For women in international journalism, it is the best and worst of times. Their numbers have grown dramatically in the last 100 years, and more women are being recognized for their journalistic accomplishments and bravery. In the last few decades, women journalists have banded together to form regional and international organizations to monitor coverage by and about women and to study the employment of women in newsrooms. In addition, some women journalists find that their gender allows them to speak to some people that men cannot – women subjects and sources in restrictive nations often feel more comfortable talking to women journalists. Yet their numbers as journalists in most countries are low when compared to those of men, and few women have been named to management positions within media organizations. Global changes, including political upheaval, technological changes, and economic cutbacks, have led to their diminished status in global media. Technological advancements within media organizations may make the dissemination of news easier, but it means reduced access to some poor and rural areas that often cannot afford expensive technology. Also, media concentration worldwide has reduced the number of small and independent media organizations that often employ women. And the elimination of international bureaus by many news outlets translates into many journalists—men and women—losing their jobs.
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Trends: Women in International Journalism
Marilyn S. Greenwald
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Global Journalism Education
Charles Self
The number of formal programs educating and training young people to work in journalism and mass communication media organizations has grown substantially worldwide since the 1920s. Estimates put the number of college and university programs well beyond 2,500, with the United States and China exhibiting the largest numbers. These estimates do not count many of the private training programs offered by for-profit companies. Beyond these programs, media organizations, foundations, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), journalist associations, and media unions offer training to help students and journalists update their skills in a field undergoing rapid change.
Much of this growth is because journalism itself has commanded attention from organizations of all kinds in the 21st century: governments, private industry, nonprofits, NGOs, sports organizations—leaders in virtually all forms of human activity have come to believe that media play a powerful role in shaping public opinion.
This attention has led societies around the globe to invest in training journalists and media workers. Some of these investments have been through higher education. Others have been through private training institutes and organizations, NGOs, and private foundations.
New types of media jobs have developed since the 1970s. Strategic communication and promotion industries dedicated to shaping public discourse have expanded around the world.
New media technologies have changed journalism itself, creating new kinds of journalism jobs worldwide. Digital innovation has changed the structure of traditional media industries. As new forms have emerged, these digital innovations have expanded both the types and numbers of media jobs available.
These new types of media jobs have changed how journalism students are educated and trained. Demand for trained workers has increased and skill sets have changed.
This has altered thinking about journalism education around the globe. Journalism educators have introduced new types of training into the curriculum, including entirely new topics and new types of majors in many countries.
Similarities in how journalism is taught, based on shared educational needs and skills, have grown, while historically important ideological differences in teaching journalism have weakened.
Shared challenges include how to teach media technologies, ethics, fact-checking, and coping with disinformation and fake news. They also include preparing journalism students to deal with strategic manipulation, partisan hostility, threats, and shifting concepts of appropriate online media discourse in social media, blogs, tweets, and online comments.
Despite these common challenges and shared approaches, unique circumstances in each society still lead to differences in how journalism is taught around the world. These differences can be quite pronounced. These circumstances include resource shortages, competing training traditions, weak industry support, sociopolitical differences, and censorship.
Across the globe it is clear that education in journalism and media will continue to expand as changing media technologies exert a growing influence on public discourse.
Journalism education is changing in every country as: (1) technologies reshape it, (2) media theories shift teaching techniques, (3) new technologies create newly shared ideas about teaching journalism, (4) unique circumstances in each country still produce different approaches, and (5) it expands in different regions of the world.
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U.S. Freedom of Information Act and Democratic Accountability
Michael Schudson
In the 1950s and 1960s, the U.S. Congress, with allies in the news media, created legislation that came to be known as the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). It was designed to help hold the federal executive accountable to the public. It became law in 1966. Its significance can be understood in several contexts: (1) in connection with a special relationship of journalists to the operation of the FOIA; (2) in terms of arguments that transparency in government is necessary for citizens’ informed participation in democracy and that, on the other side, there are strong democratic arguments that transparency should be limited in the pursuit of other legitimate values, some of them recognized in the language of the FOIA itself that government agencies may deny a citizen's request for information on the grounds that honoring the request could endanger national security, personal privacy, the integrity of internal government deliberations, or other significant objectives; and (3) that freedom of information law are one institution within a wider web of institutions and practices dedicated to holding government accountable. In this regard, the U.S. Freedom of Information Act can also be seen in a broad context of a cultural shift toward “openness” and a political shift toward what has been called a “monitory” model of democracy.
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Framing and Journalism
Christian von Sikorski and Jörg Matthes
As one of the most popular concepts in current research on journalism and mass communication, framing refers to the idea that actors like strategic communicators, journalists, but also audience members select some aspects of a particular issue and make them salient while other aspects are ignored. Frames refer to a specific presentation of issues or events and therefore construct reality in a meaningful but selective way. They do so by suggesting a problem definition, causal interpretation, treatment recommendation, and/or moral evaluation on a given issue, favoring a specific political leaning and course of action. More specifically, strategic communicators suggest frames that compete for public and media attention, and journalists adopt and alter these frames, which ultimately affects audience members’ individual level frames. Framing as a concept thus explains the power to construct and alter meaning.
As a unifying concept, framing has the potential to bridge several areas of communication research and explain the competition of strategic positions on the side of communicators, journalists, and audience members. However, the concept is also plagued by conceptual and operational fuzziness, resulting in arbitrary and incompatible uses of the term. This limits the relevance of the framing concept to theory-driven journalism studies.
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Representation and Journalism
Toussaint Nothias
The concept of representation is a cornerstone of the field of cultural studies. Representations are symbols, signs, and images used to communicate and construct meaning. They are at stake in a variety of fundamental cognitive processes such as perception and imagination. Language, for instance, is based on a system of representation where words stand for something else, such as an object or an idea. Representations are thus central to the process by which individuals and societies make sense of the world, assign meaning, and delineate norms, rules, and identities.
Journalism is a key site of production of representations. Unlike most other fields of cultural production, journalism is grounded in a regime of truth: it claims to represent the world as it is. Scholars interested in representation and journalism have largely opposed those claims. Journalism always involves covering certain events over others. News stories necessarily prioritize certain frames, voices, and contextual information, which creates peculiar kinds of representations. Those representations are constrained by the working conditions of journalists, but they are also shaped by broader political, economic, cultural, and historical contexts. In that sense, journalism creates representations but also reproduces representations that exist elsewhere in society.
Because the concept of representation points toward broader social forces involved in meaning construction, it has largely been used to explore the operations of power. Instead of asking “is any given representation true?” cultural studies scholars have been more interested in asking “how do relationships of power, domination, and inequality shape representations?” As a result of its development in the field of cultural studies, the study of representation has largely been oriented towards questions of inequalities and identity, most notably gender, race, ethnicity, and class.
With regard to the study of representation and journalism, three broad areas of inquiries are delineated. The first concerns how journalism represents different social groups, places, events, and issues through its coverage. This literature is wide and covers a range of issues in both domestic and international coverage. Most of those studies focus on the linguistic, rhetorical, and visual properties of media texts to deconstruct the ideological operations behind what often appears natural and common sense in the news. Another strand of research looks at similar issues of representation but in the context of journalistic production. In particular, these studies centralize the importance of who makes the news to understand the peculiar representations that journalism ultimately produces. Often relying on surveys, statistical data, or ethnography, these have contributed to an understanding of issues such as gender inequalities and lack of diversity in newsrooms. A final—and more discreet—literature investigates how journalism itself is represented in popular culture. Novels, films, television, commercials, cartoons, art, and video games routinely construct representations of journalism and journalists. These representations play a role in shaping popular mythologies around journalism and its role in society.
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Tabloid Journalism and Tabloidization
Sofia Johansson
Tabloid journalism has long been a highly contested news form. With a sensationalist approach and an easily digested mix of entertainment and news, it has often attracted mass audiences at the same time as it has stirred controversy and raised concern about its impact on public discourse. Originating in the tabloid newspaper, associated both with a small newspaper format and a particular news style, the term “tabloid” is today considered to characterize a range of other media content, extending to popular TV programs and certain kinds of online news. The rise and development of tabloid journalism, in combination with wider processes shaping the media, has moreover led to a debate about “tabloidization,” involving ideas about shifting priorities in journalism and the media landscape as a whole.
Although tabloidization has no standard definition, an overview of empirical research using the concept as a starting point highlights analyses of various media, historical periods, and media markets, adding to understandings of tabloidization as multi-faceted and context-bound. Such a process, furthermore, has been viewed both as a possible threat to the public sphere and as potentially entailing democratizing elements, relating to long-standing depictions of tabloid journalism as either “dumbing down” or “reaching out.” Yet contemporary analysis in this field has tended to paint a more complex picture of both phenomena as well as pointing to emerging questions around the category of tabloid journalism in digital settings.
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Gatekeeping and Journalism
Pamela J. Shoemaker
One of the oldest social science theories applied to the study of communication, the gatekeeping approach emphasizes the movement of bits of information through channels, with an emphasis on decision points (gates) and decision-makers (gatekeepers). Forces on both sides of a gate can either help or hinder the information’s passage through a channel. The gatekeeping process shapes and produces various images of reality, not only because some bits of information are selected and others rejected, but because communication agents put information together in different ways. In addition, the timing and repetition of information can affect the prominence of events or topics and can influence the probability of future information diffusion.
Gatekeeping was originally modeled as a series of linear processes within the mass media, but in the late 20th century the flow of information through the mass and social media began to interact. Information is now understood to flow among journalists, among social media users, and among agents of both types of media. All such communication agents are gatekeepers. In addition, we can study these networked interconnections as one level of analysis, with the supra-gatekeepers (such as Facebook or Twitter) adding their own gatekeeping processes over and beyond those of their own clients of the mass media.
In addition to looking at various pairwise relationships between gatekeepers, gatekeeping theory should go beyond to instead consider the entire web of gatekeepers as a whole or system. A system is composed of elements (gatekeepers), interactions (relationships among them), and a goal or function. Multiple functions have been proposed by 20th-century scholars (such as socialization, entertainment, or surveillance) for the mass media, but scholars should now consider the function(s) of the gatekeeping system (mass and social media, as well as supra-gatekeepers) as a whole. Although each type of medium can be analyzed as its own system, such analysis would not facilitate new thinking about the various ways in which these partial systems affect one another and how the whole system functions beyond the simple addition of its parts.
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Journalistic Organizations: Arenas for Professional and Symbolic Struggles
Florence Le Cam
From the end of the 19th century until the present, journalists have created associations, trade unions, clubs, and major international networks to organize workers, defend their rights, set out their duties, establish rules of good conduct, and structure their professional journalistic skills. These journalistic organizations are central actors in the history of the professionalization of journalistic groups around the world. They have enabled journalists to make their demands public, exchange views with journalists from other countries, and sometimes even promote and achieve legal recognition of their profession. In general terms, they have provided journalists with fora to discuss their working conditions, their profession, and the social role of the media and journalism. In this way, they have helped to structure not only discourses and practices, but also networks of solidarity at both national and international levels.
These organizations can exist in different arenas: within media companies, at the national level, or internationally. And, despite their variety over time, they have often pursued similar objectives: protect journalists’ pay and employment conditions and status; conceive strategies to maintain a certain form of autonomy in authoritarian political contexts; nourish international networking ambitions that have made it possible to disseminate ways of doing and thinking journalism; and finally generate a set of actions that aims to defend the ethics of journalism, the quality of news, and the lives of journalists.
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News as Genre
Jelle Mast
The term “genre,” typically understood as a conventional categorization of recognizable texts or discursive practices based on perceived similarities and differences, has become quite commonsensical across academic, professional, and everyday settings. One has to look no further than, for instance, the catalogues or profiles of on-demand (streaming) services and (other) niche providers in today’s fragmented news media landscape, categories of professional press or broadcast award competitions, or, for that matter, the sections of an average newspaper, news website or app, or television schedule, to see a genre logic at work. Hiding behind this ubiquity, though, is a complex multidimensional notion that weaves together authorial intentions or industrial practices, textual configurations, and audience interpretations and uses, evoking a web of interactions between the textual and contextual, the material and immaterial, the consistent and contingent. A tripartite conception of genre as an enabling, shared set of codes and conventions thus suggests the term’s associated overtones of the “generic,” “patterned,” “recurrent,” “routine,” and the like. Yet, at the same time, by shedding light on the practical uses of genres and the wider contexts of their production and reception, it also opens up to contemporary conceptions looking afresh at genre by primarily accentuating its discursive, dynamic, and contingent qualities.
As such, genre has been defined as a purposive communicative event that is socially embedded in a particular discourse community and materializes through the affordances of available media (technologies) while providing an entry point into broader group identities, sociocultural belief systems and normative political ideals or epistemologies. Applied to the present context, an image emerges of journalistic genres as a heterogeneous and hierarchical set of socially situated groupings of texts or practices tied to a range of coexisting journalistic (sub)cultures and the normative professional values they adhere to, emerging and evolving in interaction with technological developments, social change, and the wider cultural atmosphere. Understanding news through the lens of genre resonates particularly well, then, in a networked, hybrid and (self-)reflexive media environment, where the normative foundations of (the) news (paradigm), and journalism broadly are being reexamined. Developments in the shifting landscape of news/journalism such as an interpretive turn, a (new) narrative wave, soft news, and the appropriation and transgressions of taken for granted conventions and expectations in “fake news” and cross-generic forms, render the concept of “genre” ever more visible, and valuable for the field of journalism studies. For in line with journalism studies’ multidisciplinary constellation, a multiperspectival view on genre provides a rich, dialogic site where scholars adopting different approaches could meet around the heterogeneous subject of what news is, could be, or should be.
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Authoritarian Societies and Journalism
Marius Dragomir
In spite of journalism’s transnational nature, there is no common history of the subject and thus no common history of journalism in authoritarian societies, a field which can only be studied by bringing together historical facts about journalism in societies that experienced authoritarian regimes at some point in their history. Journalism in authoritarian societies is closely linked with forms of manipulation and censorship. While censorship is older than journalism, it was the rise of journalism as a profession that prompted authoritarian states to develop fully fledged censorship mechanisms and systems.
The first forms of censorship of the printed word were introduced by the Catholic Church shortly after the printing press was invented in the 16th century. But it was from the 17th century on that censorship models aimed at controlling the emergent periodical press were created by absolutist monarchies. Secular institutions gradually took over censorship from the church, developing a more complex control system that would methodically check on the printed information distributed widely to the general public.
While censorship systems were scrapped in most of Europe for a short period during the 19th century, the following century saw the rise of more sophisticated and repressive forms of censorship. They were developed by fascist dictatorships in several European countries and by the Soviet system in Russia. These models, particularly the Soviet propaganda system, influenced a spate of authoritarian regimes in communist nations all over the globe during the Cold War.
The collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s sounded the death knell of a series of authoritarian regimes, heralding an era of press freedom and independent journalism. But many regimes, particularly in the former Soviet Union, soon revived old authoritarian practices to keep their people under control.
In spite of the limitations on journalistic coverage in authoritarian societies, journalists reacted in various ways to all sorts of authoritarian practices, ranging from harsh censorship systems to less intrusive, yet effective, controlling mechanisms. They did so either by seizing opportunities that appeared during more relaxed political times or by developing circumvention tools that allowed them to reach out to their audiences. The rise of the Internet brought about new opportunities for journalism to reach and engage audiences, as governments struggle to push back by designing new forms of control and censorship.
