Mel Bunce
Biographic Data
| ID | 4499212 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Mel Bunce |
| GIVEN NAMES | Mel |
| FAMILY NAME | Bunce |
| SIGNATURE | BUNCE M |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of London |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-4924-8993 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 17 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 211 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 16 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2010 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2023 |
| H-INDEX | 8 |
Whose media freedom is being defended? Norm contestation in international media freedom campaigns
This article analyses how international advocacy campaigns approach and define media freedom, and what influences this process. It does this through a two-year case study of the Media Freedom Coalition—an intergovernmental partnership of over 50 countries—that included 55 interviews with key stakeholders, observations, and document analysis. This revelatory case sheds light on how norms of media freedom are constructed and contested on the intern…
Humanitarian Journalists: Covering Crises from a Boundary Zone
The Influence of News Coverage on Humanitarian Aid: The Bureaucrats’ Perspective
We examine if and how news coverage influences governments’ humanitarian aid allocations, from the perspective of the senior bureaucrats involved in such decision-making. Using rare in-depth interviews with 30 directors and senior policymakers in 16 of the world’s largest donor countries, we found that the majority of these bureaucrats believed that sudden-onset, national news coverage can increase levels of emergency humanitarian aid allocated t…
Beyond the ‘refugee crisis’: How the UK news media represent asylum seekers across national boundaries
Migration is one of the most pressing, divisive issues in global politics today, and media play a crucial role in how communities understand and respond. This study examines how UK newspapers ( n = 974) and popular news websites ( n = 1044) reported on asylum seekers throughout 2017. It contributes to previous literature in two important ways. First, by examining the ‘new normal’ of daily news coverage in the wake of the 2015 ‘refugee crisis’ in …
Soft Power, Hard News: How Journalists at State-Funded Transnational Media Legitimize Their Work
How do journalists working for different state-funded international news organizations legitimize their relationship to the governments which support them? In what circumstances might such journalists resist the diplomatic strategies of their funding states? We address these questions through a comparative study of journalists working for international news organizations funded by the Chinese, US, UK and Qatari governments. Using 52 interviews wi…
Refugee and Asylum News Coverage in UK Print and Online Media
The representation of asylum is important, yet there is little research of how this topic is reported online. This article addresses this gap through a study of UK print and online media (N = 2018). Articles were examined for their soft and hard news focus. Results show both partisanship and the medium play an important role. Online news covered more soft and hard news topics regardless of partisanship. However, examining the focus and style, rig…
The Broken Estate: Journalism and Democracy in a Post-Truth World
"A lack of knowledge about the world can be a very dangerous thing. In the age of Trump, fake news and clickbait headlines, it is easy to despair about the future of journalism. The New Zealand and global media are in upheaval: the old economic models for print journalism are failing, public funding has been neglected for decades, and many major news organisations are shedding journalists. New Zealander Mel Bunce researches and teaches journalism…
Foundation Funding and the Boundaries of Journalism
Private foundations are an important source of funding for many news outlets. It has even been suggested that they may offer a partial solution to journalism’s economic crisis. Yet we do not know how foundation funding shapes journalistic practice. In this article, we show that foundation funding has a significant effect on the “boundaries of journalism”. That is, the ways in which journalists understand, value and practice their journalism. This…
Foundation-funded Journalism, Philanthrocapitalism and Tainted Donors
Not-for-profit news organisations are increasingly funded by private foundations, supported by wealthy entrepreneurs. This raises a range of ethical dilemmas for journalists, which are particularly serious when their donors are alleged to have been involved in unethical or illegal activities. Although this is a relatively common occurrence in the non-profit sector, so far there has been no critical discussion of these issues in relation to founda…
Our newsroom in the cloud’: Slack, virtual newsrooms and journalistic practice
Virtual newsrooms have enormous potential: enabling journalists around the world to pool their knowledge, skills and perspectives within joint projects, such as the Panama Papers. These virtual newsrooms are supported by Online Collaborative Software (OCS), the most popular of which is Slack. But although many of the world’s top news organisations now use Slack, there is no empirical research examining its impact on workplace processes or culture…
Donor Power and the News: The Influence of Foundation Funding on International Public Service Journalism
How does donor funding affect the independence, role perceptions, and ideology of the journalism it supports? We begin to answer this increasingly important but underresearched question with a year-long case study of the humanitarian news organistion IRIN as it transitioned from being funded by the United Nations to a private foundation, run by a Malaysian billionaire. Using content analysis, in-depth interviews, and ethnographic research, we doc…
Management and resistance in the digital newsroom
What happens when there is conflict between the profit motivations of a news outlet and the professional values of its journalists? Questions of managerial influence and journalistic autonomy have interested media scholars from the seminal work of Warren Breed onwards. However, there have only been a handful of studies since the introduction of audience metrics which, this research suggests, allow managers to more efficiently monitor and discipli…
Africa's Media Image in the 21st Century: From the Heart of Darkness to Africa Rising
Africa’s Media Image in the 21st Century is the first book in over twenty years to examine the international media’s coverage of sub-Saharan Africa. It brings together leading researchers and prominent journalists to explore representation of the continent, and the production of that image, especially by international news media. The book highlights factors that have transformed the global media system, changing whose perspectives are told and th…
International news and the image of Africa
This chapter explores the important role of local national journalists in international news bureaus in Africa, and asks whether their presence is changing how Africa is depicted around the Western world. The analysis is framed by a newsroom ethnography of the Thomson-Reuters bureau in Nairobi, one of the largest producers of international news on Africa; as well as thirty additional interviews with foreign correspondents and local journalists ba…
International news and the image of Africa: New storytellers, new narratives
Africa in the click stream: Audience metrics and foreign correspondents in Africa
Digital technologies have transformed the relationship between news outlets, journalists and their audiences. Notably, editors can now monitor their websites and discern the exact news preferences of their readers. Research suggests that some editors are using this data to help them produce more popular, ‘click friendly’ content. To date, research on this phenomenon has focused on journalists working within newsrooms. This article adds to the lit…
This Place Used to be a White British Boys' Club: Reporting Dynamics and Cultural Clash at an International News Bureau in Nairobi
Africa has long been portrayed by Western media as a dark and conflict-ridden continent. Such reports have traditionally been produced by white journalists in the field, writing for a distant audience ‘back home’. In recent years, significant structural changes in the foreign news industry have seen the near-demise of foreign correspondents and the increasing use of locally hired journalists. This research explores the important role of local cor…
Management and resistance in the digital newsroom
What happens when there is conflict between the profit motivations of a news outlet and the professional values of its journalists? Questions of managerial influence and journalistic autonomy have interested media scholars from the seminal work of Warren Breed onwards. However, there have only been a handful of studies since the introduction of audience metrics which, this research suggests, allow managers to more efficiently monitor and discipli…
Foundation Funding and the Boundaries of Journalism
Private foundations are an important source of funding for many news outlets. It has even been suggested that they may offer a partial solution to journalism’s economic crisis. Yet we do not know how foundation funding shapes journalistic practice. In this article, we show that foundation funding has a significant effect on the “boundaries of journalism”. That is, the ways in which journalists understand, value and practice their journalism. This…
This Place Used to be a White British Boys' Club: Reporting Dynamics and Cultural Clash at an International News Bureau in Nairobi
Africa has long been portrayed by Western media as a dark and conflict-ridden continent. Such reports have traditionally been produced by white journalists in the field, writing for a distant audience ‘back home’. In recent years, significant structural changes in the foreign news industry have seen the near-demise of foreign correspondents and the increasing use of locally hired journalists. This research explores the important role of local cor…
Africa in the click stream: Audience metrics and foreign correspondents in Africa
Digital technologies have transformed the relationship between news outlets, journalists and their audiences. Notably, editors can now monitor their websites and discern the exact news preferences of their readers. Research suggests that some editors are using this data to help them produce more popular, ‘click friendly’ content. To date, research on this phenomenon has focused on journalists working within newsrooms. This article adds to the lit…
Donor Power and the News: The Influence of Foundation Funding on International Public Service Journalism
How does donor funding affect the independence, role perceptions, and ideology of the journalism it supports? We begin to answer this increasingly important but underresearched question with a year-long case study of the humanitarian news organistion IRIN as it transitioned from being funded by the United Nations to a private foundation, run by a Malaysian billionaire. Using content analysis, in-depth interviews, and ethnographic research, we doc…
Beyond the ‘refugee crisis’: How the UK news media represent asylum seekers across national boundaries
Migration is one of the most pressing, divisive issues in global politics today, and media play a crucial role in how communities understand and respond. This study examines how UK newspapers ( n = 974) and popular news websites ( n = 1044) reported on asylum seekers throughout 2017. It contributes to previous literature in two important ways. First, by examining the ‘new normal’ of daily news coverage in the wake of the 2015 ‘refugee crisis’ in …
Soft Power, Hard News: How Journalists at State-Funded Transnational Media Legitimize Their Work
How do journalists working for different state-funded international news organizations legitimize their relationship to the governments which support them? In what circumstances might such journalists resist the diplomatic strategies of their funding states? We address these questions through a comparative study of journalists working for international news organizations funded by the Chinese, US, UK and Qatari governments. Using 52 interviews wi…
Our newsroom in the cloud’: Slack, virtual newsrooms and journalistic practice
Virtual newsrooms have enormous potential: enabling journalists around the world to pool their knowledge, skills and perspectives within joint projects, such as the Panama Papers. These virtual newsrooms are supported by Online Collaborative Software (OCS), the most popular of which is Slack. But although many of the world’s top news organisations now use Slack, there is no empirical research examining its impact on workplace processes or culture…
The Influence of News Coverage on Humanitarian Aid: The Bureaucrats’ Perspective
We examine if and how news coverage influences governments’ humanitarian aid allocations, from the perspective of the senior bureaucrats involved in such decision-making. Using rare in-depth interviews with 30 directors and senior policymakers in 16 of the world’s largest donor countries, we found that the majority of these bureaucrats believed that sudden-onset, national news coverage can increase levels of emergency humanitarian aid allocated t…
Foundation-funded Journalism, Philanthrocapitalism and Tainted Donors
Not-for-profit news organisations are increasingly funded by private foundations, supported by wealthy entrepreneurs. This raises a range of ethical dilemmas for journalists, which are particularly serious when their donors are alleged to have been involved in unethical or illegal activities. Although this is a relatively common occurrence in the non-profit sector, so far there has been no critical discussion of these issues in relation to founda…
Refugee and Asylum News Coverage in UK Print and Online Media
The representation of asylum is important, yet there is little research of how this topic is reported online. This article addresses this gap through a study of UK print and online media (N = 2018). Articles were examined for their soft and hard news focus. Results show both partisanship and the medium play an important role. Online news covered more soft and hard news topics regardless of partisanship. However, examining the focus and style, rig…
The Broken Estate: Journalism and Democracy in a Post-Truth World
"A lack of knowledge about the world can be a very dangerous thing. In the age of Trump, fake news and clickbait headlines, it is easy to despair about the future of journalism. The New Zealand and global media are in upheaval: the old economic models for print journalism are failing, public funding has been neglected for decades, and many major news organisations are shedding journalists. New Zealander Mel Bunce researches and teaches journalism…
This Place Used to be a White British Boys' Club: Reporting Dynamics and Cultural Clash at an International News Bureau in Nairobi
Africa has long been portrayed by Western media as a dark and conflict-ridden continent. Such reports have traditionally been produced by white journalists in the field, writing for a distant audience ‘back home’. In recent years, significant structural changes in the foreign news industry have seen the near-demise of foreign correspondents and the increasing use of locally hired journalists. This research explores the important role of local cor…
International news and the image of Africa
This chapter explores the important role of local national journalists in international news bureaus in Africa, and asks whether their presence is changing how Africa is depicted around the Western world. The analysis is framed by a newsroom ethnography of the Thomson-Reuters bureau in Nairobi, one of the largest producers of international news on Africa; as well as thirty additional interviews with foreign correspondents and local journalists ba…
International news and the image of Africa: New storytellers, new narratives
Africa in the click stream: Audience metrics and foreign correspondents in Africa
Digital technologies have transformed the relationship between news outlets, journalists and their audiences. Notably, editors can now monitor their websites and discern the exact news preferences of their readers. Research suggests that some editors are using this data to help them produce more popular, ‘click friendly’ content. To date, research on this phenomenon has focused on journalists working within newsrooms. This article adds to the lit…
Africa's Media Image in the 21st Century: From the Heart of Darkness to Africa Rising
Africa’s Media Image in the 21st Century is the first book in over twenty years to examine the international media’s coverage of sub-Saharan Africa. It brings together leading researchers and prominent journalists to explore representation of the continent, and the production of that image, especially by international news media. The book highlights factors that have transformed the global media system, changing whose perspectives are told and th…
Our newsroom in the cloud’: Slack, virtual newsrooms and journalistic practice
Virtual newsrooms have enormous potential: enabling journalists around the world to pool their knowledge, skills and perspectives within joint projects, such as the Panama Papers. These virtual newsrooms are supported by Online Collaborative Software (OCS), the most popular of which is Slack. But although many of the world’s top news organisations now use Slack, there is no empirical research examining its impact on workplace processes or culture…
Donor Power and the News: The Influence of Foundation Funding on International Public Service Journalism
How does donor funding affect the independence, role perceptions, and ideology of the journalism it supports? We begin to answer this increasingly important but underresearched question with a year-long case study of the humanitarian news organistion IRIN as it transitioned from being funded by the United Nations to a private foundation, run by a Malaysian billionaire. Using content analysis, in-depth interviews, and ethnographic research, we doc…
Management and resistance in the digital newsroom
What happens when there is conflict between the profit motivations of a news outlet and the professional values of its journalists? Questions of managerial influence and journalistic autonomy have interested media scholars from the seminal work of Warren Breed onwards. However, there have only been a handful of studies since the introduction of audience metrics which, this research suggests, allow managers to more efficiently monitor and discipli…
Foundation-funded Journalism, Philanthrocapitalism and Tainted Donors
Not-for-profit news organisations are increasingly funded by private foundations, supported by wealthy entrepreneurs. This raises a range of ethical dilemmas for journalists, which are particularly serious when their donors are alleged to have been involved in unethical or illegal activities. Although this is a relatively common occurrence in the non-profit sector, so far there has been no critical discussion of these issues in relation to founda…
Refugee and Asylum News Coverage in UK Print and Online Media
The representation of asylum is important, yet there is little research of how this topic is reported online. This article addresses this gap through a study of UK print and online media (N = 2018). Articles were examined for their soft and hard news focus. Results show both partisanship and the medium play an important role. Online news covered more soft and hard news topics regardless of partisanship. However, examining the focus and style, rig…
The Broken Estate: Journalism and Democracy in a Post-Truth World
"A lack of knowledge about the world can be a very dangerous thing. In the age of Trump, fake news and clickbait headlines, it is easy to despair about the future of journalism. The New Zealand and global media are in upheaval: the old economic models for print journalism are failing, public funding has been neglected for decades, and many major news organisations are shedding journalists. New Zealander Mel Bunce researches and teaches journalism…
Foundation Funding and the Boundaries of Journalism
Private foundations are an important source of funding for many news outlets. It has even been suggested that they may offer a partial solution to journalism’s economic crisis. Yet we do not know how foundation funding shapes journalistic practice. In this article, we show that foundation funding has a significant effect on the “boundaries of journalism”. That is, the ways in which journalists understand, value and practice their journalism. This…
Beyond the ‘refugee crisis’: How the UK news media represent asylum seekers across national boundaries
Migration is one of the most pressing, divisive issues in global politics today, and media play a crucial role in how communities understand and respond. This study examines how UK newspapers ( n = 974) and popular news websites ( n = 1044) reported on asylum seekers throughout 2017. It contributes to previous literature in two important ways. First, by examining the ‘new normal’ of daily news coverage in the wake of the 2015 ‘refugee crisis’ in …
Soft Power, Hard News: How Journalists at State-Funded Transnational Media Legitimize Their Work
How do journalists working for different state-funded international news organizations legitimize their relationship to the governments which support them? In what circumstances might such journalists resist the diplomatic strategies of their funding states? We address these questions through a comparative study of journalists working for international news organizations funded by the Chinese, US, UK and Qatari governments. Using 52 interviews wi…
The Influence of News Coverage on Humanitarian Aid: The Bureaucrats’ Perspective
We examine if and how news coverage influences governments’ humanitarian aid allocations, from the perspective of the senior bureaucrats involved in such decision-making. Using rare in-depth interviews with 30 directors and senior policymakers in 16 of the world’s largest donor countries, we found that the majority of these bureaucrats believed that sudden-onset, national news coverage can increase levels of emergency humanitarian aid allocated t…
Whose media freedom is being defended? Norm contestation in international media freedom campaigns
This article analyses how international advocacy campaigns approach and define media freedom, and what influences this process. It does this through a two-year case study of the Media Freedom Coalition—an intergovernmental partnership of over 50 countries—that included 55 interviews with key stakeholders, observations, and document analysis. This revelatory case sheds light on how norms of media freedom are constructed and contested on the intern…
Humanitarian Journalists: Covering Crises from a Boundary Zone
Political science (16 works) · Sociology (15 works) · Media studies (13 works) · Media Studies and Communication (11 works) · Law (10 works) · Public relations (10 works) · Politics (9 works) · News media (6 works) · Social Media and Politics (6 works) · Journalism (5 works)