Picture: Lost in the Ancient City, by Daniel Tong, license Unsplash

Technologization, LGBT self-media, and the the Chinese news ecology

Increasingly, social actors from outside the journalism business, including bloggers, commentators, coders, and Web analytics managers participate in the making of news and reshape journalism. This process also includes non-human actors such as algorithms and automated systems. The new article by Yidong Wang of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Valerie Belair-Gagnon of University of Minnesota, Twin … Continued


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Obsessive-activist reporting as a new model of journalism

In a new study, Avshalom Ginosar of Academic College Yezreel Valley, and Zvi Reich of the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, describe existing archetypes of journalists and present a new candidate: the “obsessive-activist journalist”. Following a review of literature on journalism models and role perceptions, the researchers findings are based on interviews of 17 Israeli … Continued


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ARTICLE: When it comes to professional principles, online and offline journalists in Europe are much alike

Are online journalists different from print and broadcast colleagues when it comes to professional standards? Imke Henkel of the University of Lincoln, Neil Thurman of LMU Münich, and Judith Möller and Damian Trilling of the University of Amsterdam put this thought to test by comparing professional principles and practices among online, offline, and multiplatform journalists. … Continued


ARTICLE: Egypt’s media missed its opportunity to reform

Egyptian media enjoyed a brief period of relative freedom after the 2011 revolution that ousted then-president Hosni Mubarak. However, journalists failed to reform their professional identities and the media system, which lead to the media’s descent into highly polarized political parallelism – and eventual regression back into the new regime’s servitude. Fatima el Issawi, of … Continued


ARTICLE: BBC’s senior journalists are disconnected from the public

Prominent journalists working for the British Broadcasting Corporation are very different from their audience, Gary James Merrill, of University of Roehampton, writes. He investigated the social constitution of 66 senior BBC journalists and compared them to national data. Merrill also included samples of senior Conservative and Labour politicians in the comparison. The journalists have more … Continued


ARTICLE: Journalists’ moral reasoning is becoming weaker

Modern journalists seem to have less moral reasoning skills than their predecessors, write Patrick Ferrucci and Erin E. Schauster, both of University of Colorado, with Edson C. Tandoc Jr., of Nanyang Technological University (author names not in original order). They conducted a Defining Issues Test (DIT) on 170 American journalists and compared their results to … Continued


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ARTICLE: The important role of editors for journalism

Editors practice quality control and negotiate among various groups in news journalism. Research papers have rarely taken this role as their focus. “Clearer assessment of the editor thus allows for richer assessment of what is – and what is not – journalism”, Andrew Duffy of Nanyang Technological University, writes in a new study. The role … Continued



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Five studies on constructive journalism

The journal Journalism Practice has published a bunch of articles in a special issue on the topic of constructive journalism. Also, Journalism published one article on the topic very recently. Below are some findings from these interesting studies. “How Does the Audience Respond to Constructive Journalism? Two experiments with multifaceted results” Klaus Meier of the … Continued


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ARTICLE: Social media guidelines affect journalistic boundary-setting

Social media policies reveal some underlying assumptions about the role of new media within the traditional boundaries of the newsroom, a new study states. Andrew Duffy of Nanyang Technological University and Megan Knight of the University of Hertfordshire, examined social media policies in 17 news organisations in the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, and … Continued