Journal of Applied Journalism & Media Studies - Volume 2, Issue 1, 2013

This article lays down the conceptual and methodological underpinnings the Journal of Applied Journalism and Media Studies seeks to advance. It positions the journal and its keyword ‘applied’ within the main schools of thought and philosophical deliberations that have characterized research in mainstream social science. It traces the term and its development as it first emerged in the treaties of ancient Greek philosophers down to modern thinkers such as Emanuel Kant, Jürgen Habermas, Max Horkheimer, Karl Marx, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Robert Brandom, Richard J. Bernstein and John Dewey. It seeks to carve a conceptual and methodological niche for the journal and steer the path for its future growth and development in the realm of media and journalism studies. It recommends special streams for future praxis-based media research and how the gap between media theory and media practice is to be bridged.

The repercussions of the phone-hacking scandal at the now-defunct News of the World are reshaping the regulation, culture, practice and ethics of the press in the United Kingdom. Though a purely British case, the impact on the future of newspapers and the media will not be confined to the British Isles. The scandal and the subsequent public enquiry led by Lord Justice Leveson will provide fertile ground for media and journalism scholars to focus their research and investigations. Leveson’s recommendations on the future of press regulation are certain to rework the current system in the United Kingdom, where the press has traditionally been self-regulated voluntarily through Press Complaints Commission. In this article, David Elstein, chairman of open Democracy, looks into the phone-hacking scandal, examining its various facets and what its impact will be on the future of press freedom and media ownership in Britain.

Throughout its history as a professionalized practice, the adoption of new technologies has affected news journalism as a consequence of changes in its delivery; its consumption; or its management. This article focuses on how new technologies, in particular the web, have affected the business of news. It considers whether the digitalization of news has undermined the business model to make the production of news journalism unaffordable for the handful of large companies that now dominate the UK and US newspaper industries. The article argues that the practice of journalism has become marginalized within the news industry because its business model is based on selling the attention news attracts, rather than on seeing the journalism producing the news as an asset. Finally, the article posits that there is no longer a successful, scalable business model for news journalism in the United Kingdom and United States and a new model will not emerge from adding digital delivery to existing models but from a re-imagining of journalism outside of the news industry.

This study addresses issues related to mass media coverage of the threat of asteroid collisions with the earth and speculation on potential mass and catastrophic damage, injury and death. It explores the role of the mass media in reporting the danger of major asteroid impacts, when such impacts are less frequent, but potentially more damaging than disasters related to volcanoes, hurricanes, tsunamis, tornadoes or earthquakes. The study includes interviews with aerospace scientists contributing to determinations about what narrative structures and techniques are most effective in explaining through the mass media important scientific research on asteroid and other space object threats, without resorting to shallowness and sensationalism.

Reuters has developed its own standards of impartiality. A global and multilingual news agency, Reuters highly values issues like independence and components such as fairness, balance, transparency, consistency and disinterestedness – the elements that have characterized its news and current affairs coverage for decades. With the advent of the digital age, the agency has been revising its coverage rules, experimenting broadly, and holding training courses and in-house discussions on how to extend its objectivity guidelines to embrace the exponential growth in input from the social media. Eric Auchard of Reuters sheds light on the agency’s endeavor to set up its own objectivity rules in dealing with our social media world.

Minority language media journalists face specific difficulties during the newsgathering process such as the lack of news agencies and scarcity of sources that speak their language. This reality could affect the production and quality of their news stories since often times those journalists, working in their community, must act as if they were foreign correspondents covering newsworthy issues abroad and in a different language. To overcome these problems, they deploy diverse strategies that lead to different journalistic outcomes and news stories as it can be seen in this article. It is based on a fairly representative and stratified survey of journalists from ten European minority languages (Basque, Catalan, Galician, Corsican, Breton, Frisian, Irish, Welsh, Scottish Gaelic and Sámi).

In recent years, there has been an increased recognition of the value of developing the professional capacity of journalists in developing countries and emerging democracies, and of evaluating these developments more effectively. In addition to the quantitative assessment of the media training programs along pre-defined indicators, this article argues for a participatory evaluation approach to assessing donor-funded media capacity building program to capture stories of change from the perspectives of the participants. Drawing on a case study of an evaluation of a media attachment program, ‘MDI Social Journalism Award’, it highlights the most significant change stories from the perspectives of two journalists from Papua New Guinea. The article outlines the outcomes and impacts of the program for the participating journalists, along with the facilitators and barriers that can influence the success of such media capacity building programs.

Based on Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of the social field, the following article examines how changes in the journalistic field are related to self-perceptions and career strategies of individuals working in Austrian news media. In making use of Bourdieu’s theory, survey-based information regarding role models and self-perception can be interpreted within its proper context and thus be made accessible to educational and other institutions in a practice-oriented manner. Data from three interrelated studies show that journalists in Austria see their job as a creative profession with little need for formal education, and insist on the importance of personal networks. Despite this, the younger and female journalists are more likely to educate themselves in hopes of finding a permanent job in a crowded profession that offers little job stability.

Melodramatic animated news is a new news reporting format used by some media organizations that has drawn a huge online viewership. This study adopted uses and gratifications theory and surveyed 312 college students to investigate their viewing of animated news. Seven motives were identified, through factor analysis, for viewing such animated news videos. The results of hierarchical regression analysis suggest predictive relationships among personality characteristics, the seven motives, the effects of perceived news credibility and newsworthiness, and the intention to share such animated news videos with others. Implications, ethical issues and directions for future research are discussed.

While most studies of public service media changes in European media systems focus on regulatory policies and audience markets, this article investigates the development of professional journalistic values and newsroom practices among public service journalists. Previous studies have indicated that news values among public service journalists to a large extent have been guided by the principles of public interest and social significance. However, the majority of these studies were conducted mainly in the broadcast era, where competition was less important than it is today. In this article, the objective is to analyse public service journalists’ professional values and newsroom practices in a digital age. The study is based on a comparison between Spanish and Swedish journalists working within the public service media in the two countries, but within strongly diverging public service media conditions. The article compares professional values among public service journalists in the two countries, as well as between journalists working in the public and the private media sector in each country. Methodologically, the comparison is based on nation surveys among Spanish and Swedish journalists conducted during 2010. The results show similar perceptions of news values and between public and private journalists in both countries, but public journalists are more concerned about decreasing quality of journalism and increasing commercialization.

This article identifies two major forces driving change in media policy worldwide: media convergence and renewed concerns about media ethics, with the latter seen in the UK Leveson Inquiry. It focuses on two major public inquiries in Australia during 2011–2012 – the Independent Media Inquiry (Finkelstein Review) and the Convergence Review – and the issues raised about future regulation of journalism and news standards. Drawing upon perspectives from media theory, it observes the strong influence of social responsibility theories of the media in the Finkelstein Review and the adverse reaction these received from those arguing from Fourth Estate/free press perspectives, which were also consistent with the long-standing opposition of Australian newspaper proprietors to government regulation. It also discusses the approaches taken in the Convergence Review to regulating for news standards, in the light of the complexities arising from media convergence. The article concludes with consideration of the fast-changing environment in which such proposals to transform media regulation are being considered, including the crisis of news media organization business models, as seen in Australia with major layoffs of journalists from the leading print media publications.