Sociologists and media scholars have offered a robust body of literature regarding the daily workings of global journalism—both in newsrooms and in the field. Although fixers are sometimes mentioned in this literature, the role they play in the production of global reporting is rarely analyzed. Such work often focuses on logistical assistance provided by fixers and discusses some tensions in the field regarding credit and security. Although this literature starts to paint an accurate picture of current trends in global journalism, it fails to critically examine how institutional and on-the-ground power dynamics impact a fixer’s work, let alone how global, systemic, and institutional dynamics shape which stories are reported and how the reporting itself is done. This is a glaring gap in knowledge as it ignores the impact that fixers can have on global journalism.
To rectify this gap, all aspects of global journalism must be explored, including the economic forces that allow global journalism to operate within a context of uneven power and resources. Recognizing that journalism functions in and as a field of uneven power offers a strong introduction to this discussion, but one must also situate journalism, journalists, and fixers themselves within the larger geopolitical realities of unequal economic and political power. These forces shape the process of fixing, which is why any thorough analysis of the role of fixing and fixers in global journalism must situate the conversation within a larger body of critical theory. In this context, mapping current trends and highlighting nuanced dynamics and tensions within the practice of fixing is essential to understanding how global journalism functions—and the role that fixers play in shaping its stories.
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The Practice of Fixing and the Role of Fixers in Global Journalism
Shayna Plaut and Peter W. Klein
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Advocacy Journalism
Ingrid Bachmann Cáceres
A contested term with defenders and critics, advocacy journalism refers to a genre of journalism that combines reporting with a point of view. With roots as far as the origins of journalism itself, as a contemporary practice it can be found—to varying degrees—in all kinds of media outlets across the globe. Its key premise is that journalists participate in the mass-mediated public sphere and that their work deliberately and transparently stands for specific perspectives, with stories actively championing for certain ideas and values. While some authors have labeled advocacy as the binary opposite of objective (factual) reporting, in recent decades several journalism scholars and practitioners have argued that this is not the case, and that advocacy and informing are not necessarily mutually exclusive. At the core of this discussion are normative considerations of how journalism should be, the role of objectivity in news reporting, and professional models shaping news cultures and news content in different regions. Ethical concerns are also common arguments in this debate.
Advocate journalists do not necessarily dismiss objectivity—although some do—and insist they adhere to professional standards nonetheless, since they still do journalism rather than propaganda. Promoters of advocacy also argue that having a situated viewpoint is more transparent, whereas critics argue against what they deem news reporting with an agenda or promoting an ideological campaign. More recently, advocacy journalism has been adopted—and adapted—by nongovernmental organizations and civic movements, which highlights the constant redefinitions of journalism practice outside of legacy media and traditional contexts.
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Agenda Setting and Journalism
Sebastián Valenzuela
People use the news media to learn about the world beyond their family, neighborhood, and workplace. As news consumers, we depend on what television, social media, websites, radio stations, and newspapers decide to inform us about. This is because all news media, whether through journalists or digital algorithms, select, process, and filter information to their users. Over time, the aspects that are prominent in the news media usually become prominent in public opinion. The ability of journalists to influence which issues, aspects of these issues, and persons related to these issues, are perceived as the most salient has come to be called the agenda-setting effect of journalism.
First described by Maxwell McCombs and Donald Shaw in a seminal study conducted during the 1968 elections in the United States, agenda-setting theory has expanded to include several other aspects beyond the transfer of salience of issues from the media agenda to the public agenda. These aspects include: the influence of journalism on the attributes of issues and people that make news; the networks between the different elements in the media and public agendas; the determinants of the news media agenda; the psychological mechanisms that regulate agenda-setting effects; and the consequences of agenda setting on both citizens’ and policymakers’ attitudes and behaviors. As one of the most comprehensive and international theories of journalism studies available, agenda setting continues to evolve in the expanding digital media landscape.
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Comparative Journalism Research
Thomas Hanitzsch
Comparative research in journalism studies typically involves systematic comparison of two or more countries or territorial entities with respect to some common dimension (e.g., journalistic practices, orientations, and cultures). Early works in this tradition can be traced back to the 1930s, but it was not until the late 1990s that cross-national research gained popularity in the field. Comparative journalism studies have historically evolved and developed around four distinct but partly overlapping paradigms: the United States and the rest (1950s–1960s), the North and the South (1970s–1980s), the West and the West (1980s–2000s), and the West and the world (2000s–2010s). In all these eras, comparative journalism researchers have focused on three topical areas: journalists’ professional orientations (journalistic roles and professional ethics), the contexts of news production (influences on news work and their subjective perception), and news cultures (normative and empirical analyses of press systems and journalistic cultures). Overall, a growing awareness of the advantages of comparative research has led to an explosion of these studies since the turn of the century. Comparative journalism research has thus become a principal avenue of study in the field, and it has meaningfully contributed to both knowledge about journalism and the formation of journalism studies as a discipline.
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Content Management Systems and Journalism
Juliette De Maeyer
A content management system (CMS) is a computer program used by news organizations or individuals to create, edit, organize, and publish journalistic content. The origins of modern-day CMSs date back to the process of newsroom computerization that started in the 1960s and to technological developments in web publishing in the 1990s. The latter have led to the creation of software that allows nontechnical users to easily publish content on the Web (blogging software and social media platforms). Consequently, the development of CMSs can be understood as a process of remediation, that is, the operation through which “new” media incorporate “old” media in a series of refashionings: modern-day CMSs still bear some traces of previous technological systems, as exemplified by the protean existence of the slug, a term that originated in the hot-type era and has carried into today’s digital software terminology. Journalism research has generally studied CMSs as being part of the technical infrastructure of media, through a socio-material approach. In that regard, digital technology is a black box wherein lurks the many tensions inherent to contemporary newsmaking. Opportunities to study such (invisible) infrastructure therefore arise whenever it dysfunctions, and research has focused on the various problems, obstacles, and impediments brought about by CMSs in newswork. More specifically, studying the CMS draws attention to issues related to the institutionalization of journalistic workflows (that become ossified in digital technologies), newsroom technologies constituting a complex system, the evolution of professional roles and hierarchies (and consequent power relations), as well as the agency and relative autonomy of software.
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Data Journalism: International Perspectives
Bruce Mutsvairo
With international awards celebrating outstanding work, courses appearing in universities, regular sections dedicated to it in major publications, and financial packages awarded to help journalists develop interactive digital storytelling skills, “data journalism” has, over the last decade, gained worldwide recognition. Questions still open for exploration include how sustainable is it and how is it manifesting in different parts of the world, with different government policies about making data available. Even so, assumptions that data journalism is a “new” phenomenon have been challenged as researchers continue to dig deeper into its past.
Very few will doubt the opportunities and innovations it presents especially insofar as rethinking professional practice and retooling investigative techniques are concerned. But data journalism also presents empirical, ethical and professional challenges especially in regions of the world, where it either hasn’t taken off or it’s struggling to gain ground. While access to groundbreaking statistics and ability to adopt storytelling techniques such as computer graphics and visualizations could trigger others to seek sensational success, data journalism’s first priority is to inform adequately and accurately. Failure to do so leaves journalism, already facing intensified international scrutiny as a result of numerous challenges ranging from lack of public trust to “problems associated with normative values and democracy; the political economy of the news media; the relevance of audiences and public trust; definitions of journalism itself; and the salience of old and new forms of professional ideology,” vulnerable.
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Development Journalism
Yvonne T. Chua
The term “development journalism” is five decades old. But if the volume of academic research was the lone measure of its reach and impact, then one may erroneously conclude that this field of journalism has hardly had any reach and impact at all. There is a paucity of scholarly studies for a genre that has proliferated across three continents and was once touted as the new journalism for Third World countries.
Existing literature points to two main patterns. One sees scholars pitted against each other on what development journalism is and ought to be. The reason: diverse, even opposing, variations of this genre of journalism have emerged according to social, political, economic, and cultural variations in a country or region. The original ideals of development journalism, which requires independent, critical evaluation of the process of development, have been replaced by justifications for a state-controlled media in authoritarian states being passed off as development journalism. That explains the second pattern: studies tend to diverge rather than converge on the concept of development journalism.
Over the years, calls have been made to standardize the notion of development journalism or, failing that, to revamp the entire concept. Until that happens, scholars embarking on the study of development journalism need to bear in mind the different approaches and practices, and avoid cherry-picking components that will distort findings.
The approaches range from development journalists as willing partners of government (statist) to watchdogs (investigative) and from interventionist (participatory or emancipatory) to guardians of transparency. Within the range are more variants or combinations. The bright side is that there is agreement on some of the essentials for development journalism: emphasis on the process of development to bring about social change (communitarian).
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Ethnicity, Race, and Journalism
Lynette Steenveld
“Ethnicity,” “race” and “journalism” are each problematized in this article on the relationship among them. They operate in diverse discourses relating to particularity and difference, and are used as both “analytical and folk concepts.” As race and ethnicity have different trajectories, racism has taken different forms: “scientific,” “institutional,” and “cultural” or “new racism.” While Northern/Western scholarship acknowledges the foundations of race and ethnicity with modernity, arising with 15th-century European colonization, they are nevertheless understood as “aberrations” in Western journalism—itself a practice of modernity. But critical Southern scholarship has challenged the hegemonic narrative of modernity, pointing to its “darker side,” and thus its production of the coloniality of knowledge, power, and being worldwide. It explains European colonization as the source of “modernity,” nascent capitalism, and the control of labor—including its gendered racialization. This accounts for the dominance of both the content and the perspective of European research. Sports and crime journalism are the most popular news forms which sustain the mythic concepts of racial superiority and inferiority, expressed through scientific racism. But journalism on transnationalism has led critical theorists to question its underpinning of institutional, cultural, and new racism, and increasingly, marginalized subaltern groups are producing their own media to challenge the hegemonic media framings of them. The “Southern” theoretical approach poses a fundamental challenge to contemporary, hegemonic, and gendered understandings of journalism, race, and ethnicity.
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Intimacy, Emotion, and Journalism
Karin Wahl-Jorgensen
Research on emotion and intimacy has been slow to develop in journalism studies. This is due to an allegiance to the model of liberal democracy and the associated ideal of objectivity. However, a growing body of work has shown that despite the historical allegiance to the ideal of objectivity, journalistic texts are—and always have been—profoundly infused with emotion. Emotion and intimacy serve crucial roles in the public discourse of journalism. They are used deliberately and strategically by journalists because they facilitate audience engagement and understanding. Audiences appear to connect with concrete stories of lived experience that dramatize the large and often abstract events that make up the news. Such connection can facilitate the cultivation of compassion—or feeling with others—and thereby engender cosmopolitan sensibilities. Growing scholarly attention to emotion and intimacy in journalism has occurred within the context of a rapidly changing media ecology. Technological changes associated with the digital era, including the rise of user-generated content and the emergence of social media, have ushered in a greater role for “ordinary people” in news production and participation. This has brought about the privileging of more emotional and embodied forms of storytelling. At the same time, these transformations, alongside broader existential threats to journalism, have rendered attention to the emotional impact of journalistic labor particularly urgent.
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News Literacy
Masato Kajimoto and Jennifer Fleming
News literacy is an emerging field within the disciplines of media literacy, journalism education, information technology, and other related areas, although there is no unified definition or consensus among researchers as to what exactly the news literacy curriculum should entail. Its core mission is broadly recognized as “citizen empowerment” in that the critical-thinking skills necessary to the evaluation of news reports and the ability to identify fact-based, quality information encourage active participation and engagement among well-informed citizens. One dominant instructional paradigm, which some researchers refer to as the “journalism school approach,” emerged in the mid-2000s and distinguished “news literacy” from its longer-recognized counterpart, media literacy. Lessons in news literacy classrooms focus exclusively on the deconstruction of news content. While news literacy often shares many of its analytical goals and theoretical frameworks with media literacy education, it also contains specialized pedagogical methods specific to the process of news production, which are not applicable to other types of media content.
Despite some heated discussions among scholars, particularly in the United States, with different standpoints on whether this pedagogy is more or less effective than the approaches taken by media literacy educators, the difference between the two and other related fields, such as digital literacy and web literacy, is often ambiguous because in practice, neither discipline is particularly standardized and each instructor’s understanding of the field, as well as their academic training, has a significant impact on students’ learning experiences. Globally, the debate over the—often subtle—nuances that differentiate these various approaches have even less significance, as educators around the world translate and adapt news literacy concepts to fit the unique circumstances and environments found in their own country’s news media, political, and technological environments.
Perhaps the most pressing issue in the current state of news literacy is a lack of a cohesive body of peer-reviewed research, or in particular, a research design that appropriately measures the efficacy of educational models. News literacy studies grounded in social science methods are limited. Scholarship on critical news instruction and skill development, which has been traditionally conducted under the umbrella of media literacy, is mostly comprised of descriptive accounts of educational interventions or self-reported surveys on media attitudes, content consumption behaviors, or analytical skills. In the United States, a body of quantitative work based on an assessment instrument called a “news media literacy scale” has influenced how researchers can contextualize and measure news literacy, and some qualitative analyses shed light on specific pedagogical models. Interest in educational intervention and related research has increased rather dramatically since 2016 as global concerns over “post-truth” media consumption and the “fake news” phenomena have become part of academic discourse in different disciplines. Collaborative works among scholars and practitioners in the areas that could potentially inform the design of effective news literacy curriculum development, such as cognitive science, social psychology, and social media data analysis, have started to emerge as well.
