation into the practices of Venezuelan journalists in South Florida. The Venezuelan population in the United States has more than doubled in the past decade, making it the fastest growing sub-population of Latinos in the country, and a majority of these new arrivals have settled in South Florida. Given the rapid changes this community has undergone in the previous 10 years, the results of this investigation provide a more complete picture of global journalism and transnational migration in the digital media era through the recognition of the complexities inherent in the work of immigrant journalists, offering new contributions to conceptualizations of immigrant assimilation as non-linear and providing an updated framework for understanding the production of Spanish-language, immigrant media in the United States. Three models of immigrant journalism are presented and discussed as a final result of the research.

This study provides a snapshot of the hierarchy-of-influences model in the new media environment through examining the effects of audience web metrics on editors. Surveying 318 gatekeepers, the study found that audience metrics influence editors in gatekeeping. Editors’ likelihood to monitor web metrics is affected by their journalism training. Gatekeepers who attach the importance of high readership to economic benefits are more likely to have different news decisions based on web metrics. The study suggests a revision of the hierarchy-of-influences model with more emphasis being placed on the role of the audience.

Traditional news sourcing practices that favor official, male voices have been widely documented over time and across media. But do these patterns persist in today’s social media environment, where women outnumber and spend more time than men? This study explores news sourcing and gender on Twitter by analyzing more than 2700 tweets from reporters at 51 US newspapers. Guided by hegemony and set within the framework of social networking technology, the research examines quoting practices and interaction with sources by gender, beat, newspaper size, and live coverage. The analyzed tweets show a severe underrepresentation of women in quotes, indicating perpetuation of the status quo. The data also suggest a conformity mechanism may be at work in larger newspapers, where female reporters quoted fewer women than their counterparts in smaller news organizations. But at the same time, the research offers evidence that both male and female reporters are using the technology to engage with a more diverse community via @mentions and to share conversations by retweeting those messages to their networks.