Commercialisation and tabloidisation: Journalism as infotainment

Contemporary Sociology: A Journal of Reviews, 2020

RUDN JOURNAL OF STUDIES IN LITERATURE AND JOURNALISM, 2022

This discussion article envisages five different contemporary challenges and pays special attention to the arguments as to why contemporary journalism losses its professional priorities and gets mixed in with other types of mass communication, particularly with public relations (PR) and propaganda. This clarification is of great importance not only for purely professional purposes, but also for broad social priorities. Arguments concerning the role and mission of journalism place it anywhere between watchdog and lapdog which makes the process of studying journalism uncertain and even contradictory as it is caught between the binds of historical values and the traps of contemporary practice.

Westminster Papers in Communication and Culture, 2008

For a media profession so central to society's sense of self, it is of crucial importance to understand the influences of changing labour conditions, professional cultures, and the appropriation of technologies on the nature of work in journalism. In this paper, the various strands of international research on the changing nature of journalism as a profession are synthesized, using media logic as developed by 1991) and updated by Dahlgren (1996) as a conceptual framework. A theoretical key to understanding and explaining journalism as a profession is furthermore to focus on the complexities of concurrent disruptive developments affecting its performance from the distinct perspective of its practitioners -for without them, there is no news.

The European Proceedings of Social & Behavioural Sciences (EpSBS), 2019

The article deals with theoretical and methodological approaches to studying journalism, its current state and prospects of development. The problem situation is that researchers mainly use one of the possible methodological approaches, namely, relational one. In such case, journalism is considered through its relations with external environments and partners. Accordingly, the changes in the external environments do modify journalism. Nowadays, this collision is especially evident in relations with the technical and technological environment of journalism functioning, where fundamental changes have emerged. The expansion of information and communication technologies has raised concerns on the crisis of journalism and even its death. The present and future of journalism are seen quite differently if using a substantial methodology that focuses on the essence of the phenomenon, not its functional relations. Journalism is relatively autonomous from its environments, including technological basis, and it retains its own essence as an institution and profession, although it acquires new forms and embodiment ways. According to a few of prominent theorists, it gains brilliant prospects for development; despite it will exist not only in other forms, but also on other material carriages. In this context, the author touches upon discussions on the updating of qualification requirements for media professionals as well as the content of the journalists University education. The author makes his conclusions on the basis of the grouping data on the relationship of journalism with its environments of functioning and critical evaluation of current research representations on the topic.

Journalism, 2005

2011

Those who consider democracy as a fundamental principle for society have to monitor carefully the status of journalism. As we trust our elected politicians to represent us and our core interests in policy-related issues, we also attribute journalists a core position within that process. Journalism provides the necessary information to citizens to form opinions and to take decisions. Journalism is therefore a key element in democratic societies since journalists have the moral and ethical duty to provide correct and relevant information, and to analyze factual information in context within a critical perspective. In that perspective, the media as representatives of the Fourth Estate, have the obligation to monitor public affairs and to make sure that political or business elites do not cross the borders of their power. In addition to these tasks and functions, as Peter Dahlgren succinctly adds, the democratic role of journalism should even go beyond the information provision and watchdog function: 'It must also touch us, inspire us and nourish our daily democratic horizons' (Dahlgren 2009: 146). In recent years, the journalistic field was challenged by a number of critical developments, among which the ongoing diffusion of interactive technologies, digitization of messages and convergence of media formats are clearly some of the most crucial ones. According to new media proponents, interactive media applications clearly democratize representation by making it a more direct relationship: as citizens gain access to inexpensive communication technologies the gatekeeping monopoly once enjoyed by editors and broadcasters is waning (Gurevitz et al. 2009; Coleman 2005). The Internet has indeed shifted communication to a much more personalized level, and both media and politicians are forced to address more channels in order to compete for the attention of a more fragmented audience, as well as target their messages to more fragmented groups than ever before. Therefore, the new media applications could be called the Fifth Estate, since they possess several key distinctive and important characteristics such as the ability to support institutions and individuals to enhance their 'communicative power' with opportunities to network within and beyond various institutional arenas, and the provision of capabilities that enable the creation of networks of individuals which have a public, social benefit (e.g. through social networking websites) (Dutton 2008). At the same time, however, although there are major changes in the consumption of news and information (Meijer 2006; Mindich 2004; Jenkins 2006), a large majority of the public in many European countries still counts on traditional and professional media for information on political, cultural, economic and societal issues. Indeed, the Internet may have admitted an impressive number of alternative information channels, and the public may have been attributed with more access than ever before to participate in the news production cycle, but traditional journalists in traditional news media still keep their role as main gatekeepers (Domingo et al. 2008). Dynamics of Journalistic Professionalization: Who Are the Professional Journalists Then and Now? Any observer of recent developments and challenges in the media sphere, who keeps a detached and

Pragmatics, 2010

News scholarship is vast, en vogue and, above all, theoretically eclectic. Case in point is the field of journalism: Recent journals such as Journalism Studies, Journalism Practice and Journalism attest to the interdisciplinary social-scientific interest in news study. Academic interest in journalism has, first and foremost, social causes. As cultural brokers disseminating world knowledge, the stories journalists tell are ideologically significant. This observation is old news, but ever so timely, especially given today's mediascape of ...

Journal of International Communication, 2009

Iamcr 2007 World Congress, 2007

In today's public information landscape, it seems to be increasingly difficult to draw a clear line between what is and what is not journalism (even if it appears as such). Under this cover, a lot of different practices are being developed in the wide field of communication, raising complex questions about what specifically defines journalism -whether it is carried out by formally recognized professionals or media companies, or by other kind of individuals and groups who now have easy access to public communication instruments (Internet sites, weblogs…) and commit themselves to gather, handle and diffuse some kind of information in the public sphere.