On the Frontlines of Tragedy: Journalistic Role Conceptions and Ethical Values Following the UCC Shooting

While “news deserts” are rhetorically powerful, we argue the concept is deeply problematic due to its normative presumptions and its descriptive fuzziness. The concern over the loss of local journalism in the U.S. has become a moral panic. While US local journalism is in market failure, at least when conceptualized as a professional, commercial newspaper enterprise, current scholarship and public discourse about “news deserts” and the loss of local news has three major problems, all of which reinforce a false nostalgia for the role of local newspapers in communities and focus on saving local newspapers as they are rather than reimagining what local news could be. If scholars wish to fetishize the existence of a local news outlet in a community as essential to democratic life and civic connection, it might be helpful to think more critically about whether a local news outlet actually has content specific to that community. Similarly, declines are often unobservable in places that have already been limited in their local news provision because the starting point was already deeply problematic. The “news desert” deficit framing obscures historical news deserts, or areas that have long lacked access to professional, geographically specific news about their communities. We propose an approach that focuses on place-based specificity and argue that scholars may need to acknowledge that the availability of local news and information may play less of a role in overall political knowledge, social identity, and cultural cohesion in a hybridized, deeply polarized democracy.

This article analyzes how journalists’ role conceptions compare to what the population expects fromthem. We model this interrelation as part of the reflexive relationship between journalism and audiences which is characterized by mutual (self-)expectations that can be more or less congruent. Through a representative CATI-survey (n = 1,000) we explore the tasks German citizens expect journalists to fulfill and compare them with existing representative data on German journalists’ own role conceptions as collected in the “Worlds of Journalism” study. For that purpose, we adapted the item battery on journalistic role conceptions for the audience's perspective and complemented it with potential new journalistic tasks such as moderating public discourse online. Results show that what journalists want to do most is also what the population thinks they should do: these are primarily the traditional journalistic tasks of objective reporting as well as analysis and explanation, but also the promotion of tolerance and cultural diversity. Looking more closely at the population's opinions reveals that respondents, in general, also want journalists to provide source transparency. However, individual citizens’ preferences are diverse, with age, gender, and news usage practices correlating with different expectations of journalism.

The relation between journalistic role conceptions and news content is central for the understanding of differences in journalistic cultures. Previous research has shown that the professional roles of individual journalists can influence their behaviour and that occupational socialization leads to similar role conceptions within countries. This article therefore studies the relation between cross-national differences in role conceptions and news content. A survey among political journalists in Denmark, Germany, the United Kingdom, and Spain ( N = 425), combined with a content analysis of political coverage in these countries ( N = 1,035 newspaper articles) shows that role conceptions vary more across countries than within countries. Spanish political journalists see their role as more sacerdotal and partisan than their colleagues in northern Europe, while British journalists are most entertainment oriented. These differences in role conceptions are reflected in the reporting style of political news.

This study explores how South Korean journalists’ conceptions of their professional roles are associated with problematic reporting practices and unethical behaviors. Regarding the problematic reporting practices, the study examined eleven ethically controversial practices, such as “getting employed to gain inside information,” “paying people for confidential information,” and “claiming to be someone else.” In response to unethical behaviors, conflicts of interest (political and commercial), plagiarism, and freebies were also investigated. Based on an online survey of 751 Korean journalists, the results of this study show three distinct conceptions of their roles: Populist-Mobilizer , Adversarial , and Interpretive-Disseminator . The findings indicate that the Populist-Mobilizer role conception was significantly and negatively associated with their tolerance for two types of ethically controversial practices, such as “getting employed to gain inside information” and “using hidden cameras.” The Interpretive-Disseminator role was significantly and negatively associated with “paying for confidential information.” This study also found a negative correlation between journalistic role conceptions and unethical behaviors. Specifically, Populist-Mobilizer was negatively related to political and commercial conflicts of interest, whereas Adversarial had a negative relationship with commercial conflicts of interest and plagiarism.

If there are authoritarian, transitional, and democratic political and media systems, are there associated authoritarian, transitional, and democratic role profiles for journalists? The relation between countries’ degree of democracy and the importance of journalistic role conceptions among journalists in a country is analyzed based on the World Journalism Study (Wave 2). I find that journalists in democratic political systems generally subscribe to fewer role conceptions than journalists in authoritarian political systems; Journalism-for-Democracy is more defined by what it is not (i.e., journalists reject the typical role conceptions of Journalism-for-Authoritarianism and Journalism-in-Transition) than by what it is. Journalism in transitional political systems (i.e., hybrid regimes and deficient democracies) is characterized by a specific set of role conceptions that are linked to political activism, which journalists in full democracies tend to reject. The study reassesses which role conceptions might be typical for which kind of political systems leading to revised hypotheses regarding the link between democracy and journalistic role conceptions.

In this paper, we report on the challenges that Chinese local news outlets face in the absence of independent newspapers and radio stations, the underfunding and under-training of journalists, and the effective use of digital-only local news outlets for state propaganda. To this end, we carried out in-depth interviews with 20 staff members, including department heads, editors, and journalists from Qinghai News, the local news outlet in the Chinese province of Qinghai, to examine the daily routine of a local news organization dedicated to state media propaganda. Our results also show that journalists are cognizant of the overzealous grip of the central government on the press, but that low pay, dwindling professional opportunities, limited financial support for career progression, and management inaction are the main reasons for the high attrition rate in the Chinese local news industry. The paper concludes with an overview of the local news industry in China and the relative differences to the sector in Western industrialized countries.

There are more local news outlets operating around the world at any given moment than larger-scale metropolitan newsrooms, and yet it is the latter that have dominated journalism scholarship. As a specific area of inquiry, local journalism—often branded “community journalism” or “hyperlocal journalism”—is a relatively new but rapidly growing field of research in this period of digital disruption. Scholars argue that studying news at the local level can offer rich insights into the role and place of journalism more broadly and reveal much about why people engage with news. Local journalism has been highlighted for its distinct role in reinforcing notions of and building community and the importance of social and public connection among audiences. More recently, attention has shifted to business models sustaining local news given the turbulence facing traditional media and the rapid closure of long-serving local newspapers, especially in the United Kingdom. Scholars have also emphasized the importance of re-conceptualizing local news in a globalized and digital world, highlighting the continued relevance and importance of place to journalists and audiences. Sociology and political science have been the dominant lenses used to examine this sector; however, increasingly scholars are turning to cultural studies to understand the relationship between local news and audiences. Most recent research also indicates there is renewed optimism within the sector, especially among news providers who remain embedded and committed entirely to the local areas they serve.

On the surface, it may look like there are no news deserts in the Czech Republic, but that does not mean that all audiences are able to get relevant local news. Apart from independent local news outlets, which are diminishing, Czech districts are served by information provided either by a delocalised publishing chain or a municipality press that promotes the local government. I will focus on the emergence of news deserts from the perspective of independent local newspapers, especially on the structural changes that lead to the declining number of media outlets that offer local news in Czechia. Moreover, I take the bottom-up approach to reflect on the local journalists’ point of view. The mixed-method research, which was conducted in 2019 and 2020, consisted of a survey of local newspaper owners and in-depth interviews with local journalists. I identified several structural changes to both the local newspapers and to the general publishing industry that have led to growing organisational and economic problems for the local newspapers, and often to their demise. Local news is still carried by newspapers, which depend on the traditional business model and are slow with their digital transition. Their survival is based on (non)cooperation with either ancillary organisations (printing office, distribution firm, and sales outlet) or other local newspapers. Newspapers are cornered by the demands of external actors; their economic stability depends on the self-sufficiency of their production.

Discussions about Iranian journalism have disproportionately focused upon the restrictive political context of the country. Accordingly, journalism culture and the way journalists construct their roles and identities in the face of constraints in Iran have received scant attention. This study redresses this gap by focusing on Iranian journalists’ role conceptions and perceptions of role enactment. Based on interviews with 26 journalists working in media outlets in Iran, this study found that the role conceptions of Iranian journalists correspond to adversarial advocate, detective watchdog, change agent, educator and informer roles. Although the journalists perceive a large gap between their role ideals and their role performance, they believe they have occasionally been successful in acting out their roles. Journalists’ role conceptions and perceived role enactment serve as journalistic illusio, which not only motivate journalists to continue operating under pressure but also allow the journalistic field to exist and function over time in the restrictive media environment of Iran. These results are discussed in relation to whether and how journalism outside a democratic context is possible.

We investigate how access to local government information affects turnout in municipal elections. We hypothesize that the availability of news focused on local public affairs in an individual’s municipality affects her political participation.We anticipate that turnout will be depressed by restricted access to local government news. We test this expectation using survey data from the Los Angeles (California) Designated Market Area (DMA) collected by the Public Policy Institute of California, and the availability of weekly and daily newspapers in municipalities surrounding Los Angeles. We find that absent local news, voters are less likely to turnout. We examine reasons for this and discuss future research to investigate the influence of local news on voting.

In this paper we explore why and how women and men farmers carry out care farming, paying attention to farming being gendered. We engage in geographical research on feminist care ethics to understand care farming by considering the people-place relationships cultivated. We draw on post-structural feminist understandings of gendered farm subjectivities, thereby exploring the emergence of new gender subjectivities. The paper fills research gaps on farmers providing care, and on the gendered nature of care farming. To the feminist geographic theorisations on feminist care ethics, we contribute a post-structural feminist approach. Empirically, the study builds on farm visits and 20 semi-structured interviews with women and men engaged in care farming on 12 farms in rural Sweden. We conclude that care farmers cultivate feminist care ethics as an ontology of connections, by working from the heart. This has meant care farmers are developing people-place and people-people connections. Feminist care ethics is, on the one hand a way of expressing criticism of current societal developments such as productivist agriculture and efficiency orientated welfare provisioning and, on the other, a way of making a difference. Feminist care ethics also includes the development of new gender subjectivities for both women and men farmers. We suggest that care farming implies farming otherwise, which shifts the farms to places of care, instead of food production. Altogether, we argue that care farmers nurturing feminist care ethics challenge the very conceptualisation of agriculture – from cultivating animals and plants to cultivating connections.

We present analyses from a real-time information monitoring system of online local news in the U.S. We study relationships among online local news coverage of COVID, cases and deaths in an area, and properties of local news outlets and their audiences. Our analysis relies on a unique dataset of the online content of over 300 local news outlets, encompassing over 750,000 articles over a period of 10 months spanning April 2020 to February 2021. We find that the rate of COVID coverage over time by local news outlets was primarily associated with death rates at the national level, but that this effect dissipated over the course of the pandemic as news about COVID was steadily displaced by sociopolitical events, like the 2020 U.S. elections. We also find that both the volume and content of COVID coverage differed depending on local politics, and outlet audience size, as well as evidence that more vulnerable populations received less pandemic-related news.

We present analyses from a real-time information monitoring system of online local news in the U.S. We study relationships among online local news coverage of COVID, cases and deaths in an area, and properties of local news outlets and their audiences. Our analysis relies on a unique dataset of the online content of over 300 local news outlets, encompassing over 750,000 articles over a period of 10 months spanning April 2020 to February 2021. We find that the rate of COVID coverage over time by local news outlets was primarily associated with death rates at the national level, but that this effect dissipated over the course of the pandemic as news about COVID was steadily displaced by sociopolitical events, like the 2020 U.S. elections. We also find that both the volume and content of COVID coverage differed depending on local politics, and outlet audience size, as well as evidence that more vulnerable populations received less pandemic-related news.

This study identifies citizen journalists' role conceptions regarding their news contributing activities and their perceptions of professional journalists' roles. Specifically, the ethical criterion of media credibility was assessed to identify predictors on their perceptions of roles. Analyses reveal citizen journalists perceive their roles to be generally similar to professional journalists and even rated certain roles more prominently for themselves. Further, their perceptions of media credibility were found to function as a core belief in how they assessed their roles and also those of professional journalists, which has implications for a system of open ethics.

This study explores data journalism within local and regional news organisations in Germany. Findings were drawn from nine semi-structured in-depth interviews with journalists working with local and regional dailies. Weischenberg’s model of contextual layers of journalism provides theoretical underpinnings to capture normative, structural, and functional insights as well as data journalists’ role conceptions. Results show that viable data is scarce at a local level and data journalists actively seek to maintain good relationships with local authorities to be granted access to data. The practice of data journalism at the local level depends on a few data journalism advocates who institutionalise the practice in their local newsrooms and take training on their own initiative. Local data journalists face similar constraints to their colleagues working for national organisations. Data-driven newswork is carried out in addition to regular duties, and collaboration with specialist correspondents who work on-site is widely reported. We find that the combination of traditional shoe-leather epistemologies of on-site reporting with data-driven practices can add to the independence and neutrality of local journalism.