Acaba de darse a conocer en versión online el número de Octubre de la revista académica Journalism, de la editorial Sage. La revista se publica en versión impresa y digital, y en este formato con uno de los artículos en abierto.
A continuación, reproducimos el sumario completo con los resúmenes de cada artículo y enlaces a los artículos en formato online en el sitio de la revista.
ARTICLES
Journalistic performance in Latin America: A comparative study of professional roles in news content
Claudia Mellado, Mireya Márquez-Ramírez, Jacques Mick, Martín Oller Alonso, Dasniel Olivera
Comparative research across the world has shown that nation-level variables are strong predictors of professional roles in journalism. There is, however, still insufficient comparative research about three key issues: cross-national comparison of journalistic role performance, exploration of how – or whether – organizational variables account for variation in role performance across countries, and the performance of specific journalistic roles that prevail in regions with post-authoritarian political trajectories. This article tackles these three issues by comparatively measuring journalistic performance in five Latin American countries. Based on a content analysis of 9841 news items from 18 newspapers, this article reports findings from Brazil, Chile, Cuba, Ecuador and Mexico, by analyzing the presence of the ‘interventionist’, ‘watchdog’, ‘loyal’, ‘service’, ‘infotainment’, and ‘civic’ roles. Results show that the region is far from homogeneous and that while ‘country’ is a strong predictor for most of the roles, other variables such as ‘media type’, ‘political orientation’, and ‘news topic’ are also significant predictors to varying levels.
Disrupting gatekeeping practices: Journalists’ source selection in times of crisis >publicado en abierto<
Toni G.L.A. van der Meer, Piet Verhoeven, Johannes W.J. Beentjes, Rens Vliegenthart
As gatekeepers, journalists have the power to select the sources that get a voice in crisis coverage. The aim of this study is to find out how journalists select sources during a crisis. In a survey, journalists were asked how they assess the following sources during an organizational crisis: news agencies, an organization undergoing a crisis, and the general public. The sample consisted of 214 Dutch experienced journalists who at least once covered a crisis. Using structural equation modeling, sources’ likelihood of being included in the news was predicted using five source characteristics: credibility, knowledge, willingness, timeliness, and the relationship with the journalist. Findings indicated that during a crisis, news agencies are most likely to be included in the news, followed by the public, and finally the organization. The significance of the five source characteristics is dependent on source type. For example, to be used in the news, news agencies and organizations should be mainly evaluated as knowledgeable, whereas information from the public should be both credible and timely. In addition, organizations should not be seen as too willing or too eager to communicate. The findings imply that, during a crisis, journalists remain critical gatekeepers; however, they rely mainly on familiar sources.
A newsmaker’s tool: The 35mm camera and journalism’s material epistemology
Brian Creech
As devices become a more visible and integral part of media practice, it is important for researchers and scholars to attend to the ways in which philosophies, professional discourses, and technical limits structure the ways these technologies are deployed. The 35mm camera is a technological waypoint between earlier large-format cameras and contemporary digital photography and offers a useful historical example for interrogating the relationship between seemingly inert technical operations and journalism’s modes of meaning production. To that end, this article offers a theoretical perspective for interrogating the 35mm camera through the lens of Latour, with the aim of developing a schema for integrating devices into the cultural study of media and communication.
Evaluating organisational ethics in Spanish news media
María Luengo, Carlos Maciá-Barber, José Luis Requejo-Alemán
Drawing from 420 surveys addressed to news media practitioners, 30 in-depth interviews with media executives and 6 focus groups, this article focuses on the institutional dimensions of ethics in journalism and explores the way in which ethical standards are perceived by journalists and other representative groups involved in Spanish news media. The data show that participants ascribe moral obligations to journalistic institutions. Interviewees emphasise the predominance of market-driven interests over ethical values as one of the main threats to journalism. However, differences between the perceptions of journalists and media executives reveal that the latter believe that journalistic ethics pertain to individual journalists.
Johnston Press and the crisis in Ireland’s local newspaper industry, 2005–2014
Anthony Cawley
Reflecting international trends, Ireland’s local newspaper industry has suffered steep circulation and advertising revenue falls since the late-2000s and has struggled to reshape traditional business models for the digital era. In harsh trading conditions, local titles are operating on reduced editorial resources and are weakened in their capacity to fulfil their traditional watchdog and informed-citizenry functions. Perhaps, no company better encapsulates the industry’s recent difficulties than UK media group Johnston Press. In 2005, it paid more than €200m to acquire 14 local titles in Ireland, but 9 years later sold them for just €8.5m. The article draws on this case study to consider wider issues related to the corporatisation of local news provision, the sustainability of local news industries in small media markets such as Ireland’s and the increasing disconnect between local journalism’s commodity value and its public good value.
Online news flow: Temporal/spatial exploitation and credibility
Sujin Choi, Jeongseob Kim
This study examines how repetitive news publishing on the Internet has changed evaluations of the credibility of the press and news aggregators. The temporal and spatial characteristics of the Internet have facilitated repetitive publishing of almost identical news content by the same news companies. The mechanism of repetitive news is based on the interplay between journalistic and algorithmic curations, which coexist on news aggregation sites. Based on a nationwide survey in South Korea, we found that the repetitive-news block was the strongest (and negative) predictor of the credibility of both the press and news aggregators. The more frequently people are exposed to repetitive news and the more they perceive it as being problematic, the less likely they are to regard the press and news aggregators as credible. These results have implications for online news flow and credibility research.
News blogs versus mainstream media: Measuring the gap through a frame analysis of Greek blogs
Maria Touri, Ioanna Kostarella
This article offers an empirical examination of the power of independent news blogs to expand the boundaries of public debates, through their capacity not only to host volumes of information but also to frame it in unique packages. Despite the scholarly attention given to blogs as a counterforce to traditional news media, there are unanswered questions regarding the discrepancy in the qualitative characteristics of the debates promoted by these two realms. We aim to offer an empirical test of this potential gap with an innovative content analysis that draws on framing research and corpus linguistic techniques. This is performed in the context of Greece, where a rapid increase in the volume of blogging has created a new platform for political debate. Through a computer-assisted qualitative frame analysis of partisan newspapers and independent news blogs, we find differences in the breadth of certain frames that could prove significant for audiences’ understanding of current affairs.
BOOK REVIEWS
Tamara Witschge, CW Anderson, David Domingo and Alfred Hermida (eds)
The SAGE handbook of digital journalism
Timothy Recuber
Consuming catastrophe: Mass culture in America’s decade of disaster