most recent by Thomas Hanitzsch
Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Communication, 2019
How do journalists around the world view their roles and responsibilities in society? Based on a ... more How do journalists around the world view their roles and responsibilities in society? Based on a landmark study that has collected data from more than 27,500 journalists in 67 countries, Worlds of Journalism offers a groundbreaking analysis of the different ways journalists perceive their duties, their relationship to society and government, and the nature and meaning of their work.Challenging assumptions of a universal definition or concept of journalism, the book maps a world populated by a rich diversity of journalistic cultures. Organized around a series of key questions on topics such as editorial autonomy, journalistic ethics, trust in social institutions, and changes in the profession, it details how the practice of journalism differs across the world in a range of political, social, and economic contexts. The book covers how journalism as an institution is created and re-created by journalists and how they experience their profession in very different ways, even as they retain a commitment to some basic, widely shared professional norms and practices. It concludes with a global classification of journalistic cultures that reflects the breadth of worldviews and orientations found in disparate countries and regions. Worlds of Journalism offers an ambitious, comparative global understanding of the state of journalism in a time when it is confronting a series of economic and political threats.
International Encyclopedia of Journalism Studies, 2019
The notion of journalistic roles refers to the way journalists perceive, articulate, and enact ge... more The notion of journalistic roles refers to the way journalists perceive, articulate, and enact generalized expectations as to how journalism is serving society, both in normative and descriptive terms. Journalistic roles are constructed in professional discourse, which is about journalism's identity and place in society. Journalists articulate and enact journalistic roles on four levels: Normative role orientations encompass generalized and aggregate expectations that journalists believe are deemed desirable in society, while cognitive role orientations comprise the institutional values, attitudes, and beliefs that journalists embrace as a result of their occupational socialization. Practiced role performance captures the roles that journalists enact in practice, and narrated role performance denominates journalists' subjective perceptions and articulations of these roles. The universe of journalistic roles can be mapped onto two analytically distinct but empirically related domains that are central to people's lives: the domain of politics and the domain of everyday life.
Journalism: Theory, Practice & Criticism, 2019
Journalism: Theory, Practice & Criticism, 2018
Journalism researchers have tended to study journalistic roles from within a Western framework or... more Journalism researchers have tended to study journalistic roles from within a Western framework oriented toward the media’s contribution to democracy and citizenship. In so doing, journalism scholarship often failed to account for the realities in non-democratic and non-Western contexts, as well as for forms of journalism beyond political news. Based on the framework of discursive institutionalism, we conceptualize journalistic roles as discursive constructions of journalism’s identity and place in society. These roles have sedimented in journalism’s institutional norms and practices and are subject to discursive (re)creation, (re)interpretation, appropriation, and contestation. We argue that journalists exercise important roles in two domains: political life and everyday life. For the domain of political life, we identify 18 roles addressing six essential needs of political life: informational-instructive, analytical-deliberative, critical-monitorial, advocative-radical, developmental-educative, and collaborative-facilitative. In the domain of everyday life, journalists carry out roles that map onto three areas: consumption, identity, and emotion.
International Journal of Press/Politics, 2018
books by Thomas Hanitzsch
The Handbook of Comparative Communication Research aims to provide a comprehensive understanding ... 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 and 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.
On the influence of mass media on public opinion and politics in Indonesia and other countries ; ... more On the influence of mass media on public opinion and politics in Indonesia and other countries ; papers of a symposium
articles by Thomas Hanitzsch
Communication Theory, 2017
The study of journalistic roles tends to be descriptive and is thin on theory. This article advan... more The study of journalistic roles tends to be descriptive and is thin on theory. This article advances an understanding of journalistic roles as being discursively constituted and builds on the notion of journalism as a discursive institution. Journalistic roles are negotiated in a relational structure—the discursive field—where journalists, news outlets, and media organizations struggle over discursive authority in conversations about journalism's identity and locus in society. Journalistic roles are articulated and enacted on 2 distinct levels: role orientations (normative and cognitive roles) and role performance (practiced and narrated roles). The process model of journalistic roles proposes a circular structure, where normative, cognitive, practiced, and narrated roles are connected through processes of internalization, enactment, reflection, normalization, and negotiation.
Journalism …, Jan 1, 2011
Journalism: Theory, Practice & Criticism, 2017
The news increasingly provides help, advice, guidance, and information about the management of se... more The news increasingly provides help, advice, guidance, and information about the management of self and everyday life, in addition to its traditional role in political communication. Yet, such forms of journalism are still regularly denigrated in scholarly discussions, as they often deviate from normative ideals. This is particularly true in lifestyle journalism, where few studies have examined the impact of commercial influences. Through in-depth interviews with 89 Australian and German lifestyle journalists, this article explores the ways in which journalists experience how the lifestyle industries try to shape their daily work, and how these journalists deal with these influences. We find that lifestyle journalists are in a constant struggle over the control of editorial content, and their responses to increasing commercial pressures vary between resistance and resignation. This has implications for our understanding of journalism as a whole in that it broadens it beyond traditional conceptualizations associated with political journalism.
Journal of Communication, 2012
Building on the assumption that journalists' attitudes toward public institutions can contribute ... 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, variation 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.
Communication Theory, 2007
Despite a large array of work broadly concerned with the cultures of news production, studies rar... more Despite a large array of work broadly concerned with the cultures of news production, studies rarely attempt to tackle journalism culture and its dimensional structure at the conceptual level. The purpose of this paper is, therefore, to propose a theoretical foundation on the basis of which systematic and comparative research of journalism cultures is feasible and meaningful. By using a deductive and etic approach, the concept of journalism culture is deconstructed in terms of its constituents and principal dimensions. Based on a review of the relevant literature, the article proposes a conceptualization of journalism culture that consists of 3 essential constituents (institutional roles, epistemologies, and ethical ideologies), further divided into 7 principal dimensions: interventionism, power distance, market orientation, objectivism, empiricism, relativism, and idealism.
Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, 2010
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books by Thomas Hanitzsch
articles by Thomas Hanitzsch