Journal of Applied Journalism & Media Studies - Volume 4, Issue 2, 2015

Journalism and the media have a direct impact for both good and ill on the health of the public discourse, yet practitioners and the academy are as divided as were late medieval barber surgeons from those who studied the relationship between practice and the health of patients. There are both valid and invalid reasons for this – the valid reasons derive from the simple fact journalists and scholars have different roles in the public sphere; and the invalid reasons derive from stubbornness bordering on arrogance on both sides of the divide. Few practitioners see the academy as relevant to them; few accept the need to listen to, understand and perhaps act on informed critique. Few scholars are either prepared to make their work timely and relevant to current issues or to abandon the intimidating formats and incomprehensible language that alienates practitioners. Yet there are numerous examples, including the Public Journalism movement in the United States, the Reuters Institute in Oxford and even the BBC’s review system that demonstrate how practitioners and scholars can be persuaded to inhabit – even briefly – the same universe.

The issue of media management or ‘spin’ came to dominate Tony Blair’s time in office, so much so that even his own press secretary, Alastair Campbell, came to concede that they had over-used it. When David Cameron came to power in 2010, although he has acknowledged that he learnt many political lessons from Tony Blair, he was keen to ensure that his government did not make the same mistakes in terms of the overuse of spin. In this article, based on interviews with key players, a comparison is made between the way the two prime ministers, and in particular their press secretaries, managed their media relations in their first year’s in office. This article, written by two who witnessed the first years of Blair and Cameron at first hand, characterizes the Blair media regime as practising ‘spin heavy’ and the Cameron regime, under Andy Coulson, as practising ‘spin lite’. It concludes that, both in terms of relations with the media and how that relationship played out vis-á-vis coverage, ‘spin lite’ was a more successful formulation.

This article examines a reflexive, praxis-based methodology for conducting journalism research from a practitioner-academic perspective. Journalism research methods that are interactive, iterative and which rest on a dynamic communicative partnership between academics and practitioners, offer the best way for understanding change in our dynamic field. This permits the researcher to coalesce and strengthen their identity as a practitioner-academic and develop research projects that are mutually beneficial for advancing scholarship and practice. Drawing on reflexive methodologies in the human sciences, such as hermeneutics, cybernetics and constructivism, this article envisions an immersive approach embracing phenomenology and Gestalt as a fully reflexive method of data collection.

This study used framing analysis to unpack framing devices employed by Al-Jazeera and Al-Arabiya in their reporting of the 2011 Egyptian Revolution. Three key days of the uprising, representing a range of political events, were analysed. Results suggest that Al-Jazeera and Al-Arabiya presented very different versions of the revolution. Al-Jazeera’s coverage, which was dominated by a ‘revolution’ frame, was overwhelmingly sympathetic to the protesters and antagonistic to ousted President Hosni Mubarak, while Al-Arabiya’s coverage, which was dominated by a ‘crisis’ frame, was generally much more sympathetic to the Mubarak regime and critical of the anti-government protesters. Al-Jazeera’s reportage did not attempt to provide voice to the Mubarak government or its supporters, while Al-Arabiya’s reportage did offer a platform for some anti-Mubarak voices.

A survey of county commissioners, chamber of commerce executives and journalists in western Kansas examined perceptions and attitudes toward change in a region of declining population. The surveys were augmented with follow-up interviews. The results showed a strong preference for locally generated news content and a belief that rural journalists should be both objective and community boosters. There was skepticism towards the Internet as a source of local news. While all respondents said they welcome newcomers, only one in five indicated they were comfortable with the rising numbers of Hispanics and Latinos in the region.

In this era of globalization, information accessibility is becoming crucial to empower citizens in their political, economic and sociocultural engagements. In emerging democracies, economic, cultural and political factors have hindered and still hinder the vast majority of the population from inclusion in the media and democratic discourse. Nevertheless, a ‘new’ phenomenon of media convergence is evolving in emerging democracies like Ghana and Nigeria that appears to provide platforms for wide citizen participation in the political and social discourse. From a phenomenological and exploratory perspective, this paper presents an overview of the media convergence practices in newsrooms in Ghana and Nigeria and their potential impact on the countries’ democracy. The article, on the one hand, juxtaposes this new trend against the need for the media to play a crucial role in sustaining and developing democracy in such countries, and on the other hand it opens discussions and research enquiry into the practices and genre underlying such media productions.

The last fifteen years have witnessed the widespread adoption of the realist style of film-making, traditionally the reserve of the documentary film on news broadcasting. As a result, it has become more difficult for a documentary to function as an objective, authentic representation of reality. In other words, the ‘real’ appears to be slipping away from the documentary ‘reel’. In this article, we examine how documentary films maintain their authoritative claim of the ‘real’ now that the monopoly of the realist style has been lost. We argue that the management of the production process has become crucial for any documentary claim of authenticity and verisimilitude. The production process has become a site of intense negotiation between the different actors involved, ranging from the director, producers and protagonists to the technological equipment itself. Using actor network theory, we flesh out this decentred vision of the production process of documentary film and subsequently illustrate how documentary authority is constructed, negotiated and contested, with excerpts from a set of 35 interviews with documentary-makers.

Many scholars have published a considerable amount of research to illustrate the representation of Turkey’s EU bid in the British and European media. No study has specifically focused on the views of the journalists who had written news items concerning Turkey’s EU bid. In addressing this lacuna in the extant literature, this article explores the journalists’ approach to Turkey and Turkey-EU relations, and looks at what influenced their writings. The data gathered from the journalists, working for the British media, are presented by employing the individual level of Shoemaker and Reese’s hierarchical model.

Community, or weekly, newspapers are the primary source of news for many Canadians, but remain an under-researched field. Though challenges facing daily newspapers in urban centres have been well documented, comparatively little is known about how smaller newspapers are responding to changes brought by the Internet. This article captures a nationwide snapshot of current online journalistic practice at Canadian weekly newspapers. A survey was sent to 776 community newspaper publishers in Canada to examine specific policies for news websites. Findings reveal a variety of approaches in Internet news distribution and website management, but a stronger emphasis and reliance on the printed edition. Enhancement of the online product is being stymied by a vicious cycle of poor revenues leading to poor quality online websites.