Journalism

This article examines the extent to which coverage of immigration issues has featured in mainstream national news coverage of six UK General Elections between 1992 and 2015. The six-phase content analysis charts shifts in the scale of coverage over this period that cannot be explained by reference to external factors alone, such as increases in net migration and growing public attentiveness to the issue. We show that since 2005, a disconnect has emerged between media coverage of the issue and external indicators of its scale and importance. The analysis also reveals a shift in the ownership of the immigration issue in formal campaign settings, with the UK Independence Party becoming the most dominant issue associate in electoral coverage of immigration issues.

The separation between editorial and business activities of news organisations has long been a fundamental norm of journalism. Journalists have traditionally considered this separation as both an ethical principle and an organisational solution to preserve their professional autonomy and isolate their newsrooms from profit-driven pressures exerted by advertising, sales and marketing departments. However, many news organisations are increasingly integrating their editorial and commercial operations. Based on 41 interviews conducted at 12 newspapers and commercial broadcasters in six European countries, we analyse how editors and business managers describe the changing relationship between their departments. Drawing on previous research on journalistic norms and change, we focus on how interviewees use rhetorical discourses and normative statements to de-construct traditional norms, build new professionally accepted norms and legitimise new working practices. We find, first, that the traditional norm of separation no longer plays the central role that it used to. Both editors and managers are working to foster a cultural change that is seen as a prerequisite for organisational adaptation to an increasingly challenging environment. Second, we find that a new norm of integration, based on the values of collaboration, adaptation and business thinking, has emerged. Third, we show how the interplay between declining and emerging norms involves a difficult negotiation. Whereas those committed to the traditional norm see commercial considerations as a threat to professional autonomy, our interviewees see the emerging norm as a new way of ensuring professional autonomy by working with other parts of the organisation to jointly ensure commercial sustainability.

This research critically assesses the press coverage of Jeremy Corbyn during his leadership bid and subsequent first months as the leader of the United Kingdom’s Labour Party. A content analysis (n = 812) found that the British press offered a distorted and overly antagonistic view of the long-serving MP. Corbyn is often denied a voice and news organisations tended to prize anti-Corbyn sources over favourable ones. Much of the coverage is decidedly scornful and ridicules the leader of the opposition. This analysis also tests a set of normative conceptions of the media in a democracy. In view of this, our research contends that the British press acted more as an attackdog than a watchdog when it comes to the reporting of Corbyn. We conclude that the transgression from traditional monitorial practices to snarling attacks is unhealthy for democracy, and it furthermore raises serious ethical questions for UK journalism and its role in society.

Drawing on interviews with a diverse group of adults living in the United States, this study examines news media literacy and how perceptions of personal bias and news bias affect news choices and interpretation in general and evaluation of two news stories specifically. Findings suggest that while people recognize that their worldviews shape their news choices in the abstract and believe that news bias occurs for a variety of complex reasons, when faced with analyzing stories, they point to political partisanship connected to specific news outlets as the root of bias in news with most relying on source cues to make their assessments.

This study seeks to determine the extent to which the Flemish press gives voice to gender and ethnic diversity. A total of 16 in-depth interviews with print journalists outlined five key arguments about diversity in the newsroom. Two of these view the portrayal of diversity as conceptually irrelevant or inconsistent with a notion of universal equality. The third argument defines diverse representation as an active search process that is part and parcel of a journalist’s mission. Two additional arguments blame the lack of diversity in news reporting on practical obstacles – professional practices that make it difficult to aim for a diverse source selection, or the less prominent role of women and ethnic minorities in society which leads to a less diverse set of news sources. This study seeks to find explanations in the news production process as to why gender and ethnic diversity in the news continues to be consistently scarce.

This study examines how market orientation affects the use of web analytics in newsrooms. The researcher conducted 57 in-depth interviews with journalists working full time in United States-based news organizations. These organizations varied by market orientation: strongly market oriented, somewhat strongly market oriented, somewhat weakly market oriented, and weakly market oriented. Using market theory for news production as a framework, this study found that prior research correctly identified how newsrooms utilize analytics, but did not necessarily illustrate the nuances in how organizations utilized analytics differently depending on market orientation. Finally, the piece extends and discusses the utility of market theory for news production.

The arrival of new actors in the journalistic field increasingly necessitates new conceptual approaches to better understand journalistic work in the digital age. Social network sites have played an important role in these processes, with the rapid emergence of non-traditional actors engaging in activities that may be classified as journalism. Yet, while scholarship on Twitter and Facebook has continually expanded, the visual platform Instagram has received comparatively little attention, despite being an important venue for new forms, particularly in lifestyle journalism. Through an examination of professional lifestyle Instagrammers’ discursive constructions of journalistic boundaries and their role perceptions, this article suggests that in their key values and functional understanding their approach resembles traditional journalistic occupational ideologies, and their role perceptions are very similar to those of lifestyle journalists. The findings contribute to our understanding of transformative processes in journalism more broadly, and their implications for journalistic values, ideals, and practices.

Journalists use news factors to construct newsworthy stories. This study investigates whether different types of news outlets emphasize different news factors. Using a large-scale manual content analysis (n = 6489), we examine the presence of seven news factors in economic news across four different outlets types (i.e. popular, quality, regional, and financial newspapers). Results suggest that popular and regional newspapers particularly rely on the news factors of personification, negativity, and geographical proximity. Quality newspapers, instead, employ a rather general pattern of news factors, whereas the financial newspaper consistently relies on less news factors in its reporting. Findings urge scholars to move toward a more detailed understanding of how newsworthiness is constructed in different types of news outlets.