No full-text available
To read the full-text of this research,
you can request a copy directly from the authors.
Solidarity, safety and journalism: Collaboration between Ukrainian and Kosovar journalists in times of war
Abstract
This paper discusses the issues of safety and solidarity of journalists for journalists in a cooperative project where Ukrainian journalists fled to Kosovo at the time of war in Ukraine. Through international non-governmental mediation, several journalists have moved to Kosovo after the Russian full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 to continue the work of reporting from Kosovo. This is done with the help of journalist peers in Kosovo. The political situation is not favorable for journalists in Ukraine, also considered the fact that Ukraine has not recognized Kosovo as a sovereign state, but this provides a political opportunity to extend this solidarity in political spectrum as well. Interviewed journalists claim that this “functional solidarity” is essential in media development and aid in the future and is a new way to look at safety of journalists. The altruistic solidarity of journalists for journalists also has its culprits of political consequences such as being part of political agendas to try and develop political bridges at the times of war. Findings such as willingness to extend help, planning for solidarity and joint interactions will further advance studies on safety of journalists and reflect on best practices of solidarity among journalists for the future endeavors of similar nature. The role of existing institutions such as journalist associations and international non-government organization are explored as well, defining their role in the process. Ukrainian journalists are in Kosovo to reveal this story of unusual collaboration.
ResearchGate has not been able to resolve any citations for this publication.
This theoretical essay considers how the institution of journalism, now threatened by authoritarian attack and other challenges, has been conceptualized and proposes a refinement on previous definitions: An institution is a complex social structure—formed by an interlocking network of rules and activities, roles, technologies, norms, and collective frames of meaning–which work together to sustain its coherence, endurance, and value. Guided by this general definition, and to better accommodate new institutional forms of journalism specifically in the hybrid media system, I introduce a typology based on two dimensions: level-of-analysis and structural emphasis, that is whether on traditional news organizations or emerging assemblages. In balancing their roles as critic and champion, I argue that academic observers must not take institutional stability, coherence, and value for granted, which previous perspectives have over-stated, but rather take a more explicitly normative assessment of how different structures contribute to those qualities.
Democracies with sharp violence and public insecurity have proliferated in recent decades, with many also featuring extreme economic inequality. These conditions have not been explicitly considered in comparative research on journalists’ work environments, an omission that may obscure important realities of contemporary journalism. We address this gap through analysis of journalist surveys in 62 countries. We confirm the existence of insecure democracies as an empirical phenomenon and begin to unravel their meaning for journalists. We find democracies with uneven democratic performance tend to have more journalist assassinations, which is the most extreme form of influence on work, and that levels of democratic performance, violence, public insecurity and economic inequality significantly shape how journalists perceive various influences in their work environment. Case studies of insecure democracies in Africa and Latin America address why these conditions sometimes (but not always) lead to journalist assassinations and other anti-press violence. They suggest anti-press violence is higher when sub-national state actors intensify criminal violence and when insecurity is geographically and topically proximate to journalists. How journalists’ perceive influences on work are therefore more complex and multidimensional than previous research has suggested. The study concludes by identifying areas for improvement in data collection.
Social media networks are rapidly rewriting the traditional principles and protocols of war and conflict reporting. This paper endorses the argument that with the help of new media technologies, journalists can enhance the peacebuilding efforts in societies and communities. Their writings in the alternate media can provide ‘compelling form of engagement’ between the audiences and the people affected in the areas of violent conflict. But, the paper further argues, this requires a broadening of the orthodox model of journalistic objectivity that has so far been in place. It examines the possibilities of new models in the light of the existing journalism paradigms as argued by scholars including Galtung and Ruge (1965), Lynch and McGoldrick (2005), Shinar (2007), Hackett (2011) and Shaw (2011). It concludes on the need to have a model that is ‘a more natural fit’ for the 21st century by giving journalists the ‘flexibility’ to enable people to make their own judgments as to where the truth lies; and to open up the possibilities for dialogue and engagement in conflict resolution.
This article is a contribution to the debate on audience participation in online media with a twofold aim: (1) making conceptual sense of the phenomenon of participatory journalism in the framework of journalism research, and (2) determining the forms that it is taking in eight European countries and the United States. First, participatory journalism is considered in the context of the historical evolution of public communication. A methodological strategy for systematically analysing citizen participation opportunities in the media is then proposed and applied. A sample of 16 online newspapers offers preliminary data that suggest news organisations are interpreting online user participation mainly as an opportunity for their readers to debate current events, while other stages of the news production process are closed to citizen involvement or controlled by professional journalists when participation is allowed. However, different strategies exist among the studied sample, and contextual factors should be considered in further research.
This paper seeks to explore to what degree revisionism and journalism interact in a European context. By looking at countries with troubled pasts, such as Greece and Spain, which are well into the European Union and also the euro-public sphere, and Kosovo, which uses European Integration as a framework to deal with its conflicting past, we aim to answer the crucial questions of what historical revisionism in journalistic productions is; how it emerges and how it is addressed by journalistic productions in such discourses. We use data from 22 semi-structured in-depth interviews with selected journalists who cover ‘troubled past,’ identified by searching content on the media with the same keywords. These journalists represent a pool of professionals who research the past and forensically deconstruct events and documents to come to new conclusions or re-interpretations of the past through present journalistic productions. Our data suggest that journalists indeed have a narrative of the past in their minds and are eager to explore it further in seeking an ideal professional role of finding out the truth as a counter-revisionist measure. In doing so, journalists also face competing loyalty between their identity and professionalism, belonging, and political situation. Greece, Spain, and Kosovo have suffered very different past conflicts and have different ways of dealing with the past, but journalists in all three countries compete for the true narratives of war and the past. Writing the first draft of history, they argue that the latter is continuously under revision.
Cross-border journalism (CBJ) has evolved from foreign correspondence, its dominant form for decades, to other forms like international advocacy journalism and global collaborative investigations, driven largely by the rapid development of technologies. Amid all this talk on an increasingly connected world, and on CBJ as part of the future of journalism, it is necessary to reflect: Is CBJ as described in European-North American literature really the reality for the rest of the world? How is current scholarship able to take stock of CBJ beyond the so-called mainstream West? This chapter looks at CBJ under the lens of critical de-Westernization by describing the realities of CBJ practice and research beyond the West, as well as the methodological and theoretical considerations in decentering knowledge production.
This book explores the role of external powers and international organisations in media assistance in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Through analysis of key documents, media reports and interviews with key participants it examines the main actors, their roles and the way in which they influenced the media and society.
Bosnia and Herzegovina remains one of the biggest experiments in international intervention in modern history. Media assistance, as well as international intervention, was an enormous project which involved many donors and recipient organisations, and large amounts of money, but it is just one of many countries where democratisation and state-building took place with little to no input from the local community. Since the mid-1980s, media assistance has been an integral part of international intervention used as a tool of democratisation in post-conflict countries and societies. The process is often led and created outside these countries and implemented by various international organisations, led by technocrats and dictated by the will of donors. The author uses the case study of Bosnia and Herzegovina to assess this in a broader context.
This volume will be of interest to scholars and students of Southeast Europe, international organisations, peace-building, and rebuilding society in post-war countries, as well as journalists and policy-makers.
Killings, as the most extreme form of violence against journalists, receive considerable attention, but journalists experience a variety of threats from surveillance to gendered cyber targeting and hate speech, or even the intentional deprivation of their financial basis. This article provides a comprehensive, interdisciplinary framework of journalists’ safety, summarized in a conceptual model. The aim is to advance the study of journalists’ safety and improve safety practices, journalism education, advocacy, and policy making - vital as press freedom and fundamental human rights face multifaceted challenges, compromising journalists’ ability to serve their societies. Journalists’ occupational safety comprises personal (physical, psychological) and infrastructural (digital, financial) dimensions. Safety can be objective and subjective by operating on material and perceptional levels. It is moderated by individual (micro), organizational/institutional (meso), and systemic (macro) risk factors, rooted in power dynamics defining boundaries for journalists’ work, which, if crossed, result in threats and create work-related stress. Stress requires coping, ideally resulting in resilience and resistance, and manifested in journalists’ continued role performance with autonomy. Compromised safety has personal and social consequences as threats might affect role performance and even lead to an exit from the profession, thus also affecting journalism’s wider function as a key institution.
The article is devoted to the values and practices of solidarity in Russian journalism related to the law on foreign agents in the second half of 2021. Its significance lies in the need to analyze the contemporary value spectrum of Russian journalism with its discreteness. The aim of the survey is to analyze new formats for expressing solidarity on an ambiguous point for the media community (the law on foreign agents), using the example of the flash mob #banned profession (August 2021). Through more than 50 Facebook posts with the hashtag #bannedprofession and user comments, the author explores professional and civic value narratives. The qualitative thematic analysis of the texts is used as a research method. The flash mob brought personal stories of professional development and compared different time and socio-political contexts of the profession. Solidarity showed itself in the form of concern for colleagues who had lost their jobs and their source of income. Attempts to monetize solidarity are noticeable features. The social geography of participation expanded, and former journalists also took part in the flash mob. They used it as an opportunity to mark their belonging to the journalistic community. At the same time, in a number of cases the hashtag was used for indirect purposes. The main outcome of the flash mob #banned profession is seen in the personification of the profession of journalism and the articulation of its importance in the modern context. Solidarization is traced not in the texts of the participants of the flash mob, but in the very fact of joining it. Ideas of solidarity are articulated through indignation and rejection of the situation. At the same time, the texts themselves are dominated by individual professional and personal narratives, their own emotions and feelings in the tradition of “new ethics”.The practical significance of the study can be traced back to the development of a theoretical and practical basis for the similar campaigns. Solidarity in journalism as a research topic touches on the intersectional areas of media, activism, relations with power, digital participation, and the axiology of journalism, and may appeal to researchers from various specialties.
Valuable work describing occupational stress in journalism has been published over the last two decades. However, the experience of coping and how local context influences coping and support are less-often the central focus of inquiry. This study addresses this gap using qualitative responses from journalists working in the Mexican areas of Tamaulipas, Puebla, and Mexico City. Using a comparative case design to capture key differences in local conditions, this exploratory study reveals generalizable and context-contingent occupational stress, coping, and support experiences. The study found journalists in each context suffered from occupational stress and found strength in professional identities expressed as gratifications from work, commitments to public service norms, and solidarity among colleagues. In addition, the study found that the local configuration of state, civil society, and criminal actors shaped whether participants engaged in collective action to demand state protection as another form of coping. These findings articulate disconnected observations on camaraderie and values from other qualitative studies of stress in journalism, emphasizing that professional identity and advocacy are sources of strength that should be supported. The study additionally contributes to the literature on journalists’ safety by clarifying the concepts of risk, occupational stress, and coping for journalists.
On February 17, 2008, Kosovo declared its independence, becoming the seventh state to emerge from the break-up of the former Yugoslavia. A tiny country of just two million people, 90% of whom are ethnic Albanians, Kosovo is central - geographically, historically, and politically - to the future of the Western Balkans and, in turn, its potential future within the European Union. But the fate of both Kosovo, condemned by Serbian leaders as a “fake state” and the region as a whole, remains uncertain. In Kosovo: What Everyone Needs to Know, Tim Judah provides a straight-forward guide to the complicated place that is Kosovo. Judah, who has spent years covering the region, offers succinct, penetrating answers to a wide range of questions: Why is Kosovo important? Who are the Albanians? Who are the Serbs? Why is Kosovo so important to Serbs? What role does Kosovo play in the region and in the world? Judah reveals how things stand now and presents the history and geopolitical dynamics that have led to it. The most important of these is the question of the right to self-determination, invoked by the Kosovo Albanians, as opposed to right of territorial integrity invoked by the Serbs. For many Serbs, Kosovo's declaration of independence and subsequent recognition has been traumatic, a savage blow to national pride. Albanians, on the other hand, believe their independence rights an historical wrong: the Serbian conquest (Serbs say “liberation”) of Kosovo in 1912. For anyone wishing to understand both the history and possible future of Kosovo at this pivotal moment in its history, this book offers a wealth of insight and information in a uniquely accessible format.
The goal of this paper is to explain media impact on politics by focusing on characteristics of journalist-politician relationships. Based on the concept of political communication cultures, we present a model that assumes that four dimensions of a political communication culture affect media influences on the presentation of politics and on political processes. These characteristics of the journalist-politician relationships are assumed to depend on the competitive structures of a city’s media and political system. To test this model, we selected four German cities with extreme competitive structures. Our findings, based on 31 interviews with political actors and journalists, show that a stronger media impact on political processes can be traced back to more proximity, conflicts, and background conversations between both sides—a result of media competition in a city. A stronger media impact on the presentation of politics can be explained by a more responsive political communication culture —the result of a consensus-oriented political system.
In conflicts between nations or ethnic groups, journalists can play a major role in bridging between the sides, in particular by interacting sources from the other side of the conflict. The relationship with these sources can shape the context in which journalists see and present the conflict to their audiences. This article investigates the practice of interactions between journalists across conflict lines. In-depth interviews were conducted with 58 journalists who cover the Israeli-Palestinian and the Kosovo-Serbia conflicts. Findings reveal a complex relationship, in which interests and friendships are confused and national and professional identities blurred. We show how journalists use these interactions to manage restrictions, overcome censorships, obtain new information, send messages to people on the other side, and understand the conflict more comprehensively. We suggest that the forms of these interactions may vary from conflict to conflict depending on characteristics of the conflicts such as restrictions on movement and government control of the media.
Young People and the Future of News traces the practices that are evolving as young people come to see news increasingly as something shared via social networks and social media rather than produced and circulated solely by professional news organizations. The book introduces the concept of connective journalism, clarifying the role of creating and sharing stories online as a key precursor to collective and connective political action. At the center of the story are high school students from low-income minority and immigrant communities who often feel underserved or misrepresented by mainstream media but express a strong interest in politics and their communities. Drawing on in-depth field work in three major urban areas over the course of ten years, Young People and the Future of News sheds light on how young people share news that they think others should know about, express solidarity, and bring into being new publics and counter-publics.
Based on interviews with 215 conflict journalists and 315 reconstructed articles, this article explores the way conflict coverage comes into being. The study used retrospective reconstruction to investigate the genesis of news through the journalists’ recollections of decisions and considerations made during the process of news production. The analysis specifically focused on story ideation, story narration and story presentation in the context of coverage about the Israeli–Palestinian conflict and the civil war in Syria, as well as about Kosovo, Macedonia, Burundi and the DRC. The study found that, when invited to speak about their jobs, many conflict journalists cling to a professional narrative suggesting that they are reporting ‘just the facts’ and that it is the ‘reality’ that tells the story. The story reconstructions demonstrate, however, that journalists deliver an intellectual reconstruction of ‘reality’ by actualizing the factual evidence that speaks best to the central narrative of a story and that best ‘exemplifies’ what they think has ‘really’ happened. Furthermore, journalists’ habitus of routinely digesting social media and leading news outlets explains why conflict coverage is often so self-referential.
The article draws on the first findings of the INFOCORE project to better understand the ways in which different types of media matter to the emergence, escalation or, conversely, the pacification and prevention of violence. The authors make the case for combining an interactionist approach of media influence, which is centred on the effects of evidential claims, frames and agendas made by various actors over time, with greater sensitivity for the factors that make conflict cases so different. They argue that the specific role played by the media depends, chiefly: (a) on the ways in which it transforms conflict actors’ claims, interpretations and prescriptions into media content; and (b) their ability to amplify these contents and endow them with reach, visibility and consonance. They found significant variation in media roles across six conflict cases and suggest that they are best explained four interlocking conditioning factors: (i) the degree to which the media landscape is diverse and free, or conversely, controlled and instrumentalized by conflict parties; (ii) societal attitudes to and uses of different media by audiences; (iii) different degrees of conflict intensity and dynamics between the conflict parties; (iv) the degree and nature of the involvement of regional and international actors. The article maintains that de-escalatory media influence will be most effective over the longer term, in settings of low intensity conflict and when tailored carefully to local conditions.
As new actors assert their voices into global discussions, the boundaries of journalism are continuously tested and tugged at. Some, like citizen journalists and alternative community media organisations, are relatively well documented by scholars. Others present a grey area in our understanding of who makes up the perceived “in club” of journalism. One such area of emerging journalistic boundary research is about the media outputs of non-governmental organisations (NGOs), whose staff have traditionally been seen as sources for or stringers to journalists. Technological advances in information communications, increased staffing capacity and more sophisticated media strategies mean that some NGOs are now producing their own independent news as opposed to relying on journalists to tell their organisational stories. The question, however, is whether this is to be seen as more sophisticated communication strategies aimed at advocating a specific viewpoint or/and an emerging form of reporting folding into the expanding boundaries of journalism. This paper argues that one way to conceptualise advocates and NGO actors engaging in eyewitness reporting is as “Unintentional Journalists” doing the work of journalism, without intentionally meaning to do so. Following an exploratory case study of the Pacific branch of global NGO 350.org, the paper suggests that the organisation’s members who produced reports about the passing of Cyclone Pam in Vanuatu, 2015, intended to produce advocacy and, in doing so, unintentionally acted to fill a global news gap for reporting from the Pacific region.
Comparative studies of journalism have become immensely popular in recent times, yet a range of methodological and logistical challenges persist in existing work. This introduction to the special issue on “Comparing Journalistic Cultures” provides a brief overview of these challenges, before providing an overview of the genesis of the Worlds of Journalism Study, an unprecedented, global and collaborative undertaking to examine journalistic culture in 66 countries. In particular, we reflect on how the study approached and aimed to solve methodological challenges, providing some ideas that may aid future studies in this field.
After almost 20 years of political instability and ongoing conflicts in the Western Balkans, the region is still haunted by the past, and there is an ongoing synergy of influence between media and the political sector. Media in this region have frequently been criticized for fueling conflicts, instigating ethnic hatred and taking political sides. This article suggests a new research agenda in the practice of transitional journalism in this part of Southeastern Europe. This research strand combines elements from troubled pasts, war reporting, peace journalism and issues of transitional justice. This article analyzes how journalists in the Western Balkans consider the roles of journalism in times of transitions in the region. Findings from the Worlds of Journalism (WJS) study reveal that journalists and editors in the Western Balkans perceive their roles to be broader than those in traditionally western societies. They subscribe to traditional journalism values but also argue that the media has a broad responsibility to contribute to enhance transitions of societies after longer periods of conflict. At the same time, journalists have little trust in the institutions of society entrusted with the task of leading the countries through many issues of transitional justice. The article draws on empirical material from the WJS survey in 2014 and 2015 in Albania, Croatia, Kosovo and Serbia.
This book challenges the idea that Western media systems are becoming more American in the digital age, arguing that journalistic cultures are not only significantly different from each other still but also variably open and resistant to change. Drawing upon extensive field research of political reporters and examination of discourses of journalistic professionalism as well institutional analysis, this book finds that occupational norms and values of journalism in the US are vigorously upheld but in fact relatively porous and malleable. In Germany, by contrast, professional boundaries are rather strong and resilient but treated matter-of-factly. Revers argues that this is both a consequence of institutional arrangements of media systems and historically evolved cultural principles of journalism in both countries which mutually constitute each other.
This article explores network journalism (connective journalism) and shows how citizen journalists in Syria are trained and supported through the network journalism model. The article applies three major concepts of connective journalism: engagement with social networks, negotiation, and maintaining a connection with norms and values of journalism, and suggests a fourth aspect: protection. Through a case study of the newsgathering and mentoring process leading up to stories being posted on the Damascus Bureau website (damascusbureau.org), a news site dedicated to publishing the stories of Syrian citizen journalists, we show that connective journalism is a viable model for citizens to tell their community’s story to each other and the world.
Building on a survey of media institutions in eighteen West European and North American democracies, Hallin and Mancini identify the principal dimensions of variation in media systems and the political variables which have shaped their evolution. They go on to identify three major models of media system development (the Polarized Pluralist, Democratic Corporatist and Liberal models) to explain why the media have played a different role in politics in each of these systems, and to explore the forces of change that are currently transforming them. It provides a key theoretical statement about the relation between media and political systems, a key statement about the methodology of comparative analysis in political communication and a clear overview of the variety of media institutions that have developed in the West, understood within their political and historical context.
A transnational research project: “Journalism in Change: Professional journalistic culture in Poland, Russia, and Sweden” The purpose of the project “Journalism in Change” is to identify common par ...
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 pressures, in democratic and nondemocratic regimes, can perform their roles as society's main providers of information. We demonstrate that predictors of professional autonomy are twofold: comprising journalists' perceived influences on news work, and objective limits of autonomy that exist beyond journalists' perceptions. The latter reside on 3 levels: the individual journalist level, the organizational level, and the societal level. Journalists' subjective perceptions of political, organizational, procedural, professional, and reference group influences proved to be strongest predictors of professional autonomy. Of the hypothesized objective determinants of journalists' autonomy, ownership, editorial rank, and professional experience had the highest predictive value.
Our study explores the state of mediatization in a comparative framework. We ask how political and journalistic elites in eight European democracies (Austria, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Spain, Sweden, and Switzerland) perceive mediatization with respect to the coverage of politics and the dynamics in their professional relationship. The comparative approach allowed us to assess mediatization in settings where the political impact on the media system takes on different forms and strengths, and, hence, the media enjoy different degrees of autonomy. We argue that these structural differences act as a moderator in the progress of the mediatization of politics. Our results suggest that political and journalistic elites across media systems agree in their belief that the political logic has been replaced by the media logic in news coverage. We also find that this outcome of political communication coincides with perceived tension between the actors, particularly in the polarized-pluralist media system context.
This article sets out to map the journalistic field as a space of struggle between distinct professional milieus. These milieus crystallize around journalists who share similar views on journalism’s function in society. By means of cluster analysis, four global professional milieus were extracted from the survey responses of 1800 journalists in 18 countries: the populist disseminator, detached watchdog, critical change agent and the opportunist facilitator. The detached watchdog milieu clearly dominates the journalistic field in most western countries, while the milieu of the opportunist facilitator reigns supreme in several developing, transitional and authoritarian contexts. In accordance with the theoretical propositions, relatively little professional autonomy was found in contexts with rather strong corporate and commercial influences. However, a more universal approach would need to go beyond corporate and commercial factors in order to account for the realities of the journalistic field in non-western countries.
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.
Afghan journalists in a balancing act: coping with deteriorating security
- A M Khalvatgar
Ukraine to start pullout of peacekeepers from Kosovo
- Reuters