Homelessness remains one of the most persistent and complex societal issues globally, and the media play a significant role in shaping both representations of and public attitudes toward this marginalized population. This study presents a thematic analysis of Czech mainstream news coverage of homelessness during three consecutive Christmas periods (2022, 2023, and 2024). While Christmas coverage might be expected to foreground empathy, humanization, or solidarity more strongly than routine reporting, the analysis shows that such elements remained relatively marginal in the Czech material examined here. The findings reveal a persistent scarcity of solidarity and empathy, with media portrayals frequently reinforcing harmful stereotypes rather than challenging them. The study concludes that substantial changes in media discourse are necessary to promote more accurate and just representations of homelessness in the Czech and possibly further Eastern European context.
On social media, efforts by individual journalists to share news with audiences may be a viable response to personality-driven news presentation coming from peripheral actors like influencers, who are increasingly popular information sources for adolescents. Yet, when using social media to disseminate content, journalists may risk backlash, especially when innovative approaches represent a deviation from traditional journalistic norms. Drawing on expectancy violations theory and semi-structured qualitative interviews conducted among Portuguese journalists ( N = 7) and adolescents ( N = 20), we contrasted professionals’ own perceptions of being journalists on social media to adolescents’ role expectations. Findings showed that adolescents generally prefer journalists to be personal and independent when presenting news on social media, though they also recognized that journalists may in this context be bound by institutional rules. Similarly, journalists highlighted perceived pressure coming from news organizations and licensing bodies to abide by professional standards, even when using their private social media. Despite seeing value in adopting a ‘newsfluencer’-like role, journalists’ need to negotiate between various interests and expectations represents one of the main hurdles that prevents them from establishing a clear presence on these platforms – and may explain low attraction to journalistic sources on social media among adolescents.
This article investigates how journalists in Northeast India negotiate objectivity, ethics and journalistic role perceptions while covering conflicts in geo-politically sensitive and digitally mediated settings. Drawing on eight in-depth interviews, this study reveals how journalists navigate safety concerns, emotional connections and platform logics that increasingly affect their workflows. Employing Framing Theory and Role Theory, the paper highlights three interconnected dimensions: journalists’ reflexive negotiation between emotional attachment and professional neutrality, increasing influence of platform logics and analytics in editorial processes; and contextual restrictions arising from state control and linguistic hegemonies within the Indian national media landscape. The findings demonstrate that in conflict settings, journalistic objectivity is contextually negotiated rather than being universally fixed, highlighting moral sensitivities and hybrid professionalism in peripheral media settings. By examining the lived realities of journalists; the study contributes to de-Westernised discourses in Journalism Studies and explains how journalists in parts of the Global South, especially in conflict-sensitive and marginalised territories, reimagine journalistic ethics and agency amid political, cultural and technological challenges.
This article examines how populist political legitimacy is discursively constructed through semiotic framing in a context of democratic instability. Focusing on Romania’s 2024 presidential crisis, the study analyses how nationalist and anti-establishment meanings are produced, circulated, and recontextualized across digital and traditional media environments. Drawing on semiotic theory and critical discourse approaches, the article explores how recurring symbolic elements, such as sovereignty , moral purity , and elemental resources , operate as indexical signs that connect individual grievances to broader ideological narratives. The analysis combines qualitative discourse analysis of candidate communication, computational analysis of 10,556 news articles, and post-electoral survey data ( N = 572) collected immediately after the first round of voting. The analysis shows how discursive strategies contribute to processes of political legitimation by framing power relations in affective and moral terms rather than procedural or institutional ones. Empirical survey data are used to contextualize how these symbolic repertoires circulated across fragmented media environments and were associated with differentiated patterns of electoral alignment. The findings highlight the central role of media discourse and symbolic framing in shaping political legitimacy, polarization, and interpretive authority within contemporary hybrid media systems, offering insights into the symbolic mechanisms through which legitimacy is negotiated in post-socialist societies.
Investigative journalism plays a vital role in exposing wrongdoing. This study examines the practices and challenges of investigative reporting in Afghanistan during the Republic era (2001–2021). Drawing on in-depth interviews with fifteen investigative journalists from leading television networks, it applies the Hierarchy of Influences model to analyze how multiple levels of pressure shaped investigative reporting in a conflict-affected context. The findings reveal that investigative reporting was constrained across the individual, routines, organizational, extramedia, and social system levels. At the individual level, journalists engaged in anticipatory self-censorship. At the routines level, newsroom practices and narration strategies reflected the normalization of insecurity in everyday work. Organizational pressures, including financial constraints, media dependency, and editorial control, undermined investigative practice. At the extramedia level, pressures from government officials, armed groups, and other actors created an unpredictable reporting environment. At the social system level, weak rule of law, limited enforcement, restricted access to information, and cultural norms narrowed the scope of investigative reporting. The study extends the Hierarchy of Influences model by demonstrating that macro-level pressures converged at the story-conception stage, producing temporal compression across levels of influence. At the same time, journalists exercised negotiated agency through adaptive strategies that enabled investigative journalism to persist despite severe constraints.
This research investigates China’s mediated public diplomacy on climate change in the context of China’s “Media Going Global” campaign and its pursuit for leadership in global climate governance. Utilizing mixed computational analyses on a 6-year news corpus (2020-2025), this study examines the potential of China’s outward news channels shaping the salience of China-related climate issues in American and British media. It finds that, while China succeeds in ensuring its climate commitments acknowledged in foreign coverage, foreign evaluations of its climate actions remain largely independent of its mediated messaging. This article underscores the significance of considering the nature of issue when examining mediated public diplomacy. Climate change, unlike more contentious political issues, enables some alignments between China and western media through shared acknowledgment of climate crisis and China’s pivotal role, but remains limited to swing China’s climate image.
This scoping review maps anglophone scholarship on trauma and journalism in and/or about sub-Saharan Africa published between 1990 and 2025. Rather than assuming a single universal definition of trauma, the review examines how trauma is implicitly and explicitly conceptualised within this literature. Drawing on 139 peer-reviewed journal articles identified through searches of four academic databases, the review analyses patterns in trauma type, methodology, country focus, authorship location, and media platform. The findings indicate that trauma is conceptualised inconsistently across the literature, with only 28% of studies explicitly employing the term. Trauma coverage nevertheless closely mirrors regional crisis contexts. Conflict and war dominate studies focused on Nigeria, Sudan, South Sudan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Somalia, while political and societal trauma cluster around election-related violence in Kenya, Nigeria, and Zimbabwe. Violence and crime, particularly gender-based violence, are most prominent in South African scholarship. Since 2010, journalist safety has emerged as a growing area of concern, particularly in Zimbabwe, Nigeria, and South Africa, while health-related trauma remains comparatively marginal despite the continent’s significant disease burden. Qualitative methods dominate the reviewed literature, while quantitative and mixed-methods research remain limited. Patterns of authorship further suggest differences in knowledge production in which Africa-based scholars more frequently produce locally grounded qualitative research, while non-Africa-based scholars disproportionately publish conceptual or theoretical work. The review identifies important conceptual, geographic, and methodological gaps and argues for more contextually grounded and trauma-informed approaches to journalism research relating to sub-Saharan Africa.
This study examines source diversity in broadcast news in Albania and Kosovo’s hybrid clientelist media systems. Drawing on institutional theory, we explore how sourcing practices reflect competing logics of power, professionalism, and market pressures under conditions of uncertainty. Using a mixed-method approach that combines content analysis of prime-time news with survey data from journalists, we assess both the visibility of political and societal actors and the factors shaping source selection. Findings reveal persistent elite-centric sourcing patterns, with significant variation between the two countries. Albanian journalists report stronger influence from media owners, managers, and government institutions, indicating a highly hierarchical and clientelist structure. In contrast, Kosovo’s media system exhibits a more fragmented and fluid environment. Theoretically, this research challenges assumptions that institutionalized routines uniformly produce news source homogeneity or that clientelist systems completely suppress pluralism. By situating source diversity as a proxy for power distribution, the study contributes to debates on journalism in transitional democracies and highlights the tension between normative ideals and the realities of hybrid clientelistic media systems.
While many studies have focused on direct and external attacks threatening journalists’ safety, this article examines how journalists experience and cope with structural and cultural violence emanating from within the journalistic field itself. This study analyzes 33 in-depth interviews with a diverse sample of journalists in French-speaking Belgium – including freelancers, journalists without press cards, and minority journalists. The analysis reveals how intersecting identity markers (gender, race, age), organizational factors (employment status, beat), and newsroom culture shape journalists’ experiences of three forms of structural violence: discrimination, trauma exposure, and economic precarity. Discrimination experienced by minority journalists elicits primarily resilience strategies; trauma exposure associated with certain beats leads to emotional withdrawal and mental health conditions; while economic violence, particularly acute among freelancers, results mostly in compliance and avoidance strategies, which can result in burn-out or exit from the profession. Crucially, cultural violence emerges as normalizing these harms by dismissing microaggressions, framing trauma as inevitable, and presenting precarity as vocational sacrifice. The study reveals that journalists face these difficulties largely in isolation, with individual coping strategies proving exhausting and unsustainable over time, highlighting the need for institutional support.
During the 2023 wildfires in Canada’s Northwest Territories, journalists evacuated alongside residents. Spread across Canada, they continued to report on and for a community that had been dislocated. This paper argues that, in such conditions, local journalism adopts a place maintenance function, preserving and repairing a shared sense of “home” when physical proximity is no longer possible. Building on concepts of imagined communities, place maintenance, and interpretive communities, we show Northern journalists sustain continuity through three mechanisms. First, they reaffirm a distinct Northern identity and its boundaries. Second, they coordinate and legitimate shared interpretations of the crisis within a small Northern journalistic community. Third, they enact custodial relationships with audiences through translation, coordination, and information provision when routine infrastructures falter. Across these practices, coverage is oriented toward restoring the status quo ante , clarifying journalism’s continuity work and the conditions under which place maintenance takes place during periods of rupture.
Drawing on semi-structured interviews with 25 Kenyan journalists who traveled with the Kenya Defense Forces (KDF) to Somalia between 2011 and 2021, this study examines how trauma impacts war reporting within embedded journalism. I argue that trauma functions as a force that structures how news is produced on the battlefield. Building on field theory, I introduce the concept of the emotional field to explain how emotions function as a relational space that connects the military and journalistic fields. Within this field, fear, dependency on military protection, and lack of mental health support jointly shape news production from the battlefield. The findings show that journalists silence their emotions as a survival strategy in highly insecure environments, intensified by the absence of institutional mental health support from their employers. Consequently, embedded journalism privileges official and military narratives while marginalizing civilian experiences. By shaping what journalists can narrate, trauma within the emotional field influences knowledge production in ways that reinforce security-centered understandings of war and align with Kenya’s broader role as a regional military and security actor.
Based on an in-depth interview study of a strategic sample of Swedish journalists ( n = 20), this article analyzes the coping processes and coping strategies of these journalists when faced with threats and harassment. The paper also presents data on new forms of harassment against a backdrop of developments over the past decade. The analysis uses Lazarus and Folkman’s (1984) theory of stress and coping in combination with Latack, Kinicki & Prussia’s (1995) integrative process model for coping. The coping process is analyzed as beginning with an appraisal phase, then a set of intervening factors (coping goals, coping resources and coping efficacy) before applying one or more coping strategies (which we have divided into problem-focused, emotion-focused, meaning-focused, and future-focused strategies), followed by the creation of (positive and negative) feedback loops. We find a common pattern of engaging in emotion-focused and meaning-focused coping in the first instance, shifting to problem-focused and future-focused coping when the earlier attempts do not work. We further find that the investigative journalists in our sample are more used to harassment and therefore utilize available coping resources better and use a wider range of coping strategies than other interviewees. Implications of our findings are discussed in the concluding section.
In a constantly shifting context, where journalism is changing in response to evolving dynamics from politicians, the public, and big tech, it is crucial to understand the concepts that characterize the journalism profession. By understanding what journalism is and is not, and who is, or is not a journalist, journalists can reevaluate their added value in a changing society. This paper aims to identify key pressures that have been reshaping the journalism profession and to explore how the underlying core concepts that describe it are interconnected. It presents the results of a scoping literature review in journalism and media studies, focusing on academic literature that conceptualizes professional journalism. Our analysis shows, firstly, that a substantial body of literature refers to journalism as a collective entity; journalism at an institutional and an organizational level. Little attention has been paid to the journalist as an individual. Secondly, professional journalism is affected by both external developments, including technological, societal, and economic changes, as well as internal debates within the field. Building upon these two findings of our extensive scoping review, we propose a conceptual model that includes five factors influencing the core concepts of professional journalism: two related to journalism as a collective entity and three related to the individual journalist. Based on this model and our description of how the core concepts of professional journalism are interconnected, we propose a research agenda for further studying the professionalization of journalism.
This article investigates whether Brazil’s regional press mirrors subnational electoral cleavages during the impeachment of President Dilma Rousseff. Drawing on debates about political and regional parallelism, we compare editorials from two leading state newspapers located in electorally opposed contexts: O POVO is located in the state of Ceará, a Workers Party (PT) stronghold and Gazeta do Povo in Paraná, a predominantly anti-PT state. Our corpus comprises 60 editorials published between March 2015 and August 2016. Using content analysis, we coded editorial framings in terms of problem definition, causal attributions, consequences, those deemed responsible, proposed solutions, and explicit stances on the impeachment of Rousseff. We test two competing hypotheses: (H1) regional parallelism, whereby newspapers align with their state’s prevailing partisan preferences; and (H2) a “default” hypothesis, whereby regional outlets reproduce the national press’s anti-PT bias regardless of local electorates. Mixed results support partially both hypotheses. Gazeta do Povo consistently frames the impeachment as a legitimate constitutional response to a crime of responsibility and endorses Rousseff’s removal as the only viable solution. O POVO, by contrast, foregrounds the economic crisis, avoids projecting consequences, and remains largely non-committal, oscillating between criticisms of the impeachment and acceptance of its formal legality. We argue that these patterns indicate neither clear regional parallelism nor uniform anti-left bias, but an asymmetric regional parallelism in which conservative regions exhibit strong anti-PT advocacy while PT-leaning regions display moderated, centrist editorial postures constrained by political and economic elites.
Climate change journalism has often been criticized for being too complex, abstract, and detached in time and space, which may leave audiences disengaged. The present paper nuances this discussion by examining editorial considerations behind climate reporting in local and regional newsrooms with a specific focus on extreme weather. Drawing on ten semi-structured interviews and a thematic analysis, the study explores how local media outlets integrate climate change into everyday reporting through recurring coverage of weather and seasonal phenomena. The findings reveal a recurring editorial logic in which weather events are interpreted as part of longer-term climatic developments and not as isolated incidents. Building on the concept of seasonal journalism, the paper argues that seasonal journalism functions as a mechanism of temporal accumulation through which discrete weather events are transformed into evidence of environmental change over time. In doing so, the article extends existing research on local climate journalism by showing that its distinctive contribution lies not only in its embeddedness in place, but also in its embeddedness in temporal rhythms. By combining the local and the seasonal, the paper contributes to ongoing discussions about how journalism renders climate change observable and meaningful in everyday life.
