Crisis In Journalism Research Articles

Reimagining American public media: A key infrastructure for local journalism

As the state of U.S. local journalism continues to deteriorate, contributing to growing news deserts and the proliferation of mis- and disinformation, alternative models for sustaining local news are increasingly paramount. One such alternative to the failing commercial model that deserves more attention, we argue, is the American public media system. While less robust than its international counterparts, the U.S. public media system tends to be less reliant on market support, less subject to commercial pressures, and more devoted to a universal service mission. This study explores to what extent the American public media system may serve to lessen the severity of the local journalism crisis. Drawing on interviews and conversations with two dozen public media practitioners and analysts, our research examines how public media could be reimagined and repurposed to better serve local information needs. We conclude that a renewed investment in the existing system in tandem with structural reforms presents a possible pathway towards a more sustainable future for local news.

The Crisis of Journalism and the Health of Journalists

The greatest public health emergency of recent years, the COVID-19 pandemic, wars, economic and climatic crises at local level have threatened to "wipe out" many of the journalistic newsrooms present throughout the world, causing feelings of psycho-physical discomfort among journalists. Events that have a strong impact on media behaviour and the effectiveness of building clear narratives while controlling personal problems, stress and anxiety. The study will analyse, through qualitative methods, a local Italian case on how difficult it is to work for those who provide information during a natural disaster.

‘Everyone keeps telling us it's going to die’: A close examination of ‘myths’ clouding local newspaper futures in Australia

Digital adaptation is often considered the panacea to the local journalism crisis in Australia. As a result, this digital first agenda has perpetuated ‘death and doom’ narratives about some traditional strategies and practices, especially in regards to the future of printed local newspapers. This paper draws on interviews and focus groups with local news owners, journalists, editors, advertising staff and managers who work for small independently owned titles in rural and regional Australia to suggest there are three key myths which are deeply interwoven and impact perceptions of local news media realities: that print is dead, the traditional advertising model has collapsed and there are no jobs in journalism. We suggest these myths can cloud discussions around the targeted and systemic solutions needed to secure local news futures.

“It was a Real Town Newspaper”: Creating Community-Centered News Myths Through Newspaper Closure Statements

ABSTRACT While ample scholarly attention has focused on the effects of news deserts in local communities, very little academic literature has examined the goodbye discourse in the final statements of local newspapers. This article critically explores the collective identity communicated by news organizations during critical incidents such as COVID-19 that proliferated the existing journalism crisis. Guided by new institutionalism theory, this article examines closure statements from 67 local news outlets using critical discourse analysis (CDA). Findings reveal that news organizations use these statements to memorialize institutionalized journalistic myths by valorizing local news. The analysis also reveals the fundamental issues of mythicizing traditional journalism furthered through the creation and proliferation of community news myths. Although critical incidents provide an introspective platform for journalism, our findings suggest that the newspaper crisis will continue without addressing the ideological basis of the normative values and practices that have continuously been reinforced in the industry.

Building Better Local Media Systems: A Comparative Policy Discourse Analysis of Initiatives to Renew Journalism Around the World

ABSTRACT Amid the retreat of local journalism and the resulting emergence of “news deserts,” where communities lack authentic and civically accountable sources of news, it is important to not only seek new revenue streams for news organizations but also to consider how financial resources and institutional structures secure journalistic autonomy and an abiding dedication to public service. Surveying initiatives to bolster local reporting in multiple countries, this study finds that such efforts frequently rest on an unstated optimism that market failures can be corrected and that new, sustainable business models ultimately will solve the journalism crisis. In contrast to these stopgap interventions, initiatives based on public service media principles found in the world's healthiest democracies—such as providing information across all social groups and fostering civic engagement—are better positioned to rebuild local systems in which news media are structured as enduring social institutions with crucial roles to play in democratic processes.

Journalists during COVID-19: Perceptions of Negative Impacts on Portuguese Journalism

ABSTRACT The COVID-19 pandemic has promoted a disruption of journalism, which reflects in both journalistic practices and journalism contents. A questionnaire survey conducted in the beginning of the pandemic with 200 Portuguese journalists showed a pessimistic scenario of the profession, with labor issues among journalists’ top concerns. This research aims at assessing the impact of COVID-19 in Portuguese journalism through journalists’ perceptions. A qualitative content analysis was carried out, focusing on the negative impacts on journalists and journalistic procedures. On the one hand, the pandemic fueled an already visible crisis in journalism and led journalists to struggle with several difficulties, among which are their own physical and mental health. On the other hand, the characteristics of this period reinforced the role of journalism in society. Some of the lessons learnt might be useful to deal with ongoing challenges: the multiplicity of (new) voices in the networked public sphere, the amplification of information disorders, the demand to deal with systematic change, the ability to work in adversarial conditions, the ever growing need of several literacies (media literacy, digital literacy, health literacy, science literacy). “The times they are a-changing” for journalists and journalism. Again.

Investigating News Deserts on the Content Level: Geographical Diversity in Swiss News Media

With its diverse landscape of regional and local news media, Switzerland seems far from being a news desert. However, the centralization of editorial offices following the economic crisis of journalism has led to news outlets that share most of their content but appear under different names in different regions. This development has fostered fears about declining geographical diversity at the regional level in the news coverage of Swiss news media. We argue that this centralization by regional news outlets affects news content; it constitutes a specific process of news desertification, which is not aptly captured by news desert research’s focus at the outlet level. With our explorative study, we aim to analyze news deserts at the content level. We apply an automated geoparser to a manually annotated dataset of local news media articles (<em>n</em> = 5,173) published by six regional news outlets of two news organizations between 2016 and 2021 to determine the extent and development of geographical diversity in Swiss regional news media. The geoparser uses a weighted gazetteer-based approach to determine the most relevant locations of news articles within Switzerland. We find early signs of news desertification. At the output level, we observe a declining number of articles published by the analyzed outlets. At the performance level, we see a declining number of unique place names in the articles and more mentions per article. However, the diversity of place names in the coverage remains stable.

Cultural Journalism in Pakistan: Decline of Literary Content in National Urdu Newspapers

The crisis of cultural journalism is a contemporary debate in many countries. Various research explores that the media’s focus of cultural journalism is increased on the coverage of pop cultural content (service and entertainment) instead of serious traditional high art forms like theatre and literature. The present study examines the space and coverage of literary content in national Urdu newspapers of Pakistan in the last 6 years (2013 – 2018) through quantitative content analysis. Moreover, findings show a huge decline in the daily national Urdu newspaper’s attention to literature as the size of literary content decreased by 37% from 13824 cm in 2013 to 8848 cm in 2018. The study also gives insights to understand the approaches of newspapers towards the coverage of literary content which are based on their ideological & political alliances and set agendas that as a result used intermittently to shift cultural trends and decline of literary coverage.

European news media in the decade of digitalisation: Persisting democratic performance with uneven developments

This article discusses how the performance of leading European news media evolved between 2010 and 2020 regarding normative expectations of liberal democracies, focusing on the role of digital journalism. The rise of platforms, news media crisis and consolidation of digital journalism in the 2010 decade challenge established discourses on the normative roles of news media. It is unclear to what extent media performance may have changed, especially outside the United States. This article draws on 2010 and 2020 data from the Media for Democracy Monitor (MDM) to compare the performance of news media in Austria, Finland, Germany, the Netherlands, Portugal, Sweden, Switzerland and United Kingdom. It argues that leading news media in these countries have had an overall similar contribution to democratic roles as before the 2010 decade. However, there are uneven developments, as digital journalism has strengthened the watchdog dimension while failing to attract younger audiences for the news industry. Additionally, countries with stronger public media ownership performed fairly better, indicating that technology alone is not the main factor to fulfil democratic expectations.

Newsroom–Classroom Hybrids at Universities: Student Labor and the Journalism Crisis, Gunhild Ring Olsen (2022)

Review of: Newsroom–Classroom Hybrids at Universities: Student Labor and the Journalism Crisis, Gunhild Ring Olsen (2022) New York: Routledge, 197 pp., ISBN 978-0-36736-316-1, h/bk, AUD 218.40 ISBN 978-0-36751-756-4, p/bk, AUD 65.59 ISBN 978-0-42934-526-5, e-book, AUD 59.19

Global Digital Lords and Privatisation of Media Policy: The Australian Media Bargaining Code

After two decades of regulatory vacuum, powerful digital platforms such as Google and Meta/Facebook, also known as the “Digital Lords” (Brevini 2020), have faced growing criticism worldwide. They are accused of possessing excessive economic, political, and ideological influence while evading public accountability. Although there have been calls to address their monopolistic market dominance, such as antitrust measures to break their stranglehold on data, the most tangible interventions have focused on policy tools to make the Digital Lords contribute to journalism. With governments hesitant to allocate public funds for public interest journalism, policymakers in various countries are exploring avenues to make these wealthy and tax-avoiding Digital Lords pay for the news they distribute. The “Journalism Competition and Preservation Act” is presently being deliberated in Congress in the United States, with the objective of aiding small and mid-sized news organizations in their negotiations with digital platforms for fair compensation for the utilization of their content. The European Union has implemented a copyright reform granting press publishers the right to be remunerated by Digital Lords for the use of newspapers and magazines. One widely discussed policy tool in this regard is the Australian “News Media Bargaining Code.” This article examines the successes and failures of the code, adopted a year and a half ago, in addressing Australia's journalism crisis and its pressing issues of media diversity and news scarcity. Ultimately, it argues that the Australian Media Bargaining Code exemplifies the progressive privatization of media policy.

Constructiveness of constructive journalism in a conflict-generating social-communication environment

The article considers the potential communication possibilities of such a new media phenomenon as constructive journalism / solution journalism in relation to its impact on the level of conflict-genicity of the social-communication space. the prospects of constructive journalism / solution journalism in overcoming the competition of classical journalism with social media and overcoming the crisis of traditional journalism are also analyzed. Reflections on the potential of traditional journalism in the aspect of reducing the level of conflict-genicity of the social and communication environment in the article unfold against the background of ideas about the receptive requests of the modern media audience for quality, verified, exclusive and useful information and appear to be justified and relevant in the context of the analysis of the communication potential of constructive journalism / solution journalism as a new media phenomenon. Constructive journalism / solution journalism is a new trend in the field of journalism, which is characterized by several fundamental features that give grounds for asserting that it is able to provide a new impetus to overcome competition with non-professional journalism and help professional media activity to get out of the crisis in which it found itself and satisfy the above-described audience requests. 1. Constructive journalism is a “revision” of journalistic intentions and opportunities for communicating with the media audience and restoring social dialogue. 2. Constructive journalism is a new approach to journalism. 3. Constructive journalism is a new journalistic proposal regarding the communicator in the process of mass communication. 4. Constructive journalism is an effective competition of professional mass media activity with the information activity of social media. Constructive journalism / solution journalism can be implemented in the form of separate materials in traditional mass media, separate sections in traditional mass media with the appropriate name, and also as separate media projects. Constructive journalism / solution journalism is able to reduce the conflict-genicity of the social communication environment because it has the potential and prospects to make the position of the media audience more adequate, reducing the level of its emotional instability and expanding the field of perceived and adequately seen phenomena, processes, issues of the current socio-cultural life. In the variant of constructive journalism, professional mass media activity can show, explain, explain the position of the “other”, so that it becomes less distant, less unacceptable, more tolerated where there is a prospect of avoiding collision and confrontation. Reducing the level of conflict-genicity of the social-communication space should become a special communication intention, which fits constructive journalism in particular.

Out of Print: What the Pandemic-Era Newspaper Crisis in Australia Teaches Us about the Role of Rural and Regional Newspapers in Creating Sustainable Communities

Print newspapers tend to form part of the conversation on sustainable development goals in terms of the ability to communicate goals to the public, but to what degree are print newspapers part of the solution to sustainable rural and regional communities in particular? The COVID-19 pandemic coincided with a global crisis in print journalism. This article takes Australia as an extreme case study of the collapse of print news, tracing both the immediate causes as well as the scale of the decline, and the impacts in terms of community conversation, building social capital, and improving governance, particularly in sub-populations such as the aged, and in digitally disadvantaged regional and remote communities. This paper uses a range of secondary and primary data sources to build a paradoxical picture of a revival of rural and regional journalism, a revival that is focused on survival rather than revisiting the activist origins of early independent rural and regional media in the country. The new papers include part of the traditional mission of print news—building social capital—but are less engaged in creating political and financial transparency. It is concluded that the new wave of rural and regional titles may be simply at an early stage of evolution, but with the digital divide in Australia reducing, they may have little time to evolve.

Media, Democracy and Pluralism: Exploring a Radical Response to the Crisis of Journalism

ABSTRACT Professional journalism’s relationship with democracy has been tested in recent years. A so-called crisis of journalism has shaken several of the bedrocks upon which both journalism and liberal democracy are based. One response has been to try and rediscover and strengthen these foundations, and in the process for journalism to reaffirm its central place within democratic societies. In this paper, I theorise what might happen if we were to understand journalism in relation to a different form of democracy, a radical democracy. How might our understandings (public and academic) of journalism change, and how might journalism itself transform if it were to comprehend its vital public role in relation to a set of values, practices and systems radically different to those of dominant models of rational consensus? The article presents three main arguments. (1) The current crisis of journalism is predominantly built upon journalistic values associated with liberal and deliberative democracy. (2) This particular construction of crisis ignores the exclusions and inequalities of its rationalist foundations. (3) A radical democratic perspective provides a model through which to understand the crisis of journalism in a way that may address such exclusions.

A cardinal approach towards sports news in national newspaper through journalism and mass media

A paradox exists at the heart of sports journalism. On one hand, it has over the years often been viewed as the poor relation within journalism, lacking the integrity that journalists often like to associate with their self-image. Sports journalism has been characterised as a form of “soft” journalistic practice, without the rigour and credibility of other forms of “hard” journalism. It was an area of journalism that was viewed as an uncritical booster and promoter of sport and its culture rather than a sector that called the powerful in sport to account. It was a journalism that was more often going to ask the easy and banal question, rather than the penetrating and pertinent one. The digital turn of the has also dramatically reshaped the journalistic landscape, with sports journalism often being at the leading edge of this transition as journalism moved online and many new (often fan-based) sources of information become available around sports culture. The business crisis in print journalism has arrived at the sports journalists door somewhat later than for other sectors, but arrive it has. As the funding of journalism moves centre stage as a driver in shaping the new trajectories of journalism, those working in sports also have had to adapt and re-invent themselves and it is this process that is the focus of this special issue of Digital Journalism.

Leading Polish missionary journals during the Covid-19 pandemic, their functioning, message and realization of press functions

This research has confirmed the need for missionary periodicals on the Polish press market, which have specific tasks and functions to perform. Declining circulation should lead to some consolidation of press titles and to cooperation and raising the standard of individual titles. The period of the pandemic proved that the leading Polish missionary periodicals react quickly to the crisis situation, provide reliable and wide-ranging information about it, and in some titles this translates into an invitation to readers to commit themselves spiritually and materially to specific needs. From the course of the analyses carried out, we can verify the hypotheses or confirm the theses posed before the research began.
 Thesis 1. During the Covid-19 pandemic, the leading missionary journals carried out the press functions for which they were established - confirmed, although mainly in terms of information-publicity, fundraising and organising functions.
 Thesis 2. During the Covid-19 pandemic, the leading missionary magazines reported on the pandemic situation in mission areas and publicised the social campaigns that were being conducted - confirmed, although some titles more than others.
 Hypothesis 1. There is a deepening crisis of missionary journalism, in favour of missionary media communicating via the internet. It seems necessary to adapt different content to the two distinct target groups (audiences) - verified positively.
 Hypothesis 2. There is a need for change and centralisation on the market of missionary journalism - verified positively.

Contested Journalistic Professionalism in China: Journalists’ Discourses in a Time of Crisis

ABSTRACT Legacy media worldwide face challenges from both digital platforms and new media rivalries. China offers alternative views and modes of journalistic practices in response to the worldwide “professionalism” crisis. The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic has provided legacy media with an opportunity to reassert journalistic professionalism at a critical moment. Taking the market-oriented media outlet Caixin as a case, this study explores how Chinese journalists articulate their professional roles, values and ideals in the coverage of COVID-19. Through discourse analysis, we find that Caixin has defended its authority and legitimacy as quality journalism by incorporating “self-reflexivity” and “transparency” in their professional practices in the digital age. In response to the global journalism crisis, while Chinese state media have adopted the Marxist view, positivity and “conditioned autonomy” to counter the Western “professionalism”, market-oriented media represented by Caixin have turned inward to “reflexivity” and “transparency” as a compromising strategy in their professional conventions.

Racism and journalism: The dangers of returning to the ‘safe-space’ of objectivity

Although a contested term in journalism research, the need for a critique of objectivity is increased by responses to the current “crisis of journalism,” which have united around the rediscovery of sacred journalistic ideals such as truth, facts, and autonomy. In particular, objectivity must be critiqued for its role in the persistence of racism in liberal democratic journalism, a persistence that runs across different funding models and organizational structures. Objectivity, as a contested and flexible political concept, has proven incapable of addressing systemic racism. I argue that objectivity needs to be understood as an inherently political concept, which is as much proscriptive as descriptive in the way it shapes the field of journalism and the profession’s relationship to political and social life. Rather than return to the safe ground of autonomy, truth and facts, professional, liberal journalism must recognize its foundations within racially unequal political and social structures.

APPLIED RESEARCH AS A METHODOLOGICAL INNOVATION IN JOURNALISM: theoretical, empirical and experimental dimensions

This paper discusses applied research as a perspective of methodological innovation in journalism by reporting the process of crafting a Doctor's Degree research about mobile journalism. For this, we relate innovation and crisis in journalism and address aspects related to applied research in the field. We also highlight the methodological processes developed in the thesis, reflecting on the articulation of what we call the theoretical, empirical and experimental dimensions of applied research. We approach the theoretical-methodological experimentation in this type of investigation, the role of the academy for conducting applied research and the limitations and potential of this research perspective for journalism.

‘The Colorado Sun’ Case: A Bet for Digital, Quality, Community and Ethical Journalism

We are in an era marked by disinformation, fake news and the crisis of journalism that entails an intense crisis of trust. Among the options to escape from this situation, several communication theorists and some companies believe that blockchain technology offers new opportunities for high-quality journalism. Blockchain has its origin in electronic currencies, but it is increasingly being used in digital communication and journalism. This article is dedicated to the case of The Colorado Sun. This study focuses its attention on the following aspects: the mission and objectives of the newspaper at the foot of the Rocky Mountains, its origins and history, the structure and governance system of the media, the function of the cryptocurrency itself and the ethical principles and professional standards that have been awarded. To study the case of The Colorado Sun, in addition to looking at the documents on its website and existing bibliography, we conducted interviews with members of the founding team and different organizations that gave it their support.