Journal of Applied Journalism & Media Studies - Volume 2, Issue 3, 2013

This note focuses on the deliberations from a two-day international conference at Sweden’s Jönköping University in October 2013. The theme was ‘Towards a praxis-based media and journalism research’. The conference dwelt on the epistemological and methodological underpinnings to which the Journal of Applied Journalism and Media Studies (AJMS) adheres, particularly its applied or praxis niche. The note starts with a short background and then considers the major concerns voiced by practitioners attending the conference about much of the research media academics carry out. It then presents a synopsis of the response of the participants to two major questions: (1) Why do media practitioners generally discard or not trust findings by media scholars? (2) Are media scholars under any obligation to relate their theories to practice? It ends with the lessons that academics can draw from the way practitioners view their world and assess their research.

There is no denying the wide gap that separates the media and journalism as an industry and the media and journalism as an academic discipline. The industry, facing inexorable and inexhaustible challenges from the digital world and the social web, rarely builds on academic work. Practitioners say academic research is not specifically written for them. While acknowledging the credibility and worthiness of academic research, they at the same time find its language and style strange and difficult to comprehend. In this article, Matthew Eltringham, executive editor at the BBC’s College of Journalism, charts a path on how to bridge this ‘regrettable’ gap. He calls for a ‘genuine partnership’ through which both sides can work together to help practitioners address the problems that are disrupting the industry. The author cites examples of how a few academics have preserved the rigour of scientific research and at the same time made their work ‘practical, relevant and useful’ to the industry.

In order to understand how new media development in a traditional media organization affects the journalism production process, it is necessary to understand the strategic role of new platforms and the rationale for a multi-platform product portfolio development. This article discusses why the role of CNN.com over the first ten years of operations developed from being a creator of change in the news industry into playing a supporting role in the CNN portfolio of distribution channels.

High levels of censorship and restrictions in the media coverage in many of the countries of the Middle East explain the quality of reporting in the region. This comparative analysis of the BBC and Al Jazeera English (AJE) during the 2009 Iranian election illustrates the threats and difficulties faced by both BBC and AJE journalists country such as Iran. Analysis shows that international reporters on the ground with Iranian passport face more obstacles than foreign reporters without Iranian passports in reporting the ‘reality’ of the country. This article concludes that AJE, which had an all-Iranian team, faced more danger from the Iranian government as a result of their coverage than the BBC’s all-English team. This contributed to the disparity in the coverage of both networks.

European journalism educators and practitioners seem to expect professional outcomes which are quite different from those in the United States. The 50 competencies and qualifications published as the Tartu Declaration of the European Journalism Training Association in 2006 have been compared with a list of 22 competencies and qualifications discovered in a wide-ranging review of editorial employment advertisements in the United States in 2008 and 2009. Results suggest a very narrow overlap in otherwise disparate sets of expectations. This raises questions for future research such as does this disparity impede professional migration for journalists between the two continents, and does it undermine intercultural transferability of contemporary journalism curricula. An unexpected additional finding is that, while US media rhetoric and history emphasize Constitutional first Amendment press freedom issues, only the European list accords any importance to journalists’ awareness of media’s societal role.

The term convergence has been widely used in communications to refer to different media issues such as conglomeration of media corporations, changing behaviour of new media users and use of technological affordances among other things. There are debates about driving forces of media convergence. Whereas media owners consider convergence as a tool for more profits, critics express concerns about media monopoly as a result of organizational convergence. However, journalists regard convergence as a way to present more attractive and precise news. This article is an attempt to explore main aspects of convergence related to relationship among media organizations and characteristics of media contents in the context of Iranian online news papers. I also analyse essential factors that drive convergence for Iranian online newspapers and compare the findings with conditions of online news media in the United States. This article is significant since it expands existing knowledge about media convergence in Iranian context. The findings of this research can be helpful for news organizations to improve the quality of their news websites through different forms of convergence. Finally, implications for future research on convergence in contexts similar to Iran are provided.

Recent years have witnessed a significant increase in the need for new media faculty in the journalism field. This research aims to identify hiring trends in the context of new media via a longitudinal study of job advertisements for journalism faculty published since 1995, the ‘Year of the Internet’. The study includes a content analysis that focuses on credentials and expectations outlined in the selected advertisements for faculty positions. In particular, this study analysed the requirements for new-media-specific expertise. It attempts to reflect the rapid development and evolution of new media and technologies in the journalism field and its implications.

This article analyses perceived television quality in a sample of Spanish consumers by considering the role played by viewers’ concerns about television contents. It applies to all kinds of terrestrial television channels in Spain. These concerns are found to be classiffied in two categories: pragmatic and moral. The intensity of these concerns is related to the socio-demographic characteristics of the viewers. Male, older and educated viewers are found to show stronger pragmatic concerns on TV content whereas women and older viewers show stronger moral concerns. Pragmatic concerns have a negative influence on perceived TV quality, but no effect is detected for moral concerns.

The authors research the strategies used by Slovenian journalists in reporting on the parliament members hate speech expressed during a discussion about the Family Law. A critical discourse analysis of news reports and in-depth interviews with their authors showed that journalists mostly referred to news sources when condemning hate speech, avoiding their own value judgment because they found commenting in a news genre inappropriate. When citing hate speech, they chose moderate examples out of fear of promoting hate speech. They mostly focused on one parliament member, who had been known for hate speech from the past.