Crisis In Journalism Research Articles

Research Integrity: the Experience of a Doubting Thomas

The sensational "reactome array" paper published in Science in 2009 was investigated in Spain by the Ethics Committee of Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientificas (CSIC) after Science issued an editorial expression of concern. The paper was retracted in 2010 because of "skepticism" due to "errors" in chemistry. The "errors" were so profound that many readers expressed doubt that they were really errors, but part of an elaborate hoax. I conducted a forensic analysis of mass spectrometry data in the paper's Supporting Online Material (SOM) and was able to prove that thousands of data values were in fact fabricated. The SOM contains signatures of improper extensive spreadsheet manipulations of incorrect atomic and molecular mass values as well as impossibly repetitive deviations of found molecular mass values from their expected values. No evidence of real mass spectrometry data was detected. Both CSIC and Science have been content to retract the paper without acknowledging the fabrications or assigning responsibility for them. Neither CSIC nor Science has expressed interest in having an independent investigation determining how the paper came to be written, reviewed and published. Their weak response to this episode is a daunting signal that there is an impending crisis in research integrity and science journalism.

Losing my profession: Age, experience and expertise in the changing newsrooms

The article examines how the crisis in journalism was experienced in the Finnish newsrooms in the spring of 2010. Based on interviews conducted in six newsrooms, this article highlights changes in journalistic practices, and the ways in which these changes have affected professional identity and journalistic expertise, in particular, in terms of age. The change does not affect everyone in a similar way. Its implications are experienced differently according to the position and work history of individual journalists. The article points out two particular factors that had a specific impact on shaping the boundaries of the journalistic profession, and notions of journalistic identity, skills and values. These are the concurrent processes of the move towards convergent newsrooms and the implementation of pension packages to downsize the newsrooms. With the implementation of pension packages as a solution to downsize newsrooms, age became the defining factor for professional identity, capacities and skills in the Finnish newsrooms. This particular time of change was also characterized by the implementation of new technology in the newsrooms. Thus, the measures taken in newsrooms emphasized speed, technological skills and youth as characteristics that were needed to compete in the changing and increasingly convergent media markets. It is argued that journalistic identity is tightly bound to its practice. Changes in practice are reflected in professional identity and the qualities that are valued within the profession. During this time of transition, the older journalists, particularly, struggled to hold on to their professional values and notions of expertise when, in practice, they had difficulties in bringing their expertise into use in the new technology-centered newsroom structure. Research highlights the multiplicity and complexity of change, where taken-for-granted positions are challenged and put into circulation. It provides insight into changes in the professional imagination and shared journalistic values.

Social Democracy or Corporate Libertarianism? Conflicting Media Policy Narratives in the Wake of Market Failure

Assuming that crucial public services should not be left entirely to market-driven forces, American policymakers attempted to establish safeguards for news media. An examination of conflicting narratives within postwar policy debates suggests that the US evaded this path largely because of a concerted backlash—often in the form of red-baiting—encouraged by threatened newspaper and broadcast industries. Many lessons, parallels, and forgotten antecedents for current American media policy can be drawn from the postwar 1940s. Thus, it is instructive to explore how these earlier debates were framed, particularly in response to what might be referred to as “market failure.” Given the worsening journalism crisis and other persistent media policy challenges, this analysis of market failure holds much contemporary relevance.

Reluctant Stewards: Journalism in a Democratic Society

Journalists are reluctant stewards for democracy because they believe that democracy makes citizens their own stewards. They resist donning the mantle of moral guides on behalf of those who are authorized to guide themselves. Yet sometimes journalists do exercise responsibility for the public good in ways that are not subsumed under their professional duty to be nonpartisan, accurate, and fair-minded. Examining some of these exceptions, this essay argues that journalistic stewardship should be loosely defined, decentralized, multiform, and open to invention. In fact, today's economic crisis in journalism (and the identity crisis it stimulated) has launched a new set of initiatives – from fact-checking to organized crowd-sourcing – that have each sought to address a specific problem of democracy, truthseeking, or the public good. Pluralism, pragmatism, and decentralized invention may do better at stewarding democracy than a coherent philosophy of moral guardianship ever could.

Media Fragmentation, Party System, and Democracy

This paper discusses the possible consequences of mass media fragmentation over the structure and the functioning of democracy. Media fragmentation and audience segmentation are not new but they greatly increased in the very last years because of the long ongoing tendency towards commercialization and mostly because of the development of new media and the internet in particular. This has determined what is usually defined “the crisis of traditional journalism” that has become the very frequent topic of most of the seminar on journalism today. The last part of the paper looks at the possible consequences of these changes over the structure of democracy beyond the well rooted techno-optimism: increasing social and political polarization, new forms of political socialization, more complex process of social and political negotiation, new forms of public scrutiny.

Convergence Content in International On-Line News: Thematic and mythical recurrence in The New York Times and BBC On-Line News

This paper analyzes the presence and absence of thematic and mythical recurrence in online news, considering that online news production is under the influence of transmedia storytelling and, for this reason, could be affected by the presence of myth, as a cultural production that News are, and as receiving the influence of themes and myths in this new sphere. The research concludes that the maintenance of the generic regularities in the quality press in the sample analyzed (The New York Times and BBC On-Line News) reinforces the quality press features, even though the nowadays’ journalism crisis and opposite to the introduction of spectacular and banal characteristics in TV news.

First Amendment, Fourth Estate & Hot News: Misappropriation is Not a Solution to the Journalism Crisis

Journalism is a public good. The Framers understood the importance of a free press in a self-governing society and embedded a structural right for freedom of the press in the First Amendment. There is a journalism crisis. Symptoms of the crisis include layoffs of journalists, diminishing content in newspapers and shuttering of newspapers. The rise of online technologies has exacerbated the crisis, mainly by siphoning advertising revenue away from traditional news organizations to free classified advertisement websites such as Craigslist, search engines and myriad other non-journalistic online endeavors. The internet, however, is not the main cause of the journalism crisis. Concentration of media ownership and the influence of advertising revenue on traditional news content are the primary causes of the journalism crisis. Recently, there has been renewed interest in the hot news misappropriation doctrine as a potential solution to the journalism crisis. Not only will this doctrine fail to help resolve the journalism crisis, it will perpetuate a twentieth-century news business model – a model of concentrated ownership dependent on direct advertising revenue. In addition to explaining that hot news perpetuates the journalism crisis, this Article shows that there are constitutional and practical obstacles to the legal viability of the hot news doctrine. The constitutional obstacle is the First Amendment guarantee of free speech. The practical obstacle is the difficulty in proving the utilitarian factor required to establish a hot news claim. The Article concludes by describing alternative solutions to the journalism crisis, including why taxation of all online advertising and using some portion to fund non-profit members of the institutional press is appealing from both normative and pragmatic perspectives.

From aesthetes to reporters: The paradigm shift in arts journalism in Finland

The crisis of cultural journalism has recently been a topical issue in many countries. In Finland, too, it has been claimed that arts pages, previously dominated by aesthetically oriented critics, have been shrinking and become more news oriented and entertaining. In this article, we explore the change of structures, values and ideals of arts reporting as friction between two opposing paradigms, the aesthetic and the journalistic, and analyse how the changes are reflected in the contents of the cultural pages and in the self-image of arts journalists. The research data of this case study consist of the arts pages of the biggest national newspaper, Helsingin Sanomat, and of various internal planning documents related to its management. In addition to a longitudinal content analysis, we also employed theme interviews with and observation of cultural journalists. The results show a change of paradigm in arts journalism, with the consequence that the previously autonomous department has become an inseparable part of the news organization, increasingly adapted to meet the challenges of news journalism.

Thinking about journalists’ thinking (Two)1

The first purpose of the article is to briefly highlight the global and South African relationship between society and journalism training/education. The second purpose is to take cognizance of how the changed and new media landscape has caused a so-called ‘crisis of journalism’ (meaning journalism’s loss of legitimacy and authenticity) and how this may affect journalism training. Part of this ‘crisis’, if not the essence thereof, is the almost customary and long-standing criticism against the very nature of journalism and the journalistic profession. This criticism is briefly summarized before a case is made for focusing on the intellectual development of student journalists through meta-theoretical approaches to and in journalism training and education. Such a meta-theoretical approach could place the emphasis on what makes up four of the most prominent key constructs in mass communication, namely ‘representation’, ‘dialogue’, ‘rhetoric’ and ‘meaning’. These constructs, how they relate to journalism and how they can lead to a better understanding of journalism as a human (mass) ommunication phenomenon, to a better understanding of the fundamental criticism against journalism and eventually how to deal with this criticism are briefly introduced. To illustrate the relationships between society, new media landscape, journalism and journalism training, brief case studies of the situation in South Africa are given. In terms of methodology, it should be emphasized that the article is not an empirical analysis of journalism training, but rather, a contemplative piece. As such it constitutes an opinion that in itself is debatable and hopefully will lead to further debate. The article is a continuation of the very old, and in the literature well known, if not fierce debate between skills versus theoretical (academic) training.

Book Reviews: Book Review Policy

Journalism in Crisis: Corporate Media and Financialization. Nuria Almiron, trans, by WUUam McGrath. New York: Hampton Press, Inc., 2010. 212 pp. $45 hbk $23.95 pbk This is most important available analysis of crisis of journalism, exhibiting critical skills of which alarmingly few North American analysts are capable. Nuria Almiron is lecturer and researcher in communication at Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona. Her political economy approach goes well beyond platitudes of death-by-Internet sermonizing even beyond themes of concentration and overreach so well-rehearsed by Robert McChesney. McChesney and Nichols (2010) regret passing of a Golden Age that preceded advertising. For Almiron, journahsm is in perpetual crisis, hapless child of bourgeois parents - freedom of press as formulated in Declaration of Rights of State of Virginia (1776) and in French Revolution's Declaration of Rights of Man (1789), eternally abused by instrumentalization of dominant classes. Journalism remains caught in contradiction between its emancipating potential and conditions imposed on it by financial globalization. No longer even plaything of erratic conglomerates and moguls, it has entered a post-corporate era characterized by supremacy of capital (finance) over industrial sphere (production) inherent to evolution of modern capitaUsm. The term financialization (first employed by Andre Orlean in 1999) is identified by Gerald Epstein (2005) as one of three main trends in global economics of past thirty years, others being neoUberaUsm and globalization, and defined as the increasing role of financial motives, financial markets, financial actors, and financial institutions in operation of domestic and international economies. It is product of ending of fixed international Exchange rates, disorganization of raw-materials markets, privileged position of transnational corporations, budget deficits, deregulation, Uberalization, and monetary disintermediation. The result is conversion of financial sector into one of today's principal sources of profit, but also of global instability - manifest in overinvestment and financial engineering as egregiously illustrated by tax havens that hold a third of wealth of high net-worth individuals, and by other forms of money hiding, laundering and extreme speculation. These lead to overcapacity, concentration, and implosion. These basic capitalist cycles are far more enduring and predictable than information, digital, ICT, and other revolutions that bedazzle those who should know so much better. Media and finance are closely interlinked, illustrated by development in mid-nineteenth-century of Reuters, not long after London Stock Exchange, providing financial, business, and economic information flows that have become bedrock of very structure of modern capitalism. The technology of information flows is dependent on raising of capital in financial markets, which are also insatiable consumers of communication technologies and financial news. Banks exert a fundamental influence on information corporations: they determine which and how many media wUl survive, their degree of concentration, autonomy, and diversity. These relationships bind concentration, internationalization, industrialization, and financialization, this latter passing through three main stages of absolute family control, relative farmly control, and managerial control. …

A recipe for journalism's fight back for public interest


 
 Reviewed book by: Martin Hirst
 
 
 
 Publication date: May, 2011
 
 At the front of News 2.0, University of Queensland journalism professor Michael Bromley says this has ‘much needed grounded insight and foresight’. And as some academics’ writing about journalism seems to fit into a matrix of media theory few general readers could fully understand, a book dealing with what’s really going on in journalism is a great idea.
 Martin Hirst of AUT University takes care to separate out what he calls a crisis in journalism from a commercial crisis in the news industry, while also making clear the ways in which the two are linked. He presents a concise and convincing account of how commercial pressure on the modern news media have made it hard, and in some cases impossible, to sustain the quality, depth and range of journalism the public have enjoyed in the past.

When a Crisis in Journalism Meets an Economy in Crisis

Why is economics a field where mainstream journalism generally follows and seldom leads? Why is there so little independent, original journalistic inquiry, and as a result so few earth-shaking scoops or must-read revelations? Economics confounds many journalists assigned to cover the economy. A journalism bubble accompanied the market bubble of the first part of the decade, one that failed to examine prevailing wisdom, discounted dissent, and produced little independent analysis. What have we learned since?

Can Government Support the Press? Historicizing and Internationalizing a Policy Approach to the Journalism Crisis

Although consensus has been reached that journalism is in crisis, few agree on the nature of its decline or the means of resolving it. After providing an overview of this ongoing debate, the author contextualizes the journalism crisis within several historical, political, intellectual, and structural processes that help highlight what is at stake and what can be done to support the journalism required for a democratic society in the United States. He concludes with an emphasis on normative considerations regarding the future of journalism and provides several policy proposals that aim to provide the resources necessary for a robust and independent press. These policies, he suggests, will help facilitate the transition from a failing commercial media system to a public-service model of the press.

1. CBQ REVIEW ESSAY: CRISIS IN JOURNALISM (PART I)

1. CBQ REVIEW ESSAY: CRISIS IN JOURNALISM (PART I)

What is happening to news: the information explosion and the crisis in journalism

Across America, newspapers that have defined their cities for over a century are rapidly failing, their circulations plummeting even as opinion-soaked Web outlets like the Huffington Post thrive. Meanwhile, nightly news programs shock viewers with stories of horrific crime and celebrity scandal, while the smug sarcasm and shouting of pundits like Glenn Beck and Keith Olbermann dominate cable television. Is it any wonder that young people are turning away from the news entirely, trusting comedians like Jon Stewart as their primary source of information on current events? In the face of all the problems plaguing serious news, What Is Happening to News explores the crucial question of how journalism lost its way - and what is responsible for the ragged retreat from its great traditions. Veteran editor and newspaperman Jack Fuller locates the surprising sources of change where no one has thought to look before: in the collision between a revolutionary new information age and a human brain that is still wired for the threats faced by our prehistoric ancestors. Drawing on the recent discoveries of neuroscience, Fuller explains why the information overload of contemporary life makes us dramatically more receptive to sensational news, while rendering the staid, objective voice of standard journalism ineffective. Throw in a growing distrust of experts and authority, ably capitalized on by blogs and other interactive media, and the result is a toxic mix that threatens to prove fatal to journalism as we know it. For every reader troubled by what has become of news-and worried about what the future may hold - What Is Happening to News not only offers unprecedented insight into the causes of change but also clear guidance, strongly rooted in the precepts of ethical journalism, on how journalists can adapt to this new environment while still providing the information necessary to a functioning democracy.

Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation: A Media Institution with A Mission

Two recent events in the United States have focussed attention on the political influence of the giant media group News Corporation and its chief executive officer, Rupert Murdoch. In the aftermath...

Crisis, What Crisis? The Media: Business and Journalism in Times of Crisis

The global financial and economic crisis is often used to justify a crisis of media and journalism: lower advertising, collapses in the share price, falls in consumption, more unemployment. But is this just a business crisis, or is it also a crisis in journalism and its role in democratic societies? In this case, is the journalism crisis attributable to the economic crisis or, rather, was it forged during the years of high profitability and high salaries in the mass media? These two sides of the crisis, in media industry and in journalism, are addressed in this article, which explores the evolution of mainly Spanish media in the years before the crisis. However, in order to understand how they reached the current situation, political and economic transformations in what has been called the Information Society and neoliberal globalization must be addressed.

Crisis, What Crisis? The Media: Business and Journalism in Times of Crisis

The global financial and economic crisis is often used to justify a crisis of media and journalism: lower advertising, collapses in the share price, falls in consumption, more unemployment. But is this just a business crisis, or is it also a crisis in journalism and its role in democratic societies? In this case, is the journalism crisis attributable to the economic crisis or, rather, was it forged during the years of high profitability and high salaries in the mass media? These two sides of the crisis, in media industry and in journalism, are addressed in this article, which explores the evolution of mainly Spanish media in the years before the crisis. However, in order to understand how they reached the current situation, political and economic transformations in what has been called the Information Society and neoliberal globalization must be addressed.

THE FUTURE OF JOURNALISM AND CHALLENGES FOR MEDIA DEVELOPMENT

Large parts of media development work have focused on providing support to create privately owned, independent media in transition and developing countries. The accepted logic of many donor organisations has been that creating external pluralism, i.e. having many different private media companies operating in one country, is the best way to build democracy and to provide access and voice to citizens. Often the model of choice was the one that has dominated the media landscapes of the United States and Europe since the Second World War: privately owned media funded through advertising and sales revenues. But as advertising income dwindles for traditional media and as newspapers close at alarming rates, the question arises whether promoting this business model in the developing world is the right way forward. In developing a response to this question, this article explains how media assistance has developed, identifies the main characteristics of the current crisis in journalism in the developed world and indicates how some of the experience gained in media development can help to provide answers to the current crisis. Media development itself has come a long way in recent years and today adopts a more holistic approach that focuses not only on building private media but recognises the need for legal reform, civil society involvement, enhanced professional capacity, strengthened institutions that support media freedom and development of technical media infrastructure.

THE JOURNALISM “CRISIS”

Australia is facing many of the same trends in journalism that are occurring in other countries with mature media industries including declining numbers of journalists, fragmenting audiences, a loss of advertising revenue for media organisations and other challenges to their traditional business models including shifting patterns of news consumption, new competitors for old media and new technologies that demand more time from audiences. However, Australia is also in a unique position. It has a small population and unusually concentrated media ownership; recent newspaper circulation declines have not been as large as in the United States or United Kingdom; and Australia's major media organisations have “colonised the Web” to a larger degree than in many other countries. This has led to suggestions that Australian journalism will be immune from many of the most damaging international trends. Yet other evidence suggests Australia is already in the midst of an economic and professional crisis in newspaper journalism and that this is even more advanced than in other countries such as the United States and United Kingdom. This paper tests these competing propositions.