While scholarship has studied the boundary discourses of (quasi-)journalistic actors on social network sites, how audiences perceive these boundaries and engage with these interlopers’ work has been ...examined far less frequently. Drawing on 11 focus groups, this article explores how audiences construct boundaries by examining and comparing their expectations of content creators on Instagram, YouTube and blogs, with traditional journalism and journalists. Findings show audiences expect journalists to embody established, normative journalistic values, largely excluding content creators from this field. Audiences’ expectations of content creators reveal a more nuanced picture, which includes expectations of authenticity and transparency, engagement, and quality, slow content. Interpreted against broader debates in journalism, we argue that they reveal implicitly journalistic values and expectations, thus blurring normative boundary distinctions. Furthermore, audiences feel an increase in market orientation among both journalists and content creators leads to lower connection and perceptions of credibility, thus further disrupting boundaries.
Audience expectations of journalism reveal how well journalism is performing its role in society in the minds of its consumers. In an increasingly fragmented media and audience landscape, it has ...become more important to consider how social identity shapes audience expectations. However, scholarship has tended to examine expectations based on single identity categories (e.g., class or gender), revealing a crucial but disassembled understanding of how audiences perceive the journalism they consume. This study relies on an intersectional framework and eight focus groups to examine how class, race, and gender, as intersecting and mutually constitutive modes of power/oppression, shape audiences' expectations of journalism in South Africa. It identifies intersectional differences in audiences' expectations of solutions journalism, perceptions of journalism's unaffordability and inaccessibility, and normative evaluations of quality and popular journalism that reveal classist and racist discourses of distinction and stereotyping. The study demonstrates the importance of intersectionality as a critical framework for studying audience expectations and the extent to which they are in/excluded and rendered (in)visible to journalism's dominant ideology.
An innovation and change discourse has become central in journalism studies scholarship concerned with highlighting solutions to the many challenges confronting media in the digital era. Although ...with good intentions, these debates have been predominantly technocentric in their imagination of media’s future, inadvertently directing its development towards a preoccupation with mastering digital technologies. On the one hand, media have strategically appropriated and exploited such technocentric discourse to position themselves within the field as leaders with considerable prestige and status. On the other hand, however, journalists and media professionals have approached technological innovation with caution, demonstrating innovation to be a gradual process with incremental changes that need to align with or reimagine practices that support journalism’s core ambitions and public service ideals. Drawing on the scholarly work of colleagues included in this thematic issue, in this editorial we conceptualize media innovation as a fuzzy and contested concept and call for an expanded research agenda that redirects our attention more firmly towards: exploring organisational and institutional innovation; considering the role of ancillary organisations, collaborative projects, and the various newly emerging innovative actors within and outside of the journalistic field; adopting bottom-up approaches to examine societal innovation and its public value and scrutinize questions around who benefits from change; and finally, paying more attention to the transnational as well as culture-specific contexts in which media innovations happens.
A growing amount of scholarship on lifestyle journalism and role conceptions has shown its relevance in the context of consumption cultures and societal changes. However, the existing literature has ...tended to focus on countries with relatively prosperous economies, neglecting to explore those with greater socio-economic inequality. Likewise, scholarship has offered some insight into what audiences expect of political journalists, but we know little about expectations of lifestyle journalism. Exploring role conceptions and expectations in socio-economically unequal societies gives rise to the question: How may social class shape these? To examine this, our study draws on 22 in-depth interviews with lifestyle journalists and three focus groups with audiences from different class backgrounds in South Africa. Findings suggest that lifestyle journalists’ awareness of class disparity and the country’s history of racial segregation and oppression shapes their roles in three ways. First, journalists expressed strong support for roles typically associated with political journalism, albeit interconnected with lifestyle roles. Second, journalists acted as ‘responsible’ cultural intermediaries, mediating the worlds of luxury and inequality. Third, journalists expressed a strong role orientation toward providing aspiration, as did audience expectations, indicating a level of congruence. Applying a Bourdieusian framework, we argue that lifestyle journalism allows audiences who live under ‘conditions of scarcity’ and who have been conceptualized as having a ‘taste of necessity’, to perform a ‘taste of aspiration’. We suggest a need to reconceptualize scholarship’s approach to studying journalistic roles by moving beyond a politics-lifestyle binary, and to more closely examine the role of aspiration in lifestyle journalism.
Scholarship has pointed to an artificial hierarchy between political and lifestyle journalism that is rooted in norms and values stemming from Western-liberal thought. Within this distinction, ...lifestyle journalism has been subordinated as occupying a marginal or peripheral position in the field. Yet, how journalists perceive this distinction has rarely been studied empirically. This study draws on concepts of ‘boundary work’ and ‘othering’ to examine how political and lifestyle journalists discursively reinforce and contest boundaries and hierarchies. Through semi-structured interviews with 22 lifestyle and 26 political journalists and editors in South Africa, we show that political and lifestyle journalists engaged in both intra-field (self-)expansion, and (self-)expulsion and (self-)othering, by evoking several boundary markers. Boundaries were reinforced through gendered discourses, autonomy ideals, claims to specialization and accessibility in news beats and presentation, beliefs about political journalism’s preservation of humanity, and greater risks to safety of political journalists. Boundaries were challenged by politicizing lifestyle journalism and popularizing political journalism, providing a counter-narrative to political journalism’s negativity, and treating lifestyle journalism as economically beneficial.
•Authenticity labour and authenticity consumption of behaviour is congruent•Authenticity of visuals is perceived differently by producers and consumers•Producers believe editing adds to their ...categorical authenticity and recognition value•Consumers prefer videos as marker of authentic behaviour•Authenticity online shifts based on expectations of actors involved
Social media have facilitated an environment in which ordinary users can reach large audiences and make money with the content they produce. However, with growing success, their ordinary appeal begins to lack credibility, leading micro-bloggers to invest in authenticity labour, a process where they perform and present genuineness. While authenticity labour has previously been discussed in light of ‘realness’ and covert product placement, visual dimensions of authenticity have been underexplored, despite the fact that many social media have important visual components. To address this gap, this study explores Instagram micro-bloggers’ and users’ views in relation to the various dimensions of authenticity labour. We find considerable congruence between producers’ and audiences’ perceptions of relevant authenticity dimensions. However, we also find incongruence around the evaluation of visual components, where producers view editing as important to perform authenticity, but audiences disagree. Moreover, this study emphasizes the relational character of authenticity, as it is an evaluation of expectations met or disappointed.
Abstract Journalists constantly navigate pressures and competing expectations from diverse stakeholders, all of whom have an interest in shaping journalistic work. Scholarship examining the wide ...range of influences on journalists has often placed the journalist at the center of the inquiry. We further the argument that there is an urgent need to place more emphasis on understanding the expectations that various stakeholders hold of journalists. To do so, we introduce a conceptual framework to (1) explore expectations across a range of modalities, forms and contexts, and map out their diversity across different stakeholders, and (2) to evaluate which stakeholders’ expectations may hold the power to prompt change and conformity in journalism. By triangulating different perspectives, we gain insight into whose expectations journalism may be prioritizing and fulfilling, or conversely, failing to meet.
The growth of advertising and PR industries in recent years, combined with the economic downturn in many news organizations has led to renewed debates about the influence of commercial pressures on ...journalistic work. While the relationship has frequently been studied in relation to hard news journalism, less attention has been paid to other beats, especially those which have always had a closer relationship with commercial interests. Focusing on the field of lifestyle journalism, this article presents the results of a survey of more than 600 Australian lifestyle journalists. It examines in detail how these journalists experience working with advertising and PR interests, as well as the provision of free products and services. It finds that lifestyle journalists broadly deny being influenced too much by these pressures, however, regression analysis suggests that, in particular, younger journalists experience more pressure, as do magazine journalists, as well as those working in the areas of travel, fashion and beauty journalism.
Recent research has examined the sociomaterial contexts that shape journalistic practice within and beyond the newsroom, considering relationships between humans, and between humans and (non)physical ...artifacts like desks, computers, or software. While much of that research has focused on the use and role of technology, recent research also suggests an affective dimension of materiality like the sense of stability provided by physical news spaces. The newsroom as a material and lived place and place of power relations can greatly shape journalists' work practices and identity. However, the relevance of the newsroom as a physical place for journalistic practice has so far been taken for granted. This study investigates the role of the newsroom as a physical, material place for journalistic practice and how it contributes to journalists' sense of belonging and identity. Drawing on interviews with 18 Austrian journalists, we find that newsrooms as sociomaterial places facilitate proximity and serendipity which is perceived as relevant for creative and effective work, as well as a visible manifestation of in-group belonging. As such this study contributes to a better understanding of the meaning and relevance of newsrooms as material places for journalistic work.
Peripheral actors in journalism Sandra Banjac
Media International Australia, Incorporating Culture & Policy,
05/2023, Letnik:
187, Številka:
1
Book Review
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
Review(s) of: Peripheral actors in journalism, by Aljosha Karim Schapals, London, New York: Routledge, 2022; 80 pp., ISBN: 9780367701260, A$76.00.
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