Journalism Practice

Are female journalists more at risk in covering conflict than their male colleagues? Be k states isk is the a ti ipatio of the atast opheso it is existent and none iste t. Is the contention that female journalists are more at risk, knowledge, or a construction of knowledge? Are Editors and journalists who decide that women are more at risk merely anticipating a catastrophe? There is no certainty that women would be more at risk, but the fear that women are more at risk can prevent them from being sent to cover conflict, or force them to decide not to go to dangerous places. It is not possible to say with certainty that women journalists are targeted because they are women or because they are journalists. An IED or rocket fire does not distinguish between sexes. In many situations being female actually helps women journalist in conflict zones. In this paper we conduct a survey of journalists who work in conflict zones and ask whether it is the job or the gender which is the most dangerous. The question of whether it is more dangerous to be a woman might be debatable, but the survey shows that sexual harassment is a concern for female journalists.

Questo volume è il frutto di una ricerca sul campo svolta tra il 2008 e il 2015 che è consistita nella raccolta di interviste orali in cinese a giornalisti freelance, redattori e studiosi di media in Cina. Dal corpus costituito dalle trascrizioni e dalle traduzioni in italiano di tali interviste nasce una selezione di testi presentati e commentati in questo volume con l’obiettivo di portare alla luce, da una parte, i riferimenti a problemi, temi e aspirazioni comuni di una comunità di discorso e, dall’altra, il ricorrere di espressioni, parole chiave, formule e metafore condivise. Gli elementi discorsivi e lessicali identificati rafforzano l’ipotesi del rinsaldarsi di un’identità professionale condivisa tra le diverse figure che operano nel settore dei media in Cina oggi. Un risultato che appare rilevante soprattutto perché tale identità professionale ha dovuto ridefinirsi negli ultimi decenni in seguito alle riforme che hanno investito i media cinesi e alla diffusione sempre più ampia di forme di collaborazione esterna dei giornalisti cinesi alle testate su cui scrivono.

ABSTRACT This article examines computational journalism as a craft practised in Norwegian newsrooms. Based on in-depth interviews with expert practitioners in six of the largest newsrooms in Norway, we find that computational journalism represents a continuation of traditional (investigative) journalism. While the skills and tools necessary to do this kind of journalism diverge from the typical journalist's, the values and aims align well with tradition. Even though computation enables journalists to cope with the size and scale of journalistically appealing datasets, we find little evidence for computational journalism to increase the efficiency of doing journalism or in any other way rid journalists from low-level technical work.

Through interviews with one hundred journalists and editors in seven countries, we examine safety as the main challenge for journalists covering war and conflict in both local and international contexts. The article places a particular focus on the situation for Filipino and Norwegian journalists. The underreporting of legal aspects of international conflict, combined with less security, means less presence and more journalistic coverage based on second-hand observation. The article argues that reduced access to conflict hotspots owing to the tactical targeting of journalists might distort the coverage of wars and conflicts and affect the quality of journalism in future.

This special issue addresses a topic of journalism studies that has previously been somewhat neglected but which has gained increasing scholarly attention since the mid-2000s: the coverage and evaluation of art and culture, or what we term "cultural journalism and cultural critique." In this introduction, we highlight three issues that serve to frame the study of cultural journalism and cultural critique more generally and the eight articles of this special issue more specifically: (1) the constant challenge of demarcating cultural journalism and cultural critique, including the interrelations of "journalism" and "critique"; (2) the dialectic of globalisation's cultural homo-genisation, on the one hand, and the specificity of local/national cultures, on the other; and (3) the digital media landscape seen in terms of the need to rethink, perhaps even redefine cultural journalism and cultural critique.

This article is a contribution to the debate on audience participation in online media with a twofold aim: (1) making conceptual sense of the phenomenon of participatory journalism in the framework of journalism research, and (2) determining the forms that it is taking in eight European countries and the United States. First, participatory journalism is considered in the context of the historical evolution of public communication. A methodological strategy for systematically analysing citizen participation opportunities in the media is then proposed and applied. A sample of 16 online newspapers offers preliminary data that suggest news organisations are interpreting online user participation mainly as an opportunity for their readers to debate current events, while other stages of the news production process are closed to citizen involvement or controlled by professional journalists when participation is allowed. However, different strategies exist among the studied sample, and contextual factors should be considered in further research.

Previous studies have noted the dominance of official sources within the news process and their unique ability to shape media narratives. This research addresses the role and implications of news sources in contributing to the overwhelmingly positive portrayal of the anti-Mubarak opposition protesters within British and American newspaper coverage of the 2011 Egyptian Revolution. Furthermore, this paper will assess how the position of global political elites towards the protests in Egypt possibly opened up the editorial space within the news coverage of the revolution for the anti-Mubarak opposition movement to emerge as the dominant voice within the reporting.

Drawing on insights from field theory, this study examines journalists’ textual and discursive construction of entrepreneurial journalism from 2000 to 2014. The goal is to understand how such discursive practices contribute to the articulation and legitimation of entrepreneurial journalism as a form of cultural capital as the field’s economic imperatives change. The findings suggest that “entrepreneurial journalism” is a condensational term: It is defined broadly and loosely but generally in a positive way. Despite the potential for disruption to long-standing journalistic doxa, particularly normative stances related to the separation of editorial and commercial interests, many of the examined articles seem to reflect a belief that entrepreneurialism is not only acceptable but even vital for survival in a digital age.

In this study, I examine the perilous conditions facing Filipino journalists covering the Mindanao region, focusing on differences in threats and dangers faced by those who are local to the region and those parachuting in from Manila. Using a qualitative approach, I have conducted one group interview with two local and two non-local journalists, and five in-depth one-to-one interviews with journalists and expert sources, in 2017. The study additionally draws on interviews with fourteen Filipino journalists and editors from 2014. The journalists perceive that safety differ depending on whether they are local to the conflict they cover or not. Safety issues are significant for the ways in which they operate in the field and decisions they make. Extra-judicial killings and impunity for perpetrators committing crimes against journalists perpetuate dangerous conditions particularly for local journalists, while kidnapping for ransom is among the greatest threats perceived by non-local journalists. In situations which non-local journalists can retreat, their local counterparts stay behind and face reprisals. Ethics is imperative to safety particularly for local journalists. Safety training should be tailored to and differentiate between security challenges. Collaboration between local and non-local journalists may improve their safety altogether, but media organisations must adequately compensate both.

European societies are becoming increasingly multicultural and ethnically diverse as a result of immigration. This change, however, is not properly reflected in the European mass media, neither in the portrayal nor in the representation of immigrants in the mainstream media. The aim of this paper is to analyse the newsmaking routines of mainstream newspapers and TV channels in six European countries (Greece, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland amd the United Kingdom) with a view to showing which factors ...

Speed and quality used to be considered the twin pillars of ''good'' journalism. Now there is a third pillar: sociability. It is no longer enough to be ''first with the news'', nor is it sufficient to be comprehensive and trustworthy. It is now increasingly considered necessary to ensure that news is produced in a form that is capable of spreading virally. This paper considers the way in which ''viral'' transmission is impacting on the work of news journalists and news organisations.

Through interviews with 100 journalists and editors in seven countries, the authors examine safety as the main challenge for journalists covering war and conflict in both local and international contexts. The article places a particular focus on the situation for Filipino and Norwegian journalists. The underreporting of legal aspects of international conflict, combined with less security, means less presence and more journalistic coverage based on second-hand observation. The article argues that reduced access to conflict hotspots owing to the tactical targeting of journalists might distort the coverage of wars and conflicts, and affect the quality of journalism in future.

This study seeks to understand how community newspaper editors negotiate the professional complexities posed by citizen journalism*a phenomenon that, even in the abstract, would appear to undermine their gatekeeping control over content. Through interviews with 29 newspaper editors in Texas, we find that some editors either favor or disfavor the use of citizen journalism primarily on philosophical grounds, while others favor or disfavor its use mainly on practical grounds. This paper presents a mapping of these philosophical-versus-practical concerns as a model for visualizing the conflicting impulses at the heart of a larger professional debate over the place and purpose of user-generated content in the news production process. Moreover, these findings are viewed in light of gatekeeping, which, we argue, offers a welcome point of entry for the study of participatory media work as it evolves at news organizations large and small alike. In contributing to a growing body of literature on user-generated content in news contexts, this study points to the need for better understanding the causes and consequences of journalism's hyperlocal turn, as digitization enables newswork to serve increasingly niche geographic and virtual communities.

Recently, true crime podcasting has exploded. These podcasts organizations mobilize resources, compete with other organizations, gain legitimacy, and focus on sustaining foundings and preventing mortalities. This study uses a mixed methods approach to explore this media phenomenon from the perspective of organizational ecology. A demography of true crime podcasts was conducted and population density over time was calculated. Content analysis of news articles mentioning "true crime podcasts" was conducted to understand how journalists from other media organizations act as legitimacy agents to confer public legitimacy on organizations within the population. Explanation of the true crime podcasts' ecosystem is provided, as well as evidence of growing public legitimacy.

Magazines increasingly seek to drive up traffic by developing busy online communities with high levels of user generated content, without the resources for active management of every comment. If successful, a highly interactive site can generate free content, attract regular visitors, give an insight into readers' concerns and provide revenue. Like a successful pub, it generates and thrives on lively debate, which may carry the seeds of trouble.

This article introduces a theoretical typology of four rival yet converging ideal types of cultural critics in contemporary media culture and in cultural journalism, more specifically, encapsulated by the term the heterogeneous cultural critic and characterized by different kinds of authority and expertise: (1) the intellectual cultural critic, who is closely connected to an aesthetic tradition, bohemia and/or academia, or institutionalized cultural capital; (2) the professional cultural journalist, who is first and foremost embedded in a media professional logic; (3) the media-made arbiter of taste, whose authority is closely linked to practical experience with cultural production and repeated charismatic media performances; and (4) the everyday amateur expert, who offers subjective opinions and represents experience-based cultural taste. The aim is to provide an analytical minimum model for future empirical studies by outlining the contours of the multiple, objective and subjective, professional and non-professional cultural "authorities" of contemporary media culture.

Newsrooms are in a makeover process, reflecting the complex changes taking place in the market, along with a shift towards the digital domain within the media value creation chains. Our comparative study monitors convergence and integration processes in newsrooms in Spain (El Mundo), Germany (Die Welt) and Austria (Der Standard). Five years ago, we established three typical newsroom models and a convergence matrix for analysis and comparison: Full Integration, Cross-Media and Coordination of Isolated Platforms. The models and matrix have now been confirmed-and enriched with new details and descriptors regarding newsroom organization, workflows and change management. At the same time, audience participation is becoming a key strategic question in all newsroom models, whereas the traditional logic and rhythms of daily newspaper production are losing ground.

This article analyzes the nature of debate on “below the line” comment fields at the United Kingdom’s Guardian, and how, if at all, such debates are impacting journalism practice. The article combines a content analysis of 3,792 comments across eighty-five articles that focused on the UN Climate Change Summit, with ten interviews with journalists, two with affiliated commentators, plus the community manager. The results suggest a more positive picture than has been found by many existing studies: Debates were often deliberative in nature, and journalists reported that it was positively impacting their practice in several ways, including providing new story leads and enhanced critical reflection. However, citizen–journalist debate was limited. The results are attributed to the normalization of comment fields into everyday journalism practice, extensive support and encouragement from senior management, and a realization that comment fields can actually make the journalists’ life a little easier.

This study analyzes the interpretive repertoires used by public relations (PR) advisors of Dutch politicians to describe their relations with talk show journalists. A qualitative analysis of semi-structured interviews revealed that the dominant repertoires come from the realm of play. PR advisors downplay the power struggle to position politicians on talk shows as a competitive game while at the same time they legitimize their close relationships with journalists with another play metaphor, the rehearsed stage play. Moreover, comparing politicians' appearances on talk shows with stage performances gives them the opportunity to brush aside the contradiction between their extensive pre-broadcast preparations and the authentic appearance they attempt to emulate. Studying the interpretive repertoires of advisors working in PR and how they fruitfully combine the elements of struggle and cooperation sheds light on the structures and strategies that define journalist-source relationships. It provides insights into how PR advisors perceive and enact their own role, which often goes unnoticed both in research and by the general public.

Newsrooms are in a makeover process, reflecting the complex changes taking place in the market, along with a shift towards the digital domain within the media value creation chains. Our comparative study monitors convergence and integration processes in newsrooms in Spain (El Mundo), Germany (Die Welt) and Austria (Der Standard). Five years ago, we established three typical newsroom models and a convergence matrix for analysis and comparison: Full Integration, Cross-Media and Coordination of Isolated Platforms. The models and matrix have now been confirmed-and enriched with new details and descriptors regarding newsroom organization, workflows and change management. At the same time, audience participation is becoming a key strategic question in all newsroom models, whereas the traditional logic and rhythms of daily newspaper production are losing ground.

Popular criticism of legacy news media is argued to have the capacity to influence journalistic practice and subsequently keep journalists accountable. Scholars give prescriptions of the kinds of criticisms journalists need, if they are to be kept accountable to journalistic norms and values, but this has not been matched with perspectives of journalists. Following in-depth interviews with 24 practising journalists in Kenya and South Africa, the study found that although journalists treat fairness,
facts and positiveness as “good” attributes of media critique, they are more inclined towards criticisms that show an understanding of news processes.

This paper looks at service journalism and its evolution as a community platform through blog comments and social media through a case study of two sections of The New York Times' business section: the personal finance section and the personal technology section. The paper proceeds through a discussion of the importance of networked journalism, and relies on in-depth qualitative interviews with the journalists closest to the decisions being made about how service journalism at the Times becomes a participatory experience for readers. The article argues that a Web 2.0 world facilitates a community experience that changes the one-to-many relationship that journalists have with their readers; instead, journalists make decisions about coverage and engage in conversations with readers in response to this new relationship with readers.

This study explores how an engaged journalism process supported by participatory design practices can impact attitudes and perceptions of audience engagement in local journalism. Using MuckRock's Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) submission tool, journalists, journalism students, and community stakeholders engaged in participatory design workshops centered around pressing local issues and creative approaches to filing FOIA requests. This study re-imagines FOI requests not just as a way to locate source material for important local reporting, but as a visible process that invites the public to engage and understand how that reporting is doneand how anyone can use and benefit from the process. Findings show that design-driven engagement journalism practices can make public records culture more inclusive, engaging, and accessible, and support more collaborative and creative engagement between journalists and audiences.

The purpose of this study is to understand how journalists engage with and use statistics to articulate science news in particular Arab countries with emphasis on the cases of Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. The study assesses the current capabilities of journalism and identifies key knowledge gaps in the area, while examining the nature of the news sources that provide this data and how journalists handle these sources in relation to the outputs that they produce. It does so by applying a mix-methods approach that triangulates content analysis, expert panel and semistructured interviews with journalists and news editors in order to analyse outputs, organisational cultures and practices. The overall project suggests similarities in the existing gaps and causes of these deficits to those present among journalists in the West and highlights some important distinctive contextual features that hinder news reporting of science in the countries studied here.

Between 2012 and 2016, UNESCO registered 530 deaths of journalists. They also published a statistic showing that television journalists were the most killed, followed by print media, radio and online journalists. Hinted in this statistics is the need to understand the relationship between the medium through which and in which the journalists produce news and the threats and dangers posed to them. In this article, we discuss this interlinkage and call it medium-specific threats. As examples of this interlinkage, we describe the cases of community radio journalists in the Philippines, photojournalists in Afghanistan and online journalists in Venezuela. Based on these examples from independently conducted studies from very different parts of the world, we make the broader case that while recognizing the prevailing political-economic and socio-cultural factors and forces at work in these media systems-influx , investigations of mediumspecific threats to journalists are needed for more nuanced understanding of and thus mitigation of journalists' insecurities.

The mass media are expected to play a key role in providing relevant and accurate information during a crisis. While numerous studies have explored how well the media perform in providing information during crises, less attention has been given to journalism's ritual aspects, such as those related to remembering, celebrating, mourning and sharing among members of a community. In the culturalist tradition, journalism is as much about ritual and meaning-making as it is about providing information. One of the most important ways of performing this ritual function is through live, on-the-spot journalism *a form of journalism that has becoming increasingly commonplace due to technological developments, and at the very least, it is connected with crisis news coverage. Based on interviews with broadcast media journalists about their decision-making strategies and motives during two crises (11 September 2001 and the Anna Lindh murder in 2003), we link crisis communication with journalism's ritual and symbolic functions. We argue that key journalistic strategies such as immediacy and competition are motivated just as much by rituals related to affirming community and journalistic organisational needs as by informational motivations. We conclude by suggesting that in times of crisis, the roles of psychologist, comforter and co-mourner should be considered journalistic role conceptions especially in a live, 24-hour news culture.

Adopting a systems framework from the sociology of occupations, this study proposes a model to explain the vulnerabilities of journalism in the face of challenges from blogging, and the conditions under which journalists are likely to change their practices to address these vulnerabilities. A test of this model shows that editors' awareness of local blogging activity corresponds to increased use of blogs as sources, discussion of blogs in planning meetings and adoption of the blogging form on news websites.

One of the most important civic phenomena emerging from favelas in Rio de Janeiro today is 'community (photo)journalism', which is practised by favela residents who are trained in journalistic and artistic techniques to raise critical awareness and promote political mobilisation in-and outside favelas. This paper looks at some of the work produced at one training place for community photographers, the agency-school Imagens do Povo ("Images of the People") in Nova Holanda, a favela located in Rio's North Zone. Using an ethnographic approach, this article first provides an account of the working practices of the School and its photographers. This is followed by a discussion of a small sample of their photographic work, for which we employ a social semiotic paradigm of image analysis. This methodological synergy provides insights into how these journalists document long-term structural as well as 'spectacular' violence in favelas, while at the same time striving to capture some of the 'beauty 'of these communities. The paper concludes that this form of photographic work constitutes an important step towards a more analytical brand of journalism with different news values that encourage a more context-sensitive approach to covering urban violence and favela life.

By its nature, news focuses on unique occurrences-the latest details and newest revelations about what's going on in the world. But some news stories are extraordinary. They come at us in bold type on newspapers, flashing graphics on television, and now in interactive digital forms fueled by digital sources. They shock us when they come out, and leave us thinking differently about the world after we've encountered them. These stories also pose new questions about what journalism can be in a digital age. By their nature, journalists are rarely the subjects of their own stories. They are more often in the background, and we only know of a journalist's presence by their byline and an inherent recognition that someone did the work to report a story. But some news stories are extraordinary, and call for greater attention to those involved in the newswork behind the headlines. These stories also draw attention to the journalists and their work in a digital age. Among stories which are extraordinary and which called for extraordinary endeavor are those surrounding the massive troves of digital material leaked via WikiLeaks in 2010 and by Edward Snowden in 2013. In news built on these materials, there were explosive revelations, but also dramatic renderings of journalists working to report the stories which made "WikiLeaks" and "Snowden" household names. With WikiLeaks, journalists recounted the secrecy involved in working with Assange, and the expertise in making sense of WikiLeaks' releases. With Snowden, we were shown how encrypted emails and secret meetings in a Hong Kong hotel led journalists to their source, enabling the reporting on international surveillance that followed. These stories brought attention to the complex relationship between journalists and their sources, and to the boundaries between traditional journalists and new digital actors. These dynamics were addressed in a study titled "Hero or Anti-hero?". In part an exploration of methodological approaches for examining journalistic identity and newswork in texts, this research showed news also provided a reassuring narrative, as journalists took these "extraordinary occurrences" and went about "reporting on them in a way that makes journalistic work appear competent to news media audiences" (Berkowitz 2000, 129). Its findings showed how news stories provide a public platform for journalists

Journalistic quality and professional autonomy are two phenomena that go well together. In this paper I problematize the limits of Romanian journalistic autonomy in the context of the emerging centrality of the market. More specifically, I explore how quality journalistic professional practice can(not) get shaped when there is no structured demand for it in the context of the institutionalization of the market as driving principle in the field of journalism. The phenomena that further hamper journalistic professionalization are the legacies of servitude inherited from the communist period, the low capitalization of this sector, and rampant globalization. I hypothesize that the institutionalisation of the market driven media sector negatively influences the professionalization of journalism in the context of globalization and limited legacy of media autonomy.