"This article, through conducting a study of the sexual harassment (SH) of media workers, investigates the extent and types of SH experienced by the editorial staff of Norwegian newsrooms at the time the #MeToo campaign arrived in Norway, and what effects such experiences have on journalists’ prof
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essional lives. We are also interested in what Norwegian media houses are doing to address these challenges. The leading research question consists of three interrelated parts: To what extent are journalists exposed to SH? What coping strategies do they use? How can newsrooms be better prepared to fight SH, from the perspective of the safety of journalists? A mixed methods approach, which combines findings from a quantitative questionnaire with qualitative in-depth interviews, was used to answer these questions. The findings show that female, young, and temporary media workers are significantly more frequently targeted than others and that those who had experienced SH handled the situation using avoiding strategies to a significantly greater extent than those who had only been exposed to unwanted attention experiences. The findings feed into a discussion of what strategies media houses can use to be better prepared in the fight against SH." (Abstract)
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"Risks to journalists are rising with disasters, epidemics, physical, mental and digital harassment all increasing globally. Some 1382 journalists have been killed since 1992 and 246 are imprisoned. However, the threat type has been changing, with the majority of journalists killed annually being on
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es working in their own country, often who are targeted for assassination. In response, UNESCO and others have called for research into best practice for safety education to halt this and the consequential decline in global media freedom. This five-year award winning project, A Holistic Humanitarian Approach to Enhance the Safety and Resilience of Journalists Globally, tested the hypothesis that a new pedagogy based on a 'holistic humanitarian' philosophy would be more effective in protecting journalists working in dangerous domains globally than existing provisions. The little-changed 30-year-old dominant international provision, the 'military battlefield' pedagogy, is used by the world's major news organizations like BBC, CNN and the New York Times. This new pedagogy adapted and customized best practice from other professions and used Taylor's 2020 Competencies for Disaster Healthcare professionals. A new program was devised and the two international cohorts who took it in 2018 and 2019 judged that it 'very significantly' enhanced their resilience and safety skills. Its concentration on group and individual physical and mental resilience building, risk mitigation, psychology, communication, self-defence, and digital security skill acquisition was a paradigm shift in training internationally for news professionals in dangerous environments. The research, thus, proved the study's hypotheses." (Abstract)
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"Safety training courses and manuals are designed to provide journalists with guidance to assess and mitigate risk. In this article, we ask whether content of such training and guidance is informed by actual threats and risks relevant to journalists working in the field. Departing from our own previ
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ous research about threats and dangers faced by journalists working in conflict zones or covering dangerous beats, and a review of the literature addressing the issue of safety manuals for journalists, we evaluate the content of five safety-training documents. Of these, two are descriptions of internationally-focused safety courses, two are safety manuals produced for a national audience, and one is a handbook focusing specifically on safety for women reporters in the Arab region. The purpose is to identify various aspects of safety addressed in training and manuals offered to locally and internationally-deployed journalists-and illuminate how they may differ in focus and approach. Through a comparison of the content of the selected manuals and course descriptions, we conclude that these trainings and manuals to some extent address specific variations in context, but that detailed attention towards gender differences in risk and other personal characteristics are not given equivalent weight. The international training focuses excessively on physical environment issues (such as those of a 'hostile environment'), while the manuals with national or regional focus are practice-oriented and largely take a journalistic point of departure. We argue that training and manuals can benefit from considering both these aspects for risk assessment, but recommend that addressing journalistic practice and personal resources is fundamental to all journalist safety training since it is at the personal, practical, and media organisational levels that the mitigation encouraged by these trainings can happen." (Abstract)
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"Journalist safety is vital to media freedom as it shows stakeholders' duties to protect the media from crime and to guard media freedom. The media have the power to combat problems via coverage, yet evidence submits that journalist insecurity persists in Ghana. So, the study aims to examine how the
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Ghanaian media are tackling journalist insecurity through coverage. Using agenda-setting and framing theories, content analyses of 66 news stories from newspapers, and five interviews are used to gather data to study the coverage and framing of journalist insecurity in the media and how they tackle threats to media freedom. Thematic analysis of data gathered showed that the newspapers were unable to give prominence to the problem because only 30.60% of total editions gave attention to the issue. Also, the media failed to present journalist insecurity as an issue that needs national attention because only 10.6% of the news stories used thematic frames. This undermines media freedom as it allows journalist insecurity to thrive, hence, failure to advocate journalist safety." (Abstract)
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"Safety trainings (STs), also known as hazardous or hostile environment trainings, are evolving as a worldwide industry practice designed to keep journalists safe. However, little is known about the effectiveness of STs, particularly how men and women journalists respond to them. In order to better
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understand differences in ST needs and satisfaction among men and women journalists, 247 journalists completed a survey about their most recent experience with STs. Overall, all journalists reported high satisfaction with trainings. Nevertheless, statistically significant gender differences were found on measures of overall satisfaction (general rating and whether to recommend ST to a colleague), satisfaction with trainer knowledge and STs' sensitive and accurate coverage of gender and diversity related threats. Men reported higher satisfaction than women on all four measures. However, gender differences varied based on the regions in which journalists worked and the type of stories covered. Recommendations for future research and design of safety trainings are discussed." (Abstract)
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"This paper examines the teaching of conflict-sensitive reporting, safety education and peace journalism in the curricula of institutions offering mass communication/journalism programmes in three English speaking countries of West Africa: Nigeria, Ghana and Sierra Leone. It assesses the status of r
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esearch and teaching of reporting of conflicts, peace journalism and professional safety in institutions of the selected countries." (Abstract)
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"The article is an overview of the growing concerns about escalating violence against journalists in India and a matching lack of interest in Indian academy to understand the various implications of such violence both pedagogically and sociologically. The fact that about six journalists were killed
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in a span of two to three months September-November 2017 speaks volume about the magnitude of the problem in Indiathe world's largest democracy that has the largest volume of media presence. By far, the safety and security of journalists was never part of a serious debate among Indian media houses or Indian journalism education except by way of expressing a symbolic condolence whenever a journalist was killed in action. Although Indian academy has displayed abject ignorance of this important component of journalists' training despite the UNESCO proposing a model curriculum for safety of journalists at University level in 2007, the media industry which runs its own media schools in India to train its recruits is never concerned about the safety and security of the journalists. Using the methodology adopted by the Freedom House in its report on Freedom of Press (2016) for determining the varied ways in which the pressure was laid on the objective flow of information, the present study throws light on several dimensions involved in evolving a pedagogy for the safety and security of journalists' from sociological perspectives." (Abstract)
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"Journalism is considered as fourth pillar of any democratic society and it is only a Journalist who can take many challenges to bring truth in front of society. But sometimes journalist has to face difficult and stressful conditions while working in field where they have serious threat for their li
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fe even. In this paper researcher is trying to explore various challenging and stressful conditions of Indian journalists along with the data which reveals that why India is considered a dangerous country for journalists. Mostly secondary data is taken to analyze various aspects of working conditions of journalist. Through this paper the actual dangerous conditions for Indian journalist will be analyzed and explored." (Abstract)
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"With Kosovo as its case, this article explores the context and challenges of journalism education in transition societies. Journalists in Kosovo have lived through constant changes from authoritarian to democracy. In this struggle, journalism education has never been stable and steady. The past con
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flict events of the destruction of Yugoslavia haunts present day journalism in challenging human rights, ethics and even business model of Kosovar media. The traumatic past, conflict and ethic animosity is still present in the public discourse among Kosovar journalists due to political resistance of the leadership of the entire region to take steps towards recognizing conflicting past and the atrocities that happened. Over the last decade, new journalism schools have been founded both in public and private sector which reflects significant increase in quality reporting. By utilizing previous research, including data from the Worlds of Journalism Study (WJS) in Kosovo, the article discusses the aspect of transitional journalism in Kosovo, which focuses on transitional justice and looks at the problems from a human rights approach, including the education of journalists in the field of human rights but instead of learning from top down approach. The data in the article show journalistic roles shifting from traditional watchdog to activist role which challenges journalistic professionalism at a time when journalism education in higher education is in its infancy. The article exposes the need for practical, tailored training about the realities of political pressure, history and the transition. As one of the significant gaps in the teaching journalism in Kosovo is in relation to dealing with the past, a lack of taught courses for journalists entering the media market is seen as a weakness of the education system in Kosovo along with other structural problems in the media. Technology, globalization, rapid development of social media leave much to be desired in the journalism education in Kosovo." (Abstract)
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"Democracies with sharp violence and public insecurity have proliferated in recent decades, with many also featuring extreme economic inequality. These conditions have not been explicitly considered in comparative research on journalists' work environments, an omission that may obscure important rea
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lities of contemporary journalism. We address this gap through analysis of journalist surveys in 62 countries. We confirm the existence of insecure democracies as an empirical phenomenon and begin to unravel their meaning for journalists. We find democracies with uneven democratic performance tend to have more journalist assassinations, which is the most extreme form of influence on work, and that levels of democratic performance, violence, public insecurity and economic inequality significantly shape how journalists perceive various influences in their work environment. Case studies of insecure democracies in Africa and Latin America address why these conditions sometimes (but not always) lead to journalist assassinations and other anti-press violence. They suggest anti-press violence is higher when sub-national state actors intensify criminal violence and when insecurity is geographically and topically proximate to journalists. How journalists' perceive influences on work are therefore more complex and multidimensional than previous research has suggested. The study concludes by identifying areas for improvement in data collection." (Abstract)
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"The report, based on answers from 247 respondents, summarises the ‘good news’, that journalists do implement changes in their behaviour when they have attended safety trainings, and the gaps and challenges, including the fact that few journalists keep their training up to date in spite of indus
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try recommendations for refresher courses every 3 years. Recommendations include more sexual violence and harassment training; that safety trainers should be knowledgeable about gender and cultural issues; that psychological trauma needs to be addressed in training; and that more digital security training is needed." (www.gfmd.info)
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"[...] To test the argument whether the killing of journalists is a precursor to increasing repression, we introduce a new global dataset on killings of journalists between 2002 and 2013 that uses three different sources that track such events across the world. The new data show that mostly local jo
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urnalists are targeted and that in most cases the perpetrators remain unconfirmed. Particularly in countries with limited repression, human rights conditions are likely to deteriorate in the two years following the killing of a journalist. When journalists are killed, human rights conditions are unlikely to improve where standard models of human rights would expect an improvement. Our research underlines the importance of taking the treatment of journalists seriously, not only because failure to do so endangers their lives and limits our understanding of events on the ground, but also because their physical safety is an important precursor of more repression in the future." (Abstract)
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"This article has addressed the level of journalists’ safety in Pakistan, revealing the diverse threats to journalists’ safety and their right to freedom of expression in the country. Freedom of expression is an individual right, for which no one should be attacked or killed. However, in this st
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udy, journalists’ feedback reveals that not only their lives but their right to freedom of expression is at risk because of the prevailing unsafe environment in Pakistan. The study suggests journalism is a dangerous profession in Pakistan because of physical, psychological, financial, social, emotional and topic-specific risks, which constrain journalists’ right to freedom of expression and affect them most while doing their routine jobs. Despite the unsafe environment and constant threats, this study indicates that only 18% of surveyed journalists have received safety training to protect themselves in conflict and non-conflict situations. The following questions need to be addressed when analysing issues around journalists’ safety training in Pakistan, namely: who are the trainers? Are trainers themselves trained for journalists’ safety training, bearing in mind the local safety circumstances? What is the role of local and international NGO’s in promoting journalists’ safety education either at university or media organisational level? Further research on these aspects is crucial for the better training of journalists. This study reveals that the education of conflict reporting and peace journalism is not the major part of journalism curricula in Pakistan’s public and private sector universities. The curriculum in most of the universities do not reflect distinctively the local aspects of journalism teaching and approaches, which is important for enabling journalists to understand the context within which they perform their work. As highlighted by Abit and Kenneth in their article, the case of Kosovo is quite similar to Pakistan – where journalism education lacks local teaching approches. Therefore, in this article, I emphasize certain initiatives such as: the inclusion of journalists’ safety and peace journalism modules in curriculum; collaboration with international universities for innovative pedagogical models; regular curriculum revision and local-context teaching and research within this field. Others have underlined the need for a few more significant inititatives that I think are crucial as far as journalists’ safety education is concerned, such as: enhancing journalists’ awareness of their rights and physical and psychological safety; protection of their equipment, and legal protection while covering war or conflict." (Conclusion)
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"This paper studies how the training of journalists has been approached in Spain. Since 2003, the Army War College has held annual Training Courses for War Correspondents. Over three hundred journalists have been trained on these courses. This study analyses and reflects on how the Spanish Army carr
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ies out the training of journalists; how this training has evolved; and how it is assessed by Spanish journalists. It also examines the role of Spanish universities in this regard. In order to do so, our research required an analysis of curriculums for both undergraduate and graduate studies of the Communication Faculties at Spanish universities. In-depth interviews were conducted with journalists who had taken part in the courses and army members who had designed and taught them. One of our main findings is that the Spanish army is the leading institution in safety training for journalists; neither the media nor Spanish universities play a role in it. The army designs, runs and provides the financing for this training, which is very positively assessed by journalists, to the point where they consider it has determined their safety at work." (Abstract)
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"The article recaps the main findings of the investigations presented in this special issue and seeks to answer the question “What can Northern journalism educators do to improve safety during fieldwork in the Global South?” The article builds mainly on qualitative interviews with former journal
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ism students who have done journalism fieldwork in dangerous situations as part of journalism education in Norway. It concludes by recommending the building of networks of mutual aid across countries and continents to research journalism safety and enlist the help of educators around the world in the training of journalism students." (Abstract)
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"Both long-standing and innovative partnership models suggest that collaborative newsgathering by international and local journalists has been an invaluable practice to get the news in unsafe environments and out to global audiences. As violence, often deadly and nearly always unpunished, multiplies
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against all journalists, and foreign correspondence is cut back while many news media struggle financially, this safety mechanism is at risk precisely when it is most necessary." (Abstract)
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"Too many journalists are victims of violence and impunity, and more should be done in academia to prepare media students for the perils they are likely to face. I urge all faculty members at this conference to incorporate a course on safety for journalists in their curricula. It’s not a luxury; i
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t’s an urgent necessity. According to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), one journalist is killed every five days in the line of duty and the impunity of such acts is unabated." (Abstract)
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"Journalists face numerous threats from different stakeholders. In developing countries, internal threats coming from inside media organizations – threats that have a serious impact on the professional, economic and psychological lives of journalists – are less researched. This research is an at
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tempt to identify the various internal threats faced by journalists and the implications of these threats on their daily lives. It was conducted among Indian journalists during March and April of 2015. Results revealed that sudden suspension, dismissal from the service, de-promotion, non-allocation of work, transfer of department and place of work are some of the internal threats faced by the journalists." (Abstract)
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"This chapter illuminates new understanding about the dangers experienced by Australian news photographers on international and domestic assignments. Using oral history methodology, the interviews with 60 present and former Australian newspaper photographers revealed a litany of psychologically and
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physically hazardous aspects of their work, and the safety training available. Despite the implementation of trauma counselling and hostile environment courses, press photography continues to be a highly dangerous and precarious vocation." (Abstract)
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"In this article, I seek to inform Peace Journalism (PJ) education and training in conflict-affected countries in particular. Based on a case study of the professional experiences of Afghan photojournalists, I offer insights into the acceptability and adoptability of PJ practice by journalists from
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conflict-affected countries. I present six key findings of a larger study on Afghan photojournalists in this article and discuss the lessons they hold for PJ training in conflict-affected countries. In sections 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5, I provide some important theoretical, contextual and methodological background. In section 6, I discuss three professional adversities faced by Afghan photojournalists and evaluate the obstacles that implementation of PJ faces as a result of them. In section 7, I describe one professional motivator for Afghan photojournalists and discuss the opportunity it presents for PJ adoption. In section 8, I describe two other constraints faced by Afghan photojournalists related specifically to donor-funded media development in post-2001 Afghanistan and discuss their implications for PJ training. Finally in section 9, while noting the limitations of the current study, I offer two ways forward for PJ training in conflict-affected countries like Afghanistan." (Abstract)
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