The study explores the (re)negotiated visuality of television journalism during the first wave of the epidemic in Slovenia and on this basis examines the visibility of the COVID-19 crisis. ...Institutionalised procedures and relations of production together with the conventional visual-aural news form are analysed by assessing journalism's (cl)aims of bringing relevant events and disputes to public attention, uncovering hidden social realities, and enabling people to engage in public life. By combining qualitative interviews with journalists and editors of public television and the leading commercial broadcaster with ethnographic content analysis of the lead news packages, the study reveals "not as neat television like before the epidemic", albeit a detailed analysis of the mechanisms for ensuring veracity in the newscasts showed "business as usual" in television journalism. Although the two newsrooms (cl)aimed to be performing in line with the journalism's normative foundations, chiefly monitoring disputes, deviances and changes, making them visible for people in their public engagements and encounters with power, the study points to the emergence of "kaleidoscopic vision". Namely, television journalism provided a shifted, fractured and scrambled vision of the COVID-19 crisis defined by competing, conflicting and dysfunctional narratives articulated in the contradictory (dis)connect within the journalism-power-citizenry nexus.
Sourcing practices are among the central research topics within the sociology of the media. Empirical studies have analysed what and who are the major journalistic sources, demonstrating that the ...selections journalists make not only depend on their subjective choices, but are connected to the norms and routines established in the profession. While invaluable, these studies are primarily media-centric and focused on small-scale investigations, meaning they regularly ignore the social totality in which sourcing is inevitably embedded. Such studies hence also pay too little attention to the external actors that provide ‘information subsidies’ to journalists. By employing the framework of the public sphere, we show that news sources should be viewed as a topic of central social relevance that touches on wider power relations within society. Sociological approaches should thus be complemented with other critical traditions, for instance the political economy of communication. The latter approach’s value is revealed in brief sketches that point to the possibilities of achieving deeper understanding of the topic.
The study explores uses of algorithmic techniques in journalists’ working environments and investigates newsroom managers’ negotiations of automation as innovation process aimed at ensuring partial ...or full replacement of human labour with technology. Drawing from 15 qualitative interviews with representatives of newsroom management from legacy news institutions in the United Kingdom, Germany and the United States, the study analyses their (cl)aims to maintain the newsroom as a stable, but dynamic working environment and reveals three dualist propositions when negotiating automation novelties – human journalistic agency stands in contrast to technology, skills are separated from newsworkers, and the creation of news contrasts with its presentation. The results show the interviewees re-articulate the dominance of human agency over technology, re-establish technological innovations as liberating newsworkers rather than subordinating them, and standardise news by re-evaluating the concept as both a civic bond and a commodity. Such considerations are detached from recent concerns about automation of human labour and closer to what we call algorithmic sublime, maintaining the newsroom management’s loyalty to both the professional values of journalism and the corporate goals of management.
Human Still in the Loop Milosavljević, Marko; Vobič, Igor
Digital journalism,
9/14/2019, 2019-09-14, Volume:
7, Issue:
8
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
The study investigates how automation novelties in the newsroom both challenge and maintain the core values of journalism's professional ideology. Building on semi-structured interviews with editors ...of legacy news institutions in the United Kingdom and Germany, the study reveals the rationales behind the changing journalism-technology relationship and the dynamics of the re-articulation of the core ideals of journalism. In discussing automation with respect to strategic newsroom development, the interviewees see journalism's professional ideology as being in a state of flux. They identify contradictions between automation and some of journalism's core ideals (public service, autonomy, and objectivity) and acknowledge both the potential and limits of technology with regard to others (timeliness and ethics). Despite the growing relevance of automation for news production, human journalists are still regarded as the dominant agents in news production and its continuous reinvention. This human-still-in-the-loop perspective highlights the idea that journalism is undergoing a profound yet long transformation where new technologies are not simply appearing and changing everything, but are innovations developed and embedded in established relations of the news production process. This perspective both reiterates and challenges the prevailing meanings of journalism.
The study provides a historical inquiry into online journalism newsroom arrangements in the context of the Slovenian media environment. The author concentrates on two leading Slovenian newspapers, ...Delo and Dnevnik, and explores spatial organisation, editorial decision-making and news-making routines by adopting three qualitative methods: observation, interviews and document analysis. The study shows that online journalism at respective newspapers developed through three phases: (1) from one-man bands where individual online staffers performed as multifunctional all-rounders having the technical tasks of shovelling print content online (mid-1990s to early 2000s); (2) through organisationally and spatially separate online departments where standardisation of news-making routines was mainly defined by the principle of speed (mid-2000s to late 2000s); and (3) to newsroom integration with distinct models of decision-making, spatial organisation and print-online relations (late 2000s onwards).
Using the case of two Slovenian print media as an example, this article examines how online multimedia news has been adopted, what role different newsroom organization models play in online ...multimedia news production, and what multimedia news formats have emerged on news websites of Slovenian print media organizations. In the last decade, different multimedia news content has been emerging rapidly within news websites of print media organizations with online production organized differently and multimedia news formatted distinctly. A review of scholarly debates and research in media and journalism studies reveals that the particular institutionally structured features of online news production, and the technical and organizational attributes which influence what gets represented in the medium and the manner in which it is done have not yet emerged. Furthermore, on the basis of news format analysis, participant observation, and problem-centered interviews, the article concludes that there is a lack of vision in furthering the evolution of online production organization and news formats in Slovenian print media arena, which signals the present marginal significance of online multimedia news.
The public broadcaster RTV Slovenia strategically relied on non-standard employment for its permanent workers until the courts ruled that this was unlawful about a decade ago. The ensuing process of ...standardising employment has led to the regular employment of about 500 "permanently outsourced workers" under various arrangements. To interrogate the inverse, the study tests the Streeckian "beneficial constraints hypothesis", whereby a reduction of external numerical flexibility should push RTVS on to the path of socially more sustainable flexibility in its internal functions that prove to be economically beneficial. The process expanded the standard employment and the grounding for the collective organisation of newsworkers, while the prevailing imperative of "rationalising" the tendencies for the norm of work intensification with greater workloads, saturated working time, and basic reskilling in the newsroom. Unlike the process of "proletarisation" that has economically subordinated journalists through the process of professionalisation and its ideologisation that sought to align their interests with those of media owners, the study reveals patterns of the "creative destruction of journalism" in response to the worsening material conditions of professional journalism, adapting newswork to the evolving commercial modes of digitised communication, introducing the ideology of non-professionalism to reskilling, while exposing newsworkers to pauperisation.
Practice of Hypertext Vobič, Igor
Journalism practice,
20/7/4/, Volume:
8, Issue:
4
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Despite scholarly research inconsistencies in conceptualizations of hypertext, there seems to be a consensus among scholars from different epistemological grounds that hypertextuality as a ...communication potential refers to the interconnectivity and interlayering of textual parts in an extended nonlinear chain of integrated content that enables innovation in practices within the triad journalist-text-reader. However, within this rather large area of research, media and journalism scholars have paid minimal attention to hypertext as practice despite hypertext raising many questions regarding the processes and relations of news making. In this paper the author attempts to fill this research gap and to investigate how hypertext shapes different phases of online news making, that is, gathering, selecting, and assessing information, and how these processes influence journalist-source-audience relations. This study thus provides analysis of data gathered through participant observation in the online departments of two leading Slovenian print media organizations, Delo and Dnevnik, and in-depth interviews with their online journalists and editors. The analysis indicated that (1) lack of reasoning and a conservative mind-set prevail among online staffers when conceptualizing hypertext; (2) the normalization of hypertextual news making is subordinated to speed and timeliness in news delivery; and (3) nurtured journalist-source-audience relations bring little to strengthen the social relevance of news. These results confirmed hypertext as a commodity rather than emphasizing its public character. The practice of hypertext at the two Slovenian newspapers indicates a phenomenon that could be labelled as journalistic deskilling in online news making.
This study offers insights into articulations between the normative and the empirical in online journalists’ self-negotiations concerning their roles in people’s assimilation of information, the ...daily provision of news and their institutional status in online departments. In-depth interviews with online journalists from two leading newspapers, Delo in Slovenia and Novosti in Serbia, are used to investigate their negotiations with respect to their societal role. The analysis reveals troubled negotiation processes among interviewed online journalists when they consider what is regarded as “true” journalism, news production requirements and their institutional status. This indicates that rearrangements of political–economic relations in both post-socialist societies have increased journalism’s responsibility to the media owners and power holders and surpassed its normatively defined responsibility to the public. Both case subjects are compared through the prism of the processes of negotiation of normative principles of journalism in the social, national and institutional contexts of the two newspapers.
Who Leads the Twitter Tango? Vobič, Igor; Maksuti, Alem; Deželan, Tomaž
Digital journalism,
10/2017, Volume:
5, Issue:
9
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
By reconsidering the complexities of the journalist-politician relationship, the study pursues the metaphor of tango introduced by Herbert J. Gans and analyses the online interplay in Twitter ...conversations between journalistic and political actors. Various types of conversations emerged through the quantitative analysis of the tweets, which ranged from seeking mutual affection, through monitoring-advocating connections and information sharing to unbridgeable advocacy. According to the interviewed journalistic and political actors, such tweets were shaped by their subjective considerations of boundaries in their Twitter repertoires as the principles of social media networking have not been institutionalized in either Slovenian newsrooms or parties. The results revealed that neither journalists nor politicians led the Twitter tango, but instead whether these actors engaged in Twitter conversations as either initiators or respondents. The identified boundary dynamics of the Twitter tango indicate that social media are a particular venue for the articulation of journalist-politician relationships, which in some cases are shaped by offline relations. The findings imply that in Slovenia contemporary journalism's relation to politics is paradoxical because it is shaped by the liquidity of late-modern social communication and the compactness of an elite culture.
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