Traditional Journalism Research Articles

Problems of Creative Self-Realization of Freelance Journalists of the Digital Age

Ubiquitous digitalization and the coronavirus pandemic have made freelancing a familiar part of our lives. Journalists are no exception. Moreover, the media sphere is one of the most popular for freelancing and remote work. However, freelancing is not only about changing the location of an employee. This is a completely different format of relations: from an economic, legal, psychological, creative, and other points of view. For many freelancers, this is a way of life and a different type of thinking. Taking into account the process of media convergence and the popularization of new media, the boundaries of the journalistic profession are blurring and include specialists who are far from traditional journalism. There is also a question of freedom of journalistic creativity: many freelance journalists choose this path for the sake of autonomy, although entrepreneurial risks and economic challenges often undermine the independence they have gained. We analyzed 200 texts from open sources on the topic of the start and development of professional activity of freelance journalists, adding the results of personally conducted surveys. As our research has shown, despite the economic instability that often forces freelance journalists to immerse themselves in related activities, the requirements of digital algorithms that set strict limits for authors, and other problems, the issue of creative self-realization still occupies an important place in the work of freelance journalists, and many of them are not ready to put up with uninteresting and meaningless tasks. Although some freelance journalists agree to write on any proposed topic for the sake of a fee, most consider it necessary to have a specialization in order to deeply understand the chosen field.

The quality oriented, the audience engagers, the transparent: Types of editorial trust-building in German news outlets

Trust in journalism is highly relevant for society. Within the past years, especially during the COVID19-pandemic, trust in journalism became a recurring subject of public debate in Germany: Journalism is often vilified as ‘lying press’ and the legitimacy of traditional media is increasingly questioned. While in Germany, unlike other countries, we do not see a crisis in media trust, there nonetheless is a certain share of the population being skeptical towards traditional journalism. News outlets therefore need to ask themselves how to win back these sections of their audience and strengthen trust in their work. So far, research on media trust has largely focused on the audience – the journalistic perspective has hardly been examined. By conducting 29 interviews with German journalists, this paper aims to analyze which strategies news outlets pursue to cultivate trust in their work. Three main approaches to trust-building can be identified: The quality oriented, the audience engagers and the transparent. The results enable us to get a clearer overview on how news outlets try to regain and build their audience’s trust – which presents starting points for both journalism practice and research.

Journalism's Immersive Shift: Uncovering Immersive Journalism's Adherence to Traditional News Values, Norms, Routines and Roles

ABSTRACT As newsrooms begin to produce more immersive stories to better engage audiences, little is known about how immersive journalism compares with traditional journalism as we know it. Defined as news that is created with virtual reality, augmented reality, mixed reality, and 360° video technologies, research has tended to focus on ways to define it, and its effects on audiences and journalists. Understanding the extent to which immersive journalism adheres to long-held news values, norms, roles, and routines in journalism is essential as part of “boundary work”, where boundaries that form the essence of journalism legitimize the profession and help journalists understand their work. This study examines 200 immersive stories from five prominent news organizations leading in their production of immersive stories, The New York Times, USA Today, CNN, BBC and The Washington Post. Results indicate that immersive stories remain timely and tend to focus on what is unusual or of human interest. When it comes to sources, there is a shift away from government voices towards civil society. Notably, however, while high on displaying objectivity, there is a lack of source and process transparency in immersive stories, and the infotainment role ranks high, presenting some concerns for journalistic practice.

Between Immersion and Deimmersion. Adaptation to 360° Technology in The New York Times Daily 360

ABSTRACT In recent years, many journalistic organisations have experimented with 360° video technology. One of the reasons for the interest is its potential ability to facilitate the public’s emotional engagement. However, this seems to come into conflict with the prevailing idea that news should be presented in an emotionally detached manner. The New York Times is a media outlet that, more than most, conjures up notions of professional and high-quality journalism. The present article chooses the NYT Daily 360 project as a case study to examine the tension between traditional journalist ethics and the emotional bias that seems to characterise immersive technology. We conducted a content analysis to identify the elements that, by emphasizing the mediation between the user and the narrated facts, generate a “deimmersion” effect. As a result, we have observed that, in general, the immersive properties of the videos tend to be mitigated by resources with an opposite effect. Reasoning from this compromise solution between immediacy and hypermediacy, the discussion is based on the problem of the distance between the user and the narrator. To this end, reference is made to theoretical tools from journalism and media studies as well as from art history, literary studies, and semiotics.

Civic Journalism as a Phenomenon of Digital Civilization

This article explores the role of citizen journalism in terms of promoting civil society and democracy. Civic journalists, as well as citizen journalists, contribute to public discussion and try to voice and address many issues that have been ignored by traditional journalism. This study aims to explore the relevance of citizen journalism in the modern world. In addition, a negative phenomenon that is widespread in social networks and infringes on human rights, fake news and hate speech on social networks is investigated. Combining qualitative discourse analysis, comparison and description, the study shows that the role of citizen journalism is growing in many countries. However, hate speech and fake news on social media hinder the development of citizen journalism. To this end, further legislative and democratic measures must be taken. However, the most effective way to combat the obstacles to citizen journalism is to promote media literacy, which will enable everyone to comparatively analyze information, check the message and develop critical thinking.

Transformative processes of blogosphere and Internet journalism

This investigation considers the main features and directions of citizen internet journalism development, professionalization of blog platforms, which have become an instrument for communication between people, and regulation of blog platforms, where they can share their opinions, news, analyses, and emotions about different themes. The information transmitting processes over the last 5 years in Kazakhstan, with the growing influence of bloggers on society, changes in the traditional journalism content and journalistic articles on websites. Rapid progress in the field of computer technology, the emergence and development of the Internet are making significant changes to the modern information and communication environment. The Internet has become a powerful information space, covering in varying degrees all aspects of public lifein Kazakhstan. In the new environment, the Internet media sector is actively developing and playing a significant role. The advent of the Internet forces us to rethink previously established concepts and categories in discussions about the media, to take a different look at traditional communications and information transmission processes. Against the backdrop of the crisis of classical media, new public models of informing the public and commenting on the news appear, which are less limited by various kinds of control, as well as economically less expensive, due to the reduction of their production and distribution costs. Network circumstances, which have become an important transforming factor for journalism as a profession (and as an educational and career path), began to have a significant impact on the entire media communications industry from about the beginning of the 2000s. These factors and their impact were a direct result of the rapid spread of the Internet as a communication platform. Changes’ analysis in the phenomena of the blogging sphere is useful, as well as their influence on professional media.

ЖУРНАЛИСТИКА, ОСНОВАННАЯ НА ТЕХНОЛОГИЯХ ИСКУССТВЕННОГО ИНТЕЛЛЕКТА

The integration of the Internet in the media has contributed to the emergence of several new types of journalism, such as Robot Journalism, Drone Journalism, Data Science Journalism, etc. Formation of news materials, their attractiveness to the audience and the diversity of the fast dissemination ways of these materials in the society depend, first of all, on the development of advanced information technologies. The expansion of journalism based on advanced information technologies along with traditional journalism, the use of data mining, big data, and artificial intelligence in journalism have created new opportunities in this area. Although journalism of artificial intelligence ensures the requirements of the modern world and successfully solves the problems of the safety of journalists, the rapid collection and dissemination of information, it also has its drawbacks. The fact that journalism of artificial intelligence is far from the emotionality of the news transmitted, as well as the dynamic changes and excessive volumes of the news, indicate the change to be observed in the attitude of readers towards this news in the future. The aim of the study is to examine the influence of the Internet, which is a half century old, on the media as many other areas, as well as to identify existing problems in this area. To this end, the influence of artificial intelligence on modern journalism is studied and its opportunities and problems are identified. The advantages of journalism based on artificial intelligent over traditional one are specified. The study uses empirical and comparative analysis methods.

The heavenly component. On Marina Kudimova’s new book

The paper offers an extended review of the book High and Codependency. Recovered Sobriety and Literature [Kumar dolbyashchiy i sozavisimost. Trezvenie i literatura] (2021) by the modern poet and critic M. Kudimova, pointing out and discussing the most problematic theses found in this collection of critical reviews and essays: in particular, the topics of the ethnic component of Russian literature, literary oblivion, and the patronage of writers by the authorities and critics, etc. Zubareva suggests and successfully proves that the scope of Kudimova’s book goes beyond a philological study. The problems of literary studies overlap with contemporary issues of Russian culture which is predominantly literature-centric. Kudimova is drawn to controversial images and characters — P. Ershov, A. Kryzhanovsky, and V. Vysotsky; analysing her philological and critical essays, Zubareva discovers that the collection follows in the footsteps of the best literary critical and journalistic traditions of the Pushkin era and stimulates the mind as well as emotions, encouraging the reader to view the 19th- and 20th-c. Russian literature as part and parcel of our daily life.

Blockchain Technologies and Media Transformation

In this paper we start from the assumption that social dynamics and cultural-civilizational progress cannot be viewed separately from the social history of the media as complex technological-communication structures. In this paper we deal with the influence of new disruptive technologies DLT (Distributed Ledger Technologies) better known as blockchain technologies which, thanks to the latest technological solutions, have great potential for transforming the media and journalism as a profession, thus we have explained the technological concept on which they are based. We will discuss the concept of personalized blockchain journalism and propose a user economy model that guarantees the financial sustainability of the platform. Observing information as a user experience, we have discussed the possibility of adequate cognitive response of users in conditions of information saturation, and raised the issue of structuring information in designing a journalistic platform on the blockchain, as an ecosystem that will distance itself from existing polluted media space. Finally, we have proposed a topic for further reflection and scientific research, which is the latest technological transition based on quantum computing, artificial intelligence and the Metaverse, which will provide a completely new user experience in 3D virtual space, where user avatars will rely less and less on traditional media and journalism as we know it today.

A Model of Identity Crafting among Novice and Experienced Journalists in an Era of Transformation

As numerous transformative forces - notably the prevalence of a new business logic, the emergence of new actors and the penetration of new technologies - transcend traditional newsroom practices, journalists of all ages see the cornerstones of their professional identity being disrupted. Conceiving their profession as a calling, and having different conceptions of their work depending on their generation, journalists tend to apply a variety of strategies to respond to these changes and re-craft their journalistic identity. Based on the literature on professional identity, generations and the transformation of journalism, this paper proposes a multi-dimensional model presenting the strategies of identity crafting applied by novice and experienced journalists. The model explains the differences in their strategies by juxtaposing their distinct views on calling, alongside three facets of generational identity (year of birth, life stage, nature of work). The main proposition is that novice journalists adopt a strategy of liquid identity crafting characterized by a willingness to integrate transformative elements in their work, while experienced journalists prefer a strategy of solid identity crafting, shaped by a desire to preserve traditional journalism practices. With the digital transformation of journalism as major driver, the paper contributes to the literature on professional identity with an original perspective on calling, and adds to research on generations by unpacking differences in the process of identity crafting among novice and experienced journalists.

Evaluating and Exploring the Effectiveness of Journalism and Communication Discipline Construction in the Context of Smart Era

In today’s intelligent era, the talent training mode of traditional journalism and communication discipline cannot keep up with the pace of the times. Under the background of intelligent era, the cultivation of compound talents in journalism and communication discipline is not only in line with the direction of education reform in journalism and communication discipline, but also in line with the objective requirements of economic and social development. Based on this, this paper puts forward three suggestions: improve the discipline layout of “smart age + journalism and communication discipline” and strengthen professional construction; enrich the textbook resources in the era of wisdom and promote smart teaching.

THE USE OF MODERN TECHNOLOGIES IN ONLINE MEDIA PUBLICATIONS

The aim of the article is to give practitioners and theorists of journalism an understanding of the importance of using modern technologies in online media practice as a component of the transformation of the journalist’s work, as well as changes in traditional journalism in connection with the introduction of new technologies. The relevance of the topic lies in the study from a scientific point of view of a new technological format, the use of AI and modern content as immersiveness in the preparation of journalistic material. The research methodology includes a theoretical and comparative analysis of the study of AI technologies based on research by domestic and foreign media experts, an analysis of the experience of universities and media organizations. The author believes that the phenomenon of AI and modern content technologies involves theoretical understanding and practical application in the media space of Kazakhstan. The results of the study will make a certain contribution to the development of digital technologies in the media sphere of the country. The practical significance of the results of this work lies in the analysis of a new format for presenting information: the creation of recommendations and the introduction of a “smart feed” and multi-format content in the media, which allows selecting news for a specific user. Key words: AI, new media research, transformation of journalism, Kazakhstan, modern technologies, development of journalism.

Mass Media Trends: Implementation of AI, ML, SEO and Data Journalism in the Worldwide Media Landscape

This article refers to the use and implementation of new technologies, like AI (Artificial Intelligence), ML (Machine Learning), Big Data, data journalism and SEO optimization in traditional media, new media and brand journalism. The author explains what is “data journalism” in the opinion of Russian and English-speaking researchers. The article describes the main accidents and dates of the establishing of date journalism in the USA, Russia. The author examines how artificial intelligence and machine learning are implemented by editorial offices, as an example author takes “Forbes”, “Reuters”, “The Guardian” and other media outlets. This study is based on both primary and secondary sources of qualitative data to understand the challenges and opportunities to work in the ever-changing media landscape. Based on the empirical base, the author examines the implementation of data journalism in Latvia – using the materials published in collaboration with the author in the print magazine “Forbes Latvija” during the period of 2017– 2019. Based on research methods and the use of SEO tools while writing articles in English for an IT company in the period from 2019–2021, the author examines the impact of SEO promotion in traditional media, new media and brand journalism. There is a tendency nowadays that brand journalism is affecting the agenda of media, and having considered this issue in more detail, the author gives examples of specific SEO optimization and promotion tools that help brand journalism in achieving this goal.

When a Journalistic Truth-Seeking Tradition Thrives: Examining the Rise of the Brazilian Fact-Checking Movement

ABSTRACT This study addresses socio-political and professional factors driving the surge of the Brazilian fact-checking venture in the last years. Drawing on a set of 16 semi-structured interviews with fact-checkers from 13 active initiatives, it delves into motivations that led journalists to put in motion their fact-checking firms. Based on the existing literature on structural dynamics and professional incentives for fact-checking, the paper suggests that these two instances concur with the advancement of that journalistic subgenre. Research findings show that the last two electoral cycles (2014–2018) created a thriving landscape for fact-checking due to growing political turmoil in Brazil. Besides, there is also an isomorphic tendency in the development of new fact-checking initiatives. Pioneer American and Argentinean fact-checking firms inspired first projects. Nevertheless, motivations for fact-checking have been increasingly diverse over the years, including training workshops, successful coalitions, and grants from foreign investors. This study contributes to the growing scholarship on an emerging journalistic subfield showing the context-sensitive nature of the expansion of the fact-checking enterprise in a milieu distinct from the US-European landscape. Furthermore, it stresses how structural and professional factors act as field-configuring instances of new journalistic ventures.

Hijacking Journalism: Legitimacy and Metajournalistic Discourse in Right-Wing Podcasts

Whereas personal expression has become a core practice of journalism whose merits can include greater attention to context and interpretative analysis, these freedoms from the constraints of traditional broadcast conventions can pose serious risks, including the ideological hijacking of journalism by partisan actors. In popular right-wing podcasts, such as those hosted by Ben Shapiro and Dan Bongino, the element of opinion amplifies the tendency of the podcast medium to relegate news to a secondary concern behind the emotional impact. Not only do podcasters like Shapiro and Bongino contribute to a fractured media environment of hyper-partisan news and commentary, but they also utilize social media platforms and transmedia networks to undermine traditional journalism and replace it with an alternative conservative media ecosystem—a multiplatform, full-service clearinghouse of news and commentary afforded by the publishing capabilities of the internet and the distribution algorithms of social media platforms like Facebook. This study charts the evolution of conservative audio production, from the influential work of talk radio star Rush Limbaugh through the latest innovations by conservative podcasters, as exemplified by Shapiro and Bongino. Our study builds on previous scholarship on metajournalistic discourse to examine how right-wing podcasters use exclusionary language to delegitimize the institution of journalism and offer a self-contained, ideologically conservative version of journalism as a replacement.

The Advancement and Application of New Media Technology in Traditional Journalism

Regarding the challenges of global digitization and network technology, whether traditional media and new media are a game or a topic of integration has attracted much attention in recent years. It has become a research hotspot for scholars at home and abroad. With the constant emergence of various new media, the pattern of mass communication is undergoing tremendous changes, and traditional media have also begun their way of media integration. In this regard, this article takes the Shanghai World Expo news report as the starting point and deeply studies the exploration and practice of new media technology by traditional media in the World Expo report. Also analyzed the streaming media, other new media technologies, paths and effects. This paper declares that the development of new media is changing traditional media's communication methods and concepts. Under the background of the vigorous development of new media, traditional media must adapt to the needs of new media, change their strengths, and pursue news planning and in depth reporting. It has been proved that traditional media will not weaken through the bonding and interaction with new media. With the advantages of new media, traditional media can also enhance brand influence and popularity.

Significant social movement as a critical event: The impact of journalists’ mutual attention on the differentiation between traditional and alternative media in the field

This paper intends to investigate how the differentiation between traditional and alternative media is reinforced through the mutual attention among journalists, based on field theory. It further argues that a significant social movement can serve as a critical event which intensifies mutual monitoring among journalists. Focusing on the anti-extradition law amendment bill movement in Hong Kong, this study conducted interviews with 20 reporters from traditional and alternative media. The analysis revealed two mechanisms of mutual monitoring: (a) direct monitoring at protest sites and (b) monitoring published works. Such monitoring activities reinforce the differentiation between traditional and alternative media through encouraging boundary work exercised by traditional media journalists and providing cues for alternative media reporters to cover important perspectives which are missing in the mainstream coverage.

ARTIFICAL INTELLIGENCE JOURNALISM AND THE PROBLEMS IT MAY BRING

The history of communication is as old as the history of humanity. In various ways since the existence of humanity; we have chosen to communicate. This way, which is very limited, started to develop after the invention of the printing. In fact, a new era has been opened in the field of communication. With the spread of communication; as in various countries of the world; In media professionalism, which was carried out mostly through the regiment (master - apprentice) in our country until then, an education campaign was made to train educated journalists. The educated people who have been educated in the journalism schools opened under various names in Turkey since 1948, the media has developed and has taken a great stride in the field of communication. However, with the development of technology in recent years; 'Artificial Intelligence Robots', which have entered many areas of our lives, have also started to enter the media sector. 'Artificial Intelligence Journalists', which emerged especially with the initiatives of Microsoft, have recently begun to disturb media workers in many parts of the world. Concerned that robots will take their jobs, 'flesh-and-bones journalists' in the media have sought how to fight these 'iron-heap journalists'. Although this situation does not pose a threat for the Turkish media yet, experts and scientists warn the traditional journalists who are still working and recommend that they take precautions on the issue of 'Artificial Intelligence Journalists'. Not only that; they also warn future journalists who are currently studying media at universities. In order to cope with “Artificial Intelligence Journalists”, besides the existing basic curriculum; They emphasize that taking some software courses such as Coding and Artificial Intelligence will be important for their future in the media. In this article, we will try to suggest solutions by examining these problems that artificial intelligence can bring to the media world, with the evaluation of experts.

Who, What, and How: Identifying Judicial Constructions of Journalism

ABSTRACT The networked era has made it increasingly difficult to define journalism and to separate it from other types of information. This is no small thing. The definition of journalism influences its practice and its role in democratic society. This article identifies themes from judicial definitions of journalism from recent U.S. state and federal cases. Jurists’ rationales for why a person is or is not a journalist have come as they face a variety of cases in which bloggers, message-board posters, website publishers, and others have claimed protections that have historically been primarily associated with traditional journalists. Ultimately, judges have constructed a discourse about journalism that combined concerns regarding how closely the process and practices the publishers used to gather and communicate the information aligned with traditional journalistic work, the public-service value of the information, and the journalistic credentials of the publisher. Though concern for how the work was created and who communicated it was crucial, jurists consistently conveyed the public-service role was most instrumental in their evaluations, often rationalizing broad expansions of what legally constitutes journalism.

MisRoBÆRTa: Transformers versus Misinformation

Misinformation is considered a threat to our democratic values and principles. The spread of such content on social media polarizes society and undermines public discourse by distorting public perceptions and generating social unrest while lacking the rigor of traditional journalism. Transformers and transfer learning proved to be state-of-the-art methods for multiple well-known natural language processing tasks. In this paper, we propose MisRoBÆRTa, a novel transformer-based deep neural ensemble architecture for misinformation detection. MisRoBÆRTa takes advantage of two state-of-the art transformers, i.e., BART and RoBERTa, to improve the performance of discriminating between real news and different types of fake news. We also benchmarked and evaluated the performances of multiple transformers on the task of misinformation detection. For training and testing, we used a large real-world news articles dataset (i.e., 100,000 records) labeled with 10 classes, thus addressing two shortcomings in the current research: (1) increasing the size of the dataset from small to large, and (2) moving the focus of fake news detection from binary classification to multi-class classification. For this dataset, we manually verified the content of the news articles to ensure that they were correctly labeled. The experimental results show that the accuracy of transformers on the misinformation detection problem was significantly influenced by the method employed to learn the context, dataset size, and vocabulary dimension. We observe empirically that the best accuracy performance among the classification models that use only one transformer is obtained by BART, while DistilRoBERTa obtains the best accuracy in the least amount of time required for fine-tuning and training. However, the proposed MisRoBÆRTa outperforms the other transformer models in the task of misinformation detection. To arrive at this conclusion, we performed ample ablation and sensitivity testing with MisRoBÆRTa on two datasets.