TY - ABST

T1 - Different platforms, different journalisms

AU - Willig, Ida

AU - Blach-Ørsten, Mark

AU - Flensburg, Sofie

PY - 2018

Y1 - 2018

N2 - The term “quality journalism” has been debated vividly in recent years, both in light of the challenged business model of news journalism as well as different challenges to democracy. On the one hand, it seems that there is a strong ‘taken-for-grantedness’ on the importance of “quality journalism”. On the other hand,it is possible to find many different definitions of what constitutes “quality” when it comes to journalism in the research literature. Quality can for instance be studied from the perspective of the user (Schweiger 2014, Meiijer 2013), in relation to codes of conduct or policy recommandations (Wurf and Schönback 2011) or as a professional norm (Lewis et. al. 2008) or professional ideal (Picard 2004, Stromback 2005).This article focuses on a fourth tradition of studying journalism quality, which focus on news content. The quality of news content can be studied from many theoretical perspectives, using different definitions and measures of quality. Some focus on a single genre, for instance political communication (as in Esser & Umbricht 2013) or participatory journalism (as in Borger et. Al. 2016), and some focus on comparing the content on different platforms (as Piscina et. al. 2015) but it is very rare, that the data sets for studying content quality allows for a diachronic analysis and for an analysis across platforms. A rare exceptions is “Quality and Indpendence of British News Media” (Lewis et. al. 2008, Lewis and Franklin 2008) where a historical data set made it possible for the researcher to follow the development over a period of 20 years. The analysis is an explorative study of journalism quality based on a unique historical data set of the content in all Danish news media. The data set covers news items from print, digital and broadcast media in the so- called “News Week” (week 46) in 1999, 2008 and 2012 (n = 23.989 editorial items) allowing us to follow “the form of the news” (Barnhust and Nerone 2001, Benson et. al. 2012) over time. Besides an analysis of the general development in the news output (number of news items, relative proportion of genres, of topics and of hard vs soft news), two areas were chosen for close examination: Firstly, news sources (mainly number and types of sources used) and secondly, journalistic processing (whether the story is agency material, recycled journalism, routine journalism, service journalism or prioritized journalism). The overall conclusion is, that two distinct types of journalistic quality can be identified across time: An ‘online quality’ characterized by news stories rather than background stories, and a tendency towards less processed forms of journalism, and an ‘print quality’ characterized by more background genres and a tendency towards more processed journalism.

AB - The term “quality journalism” has been debated vividly in recent years, both in light of the challenged business model of news journalism as well as different challenges to democracy. On the one hand, it seems that there is a strong ‘taken-for-grantedness’ on the importance of “quality journalism”. On the other hand,it is possible to find many different definitions of what constitutes “quality” when it comes to journalism in the research literature. Quality can for instance be studied from the perspective of the user (Schweiger 2014, Meiijer 2013), in relation to codes of conduct or policy recommandations (Wurf and Schönback 2011) or as a professional norm (Lewis et. al. 2008) or professional ideal (Picard 2004, Stromback 2005).This article focuses on a fourth tradition of studying journalism quality, which focus on news content. The quality of news content can be studied from many theoretical perspectives, using different definitions and measures of quality. Some focus on a single genre, for instance political communication (as in Esser & Umbricht 2013) or participatory journalism (as in Borger et. Al. 2016), and some focus on comparing the content on different platforms (as Piscina et. al. 2015) but it is very rare, that the data sets for studying content quality allows for a diachronic analysis and for an analysis across platforms. A rare exceptions is “Quality and Indpendence of British News Media” (Lewis et. al. 2008, Lewis and Franklin 2008) where a historical data set made it possible for the researcher to follow the development over a period of 20 years. The analysis is an explorative study of journalism quality based on a unique historical data set of the content in all Danish news media. The data set covers news items from print, digital and broadcast media in the so- called “News Week” (week 46) in 1999, 2008 and 2012 (n = 23.989 editorial items) allowing us to follow “the form of the news” (Barnhust and Nerone 2001, Benson et. al. 2012) over time. Besides an analysis of the general development in the news output (number of news items, relative proportion of genres, of topics and of hard vs soft news), two areas were chosen for close examination: Firstly, news sources (mainly number and types of sources used) and secondly, journalistic processing (whether the story is agency material, recycled journalism, routine journalism, service journalism or prioritized journalism). The overall conclusion is, that two distinct types of journalistic quality can be identified across time: An ‘online quality’ characterized by news stories rather than background stories, and a tendency towards less processed forms of journalism, and an ‘print quality’ characterized by more background genres and a tendency towards more processed journalism.

M3 - Conference abstract for conference

Y2 - 31 October 2018 through 3 November 2018

ER -