From impartial commentator to emotional choirmaster – using the concept of liminality to theorize the departure from journalistic ‘norms’ during moments of national sporting euphoria

This article explores the professional role and normative demands of online feature journalists. Through a longitudinal ethnographic case study of the work practices of feature journalists in the Norwegian online newspaper dagbladet.no, the article uncovers how the normative demands of a new professional role are negotiated within the online newsroom of a newspaper. It further reveals how the role of journalists is shaped by two axes: a historical axis of factors that have shaped the role of journalists throughout history, and a contemporary axis of the particulars of labour in modern society at large. The findings suggest that online feature journalists practise a more audience-driven and source-detached kind of journalism than their print counterparts. They further suggest that the remediation of feature journalism online yields increased status to the role of online journalists at large.

This paper examines emerging news forms and journalistic practices within Australia that are native to social media. It argues that these shared forms and practices constitute a new genre of ‘social news’. Social news embodies specific kinds of platform vernaculars and pop-cultural sensibilities, and challenges journalistic norms of ‘objectivity’ and ‘balance’ by consistently adopting an overtly positioned perspective. Three Australian-based outlets are studied through this conceptual lens: BuzzFeedOz News, Junkee Media, and Pedestrian.tv. Using digital tools alongside manual methods, this paper investigates the role and significance of these outlets on Twitter and Facebook during the August-November 2017 same-sex marriage postal survey. The survey was commissioned by the incumbent conservative Liberal-National Australian government to gauge nationwide support for same-sex marriage. During the survey, social news outlets played an advocacy and activist role. These outlets refrained from publishing provocative ‘No’ op-eds, and Junkee Media and Pedestrian.tv actively encouraged readers to enrol and vote ‘Yes’. Preliminary findings indicate that social news outlets were moderately-to-highly visible on Twitter during the postal survey period. On Facebook, advocacy posts received low-to-moderate levels of engagement. These findings indicate a shifting but not yet transformed Australian news ecology. In addition, social news’ eschewing of ‘balance’ indicates a challenge from emerging outlets to traditional journalistic norms in Australia. Significantly, in this case the challenge comes from outlets that intelligently critique the value in publishing both sides. Overall, this research highlights that disruptions from social media platforms and cultures can be sources of positive potential for news and journalistic practice.

Democratization of public communication not only requires the institutional reorganization of the mass media, but also the adoption of new journalistic practices in political reporting. These practices include a new conception of the role of journalists in society and new standards of the quality of news reporting. This article takes the Izvestiya, one of Russia's quality papers, as an example to discuss the specific problems Russian print media are confronted with when struggling for independence. A quantitative content analysis of the political coverage of the Izvestiya, which compares front-page news in 1988 and 1996, elucidates how the paper informs its readers about political matters today and how the structure of news has changed over the last decade. The findings show the coexistence of old and new journalistic norms. There are clear signs of growing professionalization with the news becoming more factual, more timely and broader in the selection of topics. At the same time, we still find a high degree of subjective evaluations indicating the persistence of the historical legacy of Russian journalism.

Purpose In this chapter, I develop a theoretical framework to address the financial–social performance debate in strategy research, drawing on literatures on institutional logics and organizational forms. Methodology/design I test the theoretical framework using an exploratory empirical approach based on ideal types with global microfinance data. A joint consideration of financial and social performances of microfinance organizations (MFOs) helps classify them into four ideal types – self-sustainable, mission-drifting, failing, and subsidized. I examine how an MFO’s organizational form and the configurations of institutional logics of the nation within which it is embedded jointly explain which ideal type the MFO falls into. Findings Based on a study of 1455 MFOs in 98 countries between 1995 and 2007, I show that the interactions between national institutional logics and organizational forms add significant predicting power in estimating MFOs’ ideal types. Explaining the intricate relationships between the financial and social performance of MFOs thus requires a simultaneous consideration of both the configuration of national logics and organizational forms. Originality/value The theoretical framework introduced in this chapter builds on recent developments in the institutional logics perspective and research on organizational forms, extending our understanding of the financial–social performance relationship among organizations. It also advances the social entrepreneurship literature by focusing our attention on various institutions at both national and organizational levels that may facilitate or inhibit social venture efficacy.

This article builds on a research project examining news values, journalistic practices, and media power in Australia and Malaysia. These two countries differ from each other in socio-cultural, religious, regional, political perspectives, and journalistic practices but share the presence of indigenous people, appreciation for multiculturalism, and increasing numbers of older people. The comparison of journalistic practices – Asian-based development journalism and Western journalism practices – along with other differences, especially socio-cultural values, provides the rationale for the selection of these two countries. The study draws on Fairclough’s three-dimensional critical discourse analysis and Caple and Bednarek’s discursive news values analysis to explore the discursive practices of journalists in providing voices and prioritising different actors in news stories. 99 news articles from 8 mainstream Australian newspapers – The Age, The Sydney Morning Herald, The Australian, The Advertiser, The Daily Telegraph, The Courier-Mail, The Herald Sun, and The Canberra Times – and 5 English-language Malaysian newspapers – New Straits Times, The Malay Mail, The Star, The Borneo Post, and The Sun – published between January 2011 and December 2013 are selected as the dataset in this study. The study finds that reference to elite persons remains a uniform news value in both Australian and Malaysian newspapers, indicating the role of journalists in reflecting and reinforcing the status quo, and the imbalance of power in society. This dominant news value amongst journalists tends to silence those who are not conceived as newsworthy or seen as less newsworthy, such as older people. While the dominance of elites can be linked to social norms in Malaysia that prevent challenges to the social hierarchy and the maintenance of a high regard for people in authority such as political leaders, the discursive practices of Australian journalists do not align with their role to provide a uniform forum for the exchange of ideas, as elderly Australians are given limited opportunities to be active participants.

After the NBA season2019-2020 was postponed due to the spread of COVID-19 in the United States, it was resumed on July 72020, in a tightly secured environment within Walt Disney World termed as NBAbubble. Only ten sports reporters were allowed within this bubble to provide news coverage for the fans, and they were soon called the Magic 10. The purpose of this exploratory study is to understand, through textual analysis of metajournalistic discourse published about the NBA bubble, how these sports journalists adjusted their practices during an unprecedented sports event. The first theme was the disruption of the journalistic norms and practices of the in-bubble reporters. The second theme manifest in the content was related to reporting on timely social justice issues from within the bubble. The third theme emerged as an element of introspection or reflection about the peculiar experience of reporting from a “bubble.” We discuss the implications of these practices for sports journalism and suggest that the NBA bubble may catalyze the relationship between sports and journalism.

Considerable scholarly discussion, in broad terms at least, has focused on the disruptions that the Internet has delivered to journalistic norms and the changes to perceptions that journalists hold of their role. However, such discussion tends to emphasize the Internet as a globally used form of technology with a singular impact on journalism; it mentions only in passing that its understanding of this concept is mainly based on an Anglo-American model. This article explores Chinese journalists’ ideas about disruption in China. It finds that Chinese journalists use of the Internet falls within the margins of the censorship system, leading to a grey area surrounding the practice of online journalism within which certain specific constraints supposedly enforced by administration law and departmental policies can be broken without punishment. While working in this grey area signals a disruption of journalistic norms in China, the characteristics of this disruption differ from those found in western countries.

The frequent referencing of service to the public interest as a core professional journalistic value raises the question of the correspondence between the perception of journalists and the public as to what constitutes good and bad journalism. In this study, a sample of Israeli journalists and a sample of the Israeli public were asked a series of questions about the core values and practices of journalism. Results suggest four major conclusions: first, Israeli journalists have a clear, relatively uniform perception of what constitutes worthy journalism. Second, journalists and the public differ in the degrees of significance they assign to various journalistic norms and practices. Third, the public is slightly more positive in its overall assessment of the Israeli media in comparison with the journalists. Finally, the two general assessments are constituted by different, or even opposing, components.

This article addresses practices of constructive journalism in the local, postcolonial context of St. Maarten, an autonomous Dutch Caribbean island. Building on extensive fieldwork at print and online news media outlets on the island and 14 in-depth interviews with reporters, editors, and news bloggers, this article shows that constructive journalism practices are widespread in St. Maarten. These are based on ideals of contributing to economic development, engagement and belonging, and social stability. The fieldwork, however, also revealed skepticism toward constructive journalism practices because of local political, economic, and socio-cultural constraints. This skepticism parallels broader critiques on active and involved forms of journalism, throwing up questions about the meaning and feasibility of a ‘constructive’ role of journalists in young, postcolonial democracies. This article argues that local constraints on St. Maarten journalism undermine the normative underpinnings of constructive journalism and calls for more disruptive journalism to serve the local community.

The algorithmic personalisation and recommendation of media content has resulted in considerable discussion on related ethical, epistemic and societal concerns. While technologies of personalisation are widely employed by social media platforms, they are currently also being instituted in journalistic media. The objective of this study is to explore how concerns about algorithms are articulated and addressed when technologies of personalisation meet with long-standing journalistic values, norms and publicist missions. It first distinguishes five normative concerns related to personalisation: autonomy, opacity, privacy, selective exposure and discrimination. It then traces the ways that these issues are navigated in the context of journalistic media in Finland where the implications of algorithmic media technologies have received considerable attention. The results indicate that personalisation challenges traditional notions of journalism, including those of choosing what is important and relevant and providing the same content to everyone. However, aspects of personalisation also have a long history within journalistic practices, and new technologies of personalisation are being adapted to accord with journalistic norms and aims. Based on these results, ethical blindspots concerning privacy and discrimination are also identified.

The piversity paradox. Analyzing the changing relation between journalism and cultural diversity. The piversity paradox. Analyzing the changing relation between journalism and cultural diversity. In this article we study the relationship between journalistic practice and the ideals of diversity and multiculturalism. By means of interviews with 61 Dutch journalists we demonstrate that the journalist’s practice is dominated by a ‘diversity paradox’. On the one hand, journalists seem to collectively reject the idea that ethnic minorities should receive a special treatment by the news media. Yet, on the other hand, the same journalists choose to explicitly name (issues related to) diversity when it comes to bad news. The analysis of the transcribed interviews shows that, even though journalists feel a certain responsibility towards covering diversity, in daily practice this ideal can easily conflict with other journalistic norms and values. As a result, in their everyday routines, the place of diversity is not determined by these (conflicting) journalistic ideals but rather by contextual factors such as personal preferences and time constraints.

Social media’s influence on journalistic norms and practices is a prominent theme in journalism studies. For small news organizations, there is not always a clear line between their public image and the online identities of their journalists. Focusing on such ambiguity, this article examines the integration of social media use and journalistic practice at The Local, an independent online news magazine based in Toronto, Canada, as well as its potential implications for community journalism. A qualitative thematic analysis of 300 tweets about the COVID-19 pandemic in Toronto, posted by the magazine’s official account and its two star journalists, revealed a unique journalistic approach that prioritized hyper-local, data-informed, and affective storytelling over the traditional norm of journalists as detached observers and information providers. This finding sheds light on how journalism practices at The Local and other comparable digital news startups may contribute to the revival of community journalism.

Shortly after its emergence as a tool for participatory journalism, online commenting became a popular format for audience public discourse and a subject of controversy for professional journalists. The early 21st century has seen a constant growth in research considering how online comments have influenced journalism by providing new ways to understand the perspective of the audience, by changing the routines and practices of the newsroom, and by encouraging a reconsideration of how content influences readers. News audiences, generally, have been relatively quiet and passive in the past, but online comments have given them the opportunity to speak alongside journalists on professional platforms. This shift in news-mediated public discourse has the potential to reshape the journalist−audience relationship in substantial ways. The research on commenting has provided new evidence on how journalistic practices are changing, how people perceive and process information online, and how journalists negotiate technological change while trying not to upend the profession. However, there is a need for more research that explores critical questions related to comment quality, changing journalistic norms, and the relationship between journalist identity and technology. Online commenting has the potential to help fulfill the journalistic norms of providing a space for public discourse and promoting diverse views from within the community. This potential, however, is reliant upon journalists who uphold the civic function of journalism’s role.

Scholarship into the role that culture plays in journalistic role orientations and practices remains scarce, despite a small increase in recent years. Drawing on the concepts of journalistic embeddedness, cultural values and journalistic roles, this paper examines the extent to which a local cultural role perception and culturally specific journalistic practices can be identified. Reporting results of a survey of Pacific Islands journalists, we find that journalists strongly support a role that places emphasis on reflecting, defending, and preserving traditional customs and values, more so than other roles. This role, as well as specific cultural journalistic practices, is explained in large part by conservation values and peculiarities in the small and micro media systems of the Pacific. The results suggest that journalists are highly embedded within their respective communities, contributing to our conceptual understanding of culture in journalistic roles and practices.

Scholarly research into journalists as a subject of study is increasing. Through this, scholars found there is no consensus among journalists about journalistic practice. This is because journalistic roles are discursively recreated, reinterpreted, appropriated, and contested. The coverage of the EU referendum in the UK provides an opportunity to further explore journalistic roles through a focus group of EU and diaspora journalists and academics. The study reveals that participants were critical of the roles played by the British press in the coverage of the referendum and that they were concerned about its effects on their physical and emotional well-being. Hence, they urge media organisations to offer support and training to redress these concerns. In conclusion, the study provides an in-depth and intense probing of journalistic roles and their eff ects in relation to the coverage of the EU referendum.