Popular criticism of legacy news media is argued to have the capacity to influence journalistic practice and subsequently keep journalists accountable. Scholars give prescriptions of the kinds of criticisms journalists need, if they are to be kept accountable to journalistic norms and values, but this has not been matched with perspectives of journalists. Following in-depth interviews with 24 practising journalists in Kenya and South Africa, the study found that although journalists treat fairness, facts and positiveness as “good” attributes of media critique, they are more inclined towards criticisms that show an understanding of news processes.
The advent of new technologies has always spurred questions about changes in journalism—its content, its means of production, and its consumption. A quite recent development in the realm of digital journalism is software-generated content, i.e. automatically produced content. This paper seeks to investigate how readers perceive software-generated content in relation to similar content written by a journalist. The study utilizes an experimental methodology where respondents were subjected to different news articles that were written either by a journalist or were software-generated. The respondents were then asked to answer questions about how they perceived the article—its overall quality, credibility, objectivity, etc. The paper presents the results from an initial small-scale study with findings suggesting that while the software-generated content is perceived as descriptive and boring, it is also considered to be objective although not necessarily discernible from content written by journalists. The paper discusses the results of the study and its implication for journalism practice.
Research concerning user participation in online news has demonstrated that news websites offer a wide range of participatory features, but largely permit users only to comment on already- published material. This longitudinal analysis of Sweden’s four major mainstream national news websites focuses on front-page news items to investigate to what extent user participation has increased over time and whether the participatory features present allow users to exert control over key journalistic processes. Its findings indicate that user participation has increased rapidly in regard to processes peripheral to news journalism, but also that users have to a minor extent begun over time to perform work previously reserved for professional journalists.
In this study, situated in Sweden, citizen community journalism in 290 municipalities is evaluated. The results reveal that there are very few cases of citizen journalism at a community level, and that the existing citizen journalists focus on business news, entertainment and sports. When sources are used, they are few and originate from social institutions such as business, media, authorities and politics rather than citizens. Furthermore, there are only a few occasions when local authorities are included at all, even less so scrutinised, in the news stories. All in all, the study indicates that Swedish citizen community journalism has trouble either providing information that maintains the community or being the watchdog of that community.
Using a survey of a sample of hyperlocal actors in Sweden (N = 178), this article examines preconditions, motivations and sustainability for hyperlocal media operations, outside the traditional media chains, in order to provide a picture of their function in the current media landscape, and to further build on the understanding of the hyperlocal business model. This study extends the hyperlocal definition by including media platforms other than websites. The results show that the operations indeed aim to support and foster citizenship, strengthen democracy and mirror the local community. At the same time, as shown by other studies, the fact that they are not large-scale, highly profitable operations may challenge their sustainability. Nonetheless, most of them claim to be profitable, largely because of the print platform, and have a positive outlook on the future. Revenues from advertising and readership are currently less substantial for Web-based operations, which reinforces the need to broaden the definition of hyperlocal publishing platforms when talking about financial sustainability. Currently, hyperlocal media in Sweden, with small resources and a lower publishing frequency, cannot be viewed as a replacement of established media, but play important roles as complementary alternative voices and contribute to media plurality in the local community.
Previous studies of intimidation and harassment of journalists have (rightly) focused on non-democratic and authoritarian nations and/or transitional/emerging democracies. In this article, we examine the situation in Sweden, a country with strong de facto and de jure safeguards of journalistic freedom and autonomy. We report the findings from a representative survey of Swedish journalists where three themes are analysed: the extent of harassment, the forms of harassment, and the consequences of intimidation and harassment. The results show that a third of the respondents had experienced threats at work in the past year, and an overwhelming majority said they had received offensive and insulting comments. Intimidation and harassment also had consequences, both professionally and personally, such as fear and self-censorship. We therefore argue that it is time to add the dimension of external pressure and threats to the discussion of journalistic autonomy—including in countries like Sweden.
Over the last decades, media environments have become radically transformed. Among the most significant changes is the rise of interactive media technologies, which raise new questions about how influence over media content has changed. At the same time, changes in media technologies and how they may change the influence over the news should not be understood in isolation from other changes in media environments. Against this background, the purpose of this paper is to investigate how much influence journalists ascribe to different sets of actors; how they perceive changes over time; and whether journalists working with online publishing differ in these respects from other journalists. Among other things, the study shows that the most influential group is perceived to be journalists, followed by the audience and media owners. The group that is perceived to have increased their influence the most is media owners. All investigated groups* except journalists*are perceived to have increased their influence at least somewhat. The results are discussed in the light of research on how interactive media technologies may reshape the influence over the news.
Previous research has shown that young people's voices are under- and misrepresented in the news. However, the editorial mechanisms behind this outcome remain largely unexplored. Drawing from the professional frame of media accountability, young people present journalism with a double challenge: to avoid harm while enabling participation. In this paper, we examine editorial mechanisms of including/excluding young people in the news in Sweden and Estonia through an overview of ethical breach cases affecting minors and a set of semi-structured interviews with editors. These investigations are set in the context of digital changes and from the perspectives of children's rights and childhood as a social construct. The interview study revealed that facilitating the freedom of expression might be an editorial ideal, but in practice, minors have limited value as news sources. While editors paid close attention to protective measures for underage interviewees, these measures were sometimes inconsistent and overly protective. Furthermore, the majority of ethical breach cases concerned children who were talked about, rather than with. Therefore, we argue that current editorial interpretations of media accountability limit young people's voices in the news, while still failing to provide an effective remedy for harm.
The involvement of citizens in public life through the Internet, variously described by terms such as interactivity and user-generated content, is frequently held up as a democracy-enhancing development. However, these concepts say little about the exact nature and character of media–audience relations. We wish to introduce a more detailed taxonomy of user-generated content (UGC) that takes issues of power and influence into account. We examine the media–reader relationship (in online newspapers) by looking at (1) degree of participation and (2) type of content. We also suggest that it might be fruitful to think in terms of a political economy of UGC. Our results show that users are mostly empowered to create popular culture-oriented content and personal/everyday life-oriented content rather than news/informational content. Direct user involvement in news production is minimal. There is a clear political economy of UGC: UGC provision in mainstream media to a great extent addresses users-as-consumers and is part of a context of consumption
Research on journalists and journalistic work has focused on journalists with permanent, full-time employment. Given the rapid decrease of such employment opportunities, we argue that journalism research needs to pay more attention to those who those who have had to leave their jobs and either stopped doing journalism entirely, or who have switched to a freelance career (sometimes combining journalism with other work). This category of people is at once becoming more marginalized and “the new normal” within the occupation: In this paper, we furthermore focus on local (Swedish) journalists and ex-journalists. Based on a set of semi-structured interviews (n = 12) with ex-journalists who share the experience of having lost their permanent, full-time jobs, we use the concept of livelihood as an analytical tool. The concept of livelihood highlights the shift from journalism as a job practiced exclusive of other jobs to an activity conducted alongside other income-generating activities and makes it possible to analyse leaving the occupation from a context that incorporates the whole life situation of the respondents. This also contributes to the current wave of studies of journalism and job loss by adding qualitative data about individual experiences of job loss to the existing quantitative survey evidence.