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Throughout journalism studies scholarship, the market orientation of lifestyle journalism has been associated with its diminished place within the journalistic field. Specifically, because lifestyle journalists are often thought to entertain and not inform, they hold less social capital within the journalism industry. This study aims to explore how lifestyle journalists perceive their own market orientation and their role relative to the audience. Through the lens of market theory for news production, this study reports on semi-structured interviews with US-based lifestyle journalists (n = 30) and argues that lifestyle journalists perceive that they do feel effects of market influence, but no more than those experienced in hard news specialties. However, lifestyle journalists did perceive expectations in their newsroom that their work ought to be market-driven, and bring in revenue, in order to support the reporting of hard news. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How and why does legacy news media move from protecting to undermining democracy? Several studies argue that journalism can facilitate and shape democratic backsliding. However, evidence is scarce and, to some extent, limited to the content analysis of news outputs and editorials. The causal mechanisms of an anti-democratic role for the press and how it is operationalised into specific processes of news production remain largely misunderstood. Using 36 semi-structured qualitative interviews and three case studies, this paper analyses journalistic practices and role perceptions in Brazil within a period of constant decline in the quality of democracy (2016-2021). The results show that labour precarity is a crucial driver in journalistic practices capable of damaging democracy, which challenges previous assumptions that media capture is mostly influenced by the political economy of news organisations. This research also indicates that journalists are not homogeneously dominated by the interests of elites and can engage with them on their own terms to advance personal agendas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This introductory paper will (a) review the intersection between science, journalism and development from a historical perspective, (b) propose normative directions for science journalism of the Global South, (c) contrast that normative framework with the rather weak state of science journalism across the South, (d) identify potential solutions to current problems, and (e) propose a research agenda for the future. Throughout, I will advance a framework of theoretical and practical principles to transform the science–journalism–development relationship in the Global South, which entails four normative dimensions: glocalisation, decolonisation, indigenisation and dewesternisation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Science journalism associations at a national and international level have aimed to form networks of support for the professionalization of the field. In this article, we focus at the process of consolidation of one of the first of such international organizations: the Ibero-American Association of Science Journalism (AIPC), created in Medellín in 1969, which sowed the seeds for the creation of new national associations across Latin America and connected these national organizations in Latin America and Spain through international conferences, exchange programs, and training initiatives. Through the analysis of historical documentation from the personal archive of one of its main leaders, the Spanish Manuel Calvo Hernando, we explore the dynamic between the AIPC and the national associations in Latin America during this formative period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While research on journalism in social media is extensive and approaches the topic from different perspectives, the consideration of what contributes to quality journalism in social media is underdeveloped. Our paper addresses this by providing a comprehensive literature review of journalism research relating to aspects of quality in social media. Based on a systematic Scopus search, 54 peer-reviewed, English-language papers published between 2015 and 2022 were selected for in-depth textual analysis using MAXQDA. Two important takeaways emerge from the analysis. First, the literature suggests that journalists and media organizations adapt work routines, norms, and values in a context-sensitive manner when producing content for social media. By enabling many-to-many communication, social media platforms force journalists and media outlets to reflect on audience demands and to develop audience engagement strategies. Second, the findings underscore that journalistic social media activities diverge depending on how individual journalists and organizations approach journalistic quality in social media. As these findings are only pieces to the puzzle of what quality journalism in social media entails, we hope to encourage further research in this area. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholarship on the mainstream press in the United States has argued that in the new media age, consumers prefer entertainment while journalists prefer hard news—yet digital Black press journalists and readers value both types of content. In the Black press, entertainment is produced and consumed as an alternative to mainstream media's often unfavorable hard news coverage of African Americans. The race-based trauma that African Americans experience through news consumption can negatively impact mental health and cause news avoidance, but some are resisting this by creating spaces for Black joy online. This research uses interviews with journalists and focus groups with readers to investigate the utility of entertainment news content in the Black press. I find that entertainment in the digital Black press contributes to positive and comprehensive coverage of the African American community, gives consumers a means to cope with or protect themselves from reading traumatic news coverage on topics such as Black Lives Matter, and can act as a form of self-care. I conclude that digital Black press entertainment content can counteract communal stress for African Americans who may experience high levels of news-related anxiety. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research systematically and empirically examines challenges that confront Nigerian foreign correspondents, including how foreign correspondents manage the demands of their job such as pressures from senior editors at their head offices, restricted access to information and state officials, and government officials interfering with objective news reporting. The study also looks at correspondents' accounts of their individual experiences and the strategies they deploy to circumnavigate the challenges they encounter in their professional practice. The merit of this research lies in its intent to fill existing gaps in the scholarship of foreign correspondence in Africa. Specifically, the study contributes to knowledge and understanding of foreign correspondents in Nigeria, the most populous country in Africa, including an understanding of the difficult environment of journalistic practices in a non-Western country. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Utilizing agenda-building theory, we explore how campaigns and parties influenced press and public agendas during Florida's 2018 midterm election. We investigate if the Gubernatorial and Senate campaigns transferred issue salience and affective attributes to press coverage and online public discourse. Results of a mixed-method computer-assisted content analysis suggest weak transfer of issue salience and affective attributes by the campaigns and parties to the press and public agendas. The DeSantis campaign and Republican Party were the most successful at influencing press coverage and public discourse. First-level agenda-setting was observed by press coverage on the Gillum campaign and Democratic Party's agendas. The symmetry between these findings and election results offers correlational support for the limited effects of first- and second-level agenda-building and -setting in state elections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study aimed to examine the conceptual, theoretical, and methodological trends and gaps in data journalism research by conducting a systematic literature review of 102 articles published in English in SSCI-indexed communication journals. The review revealed that the majority of the literature focused on empirical investigations of data journalism practice, with weak conceptual and theoretical foundations and limited methodological diversity. Additionally, the authors and topics examined were predominantly from the Global North, which makes it challenging to generalize the findings to different contexts and scales. However, recent larger-scale studies incorporating the Global South offer hope for deepening the data journalism discussion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Automated tools for parsing and communicating information have increasingly become associated with the production of journalistic content. To study this phenomenon and to explore the development of automated journalism across two locales at the cutting edge of technology, we leverage insights from in-depth interviews with news technologists from pioneering news organizations and Internet companies specialized in the construction of "news bot" technology in the United States and China, including The Associated Press, The New York Times, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, BuzzFeed, Quartz, Xinhua Zhiyun, Southern Metropolis Daily, Toutiao, and Tencent. Based on these interviews, we document how the creation of automated journalism products is heavily dependent on the successful assembly of actor networks inside and outside organizations. While metrics for measuring the success of automated journalism are applied differently, they often center around the augmentation of existing reportorial activities and focus on replacing rote and mundane (human) work processes. Some of the biggest challenges in automated journalism lie in curating high-quality datasets and managing the associated high stakes of errors in a business defined by trust. Lastly, automated journalism can be seen as a form of experimentation, helping its protagonists to future-proof their respective organizations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines journalistic role performance in coverage of the COVID-19 pandemic, based on a content analysis of newspaper, television, radio and online news in 37 countries. We test a set of hypotheses derived from two perspectives on the role of journalism in health crises. Mediatization theories assume that news media tend to sensationalize or to politicize health crises. A contrasting perspective holds that journalists shift toward more deferential and cooperative stances toward health and political authorities in a health crisis, attempting to mobilize the public to act according to the best science. Hypotheses derived from these perspectives are tested using the standard measures of journalistic roles developed by the Journalistic Role Performance Project. Results show that the deference/cooperation/consensus perspective is better supported, with media moving away from the Watchdog and Infotainment, and toward performance of the Service and Civic roles. We also explore differences in the pattern by country. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reviews the peer-reviewed literature about solutions journalism and constructive journalism to unpack their components, as such emerging solutions-oriented approaches gain steam in journalistic practice and scholarly examination. We find that solutions-oriented journalism differs from problem-oriented journalism in its qualities, frames, scope, purpose, orientation, boundaries, and journalists' reporting processes. While solutions-oriented journalism prioritizes coverage of credible responses to social problems as a method for enhancing journalists' social responsibility, tensions exist over the nature of those responsibilities, especially in different national contexts. Using the components we identified, we suggest future research clarify the individual-societal levels of solutions-oriented journalism effects, explore how it differs in various media contexts and political systems, and investigate how diverse audiences perceive and are served by solutions-oriented approaches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recommender systems are increasingly applied by traditional news organisations to structure and personalise their websites according to a set of predefined principles. But we have little insight into the people and processes involved in defining these principles and transforming them into code, despite their direct impact on online news selection and distribution. This article contributes to filling this research gap by investigating recommender system development and implementation at two Scandinavian news organisations. Drawing on field theory, the study explores the powerful position of developers and data scientists within news organisations and their working relationships around algorithmic curation. These new entrants into the field bring new forms of cultural capital and a performance-oriented doxa that clashes with the journalistic doxa, causing delays in the integration of the technology. The article highlights the important role of steering groups and bridging employees in balancing technical, commercial, and editorial concerns but also illuminates the lack of sustained collaboration between journalists and data scientists. Such overlapping and non-siloed collaboration can help build common ground and inter-field understanding and ease technology integration. To this end, the article suggests that long-term business objectives bridge the tech-editorial gap by bringing these different stakeholders together around a common goal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Autonomy is considered a prerequisite for the press to function in service of the public. Over the past few decades, both journalism and society at large have been subjected to significant change and instability, potentially affecting journalists' independent modes of production. We, therefore, argue that a re-evaluation of journalism's institutional strength to perform the societal functions bestowed upon it by the public is imperative. This paper attempts to contribute to this re-evaluation by examining to what extent legacy media journalists act according to their own professional logic rather than being historically conditioned to act according to external logics imposed on the field of journalism. We adopt a qualitative historical approach grounded in the theoretical framework of field theory for our examination of the development of journalistic autonomy at Flemish newspaper De Standaard. Based on a rich body of source material that emphasizes the rarely considered perspective of chief editors, we reconstruct journalistic autonomy as a dynamic concept shaped by an intricate web of interconnected macro-, meso- and micro-level developments and interactions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Critical reporting (piping-baodao) has long been considered one of the most important journalistic tools in China, exhibiting great democratic potential. However, the media environment for such reporting has become precarious over the past decade, raising the questions of how much space is left for critical reporting and how it is related to the media–state dynamics. Drawing on a 15-year longitudinal content analysis of how The Beijing News—an outspoken newspaper—reported corruption, this study explored the evolution of critical reporting in China. The results revealed that critical reporting is still a small-scale, non-routine journalistic practice. A detailed analysis was conducted to determine how media resources and power relations shaped critical reporting. The results showed that critical reporting has tended to take a resource-intense format and require non-official sources. Furthermore, critical reporting was more pronounced with respect to the coverage of low-ranking officials and officials outside the newspaper's parent region. Broader implications of these findings have been discussed. Overall, the present study advances the understanding of critical journalism in an authoritarian context and explores its relations with the state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study sheds light on the media controversy in Mexico surrounding the publishing of photos of Ingrid Escamilla's murdered body. Using a theoretical lens that integrates paradigm repair and decolonial feminist thought, we interrogate how four of Mexico's most read news publications, namely Reforma, El Universal, Excelsior, and Milenio, attempted to reify their journalistic paradigm in the midst of high threat. Through a multimodal critical discourse analysis of 71 news articles, we identified four different processes of paradigm repair that are deeply tied to larger hegemony-building processes. These include diverting responsibility away from media and unto others; making explicit a boundary between "low-tier" tabloid-style newspapers that leaked the photos and "respectable" media that ascribe to Western tenets; sanitizing gore to uphold the paradigm; and an overt focus on a new law proposed by the Mexican state as the "solution" to this "anomalous act." The study elucidates how these instances of metajournalistic reflection - beyond reinstating journalistic legitimacy and hegemony - produce and reinforce a binary between valid and invalid forms of knowledge and reinforce the media's institutional alliances to the state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article investigates how newspaper editorials address the "fake news" phenomenon concerning (1) the damages that mis- and disinformation pose to society and journalism; (2) the roles news organizations claim for themselves; (3) the communication agents mentioned; and (4) how media companies defend the field. We use content analysis to study 375 editorials published between 2017 and 2020 in three Brazilian quality-papers. Brazil is a relevant case since its media system and political institutions differ from those in the United States and Western Europe, leading us to understand metajournalistic discourses not necessarily seen in more stable environments. The results indicate that key political events (e.g., social security reform and presidential elections) became occasions for media organizations to publish more editorials discussing "fake news." Harming democracy was the main problem caused by mis- and disinformation. The newspapers regularly identified themselves as victims of attacks from political authorities. The editorial texts reinforced journalism's expertise in crafting and providing credible information, but, at the same time, such newspapers avoided responding to external criticisms. More interestingly, the outlets used terms associated with mis- and disinformation to attack rival groups. Lastly, our codebook provides an original contribution to the field as it considers a wide range of variables, encouraging comparative studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the early 2000s, the field of journalism studies has come of age in an era defined by increasingly complex digital media landscapes. In response, much of journalism studies research remains centered in the newsroom, in spirit if not literally, and is focused on how the industry addresses technological change. This research has advanced journalism scholarship, but has often neglected a broader vision that encompasses and reflects the diversity of audience sensemaking practices as well as the sociocultural and political implications of digital media culture. This essay argues that many scholarly endeavors flying under the banner of journalism studies are more about renovations inside the house of news than how much the neighborhood is changing around it. To address this, we introduce a realist view of journalism that forces journalism studies scholars to confront broader questions surrounding media content and culture, citizens and democracy, and audiences and public affairs. More specifically, in advocating for the value of a realist, emic perspective on audiences' ways of engaging with public affairs as central to the value proposition for the field, we propose why this view should act as a central pillar for building a new era of journalism studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on a content analysis of 263 news articles on US development assistance from 2011 to 2020 across three US media outlets, the study investigates the media's performance in covering and representing US development assistance to the public. The analysis reveals that the media focus their coverage of US development assistance based on geopolitical interests and high-profile stories of aid, and fail to critically and comprehensively follow up on them after their announcement. The media dominantly portrayed development assistance in terms of materialistic aid, uncritically justified as "doing good," while attributing its de-legitimacy to the recipients' inability and leaving the global North's dysfunctional aid system unquestioned. Such modernistic representation was further supported by the dominance of the Western voice in speaking about what development assistance is and why it matters. To promote better practices for "news about development," the study suggests that journalism should pay critical attention to the political economy of development communication and adopt a postcolonial communication approach to decenter the hegemonic conventions of journalism grounded in Western experiences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study takes a supply-side inhabited institutional perspective on journalism innovation by looking at the roles played by varied field-level actors, or meta-organizations, that inhabit the journalism field. Specifically, the study examines roles played by meta-organizations in the rise of local news collaborations at local sites. Meta-organizations—e.g., professional associations, foundations, training/research centers, and trade publications—are organizations that act at the level of the metajournalistic field to theorize, legitimate and promote new ideas; they may then help translate ideas to varied local sites and translate lessons learned back to the journalistic field. Results of a directed qualitative analysis of meta-organization texts indicate a tendency by news collaborations to embrace the aims of the meta-organizations that support them. Meta-organizations frame problems in ways that shape news collaboration goals, often in ways that are useful to meta-organizations, consistent with recent research on journalism foundations. Findings also show that collaborations receiving support from diverse local organizations engage in more impromptu and varied activities at local sites, while collaborations supported by collectives of interconnected, high-status meta-organizations tend to follow scripted paths in terms of their practices and in terms of lessons learned. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The existing literature presents several studies which show that the levels of press freedom can affect the state of the economy. What has not thus far been investigated is whether the economy can affect the levels of press freedom, the specific economic conditions that mainly affect it and the differences among various countries. This study attempts to analyze the impact of economic conditions on the degree of press freedom, in 18 countries of the western world based on a quantitative analysis for the period 2002–2019, and advance our understanding of this relationship. We find that the state of the economy within a country can affect the level of press freedom while the effects of economic conditions on the degree of press freedom seem to vary among different media systems of the western world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores an important development in mainstream U.S. journalism that has not received the attention it deserves. Since 2008, elite news and opinion outlets like the New York Times have placed Black advocacy journalists in positions where they can allocate resources, shape editorial decisions, and – in the tradition of the historical Black press – challenge long-standing narratives of the nation's racial history. Using concepts first developed by Black and feminist critics of Habermas's theory of democratic deliberation, this article contends this new Black press has shed its status as a "counterpublic" and is fighting to build a new consensus on racial justice from within the mainstream public sphere. The article contextualizes this effort by examining two critical junctures in the nation's history when the white, mainstream press helped reify racial narratives the new Black press is now struggling to dismantle. It also explores the backlash against the new Black press, and it raises questions about the functionality of the current networked public sphere. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Journalism is presented as fundamental to democratic accountability in that news media are both able and expected to hold power to account. Such normative expectations, which justify the protections given journalists and news media, are most frequently studied with regards to state power as the natural object of press scrutiny. This article reports on a successful effort to conduct a replicable analysis of a paradigmatic case of corporate power, the UK chicken meat production industry, that asked whether and how newspapers hold corporate power to account. The analytic framework that we developed to support our two-stage framing analysis decomposed accountability into problematization, causal interpretation and attributions of responsibility, thus allowing us to systematically describe how newspapers shape the public debates in a large heterogeneous dataset. We examined a census of relevant articles from seven UK outlets published between 1985 and 2016 (N = 766). While we were pleased to find that our method, if labor intensive, was fully workable, we were concerned to find that media practice was not compatible with holding corporate power to account. These findings raise serious concerns at the levels of this case, for media practice and for media scholarship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the post-award implications of international prize culture within the journalism profession. Through qualitative interviews with winners of CNN competitions, this paper specifically investigates how news professionals discursively construct the notion of excellence within the space of international award practice, and then how they subsequently perceive their roles in the post-award dispensation. The key findings show that journalists' understanding of excellence through awards is fluid and based on individual, institutional as well as professional notions of what constitutes par/sub-par journalism. These "bearers of excellence" perceive themselves as promoters of high standards of journalistic practice and champions of normative roles, such as the watchdog role, which fits into the broader mission of the specific institution sponsoring the awards. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Journalists increasingly have to cope with severe attacks – ranging from Fake News accusations to violence and death threats. To better understand how journalists can counter delegitimizing attacks such as anti-media populism and online harassment, this study examines their paradigm repair strategies to ward off assaults in the unconsolidated democracy of the Philippines. Through in-depth semi-structured interviews with 18 Filipino reporters and editors from three influential media outlets that then President Rodrigo Duterte targeted as enemies – the broadcaster ABS-CBN, the newspaper Philippine Daily Inquirer, and the website Rappler – this paper offers novel insights on journalists' counterstrategies with appeals to their strengthened roles as watchdogs, interpreters and disseminators of populist communication. Findings indicate that journalists discard practices like false equivalence and shift roles including from being detached observers to media freedom advocates and truth activists to respond to institutional attacks, rising disinformation, and perceived democratic erosion as they seek to speak truth to a populist in power. The study provides theoretical and empirical contributions by combining paradigm repair and role perceptions as tools in analyzing journalists' responses to legitimacy threats, and by presenting an understudied case of anti-media populism in the Global South. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Examining the trajectory of Brazilian journalism and its academic mediations during the period 1945–1964, this article provides elements to identify what we would call the negative dialectics of intellectual colonialism. In the Brazilian press, the replacement of the French paradigm by the North American one was seen by many as progress, without speculation about the possibility of cultivating a native formula. Associated with the institutional modernization triggered by the 1930 Revolution, the model of news production imported from the United States was softly assimilated instead of being imposed on professionals. There was a "passive revolution". Rather than resisting new foreign influences, most of Brazil's first generation of professional journalists and academics exploited for their own benefit the opportunities that, not by chance, emerged from the situation created by the context of the Second World War. On the other hand, the modernization of the press, paradoxically, had no significant impact on professional training within journalism schools, which arose in Brazil as an annex to the faculties of philosophy verified at that time and, therefore, out of step with the pedagogical pragmatism and practical teaching that characterized academically journalism in the United States. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I explored how two media aid projects from Sweden were used to intervene in the development of Vietnamese journalism between 1993 and 2007. Vietnamese journalism and media aid are contextualized in this paper by unfolding pedagogical ideology, journalistic culture, and the negotiation of professional ideals. Based on an interview study with Swedish trainers from the media aid projects and informed by document analysis, the main research question concerned the role of the trainers in negotiating journalistic practices during the aid projects and the implications of these. Furthermore, I explored the ways in which the aid influenced journalistic ideology in Vietnam, and how the projects fulfilled their political aim to contribute to the democratic development of media in Vietnam. The paper adds to the growing body of literature seeking to de-colonialize media theory to rethink the development of journalism in the Global South. The key findings demonstrate how social norms disrupted the implementation of the ideology of journalism being conveyed from Sweden, while the transfer of technological equipment and knowledge impacted journalism production. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The morphology of journalism culture comprises three factors, namely, micro-, meso-, and macrofactors. Politics and economics are among the many macro factors. However, this study focuses on how the morphology of journalism culture is formed by local culture. This study is important in the theory of de-Westernization because local culture could be a differentiator among journalism cultures. Such efforts will enable the diversity of journalism cultures that differ from those in the West. This research was conducted on journalists working in Yogyakarta, a region in Indonesia. This study shows that local culture, in this case, the Javanese culture, contributes to creating the journalism culture among journalists in Yogyakarta either in their journalism values or practices. This influence is evident in their politeness, language propriety, and criticism style. Several informants stated that they choose a criticism style that is not vulgar. They believe that there is no need for vulgar criticism because their style of criticism is effective because both the journalists and their subjects of criticism are from the same cultural environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The networked era has made it increasingly difficult to define journalism and to separate it from other types of information. This is no small thing. The definition of journalism influences its practice and its role in democratic society. This article identifies themes from judicial definitions of journalism from recent U.S. state and federal cases. Jurists' rationales for why a person is or is not a journalist have come as they face a variety of cases in which bloggers, message-board posters, website publishers, and others have claimed protections that have historically been primarily associated with traditional journalists. Ultimately, judges have constructed a discourse about journalism that combined concerns regarding how closely the process and practices the publishers used to gather and communicate the information aligned with traditional journalistic work, the public-service value of the information, and the journalistic credentials of the publisher. Though concern for how the work was created and who communicated it was crucial, jurists consistently conveyed the public-service role was most instrumental in their evaluations, often rationalizing broad expansions of what legally constitutes journalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study relies on Entman's definition of frames and framing functions to analyze how the Chilean government and news media framed a natural disaster occurring in Chile in 2014. Using structural topic modeling, 705 news stories and 174 official press releases were analyzed to identify under which conditions the media may attribute blame when natural disasters are framed beyond the realm of an accident. Findings indicate the government portrayed its own performance as a successful one where all actors did their job to minimize disaster consequences. Yet, the media narrative did not reflect the government's efficiency frame, portraying the official response as a result of lessons learned from a previous disaster. Taken together, the results suggest that when the media align with a particular political side, disaster characteristics are not the main issue to report on. This study departs from a description of journalistic practices in time of disasters towards a more complex view of the relationship between government and the press when it comes to disaster coverage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How have newspapers covered Covid-19 in Asia? To answer this question, I studied East Asian English-language newspapers published between January and July 2020. First, I measured the level of news media attention on Covid-19 among all reports. Second, I analyzed the tone and content of 330 editorials. I divided the analysis into two time periods: the initial crisis breakout period, when the number of infections was rising or high, and the crisis abatement period, when new infections declined to manageable levels. Findings show that although newspapers were slow to begin addressing the pandemic, their early editorials carried an alarming tone, which continued even after new infections dropped to low levels. This surprising level of concern continued because the topics shifted from health concerns to more ideological goals. Chinese and Taiwanese editors politicized the pandemic, using it as a wedge issue to attack international adversaries. Meanwhile, Korean editors used the economic fallout of the pandemic to press the government for pro-business economic reforms. In contrast, editors in Hong Kong exhibited cautious neutrality, largely avoiding politicization of the pandemic. These patterns of editorial coverage reveal the partizan nature of the press in East Asia, as well as salient political and economic undercurrents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on the role of passion in news journalism from a managerial perspective. The analysis is based on a data set of 40,621 web-based job advertisements obtained from Journalismjobs.com, from the year 2002 to 2017. The quantitative analysis shows that passion has been on the rise as only 4% of the job advertisements in 2002 asked for "passionate" journalists, increasing to almost 16% in 2013. The authors also performed a qualitative analysis of job advertisements mentioning the word "passion" for the periods 2002–2003 and 2017. These advertisements express a shift from a normative role of journalists to journalism as an activity: when mentioned within the context of personal character, the desired temperament of journalists has given way to descriptions of desired behaviour. The normative focus on journalism as an ideal has decreased while the focus on performance—that journalists should feel passionate about reporting and storytelling—has risen dramatically. In the texts, passion emerges as something that can be applied in a range of contexts as a strategic resource. The findings point to commodification of feelings and exploitation of emotional labour in journalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

News value research assumes that news factors may shift and diversify over time. Despite the technological and economic transformations of the media over the past decades, however, there has been little conceptual work on how journalistic news factors might be changing. This paper addresses how broader developments, such as digitization, datafication, and audience fragmentation, lead to changing news practices. One characteristic of the digital age is that attention is not only scarce and increasingly contested but also continuously measured and compared, leading to a heightened value around everything that seems to draw an exceptional response. Therefore, we introduce the news factor "public response" and argue that journalism increasingly covers those issues and actors that (are said to) have received broad or unexpected public attention. Using numerical, linguistic, and visual means, journalists explicitly tell their audience what many people are paying attention to. We demonstrate the significance of this news factor by pursuing two objectives: First, public response is presented conceptually and distinguished from other news factors. Second, we use the case of the 2016 US election campaign coverage to illustrate public response and derive suggestions for future measurements in qualitative and quantitative textual and visual content analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the past decade, the initiative of "brand propaganda," a form of positive reporting on local governments in exchange of financial support, emerged within a few of China's city-level and province-level press groups. Employing the theoretical perspective of journalistic legitimacy, this study investigates how involved local journalists rationalize this initiative and the implications it bears for the future of China's local journalism. In-depth interviews with 17 journalists from the local press group X Daily suggest that brand propaganda is legitimized through a "story of survival" entailing discourses of balance, returning, and adaptation. The effects of brand propaganda on local press and the future of Chinese journalism are complicated by the interactions between individual journalists, local press markets, and the overall media-political environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the effects of press freedom (as defined by the US-based Freedom House) on economic growth for 97 countries over four decades (1972–2014). Acknowledging that the idea of "press freedom" carries with it a weight of ethnocentric assumptions, our empirical analysis finds that US understandings of deterioration in press freedom are detrimental to a nation's economy. Further, we find that countries do not fully recover economically if their press freedoms are compromised, even if the rights of media are restored. This is consistent with emerging literature highlighting the suppressive long-term effects censorship may exert on citizen desire for a free press. We find that the relationship between press freedom and economic performance varies, particularly depending upon the education level of a nation's workforce, which is consistent with notions that education can be linked to a demand for a free press. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Adopting an integrative approach of framing health determinants of drunken driving, this content-analysis study finds Taiwan's three major newspapers have failed to present holistic aspects of this social problem. News reports were filled with episodically event-driven details while widely ignoring thematically contextual health determinants, including socio-demographic factors, causal motives, and public policies. Moreover, news sources, notably police officers, representing an episodic orientation were predominantly used, while health experts, representing a thematic nature, were rarely quoted. The study also elaborates on theoretical and pragmatic implications from the findings in line with past research that the news media lack use of health determinants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the opposing definitions of legitimate journalism between female and male sports reporters in the Swiss daily press, observable through the tensions in the division of work, task hierarchies, and contradictory definitions of what is perceived as distasteful or undesirable. It aims to adopt an inclusive approach that avoids being judgemental towards male perspectives or adopting a cynical view of female journalists, to better understand both male and female journalists' experiences of interaction of work and professional recognition, and identify obstacles to greater gender equality in sports journalism. The analysis relies on the notion of "dirty work" developed by Hughes and Bourdieu's theory of field and habitus that offers a new way to investigate the links between tasks, roles, moral divisions, and power relations. Our detailed observations and 25 semi-structured interviews conducted with female and male sports journalists revealed the co-existence of two opposed professional styles. Overall, the men control the prestigious tasks and the doxa of this speciality. The women interviewed spoke of resisting, adapting, and finding satisfaction with the work that their male colleagues consider distasteful, as while their work is recognised by their superiors and non-sports colleagues as noble in general journalistic norms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite enduring "some of the worst political and economic chaos anywhere in the world" (Mwesige, P. G. 2004. "Disseminators, Advocates and Watchdogs: A Profile of Ugandan Journalists in the New Millennium." Journalism: Theory, Practice & Criticism 5 (1): 69–96. doi:10.1177/1464884904039556), for the last quarter century Uganda has seen significant progress under President Yoweri Museveni, who is credited with liberalizing the media and instituting a constitutional guarantee of free press (Kalyango, Y., and P. Eckler. 2010. "Media Performance, Agenda Building, and Democratization in East Africa." Communication Yearbook 34: 355–389). Now, Uganda has "one of the more vibrant media scenes in east and central Africa" (Freedom House. 2017. Freedom of the Press 2017. Uganda. https://freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-press/2017/uganda, para. 5–6). Still, journalist continue to face challenges. This study utilized in-depth interviews to examine the challenges Ugandan reporters face and what could be done to alleviate them. Through the lens of Shoemaker and Reese's (2013. Mediating the Message in the 21st Century: A Media Sociology Perspective. Routledge) Hierarchy of Influences Model, findings reveal that journalists' challenges come from almost every level. At the individual level, journalists lack professionalism and engage in unethical behavior. Some of these challenges can be blamed on news organizations due to low pay and failed efforts to create a united professional organization to train reporters to act ethically. Extramedia forces, namely, government restrictions, also pose significant challenge. And some restrictions, such as limited access to information, are influenced by ideological factors. As Tabaire (2007. "The Press and Political Repression in Uganda: Back to the Future?" Journal of Eastern African Studies 1 (2): 193–211. doi:10.1080/17531050701452408) suggests, "Only a much more democratic Uganda will ensure a freer press" (208). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In August of 2018, hundreds of US newspapers participated in a coordinated editorial campaign to response to President Trump's attacks on the news media. We examine the full text of 260 of these editorials to explore their discursive strategies during this high profile instance of "information politics" (Carlson [2018]. "The Information Politics of Journalism in a Post-Truth age." Journalism Studies 19 (13): 1879–1888). We find that many editorials emphasized journalistic professionalism, along with journalism's accountability role. Many also openly signaled their participation in the coordinated, nationwide effort, while a smaller number characterized the president as an autocrat. Conceptually arranging these rhetorical strategies in terms of journalism's "externality" and "centrality" in relation to politics (Carlson 2018), the findings suggest that while the effort overall reflected journalism's continued striving to appear independent of politics, quite a few newspapers positioned themselves in open confrontation with the president, thus potentially placing themselves within politics. Our findings also suggest that some of the editorials' most combative rhetoric was related to prevailing local political sentiments. We conclude by assessing the dilemmas for US journalists of engaging in Trump's style of information politics: In a profoundly polarized context, journalism may struggle with how to rebut populist attacks without seeming to enter the partisan fray and thus appearing to confirm populist claims. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Expert voices in media coverage facilitate a well-functioning democracy by informing public debates about policy issues. Experts can fill knowledge gaps in reporting, fact-check statements, refute misinformation, and offer non-partisan perspectives on policy problems. Recent scholarly debates have largely focused on the prevalence of expertise in the public sphere. Critics claim that the demand for instantaneous entertainment has undermined expertise and hastened the decline of expert-informed news coverage. However, opponents argue that journalists are more reliant on experts to make sense of complex political and policy information. This article examines these rival propositions through a longitudinal study of expertise in Australian election reporting. Drawing upon a content analysis of 1270 newspaper articles, this article analyses news coverage of policy issues from the first five Australian election campaigns of the twenty-first century (2001–2013). This article finds that the prevalence of experts in policy coverage largely remained unchanged over the 2000s. In other words, newspapers were consistent in their use of expert sources. However, the evidence does suggest that journalists were politicising policy news by promoting partisans voices, political insiders, and political personalities over policy experts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The news media are important for political influence, and interest groups compete for visibility. However, actors on the same policy field also tend to have close ties and cooperate when interests overlap. Existing research on sources has overwhelmingly focused on journalist-source relations, and far less on how news content is negotiated between the sources themselves. Based on triangulation of in-depth interviews with 40 representatives from Norwegian health interest groups, representing business, citizens and medical professionals, the present article unpacks how groups cooperate on media management behind, and in, the media limelight. Conceptualizing cooperation as resource exchange, the study explores the barriers and incentives that condition media cooperation and visibility, theorized as network dependencies. By exploring how interest groups reason and negotiate media cooperation and access, the study adds new insight to the field of news production, and contributes to the theorizing of source representation in the news. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Economic news uses fiscal experts to construct discourse about government deficits, debt, spending, and services. Most previous studies have assumed that knowledge and understanding are key to the construction of economic expertise in news. This study undertakes a quantitative analysis to discover how the British press represents three high-profile fiscal experts: the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS), the National Audit Office (NAO), and the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR). It analyses 21,515 articles published in the Financial Times, Independent, Guardian, The Daily Telegraph, and Times between May 2010 and December 2016. Surprisingly, the results show that explicit constructions of knowing, understanding, or even being expert are rarely associated with the experts themselves. Markers of social position—being "independent" or "respected"—are much more prominent than indicators of technical knowledge or deep understanding of government finances. Discourses of economic expertise in news are less technical and more social than one would assume from previous scholarship. Journalists use expert sources in the text not to confront complexity, but rather to invoke the experts' networked positions. Press text constructs expert judgments as superior by representing the experts as properly positioned to judge, not by representing their judgments as being better informed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

According to neo-institutional theory, the survival of institutions in society is predicated on a cultural discourse. Dubbed "the institutional myth," this discourse reflects the core values, practices and aspirations of an institution and legitimizes its existence to internal and external stakeholders alike. In this paper we suggest that recent attacks on mainstream news outlets—notably President Trump's accusations that they constitute "fake news"—have led journalists to defend the journalistic institutional myth as part of their efforts to re-legitimize their profession. Our findings indicate that journalists seek to bolster and uphold their institutional myth through a range of discursive strategies ranging from highlighting established journalistic norms and practices and emphasizing journalism's central role in the maintenance of democracy, to attacking the accuser and calls to action in which journalists make a case for ignoring the president's rhetorical assaults and continuing to do their job. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Triangulating several methods including automated framing analysis and assessment of textual elements, this study examines how the elite press from three countries frames the Rohingya refugee crisis in 2017. Results from our framing and textual analysis show differences in how the press from the three countries portrayed the crisis. Specifically, The Irrawaddy (Myanmar) tends to incorporate a nationalist narrative into news content, playing down the violence used against Rohingyas. The New Nation (Bangladesh) frames the crisis according to the country's priorities, focusing its coverage on the humanitarian aspects of the crisis. The New York Times uses a Western hegemonic discourse. Textual analysis indicates that although the same words are used in the frames of the Rohingya crisis, some represent different meanings. Findings are discussed using the lens of ideological and cultural influence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many online user comments criticize the quality of news coverage. We conducted two experimental studies to assess the effects of such critical comments on readers' perception of the credibility of news articles and to analyze the effectiveness of counter-measures. Findings suggest that critical user comments can reduce readers' perceived credibility of a news article. We also demonstrate that this effect depends on whether a critical user comment receives Likes or not. Additionally, readers' credibility perceptions can be restored when a critical comment receives a reply comment by a user that includes counter-speech. A disagreeing reply by a moderator is less effective. The findings provide important implications for research on credibility perceptions in online environments and for the effects of user-generated counter-speech and interactive moderation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There are enduring inequalities in usage of social media, relating both to the demographic patterning of users and to differences in the kinds of use people make of these platforms. This paper presents a content analysis of representations of Twitter in three British newspapers from 2007 to 2014 aimed at exploring the potential contribution that differing journalistic practices make to sustaining the inequalities in uptake and use of social media platforms. The newspapers were selected for the contrasting composition of their readership, allowing for comparison of the portrayals of Twitter to distinct socio-demographic groups. The portrayal of Twitter was found to differ between the three newspapers analysed, with the readers of the tabloid and mid-range newspaper being presented a depiction of Twitter as a site for elite and celebrity voices and for fandom rather than a site for their own active participation or political content creation, to a greater extent than the readers of the quality paper. These results suggest that the journalistic practices distinctive to these diverse newspapers may have significant implications for the extent to which their readership are encouraged to see themselves as able to have a voice on social media: the tabloid style risks depoliticising Twitter. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Media scholarship has commonly regarded newspapers as an essential element of strong democratic societies: a forum that structures public debate, providing engaged citizens with coherent frameworks to identify, interpret and tackle complex issues. Despite general agreement on the merits of this goal, there is little empirical evidence suggesting it approximates the democratic role historically played by newspapers. We examined three decades of newspaper coverage of chicken meat production in the UK to find evidence relevant to the normative expectations of the democratic role of newspapers as forum for public debate, by means of a two-stage framing analysis of 766 relevant articles from seven outlets. We found mutually disconnected episodic coverage of specific issues whose aggregate effect is consistent with the diffusion rather than the structuring of public debate. Newspapers here afforded polemic rather than the systemic contestation expected. The polemic contestation we found, with diffusion of public debate as an emergent political effect, troubles the assumptions subsequent to which it is possible to argue for the democratic role of newspapers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As mobile news goes mainstream thanks to the ubiquitous smartphones, this study assesses users' perceptions of the credibility of news created, packaged and delivered to the mobile screen in four Asian cities: Hong Kong, Shanghai, Singapore, and Taipei. Results of surveys of 2988 respondents show that respondents in Shanghai and Singapore perceived mobile news as more credible than did their counterparts in Hong Kong and Taipei. Mobile news use, news reliance, utility and appeal of mobile news were found to be significantly associated with the perceived credibility. Moreover, regression results indicate that the level of press freedom was a significant but negative predictor of perceived credibility of mobile news, after taking into consideration the influences of frequency of using mobile news, reliance on traditional and mobile media as news sources, perceived utility of mobile news, and perceived appeal of mobile news presentation. Implications of the findings are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Current trends of declining newspaper circulation on the one hand and the public distrust in the news media on the other stress the need for journalistic texts that the audience finds to be both engaging and credible. This study therefore tests the effects of two quotation types—(1) reconstructive quotes presenting what was said and thought by news actors during the news events, and (2) attributive quotes attributing information to news sources after the events took place—on readers' engagement with and perceived credibility and realism of news narratives. In an experiment (N = 123), participants read a crime news narrative that included either only reconstructive quotes, only attributive quotes, both reconstructive and attributive quotes, or no quotes at all. Results indicated no differences between the four story versions in levels of engagement, perceived credibility and perceived realism. These findings challenge results from previous research as well as textbook recommendations, suggesting that readers' experience and critical evaluation of news narratives are not necessarily influenced by quotations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Knowledge brokers play a crucial role in improving the likelihood that scientific research informs public policy and professional practice, and journalists are well-positioned to serve in this role given their contributions to the flow and exchange of knowledge in society. To better understand the functions and mechanisms by which journalists may broker scientific knowledge, semi-structured interviews were conducted with a diverse sample of health and science journalists (N = 22). Findings show that journalists actively seek to perform crucial knowledge brokering functions for their audiences, including searching for, filtering, corroborating, and incorporating research evidence into their reporting. At the same time, they stop short of consciously performing higher-order knowledge brokering functions, such as using research in their reporting to connect actors with a stake in the same issue or to advocate for the adoption of evidence-based policies and practices. Theoretical and practical implications of these findings are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]