Zvi Reich

MAPPING JOURNALISM CULTURES ACROSS NATIONS: A comparative study of 18 countries

This article reports key findings from a comparative survey of the role perceptions, epistemological orientations and ethical views of 1800 journalists from 18 countries. The results show that detachment, non-involvement, providing political information and monitoring the government are considered essential journalistic functions around the globe. Impartiality, the reliability and factualness of information, as well as adherence to universal ethical principles are also valued worldwide, though their perceived importance varies across countries. Various aspects of interventionism, objectivism and the importance of separating facts from opinion, on the other hand, seem to play out differently around the globe. Western journalists are generally less supportive of any active promotion of particular values, ideas and social change, and they adhere more to universal principles in their ethical decisions. Journalists from non-western contexts, on the other hand, tend to be more interventionist in their role perceptions and more flexible in their ethical views.

HOW CITIZENS CREATE NEWS STORIES

A systematic study of day-to-day practices of citizen reporters, compared to their mainstream counterparts, suggests that ordinary citizens can serve as a vital complement to mainstream journalism, however not as its substitute. The paper develops a version of the “news access” theory, which sees citizen journalists as hindered by their inferior access to news sources, unlike mainstream journalism, where the problem is seen as the superior access of some of their sources to extensive and favored coverage. There are several symptoms for citizen reporters’ limited news access: their modest use of human sources; the high proportion of one-source items; their reluctance to interactively negotiate versions with sources; and their contacts with sources tend to be ad hoc exchanges, rather than long-term role relationships. On the other hand, citizen reporters have adopted several mechanisms that help them make up for their comparably limited access. They are much more likely to pursue stories at their own initiative. They tend to predicate their stories on firsthand witnessing, technical sources (mainly Internet), personal acquaintances, and on their own experience. Data were gleaned from a series of interviews in which reporters from Israeli citizen and mainstream news websites explained how they formulated their sampled items.

THE PROCESS MODEL OF NEWS INITIATIVE

The role of reporters and sources in the initiation of the news is neither unilateral as claimed by models of “hegemony” and “adversarial journalism”, nor reciprocal as suggested by the models of “exchange” and “role relationship”, but rather a combination of the two. According to the process model developed and examined here, the initiative passes from one side to the other in the course of the acquisition of information. In the discovery phase, during which reporters learn about the existence of a potential new item, it is the sources who initiate most of the contacts (0.70). However, during the gathering phase, in which the reporters obtain further information, it is they who initiate most of the contacts (again 0.70). The study, which focused on the Israeli daily press, used an innovative methodology of face-to-face reconstruction interviews, during which reporters detailed how they obtained each of the stories in the sample, determining the instigating party according to the technology used for each contact.

EXPLORING THE POLITICAL-ECONOMIC FACTORS OF PARTICIPATORY JOURNALISM

This comparative study of user-generated content (UGC) in 10 Western democracies examines the political economic aspects of citizen participation in online media, as assessed by journalists who work with this content. Drawing on interviews with more than 60 journalists, we explore their perceived economic motivations for an ongoing redefinition of traditional journalistic roles, as UGC becomes an increasingly dominant feature of news websites.

The Impact of Technology on News Reporting: A Longitudinal Perspective

Based on measurements across the past decade, this paper challenges common wisdom about new technologies’ transformative impact on news reporting. The telephone still reigns as queen of the news production battlefield, while use of the Internet and social media as news sources remains marginal. In face-to-face reconstruction interviews, news reporters at three leading national Israeli dailies detailed reporting of recently published items. Findings conform to the Compulsion to Proximity theory, in which technological impact on professional and lay actors is restrained by the need to maintain richer interactions based on copresence.

Different Practices, Similar Logic: Comparing News Reporting across Political, Financial, and Territorial Beats

This article seeks to explore whether political reporters present more meticulous, complex, and active standards of news reporting—justifying their special role as enablers of informed citizenry—and to help resolve the theoretical ambiguity regarding news beats as distinct domains of practice. The sample comprised reporters from three beat clusters—political, financial, and territorial—in nine national Israeli news organizations, who were asked to describe, source by source, how they obtained a sample of their recently published items (N = 840), addressing sourcing patterns, news practices, and communication technologies used. As expected, reporting was found to be distinctive across beat clusters, with political reporters employing significantly and consistently higher standards although financial reporters, in contrast to expectations, were not found to be the weakest link in the reporting chain. Despite the substantial differences, the studied beats embody a united community of practice following a similar media logic.

Comparing Reporters' Work across Print, Radio, and Online: Converged Origination, Diverged Packaging

This paper compares how eighty reporters from three media—print, online, and radio—obtained a sample of their items, seeking to establish which of two schools of thought is closer to reality: scholars who contend that each news medium embodies a unique “regime” of content creation, or those who argue that the different media maintain similar news reporting standards. A series of face-to-face reconstruction interviews with reporters from nine leading Israeli national news organizations suggests that the three media are not unique factories of news, but rather unique packing and distribution houses of similarly obtained materials.

Out of the frame: A longitudinal perspective on digitization and professional photojournalism

Contrary to the scholarly literature frequently associating digitization with external threats to professional photojournalists, this study focuses on internal factors: the new routines and practices of digital photojournalism, embedding them in the broader context of growing threats to cultural industries and labor markets. Using a longitudinal perspective, and based on in-depth interviews with 15 Israeli photojournalists with experience of both the chemical and digital eras, we suggest that digitization has had much wider ripples than just accelerating the speed and efficiency in which news photos are taken, transmitted, selected, manipulated, stored, and retrieved. Although not “causing” the crisis in the employment and work conditions of professional photojournalists, the implementation of digitization created a negative synergy between their old and new weaknesses. Further new routines may help restore the supremacy of professional photographers if they succeed in emphasizing their reskilling and upskilling enabled by new technology.

Constrained authors: Bylines and authorship in news reporting

The proliferation of bylines characterized the news as an imperfect, all too human account of reality, opening the way towards journalistic stardom, altering power relations within the news industry and shifting news organizations from a position behind the news to one behind the people who gather and compose it. Focusing on The New York Times as the chief case study and The Times of London as a supplementary one, findings show that the bylining process extended throughout the 20th century at a far slower pace than indicated in previous research. Bylining was a four-stage process: 1) initial avoidance of bylining, thereby fostering an anonymous, authoritative voice; 2) bylines promoting organizational goals only; 3) bylines accorded to a select few staff writers, leading to inconsistency in attribution policy; and 4) papers lose control over selective crediting due to journalists’ pressure for public acclaim. Using a multidisciplinary approach combining legal theory with the sociology and history of journalism, the article concludes that news reporters are constrained authors whose limitations are set chiefly by organizational, legal and commercial forces. These limitations not only delayed and slowed down their attribution but also continue to characterize their authorship to this day.

New Technologies, Old Practices: The Conservative Revolution in Communication Between Reporters and News Sources in the Israeli Press

The study explores to what extent new communication technologies have played a revolutionizing role in the ways in which news reporters acquire information. Reporters reconstructed how they used different technologies in order to obtain each of their sampled items, both before and after the introduction of new communication technologies into the Israeli daily press. Changes appear to be minor. Reporters continued to contact sources directly, negotiate their versions orally, and use technologies to replace physical presence at news scenes and face-to-face interviews. This relative stability might reflect the fact that, in the interplay between forces for continuity (represented by the ongoing patterns of newswork) and forces for change (suggested by the new technologies), the role of the former has been dominant.