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Summary Introduction to journalism studies I 2022
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Summary of week 1-7 from IJS 2022. I summarised the slides, relevant in-class discussions and the assigned literature.
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Introduction to journalism studiesWeek 1. Journalists, audiences and content
The discipline that thinks about journalism
What is journalism?
- True/factual > rules you can follow to find truth
- Qualities: objectivity and neutrality > later more about what they mean
- Boundaries > pushing your opinion?
- Connective power: world would be small without it
Why do we study it?
What should journalism be?
- Tell us things that we should know
- Public interest: things that are interesting for public? Or things that public is
interesting in?
How can we study journalism?
- Who owns the media?
Lippmann, W. (1992) - The World Outside And The Pictures In Our Heads
- Before there was journalism studies
- What is public opinion? How does it form?
- Many things you don’t know from yourself but through media
- Of all the representations that come across, journalism is an important one
- Journalism institution of truth telling > influence on picture in our head
- Corona virus > common idea that we had (thing called pandemic, behave
certain way) > picture comes from news coverage of pandemic
- Nature of picture in head is affected by communication bubble you’re sitting in
(banana bread vs. tragic)
- We act in terms of these pictures in our head (whether true or not) >
journalism as political force
- This is why media studies / journalism studies exists > political stakes can be
high
The idea in your head influences behavior > political stakes can be high
Kovach and Rosenstiel: the purpose of journalism is to provide people with the
information they need to be free and self-governing
Wahl-Jorgensen, K., Hanitzsch, T. (2019) ‘Journalism Studies: Developments,
Challenges, and Future Directions
- Democracy and journalism are inseparable
- Be skeptical > countries that are not democratic but do have things that we
recognize as journalism (E.g. Russia, China)
,Make up your own mind while reading!
Journalism studies: Central questions today
- How is journalism happening now? > descriptive
- How is journalism changing? How do we preserve this institution / fix it?
Journalism studies: What do we look at? Triangle of 3 dimensions
- Content
- Production
- Audiences/users
o More complicated nowadays > audience can encounter news on
several platforms + respond
Journalism studies is not a field that came by itself but came because other fields
had same questions that were not answered within their field
Critique of journalism studies focused on UK/US > sometimes problems only for
UK/US but act like it’s global
A history of the field
- Prehistory (1800- early 1900)
o German normative concern: how should journalism fit into society?
o
- Empirical turn (US 1950s)
o USA started measuring everything > what is happening?
o Understand the workings of news media
o While most research in this period was concerned with audiences and
media effects, the emerging field of journalism studies gradually turned
its attention to “news people” and their professional values, as well as
to editorial structures and routines (see also Oscar Westlund and Mats
Ekström’s chapter). Theories and concepts were based on empirical
research, such as the gatekeeper model (White, 1950); the
professionalization paradigm (McLeod & Hawley, 1964); and the
theories of news values (Galtung & Ruge, 1965) and agenda setting
- Sociological turn (1970s 1980s)
o Sociologist study the people who do news / culture of news
o Sociology and anthropology
o The focus shifted to a critical engagement with journalism’s conventions
and routines, professional and occupational ideologies and cultures,
interpretive communities, and to concepts related to news texts, such
as framing, storytelling, and narrative, as well as to the growing
importance of popular culture in the news.
o Anglo American scholars
- International turn (1990s)
o Journalism is not the same around the world
, Journalism studies now
- Emotional turn
o How does emotion and feelings effect the work of journalists?
- De-westernising / Postcolonial perspective
o UK/US is not universally, look at other parts of the world outside EU/US
- Return to materiality
o Money / physical technologies (structure of the internet)
- Platforms and algorithms
o Platforms – rules
o Make use of algorithms
- Digital ethnography
o Ethnography was that you could go to an actual newsroom
o If we want to study journalism, we hang out in a digital space
Week 2. News Values
- News values in production > in the heads of journalists
- Socialization > how did journalists learn the news values
- Social media > effect on news values
... a “set of criteria employed by journalists to measure and therefore to judge the
‘newsworthiness’ of events’. News values, and the notion of newsworthiness that
they are derived from, are meant to be the crystallized reflection of, or ‘ground rules’
for deciding, what an identified audience is interested in reading or watching.” – Bob
Franklin et al.
- Whether events is newswhorty is not objectively in the event
- It is about whether some audience somewhere will be interested
- For something to be news we have to think about who it might be news for >
are you writing for those people?
- If something is news is unlinked to if it is morally/politically important
- Public interest: ought to know vs. want to know
Events don’t have an objective importance – might be morally/politically important but
does not mean they are newswhorty
Common criteria
- Timeliness > happening now
- Proximity > close (e.g. geographically, cultural, language)
o Cultural proximity not always both ways > EU / USA
o Liveness can strengthen it > see it happening (Twitter stream) = close
- Conflict > more than war
- Prominence > famous people / countries (elite)
o Not necessarily enough by itself
o Eminence = a position of prominence or superiority
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