For journalism to survive and flourish, it needs journalists who understand its importance to society, believe in and are committed to its core values, and can put those values into action. This goal is at the heart of Living Journalism, a highly readable, practical book where readers will learn the core values and principles needed to produce work that informs and enlightens an increasingly mobile and participatory audience. The advice and stories of professionals throughout the book allow veteran reporters to serve as mentors to today's journalists.
This book examines the moral role of news media practitioners and organizations, and applies a modified philosophical account of Virtue Ethics as a framework for the role of journalists—and journalism organizations—in public life. It shows how journalists and news organizations that adopt an aim towards professional excellence (virtue) by putting a premium on investigative journalism—with both large and small measures depending on the nature of the reporting—can achieve lofty professional goals under modern deadlines. The news media, both electronic and traditional, are imperative to an informed public, and an informed public is critical to a properly functioning cross-section of social, government and corporate domains. The book emphasizes the virtues of justice and integrity as foundational to professional practice. It examines the modern ethical challenges presented by organizations ranging from online upstarts to massive media conglomerates, each that have economic challenges that can inhibit professional excellence through corruption or corrosion. The author applies his account of virtue—bolstered by suggestions for complementary reforms in education and regulation—to improve an ethically challenged industry as it undergoes significant technological change.
This volume sets out the state-of-the-art in the discipline of journalism at a time in which the practice and profession of journalism is in serious flux. While journalism is still anchored to its history, change is infecting the field. The profession, and the scholars who study it, are reconceptualizing what journalism is in a time when journalists no longer monopolize the means for spreading the news. Here, journalism is explored as a social practice, as an institution, and as memory. The roles, epistemologies, and ethics of the field are evolving. With this in mind, the volume revisits classic theories of journalism, such as gatekeeping and agenda-setting, but also opens up new avenues of theorizing by broadening the scope of inquiry into an expanded journalism ecology, which now includes citizen journalism, documentaries, and lifestyle journalism, and by tapping the insights of other disciplines, such as geography, economics, and psychology. The volume is a go-to map of the field for students and scholars—highlighting emerging issues, enduring themes, revitalized theories, and fresh conceptualizations of journalism.
Journalism has long been a major factor in defining the opinions of Russia’s literate classes. Although women participated in nearly every aspect of the journalistic process during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, female editors, publishers, and writers have been consistently omitted from the history of journalism in Imperial Russia. An Improper Profession offers a more complete and accurate picture of this history by examining the work of these under-appreciated professionals and showing how their involvement helped to formulate public opinion. In this collection, contributors explore how early women journalists contributed to changing cultural understandings of women’s roles, as well as how class and gender politics meshed in the work of particular individuals. They also examine how female journalists adapted to—or challenged—censorship as political structures in Russia shifted. Over the course of this volume, contributors discuss the attitudes of female Russian journalists toward socialism, Russian nationalism, anti-Semitism, women’s rights, and suffrage. Covering the period from the early 1800s to 1917, this collection includes essays that draw from archival as well as published materials and that range from biography to literary and historical analysis of journalistic diaries. By disrupting conventional ideas about journalism and gender in late Imperial Russia, An Improper Profession should be of vital interest to scholars of women’s history, journalism, and Russian history. Contributors. Linda Harriet Edmondson, June Pachuta Farris, Jehanne M Gheith, Adele Lindenmeyr, Carolyn Marks, Barbara T. Norton, Miranda Beaven Remnek, Christine Ruane, Rochelle Ruthchild, Mary Zirin
A society that isn’t sure what’s true can’t function, but increasingly we no longer seem to know who or what to believe. We’re barraged by a torrent of lies, half-truths and propaganda: how do we even identify good journalism any more? At a moment of existential crisis for the news industry, in our age of information chaos, News and How to Use It shows us how. From Bias to Snopes, from Clickbait to TL;DR, and from Fact-Checkers to the Lamestream Media, here is a definitive user’s guide for how to stay informed, tell truth from fiction and hold those in power accountable in the modern age.
Technological innovation and conglomeration in communication industries has been accelerating the commodification of the news into just another product. The emphasis on the bottom line has resulted in newsroom budget cuts and other business strategies that seriously endanger good journalism. Meanwhile, the growing influence of the Internet and partisan commentary has led even journalists themselves to question their role. In Journalism as Practice, Sandra L. Borden shows that applying philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre's ideas of a 'practice' to journalism can help us to understand what is at stake for society and for those in the newsrooms who have made journalism their vocation. She argues that developing and promoting the kind of robust group identity implied by the idea of a practice can help journalism better withstand the moral challenges posed by commodification. Throughout, the book examines key U.S. journalism ethics cases since 2000. Some of these cases, such as Dan Rather’s "Memogate" scandal, are explored in detail in Practically Speaking sections that discuss relevant cases at length. This book is essential reading for students and practicing journalists interested in preserving the ethical role of journalism in promoting the public good.
How do journalists around the world view their roles and responsibilities in society? Based on a landmark study that has collected data from more than 27,500 journalists in 67 countries, Worlds of Journalism offers a groundbreaking analysis of the different ways journalists perceive their duties, their relationship to society and government, and the nature and meaning of their work. Challenging assumptions of a universal definition or concept of journalism, the book maps a world populated by a rich diversity of journalistic cultures. Organized around a series of key questions on topics such as editorial autonomy, journalistic ethics, trust in social institutions, and changes in the profession, it details how the practice of journalism differs across the world in a range of political, social, and economic contexts. The book covers how journalism as an institution is created and re-created by journalists and how they experience their profession in very different ways, even as they retain a commitment to some basic, widely shared professional norms and practices. It concludes with a global classification of journalistic cultures that reflects the breadth of worldviews and orientations found in disparate countries and regions. Worlds of Journalism offers an ambitious, comparative global understanding of the state of journalism in a time when it is confronting a series of economic and political threats.
Mark Coddington gives a vivid account of the work of aggregation--how such content is produced, what its values are, and how it fits into today's changing journalistic profession. Aggregating the News explores how aggregators weigh sources, reshape news narratives, and manage life on the fringes of journalism.
