Sergio Splendore
Biographic Data
| ID | 322755 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Sergio Splendore |
| GIVEN NAMES | Sergio |
| FAMILY NAME | Splendore |
| SIGNATURE | SPLENDORE S |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Milan |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-5324-4496 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 43 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 172 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 43 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2013 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
What is Important to Journalism and How it Should be Done: Gaps in Journalistic Roles’ Perceptions and Their Impact on Journalistic Authority in Italy
Considering the different expectations that pervade journalism practice, this article aims to understand how discrepancies between the audiences’ and journalists’ perceptions of journalistic roles might affect journalistic authority in Italy. More specifically, we stem from data collected through two simultaneous surveys, one with citizens and another with journalists, to grasp (1) if the public and press professionals have different assessments …
Changing the norms of citizenship? Attitude, platforms and crisis-driven shifts in 17 countries during the Covid-19 pandemic
This study investigates shifts in citizenship norms during crisis. Citizenship, a core concept of democratic theory, reflects an allegiance to the state founded on public sovereignty, and individuals having the right and capacity to participate in political decision-making. Drawing on Schnaudt et al.’s framework, we explore changes in dutiful, autonomy, and solidarity norms through a two-wave panel study conducted across 17 European democracies i…
Deals, domestication, and disasters: Results of a comparative content analysis of migration coverage in 15 African and European countries
Migration has re-emerged as a central political issue across Africa and Europe, yet comparative research continues to privilege European perspectives and rarely incorporates the heterogeneity of African media systems. This study addresses this gap through a systematic content analysis of 1871 online news articles from 30 outlets in 15 African and European countries (2023-2024). We examine form, content, and evaluative dimensions of migration repo…
Explaining Polarized News Media Trust: A Comparison of Italian Adults and Young Adults
Comparing News Beat Structures across 13 Countries: From Geographic to Topical and Sub-Specialised Division of Labour
Almost 200 years after their inception, news beats became a dominant factor that shapes newsrooms. This study explores the beat mix of leading quality dailies in 13 countries. Findings are based on executive interviews triangulated with other data sources. They indicate a shift from geographic to thematic division of labour and the rising trend of beat sub-specialisation. Newsroom size matters but not linearly: larger newsrooms are not larger acr…
Concurrently fading away and strengthening: A cross-country comparison of foreign and local news beats
One of the structuring logics behind the creation of news beats is the geographical one: that is, national, foreign and local news desks. Foreign and local beats, in particular, have a lot in common: the coverage of different geographical contexts increases the diversity and plurality of views; reporting from geographical peripheries is always the costliest in terms of production; the audience is more dispersed; and geographical news beats can cr…
How do Healthy Political Discussions Invigorate Online Participation? Evidence from 17 European Countries
Social media provide unprecedented opportunities for public deliberation. However, a growing number of users perceive negativity in political debate taking place in those venues and are increasingly frustrated when discussing politics with those they disagree with. In this article, we test the proposition that perceiving online discussions as healthier (i.e. more polite and civil) than offline discussions invigorates online political participatio…
Young Adults’ Folk Theories in a Fragmented Journalistic Environment. The Case of Italy
Navigating Political Polarization in News Production: The Case of Italy
This study looks at political polarization from Italian political journalists’ perspectives and investigates (a) how they conceive political polarization and (b) how they navigate it in their daily work. Empirical data shed light on a number of main factors shaping journalists’ perceptions of political polarization, pinpointing the existence of “media polarization.” The findings also revealed five ideal-typical strategies adopted to deal with a p…
Antonio Martella, Scrolling politics. La comunicazione politica alla prova di TikTok
A Deliberative Democracy Framework for Analysing Trust in Journalists: An Application to Italy
In the current public sphere, the “deliberative model of democracy” may represent both the necessary benchmark and the best lens through which to view developments in the public debate. Democracy can never become really deliberative without the active participation of news media. The assumption of this article is that if news media are to disseminate knowledge, trust in them is crucial. This article examines an aspect neglected by studies on medi…
Justifying an Invasion: When Is Disinformation Successful
Conventional wisdom suggests that social media, especially when used by authoritarian powers with nefarious aims, leaves citizens of democratic countries vulnerable to psychological influence campaigns. But such concerns overlook predispositions among recipients of false claims to reject (or to endorse) conspiratorial narratives. Analyzing responses from a survey fielded in 19 countries, we find that it is a preexisting conspiracy outlook at the …
Perceived prevalence of misinformation fuels worries about Covid-19: A cross-country, multi-method investigation
Data suggests that the majority of citizens in various countries came across ‘fake news’ during the COVID-19 pandemic. We test the relationship between perceived prevalence of misinformation and people’s worries about COVID-19. In Study 1, analyses of a survey across 17 countries indicate a positive association: perceptions of high prevalence of misinformation are correlated with high worries about COVID-19. However, the relationship is weaker in…
Southern European Journalists’ Perceptions of Discursive Menaces in the Age of (Online) Delegitimization
In a new communication context, factors such as the rise of hate speech, disinformation, or a precarious financial and employment situation in the media have made discursive menaces gain increasing significance. Threats of this kind challenge the legitimacy of institutional news media and professional journalists. This article contributes to the existing literature on the legitimization of journalism and boundary work through a study that seeks t…
Advancing a qualitative turn in news media trust research
The contemporary media environment represents the greatest challenge ever to journalism's legitimacy. Surveys conducted in different parts of the world highlight a decline in trust in news media. Due to the numerous changes in the news media environment, different investigative tools are required to grasp the mechanisms underlying news media trust from those adopted so far. This article provides a review of existing media trust research and argue…
It's the ideology, stupid!”: Trust in the press, ideological proximity between citizens and journalists and political parallelism. A comparative approach in 17 countries
Matching national surveys with the dataset offered by the Worlds of Journalism Study network (2012–2016), this article presents an analysis of trust in the press covering 16 European countries and the United States. Drawing from the spatial proximity model of voter utility, this article focuses on the ideological proximity between journalists’ and citizens’ left-right positions as a determinant of trust in the press. We expect a positive relation…
An endless struggle between discourses: How Italian journalists have been claiming their jurisdiction in the digital era
The article describes the discursive evolution of digital journalism in Italy since 2008 by drawing on a database consisting of extracts taken from 227 semi-structured interviews with Italian journalists over 15 years (from 2008 to 2021). The study identifies three fundamental phases in the development of Italian digital journalism: the birth of the first online newsrooms; the spread of social media; and the data/platform turn. The article applie…
Mistakenly misinformed or intentionally deceived? Mis‐ and Disinformation perceptions on the Russian War in Ukraine among citizens in 19 countries
In information environments characterized by institutional distrust, fragmentation and the widespread dissemination of conspiracies and disinformation, citizens perceive misinformation as a salient and threatening issue. Especially amidst disruptive events and crises, news users are likely to believe that information is inaccurate or deceptive. Using an original 19‐country comparative survey study across diverse regions in the world (N = 19,037),…
The Effects of the Covid-19 Outbreak on Selective Exposure: Evidence from 17 Countries
A widely believed claim is that citizens tend to selectively expose themselves to like-minded information. However, when individuals find the information useful, they are more likely to consume cross-cutting sources. While crises such as terror attacks and pandemics can enhance the utility of cross-cutting information, empirical evidence on the role of real-world external threats in selective exposure is scarce. This paper examines the COVID-19 p…
Non-Elitist Truth? The Epistemologies of Italian Journalists in the Hybrid Media System
Epistemology in journalism is the criterion of validity that enables journalists to distinguish the false from the true. Questioning how journalists depict reality is important especially in an age of economic and technological uncertainty. A new group of media actors involved in the news cycles is increasingly able to 'hack the attention economy'; non-elite actors by the algorithmic logics of platforms tend to be increasingly regarded as influen…
Does a Crisis Change News Habits? A Comparative Study of the Effects of Covid-19 on News Media Use in 17 European Countries
Exogenous shocks like the COVID-19 pandemic unleashes multiple fundamental questions about society beyond public health. Based on the classical concept of ‘need for orientation’ and the literature on the role of the media in times of crisis, we investigate to what extent the COVID-19 pandemic affected news consumption in comparative perspective. Based on a two-wave panel survey in 17 mostly European countries, our study targets the role of both l…
Google, Facebook and what else? Measuring the hybridity of Italian journalists by their use of sources
The contemporary media systems present hybrid logics and features that imply an increasingly interdependence among actors, media and communication formats. The hybrid media system approach underlines that legacy news media and non-elite media actors construct flows of news through different media technologies and according to complex temporal structures. A media environment arises in which traditional distinctions between concepts like ‘online’ a…
Navigating High-Choice European Political Information Environments: A Comparative Analysis of News User Profiles and Political Knowledge
The transition from low- to high-choice media environments has had far-reaching implications for citizens’ media use and its relationship with political knowledge. However, there is still a lack of comparative research on how citizens combine the usage of different media and how that is related to political knowledge. To fill this void, we use a unique cross-national survey about the online and offline media use habits of more than 28,000 individ…
The Discursive Constitution of Mafia Journalism as a Network Beat
The article is an exploratory investigation of Italian journalists who cover issues that deal with organized crime of mafia type. It investigates their accounts of practices, organizations, and relationships with sources. Utilizing an institutional discursive approach it presents an investigation and interpretation of mafia journalism as a discursive newsbeat. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 20 journalists working for Italy-based r…
Framing Migration in Southern European Media: Perceptions of Spanish, Italian, and Greek Specialized Journalists
Greece, Italy, and Spain are the Southern European borders and the main entrances for migrants and refugees to Europe, a movement that was particularly visible after the 2015 “refugee crisis of the Mediterranean.” In this context, immigration is used as a political tool, and the object of major media coverage. However, previous studies have shown that this coverage tends to be partial and prejudiced. This study, conducted during the COVID-19 pand…
Does the platform matter? Social media and Covid-19 conspiracy theory beliefs in 17 countries
While the role of social media in the spread of conspiracy theories has received much attention, a key deficit in previous research is the lack of distinction between different types of platforms. This study places the role of social media affordances in facilitating the spread of conspiracy beliefs at the center of its enquiry. We examine the relationship between platform use and conspiracy theory beliefs related to the COVID-19 pandemic. Relyin…
From Open Journalism to Closed Data: Data Journalism in Italy
The study investigates how journalists construct the rise of data journalism discursively within the specific political and economic conditions of Italy, and whether data journalists describe it as able to promote transparency at the level of both journalism and society as a whole. Italy is an interesting case for four different reasons: (1) to date, few analyses have been carried out on Mediterranean countries; (2) the Italian media system and i…
The dominance of institutional sources and the establishment of non-elite ones: The case of Italian online local journalism
This article presents findings from a 1-year-long ‘online news ethnography’ and 20 semi-structured interviews conducted in Italian local newsrooms. It explores journalists’ practices in their relations with sources throughout the entire process of news production: discovering, gathering, and writing news. The relation between institutional sources and journalists sees the former acquiring increasing importance for the latter. At the same time, jo…
Quantitatively Oriented Forms of Journalism and Their Epistemology
The contemporary availability of data and the growing possibility of their processing have also influenced the journalistic field. Several global news companies have embraced and enhanced forms of data use. This article provides an overview of research and analysis on the journalistic use of data. It discusses three broad definitions of data, computational, and automated journalism. It then debates their epistemological implications at each stage…
Navigating High-Choice European Political Information Environments: A Comparative Analysis of News User Profiles and Political Knowledge
The transition from low- to high-choice media environments has had far-reaching implications for citizens’ media use and its relationship with political knowledge. However, there is still a lack of comparative research on how citizens combine the usage of different media and how that is related to political knowledge. To fill this void, we use a unique cross-national survey about the online and offline media use habits of more than 28,000 individ…
How effective is media self-regulation? Results from a comparative survey of European journalists
This article presents key results of a comparative journalists’ survey on media accountability, for which 1762 journalists in 14 countries had been interrogated online. The article explores how European journalists perceive the impact of old versus new media accountability instruments on professional journalistic standards – established instruments like press councils, ethics codes, ombudsmen and media criticism, but also more recent online instr…
Justifying an Invasion: When Is Disinformation Successful
Conventional wisdom suggests that social media, especially when used by authoritarian powers with nefarious aims, leaves citizens of democratic countries vulnerable to psychological influence campaigns. But such concerns overlook predispositions among recipients of false claims to reject (or to endorse) conspiratorial narratives. Analyzing responses from a survey fielded in 19 countries, we find that it is a preexisting conspiracy outlook at the …
Mistakenly misinformed or intentionally deceived? Mis‐ and Disinformation perceptions on the Russian War in Ukraine among citizens in 19 countries
In information environments characterized by institutional distrust, fragmentation and the widespread dissemination of conspiracies and disinformation, citizens perceive misinformation as a salient and threatening issue. Especially amidst disruptive events and crises, news users are likely to believe that information is inaccurate or deceptive. Using an original 19‐country comparative survey study across diverse regions in the world (N = 19,037),…
From contents to comments: Social TV and perceived pluralism in political talk shows
Going beyond source and content pluralism, we propose a two-dimensional audience-based measure of perceived pluralism by exploiting the practice of “social TV”. For this purpose, 135,228 tweets related to 30 episodes of prime time political talk shows broadcast in Italy in 2014 have been analyzed through supervised sentiment analysis. The findings suggest that the two main TV networks compete by addressing generalist audiences. The public televis…
Training or Improvisation: Citizen journalists and their educational backgrounds—a comparative view
While citizen journalists hope to bring new impulses to mass media performance, it is often asked whether they are adequately trained for the production of “newsworthy” stories. This paper focuses on educational aspects of citizen journalism, which, to date, have largely been disregarded by empirical research. A comparative analytical design illustrates the different ways in which citizen journalists acquire and develop the skills that are necess…
The Effects of the Covid-19 Outbreak on Selective Exposure: Evidence from 17 Countries
A widely believed claim is that citizens tend to selectively expose themselves to like-minded information. However, when individuals find the information useful, they are more likely to consume cross-cutting sources. While crises such as terror attacks and pandemics can enhance the utility of cross-cutting information, empirical evidence on the role of real-world external threats in selective exposure is scarce. This paper examines the COVID-19 p…
Proximity Between Citizens and Journalists as a Determinant of Trust in the Media. An Application to Italy
This study presents an analysis of trust in types of media with an application to the Italian context. In particular, we focus on the role played by the ideological proximity between journalists’ and citizens’ political leanings while differentiating between traditional (press and TV) and new (internet and social networks) media. To do so, we assume, within the Hierarchy of Influences Model, that the individual level is increasingly influent in s…
Internet revolution revisited: A comparative study of online news
While numerous studies view the internet as a patron of internationalism and public empowerment, this comparative study of leading news websites in nine nations shows that online news is strongly nation-centred, and much more inclined to cite the voices of authority than those of civil society and the individual citizen. Online news is very similar, in these respects, to newspaper and television news. This convergence is due to the way in which l…
Framing Migration in Southern European Media: Perceptions of Spanish, Italian, and Greek Specialized Journalists
Greece, Italy, and Spain are the Southern European borders and the main entrances for migrants and refugees to Europe, a movement that was particularly visible after the 2015 “refugee crisis of the Mediterranean.” In this context, immigration is used as a political tool, and the object of major media coverage. However, previous studies have shown that this coverage tends to be partial and prejudiced. This study, conducted during the COVID-19 pand…
Covering Migration—in Africa and Europe: Results from a Comparative Analysis of 11 Countries
While the issue of migration has heavily impacted on public debates in the Global North, much less is known about coverage of migration in the Global South. This pilot study sets out to de-westernize the discussion, by analyzing and comparing news coverage in migrants’ destination countries and countries of origin. The study’s focus is on media coverage of migration from Africa towards Europe.The paper builds upon prior studies on the coverage of…
Cheap Talk’? Second screening and the irrelevance of TV political debates
This article analyzes 3 months of online debate during the electoral campaign for the 2016 Italian constitutional referendum. Through supervised sentiment analysis, we assess the extent of support for the referendum within the general public of Twitter users ( Twittersphere) by analyzing the voting intentions expressed online in 2,369,333 tweets. Similarly, we exploit the practice of social TV and investigate the support for the referendum expres…
Accountability and Transparency of Entrepreneurial Journalism: Unresolved ethical issues in crowdfunded journalism projects
Crowdfunding is a new business model in which journalists rely—and depend—on (micro-) payments by a large number of supporters to finance their reporting. In this form of entrepreneurial journalism the roles of publisher, fundraiser and journalist often overlap. This raises questions about conflicts of interest, accountability and transparency. The article presents the results of selected case studies in four different European countries—Germany …
An endless struggle between discourses: How Italian journalists have been claiming their jurisdiction in the digital era
The article describes the discursive evolution of digital journalism in Italy since 2008 by drawing on a database consisting of extracts taken from 227 semi-structured interviews with Italian journalists over 15 years (from 2008 to 2021). The study identifies three fundamental phases in the development of Italian digital journalism: the birth of the first online newsrooms; the spread of social media; and the data/platform turn. The article applie…
Migración y medios de comunicación. Perspectiva de los periodistas especializados en España
En un contexto en el que la migración tiene un notable peso mediático, y dado el acuerdo general existente en la profesión y la academia sobre los déficits en la cobertura de todas las vertientes de esta en los medios de comunicación, tendente a la negatividad y el estereotipo en un gran número de ocasiones, en este artículo profundizamos en el discurso mediático desde la perspectiva de sus productores: los periodistas especializados. Con este pr…
It's the ideology, stupid!”: Trust in the press, ideological proximity between citizens and journalists and political parallelism. A comparative approach in 17 countries
Matching national surveys with the dataset offered by the Worlds of Journalism Study network (2012–2016), this article presents an analysis of trust in the press covering 16 European countries and the United States. Drawing from the spatial proximity model of voter utility, this article focuses on the ideological proximity between journalists’ and citizens’ left-right positions as a determinant of trust in the press. We expect a positive relation…
Journalists and Editors: Political Proximity as Determinant of Career and Autonomy
Political economy suggests that media owners try to influence the process of media production by providing career incentives to like-minded journalists and adjusting the level of professional autonomy granted to them. Accordingly, we analyze whether the political distance between editors and journalists (i.e., reporters) affects the careers of journalists in terms of rank and salary, as well as their perceived professional autonomy. We hypothesiz…
Media and Corruption: The Other Way Round—Exploring Macro Determinants of Journalists’ Perceptions of the Accountability Instruments and Governmental Pressures
This article reverses the direction of the causal link between corruption and media, in particular, journalism, as it has been commonly investigated in communication studies. Few existing studies have explored the effects of corruption on journalists’ practices and self-conceptions. Based on a comparative survey of 1,764 journalists in 12 European countries and two Arab states, conducted in 2011 and 2012, this article investigates how perceived c…
Internet revolution revisited: A comparative study of online news
While numerous studies view the internet as a patron of internationalism and public empowerment, this comparative study of leading news websites in nine nations shows that online news is strongly nation-centred, and much more inclined to cite the voices of authority than those of civil society and the individual citizen. Online news is very similar, in these respects, to newspaper and television news. This convergence is due to the way in which l…
How effective is media self-regulation? Results from a comparative survey of European journalists
This article presents key results of a comparative journalists’ survey on media accountability, for which 1762 journalists in 14 countries had been interrogated online. The article explores how European journalists perceive the impact of old versus new media accountability instruments on professional journalistic standards – established instruments like press councils, ethics codes, ombudsmen and media criticism, but also more recent online instr…
Accountability and Transparency of Entrepreneurial Journalism: Unresolved ethical issues in crowdfunded journalism projects
Crowdfunding is a new business model in which journalists rely—and depend—on (micro-) payments by a large number of supporters to finance their reporting. In this form of entrepreneurial journalism the roles of publisher, fundraiser and journalist often overlap. This raises questions about conflicts of interest, accountability and transparency. The article presents the results of selected case studies in four different European countries—Germany …
From contents to comments: Social TV and perceived pluralism in political talk shows
Going beyond source and content pluralism, we propose a two-dimensional audience-based measure of perceived pluralism by exploiting the practice of “social TV”. For this purpose, 135,228 tweets related to 30 episodes of prime time political talk shows broadcast in Italy in 2014 have been analyzed through supervised sentiment analysis. The findings suggest that the two main TV networks compete by addressing generalist audiences. The public televis…
Quantitatively Oriented Forms of Journalism and Their Epistemology
The contemporary availability of data and the growing possibility of their processing have also influenced the journalistic field. Several global news companies have embraced and enhanced forms of data use. This article provides an overview of research and analysis on the journalistic use of data. It discusses three broad definitions of data, computational, and automated journalism. It then debates their epistemological implications at each stage…
Training or Improvisation: Citizen journalists and their educational backgrounds—a comparative view
While citizen journalists hope to bring new impulses to mass media performance, it is often asked whether they are adequately trained for the production of “newsworthy” stories. This paper focuses on educational aspects of citizen journalism, which, to date, have largely been disregarded by empirical research. A comparative analytical design illustrates the different ways in which citizen journalists acquire and develop the skills that are necess…
Entertainment is serious stuff: The politicisation of everyday laughs
The Italian media system is characterised by a high level of political parallelism, which is usually investigated in relation to journalism but rarely in relation to TV entertainment. This article offers an analysis of one of the most influential Italian infotainment shows, which usually deals with sensitive social and political events. The conceptual framework of the article is the one offered by the mediatization of politics. We present the fin…
Media and Corruption: The Other Way Round—Exploring Macro Determinants of Journalists’ Perceptions of the Accountability Instruments and Governmental Pressures
This article reverses the direction of the causal link between corruption and media, in particular, journalism, as it has been commonly investigated in communication studies. Few existing studies have explored the effects of corruption on journalists’ practices and self-conceptions. Based on a comparative survey of 1,764 journalists in 12 European countries and two Arab states, conducted in 2011 and 2012, this article investigates how perceived c…
The dominance of institutional sources and the establishment of non-elite ones: The case of Italian online local journalism
This article presents findings from a 1-year-long ‘online news ethnography’ and 20 semi-structured interviews conducted in Italian local newsrooms. It explores journalists’ practices in their relations with sources throughout the entire process of news production: discovering, gathering, and writing news. The relation between institutional sources and journalists sees the former acquiring increasing importance for the latter. At the same time, jo…
Communicative activism and political impasse: The changing media system in the context of fake news and populism
The absence of an electoral law able to provide a clear winner at the 2013 parliamentary elections has contributed to the 2017 Italian political communication environment. The parties and leaders’ communication activities could not find any clear possibility of governing. Nevertheless, the multiplication of available channels has increased the amount of political information available. This article summarizes the communication dynamics within the…
Journalists and Editors: Political Proximity as Determinant of Career and Autonomy
Political economy suggests that media owners try to influence the process of media production by providing career incentives to like-minded journalists and adjusting the level of professional autonomy granted to them. Accordingly, we analyze whether the political distance between editors and journalists (i.e., reporters) affects the careers of journalists in terms of rank and salary, as well as their perceived professional autonomy. We hypothesiz…
From Open Journalism to Closed Data: Data Journalism in Italy
The study investigates how journalists construct the rise of data journalism discursively within the specific political and economic conditions of Italy, and whether data journalists describe it as able to promote transparency at the level of both journalism and society as a whole. Italy is an interesting case for four different reasons: (1) to date, few analyses have been carried out on Mediterranean countries; (2) the Italian media system and i…
Cheap Talk’? Second screening and the irrelevance of TV political debates
This article analyzes 3 months of online debate during the electoral campaign for the 2016 Italian constitutional referendum. Through supervised sentiment analysis, we assess the extent of support for the referendum within the general public of Twitter users ( Twittersphere) by analyzing the voting intentions expressed online in 2,369,333 tweets. Similarly, we exploit the practice of social TV and investigate the support for the referendum expres…
Senza nome, senza voce. Il peace journalism come prospettiva per valutare la copertura informativa italiana dei migranti
suoi risvolti in chiave politica ed elettorale (si pensi, in Italia, al ruolo degli avvenimenti di Macerata durante la campagna elettorale del 2018, cfr
Covering Migration—in Africa and Europe: Results from a Comparative Analysis of 11 Countries
While the issue of migration has heavily impacted on public debates in the Global North, much less is known about coverage of migration in the Global South. This pilot study sets out to de-westernize the discussion, by analyzing and comparing news coverage in migrants’ destination countries and countries of origin. The study’s focus is on media coverage of migration from Africa towards Europe.The paper builds upon prior studies on the coverage of…
Proximity Between Citizens and Journalists as a Determinant of Trust in the Media. An Application to Italy
This study presents an analysis of trust in types of media with an application to the Italian context. In particular, we focus on the role played by the ideological proximity between journalists’ and citizens’ political leanings while differentiating between traditional (press and TV) and new (internet and social networks) media. To do so, we assume, within the Hierarchy of Influences Model, that the individual level is increasingly influent in s…
Does a Crisis Change News Habits? A Comparative Study of the Effects of Covid-19 on News Media Use in 17 European Countries
Exogenous shocks like the COVID-19 pandemic unleashes multiple fundamental questions about society beyond public health. Based on the classical concept of ‘need for orientation’ and the literature on the role of the media in times of crisis, we investigate to what extent the COVID-19 pandemic affected news consumption in comparative perspective. Based on a two-wave panel survey in 17 mostly European countries, our study targets the role of both l…
Google, Facebook and what else? Measuring the hybridity of Italian journalists by their use of sources
The contemporary media systems present hybrid logics and features that imply an increasingly interdependence among actors, media and communication formats. The hybrid media system approach underlines that legacy news media and non-elite media actors construct flows of news through different media technologies and according to complex temporal structures. A media environment arises in which traditional distinctions between concepts like ‘online’ a…
Navigating High-Choice European Political Information Environments: A Comparative Analysis of News User Profiles and Political Knowledge
The transition from low- to high-choice media environments has had far-reaching implications for citizens’ media use and its relationship with political knowledge. However, there is still a lack of comparative research on how citizens combine the usage of different media and how that is related to political knowledge. To fill this void, we use a unique cross-national survey about the online and offline media use habits of more than 28,000 individ…
The Discursive Constitution of Mafia Journalism as a Network Beat
The article is an exploratory investigation of Italian journalists who cover issues that deal with organized crime of mafia type. It investigates their accounts of practices, organizations, and relationships with sources. Utilizing an institutional discursive approach it presents an investigation and interpretation of mafia journalism as a discursive newsbeat. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 20 journalists working for Italy-based r…
Framing Migration in Southern European Media: Perceptions of Spanish, Italian, and Greek Specialized Journalists
Greece, Italy, and Spain are the Southern European borders and the main entrances for migrants and refugees to Europe, a movement that was particularly visible after the 2015 “refugee crisis of the Mediterranean.” In this context, immigration is used as a political tool, and the object of major media coverage. However, previous studies have shown that this coverage tends to be partial and prejudiced. This study, conducted during the COVID-19 pand…
Does the platform matter? Social media and Covid-19 conspiracy theory beliefs in 17 countries
While the role of social media in the spread of conspiracy theories has received much attention, a key deficit in previous research is the lack of distinction between different types of platforms. This study places the role of social media affordances in facilitating the spread of conspiracy beliefs at the center of its enquiry. We examine the relationship between platform use and conspiracy theory beliefs related to the COVID-19 pandemic. Relyin…
Migración y medios de comunicación. Perspectiva de los periodistas especializados en España
En un contexto en el que la migración tiene un notable peso mediático, y dado el acuerdo general existente en la profesión y la academia sobre los déficits en la cobertura de todas las vertientes de esta en los medios de comunicación, tendente a la negatividad y el estereotipo en un gran número de ocasiones, en este artículo profundizamos en el discurso mediático desde la perspectiva de sus productores: los periodistas especializados. Con este pr…
The Effects of the Covid-19 Outbreak on Selective Exposure: Evidence from 17 Countries
A widely believed claim is that citizens tend to selectively expose themselves to like-minded information. However, when individuals find the information useful, they are more likely to consume cross-cutting sources. While crises such as terror attacks and pandemics can enhance the utility of cross-cutting information, empirical evidence on the role of real-world external threats in selective exposure is scarce. This paper examines the COVID-19 p…
Non-Elitist Truth? The Epistemologies of Italian Journalists in the Hybrid Media System
Epistemology in journalism is the criterion of validity that enables journalists to distinguish the false from the true. Questioning how journalists depict reality is important especially in an age of economic and technological uncertainty. A new group of media actors involved in the news cycles is increasingly able to 'hack the attention economy'; non-elite actors by the algorithmic logics of platforms tend to be increasingly regarded as influen…
Political science (33 works) · Media Studies and Communication (29 works) · Sociology (27 works) · Politics (24 works) · Social Media and Politics (24 works) · Media studies (23 works) · Law (20 works) · Law (19 works) · Public relations (19 works) · Journalism (18 works)