This paper explores how local news organizations seek to strengthen their bond with audiences in French-speaking Europe (Belgium, France, and Switzerland). It does so by suggesting a new methodological approach focusing on the different ways in which this bond can be observed, i.e., the "initiatives" implemented by the news organizations. The study identifies 20 types of initiatives undertaken to (re)connect with audiences and presents a model of audience inclusion in news media in line with the literature on modalities of audience participation in news media. The discussion identifies changes in the positioning of local news organizations and journalists towards audiences regarding existing literature on participatory journalism but also on new practices more rooted in engagement, dialogue, and transparency towards audiences.

This study sought to examine the potential role of news avoidance in belief in COVID-19 misinformation. Using two-wave panel survey data in Singapore, we found that information overload is associated with news fatigue as well as with difficulty in analyzing information. News fatigue and analysis paralysis also subsequently led to news avoidance, which increased belief in COVID-19 misinformation. However, this link is present only among those who are frequently exposed to misinformation about COVID-19.

This study uses the question, 'what makes a freelancer specifically a journalist' as a starting point for investigating the ways Australian freelance journalists experienced and managed precarious employment in COVID-19 impacted 2020. Drawing on qualitative interviews with 32 self-identified freelance journalists, we analyse the types of work they did, the influence of the precarious job situation on their work choices and the consequent ways they chose to display their identity as journalists. Our findings reveal a complex picture, which calls into question some of the binaries established around journalism. While nearly all participants had to resort to work outside journalism in 2020, at least half still displayed strong links to journalism, demonstrated by their sense of belonging to a community of journalists, and their continued interest in doing self-funded public interest journalism as 'passion projects'. However, we also noticed a blurring between the descriptors of journalist and writer, based partly on employment opportunities but also, importantly, on interest in increasing creativity in the journalistic space. These results lead us to question work-test definitions as a signifier of a freelancer's bond to journalism and to propose, instead, that freelancers merit a new standing in the flattening hierarchy of journalism.

This article considers how reporting about work during the COVID-19 pandemic operated as a field of discourse that challenged the ideological workings of neoliberalism. By documenting the risks and stresses workers of all classes faced during the first year of the pandemic, the reporting began to question neoliberal capitalism as socially unsustainable. Drawing on a corpus of 151 long-form articles and commentary, we show how journalistic discourse structured relationships between different classes of workers and implicated institutions for failing to properly mitigate the risks associated with COVID-19, even though the discourse largely centered on professionals working from home. As the reporting substantiated the precarities revealed by the pandemic as social facts, it challenged presumptions that undergird neoliberal ideologies, though it remains to be seen whether journalism will discursively re-center neoliberal logics in the wake of the pandemic.

The coronavirus pandemic significantly - and perhaps permanently - altered the ways by which we lead our personal and professional lives. Sports journalism is no exception - with the seasons of all kinds of sports modified, reduced or cancelled entirely in 2020, reporters on the sports beat had to quickly adapt to ever-changing circumstances. This exploratory study investigates the impact of the pandemic on the practices of sports beat writers during the 2020 season. Through in-depth, semi-structured interviews with 12 beat writers covering teams in all four major North American sports leagues, this study reveals that the journalists' experiences with the pandemic-imposed conditions underscored already-present trends within sports journalism: namely, a reduction of access to players and coaching due, in part, to increased team control through robust media relations divisions; journalists' overreliance on official team sources; and a move towards feature and data- and analytics-driven stories. This study contributes to literature on sports journalism beat reporting and offers an early insight into how the pandemic conditions might help shape the future of the industry.

The COVID-19 has caused not just an unprecedented sanitary crisis but a social crisis, which has affected, among many other fields, the local journalism, which had to adapt to meet the public's information needs about coronavirus. In this study we analyzed the evolution of local news about COVID-19 in Spain throughout the pandemic by examining local news articles in social media. Using a unique dataset of over 230k Facebook posts published by Spanish local media organizations during 2020 and 2021, we found evidence that the interest of local media in COVID-19, measured as the proportion of the news related to COVID-19, changed as the pandemic evolved. Our results also show that the interest that local media readers had in COVID-19, measured as the proportion Facebook interactions related to COVID-19, was even higher, and also evolved during the pandemic. Although the interest in COVID-19 of local media and their readers essentially progressed in parallel, we also identified some periods in which they behaved differently. While a fatigue with COVID-19 related news would be expected after 2 years of pandemic, a clear decrease of interest was not observed neither in journalists nor in readers.

Researchers and practitioners increasingly believe that journalism must improve its relationship with audiences to increase the likelihood that people will consume and support news. In this paper, we argue that this assumption overlooks the importance of structural- and individual-level factors in shaping news audience behavior. Drawing on Giddens' theory of structuration, we suggest that, when it comes to the amount of time that people devote to news, consumers' choices are guided more by life circumstances than by news preferences. To illustrate this point, we draw on a combination of interview and audience analytics data collected when so many people's life circumstances changed: the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. We find that people consumed more news during the early months of the pandemic than normal because (1) they had more time on their hands due to things like shelter-in-place orders, layoffs, and shifts to working from home and (2) they were more interested in understanding the coronavirus' spread and risks as well as the preventative measures being pursued. We conclude that journalists should embrace "journalistic humility," thereby acknowledging and accepting that they have much less control over the reception of their work than they would like to believe.

The study examines the role of experts in UK television news at the start of the coronavirus pandemic by analysing both how they were used in coverage and perceived by news audiences. Our systematic content analysis of sources ( = 2300) used in the UK's flagship evening news bulletins found a reliance on political sources, principally from the government's perspective. We also discovered health and scientific experts received limited coverage and were only occasionally used to scrutinise public health policy. Yet, our six-week online diary study with 175 participants identified a strong preference for expert views about how the pandemic was being handled. It showed audiences favoured a range of expert sources in routine reporting - balancing government appointed and independent experts - to provide evidence-based scrutiny of the executive's decision-making. Overall, our findings contribute to a greater understanding of audience expectations, opinions, and experiences with broadcast news during a major public health crisis.

This study introduces social norm theory to mis- and disinformation research and investigates whether, how and under what conditions broadsheets' accuracy norm violation in political journalism becomes contagious and shifts other news media in a media market towards increasingly violating the accuracy norm in political journalism as well. Accuracy norm violation refers to the publication of inaccurate information. More specifically, the study compares Swiss and UK media markets and analyses Swiss and UK press councils' rulings between 2000 and 2019 that upheld complaints about accuracy norm violations in political journalism. The findings show that broadsheets increasingly violate the accuracy norm the closer election campaigns approach to election dates. They thereby drive other news media in a media market to increasingly violate the accuracy norm as well. However, this holds only for the UK media market but not for the Swiss media market. Therefore, the findings indicate that the higher expected benefits of accuracy norm violation that exist in media markets characterised by higher competition outweigh the higher expected costs of accuracy norm violation created by stronger press councils' sanctions, and, thereby, facilitate contagious accuracy norm violation in political journalism during election campaigns.

Turkey has vastly increased the scale of its investment in public diplomacy tools. Although Turkey is considered one of the world's worst jailers of journalists, its media market is one of the fastest-growing in the world. In 2015, the Istanbul-based English-language TRT World was launched with the slogan 'where news inspires change', The channel promised to provide impartial coverage of global news, with its experienced journalists addressing global audiences. In this study, we investigate the interplay between public diplomacy and editorial policies at TRT World. After conducting in-depth interviews with TRT World journalists, we argue that the channel has shifted its style from being Turkey's public diplomacy tool into becoming the AKP's voice to the world. By examining TRT World, this study provides a framework to understand how international broadcasters operate in countries where media freedom is restricted.

Journalistic role perceptions have been extensively studied in general contexts, but little is known as to how roles - or role prioritization - may shift across contexts, and professional characteristics. The aim of this study was gaining an understanding of journalists' changing role perceptions in health crisis coverage, and moreover to examine potential differences between general and specialist reporters. We conducted 22 in-depth interviews with reporters with experience in health crisis reporting in Germany and Finland. Findings suggest that journalists' roles shift when covering health crises (versus non-crises), towards a role as , towards classifying risks and from a to a more . Furthermore, professional characteristics matter in journalists' understanding and performance of their roles. Specialist reporters appear better equipped to deal with the challenges of health crisis coverage, such as balancing remaining critical with co-operation with authorities in their efforts to contain crises. Specialist reporters are also less likely to get swayed by the panic often accompanying health crises than general reporters are.

This study relies on 22 expert interviews and a survey among 40 financial journalists in the United States to reassess the role of financial journalists for financial markets in today's high-frequency information and news era. Findings point to a discrepancy between the ideal active watchdog role journalists picture for themselves and their actual role enactment. Furthermore, the process of constructing and distributing financial news has been found to be self-referential within the financial system, leaving little room for alternative voices. In this sense, the influence of regular financial reporting in driving stock market prices has been found to be limited but contingent on various factors such as unexpected news, repeatedly negative reporting, or news about a merger. Eventually, facing the proliferation of online news, journalists have raised a general concern regarding the loss of journalistic values, but they also see potentials for their discipline in light of automated reporting and online news.

This study investigates to what extent audiovisual infotainment features can be found in the narrative structure of television news in three European countries. Content analysis included a sample of 639 news reports aired in the first 3 weeks of September 2013, in six prime-time TV news broadcasts of Ireland, Spain, and the Netherlands. It was found that Spain and Ireland included more technical features of infotainment in television news compared to the Netherlands. Also, the use of infotainment techniques is more often present in commercial, than in public broadcasting. Finally, the findings indicate no clear pattern of the use of infotainment techniques across news topics as coded in this study.

This article explores frame building in Scottish television coverage of the 2014 independence referendum. It uses content analysis of news and current affairs coverage and semi-structured interviews with broadcasters and their sources to explain how factors internal and external to the media may be specifically connected to the prominence of generic issue and game frames in the coverage. It argues that broadcasters' perception of their role in this event and the powerful influence of political sources were factors that encouraged policy-focused coverage, while the journalistic routine of balance and media organizations' perceptions of what would attract audiences favoured the strategic game frame.

This study on news coverage of highly visible company types in a Dutch daily quality newspaper (; N = 14,363), during the economic crisis (2007-2013), shows that attention to banks (and to a lesser extent also to the automobile and components industry) had a structural negative influence on media agenda diversity. The majority of the other salient company types had a significant positive impact on diversity. These results suggest that banks attracted attention at the expense of more varied, diverse coverage during the crisis. Our findings extend knowledge of agenda-building dynamics in relation to organizational news by considering characteristics of the broader media agenda. We discuss our findings in light of causes and consequences of media coverage of salient businesses.

This article problematizes the relationship between clicks and audience interests. Clicking patterns are often seen as evidence that news users are mostly interested in junk news, leading to concerns about the state of journalism and the implications for society. Asking and observing how 56 users actually browse news and what clicking and clicking mean to them, we identified 30 distinct considerations for (not) clicking and classified them into three categories: cognitive, affective and pragmatic. The results suggest, first, that interest is too crude a term to account for the variety of people's considerations for (not) clicking. Second, even if one aims for roughly estimating people's news interests, clicks are a flawed instrument because a lack of clicking does not measure people's lack of interest in news. Third, taking users' browsing patterns seriously could help bridge the gap between what people need as citizens and what they actually consume. Finally, we argue that all metrics should be critically assessed from a user perspective rather than taken at face value.

Journalism has enjoyed a rich and relatively stable history of professionalization. Scholars coming from a variety of disciplines have theorized this history, forming a consistent body of knowledge codified in national and international handbooks and canonical readers. However, recent work and analysis suggest that the supposed core of journalism and the assumed consistency of the inner workings of news organizations are problematic starting points for journalism studies. In this article, we challenge the consensual (self-)presentation of journalism - in terms of its occupational ideology, its professional culture, and its sedimentation in routines and organizational structures (cf. the newsroom) in the context of its reconfiguration as a , , and way of working and of being at work. We outline a way beyond individualist or institutional approaches to do justice to the current complex transformation of the profession. We propose a framework to bring together these approaches in a dialectic attempt to move through and journalism as it has traditionally been conceptualized and practiced, allowing for a broader definition and understanding of the myriad of practices that make up journalism.

Although narrative journalism has a long history in the Netherlands, it is in recent years being promoted as a 'new' genre. This study examines the motives underlying this promotional tactic. To that end, we analyze how narrative journalism is framed in (1) public expressions of the initiatives aimed at professionalization of the genre and (2) interviews with journalists and lecturers in journalism programs. Results indicate that in public discourse on narrative journalism, the genre is framed as , , and as . These frames indicate that the current promotion of narrative journalism as 'new' can be seen as a strategy that journalists apply to withstand the pressures they are facing in the competition with new media. These frames are deepened in the interviews with lecturers and practitioners, who frame narrative journalism as a , a , and as . These frames indicate that narrative journalism is regarded as the highest achievable goal for journalists, but that its practice comes with dangers and risks: it tempts journalists to abandon the traditional principles of objectivity and factuality, which can ultimately cause journalism to lose its credibility and authority. We discuss these findings in terms of and reflect on implications for narrative journalism's societal function.

As gatekeepers, journalists have the power to select the sources that get a voice in crisis coverage. The aim of this study is to find out how journalists select sources during a crisis. In a survey, journalists were asked how they assess the following sources during an organizational crisis: news agencies, an organization undergoing a crisis, and the general public. The sample consisted of 214 Dutch experienced journalists who at least once covered a crisis. Using structural equation modeling, sources' likelihood of being included in the news was predicted using five source characteristics: credibility, knowledge, willingness, timeliness, and the relationship with the journalist. Findings indicated that during a crisis, news agencies are most likely to be included in the news, followed by the public, and finally the organization. The significance of the five source characteristics is dependent on source type. For example, to be used in the news, news agencies and organizations should be mainly evaluated as knowledgeable, whereas information from the public should be both credible and timely. In addition, organizations should not be seen as too willing or too eager to communicate. The findings imply that, during a crisis, journalists remain critical gatekeepers; however, they rely mainly on familiar sources.

This article reconsiders the concepts of balance and impartiality in journalism, in the context of a quantitative content analysis of sourcing patterns in BBC news programming on radio, television and online in 2007 and 2012. Impartiality is the cornerstone of principles of public service broadcasting at the BBC and other broadcasters modelled on it. However, the article suggests that in the case of the BBC, it is principally put into practice through juxtaposing the positions of the two main political parties - Conservative and Labour. On this basis, the article develops the idea of the 'paradigm of impartiality-as-balance.' This paradigm prevails despite the news organisation's commitment to representing a broader range of opinion. The paradigm of impartiality-as-balance means that only a narrow range of views and voices are heard on the most contentious and important issues. Further, it results in reporting that focuses on party-political conflict, to the detriment of a journalism which provides much-needed context.

This study examines the news selection practices followed by news organizations through investigating the news posted on social networking sites and, in particular, the Facebook pages of four foreign Arabic language TV stations: The Iranian Al-Alam TV, Russia Today, Deutsche Welle, and BBC. A total of 15,589 news stories are analyzed in order to examine the prominence of references to countries and political actors. The study reveals that social significance and proximity as well as the news organizations' ideological agenda are the most important elements that dictate the news selection process.