Nature Of Journalism Research Articles

A year in the life of Fiji’s beleaguered national news media: Insights from the 2016 state of the media report and some potential implications of ‘development journalism’

This case study on the state of the media in Fiji in 2016 highlights some problems of development journalism in the practical, applied sense. The case study looks at the changing nature of journalism in post-coup Fiji, reputed to have the South Pacific’s toughest media law. The analysis is conducted through a review of the media sector in 2016. Major issues pertaining to the sector were documented over the year and analysed to assess the impact of the 2006 coup and the punitive 2010 Media Industry Development Decree. Using 2016 as the case year allowed for the situation to be examined over a prolonged 12-month period. The review reveals a cornered media weaned on the Anglo-American watchdog tradition under constant pressure to produce development journalism, resulting in a possible identity crisis within the national journalist corps. The review concludes that normative discussions notwithstanding, achieving a compromise between the watchdog and developmental journalism models are harder to achieve in reality.

PERLINDUNGAN HUKUM TERHADAP JURNALIS WARGA YANG BERBASIS TEKNOLOGI INFORMASI

Along with the development of technology with the invention of the internet, the speed information cannot be blocked. Black list that occurredin the print era no longer applied when the era of information technology. The problem is, when it appears journalists from citizens namely the ordinary citizens who write news or facts in blogs or personal website, then it is exposed to public whether there is any protection for the journalist. These are problems that were examined in the article titled Legal Protection Against Journalists Citizen-Based Information Technology. The results of this study can be concluded that now everyone can write and submit his writings to the audience with ease. Currently in Indonesia citizen journalism grown fairly well. This is evidenced by the number of blogs that exist in Indonesia and made by the people of Indonesia. The existence of the blog has signaled that citizen journalism is a phenomenon that is in demand and will continue to grow in the community. The nature of citizen journalism that allows all internet users can enter information that he had through the Internet, can cause a state of some kind of 'abuse of power' by the accessor. The absence of clear boundaries about what should and should not be put on the internet has made sites and blogs contain information that should not be. Therefore it needs to be a rule in the special form of legislation on the protection of citizen journalists. Keywords : Legal Protection, Citizen J

Journalist, Terrorist or Counter-Terrorist? The Perils of Investigative Journalism Post-9/11

Because of the pervasive ways in which terrorism is now perceived as a primary threat to state security, many states have adopted broad legal definitions of ‘terrorism’ and, upon that basis, have enacted correspondingly broad policing powers and criminal offences. As a dramatic instance of how these approaches, which affect leading Western jurisdictions such as the US, UK, Australia and Canada, this paper will focus on the paradigm case of David Miranda. In August 2013, Miranda was transporting computer materials (including files from security agencies) supplied by Edward Snowden, a former contractor with the US National Security Agency, to journalist Glenn Greenwald to assist ongoing disclosures in The Guardian and other publications. The materials were seized during an examination and detention of Miranda while he was transiting through Heathrow Airport. The journalists viewed their mission as one of disclosure in the public interest of a vast web of governmental illegal surveillance programmes. However, the UK Security Service (MI5) contended that Miranda was concerned in ‘terrorism’ (as defined in the UK Terrorism Act 2000, section 1) because his mission sought to influence the government by promoting a political or ideological cause. The allegation was that disclosure of the data to a hostile state (Russia) or to terrorists might imperil the identities of secret agents or the methods used for electronic surveillance of terrorists. Thus, the material was placed in the realms of terrorism (as well as official secrecy). The formulation of ‘terrorism’ in the mind of the examining officer did not require any specific offence to be formulated, nor must mens rea (beyond the ‘design’ and ‘purpose’ detectable from the mission) be established on the part of the traveller since there could be interest either in material being transported or in the traveller. On these grounds, Miranda was held under Schedule 7 powers (relating to border stops and searches), and the materials were seized. Similar arguments were used to persuade the editor of The Guardian to destroy other materials held in the newspaper offices. In a subsequent court review, Miranda v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2014] EWHC 225 (now on appeal), the meaning of who is a ‘terrorist’ and whether the journalistic activity being pursued by Miranda, Greenwald and others should be excluded from that depiction was explored. This paper seeks to reflect upon the complex linkages between freedom of information activities and the label of ‘terrorism’ which is becoming a primary threat to investigative journalism in the contemporary world. It will require reflection upon the conceptual nature of terrorism, journalism, and freedom of information.

Boulevardzeitungen im crossmedialen Vergleich: Inhalte und Gestaltung des populären Journalismus by Andreas Wiesinger

Reviewed by: Boulevardzeitungen im crossmedialen Vergleich: Inhalte und Gestaltung des populären Journalismusby Andreas Wiesinger Katherine Arens Andreas Wiesinger, Boulevardzeitungen im crossmedialen Vergleich: Inhalte und Gestaltung des populären Journalismus. Innsbrucker Beiträge zur Kulturwissenschaft: Germanistische Reihe 83. Innsbruck: Innsbruck UP, 2015. 244 pp. Andreas Wiesinger provides in his study of Boulevardzeitungen(popular tabloid journalism) an exemplary primer for those interested in cross-platform media studies. He takes up eight such papers from four different German-speaking countries ( Bild, Blick, Heute, BZ, Kronen Zeitung, Lëtzebuerg Privat, Österreich, and tz) and investigates how they change their faces, content, and audience address as they negotiate the boundaries between paper and online editions, as well as in social media. Starting with an overview of the press systems involved, Wiesinger then characterizes the papers in terms of content, language, and themes, focusing on how they are composed in each medium, [End Page 113]how they self-advertise and teach their audiences to read them, and what goes into their headlines. A separate chapter follows their media presences into Facebook. The author's detailed content analysis delimits cross-platform variances and provides detailed accounts of how the print and online editors work with each other and their common material, especially with respect to decisions about layout. Each stylistic analysis is carefully historicized and tied into journalism's normal functions. The result is a dynamic, readable presentation broken down into discrete chunks of text that quite easily could be used in advanced courses focusing on media literacy—or by Germanists who need to compare their own assumptions about how journalism functions with the modern dynamics of transmedial business practices. The text is laid out straightforwardly, with the initial set of chapters explaining how the press and journalism work today. Chapter 1 sets up the author's method, outlining the types of qualitative and quantitative analyses of the newspapers that he will use. Chapter 2 contextualizes the types of media he follows, tracing a history of the Boulevardpresseand its standard characteristics, including use of words and punctuation, layout style and type/image relationship, themes and narrative structures, and the techniques that their journalists use. Chapter 3 moves into the present and to accounts of how online journalism functions along the same lines. Chapter 4 introduces the effects of cross-media conglomerates on the practice of journalism. Wiesinger focuses particularly on how the twenty-four-hour news cycle has transformed traditional journalism. For instance, digital editions often conform to the so-called "RUDI-Prinzip" ( Relevant, unvollständig, direkt, interessant)—those aspects of a story that induce a reader to scroll down beyond the come-ons in the headlines (159). The result of these chapters is a useful narrative about the extreme variations of "the same news" on different platforms with different dynamics. The next chapters move into the specifics and analyses of his chosen corpus, on what Wiesinger calls the system level. Chapter 5 introduces the press systems in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, and Luxembourg. These sections could be potentially useful in both undergraduate and graduate courses on the topic, as could those in Chapter 6, which introduce the specific papers he addresses. Chapter 7 defines the papers' preferred thematics and storylines; on what he calls the "mesolevel," Chapter 8 extends this strand of interpretation to the lead stories, tracing how the leads, text elements, and images interact [End Page 114]in the various versions. Chapter 9 revisits these elements as they function on Facebook, framed through the acts of social networking. All five of these chapters show the specific nature of tabloid journalism in its interaction with readers. Chapters 10 and 11 address how this press operates on the micro-level, focusing more specifically on how layout, text details, and layout placement in each medium impact the reading experience. Chapter 10 takes up leads as teasers and come-ons, stressing particularly how their placement on a page or screen works to engage reader interest. Chapter 11 sketches a detailed analysis of how headlines work, in terms of their grammar, lexical choice, and the like. Chapter 12 shifts its focus back to the journalists themselves, addressing how editorial teams are organized and how they function as...

Citizen journalism 3.0: Participatory journalism at the Twin Cities Daily Planet

Abstract Among participatory journalism news sites with patterns of short life spans and few regular readers, the Twin Cities Daily Planet stands out as an exception. In its ninth year in 2014, it had an average monthly readership of more than 150,000 unique viewers and a diverse group of approximately 100 non-professional contributors. Given the evolving nature of participatory journalism, this site is significant not only because of its longevity but also because of other success factors that include community engagement-based fundraising strategies, coverage of areas neglected by the mainstream media and its utilization of technological innovations. In addition, this study argues that unlike many well-known studies of participatory journalism, in the case of this nonprofit site the persistence of professional gatekeeping is not an obstacle to amateur participation but an assurance of journalistic standards. This article also highlights new roles for professionals as educator-mentors, moderators, aggregator-curators, and community conveners.

Hybridity and the news: Blending genres and interaction patterns in new forms of journalism

This paper introduces the Special Issue’s central theme of ‘hybridity and the news’, defining the scope and setting the scene for the multiple issues and debates covered by the individual contributions in this collection. Opposing both relativist positions that discard hybridity as an analytically useless concept, and preconceived notions that construe hybridity as intrinsically negative or positive, it is argued to move beyond binary thinking and to approach hybridity as a particularly rich site for the analysis of forms and processes of experimentation, innovation, deviation and transition in contemporary journalism. In order to profoundly understand these developments, which come in many forms, manifest themselves on different levels, and serve multiple purposes, a comprehensive, multi- and interdisciplinary perspective is needed. The Special Issue aims to contribute to this research agenda by looking closely into blending categories and interaction patterns in journalistic forms, genres, and practices, encompassing theoretical frameworks and methodological approaches from various disciplinary backgrounds including political and communication sciences, sociology, linguistics, cultural studies, and history. While taking different angles on the subject and being variously located on the macro and micro levels of analysis, the articles assembled here all engage in a careful assessment of ‘hybridity and the news’ through profound conceptualizations and empirical analyses, connecting with and shedding new light on long-standing debates about the nature and meaning of journalism.

What is a Journalist?

The period 2009–2010 was characterised as an industry-transforming period of economic and professional “crisis” for news journalism, involving significant journalism job losses in most developed nations. However, at the same time that media employers were laying off journalists in unprecedented numbers, they were still hiring a small amount of new recruits to work as journalists. These job advertisements therefore provide a rich source of information about how employers defined “journalism” during a period of transformation. Focusing on jobs advertised by Australian media companies, this article shows that journalism was not a high priority as they sought to restructure. Employers advertised four times as many jobs for advertising, sales and marketing staff as they did for journalists. When they did seek to hire journalists, employers retained conservative views about the nature of journalism as a trade rather than a profession. They were focused upon centralised, low-pay positions where candidates’ malleability, experience and personal attributes were more important than formal qualifications. Employers’ advertisements also suggested they were ill-equipped to cope with the digital transition and viewed it as something that was occurring outside the domain of many journalism jobs.

Carnivalism and Engaging Journalism in the Current-Affairs Podcasts in South Korea

In this digital age, the means of journalism are being drastically reinvented and the character of news is being constantly reconstructed. This study examines the nature of podcast journalism recently emerging in South Korea, based on two unique concepts—“carnivalism” and “engaging journalism”. A carnival creates an arena where free expression of non-legitimate voices could resist and mock the dominant power. This study finds that Korean podcasts tend to subvert a range of authoritative discourses and provide a journalism venue for comic criticism and emotional catharsis. Podcasts not only serve to lampoon the establishment, but also re-engage people who have been left largely disillusioned from mainstream news into the democratic process. This research argues that the discourse in the current affairs podcasts takes on the nature of “engaging journalism”, which motivates ordinary individuals to engage in elite-challenging political action.

Українізаційні тенденції друкованої преси Луганщини 20-х – 30-х рр. ХХ ст.

The main objective of the study is to carry out a comprehensive analysis of the functioning of Luhansk regional periodicals in the scope of Ukrainisation (indigenization), which was implemented by the Bolshevists in the 1920-30s, and promoted the formation and understanding of Ukrainian national self-identification. Methods. The synchronous analysis is used to perform a comprehensive characterization of the scientific object at the particular stage of historical development. Since the study is mainly descriptive, core research methods are also descriptive, combined with various methods and procedures of scientific analysis, including comparative historical and retrospective. Results. The Ukrainisation process in media primarily affected the functioning of periodicals that were massively re-orientated to Ukrainian language. The period of 1920-30s was the most productive. Totally, there were about 100 functioning Ukrainian newspapers. However, they were only formally Ukrainian, when the semantic level of these publications absorbed the negative sides of indigenization processes, including primary focus on masses, which practically meant narrowing the role of journalism to be the ideological service of party and state policy. The course to Ukrainisation was actively supported by the national conscious people of Donbas, including clerisy, coordinated around “Zaboy” / “Literary Donbass” magazine, the only one existing at the time. The activity of the magazine in late 20s – early 30s of XX century effected rising of general cultural level of readers, impacting the modernization of national consciousness of Luhansk people. Conclusions. The study of indigenization policy and its consequences for printed press in Luhansk region reveals the social nature of journalism in general, emphasizing its creative aspect in gratification of spiritual and cultural needs of East Ukrainian community, associated with protection of Ukraine national interests.

Phantom Journalism

A key parameter of determining the changing nature of journalism is to address the question of who owns the media and why. Recent revelations of sham transactions, fraudulent trade practices and black money being used to fund the news media in India, suggest a lack of transparency in how news business are run and financed. Five cases involving leading news organizations in India are analysed to illustrate the argument. In conjunction with this, the corporate take-over of news space by non-media entities signals the rise of a press that can no longer serve as a watchdog of democracy. The paper outlines a decline in quality journalism as a consequence of a disconcerting nexus between influential politicians, powerful corporates and profit-maximizing news organizations. Corrupt funding procedures and concealed ownership patterns have orchestrated a crisis of credibility for journalism while posing fresh challenges for media governance and the nature of democracy.

Reporting tittle-tattle: twitter, gossip and the changing nature of journalism

ABSTRACTIt is understood that, at times, ‘the public has a legitimate need to know information that other people would like to keep private’ (Jones 2008); and journalists are frequently faced with a moral dilemma when disseminating private information – how far should they infringe on an individual's right to privacy in the midst of mass public self-expression? Ethicists generally agree that ‘it is just for a journalist to violate the privacy of an individual only if information about that individual is of overriding public importance, and the public need cannot be met by any other means’ (Hodges 1994, 203). But how relevant is this discussion in the current climate of new media technology? Website applications such as Twitter encourage users to collapse distinctions between public and private, and concentrate on sharing information and ideas. This, one could argue, could undermine the authority attributed to the press, as individuals turn toward unrestricted information found on social networks. This article debates whether journalists should be at liberty to use private information circulating throughout social networks, or if gossip can be used as a community-building mechanism in journalism, and how journalists should deal with appropriating information from social networks when dealing with ‘publicly private’ knowledge.

Women in the Newsroom

May 2014 firing of New York Times Executive Editor Jill Abramson, the first woman to hold the newspaper's top editorial position, prompted widespread discussion in the profession and in the academy about continuing discrimination against women in American newsrooms. Amanda Bennett, who in 2006 had met a similar fate after only 3 years as the first female editor of Philadelphia Inquirer, wrote that for women in journalism, event hit like a lightning strike to dry tinder, not just the firing but the implications that Abramson had brought it on herself by being too difficult and by having the nerve to reveal pay inequity (Bennett, 2014, p. A15). During the previous year, the departures of Barbara Walters and Diane Sawyer, like Katie Couric before them, leftthe face of national television news a very male one.The problem is not merely anecdotal. are not ascending to the top jobs in any media sector at anywhere near the rate they're entering the journalism school pipeline, wrote Ann Marie Lipinski (2014), the former (and first female) editor of Chicago Tribune, in this year's Nieman Reports issue titled Where Are the Women? (p. 3). By mid-2014, none of the nation's top-10-circulation daily newspapers and just two of the top-25 papers were under the editorial direction of a woman (Strupp, 2014). Women comprise only 36% of newsroom staffers, a figure that has remained stagnant for more than three decades (Bulkeley, 2002; Women's Media Center, 2014). The numbers stink, by and large, said Abramson during her keynote address to the 2014 Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC) Conference in Montreal.Common sense tells us that the story of women in journalism (and other media industries) surely is a narrative of progress. Yet these flatlining statistics and recent developments suggest otherwise. Once again, we are having this conversation. Why? What's more, what does it matter if newsrooms and other media workplaces are full of, and led by, women? Should we be most concerned about equality of access to jobs and promotions, or about how women are treated once they get there? Or is there something even more at stake? Might gender parity fundamentally change the nature of journalism itself?This special issue compiles 10 Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly articles in which researchers have used a range of theories and methods to grapple with these questions. Some of them were published very recently; others are important studies whose concerns have not yet fully been addressed. (Indeed, looking back through the pages of the journal over time, one is struck by how often the same research questions-and findings-recur, and the online collection provides an extended list of articles on this theme.)Readers may notice the parallels between the recent experiences of female editors and the fate of Carol Sutton, whose 1974 promotion to managing editor of the Louisville Courier-Journal was seen as so groundbreaking that Time magazine profiled her among its of the Year in 1975. Kimberly Voss and Lance Speere (2014) used oral histories and archival research to tell her story and those of other female firsts. Research conducted in the 1980s and 1990s about women in broadcast journalism-where they constituted just over one third of the workforce-conveyed their concerns about pay inequities and workplace sexism and their belief that they were valued only for their appearance. Erika Engstrom and Anthony J. Ferri (1998) summarized these studies and reported that, by century's end, female journalists were even more worried about a different problem: conflicts between roles of wife/mother and newscaster (p. 794).Around the same time, the Quarterly published its first major study of another long-term challenge, sexual harassment. Kim Walsh-Childers, Jean Chance, and Kristin Herzog (1996) surveyed and interviewed nearly 400 American newspaperwomen, finding that a third of them had been sexually harassed, yet that many felt there was little they could do about it if they wanted to keep doing their jobs. …

Transformation: Examining the Implications of Emerging Technology for Journalism, Media and Society

This paper examines the transformational implications of emerging technologies for journalism, media and society. An array of increasingly ubiquitous, global and networked technological developments is driving a sea-change in the nature and function of journalism, media and society. While low-cost, wide-spread digital technologies are empowering individuals to communicate and innovate, these same technologies are enabling governments, industry and others to engage in surveillance, censorship and control. This paper proposes that technological developments are reshaping media and society in four fundamental ways: 1) the participatory nature of journalism and media, 2) the methods of doing journalism and creating media, 3) the content and paracontent of journalism and media, and 4) the organizational structures, culture and institutional controls of journalism, media and society.

Journalism after all: Professionalism, content and performance – A comparison between alternative news websites and websites of traditional newspapers in German local media markets

In light of the problems traditional news organizations are facing in many countries, it has been suggested that journalism’s relevance as the sole provider of news in an increasingly networked society is decreasing and that the Internet has given rise to new kinds of amateur, citizen, and participatory forms of content production, changing the nature of traditional journalism and threatening its institutions. The study presented here suggests otherwise. Taking a look at the German local news market and presenting a survey of the alternative news websites that have entered this market in recent years, it suggests that it is not so much journalism’s standards and practices – its institutional characteristics – that are changing, but its organizational framework.

A Sense of History

The images and stories you see here are of families of Pakistani men who remain imprisoned without charge, without evidence and without recourse of legal rights in the American black hole of Bagram.1 These are not images or stories of victims of the war on terror-they are far more than that. They are images of individuals with histories, stories, loves, faults, proclivities, dreams, fears, doubts, and flaws. They are not stories of victimhood but vignettes of lives lived through tremendous acts of courage, determination, and resolve in the face of overwhelming odds. They are images of complete individuals, sovereign and unique.The stories shown here focus on the families of the dozens of men who have been effectively abandoned by their own government-some of whom were most likely sold to the Americans by the Pakistanis to appease America's appetite for terrorists.2 They are first and foremost stories of the citizens of a sovereign nation who, though beyond the concern of its leaders and bureaucrats, continue a relentless struggle to undo the wrongs done to them, snatching from the state a modicum of justice and rights. Their experiences, their voices, and their individuality are the basis of a larger project that connects the predicaments of the individual citizen to the historical choices of states. That this project is one of the first such projects done in Pakistan is an indictment of the callousness and indifference with which the people of this nation have been documented and reported on.I have been a strong critic of journalists, both foreign and Pakistani, who depict Pakistan as a singular pathology by erasing its political history, its post-colonial continuities, and its rich legacy of social struggles. For them, the country reveals itself only when seen through the lens of the imperial security state or pointed out on a map drawn by hysteria. It is as if the nation, complete with all its issues-social, political, and religious-simply fell into the present, in complete isolation from the broader currents of regional politics and history. It is as if there were and are no inter-relationships, collusions, collaborations and entanglements between us and them.One of the great failures of modern journalism is its forgetfulness. This is not only structural-it is in the nature of journalism to chase the new and present the shocking-but is also about ignorance. Nations like Pakistan are never permitted their history, and their citizens are certainly not permitted their individual stories. The country is almost always seen through sweeping political generalizations, collective pathologies and cultural simplicities. It is, for the excited journalist attempting to make a career, a treasure trove of the alien, freakish, artificial, corrupt, broken, failed and imploding. It is beyond history and beyond rationality. To write about any country, let alone Pakistan, in this fashion, is to sow hopelessness and despair. It is also to obfuscate and disconnect what happens here from what has been decided elsewhere.Away from the tiresome hysteria of journalists and pundits who find financial and individual gain in mouthing predictions of the demise and destruction of the Pakistani state or sowing mind-numbing fear with narratives of the arrival of the Taliban at the gates of Islamabad and other such nonsense, are other stories that most people seem not to hear or know about. These are the individual stories, and they almost always speak upwards, offering a trenchant critique of Pakistani structures and institutions of power and challenging them for their venal exploitation, indifference and oppression. These ordinary stories of ordinary people reveal their deep commitment to a secular, worldly idea of life and living. They also reveal voices who understand their rights and what has been denied them for so long. These stories may lack the glamor and sensationalism of those framed around radical Islam or the nuclear threat, but they are actually about what the bureaucracy and military elite of the country really fear-calls for social justice, social equality, and full judicial and political rights. …

From Stalingrad to Grozny: Patriotism, political pressure, and literature in the war reporting of Vassily Grossman and Anna Politkovskaya

Comparing the work of the 20th-century Soviet journalist and writer, Vassily Grossman, with that of his compatriot, Anna Politkovskaya, almost half a century later, this article examines the two journalists’ writing for what it tells us about the changing nature of Russian journalism, and reporter involvement in the coverage of war. Grossman was reporting on his country’s fight for survival in a war with Nazi Germany; Politkovskaya had no peer in her coverage of the bloodiest consequence of the collapse of that country, the Soviet Union: the wars in Chechnya. It also considers the literary nature of Grossman and Politkovskaya’s reporting. The article argues that the two journalists’ work has significance far beyond the time when they were reporting, and should therefore be more widely read and studied for what it tells us about covering conflict, and especially civilian suffering and, in the case of Politkovskaya, counter-insurgency.

Generic frame building in the 2008 Austrian elections

Media critics repeatedly refer to the adversarial and trivializing nature of contemporary political journalism, whereas the role of political public relations in the formation of these aspects of public political discourse is widely neglected. To gain empirical insight into the formation of negativity, dramatization, game- and conflict-centeredness in campaign communication in the 2008 Austrian elections, this study introduces a biaxial matrix localizing levels of confrontation (negativity and conflict) and entertainment (game and drama). The analysis rests on the comparative investigation of generic frames in political parties’ PR and the media, and the examination of underlying frame building processes. The role of journalism and political public relations in shaping campaign communication is investigated by utilizing concerted content analyses of newspaper and TV news coverage and party press releases. The study finds that Austrian party and media communication can be predominantly categorized as antagonistic substance, characterized by high levels of confrontation (negativity and conflict) and lower levels of entertainment (game and drama). The empirical investigation outlines that conflict and negativity are prevalent features of the electoral communication of Austrian parties and the media likewise, whereby party press releases are even more marked by confrontation and entertainment framing than the subsequent media coverage. In addition, the media are not the principal and exclusive sponsors of confrontation and entertainment in electoral communication; rather, they even moderately decrease conflict and drama as compared to the impulses set by political PR.

Book Review: Literary Authors, Parliamentary Reporters: Johnson, Coleridge, Hazlitt, Dickens, by Nikki Hessell

Literary Authors, Parliamentary Reporters: Johnson, Coleridge, Hazlitt, Dickens. Nikki Hessell. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012. 218 pp. $90 hbk.Of interest to scholars in both literary and media studies, Literary Authors, Parliamentary Reporters: Johnson, Coleridge, Hazlitt, Dickens adds to the reservoir of scholarship about fiction, literary journalism, and traditional journalism and its practices. Particularly notable is the balance and dispassionate approach Nikki Hessell employs. A senior lecturer in English literature in the School of English, Film, Theatre, and Media Studies, Hessell privileges biographical, historical, literary, and sociologi- cal criticism over aesthetic judgment, leaving much room for readers to assess, evalu- ate, and draw their own conclusions.For readers less interested in the time that Samuel Johnson, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Hazlitt, and Charles Dickens spent covering the Parliament than in the impact of the experience on their later work, the preface, introduction, and conclu- sion are essential to the study. Although readers may often overlook the preface of a book, it is here that Hessell best summarizes her thesis and her objectives. Citing William Law's Our Hansard: Or, The True Mirror of Parliament (1950), Hessell introduces her study with the following quotation:What are reporters? They are the humblest craftsmen in the profession of journalism. They are not the creative writers whose names are known to thousands of readers and whose work is printed over their signatures. They are those who write down patiently the exact words of public men and transmit them faithfully to the channels of publicity. They are anonymous, but indispensible.Hessell puts Law's words about the essential nature of journalism to appropriate use. Elevating parliamentary reporting and its contributions to history and society, Hessell suggests that although the distinction between a reporter and an author has traditionally been a catalog of opposites, this is not necessarily the case.Although critics often discuss the humble journalist and the exalted writer, the anon- ymous craftsman and the literary celebrity, the faithful recorder and the creative genius, the time that Johnson, Coleridge, Hazlitt, and Dickens spent covering the Parliament was not a rather unpleasant interlude or stepping stone in their careers-as biographers and literary scholars often suggest-but a reflection of the manner in which critics-and perhaps readers-want writers to be devoted to literature and to operate beyond the realm of day jobs and wages. In fact, as Hessell reminds us, it is easy to overlook the degree to which these literary writers operated as highly successful journalists, not frus- trated novelists, poets and literary essayists, during their time in the gallery.Hessell's study shines precisely because of what she does not attempt or claim to do: she does not criticize reporting that was by its very definition constrained by both Parliamentary and newspaper requirements about form and content, and she does not speculate about what Parliamentary reports tell readers about the development of a mature author. …

REVIEW: Contradiction, paradox and ambiguity

The term ‘international news’ is illustrative of the conflicted nature of journalism. At one and the same time it is well understood and meaningful—and anachronistic in a global era. There is a tendency in many quarters to shy away from addressing an inherent instability in journalism, and instead bemoan the demise of the foreign correspondent, the symbolic ‘man [invariably a man] in gray flannel’ (Cohen, 1963, p. 17) who determined what was worth knowing about the world: a highly-privileged élite among élites. The expiration of the legend can be posited as the demise of journalism writ large.

A View from the Corner Bar: Sérgio Porto’s Satirical Crônicas and the Democradura

Abstract This article explores the nature and influence of the satirical journalism of Sérgio Porto, alias Stanislaw Ponte Preta, in Brazil from 1964 to 1968. Porto’s daily column in the Última Hora newspaper lampooned the Brazilian military dictatorship for its corruption, self-satisfaction, and ignorance and denounced its violence. At the same time, Porto carefully distanced himself from the radical left, appealing to a moderate popular audience. This strategy undermined the regime’s attempt to build a popular base of support and enabled Porto to avoid censorship during the early years of the regime. Porto’s death in 1968 coincided with an intensification of regime repression that made his style of moderate opposition increasingly untenable. Porto’s example inspired the more self-consciously rebellious new journalists of the subsequent stage of the dictatorship, particularly the editors of the subversive magazine O Pasquim. The article explores both the importance and the limitations of the moderate, sensual opposition delineated in Porto’s columns.