Some reflections on journalism education and journalism culture (original) (raw)

reconsidered What is journalism? : Professional identity and ideology of journalists

2012

The history of journalism in elective democracies around the world has been described as the emergence of a professional identity of journalists with claims to an exclusive role and status in society, based on and at times fiercely defended by their occupational ideology. Although the conceptualization of journalism as a professional ideology can be traced throughout the literature on journalism studies, scholars tend to take the building blocks of such an ideology more or less for granted. In this article the ideal-typical values of journalism’s ideology are operationalized and investigated in terms of how these values are challenged or changed in the context of current cultural and technological developments. It is argued that multiculturalism and multimedia are similar and poignant examples of such developments. If the professional identity of journalists can be seen as kept together by the social cement of an occupational ideology of journalism, the analysis in this article show...

Intermediate Journalistic Cultures. International Comparative Studies in Journalism

Defining journalistic culture is a complex process as it is necessary to explain on a general level the nature of culture is as a lifestyle. The attitudes of journalists are broadly embedded within meaning spheres that shape typical and traditional values of a common professional conduct. Throughout the last century, Western journalistic culture is taken as reference at all times to act as a model for imitation. However, this article presents the contextualization of different journalistic cultures as informative practice that currently varies from place to place and is determined by the different social, political, cultural and economic situation. The multiplicity-or multipolarity- in journalism, has led to the study of so-called intermediate journalistic cultures defined by having different features of the Western journalistic culture. Today, more than ever, those fragmented cultures mould and develop the static and mono-based standardization of all international journalistic features. The following study clarifies the singularities of journalistic cultures in different regions around the globe. It is a huge task, but necessary to underpin the theoretical notions of an important line of research born in recent decades: international comparative studies in journalism.

Deconstructing Journalism Culture: Toward a Universal Theory

Communication Theory, 2007

Despite a large array of work broadly concerned with the cultures of news production, studies rarely attempt to tackle journalism culture and its dimensional structure at the conceptual level. The purpose of this paper is, therefore, to propose a theoretical foundation on the basis of which systematic and comparative research of journalism cultures is feasible and meaningful. By using a deductive and etic approach, the concept of journalism culture is deconstructed in terms of its constituents and principal dimensions. Based on a review of the relevant literature, the article proposes a conceptualization of journalism culture that consists of 3 essential constituents (institutional roles, epistemologies, and ethical ideologies), further divided into 7 principal dimensions: interventionism, power distance, market orientation, objectivism, empiricism, relativism, and idealism.

Mapping Journalism Cultures Across Nations. A comparative study of 18 countries

This article reports key findings from a comparative survey of the role perceptions, epistemological orientations and ethical views of 1800 journalists from 18 countries. The results show that detachment, non-involvement, providing political information and monitoring the government are considered essential journalistic functions around the globe. Impartiality, the reliability and factualness of information, as well as adherence to universal ethical principles are also valued worldwide, though their perceived importance varies across countries. Various aspects of interventionism, objectivism and the importance of separating facts from opinion, on the other hand, seem to play out differently around the globe. Western journalists are generally less supportive of any active promotion of particular values, ideas and social change, and they adhere more to universal principles in their ethical decisions. Journalists from non-western contexts, on the other hand, tend to be more interventionist in their role perceptions and more flexible in their ethical views.

The skills of journalism: some results from a six-nation comparative project

Cross-national comparative studies of journalists generally focus on the demographic characteristics of journalists and on journalistic values and role-perceptions. However, there are many other areas were we could reasonably expect to find interesting cross-national similarities and differences. On such area is skills: what skills are necessary to become a ‘good journalist’ and what skills do you use as a journalist on a day-to-day basis? We could for example expect that journalists from countries where journalism has a strong literary heritage (e.g. Italy) would place a higher value on writing skills, whereas journalists from countries where an adversarial journalistic tradition is stronger (e.g. the UK) would place a higher value on interview and research skills. The issue of skills can thus be viewed as linked to (but also to some extent independent from) issues of values and roles – but also draws attention to journalism as work, i.e. an activity that one is paid to do on a daily basis. This paper addresses these issues by presenting some results from a three-year project comparing journalists in the UK, Sweden, Germany, Italy, Poland and Estonia. The data presented is both quantitative (based on an email survey with a total of about 2200 respondents across the six countries) and qualitative (based on interviews conducted with 62 journalists from all six countries). The key question of the project is how journalism-as-work is changing in a context of technological change and economic hardship for the news industry. Do the increasing demands on journalists to be multi-skilled and flexible lead to more pressure on journalists and a focus on quantity rather than quality, do they create new ways to tell stories and engage and connect with audiences, or both? Are the core skills of the occupation changing? The results show that while there is great cross-national agreeement on what the core skills of journalism are (the expectation that writing skills would be valued higher in a ‘literary journalism’ tradition is not confirmed, for example, as writing skills are valued very highly in all countries), there are also interesting national differences, for example in the value placed on networking skills and cross-platform production skills. There is also some evidence that new skill demands lead to more work pressures and are not percieved as increasing the quality of journalism.

Journalism Education: Considering Theory, Goal and Changes

Public Communication and the New Media

Developments in a changing social and professional economical environment, media-technological advancements and declining prestige in the eyes of the publics are cause of concern and unrest within journalism. These developments call for new approaches towards educating new media professionals. This paper addresses various considerations of journalism education internationally in terms of:[1] Theory; focuses on the theoretical foundations for journalism besides the classic 'Four Theories of the Press' and their ...