The Shaping Of News

This book provides readers with the understanding required to analyse the range of key factors that shape the production of news, and to assess their implications for the role of news and journalism in democracy. It brings existing research together under the umbrella of a central organising framework to explore how news and its production is shaped by a multiplicity of factors including the norms, values, role perceptions and ethics associated with journalism as a profession, the role of news sources, the changing character and significance of news audiences, the aims and objectives of news organisations, and the political, economic and social contexts within which news is produced. Exploring these factors in depth, using examples, and considering the changing conditions of news production, the chapters chart significant changes, challenges, and responses to provide the essential background for understanding the consequences of current transformations for the democratic qualities of news.

Changing the News examines the difficulties in changing news processes and practices in response to the evolving circumstances and struggles of the journalism industry. The editors have put together this volume to demonstrate why the prescriptions employed to salvage the journalism industry to date haven’t worked, and to explain how constraints and pressures have influenced the field’s responses to challenges in an uncertain, changing environment. If journalism is to adjust and thrive, the following questions need answers: Why do journalists and news organizations respond to uncertainties in the ways they do? What forces and structures constrain these responses? What social and cultural contexts should we take into account when we judge whether or not journalism successfully responds and adapts? The book tackles these questions from varying perspectives and levels of analysis, through chapters by scholars of news sociology and media management. Changing the News details the forces that shape and challenge journalism and journalistic culture, and explains why journalists and their organizations respond to troubles, challenges and uncertainties in the way they do.

This book offers a comprehensive portrait of French and American journalists in action as they grapple with how to report and comment on one of the most important issues of our era. Drawing on interviews with leading journalists and analyses of an extensive sample of newspaper and television coverage since the early 1970s, Rodney Benson shows how the immigration debate has become increasingly focused on the dramatic, emotion-laden frames of humanitarianism and public order. In both countries, less commercialized media tend to offer the most in-depth, multi-perspective and critical news. Benson challenges classic liberalism's assumptions about state intervention's chilling effects on the press, suggests costs as well as benefits to the current vogue in personalized narrative news, and calls attention to journalistic practices that can help empower civil society. This book offers new theories and methods for sociologists and media scholars and fresh insights for journalists, policy makers and concerned citizens.

The author offers a comprehensive portrait of online news performance in Western countries in changing media environments. Drawing on a content analysis of 48 news outlets from different types of media organization in France, Germany, Great Britain, Italy, Switzerland, and USA, Edda Humprecht investigates the complex interplay of systemic and organizational dynamics and their impact on online news content, showing that the performance of online news media strongly varies among different media outlets. Less profit oriented outlets and those with a focus on information generally perform well offering hard news, diversity, critical distance, or analytical depth. This suggests that the divide between high and low-performing outlets is tied to the news outlet's capacity and willingness to strike a balance between their profit orientation and their normative role as information providers. Furthermore, the findings demonstrate that different dimensions of news performance are more pronounced in certain countries. This book provides new theoretical perspectives and methods for political and media scholars, and insights for journalists, policymakers, and concerned citizens.

Looks at the emerging phenomenon of online journalism, including Weblogs, Internet chat groups, and email, and how anyone can produce news.

Changing the News examines the difficulties in changing news processes and practices in response to the evolving circumstances and struggles of the journalism industry. It details the forces that shape and challenge journalism and journalistic culture, and explains why journalists and their organizations respond to troubles, challenges and uncertainties in the way they do.

Beginning in 1963 with the publication of Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique and reaching a high pitch ten years later with the televised mega-event of the “Battle of the Sexes”—the tennis match between Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs—the mass media were intimately involved with both the distribution and the understanding of the feminist message. This mass media promotion of the feminist profile, however, proved to be a double-edged sword, according to Patricia Bradley, author of Mass Media and the Shaping of American Feminism, 1963-1975. Although millions of women learned about feminism by way of the mass media, detrimental stereotypes emerged overnight. Often the events mounted by feminists to catch the media eye crystalized the negative image. All feminists soon came to be portrayed in the popular culture as “bra burners” and “strident women.” Such depictions not only demeaned the achievements of their movement but also limited discussion of feminism to those subjects the media considered worthy, primarily equal pay for equal work. Bradley's book examines the media traditions that served to curtail understandings of feminism. Journalists, following the craft formulas of their trade, equated feminism with the bizarre and the unusual. Even women journalists could not overcome the rules of “What Makes News.” By the time Billie Jean King confronted Bobby Riggs on the tennis court, feminism had become a commodity to be shaped to attract audiences. Finally, in mass media's pursuit of the new, counter-feminist messages came to replace feminism on the news agenda and helped set in place the conservative revolution of the 1980s. Bradley offers insight into how mass media constructs images and why such images have the kind of ongoing strength that discourages young women of today from calling themselves “feminist.” The author also asks how public issues are to be raised when those who ask the questions are negatively defined before the issues can even be discussed. Mass Media and the Shaping of American Feminism, 1963-1975 examines the media's role in creating the images of feminism that continue today. And it poses the dilemma of a call for systematic change in a mass media industry that does not have a place for systematic change in its agenda.