The article reflects on contemporary processes of de-professionalisation of journalism, its consequences for democratic processes and challenges to citizen journalism. In the first section, we briefly address the long-term historical decline of professional journalism; in the second section, we look at some of the attributes of the current crisis; in the third section, we probe some of the key features of what has come to be called citizen journalism, a development that is contradictorily entwined with both the de-professionalisation and the democratisation of journalism. In the conclusion, we turn our eye to some paths for future research.
COBISS.SI-ID: 33870941
The study is placed at the intersection of the classical debates on freedom of the press and freedom of expression, and discussions on the challenges to journalism’s gatekeeping role in contemporary online communication contexts. It explores the decision-making rationale of news websites’ moderators from three leading Slovenian news websites who keep hate speech at the gates by reviewing and selecting users’ comments for publication under news items. By using document analysis, newsroom observations and interviews the authors identified initial automated moderation, prevalent post-moderation, occasional reactive moderation and narrowed pre-moderation. These methods construct an enduring online communication space through the dynamic nature of the relations between moderators (gatekeepers) and online users (the gated). This, in many ways, is a Sisyphean task, and indicates four-way gatekeeping of hate speech that is articulated in the nuanced relations between structures, such as time, financial resources, work organisation and human agency.
COBISS.SI-ID: 33123677
By reconsidering the complexities of the journalist–politician relationship, the study pursues the metaphor of tango introduced by Herbert J. Gans and analyses the online interplay in Twitter conversations between journalistic and political actors. The results of content analysis of public online conversations and in-depth interviews with journalistic and political actors revealed that neither journalists nor politicians led the Twitter tango, but instead whether these actors engaged in Twitter conversations as either initiators or respondents. The identified boundary dynamics of the Twitter tango indicate that social media are a particular venue for the articulation of journalist–politician relationships, which in some cases are importantly shaped by offline relations. The findings imply that in Slovenia contemporary journalism’s relation to politics is paradoxical because it is shaped by the liquidity of late-modern social communication and the compactness of an elite culture.
COBISS.SI-ID: 34519645
An article in the context of technological development and digitisation of the media on the basis of survey carried out on a representative sample of 500 residents of Slovenia discusses diff erences in the perception of normative and empirical journalistic roles in the eyes of readers of print and online news media. The results show the important role of the press in sensing and shaping the views of readers regarding journalistic roles. Online journalism, in comparison with the press, is not realising this role, which is worrying given the current crisis of the print media and the consequences this entails in social communication. The study further notes that residents of Slovenia in journalists of the print and online media recognise the performance of four empirical roles: high modernist, suggestively-tabloid, control and communitarian, and three normative roles that journalists should perform: late modernist, amusing-control and communitarian.
COBISS.SI-ID: 33765981
The article investigates the connections between trust in journalism and media use. The authors find that the connection between frequency of media use for informative purposes and trust in journalism is very weak, being statistically significant at the 0.05 level for television viewing but not for radio listening, newspaper reading or use of the internet. The authors find indications of polarisation along partisan lines, since those respondents who follow right-wing media (especially those associated with the Slovenian Democratic Party) exhibit a lower level of trust in journalism.
COBISS.SI-ID: 34174557