"With regards to professional role orientations, Sudanese journalists found it most important to support national development, to be a detached observer, to advocate for social change, and to influence public opinion. The relevance of these roles was fairly undisputed among the interviewed journalis
...
ts as the relatively low standard deviations indicate. At the same time, respondents turned out to be less keen on acting as an adversary of the government, supporting government policy, and conveying a positive image of political leadership. However, standard deviations point to a great deal of disagreement among journalists with regards to these aspects of journalistic roles. Still, a majority of journalists in Sudan found it important to let people express their views, to report things as they are, to provide analysis of current affairs, to provide the kind of news that attracts the largest audience, to provide advice, orientation and direction for daily life, to provide information people need to make political decisions, and to monitor and scrutinize political leaders and business. Overall, Sudanese journalists’ look fairly similar to their counterparts in other parts of the world, while at the same time, they also subscribe to some of the basic elements of development journalism." (Journalistic roles, page 1)
more
"Through case studies, analysis of emerging practices, and theoretical discussion, a team of leading journalism and communication experts investigate the impact of major global trends on responsible journalism and lead readers to better understand changes in media ethics. Chapters look at how these
...
changes promote or inhibit responsible journalism, how such changes challenge existing standards, and how media ethics can develop to take account of global news media. In light of the fact that media journalism is now, and will increasingly become, multimedia in format and global in its scope and influence, the book argues that global media impact entails global responsibilities: It is therefore critical that media ethics rethinks its basic notions, standards, and practices from a more cosmopolitan perspective." (Publisher description)
more
"Das in zweiter Auflage überarbeitete Lehrbuch führt konsistent und verständlich in Theorie, Methodik und Gegenstandsbereiche der international vergleichenden Mediensystemforschung ein. Es macht mit deren Fragestellungen vertraut und arbeitet die für den Vergleich relevanten Strukturelemente her
...
aus. Der Forschungsbereich wird einerseits inhaltlich, d. h. durch ausgewählte Themenstellungen (z. B. Kommunikationspolitik, Medienkonzentration), und andererseits räumlich, d. h. durch bedeutende Länder und Weltregionen, erschlossen." (Verlagsbeschreibung)
more
"Research into journalism and gender to date has found somewhat contradictory evidence as to the ways in which women and men practice journalism. Some scholars claim that women have inherently different concepts and practices of journalism and that this has led to a feminization of journalism, other
...
s have found little evidence to suggest that men and women differ significantly in terms of their role conceptions. While numerous studies have been conducted into this issue around the world, few have taken a truly comparative approach. This article presents results from a large-scale comparative survey into gender differences in journalists’ professional views in 18 countries around the world. Results suggest that women and men do not differ in any meaningful ways in their role conceptions on either the individual level or in newsrooms dominated by women, or in sociocultural contexts where women have achieved a certain level of empowerment." (Abstract)
more
"Building on the assumption that journalists' attitudes toward public institutions can contribute to a decline in public trust, this article sets out to identify the driving forces behind journalists' confidence in public institutions. Based on interviews with 2000 journalists from 20 countries, var
...
iation in trust is modeled across the individual level of journalists, the organizational level of news media, and the societal level of countries. Our findings suggest that the principal determinants of journalists' trust emanate from a country's political performance, from state ownership in the media, and from the extent to which people tend to trust each other. Journalism culture and power distance, however, seem to have relatively little weight in the calculus of journalists' institutional trust." (Abstract)
more
"The Handbook of Comparative Communication Research aims to provide a comprehensive understanding of comparative communication research. It fills an obvious gap in the literature and offers an extensive and interdisciplinary discussion of the general approach of comparative research, its prospect an
...
d problems as well as its applications in crucial sub-fields of communications. The first part of the volume charts the state of the art in the field; the second section introduces relevant areas of communication studies where the comparative approach has been successfully applied in recent years; the third part offers an analytical review of conceptual and methodological issues; and the last section proposes a roadmap for future research." (Publisher description)
more
"The study of communication for development and social change has been through several paradigmatic changes during the past decades. From modernization and growth theory to the dependency approach and the participatory model, the new traditions of discourse are now characterized by a turn towards lo
...
cal communities as targets for research and debate, on the one hand, and the search for an understanding of the complex relationships between globalization and localization, on the other. Our present-day “globalized” world as a whole and its distinct regional and national entities are confronted with multifaceted crises, from the economic and fi nancial to those relating to social, cultural, ideological, moral, political, ethnic, ecological, and security issues. Previously held traditional modernization and dependency perspectives have become more diffi cult to support because of the growing interdependency of regions, nations, and communities in our globalized world." (Abstract)
more
"This review of available scholarship in international health communication reveals a curious disconnect between an abundance of material available in selected nations and regions (e.g., Australia, southern Asia, sub-Saharan Africa and the United States), on the one hand, and relatively little atten
...
tion to comparative research on the other hand. Cross-national research on major conditions and diseases, such as tuberculosis and HIV/AIDS, is similarly rare [...] Several scholarly tools are recommended, among them a focus on "preparedness" as an umbrella concept, along with systeatic attempts to compare the way norms, media, and journalism function in different community and national contexts. Special endeavors to compare cultural differences are also recommended, exploring, for example, the ways different cultures handle a universal resource (water) or view critical thresholds in the lifecycle (such as marriages and first pregnancies), generating expectations for creating equivalent research "communities" in order to compare different theories and approaches to health communication." (Conclusion)
more
"While some of the mentioned problems are inherent to any comparison of media policy and regulation and are hard to avoid (e.g., due to changing regulation or differences in regulatory regimes), other pitfalls may be bypassed and pave the way for future research. First, a theory-driven approach to a
...
ny (comparative) research is essential [...] Second, scholars should try to adopt methods of comparative politics to the analysis of media systems, media policy, and media regulation [...] Third, comparisons of media policy and media regulation beyond the North Atlantic zone are needed." (Page 229)
more
"The Global Journalist in the 21st Century systematically assesses the demographics, education, socialization, professional attitudes and working conditions of journalists in various countries around the world. This book updates the original Global Journalist (1998) volume with new data, adding more
...
than a dozen countries, and provides material on comparative research about journalists that will be useful to those interested in doing their own studies. The editors put together this collection working under the assumption that journalists' backgrounds, working conditions and ideas are related to what is reported (and how it is covered) in the various news media round the world, in spite of societal and organizational constraints, and that this news coverage matters in terms of world public opinion and policies. Outstanding features include:"Coverage of 33 nations located around the globe, based on recent surveys conducted among representative samples of local journalist, comprehensive analyses by well-known media scholars from each country, a section on comparative studies of journalists and an appendix with a collection of survey questions used in various nations to question journalists" (Publisher description)
more
"Bringing together the perspectives of more than 40 internationally acclaimed authors, The Handbook of Global Media Research explores competing methodologies in the dynamic field of transnational media and communications, providing valuable insight into research practice in a globalized media landsc
...
ape; provides a framework for the critical debate of comparative media research; posits transnational media research as reflective of advanced globalization processes, and explores the role and responsibility this bestows it with; articulates the key themes and competing methodological approaches in a dynamic and developing field; showcases the perspectives and ideas of 30 leading internationally acclaimed scholars; offers a platform for the discussion of crucial issues from a variety of theoretical, methodical and practical viewpoints." (Publisher description)
more
"This article sets out to map the journalistic field as a space of struggle between distinct professional milieus. These milieus crystallize around journalists who share similar views on journalism’s function in society. By means of cluster analysis, four global professional milieus were extracted
...
from the survey responses of 1800 journalists in 18 countries: the populist disseminator, detached watchdog, critical change agent and the opportunist facilitator. The detached watchdog milieu clearly dominates the journalistic field in most western countries, while the milieu of the opportunist facilitator reigns supreme in several developing, transitional and authoritarian contexts. In accordance with the theoretical propositions, relatively little professional autonomy was found in contexts with rather strong corporate and commercial influences. However, a more universal approach would need to go beyond corporate and commercial factors in order to account for the realities of the journalistic field in non-western countries." (Abstract)
more
"Der vorliegende Aufsatz berichtet erste deskriptive Befunde aus einer multinationalen Studie zum Vergleich von Journalismuskulturen. Im Rahmen des Projekts wurden insgesamt 1700 Journalisten in 17 Ländern zu ihren professionellen Orientierungen befragt. Im Vordergrund standen Fragen nach dem Verst
...
ändnis der eigenen gesellschaftlichen Rolle, den erkenntnistheoretischen Grundlagen und ethischen Imperativen im Journalismus. Im Ländervergleich zeigt sich dabei, dass jene Rollenmodelle, die durch Distanz und Nichtinvolviertheit gekennzeichnet sind, durchaus zu den weltweit akzeptierten journalistischen Standards zählen. Darüber hinaus ist den Journalisten global relativ übereinstimmend die Verlässlichkeit und Faktizität von Informationen sowie das strikte Einhalten von Unparteilichkeit bzw. Neutralität sehr wichtig. Umstritten sind hingegen interventionistische Aspekte der Berufsausübung, wobei sich die größten Differenzen zwischen den entwickelten Staaten des Westens und Transformationsgesellschaften zeigen. Große Länderunterschiede lassen sich auch bezüglich der Rolle von Subjektivität sowie der Vermischung von Fakten und Meinung feststellen." (Abstract)
more
"This chapter examines journalism that is produced not by professionals but by those outside mainstream media organizations. Amateur media producers typically have little or no training or professional qualifi cations as journalists; they write and report from their position as citizens, as members
...
of communities, as activists, as fans. This chapter will show how key writers in the subject area have understood the activities of these amateur journalists. The chapter places these activities in three categories: social movement media and citizens’ media; local alternative journalism; fanzines and blogs. It examines the major studies to show how different theoretical and ideological perspectives have infl uenced the nature of those studies." (Abstract)
more
"This chapter reviews historical and contemporary advocacy journalism in a global context, and identifies future directions for research. The intention is not to offer a comprehensive survey, a rather ambitious scope given the diversity of journalistic practices worldwide, but rather to review conce
...
ptual definitions and historical developments to locate advocacy journalism as a specific form of journalistic practice." (Abstract)
more