The relationship between the practice and field of journalism and the interdisciplinary field of memory studies is complex and multifaceted. There is a strong link between collective memory production and journalistic practice, based on the proposition that journalists produce first drafts of history by using the past in their reportage. Moreover, the practice of journalism is a key agent of memory work because it serves as one of society’s main mechanisms for recording and remembering, and in doing so helps shape collective memory. Journalism can be seen as a memory text, with journalists constructing news within cultural-interpretive frames according to the cultural environment. Journalism also plays a key role in the production of visual memory and new media, including social media. Journalism is thus a key agent of memory work, providing a space for commentary on institutional and cultural sites of memory construction.
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Collective Memory and Journalism
Tanja Bosch
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Journalistic Autonomy
Henrik Örnebring and Michael Karlsson
The notion of journalistic autonomy is the idea that journalism as a societal institution, as well as individual journalists in their workplace (the newsroom), should be free from undue influence from other societal institutions and actors. The term “independence” is frequently used as synonymous with autonomy. Journalistic autonomy is commonly seen as normatively desirable as it is linked to two of journalism’s core democratic functions: information provision (journalists who are not autonomous may produce biased information) and the watchdog function (non-autonomous journalists may act in the interests of other actors when fulfilling the watchdog function rather than in the public interest).
Autonomy exists on three distinct analytical levels: first, the institutional level (referring to journalism as a whole, being independent from other societal institutions like the state and the market); second, the individual level (referring to individual journalists having discretionary decision-making power in their own work); and third, the organizational level (referring to the workplace level, where individual preferences frequently are mediated by institutional constrains). In general, journalism research has focused mostly on analyzing autonomy on the institutional and individual levels and less on the organizational level.
Research on journalistic autonomy on the institutional level focuses on the autonomy of journalism from the state (or, more broadly, the political sphere in general) and the market. The key instrument for both state and market actors seeking to influence journalism (thereby decreasing journalistic autonomy) is information subsidies, that is, information resources of different types that conform to journalistic genre demands and professional norms but which also advance the agenda of the actors who produce them.
Research on journalistic autonomy on the individual level focuses on so-called perceived influences on journalistic work, that is, the factors that journalists themselves see as limiting their autonomy. There are broad cross-national patterns to such perceptions. The political system is the most important determinant of perceived political influence, as journalists in more authoritarian countries perceive more political interference than journalists in democratic countries. Another broad pattern is that nation-level and individual-level influences are perceived as more important than organizational-level influences. Almost regardless of country, most journalists actually see themselves as having a high degree of workplace autonomy.
This is in contrast to the research on organizational-level autonomy (as well as much of the research on autonomy on the institutional level), which demonstrates that journalists’ workplace autonomy is constrained in many important ways. Tacit rules, implicit policies, and norms of professionalism all combine to make journalists obedient employees who generally voluntarily accept many constraints on their autonomy without perceiving them as such. Only overt and explicit attempts from political and commercial actors to control reporting are perceived as interference, whereas informal norms of story selection that favor resource-rich actors are seen as “natural” or “normal.” Thus in many ways, journalistic autonomy is a rhetorical construct as much as a normative ideal.
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Native Advertising
Bartosz Wojdynski
Native advertising has become an increasingly important revenue component for many online journalism publications. Because Web consumers engage in advertising avoidance strategies when using the Web, advertisers have gradually come to rely increasingly on paid advertising that resembles in format, appearance, and content non-advertising content on websites. On news websites, native advertising forms include sponsored content, sponsored homepage links, and sponsored article-referral links. The spread of native advertising news content has led to concern that news consumers fail to recognize it as advertising, and questions about whether it is unethical or deceptive.
Contemporary native advertising is not the first content delivered alongside news that blurs the boundaries between editorial and paid promotional content. Print advertorials, which took root in newspapers and magazines in the mid-20th century, are a direct analogue, but host-read ads on radio and television programs, text-based search engine result advertising, and newspaper special advertising sections can all be seen as advertising content designed to feel like non-paid content. However, because contemporary native advertising takes so many different forms, and because practices of disclosure to the user are so varied, there has been a rise in public concern and academic inquiry into the prevalence and effects of native advertising.
Native advertising on online news sites has generated a number of ethical concerns from practitioners, media critics, and consumers. On the production side, scholars and practitioners worry that the creation of content on behalf of, or in partnership with, advertisers may erode norms of editorial independence that have governed media organizations’ practices for over half a century. Others are concerned that as consumers become accustomed to seeing articles produced with advertiser input, the credibility of news organizations and trust in their non-advertising content will decrease. Perhaps most prominent have been concerns that native advertising deliberately disables consumers’ ability to recognize advertising elements on a website, rendering advertiser and publisher liable for deceiving consumers.
Research on native advertising has focused primarily on understanding how consumers detect and perceive native advertising, with additional streams focused on descriptive analyses of native advertising content and practitioner perspectives. Empirical studies show that many consumers do not recognize native advertising, and that there are substantial differences in how the content is received and trusted between those who recognize it and those who do not. Scholars have also identified characteristics of content, disclosure practices, and individual characteristics that influence the likelihood of advertising recognition.
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News, Children, and Young People
Eiri Elvestad
Studies of how children and young people relate to news have made important contributions to the field of journalism. As early as the early 1900s, children’s and young people’s news exposure was considered with interest. News exposure plays an important role for citizenship in democracies, and for news media organizations, recruiting new generations of audiences is important for survival in the future. From the early days, scholars have mainly focused on four areas in studies of news children and young people. First, the role of mass media as an agent of political socialization and how news exposure can inspire children and young people to civic engagement. Second, the introduction of television and television news increased the numbers of studies of children’s and adolescent’s emotional reactions to news coverage, and the emotional reactions to violence in the news coverage in particular. Third, an increasing focus on children’s rights and children as a minority group has further inspired studies of representation of children and young people in the news. Finally, inspired by methodological approaches focusing on people’s motivation for the use of different media and how they were used (“uses and gratification” studies), a main area for researchers has been to grasp how children and young people engage with news and how they do so in changed media environments. In the last decade, journalism studies have increasingly focused on how children and young people receive, evaluate, produce, and share news in social media.
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News Editing and the Editorial Process
Tim Klein, Elisabeth Fondren, and Leonard M. Apcar
Throughout the ages, the editor’s primary role has been to connect writers with readers by deciding what to publish. In modern scholarship, this is known as gatekeeping. The stories an editor allows through the metaphorical “gate” can influence what readers find important—what scholars call agenda setting. But editors not only influence which stories are told; they also shape how stories are told, through word choice, story arrangement, selection of examples, photos, and the all-important headline; this is known as framing. Historians and biographers have written a good deal about individual editors—their publications, their editorial instincts, their altercations with powerful politicians, and their pursuit of truth, entertainment, profit, and influence. But there has been less focus on the broader changes that have impacted the work of editors as the media ecosystem has shifted. Cultural and social changes have created new demands on editors, who have had to adjust to stay in sync with audiences’ tastes and expectations. Technological invention—and the disruption of old economic models—have forced editors to adapt to new mediums of mass communication that serve new audiences and new financial realities. In short, broader economic, political, technological, and social changes have all influenced what type of editing has flourished and what practices drifted into the past. The Internet has posed an existential threat to editors as gatekeepers. Countless new gates that connect readers and writers have been thrown open, some with little to no editorial oversight. This is far from the first time editors have been forced to adapt to change—the history of editing has been a story of innovation in a continuing quest to find new ways to connect readers and writers. Today, despite the decline in gatekeeping power, professional editing still has an essential role—to curate quality out of the multitude of online voices and uphold a rigor for accuracy and truthfulness that can be easily overlooked on social media and non-professional news sites. Whether it is approving (or rejecting) a topic of investigation, copy-editing prose, fact-checking a story, arranging the home page of a website, managing a newsroom, or deciding which journalist to hire, editors play an integral role in shaping the information that is shared with audiences.
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Commercialization of Journalism
Nina Kvalheim and Jens Barland
Commercialization of journalism is not a new concern. Indeed, journalism has always been bought and sold in the market, and commercialization has thus always been a central part of the production of journalism. In a modern sense, however, commercialization became an issue with the emergence of the penny press in the United States and the abolishment of the “taxes on knowledge” in the United Kingdom. These developments altered the content of newspapers and brought along discussions concerning the effects of commercialization. In the late 20th and early 21st century, commercialization of journalism again took a new turn. Developments such as digitalization and the emergence and communization of the internet, has led to an increased attention to market logics. This, in turn, makes studies of the commercialization of journalism increasingly more important.
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The Nation-State and Journalism
Shakuntala Rao
The concept of nation-state has historically been defined as peoples having some manner of territorial and political self-determination; cultural, linguistic, or religious affinity; and economic independence. Recent forces of globalization have made the nation-state increasingly vulnerable to and dependent on capital, corporations, and/or more powerful states. Such integration of the nation-state in the global world has also led political actors to reverse course and seek ethno-nationalist agendas where differences in race, ethnicity, religion, gender, caste, and other identity markers are used to inflame fears or defend against economic, cultural, and environmental dislocation among a nation’s citizens. Journalists face critical challenges as the nation-state gets reconfigured. These challenges include the rise of new media technology as a force of division and the rise of ethno-nationalism. Research shows that new media platforms expanded not only the definition of who can create content but also the range of topics covered. Positive opportunities, alternately, are undermined by the reality that non-media factors—historical, political, economic, and social divisions—continue to determine not only the diffusion and adoption of new media but also its influence; each nation has its own cultural equations and socio-historical footprints on which new media gets imposed. Journalists, as part of national media systems, increasingly find themselves operating in an environment where they are competing with non-regulated technologies and supra-national information landscape. A core belief propagated by new ethno-nationalists is an anti-media bias, where all news is perceived to be left leaning or “liberal” in nature and content, and therefore open to criticism and censorship. The reprieve from such narratives of ethno-nationalism is the model of global journalism, which makes possible transnational information sharing.
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Skills and Journalism
Henrik Örnebring
What skills do journalists need? Why do they need them? What do we even mean by “skill” in the first place? In journalism research, the issue of skill has mainly been studied as an applied issue closely linked to journalism education. The main concern has been whether journalism education equips students with the skills they need to succeed in the job market, as well as with the skills they need to fulfill journalism’s democratic function. There is a long-standing conflict between these two “skill goals” of journalism education, where vocational or practical skills are often viewed as (at least potentially) in opposition to academic or theoretical skills. Journalism students need vocational skills in order to satisfy employer needs, and academic skills in order to satisfy wider societal needs.
Another key research concern in this area has been the issue of de-skilling: the idea that journalistic work gradually becomes less and less skilled as employers mainly demand quicker outputs across different media platforms, rather than the production of quality content. Another element of the deskilling idea is that experienced (older) journalists are phased out and/or replaced with less experienced (younger) and therefore cheaper journalists who do not necessarily possess specific or very in-depth training in journalism. This process is mainly linked to the ongoing commercialization and digitalization of journalism. Empirically, however, many research results point instead either to a general upskilling of journalism (a higher and higher share of the workforce have a university degree, for example) or to the fact that deskilling may occur in parts of the occupation, whereas other parts may experience upskilling.
All of this research has in common that skill is rarely defined and that analyses of skill rarely reference the wider sociological and psychological literature on skill, expertise, and competence. A few scholars have analyzed skill among journalists at a higher level of abstraction, attempting to define what the core expertise or skill of journalism actually is. This research direction is key to the future development of research on journalism and skill.
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Credibility and Trust in Journalism
Anya Schiffrin
Questions of media trust and credibility are widely discussed; numerous studies over the past 30 years show a decline in trust in media as well as institutions and experts. The subject has been discussed—and researched—since the period between World Wars I and II and is often returned to as new forms of technology and news consumption are developed. However, trust levels, and what people trust, differ in different countries. Part of the reason that trust in the media has received such extensive attention is the widespread view shared by communications scholars and media development practitioners that a well-functioning media is essential to democracy. But the solutions discussion is further complicated because the academic research on media trust—before and since the advent of online media—is fragmented, contradictory, and inconclusive. Further, it is not clear to what extent digital technology –and the loss of traditional signals of credibility—has confused audiences and damaged trust in media and to what extent trust in media is related to worries about globalization, job losses, and economic inequality. Nor is it clear whether trust in one journalist or outlet can be generalized. This makes it difficult to know how to rebuild trust in the media, and although there are many efforts to do so, it is not clear which will work—or whether any will.
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Financial Journalism
Jeffrey Timmermans
On a fundamental level, financial journalism provides information to individuals that helps them make informed economic choices, and understand how those choices impact their financial situation within the context of the broader political economy. The need for reliable information about prevailing business conditions has been recognized since the dawn of commerce, and since then financial journalism and commerce have developed together in a mostly symbiotic, albeit occasionally combative, relationship for hundreds of years. In its earliest iterations, in the 16th century, financial journalism consisted of little more than the publication of prices of commodities or other goods for sale. As trade and commerce expanded over the following centuries, so did the role and content of financial journalism. The globalization of commerce and increasing integration of the world economy since the late 20th century has increased the importance of financial journalism, while the spread of mass-market investment opportunities and defined-benefit retirement accounts in many countries has expanded the pool of individuals exposed to moves in financial markets, helping to make financial publications among the world’s most-read newspapers and websites. The focus of financial journalism is quite consistent no matter what country or language it is published in: broadly defined, financial journalism encompasses news about financial markets, macroeconomic data and trends, government economic policy, corporate news (especially earnings announcements), personal finance, and commentary about all of the above. However, the often mutualistic relationship between financial journalism and the organizations it covers has led to conflicts of interest, and to a debate over the proper role of a financial press: whether it is to merely disseminate data and information from those organizations, or to serve as a watchdog over them. For example, the bubble in internet-related shares in the 1990s was blamed partly on “boosterism” by the financial media, while many investors also blamed the financial press for failing to sound the alarm ahead of the Global Financial Crisis later in the following decade.
