Journalism seeks to observe and communicate what it learns of social importance, something called news, and in doing so is always in the process of creating a public by bringing it into synchronized conversation with itself. Theories of journalism provide explanatory frameworks for understanding a complex combination of social practice, product, and institutional arrangement. Journalism’s late 20th-century professionalized, high modern version, which is still recognizable today, has continued to change, particularly with the disruptive effect of the Internet, as it has evolved to absorb other forms. The boundaries of profession and news organization have been destabilized within this rapidly shifting media terrain, but still there remain productive approaches for systematically organizing knowledge around the concept of journalism.
The early 20th-century perspectives on journalism—before becoming linked to the communication field and a more narrow media effects focus—were at home in the University of Chicago school of sociology, which emphasized community-based, multi-method participant observation. A sociology of news perspective resurfaced with more ethnographic research in newsrooms in the 1950s, and theories of journalism have continued to highlight the ethnographic method, especially in understanding the impact of technology on a more digitally-oriented journalism practice. A hierarchy of influences perspective, developed by Shoemaker and Reese, incorporates other perspectives beyond the ethnographic by considering factors at multiple levels of analysis that shape media content, the journalistic message system, from the micro to the macro: individual characteristics of specific newsworkers, their routines of work, organizational-level concerns, institutional issues, and the larger social system. At each level, one can identify the main factors that shape the symbolic reality constituted and produced by journalism, as well as how these factors interact across levels and compare across different contexts (e.g., national, technological).
A hierarchy of influences model worked well to disentangle the relationships among professionals and their routines, and the news organizations that housed them, which cohered into institutions. But journalism has been newly problematized, destabilizing and restructuring both the units and levels of analysis in journalism theorizing. The networked public sphere is constituted with new assemblages: of newswork, institutional arrangements, and global connections, which give rise to new emerging deliberative spaces. Journalism theories now have as much interest in process as product, in assemblage as outcome, but still need to be concerned with the nature of quality of these spaces. What shape do they take on and with what implications for healthy democratic discourse?
Article
Theories of Journalism
Stephen D. Reese
Article
Journalism Education
Beate Josephi
Journalism education at the college level was first offered in 1869, and developed primarily in the United States. No other country has had a similar impact on the discipline, and the United States’ pioneering role has shaped curricula around the world. While journalism education was also offered in Europe throughout the 20th century, especially from the 1980s onwards, its global spread came in the 1990s and 2000s. This is closely linked to the proliferation of media in countries where economic growth, technological progress, and rising literacy have combined to create a dramatic increase in readership and audience, especially in the most populous nations, China and India, but also in Africa and Latin America.
In 2013, the census of journalism education programs kept by the World Journalism Education Council listed almost 2,400 programs globally. This spread does not only mean a shift in geographical terms, but also in conceptual terms. North American scholars imagined journalism as central to democratic life. But the notion of journalism serving first and foremost democracy puts it at odds with other parts of the world, where different forms of governance are prevalent. This necessitated the American inspired image of journalism, legitimized by its centrality to democracy, to be modified. In this global process, journalism education importantly did not relinquish its normative constituent, but moved it to the ideal of journalism and journalists serving the public.
Equally remarkable, and telling, is the consistency of subjects in curricula around the globe, especially in what are deemed the vocationally relevant subjects. In 2007, and again in 2013, UNESCO released model curricula for journalism education. These are ostensibly directed toward developing countries and emerging democracies, but are used globally and in countries as diverse as Afghanistan and Rwanda. This has raised the question of whether a homogenization of journalism around the world could be observed. At this stage, however, differing political, cultural, and religious conditions exert too much influence on a country’s journalistic output for this to occur.
The intentions behind the support for journalism education vary over time and between countries. Although journalism education is never openly acknowledged as an ideological battleground, it has been used to spread influence. After the disbandment of the Soviet Bloc, the United States and European nations sent journalism educators to the countries of the former Soviet Bloc, ostensibly to teach journalists the values of a free press, but also to build their commercial interests in new media markets. In Africa, after decades of Western assistance in media education,, China has attempted to challenge the dominance of the traditionally Western helpers, although with limited success.
The most prevalent and persistent issue regarding the content of journalism education has been the theory-practice division. This extends to the suitability of journalism education as a tertiary study area and the composition of its curricula, which have been debated since its inception. The earliest programs in formal journalism education in the United States consisted of teaching technical skills as well as writing and editing. This inclusion of skills training pointed from the very beginning to the gulf journalism education would have to bridge in academic institutions. Many countries, notably the United Kingdom, left the training of journalists to the industry until the 1990s.
Academic literature, by its very nature, argues for the place of journalism education in academia. The voices against come from the industry, where employers and editors see journalism education as theory-laden and out of touch with industry realities. Since the 1990s, media companies have largely accepted that journalism training be done in colleges and universities, mostly because it frees valuable resources in a strained industry.
All the same, the criteria for measuring success in journalism education continue to differ between the industry and the academy. The debates on what and how to teach are similarly divergent, although since the early 2000s the idea of educating future journalists as “reflective practitioners” seems to have taken hold. But this comes at a time when in North America, Europe, and Australia the main challenge for journalism education is the fragility of legacy media, which traditionally absorbed the highest number of graduates. Media sustainability has therefore been named as one of the foremost concerns for journalism education.
In times of digital journalism, the challenges for journalists come from many sides. Not only the precariousness of employment, but also the diminishing of authority is affecting the profession. Professionalism is again emerging as a vital concept, although it remains as contentious as ever. At a time when journalistic authority is under attack, professionalism is seen as a tool in the boundary-work taking place between journalists, a public participating in news creation and distribution, tweeters, and bloggers. Journalism schools are using various ways to train journalists for a new, shared world. This includes teaching “entrepreneurial journalism” in order to prepare their students for an anticipated de-institutionalized future.
While much has been written about how and what journalism education should be, little research has been done on the effects of journalism education. A major problem is the difficulty of empirically quantifying this influence. One area where the impact of journalism education can be researched is on students during their years of study, although this goes only a small way toward establishing the influence that journalism education has on the practicing journalist.
Since 1869, much has changed yet some things remain. Journalism education will continue to be characterized by its dichotomous nature. It will remain caught between theory and practice, normative and empirical, academy and industry, market and public service, dependence and autonomy.
Article
Journalism Ethics
Patrick Lee Plaisance
News workers—writers, editors, videographers, bloggers, photographers, designers—regularly confront questions of potential harms and conflicting values in the course of their work, and the field of journalism ethics concerns itself with standards of behavior and the quality of justifications used to defend controversial journalistic decisions. While journalism ethics, as with the philosophy of ethics in general, is less concerned with pronouncements of the “rightness” or “wrongness” of certain acts, it relies on longstanding notions of the public-service mission of journalism. However, informing the public and serving a “watchdog” function regularly require journalists to negotiate questions of privacy, autonomy, community engagement, and the potentially damaging consequences of providing information that individuals and governments would rather withhold.
As news organizations continue to search for successful business models to support journalistic work, ethics questions over conflicts of interest and content transparency (e.g., native advertising) have gained prominence. Media technology platforms that have served to democratize and decentralize the dissemination of news have underscored the debate about who, or what type of content, should be subjected to journalism ethics standards. Media ethics scholars, most of whom are from Western democracies, also are struggling to articulate the features of a “global” journalism ethics framework that emphasizes broad internationalist ideals yet accommodates cultural pluralism. This is particularly challenging given that the very idea of “press freedom” remains an alien one in many countries of the world, and the notion is explicitly included in the constitutions of only a few of the world’s democratic societies. The global trend toward recognizing and promoting press freedom is clear, but it is occurring at different rates in different countries. Other work in the field explores the factors on the individual, organizational, and societal levels that help or hinder journalists seeking to ensure that their work is defined by widely accepted virtues and ethical principles.
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Drone Journalism, Privacy Law, and Journalism Ethics
Courtney Barclay and Kearston Wesner
This is an advance summary of a forthcoming article in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Communication. Please check back later for the full article.
Drones armed with cameras have allowed journalists to capture images from new perspectives and in places previously unreachable. Footage of volcanic eruptions, war-torn villages, and nuclear disaster areas have all been made possible with drone technology. However, this same technology presents risks to personal privacy.
Since before Warren and Brandeis penned the oft cited Right to Privacy, newsgatherers have tested the boundaries of society’s notion of privacy. The development of new technologies at the time, such as the snap camera, made photography a faster, more efficient endeavor. Warren and Brandeis recognized that the increased photographic recording of society threatened individual privacy on a scale never before imagined. More than a century later, the use of new technology—drones outfitted with cameras and other imaging devices—has once again ignited debate over how to protect an individual’s privacy while ensuring journalists’ ability to gather news.
The traditional remedy for intrusive journalism has been through tort law, which requires an individual to show that she or he had a reasonable expectation of privacy. By and large, these laws have favored journalists; however, that result is usually based on the fact that the newsgathering activity occurred in a public place rather than any recognition of the importance of newsgathering. State lawmakers have begun to address drone photography with a wide variety of approaches that would move away from this public place exception—from prohibiting photography over private property to prohibiting any photography without someone’s consent, even in a public place.
The press has recognized the cost to individual privacy incurred by use of technologies such as drone photography. Professional codes of ethics instruct journalists to minimize harm to the public, requiring an “overriding” public interest to invade someone’s privacy. The Professional Society of Drone Journalists’ Code of Ethics addresses the additional responsibilities inherent to drone technology. Under this code, journalists should record only public spaces and delete any images of individuals in a private space.
Drone technology represents only one of the latest developments in surveillance used for law enforcement, commercial enterprise, and journalism. However, its growth and the gaps in privacy tort law underscore the importance of strong codes of ethics that serve the interests of both newsgathering and individual privacy.
