Suchergebnisse

Review van het boek, Remieg Aerts & Peter de Goede (red.) Omstreden democratie. Over de problemen van eensuccesverhaal. Amsterdam (Boom) 2013.

In theories about journalism's democratic remit, trust is generally regarded as a prerequisite for public connection: only when citizens believe the news, they will engage with it and act upon it to perform their citizenship. Trust seems even more important in today's digital society, where the destabilization of journalism institutions and proliferation of sources make the media ecology increasingly complex to navigate. This paper challenges such conceptualizations of media trust rooted in rationality and deliberateness. Based on two series of semistructured interviews with fifty-five young people from ten nationalities living in the Netherlands, conducted in 2016 and 2017, we develop a taxonomy of people's tactics when assessing the reliability of news. We explore what this means for how they value news and how such judgments, drawing on explicit and tacit knowledge, impact their news use. Rather than critically evaluating news through comparing and checking sources, users often employ more pragmatic shortcuts to approximate the trustworthiness of news, including affective and intuitive tactics rooted in tacit knowledge. Consequently, we argue that to fully understand how users deal with the complexity of trust in digital environments, we should not start from ideals of informed citizenship, but from people's actual practices and experiences instead.

In theories about journalism's democratic remit, trust is generally regarded as a prerequisite for public connection: only when citizens believe the news, they will engage with it and act upon it to perform their citizenship. Trust seems even more important in today's digital society, where the destabilization of journalism institutions and proliferation of sources make the media ecology increasingly complex to navigate. This paper challenges such conceptualizations of media trust rooted in rationality and deliberateness. Based on two series of semistructured interviews with fifty-five young people from ten nationalities living in the Netherlands, conducted in 2016 and 2017, we develop a taxonomy of people's tactics when assessing the reliability of news. We explore what this means for how they value news and how such judgments, drawing on explicit and tacit knowledge, impact their news use. Rather than critically evaluating news through comparing and checking sources, users often employ more pragmatic shortcuts to approximate the trustworthiness of news, including affective and intuitive tactics rooted in tacit knowledge. Consequently, we argue that to fully understand how users deal with the complexity of trust in digital environments, we should not start from ideals of informed citizenship, but from people's actual practices and experiences instead.

Journalism studies as an academic field is characterized by multidisciplinarity. Focusing on one object of study, journalism and the news, it established itself by integrating and synthesizing approaches from established disciplines – a tendency that lives on today. This constant gaze to the outside for conceptual inspiration and methodological tools lends itself to a journalism studies that is a fusion cuisine of media, communication, and related scholarship. However, what happens when this object becomes as fragmented and multifaceted as the ways we study it? This essay addresses the challenge of multiplicity in journalism studies by introducing an audience-centred, functional approach to scholarship. We argue this approach encourages the creative intellectual advancements afforded by interdisciplinary experimental cooking while respecting the classical intellectual questions that helped define the culinary tradition of journalism studies in the first place. In so doing, we offer a recipe for journalism studies fusion cooking that: (1) considers technological change (audiences' diets), (2) analyses institutional change (audiences' supermarket of information), and (3) evaluates journalism's societal and democratic impact (audiences' cuisines and health).

Journalism studies as an academic field is characterized by multidisciplinarity. Focusing on one object of study, journalism and the news, it established itself by integrating and synthesizing approaches from established disciplines – a tendency that lives on today. This constant gaze to the outside for conceptual inspiration and methodological tools lends itself to a journalism studies that is a fusion cuisine of media, communication, and related scholarship. However, what happens when this object becomes as fragmented and multifaceted as the ways we study it? This essay addresses the challenge of multiplicity in journalism studies by introducing an audience-centred, functional approach to scholarship. We argue this approach encourages the creative intellectual advancements afforded by interdisciplinary experimental cooking while respecting the classical intellectual questions that helped define the culinary tradition of journalism studies in the first place. In so doing, we offer a recipe for journalism studies fusion cooking that: (1) considers technological change (audiences' diets), (2) analyses institutional change (audiences' supermarket of information), and (3) evaluates journalism's societal and democratic impact (audiences' cuisines and health).

Imagine for a moment – a thought experiment if you will – that journalism as we have come to know it would disappear overnight. What would happen in terms of the informational flows in society? What would we miss and what would be the risk, if any? Instinctively, the answers likely proffered to such a hypothetical scenario are predictable: people would lose crucial information for engaging civically; unfettered from investigative oversight, governments, businesses and other powerful institutions would become less accountable; the fodder for public discussion on prominent issues of the day would be lost; and so on and so forth. In sum: the conditioned reaction on questions about 'what journalism is good for' tends to lead back toward familiar rhetorics and rationales. Journalism's normative claims rely heavily upon these established modernist discourses which serve to affirm its essential role within a democracy and assert its relevance to the public (see McNair, 2012; Schudson, 2008). However, the reality is that most journalism is not a public good, at least not in the traditional economic sense. Publishers in print and online as well as commercial broadcasters are typically companies with all the drawbacks and market susceptibilities this implies no matter how much journalists, journalism studies scholars, and audiences alike frequently place expectations of public service upon journalism tout court. Even public broadcasting, for that matter, is obliged by law to cater for and reach certain audiences. Given this context, it is intriguing to consider the possible disconnect between journalism's normative assertions, its day-to-day activities, and its actual resonance.

Notions of life and death hold a prominent place in our metaphorical repertoires. As oppositional pairs go, there are few more stark and palpable, and this is probably why it's not only tempting but also persuasive to present the claim for journalism's worth in similar terms. If journalism is indeed the 'lifeblood of democracy' and all this implies, societies with an unhealthy press are evidently at risk. Pleas for solutions to improve journalism's conditions therefore tend to go hand in hand with doomsday scenarios about the broader losses for society if journalism-as-we-know it should cease to exist. While such thinking may not always be put in austere terms, it is nonetheless a constitutive part of the discourse that surrounds journalism as well as the basis for many concerns over its future.

This article argues that French journalism, which historical development has often characterized as backward in comparison to its Anglo-American counterpart, changed more profoundly in the interwar years than is often acknowledged in scholarship into journalism history. Based on a textual analysis of the reportages Andree Viollis wrote about her 1931 trip to French Indochina and China, situated against the background of French journalism history, we challenge the dominance of the Anglo-American conception of the objectivity regime as a factual, impartial and depersonalized standard for professional journalism. work illustrates how in France the reflective reporting in the sense of mixing factual description with argumentation and opinions of engaged intellectual writers lost ground to their particular version of fact-centred reporting by so-called grand r"epor"ters, who interpreted objectivity as impartial reporting that was nevertheless structured by the mediating subjectivity of the reporter. These were, contrary to the rhetorically gifted ecrivain engage, expected to convey social reality in a descriptive manner, avoiding explicit political and ideological views. Yet reporters' personal experiences played a pivotal role, expressed in an evocative, literary style that was inspired by literary naturalism.

"Addresses how journalism tries to find and craft new forms and genres of storytelling. It questions how these transitions stimulate new journalistic practices and shift the institutional function and ethics of journalism. What does it means to tell newsworthy and trustworthy stories in a digital age?"--Publishers website

This thematic issue sets out to explore the power relationships between journalism and social media. The articles here examine these relationships as intersections between journalistic actors and their audiences, and between news media, their content, and the functions of social media platforms. As the articles in this issue show, the emergence of social media and their adoption by news media and other social actors have brought about a series of changes which have had an impact on how news is produced, how information is shared, how audiences consume news, and how publics are formed. In this introduction, we highlight the work in this issue in order to reflect on the emergence of social media as one which has been accompanied by shifts in power in journalism and its ancillary fields, shifts which have in turn surfaced new questions for scholars to confront.

Abstract

This article asks what digital literacy tactics low-literate Dutch adults employ to bypass their low-literacy to be able to participate in digital society, and what the consequences are for their socio-digital exclusion and inclusion. It contributes to a better understanding of the impact of digitalization for low-literate citizens, and the linguistic and digital barriers encountered in everyday life. Drawing upon participant observations and semi-structured interviews with low-literate adult citizens in four libraries, a community center, and a school for adult education ( N = 73), this article develops a taxonomy of five tactics which enables low-literate citizens to digitally participate despite their linguistic and digital barriers: (1) informal support structures, (2) formal support structures, (3) non-written communication, (4) translation software, and (5) optimal character recognition. We show how these tactics of appropriating the affordances of information and communications technologies (ICTs), and making use of social networks enable low-literate Dutch citizens to participate in socially situated manners, making use of social support structures and digital literacies developed in relation to "foreign" languages. Consequently, this study counters the stigma on such marginalized groups, who are often assumed to be unable or unwilling to participate, and presents them as not adhering to the dominant discourse of participatory culture. Hence, the added value of this study is threefold: (1) it centers the capabilities of low-literate citizens stemming from social capital and obfuscated linguistic potential, (2) it gives visibility toward more hidden everyday (digital) practices of marginalized subgroups with a larger distance toward the digital society, and (3) it foregrounds the lived experiences of the user and their (limited) use of ICTs, and how tactics are developed and practiced to bypass linguistic and/or digital barriers showing situated agency and problem-solving capacities. We argue that digital literacies should not be considered as a prerequisite for digital participation and inclusion, as our findings show that low-literate Dutch citizens are a highly diverse group that are capable of participating, despite their low (digital)-literacy. However, they do so in socially situated and non-written manners, in line with their digital and linguistic capabilities and barriers.