Social Justice Journalism

This cultural history seeks to deepen and contextualize knowledge about digital activist journalism by training the lens of social movement theory back on the nearly forgotten role of eight twentieth-century American social justice journals in effecting significant social change.

While social network analyses often demonstrate the usefulness of social media networks to affective publics and otherwise marginalized social justice groups, this book explores the domination and manipulation of social networks by more powerful political groups. Jeffrey Layne Blevins and James Lee look at the ways in which social media conversations about race turn politically charged, and in many cases, ugly. Studies show that social media is an important venue for news and political information, while focusing national attention on racially involved issues. Perhaps less understood, however, is the effective quality of this discourse, and its connection to popular politics, especially when Twitter trolls and social media mobs go on the attack. Taking on prominent case studies from the past few years, including the Ferguson protests and the Black Lives Matter movement, the 2016 presidential election, and the rise of fake news, this volume presents data visualization sets alongside careful scholarly analysis. The resulting volume provides new insight into social media, legacy news, and social justice.

America was born in an act of rebellion, and protest and dissent have been crucial to our democracy ever since. Along the way, movements for social justice have created a wide array of pamphlets, broadsides, newsletters, newspapers, and even glossy magazines. In People's Movements, People's Press, Bob Ostertag brings this hidden history to light, examining the publications of the abolitionist, woman suffrage, gay and lesbian, and environmental movements, as well as the underground GI press during the Vietnam War. This fascinating story takes us from the sparse, privately owned media environment of the nineteenth century to the corporate media saturation of the present. Within these publications, we find powerful debates about the direction of a movement; impassioned cries for rights and civil liberties; lonely voices reaching out to others after being alienated by the mainstream press and the unaccepting world around them; and demands that now seem surprisingly reasonable but were at one time quite revolutionary. With both plain language and rigorous scholarship, Ostertag tells the story not only of the publications but the many colorful characters who created them. The story of the social justice movement press is deeply intertwined with the story of the movements themselves. In fact, Ostertag shows how reliance on the printed word fundamentally shaped what we now know as social movements. People's Movements, People's Press, then, offers a new view—from the ground up—of social transformation in America and raises the question of how social movements will change as they move from print to the Internet as their primary means of communication. As large corporations take over every media outlet available, People's Movements, People's Press reminds us of the great value and historical importance of independent, activist-driven media.

This book offers a diverse approach to journalism history told from a multimedia perspective, re-examining mainstream stories and highlighting contributions that are often overlooked. Bringing together a team of prominent journalism historians, the volume centers race and ethnicity, gender and sexuality, class, religion, disability, mental health and generations to tell forgotten stories of journalism’s historical influence. The book is designed to appeal to Generation Z college students, offering budding mass communicators a valuable tool that addresses gaps in historical pedagogy and fosters representation in the classroom. Each chapter contains access to video and podcast extras, chapter summaries, guides to further reading and suggested activities to bring these narratives alive and keep readers engaged. Interactive and accessible, Social Justice, Activism and Diversity in U.S. Media History is an indispensable resource for Generation Z, scholars in mass communication and American history, journalists and general readers.

"This book combines the political and the practical aspects of Access to Information (ATI) and Freedom of Information (FOI) research. It covers ATI in relation to critical social science, investigative journalism, and social justice activism in Canada. It addresses recent political stories and issues uncovered by researchers, journalists and activists using ATI, including state surveillance, prison expansion, the close ties between oil companies and the federal government, and the Lac-Megantic rail disaster. Written by prominent journalists and academic researchers, each chapter also offers advice to those interested in using ATI in their own research, and the volume ends with a list of helpful tips for conducting ATI/FOI research."--

This book examines the prominent place a commitment to social justice and equity has occupied in the global history of literary journalism. With international case studies, it explores and theorizes the way literary journalists have addressed inequality and its consequences in their practice. In the process, this volume focuses on the critical attitude the writers of this genre bring to their stories, the immersive reporting they use to gain detailed and intimate knowledge of their subjects, and the array of innovative rhetorical strategies through which they represent those encounters. The contributors explain how these strategies encourage readers to respond to injustices of class, race, indigeneity, gender, mobility, and access to knowledge. Together, they make the case that, throughout its history, literary journalism has proven uniquely well adapted to fusing facts with feeling in a way which makes it a compelling force for social change.

Citizen Journalism explores citizen participation in the news as an evolving disruptive practice in digital journalism. This volume moves beyond the debates over the mainstream news media attempts to control and contain citizen journalism to focus attention in a different direction: the peripheries of traditional journalism. Here, more independent forms of citizen journalism, enabled by social media, are creating their own forms of news. Among the actors at the boundaries of the professional journalism field the book identifies are the engaged citizen journalist and the enraged citizen journalist. The former consists of under-represented voices leading social justice movements, while the latter reflects the views of conservatives and the alt-right, who often view citizen journalism as a performance. Citizen Journalism further explores how non-journalism arenas, such as citizen science, enable ordinary citizens to collect data and become protectors of the environment. Citizen Journalism serves as an important reminder of the professional field’s failure to effectively respond to the changing nature of public communication. These changes have helped to create new spaces for new actors; in such places, traditional as well as upstart forms of journalism negotiate and compete, ultimately aiding the journalism field in creating its future.

This book is an anthology of work by critical media scholars, media makers, and activists who are committed to advancing social justice. Topics addressed include but are not limited to international media activist projects such as the Right to Communication movement and its corollaries; the importance of listening and enacting policies that advance democratic media; regional and local media justice projects; explorations of the challenges the era of participatory media pose to public media; youth and minority media projects and activism; ethical dilemmas posed by attempts to democratize access to media tools; the continued marginalization of feminist perspectives in international policy venues; software freedom and intellectual property rights; video activism in both historical and contemporary contexts; internet strategies for defending dissenting voices; and five accounts by prominent scholar/activists of their lifelong struggles for media justice.