Valérie Bélair-Gagnon

University of Minnesota Twin Cities | UMN · School of Journalism and Mass Communication

Since the emergence of social media in the journalistic landscape, the BBC has sought to produce reporting more connected to its audience while retaining its authority as a public broadcaster in crisis reporting. Using empirical analysis of crisis news production at the BBC, this book shows that the emergence of social media at the BBC and the need...

In recent years, there has been a surge in research on small unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in news production and news audience engagement. Most of this research has focused on legal, ethical, and regulatory implications of UAVs in newsgathering, while paying less attention to the journalists' perspectives. To fill this gap in the academic litera...

A maioria das pessoas passa uma grande parte das suas vidas a trabalhar. É, talvez, inevitável que os ambientes de trabalho ajudem a moldar o bem-estar e a felicidade das pessoas. Ao refletirmos sobre os últimos 20 anos da revista Media & Jornalismo, devemos também olhar para o futuro do jornalismo e ponderar o modo como a pesquisa académica pode c...

This article presents a hermeneutical epistemology for the assessment and production of truth-claims in journalism. This epistemology is based on Gadamer’s functional hermeneutics, and it advances the concept of source criticism as an alternative to other practices and understandings of information verification in journalism. The article argues tha...

Sharing is a central activity on social media platforms and a key component in crafting one’s self-presentation online. In the context of news, user-driven sharing is seen as vital to the success of digital journalism. While research has examined why people choose to share news online, much less is known about non-sharing—that is, why people may be...

This study seeks to explore the motivations and labor of lifestyle, or “soft news,” journalists. Rooted in the lens of discursive institutionalism and through 30 interviews with lifestyle journalists in the United States, this study reflects on the aspirational labor—the opportunity to “do what you love”—that motivates entry into journalism but als...

Product innovation within institutional journalism has become an increasingly apparent strategy for news organizations to form and maintain audience interest and economic stability. The common desire for product innovation to be a fiscal savior ultimately challenges internal boundaries of professions. This is particularly apparent as the product in...

This introduction to the special issue “Fighting Fakes: News publishers, fact-checkers, platform companies, and policymaking” argues that the institutionalization of interactions related to misinformation is central to scholarly understandings of the visibility and structural inequalities of institutionalized efforts to fighting fakes. We look at t...

This commentary considers the concept of “disconnection” as a way to understand practices of contemporary digital journalism while advocating for consideration of disconnection as a necessary component of sustainable journalism.

This study offers a metajournalistic discourse analysis of first-person narratives by former journalists who quit the profession. It finds the former journalists felt powerless while in the industry. They expressed this by writing about feelings of being stuck in their “dream job,” haunted by an always-on mentality, strained mentally overall, and u...

As news organizations continue to explore the opportunities and challenges presented by engagement with audiences across digital and social media platforms in the creation and sharing of news and in the development of news-oriented products, they also offer up uniquely personal investment pathways and emotional ties for their audiences. This commen...

This chapter introduces the book by claiming the urgency of Journalism Studies and reflects on how academics have engaged with practice and the public. It provides an overview of some misconceptions about the crisis in journalism. It also presents ways forward for how journalists and practitioners can produce rigorous academic research that matters...

Despite the looming crisis in journalism, a research–practice gap plagues the news industry. This volume seeks to change the research–practice gap, with timely scholarly research on the most pressing problems facing the news industry today, translated for a non-specialist audience. Contributions from academics and journalists are brought together i...

Journalists are increasingly reporting that online harassment has become a common feature of their working lives, contributing to experiences of fatigue, anxiety and disconnection from social media as well as their profession. Drawing on interviews with American newsworkers, this study finds at least three distinct forms of harassment: acute harass...

In public communication, in the absence of a clear sense of one’s actual audience, a communicator relies on a mental image of an imagined audience. But where does one’s image of the audience come from, and how might that matter for how people evaluate their audience? The case of journalists and their perceptions offers an instructive lens for exami...

Journalism scholars have acknowledged the importance of innovation in journalism. A common finding is that journalism has difficulty adapting to change and uses multiple coping mechanisms, including making excuses for not innovating by relying on their professional norms and practices. However, such research does not more broadly show how journalis...

This article explores the institutional logics of intrapreneurial units, or groups within organizations that are designated to foster organizational innovation. Drawing on interviews with news intrapreneurs developing chatbots in news media organizations, this study shows that innovation can be stymied because of conflicting institutional logics. N...

This exploratory study examines the roles journalists rely on when covering social justice topics and what these role conceptions reveal about emotion and self expression values in news production. This article builds on Herbert Gans’ definition of what news is, discursive understandings of journalistic performance, and emotion in news to understan...

This survey of journalists, editors, and managers working for news organizations in the United States explores the perceived importance of citizen and consumer role orientations among newsworkers. It then examines how useful these professionals perceive particular audience metrics to be in fulfilling those roles orientations. This examination takes...

This essay considers how social actors in news have come to shape the contours of news and journalism and what these changes may suggest for other industries. It looks more specifically at the question of who does journalism and news and what that may signal for power dependencies, status, and norms formation. It examines how authors who contribute...

Audience analytics and metrics are ubiquitous in today’s media environment. However, little is known about how creative media workers come to understand the social norms related to those technologies. Drawing on social influence theory, this study examines formal and informal socialization mechanisms in U.S. newsrooms. It finds that editorial newsw...

Since their emergence in 2011, mobile chat applications have gained massive user bases and given enterprising reporters a new challenge: verify truth in a set of fragmented public and private digital conversations involving journalists and audiences. This fragmentation fosters an intimacy and frankness among participants that, for journalists privy...

Since the early days of the sociology of news work, sociologists have considered news work to be “socially constructed,” “purposive behavior,” “ideological construct,” “ritual behavior,” and a “gatekeeping process.” ese scholarly concepts refer to ways that jour- nalists produce news, and the factors that a ect its production. Early sociology of ne...

Since the early days of the sociology of news work, sociologists have considered news work to be “socially constructed,” “purposive behavior,” “ideological construct,” “ritual behavior,” and a “gatekeeping process.” These scholarly concepts refer to ways that journalists produce news and the factors that affect its production. Early sociology of ne...

In the early 2000s, along with the emergence of social media in journalism, mobile chat applications began to gain significant footing in journalistic work. Interdisciplinary research, particularly in journalism studies, has started to look at apps in journalistic work from producer and user perspectives. Still in its infancy, scholarly research on...

In the early 2000s, along with the emergence of social media in journalism, mobile chat applications began to gain significant footing in journalistic work. Interdisciplinary research, particularly in journalism studies, has started to look at apps in journalistic work from producer and user perspectives. Still in its infancy, scholarly research on...

Looking at web analytics in newsrooms, journalism studies scholarship has explored the notion of success in using web analytics and metrics in measuring journalist-audience engagement. Scholars have looked at the role of organizational structures, cognition, and emotion in defining success with analytics. This article analyzes how journalists inter...

In light of the media industry’s growing focus on audience engagement, this article explores how online and offline forms of engagement unfold within journalism, based on a comparative case study of two American public media newsrooms. This study addresses gaps in the literature by (1) examining what engagement means for public media and (2) applyi...

The contours of journalistic practice have evolved substantially since the emergence of the world wide web to include those who were once strangers to the profession. Amateur journalists, bloggers, mobile app designers, programmers, web analytics managers, and others have become part of journalism, influencing the process of journalism from news pr...

Sociological inquiries into journalism have considered journalism as the product of cultural, economic, political, and technological forces in different times and spaces. As part of (and like) the field of media sociology, the sociology of journalism is an interdisciplinary subfield. It has several objectives of inquiry: examining situational and l...

Amid the increasing use of web analytics to gage the success, present and future, of news content and related news products, this article focuses on in-depth interviews with the suppliers of those analytics: web analytics companies. Drawing on the concepts of boundary work and interloper media, this article examines how managers for these companies...

Since 2011, mobile chat apps have gained significant popularity worldwide and the leading chat apps have surpassed social networking sites in user numbers. These apps have become the hosts for everyday communication among a wide variety of users and, thanks to the functionalities of certain apps, have taken on new significance in reporting. Especia...

In the Special Administrative Region of Hong Kong, a former British territory in southern China returned to the People’s Republic as a semi-autonomous enclave in 1997, media capture has distinct characteristics. On one hand, Hong Kong offers a case of media capture in an uncensored media sector and open market economy similar to those of Western in...

Mobile chat apps have shaped multiple forms of communication in everyday life, including education, family, business, and health communication. In journalism, chat apps have taken on a heightened significance in reporting political unrest, particularly in terms of audience/reporter distinctions, sourcing of information, and community formation. Mob...

Coverage of any breaking news event today often includes footage captured by eyewitnesses and uploaded to the social web. This has changed how journalists and news organizations not only report and produce news, but also how they engage with sources and audiences. In addition to social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook, chat apps such as...

This collaborative research project is exploring the impact of national charity and tax laws and regulation on efforts to establish and operate not-for-profit news organisations. It focuses on UK, US, Canada, Australia and Ireland, all developed countries with Anglo-based legal systems. The project is led jointly by the Reuters Institute, Universi...

This paper examines India’s experience in developing national Internet policy by focusing on interactions among stakeholders in the Internet governance process. The paper begins by tracing the history of telecom policies in India along with the development of its IT sector as well as its civil society. It identifies the tensions, opportunities and...

The past ten years have brought significant growth in access to Web technology and in the educational possibilities of social media. These changes challenge previous conceptualizations of education and the classroom, and pose practical questions for learners, teachers, and administrators. Today, the unique capabilities of social media are influenci...

This paper examines India’s experience in developing national Internet policy by focusing on interactions among stakeholders in the Internet governance process. The paper begins by tracing the history of telecom policies in India along with the development of its IT sector as well as its civil society. It identifies the tensions, opportunities and...

Citizen media is defined as a form of journalism that provides an alternative to traditional journalism. It is now an integral part of journalism input, production, dissemination, and consumption. The citizen media that emerged at the end of the twenty-first century is associated with the rapid rise of the Internet and Web 2.0. as a source of broad...

Since the emergence of social media in the journalistic landscape, the BBC has sought to produce reporting more connected to its audience while retaining its authority as a public broadcaster in crisis reporting. Using empirical analysis of crisis news production at the BBC, this book shows that the emergence of social media at the BBC and the need...

This article contributes to the literature of news production studies by providing a powerful example of how processes of deliberation bring change to journalism. It explores the reconstruction of impartiality using the single case-study of social media in the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) international journalism. In this case-study, symb...

In recent years, a growing literature in journalism studies has discussed the increasing importance of social media in European and American news production. Adding to this body of work, we explore how Indian and foreign correspondents reporting from India used social media during the coverage of the Delhi gang rape; how journalists represented the...

Comparant l’Allemagne à l’ensemble des pays occidentaux, nombreux ont été les chercheurs et les activistes qui ont affirmé que les « gains » féministes n’avaient pas été aussi importants en Allemagne qu’à l’étranger. Cet état provisoire des lieux n’implique cependant pas l’absence de féministes en Allemagne. Le présent mémoire se penche sur la fémi...