Placing Facebook

Facebook is challenging professional journalism. These challenges were evident in three incidents from 2016: the allegation that Facebook privileged progressive-leaning news on its trending feature; Facebook’s removal of the Pulitzer Prize-winning “Napalm Girl” photo from the pages of prominent users; and the proliferation of “fake news” during the US presidential election. Using theoretical concepts from the field of boundary work, this paper examines how The Guardian, The New York Times, Columbia Journalism Review and Poynter editorialized Facebook’s role in these three incidents to discursively construct the boundary between the value of professional journalism to democracy and Facebook’s ascendant role in facilitating essential democratic functions. Findings reveal that these publications attempted to define Facebook as a news organization (i.e., include it within the boundaries of journalism) so that they could then criticize the company for not following duties traditionally incumbent upon news organizations (i.e., place it outside the boundaries of journalism). This paper advances scholarship that focuses on both inward and outward conceptions of boundary work, further explores the complex challenge of defining who a journalist is in the face of rapidly changing technological norms, and advances scholarship in the field of media ethics that positions ethical analysis at the institutional level.     

When News is Everywhere

This article contends that not only journalism but also journalism studies can benefit from a stronger commitment to the public. While the bodies of literature on “popular journalism”, “public journalism” and “citizen/participatory journalism” have, in different contexts and from different angles, made a strong case in favour of a public-oriented approach to journalism, it is remarkable how few of the empirical studies on journalism are based on user research. As the control of media institutions over the news process is in decline, we should take the “news audience” more seriously and try to improve our understanding of (changing) news use patterns. Besides this rather obvious theoretical point, there are also societal and methodological arguments for a more user-oriented take on the study of journalism. Starting from a reflection on the key trends in news use in the digital age—participation, cross-mediality and mobility—this article attempts to show the theoretical and societal relevance of a radical user perspective on journalism and journalism research alike. Furthermore, we look at new methodological opportunities for news user research and elaborate on our arguments by way of an empirical study on changing news practices. The study uses Q-sort methodology to expose the impact a medium's affordances can have on the way we experience news in a converged and mobile media environment. The article concludes by discussing what the benefits of a radical user perspective can be both for journalism studies as for journalism.     

Fake News

Much has been written about the alleged “crisis” of journalism, with narratives of cultural pessimism centred on the decline of legacy news media, and print media in particular. Whilst factually accurate in parts, such narratives offer an incomplete picture not just of how journalism is declining, but also evolving as it transitions in the digital age. This paper is funded by a major Australian Research Council-study of “Journalism beyond the crisis”, a project which seeks to evaluate the emerging assemblage of journalistic forms, practices, and uses in a transnationally comparative study across four different countries. The present study is a first step in investigating how journalists perceive their roles at a time in which the legitimacy of factual accounts of current events is increasingly put into question. To do so, it draws on in-depth interviews with senior journalists based in London and Sydney, providing topical insights into how these practitioners understand their role in an era of “fake news”. The findings indicate that journalists are particularly concerned about a decrease of public trust in the media, and urge colleagues to adapt more rigorous fact-checking techniques – particularly at times when the role of journalism as a “watchdog” over society appears to be most crucial.     

民国新闻学人孙如陵的新闻理论探讨

孙如陵,民国时期知名新闻学人。在国民党中央政治学校新闻学系就读期间,担任《新闻学季刊》编辑。毕业后历任《中央日报》记者、《中央日报》专门性副刊《报学》双周刊编辑、《报学杂志》编辑。孙如陵的新闻为学之路,是民国时期的一种典型,求学伊始即开始新闻实践与新闻学术研究。这种“半工半读”经历不仅给他带来新闻实践的切身体验,还有新闻学理的深刻体悟。本文就民国时期孙如陵的新闻学观、新闻观、新闻教育观、报业发展观进行分析,揭示其独到的理论洞见。     

The Return of the Nervous Liberals: Market Fundamentalism,Policy Failure,and Recurring Journalism Crises

By providing historical context for the recurring regulatory retreat in the face of structural problems in the news media, this study examines the policy discourse that continues to define the US journalism crisis and government’s inability to confront it. To contextualize this pattern, I compare two historical junctures, the first occurring in the 1940s, exemplified by the Hutchins Commission, and the second occurring in the more recent policy debates during the years 2009–2011, exemplified by the Waldman Report. Both of these historical moments represented a societal response to a journalism crisis, and both entailed deeply normative discussions about the role of media in a democratic society and government’s role in managing that relationship. A comparison of these historical case studies brings into focus recurring weaknesses in liberal reform efforts. Specifically, it highlights what I refer to as the “discursive capture” reflected in common assumptions about the proper relationship between media and government, and how this American paradigm is constrained by an implicit market fundamentalism.     

What Makes “Good” News Newsworthy?

To combat the constant supply of negative news, some online news outlets focus solely on “good” news. But what is the value of “good” news? A content analysis was conducted to determine which traditional news values (timeliness, conflict, impact, etc.) appear in stories on Web sites dedicated to positive news. The researcher compared “good” news sites to the New York Times. Results indicated that the majority of “good” news stories were entertaining and emotional, whereas the majority of New York Times stories involved authority figures and conflict. Good news stories were less committed to journalism’s core functions, such as holding power accountable and providing the public with information necessary for creating an informed electorate.     

Politicians as Media Producers

The emergence of social media raises new questions concerning the relationship between journalists and politicians and between news media and politics. The increasingly complex media milieu, in which the boundaries between media producers and audiences become partly dissolved, calls for new theoretical approaches in the study of journalism. This article reassesses central theoretical arguments about the relationship between journalism, sources, politics and democracy. Drawing on a pilot study of the printed press, it explores the increased social media use among politicians in Sweden and its implications for political journalism. The article suggests that power relations between journalism and politics can be fruitfully explored from the perspective of mediatized interdependency, a perspective that acknowledges that journalists and politicians have become both actors and sources through mutual interaction in online spaces. Furthermore, it argues that social media use has expanded journalism's interest in the private life of politicians, thereby contributing to a de-politicization of politics.     

When Empathy is Not Enough

Journalism that humanizes marginalized communities can advance social justice by appealing to collective solidarity. News reporting, however, often encourages audience empathy instead of solidarity by representing social injustice as individual problems. This paper examines mechanisms of empathy and solidarity in two news outlets that participated in The San Francisco Homeless Project. The San Francisco Homeless Project was a collaborative journalistic effort in June 2016 that called for attention and action to address homelessness. The San Francisco Chronicle’s coverage represents homeless people as beset with individual problems, which encourages empathy, and its accompanying solutions journalism suggests expanded individual services to address these problems. On the other hand, AlterNet emphasizes shared conditions that homeless people endure, which situates homelessness as a social injustice and invites solidarity against systemic factors that produce and maintain homelessness. This distinction is important because strictly evoking empathy for individuals places journalism on a trajectory to suggest individualistic remedies to an issue like homelessness, whereas inviting solidarity charts a course for large-scale social change.     

大卫·诺德的“新闻机制史”书写路径及其知识贡献——以《新闻的共同体:美国报纸和它们读者的历史》为中心

以詹姆斯·凯瑞的讨论为源头,兴起于20世纪70年代的新闻史观变革运动推动了美国新闻史研究走出辉格式的、线性的、进步的传统范式。大卫·诺德延续了凯瑞的新闻文化史路径,将其进一步聚焦到以阅读史为代表的新闻机制史的范畴中。他的《新闻的共同体》重新定义了“新闻”与“新闻史”的内涵,从“生产的共同体”和“接收的共同体”两个维度阐发了北美新闻传统中的共同体精神。他的新闻史研究试图将文学批评、历史学、传播学、社会学等融合在一起,建立一种兼顾人文主义和社会科学的新的关于传播的历史。由于他的新闻史观是地方性的,国内研究借鉴时要注意可行性和合理性。     

News Sources and Follow-up Communication

For sports actors, social media provide the opportunity to bypass sports journalism's gatekeeping function and to disseminate sports-related information to target groups directly. Thus, social media have been conceptualized as a competitor to journalism. We argue that the relation is much more diverse. We differentiate between competitive, integrative, and complementary facets of the relationship between sports journalism and social media. Our study focuses on complementarity and analyzes how far social and mainstream media serve as sources for each other. Therefore, we combine an online survey among 122 German sports journalists, an analysis of the Twitter networks of German sports journalists during the Winter Olympics 2014, and a content analysis of the most popular news items in social media. Results suggest that sports journalists perceive social media accounts of athletes as beneficial news sources, especially to gather inside information. Huge sports events influence the social media activities of sports journalists as they tend to have stronger connections to athletes at these times. Whereas social media appear to be significant sources for sports journalism, sports media content receives little attention in social media. However, our results indicate that sports journalism and social media indeed maintain a complementary relation.     

Stuart Hall’s encoding/decoding model and the circulation of journalism in the digital landscape

ABSTRACT

Notions of circuitry are central to Stuart Hall’s conceptualization of how communities, cultures, and media constitute each other. This is very explicit in his encoding/decoding model from 1973. Hall here reserves the term “circulation” for a delimited process within a broader argument for a circular movement, or a “reproduction” of culture through media. In this broader view, however, Hall sees circulation as both technological and hermeneutical processes through which meaning and/or ideology move into and out of discursive form. The encoding/decoding text(s) refer on several occasions to “current affairs” but later applications of this model have somewhat neglected the sphere of journalism. This paper consequently situates Hall’s notions of circulation in relation to new modes of circulating journalism on participatory digital platforms. Given the status of Hall’s model, the overall goal of this re-reading is twofold: seeing Hall through contemporary issues puts into perspective key aspects of Hall’s thinking, while Hall’s framework in turn helps illuminate important characteristics of how journalism is ascribed meaning in a digital landscape. The paper ultimately argues that while Hall’s insistence on seeing the circulation of journalism within a broader circuit of culture is as important as ever, some of his main tenets and assumptions need to be rethought and supplemented in light of newer developments.     

从公民新闻网建设看公民新闻的发展

随着web2．0时代的到来,公民新闻逐渐兴起,它使新闻采集和发布的权利从专业媒体流向普通大众,并促使各国兴起了建设公民新闻网站的潮流。本文以公民新闻网的运营为切入点,分析了公民新闻事业的生存现状及其存在的问题,并对公民新闻的未来做出了展望。     

新闻规律观念:“马新观”的基础观念

当代中国马克思主义新闻观主要由党性原则观念、人民中心观念、舆论引导观念和新闻规律观念构成。其中,新闻规律观念在四大观念结构中居于基础地位。基础观念,是一个观念系统结构中的根基性观念,是其他观念发挥合理作用的出发点或奠基石。新闻规律是新闻活动的内在本质联系、稳定机制,新闻规律观念是对新闻规律的自觉。新闻规律观念的实质就是以新闻为本位的观念,对职业新闻活动来说,规律观念表现为专业新闻观念,体现在新闻工作中,就是坚守专业精神、专业伦理,按照专业原则、专业方法生产传播新闻。在更为广泛的意义上,新闻规律观念要求所有新闻活动主体要承认新闻规律,尊重新闻规律,按照新闻规律办事,不断探索新闻规律;一切期望通过新闻实现的追求都要首先以新闻的基本目的、基本功能为基础。     

Opportunity or risk? How news organizations frame social media in their guidelines for journalists

Guided by regulatory focus theory and framing, the present study analyzes how U.S. and British mainstream news organizations (N = 12) frame the current social media environment in their social media guidelines. The results indicate that news organizations dominantly frame the new environment as a risk to guard against, warning of the possible harm to their reputations and journalism norms such as accuracy and objectivity (prevention-focused), rather than as an opportunity to actively take advantage of (promotion-focused).     

论当代中国新闻学科层面几个主要概念之间的关系

在当代中国新闻学研究的学科层面,实际存在着多种名称或概念(有些准确,有些模糊),诸如新闻学、党报理论、中国特色社会主义新闻学、马克思主义新闻观(新闻学)等,它们之间互相联系,但又互有区别。最基本的关系是:党报理论是中国特色新闻学的核心内容,马克思主义新闻观是中国特色新闻学的理论立场和基本方法。因而,中国特色社会主义新闻学,就是以中国新闻现象、新闻活动特别是以"党媒"新闻宣传活动、新闻舆论活动为主要研究对象,以马克思主义为基本立场、观点和方法,以党报(党媒)理论为核心内容的新闻学。其中的"中国特色"是当代中国新闻学的特征描述,"社会主义"则是当代中国新闻学性质定位。中国特色社会主义新闻学与新闻学在研究对象、研究目的、研究的价值取向上虽有相同之处,但重点有所不同。     

Time's up. Or is it? Journalists’ Perceptions of Sexual Violence and Newsroom Changes after #MeTooIndia

ABSTRACT

The #MeToo movement, which engulfed much of India's news and entertainment industry in October 2018, was projected by many as a watershed moment for Indian journalism. Driven largely through social media activism, it created significant public discourse and outcry, leading to the “outing” and resignation of many journalists. This paper explores the perception of #MeTooIndia in regional and national newsrooms. Drawing on Manuel Castells's ideas of networked social movement, we consider the origins of #MeTooIndia, including its mediation on private and social networks. We then draw on 257 semi-structured interviews with journalists working in 14 languages across India to explore the “cause” of the campaign—the prevalence of sexual harassment and sexual violence in workspaces—before turning our attention to the impact, or potential for impact, that journalists saw in it. We find most journalists felt the movement was “good”, but did not think it influenced their environment or newswork in any meaningful manner. Regional journalists expressed more pessimism about the #MeTooIndia, men more so than women.     

THE MOJO IN THE THIRD MILLENNIUM

Digital technology has revolutionized the journalist's toolkit with affordable miniaturized still and video cameras for producing high-quality multimedia, and connection equipment enabling that content to be transmitted via satellite from almost anywhere on the globe for publication on the Internet. Two results have been the advent of news production by an innovative type of lone, multimedia reporter, known as a “mojo” (mobile journalist) or “sojo” (solo journalist), and an increasing focus on “hyper-local” news on media websites. In an era of heightened newspaper and television competition driven by steadily declining North American readership and viewer numbers, many media managers have embraced with enthusiasm the solo journalist—able to move fast and travel light, at lower cost than traditional news teams. This paper surveys the impact that developments in multimedia publishing have had on the news produced by such solo journalists. It finds evidence of degradation of the genre in some, but not all, cases and concludes that since the Pandora's box of mojo journalism has been opened, if used judiciously by journalists with sufficient experience, there is some hope that the new modalities may result in responsible journalism enriched with multifaceted storytelling.     

Engaged Journalism and News Work: A Sociotechnical Analysis of Organizational Dynamics and Professional Challenges

ABSTRACT

Building upon the sociotechnical perspective presented by Lewis and Westlund (2015, “Actors, Actants, Audiences, and Activities in Cross-media News Work: A Matrix and a Research Agenda.” Digital Journalism 3 (1): 19–37. doi:10.1080/21670811.2014.927986), this study examines organizational dynamics, technological affordances and professional challenges of engaged journalism practices by analyzing how Hearken, one of the most celebrated audience engagement companies, and its tools and services are being implemented in 15 U.S. news organizations. This framework identifies Hearken and organizations like it as important “external actors” providing technological “actants” that are shaping how newsrooms report the news by providing ways for audiences to be brought into producing the news, particularly during the earlier phases of the reporting process. Based on in-depth interviews, we find that nearly every news organization in our sample reports some measure of success by using Hearken for involving audience members throughout the production of news. At the same time, we also identify how this implementation is significantly shaped by organizational imperatives and the models particular organizations create for producing audience-centric news work. Ultimately, this study presents a partial update to the decades-long literature on participatory journalism by suggesting that engaged journalism practices actually create opportunities for meaningful audience involvement.     

News framing of adolescents’ use of Facebook in Taiwanese newspapers

ABSTRACT

While media frames reflect the dominant discourse about an issue, frame analysis can elucidate how they affect public perception. ¹ 1 William A Gamson and Andre Modigliani, “Media Discourse and Public Opinion on Nuclear Power: A Constructionist Approach,” American Journal of Sociology 95, no. 1 (1989): 1–37. Employing content analysis of news coverage of adolescents’ use of social media in mainstream newspapers (n?=?323) from 2014 to 2017, supplemented with secondary data from two national surveys of adolescents, this study investigates how news media construct the reality of adolescents’ use of social media; how the constructed reality differs from the subjective reality reported by adolescents’ themselves; and how news media reflect the elite discourse in terms of adolescence’s nature, agency, and needs in the context of using social media.