Zvi Reich

Zvi Reich
Ben-Gurion University of the Negev | bgu · Department of Communication Studies

About

69
Publications
65,966
Reads
How we measure 'reads'
A 'read' is counted each time someone views a publication summary (such as the title, abstract, and list of authors), clicks on a figure, or views or downloads the full-text. Learn more
3,433
Citations

Publications

Publications (69)
Article
This study shows how, during the turbulent period of their initial months on the job, new beat reporters experience a shift in their basic approach to knowledge. This new epistemic approach encompasses two interconnected shifts: From seeing self-knowledge as a necessity to reliance on sources’ knowledge, and from prioritizing content knowledge to p...
Article
Journalistic interactive visualizations (JIVs) – such as scrollytellings, interactive infographics, and clickable data visualizations – have an epistemic potential to efficiently and intricately mediate rich journalistic knowledge. In practice, however, they usually mediate and oversimplify limited knowledge. To understand why and where, across the...
Article
Reliance on evidence is highly desired in disciplines such as science and law. However, the extent to which daily reporters use it to corroborate or refute sources’ say-so is disputed. To explore how evidence is built into stories in ways that are not entirely obvious from the manifest content, we studied the involvement of evidence in a sample of...
Article
This article presents for the first time longitudinal evidence according to which the role of digital news sources has grown dramatically since 2006. The study includes reconstructions of 1,594 news items, authored by a representative sample of Israeli news reporters, and details regarding each item’s sources (n = 5,647). We found that digital sour...
Article
Full-text available
This study analyzes a journalistic community's interpretation of an experiment in which authors (primarily fiction writers) and poets replaced the reporters of a major Israeli newspaper and produced the news in two special issues. Using a mix of methodologies—content analysis, interviews with journalists and authors, a survey among journalists and...
Article
Full-text available
The article offers a new theoretical model that conceptualizes the “exotic” expertise of journalists and other knowledge-brokers who specialize in particular domains (e.g., teachers, librarians, analysts). The model adapts theories from sociology, pedagogy and philosophy and juxtaposes them against the insights of 14 editors-in-chief from leading I...
Article
This paper summarizes almost two decades of applying the newsmaking reconstruction method for studying numerous aspects of news processes. The suggested methodology can overcome the shortcomings of traditional methods in changing and decreasingly observable news environments. While suiting a wide array of theories, newsmaking reconstructions are es...
Article
Full-text available
This study uses the case study of journalists to explore the socio-cognitive nature of interpersonal trust in growingly deceptive ecosystems. Journalists are ideal test subjects to explore these issues as professional trust allocators, who receive immediate feedback on right and wrong trust decisions. The study differentiates, for the first time, b...
Article
Full-text available
Journalism and media studies lack robust theoretical concepts for studying journalistic knowledge generation. More specifically, conceptual challenges attend the emergence of big data and algorithmic sources of journalistic knowledge. A family of frameworks apt to this challenge is provided by “social epistemology”: a young philosophical field whic...
Article
The media’s capacity to maintain its role as an institution for public knowledge is growingly dependent on its capacity to verify information effectively, especially in times of growing mis/dis and mal information. To explore the epistemic role of verifications, covering their frequencies, predictors and underlying motivations, procedures, and cont...
Article
Disagreements over facts, in which news sources are leading journalists in opposite directions, are an ultimate test of journalists’ knowledge, forcing them to develop their own understanding of the actual state of affairs. This study focuses on how reporters think, act, and establish knowledge during the coverage of day-to-day disagreements – cont...
Article
Full-text available
This article explores how leading Israeli news organizations evaluate the performance of their reporters in an era when evaluations are becoming more intensive and challenging, addressing new measures, pressures, and narrower margins of error concerning editorial employment. Data are based on in-depth interviews with 13 current and former editors-i...
Article
Full-text available
This article summarizes a longitudinal study on the role of technology in obtaining the information behind print and online news in Israel, across 15 years. Rather than taking the benefits of innovation for granted, knowledge acquisition technologies should be evaluated according to their ‘epistemic bandwidth’, involving the scope of knowledge-seek...
Article
Full-text available
A growing series of news platforms such as live blogging, tweeting, and push notifications are struggling with the extreme pressure of immediate reporting. The current study explores which strategies of knowledge acquisition and knowledge presentation journalists who operate immediate channels are using to address the mounting pressures and enhance...
Article
Full-text available
This study explores the potential of an online platform that encourages journalists to post the documents behind their news stories to help restore the deteriorating public trust in news media. Based on content analysis of 200 news items and 315 accompanying documents posted on DocumentCloud, findings indicate that contrary to journalists’ traditio...
Article
In the age of spirited debates about the mediating role of technologies, the other side of the coin is the state of direct experience in contemporary news production, that is, cases in which news reporters still rely on traditional channels such as “legwork,” “firsthand witnessing,” or “shoe-leather reporting.” The present study is a systematic att...
Article
Full-text available
In order to gain an understanding of journalists’ conceptions of what being factual means, the present work supplements the existing insights of journalism studies and the sociology of knowledge and philosophy with data about journalists’ beliefs regarding the importance of detached observation and reporting things as they are, spanning 62 countrie...
Article
Full-text available
The broadening reliance on algorithms to generate news automatically, referred to as “automated journalism” or “robot journalism”, has significant practical, sociopolitical, psychological, legal and occupational implications for news organizations, journalists and their audiences. One of its most controversial yet unexplored aspects is the algorith...
Article
Full-text available
This paper examines the anatomy of leaking in the age of megaleaks based on a series of reconstruction interviews with 108 Israeli reporters, who recreated a sample of leaked versus non-leaked items (N = 845). Data show that leaking remains a journalistic routine, encompassing one in six items; however, they cease to be the sole game of senior sour...
Article
Journalists apparently maneuver between their inability to validate every single bit of information and the ramifications of publishing unverified reports. This study is the first attempt to uncover and characterize the reasoning which underlies the journalistic journey from skepticism to knowledge. We draw on the philosophical field of the ‘episte...
Article
Full-text available
This paper suggests that news media remain distinct despite increasingly converging news environments. Print, online, radio and television constitute not only unique packing and distribution houses of similarly obtained raw materials, as suggested by the generic approach, but also unique manufacturing houses of news, as suggested by the particulari...
Book
מעברים בתקשורת: לכבוד דן כספי ופועלו - עורכים: נלי אליאס, גלית נמרוד, צבי רייך, עמית שכטר. אסופה של 17 מאמרים של חוקרי תקשורת, העוסקים בסוגיות בולטות במציאות התקשורתית בישראל ובחו"ל. כל אחד מהם פותח בביקור חוזר בתחנה מרכזית בקריירה הענפה של כספי, וחוזר ממנה עם ממצאים ותובנות.
Article
Despite being equipped to an unprecedented extent to become substantial news players, despite a growing need for their journalistic input, and despite the promise of user-generated content to give them voice, ordinary citizens remain a negligible news source. To explore why this is so, I propose a model that indicates journalists' reliance on citiz...
Article
For the first time, this paper studies the evolution of photojournalists' bylines compared to reporters' bylines, which proved a sensitive barometer of longitudinal changes in reporters' status, professionalism, creativity and authorship. Based on a sample of 8800 photographs and news items published across the twentieth century in five quality nat...
Article
The present study is the first systematic attempt to examine the role of time constraints in journalists' daily routines and practices, at the level of individual news items. Long-standing concerns about journalism's “stopwatch culture” and the negative impact of time pressures on newswork have been exacerbated in the digital age by growing demands...
Article
Full-text available
Contrary to the scholarly literature frequently associating digitization with external threats to professional photojournalists, this study focuses on internal factors: the new routines and practices of digital photojournalism, embedding them in the broader context of growing threats to cultural industries and labor markets. Using a longitudinal pe...
Article
Full-text available
The article summarizes three consecutive studies (2001, 2006, 2011) in which national Israeli press reporters detailed how they obtained random samples of their recently published items (N = 1003): first, in order to explore the public interest in whether the standards of news production are deteriorating, improving or staying put; second, to indic...
Article
Full-text available
Credit attribution for journalists represents a crucial development in journalism, with numerous organizational, legal, political and literary implications. This article explores the rise of bylines and authorship in the French press during the last 250 years, as an alternative to the Anglo-American model, on which studies have focused. Findings sh...
Article
This study focuses on the performance of female and male reporters in various news processes for which little systematic research has been accomplished. It is based primarily on a series of reconstruction interviews with 60 Israeli reporters in parallel beats and on the ways in which they obtained material for a sample of their recently published i...
Article
This study focuses on the performance of female and male reporters in various news processes for which little systematic research has been accomplished. It is based primarily on a series of reconstruction interviews with 60 Israeli reporters in parallel beats and on the ways in which they obtained material for a sample of their recently published i...
Article
The degree to which journalists realize their most basic societal role and provide fact-based accounts has been a point of contestation between several camps. While adherents to the notion of the social construction of reality have infused scholarly discourse with far-reaching doubts about journalists' ability to report facts, emphasizing the arbit...
Article
Full-text available
Based on measurements across the past decade, this paper challenges common wisdom about new technologies’ transformative impact on news reporting. The telephone still reigns as queen of the news production battlefield, while use of the Internet and social media as news sources remains marginal. In face-to-face reconstruction interviews, news report...
Article
Full-text available
Journalists' ability to capture and deliver factual information is central to their sense of professionalism and to their societal and democratic functions. The need to understand journalists' dealings with facts becomes especially pronounced in an age when news organizations face an economic crisis and journalism's exclusive jurisdiction over the...
Article
This article seeks to map systematically predictors of journalists' perceived professional autonomy. On the basis of survey responses of 1,800 journalists from 18 countries, the study tests the extent to which journalists with different backgrounds and jobs, who work for different media and organizations, under different kinds of ownerships and pre...
Article
Full-text available
This article offers a theoretical framework for understanding journalistic expertise, based on a revision of Collins and Evans' model. While their model maintains that a small elite of experienced and diligent journalists can become “interactional experts” in the respective specializations of their news sources, the current paper suggests that expe...
Article
Full-text available
One of the questions dominating discourse on the changing face of the news industry and the future of journalism concerns the extent to which professional news reporters may be replaced by a series of new human and technological agents, such as bloggers, citizen journalists, user-generated content, offshore reporters and news-story composing algori...
Article
Full-text available
This article seeks to explore whether political reporters present more meticulous, complex, and active standards of news reporting—justifying their special role as enablers of informed citizenry—and to help resolve the theoretical ambiguity regarding news beats as distinct domains of practice. The sample comprised reporters from three beat clusters...
Article
Full-text available
This study analyzes a journalistic community's interpretation of an experiment in which authors (primarily fiction writers) and poets replaced the reporters of a major Israeli newspaper and produced the news in two special issues. Using a mix of methodologies—content analysis, interviews with journalists and authors, a survey among journalists and...
Article
This paper compares how eighty reporters from three media—print, online, and radio—obtained a sample of their items, seeking to establish which of two schools of thought is closer to reality: scholars who contend that each news medium embodies a unique “regime” of content creation, or those who argue that the different media maintain similar news r...
Article
Full-text available
This article reports key findings from a comparative survey of the role perceptions, epistemological orientations and ethical views of 1800 journalists from 18 countries. The results show that detachment, non-involvement, providing political information and monitoring the government are considered essential journalistic functions around the globe....
Book
Who makes the news in a digital age? Participatory Journalism offers fascinating insights into how journalists in Western democracies are thinking about, and dealing with, the inclusion of content produced and published by the public.
Chapter
Full-text available
Article
Full-text available
The extent to which information sources, that stand behind virtually all the news, are perceived by journalists as credible is a key determinant of the likelihood of their obtaining news access and public voice. The nature of source credibility judgment in journalism, however, is disputed between two major schools: while the “visceral” camp contend...
Book
Full-text available
https://jyx.jyu.fi/dspace/handle/123456789/27124
Article
Full-text available
News outlets are providing more opportunities than ever before for the public to contribute to professionally edited publications. Online news websites routinely provide tools to facilitate user participation in the news, from enabling citizens to submit story ideas to posting comments on stories. This study on participatory journalism draws on the...
Article
Full-text available
The proliferation of bylines characterized the news as an imperfect, all too human account of reality, opening the way towards journalistic stardom, altering power relations within the news industry and shifting news organizations from a position behind the news to one behind the people who gather and compose it. Focusing on The New York Times as t...
Article
Full-text available
As news environments become more fragmented, public relations grows more sophisticated and editorial systems weaken, the impact of PR on news becomes greater and more diverse. Its scope and intensity, however, can hardly be grasped by traditional newsroom-oriented and press release-centered approaches that try to reduce PR impact to a single bottom...
Article
Full-text available
Based on a comparative study of user-generated content in ten countries, this article explored the developmental features of citizen participation in online media with special emphasis on political economic issues regarding the phenomena. We dealt with the emerging practices for audience participation management and their relationship to news produ...
Article
Full-text available
This comparative study of user-generated content (UGC) in 10 Western democracies examines the political economic aspects of citizen participation in online media, as assessed by journalists who work with this content. Drawing on interviews with more than 60 journalists, we explore their perceived economic motivations for an ongoing redefinition of...
Article
Initial research findings concerning seven leading Israeli national authorities and the communicative practices they use or plan to use during emergencies show that public authorities facing emergencies tend to develop four areas of professional and ethical weakness that require attention: (1) The theory vs. practice conflict, in which spokesperson...
Article
An innovative methodology of face-to-face reconstruction interviews with the reporters who had authored a sample of news items allowed wide and systematic research access to one of the most sensitive and virtually unapproachable spheres of journalism — leaks. The main findings were that (1) leaks were highly prevalent — each fifth item involved the...
Article
Full-text available
A systematic study of day-to-day practices of citizen reporters, compared to their mainstream counterparts, suggests that ordinary citizens can serve as a vital complement to mainstream journalism, however not as its substitute. The paper develops a version of the “news access” theory, which sees citizen journalists as hindered by their inferior ac...
Article
This study proposes a framework for a theory of epistemological technologies in news sourcing, based on research on communication channels (technology-mediated and non-mediated) used to acquire information for stories published or aired by nine Israeli news organizations, employing face-to-face reconstruction interviews with reporters. Findings rev...
Article
The role of reporters and sources in the initiation of the news is neither unilateral as claimed by models of “hegemony” and “adversarial journalism”, nor reciprocal as suggested by the models of “exchange” and “role relationship”, but rather a combination of the two. According to the process model developed and examined here, the initiative passes...
Article
The study explores to what extent new communication technologies have played a revolutionizing role in the ways in which news reporters acquire information. Reporters reconstructed how they used different technologies in order to obtain each of their sampled items, both before and after the introduction of new communication technologies into the Is...
Article
Full-text available
The norm according to which each news item carries a reporter's byline is not a law of nature, but rather an outcome of a silent evolution that took place during the 20 th century in several countries simultaneously. From almost no-byline policy at the beginning of the century to almost total byline policy towards its end. The proposed research foc...
Article
Full-text available
The role of reporters and sources in the building of the agenda is neither too dynamic, as described by the reciprocal models (exchange and role relationship), nor rigid as claimed by the one-sided models (hegemony and adversarial), but rather a combination of the two. According to the process model suggested and examined here, the relations betwee...

Network

Cited By