Zvi Reich
Biographic Data
| ID | 4899730 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Zvi Reich |
| GIVEN NAMES | Zvi |
| FAMILY NAME | Reich |
| SIGNATURE | REICH Z |
| AFFILIATIONS | Ben-Gurion University of the Negev |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-5523-1821 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 53 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 1044 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 52 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2006 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 17 |
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…
Why journalism needs a generalist epistemology
The “generalist turn,” where different disciplines are recently discovering the merits of knowledge breadth, is a favorable zeitgeist for journalism to turn an alleged weakness, its generalism, into an epistemic strength. However, to become “synthesizing minds” and integrators of knowledge in an era of siloization and hyper-specialization, journalism needs more robust generalism. The current article suggests that journalists are a unique type of …
What is beat expertise? News sorting as a novel method for studying traits of journalists’ proficiency
This exploratory study develops and tests a new approach to the study of expertise in journalism. It introduces a new method, News Sorting, which takes journalists out of their comfort zone by asking them to rank a sample of their recent publications and reflect on their challenges. This novel method is combined with two theoretical frameworks: Journalistic Content Knowledge, designed to study specialized beat journalists, and Naturalistic Decisi…
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…
Mapping the emergence of visual biases in journalistic interactive visualizations
Despite their attractive and effective nature, journalistic interactive visualizations (JIVs) are highly susceptible to bias and manipulation. Based on a quantitative content analysis of 600 JIVs from six leading general and financial news sites ( The New York Times , The Wall Street Journal , The Guardian , The Economist , Haaretz and Calcalist ), this study traces the emergence of four visual biases in JIVs – visual ambiguity, exaggeration/unde…
Rethinking the role of common-sense in journalism and journalism studies
Despite its crucial role in the epistemology of journalism, journalists’ reliance on common- sense has received little and unsystematic scholarly attention. This conceptual paper calls for placing common-sense at the center of the epistemology of news, while underpinning it with a more systematic approach that draws not only from journalism studies but also from philosophy and political science. The paper discusses the conditions appropriate for …
Reimagining the epistemology of news: The desired knowledge of military reporters
This paper offers to cut the epistemic problem of journalism into smaller and more concrete pieces, mapping the desired journalistic knowledge in particular beats, according to both beat experts and journalists. Our case study focuses on highly knowledgeable Israeli military journalists, using in-depth interviews with 30 experts and journalists. The interviewees offered a sophisticated, dynamic and adjustable knowledge matrix assigning journalist…
Knowledge can wait? The epistemic conversion of new beat reporters
This study shows how, during the turbulent period of their initial months on the job, new beat reporters experience a shift in their basic approach to knowledge. This new epistemic approach encompasses two interconnected shifts: From seeing self-knowledge as a necessity to reliance on sources’ knowledge, and from prioritizing content knowledge to prioritizing journalistic knowledge. Findings suggest that reporting without knowledge isn’t a bug, b…
The Familiarity Paradox: Why Has Digital Sourcing Not Democratized the News
This article presents for the first time longitudinal evidence according to which the role of digital news sources has grown dramatically since 2006. The study includes reconstructions of 1,594 news items, authored by a representative sample of Israeli news reporters, and details regarding each item’s sources (n = 5,647). We found that digital sourcing did not open the gates for alternative voices. Moreover, digital sources are verified less than…
Trusting Others: A Pareto Distribution of Source and Message Credibility Among News Reporters
This study uses the case study of journalists to explore the socio-cognitive nature of interpersonal trust in growingly deceptive ecosystems. Journalists are ideal test subjects to explore these issues as professional trust allocators, who receive immediate feedback on right and wrong trust decisions. The study differentiates, for the first time, between source and message credibility evaluations, based on a combination of qualitative and quantit…
Industrial Production of Post-industrial Products: How Interactive Visualizations Miss Their Potential as a Journalistic Form of Knowledge
Journalistic interactive visualizations (JIVs) – such as scrollytellings, interactive infographics, and clickable data visualizations – have an epistemic potential to efficiently and intricately mediate rich journalistic knowledge. In practice, however, they usually mediate and oversimplify limited knowledge. To understand why and where, across the production line, JIVs lose their epistemic potential, we map the production process of JIVs in thre…
The State of the News Beat: Expertise and Division of Labour in Current Newsrooms
2021). The State of the News Beat: Expertise and Division of Labour in Current Newsrooms. Journalism Practice: Vol. 15, The State of the News Beat: Expertise and Division of Labour in Current Newsrooms, pp. 1199-1202
Justifying the news: The role of evidence in daily reporting
Reliance on evidence is highly desired in disciplines such as science and law. However, the extent to which daily reporters use it to corroborate or refute sources’ say-so is disputed. To explore how evidence is built into stories in ways that are not entirely obvious from the manifest content, we studied the involvement of evidence in a sample of stories, published by leading print and online Israeli news outlets, using reconstruction interviews…
Social epistemology as a new paradigm for journalism and media studies
Journalism and media studies lack robust theoretical concepts for studying journalistic knowledge generation. More specifically, conceptual challenges attend the emergence of big data and algorithmic sources of journalistic knowledge. A family of frameworks apt to this challenge is provided by “social epistemology”: a young philosophical field which regards society’s participation in knowledge generation as inevitable. Social epistemology offers …
What on Earth do Journalists Know? A New Model of Knowledge Brokers’ Expertise
The article offers a new theoretical model that conceptualizes the “exotic” expertise of journalists and other knowledge-brokers who specialize in particular domains (e.g., teachers, librarians, analysts). The model adapts theories from sociology, pedagogy and philosophy and juxtaposes them against the insights of 14 editors-in-chief from leading Israeli media, in order to validate, refine and illustrate the theoretical generalizations. According…
How News Become “News” in Increasingly Complex Ecosystems: Summarizing Almost Two Decades of Newsmaking Reconstructions
This paper summarizes almost two decades of applying the newsmaking reconstruction method for studying numerous aspects of news processes. The suggested methodology can overcome the shortcomings of traditional methods in changing and decreasingly observable news environments. While suiting a wide array of theories, newsmaking reconstructions are especially built to address the strategies and priorities of practice theory, and its inclusive desire…
Obsessive–Activist Journalists: A New Model of Journalism
This study exposes a unique model of journalism – “obsessive-activist” reporting. Motivated by a strong sense of justice and a passion to make a significant change, these journalists promote their social or political agenda in both spheres: the professional and the public. In the professional, they do it through an obsessive and continuing reporting on the issue they care for, while in the public sphere, they are personally involved in activities…
The When, Why, How and So-What of Verifications
The media’s capacity to maintain its role as an institution for public knowledge is growingly dependent on its capacity to verify information effectively, especially in times of growing mis/dis and mal information. To explore the epistemic role of verifications, covering their frequencies, predictors and underlying motivations, procedures, and contribution to reporters’ knowledge, this study combines qualitative and quantitative reconstruction in…
Disagreements as a form of knowledge: How journalists address day-to-day conflicts between sources
Disagreements over facts, in which news sources are leading journalists in opposite directions, are an ultimate test of journalists’ knowledge, forcing them to develop their own understanding of the actual state of affairs. This study focuses on how reporters think, act, and establish knowledge during the coverage of day-to-day disagreements – contrary to former studies, which focused on large-scale scientific and political controversies based on…
The decline in orally negotiated news: Revisiting (again) the role of technology in reporting
This article summarizes a longitudinal study on the role of technology in obtaining the information behind print and online news in Israel, across 15 years. Rather than taking the benefits of innovation for granted, knowledge acquisition technologies should be evaluated according to their ‘epistemic bandwidth’, involving the scope of knowledge-seeking opportunities they afford, the convenience of challenging this information, and its verifiabilit…
I, Robot. You, Journalist. Who is the Author?: Authorship, bylines and full disclosure in automated journalism
The broadening reliance on algorithms to generate news automatically, referred to as “automated journalism” or “robot journalism”, has significant practical, sociopolitical, psychological, legal and occupational implications for news organizations, journalists and their audiences. One of its most controversial yet unexplored aspects is the algorithmic authorship. This paper integrates a multidisciplinary theoretical framework of algorithmic creat…
From “Trust Me” to “Show Me” Journalism: Can DocumentCloud help to restore the deteriorating credibility of news?
This study explores the potential of an online platform that encourages journalists to post the documents behind their news stories to help restore the deteriorating public trust in news media. Based on content analysis of 200 news items and 315 accompanying documents posted on DocumentCloud, findings indicate that contrary to journalists’ traditional reluctance to rely on documents, the platform succeeds in boosting massive use of documents, bot…
News Cultures or “Epistemic Cultures: Theoretical considerations and empirical data from 62 countries
In order to gain an understanding of journalists’ conceptions of what being factual means, the present work supplements the existing insights of journalism studies and the sociology of knowledge and philosophy with data about journalists’ beliefs regarding the importance of detached observation and reporting things as they are, spanning 62 countries (N = 18,248). In essence, our goal is to contribute to a future theoretical account of why journal…
Being There? The Role of Journalistic Legwork Across New and Traditional Media
In the age of spirited debates about the mediating role of technologies, the other side of the coin is the state of direct experience in contemporary news production, that is, cases in which news reporters still rely on traditional channels such as “legwork,” “firsthand witnessing,” or “shoe-leather reporting.” The present study is a systematic attempt to identify journalists’ reasons for engaging in legwork, by recreating item by item the work p…
Between the technological hare and the journalistic tortoise: Minimization of knowledge claims in online news flashes
A growing series of news platforms such as live blogging, tweeting, and push notifications are struggling with the extreme pressure of immediate reporting. The current study explores which strategies of knowledge acquisition and knowledge presentation journalists who operate immediate channels are using to address the mounting pressures and enhanced risk of error. It focuses on online news flashes that at least in the Israeli case enable systemat…
Mapping Journalism Cultures Across Nations: A comparative study of 18 countries
This article reports key findings from a comparative survey of the role perceptions, epistemological orientations and ethical views of 1800 journalists from 18 countries. The results show that detachment, non-involvement, providing political information and monitoring the government are considered essential journalistic functions around the globe. Impartiality, the reliability and factualness of information, as well as adherence to universal ethi…
Modeling Perceived Influences on Journalism: Evidence from a Cross-National Survey of Journalists
Surveying 1,700 journalists from seventeen countries, this study investigates perceived influences on news work. Analysis reveals a dimensional structure of six distinct domains—political, economic, organizational, professional, and procedural influences, as well as reference groups. Across countries, these six dimensions build up a hierarchical structure where organizational, professional, and procedural influences are perceived as more powerful…
How Citizens Create News Stories: The “news access” problem reversed
A systematic study of day-to-day practices of citizen reporters, compared to their mainstream counterparts, suggests that ordinary citizens can serve as a vital complement to mainstream journalism, however not as its substitute. The paper develops a version of the “news access” theory, which sees citizen journalists as hindered by their inferior access to news sources, unlike mainstream journalism, where the problem is seen as the superior access…
The Process Model of News Initiative: Sources lead first, reporters thereafter
The role of reporters and sources in the initiation of the news is neither unilateral as claimed by models of “hegemony” and “adversarial journalism”, nor reciprocal as suggested by the models of “exchange” and “role relationship”, but rather a combination of the two. According to the process model developed and examined here, the initiative passes from one side to the other in the course of the acquisition of information. In the discovery phase,…
Journalistic evidence: Cross-verification as a constituent of mediated knowledge
Journalists apparently maneuver between their inability to validate every single bit of information and the ramifications of publishing unverified reports. This study is the first attempt to uncover and characterize the reasoning which underlies the journalistic journey from skepticism to knowledge. We draw on the philosophical field of the ‘epistemology of testimony’ and analyze a robust data set. Data consist of detailed cross-verification meas…
Exploring the Political-Economic Factors of Participatory Journalism: Views of online journalists in 10 countries
This comparative study of user-generated content (UGC) in 10 Western democracies examines the political economic aspects of citizen participation in online media, as assessed by journalists who work with this content. Drawing on interviews with more than 60 journalists, we explore their perceived economic motivations for an ongoing redefinition of traditional journalistic roles, as UGC becomes an increasingly dominant feature of news websites
Journalism as Bipolar Interactional Expertise: Journalism as Bipolar Interactional Expertise
Journal Article Journalism as Bipolar Interactional Expertise Get access Zvi Reich Zvi Reich 1Department of Communication Studies, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Beer Sheva, Israel Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Communication Theory, Volume 22, Issue 4, November 2012, Pages 339–358, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2885.2012.01411.x Published: 15 October 2012
Determinants of Journalists' Professional Autonomy: Individual and National Level Factors Matter More Than Organizational Ones
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…
Different Practices, Similar Logic: Comparing News Reporting across Political, Financial, and Territorial Beats
This article seeks to explore whether political reporters present more meticulous, complex, and active standards of news reporting—justifying their special role as enablers of informed citizenry—and to help resolve the theoretical ambiguity regarding news beats as distinct domains of practice. The sample comprised reporters from three beat clusters—political, financial, and territorial—in nine national Israeli news organizations, who were asked t…
Comparing News Reporting Across Print, Radio, Television and Online: Still distinct manufacturing houses
This paper suggests that news media remain distinct despite increasingly converging news environments. Print, online, radio and television constitute not only unique packing and distribution houses of similarly obtained raw materials, as suggested by the generic approach, but also unique manufacturing houses of news, as suggested by the particularist approach. The study compares for the first time the news practices across all four media in natio…
Out of the frame: A longitudinal perspective on digitization and professional photojournalism
Contrary to the scholarly literature frequently associating digitization with external threats to professional photojournalists, this study focuses on internal factors: the new routines and practices of digital photojournalism, embedding them in the broader context of growing threats to cultural industries and labor markets. Using a longitudinal perspective, and based on in-depth interviews with 15 Israeli photojournalists with experience of both…
A Time of Uncertainty: The effects of reporters' time schedule on their work
The present study is the first systematic attempt to examine the role of time constraints in journalists' daily routines and practices, at the level of individual news items. Long-standing concerns about journalism's “stopwatch culture” and the negative impact of time pressures on newswork have been exacerbated in the digital age by growing demands for multi-platform technological proficiency, resulting in “hamsterization” of journalistic work. T…
Participatory Journalism: Guarding Open Gates at Online Newspapers
Citation only. For full access, check out the book through the USF St. Petersburg Library P92.U5H54 1998, request it on interlibrary loan, or order it through a book dealer.
Constrained authors: Bylines and authorship in news reporting
The proliferation of bylines characterized the news as an imperfect, all too human account of reality, opening the way towards journalistic stardom, altering power relations within the news industry and shifting news organizations from a position behind the news to one behind the people who gather and compose it. Focusing on The New York Times as the chief case study and The Times of London as a supplementary one, findings show that the bylining …
How News Become “News” in Increasingly Complex Ecosystems: Summarizing Almost Two Decades of Newsmaking Reconstructions
This paper summarizes almost two decades of applying the newsmaking reconstruction method for studying numerous aspects of news processes. The suggested methodology can overcome the shortcomings of traditional methods in changing and decreasingly observable news environments. While suiting a wide array of theories, newsmaking reconstructions are especially built to address the strategies and priorities of practice theory, and its inclusive desire…
From “Trust Me” to “Show Me” Journalism: Can DocumentCloud help to restore the deteriorating credibility of news?
This study explores the potential of an online platform that encourages journalists to post the documents behind their news stories to help restore the deteriorating public trust in news media. Based on content analysis of 200 news items and 315 accompanying documents posted on DocumentCloud, findings indicate that contrary to journalists’ traditional reluctance to rely on documents, the platform succeeds in boosting massive use of documents, bot…
How Journalists Think About Facts: Theorizing the social conditions behind epistemological beliefs
Journalists' ability to capture and deliver factual information is central to their sense of professionalism and to their societal and democratic functions. The need to understand journalists' dealings with facts becomes especially pronounced in an age when news organizations face an economic crisis and journalism's exclusive jurisdiction over the supply of news information is challenged by new and old forces. This study—part of the “Worlds of Jo…
Comparing Reporters' Work across Print, Radio, and Online: Converged Origination, Diverged Packaging
This paper compares how eighty reporters from three media—print, online, and radio—obtained a sample of their items, seeking to establish which of two schools of thought is closer to reality: scholars who contend that each news medium embodies a unique “regime” of content creation, or those who argue that the different media maintain similar news reporting standards. A series of face-to-face reconstruction interviews with reporters from nine lead…
Social epistemology as a new paradigm for journalism and media studies
Journalism and media studies lack robust theoretical concepts for studying journalistic knowledge generation. More specifically, conceptual challenges attend the emergence of big data and algorithmic sources of journalistic knowledge. A family of frameworks apt to this challenge is provided by “social epistemology”: a young philosophical field which regards society’s participation in knowledge generation as inevitable. Social epistemology offers …
Obsessive–Activist Journalists: A New Model of Journalism
This study exposes a unique model of journalism – “obsessive-activist” reporting. Motivated by a strong sense of justice and a passion to make a significant change, these journalists promote their social or political agenda in both spheres: the professional and the public. In the professional, they do it through an obsessive and continuing reporting on the issue they care for, while in the public sphere, they are personally involved in activities…
Between the technological hare and the journalistic tortoise: Minimization of knowledge claims in online news flashes
A growing series of news platforms such as live blogging, tweeting, and push notifications are struggling with the extreme pressure of immediate reporting. The current study explores which strategies of knowledge acquisition and knowledge presentation journalists who operate immediate channels are using to address the mounting pressures and enhanced risk of error. It focuses on online news flashes that at least in the Israeli case enable systemat…
Stubbornly unchanged: A longitudinal study of news practices in the Israeli press
The article summarizes three consecutive studies (2001, 2006, 2011) in which national Israeli press reporters detailed how they obtained random samples of their recently published items ( N = 1003): first, in order to explore the public interest in whether the standards of news production are deteriorating, improving or staying put; second, to indicate whether journalists adjust to the transforming news ecosystem; and third, to resolve the theore…
The anatomy of leaks Tracing the path of unauthorized disclosure in the Israeli press
An innovative methodology of face-to-face reconstruction interviews with the reporters who had authored a sample of news items allowed wide and systematic research access to one of the most sensitive and virtually unapproachable spheres of journalism — leaks. The main findings were that (1) leaks were highly prevalent — each fifth item involved the sensitive practice; (2) the dominant leakers were senior sources; (3) the favorite channel for leak…
Being There? The Role of Journalistic Legwork Across New and Traditional Media
In the age of spirited debates about the mediating role of technologies, the other side of the coin is the state of direct experience in contemporary news production, that is, cases in which news reporters still rely on traditional channels such as “legwork,” “firsthand witnessing,” or “shoe-leather reporting.” The present study is a systematic attempt to identify journalists’ reasons for engaging in legwork, by recreating item by item the work p…
The fickle forerunner: The rise of bylines and authorship in the French press
Credit attribution for journalists represents a crucial development in journalism, with numerous organizational, legal, political and literary implications. This article explores the rise of bylines and authorship in the French press during the last 250 years, as an alternative to the Anglo-American model, on which studies have focused. Findings show that bylines not only emerged much earlier in France but also represent different driving forces,…
The Process Model of News Initiative: Sources lead first, reporters thereafter
The role of reporters and sources in the initiation of the news is neither unilateral as claimed by models of “hegemony” and “adversarial journalism”, nor reciprocal as suggested by the models of “exchange” and “role relationship”, but rather a combination of the two. According to the process model developed and examined here, the initiative passes from one side to the other in the course of the acquisition of information. In the discovery phase,…
How Citizens Create News Stories: The “news access” problem reversed
A systematic study of day-to-day practices of citizen reporters, compared to their mainstream counterparts, suggests that ordinary citizens can serve as a vital complement to mainstream journalism, however not as its substitute. The paper develops a version of the “news access” theory, which sees citizen journalists as hindered by their inferior access to news sources, unlike mainstream journalism, where the problem is seen as the superior access…
The anatomy of leaks Tracing the path of unauthorized disclosure in the Israeli press
An innovative methodology of face-to-face reconstruction interviews with the reporters who had authored a sample of news items allowed wide and systematic research access to one of the most sensitive and virtually unapproachable spheres of journalism — leaks. The main findings were that (1) leaks were highly prevalent — each fifth item involved the sensitive practice; (2) the dominant leakers were senior sources; (3) the favorite channel for leak…
Measuring the Impact of Pr on Published News in Increasingly Fragmented News Environments: A multifaceted approach
As news environments become more fragmented, public relations grows more sophisticated and editorial systems weaken, the impact of PR on news becomes greater and more diverse. Its scope and intensity, however, can hardly be grasped by traditional newsroom-oriented and press release-centered approaches that try to reduce PR impact to a single bottom line. The present study proposes a multifaceted approach to studying PR impact on the news. It exam…
Mapping Journalism Cultures Across Nations: A comparative study of 18 countries
This article reports key findings from a comparative survey of the role perceptions, epistemological orientations and ethical views of 1800 journalists from 18 countries. The results show that detachment, non-involvement, providing political information and monitoring the government are considered essential journalistic functions around the globe. Impartiality, the reliability and factualness of information, as well as adherence to universal ethi…
Exploring the Political-Economic Factors of Participatory Journalism: Views of online journalists in 10 countries
This comparative study of user-generated content (UGC) in 10 Western democracies examines the political economic aspects of citizen participation in online media, as assessed by journalists who work with this content. Drawing on interviews with more than 60 journalists, we explore their perceived economic motivations for an ongoing redefinition of traditional journalistic roles, as UGC becomes an increasingly dominant feature of news websites
Modeling Perceived Influences on Journalism: Evidence from a Cross-National Survey of Journalists
Surveying 1,700 journalists from seventeen countries, this study investigates perceived influences on news work. Analysis reveals a dimensional structure of six distinct domains—political, economic, organizational, professional, and procedural influences, as well as reference groups. Across countries, these six dimensions build up a hierarchical structure where organizational, professional, and procedural influences are perceived as more powerful…
Constrained authors: Bylines and authorship in news reporting
The proliferation of bylines characterized the news as an imperfect, all too human account of reality, opening the way towards journalistic stardom, altering power relations within the news industry and shifting news organizations from a position behind the news to one behind the people who gather and compose it. Focusing on The New York Times as the chief case study and The Times of London as a supplementary one, findings show that the bylining …
Participatory Journalism: Guarding Open Gates at Online Newspapers
Citation only. For full access, check out the book through the USF St. Petersburg Library P92.U5H54 1998, request it on interlibrary loan, or order it through a book dealer.
User Comments: The Transformation of Participatory Space
Source Credibility and Journalism: Between visceral and discretional judgment
The extent to which information sources, that stand behind virtually all the news, are perceived by journalists as credible is a key determinant of the likelihood of their obtaining news access and public voice. The nature of source credibility judgment in journalism, however, is disputed between two major schools: while the “visceral” camp contends that it is highly subjective, intuitive and biased, the “discretional” camp perceives it as a far …
Authors and Poets Write the News: A case study of a radical journalistic experiment
This study analyzes a journalistic community's interpretation of an experiment in which authors (primarily fiction writers) and poets replaced the reporters of a major Israeli newspaper and produced the news in two special issues. Using a mix of methodologies—content analysis, interviews with journalists and authors, a survey among journalists and analysis of readers' responses—the study shows that the journalistic community reacted conservativel…
Different Practices, Similar Logic: Comparing News Reporting across Political, Financial, and Territorial Beats
This article seeks to explore whether political reporters present more meticulous, complex, and active standards of news reporting—justifying their special role as enablers of informed citizenry—and to help resolve the theoretical ambiguity regarding news beats as distinct domains of practice. The sample comprised reporters from three beat clusters—political, financial, and territorial—in nine national Israeli news organizations, who were asked t…
Comparing Reporters' Work across Print, Radio, and Online: Converged Origination, Diverged Packaging
This paper compares how eighty reporters from three media—print, online, and radio—obtained a sample of their items, seeking to establish which of two schools of thought is closer to reality: scholars who contend that each news medium embodies a unique “regime” of content creation, or those who argue that the different media maintain similar news reporting standards. A series of face-to-face reconstruction interviews with reporters from nine lead…
Are reporters replaceable? Literary authors produce a daily newspaper
One of the questions dominating discourse on the changing face of the news industry and the future of journalism concerns the extent to which professional news reporters may be replaced by a series of new human and technological agents, such as bloggers, citizen journalists, user-generated content, offshore reporters and news-story composing algorithms. This article addresses a ‘quasi-experimental’ case study in which a group of international and…
Journalism as Bipolar Interactional Expertise: Journalism as Bipolar Interactional Expertise
Journal Article Journalism as Bipolar Interactional Expertise Get access Zvi Reich Zvi Reich 1Department of Communication Studies, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Beer Sheva, Israel Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Communication Theory, Volume 22, Issue 4, November 2012, Pages 339–358, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2885.2012.01411.x Published: 15 October 2012
How Journalists Think About Facts: Theorizing the social conditions behind epistemological beliefs
Journalists' ability to capture and deliver factual information is central to their sense of professionalism and to their societal and democratic functions. The need to understand journalists' dealings with facts becomes especially pronounced in an age when news organizations face an economic crisis and journalism's exclusive jurisdiction over the supply of news information is challenged by new and old forces. This study—part of the “Worlds of Jo…
How Journalists “Realize” Facts: Epistemology in practice at press conferences
The degree to which journalists realize their most basic societal role and provide fact-based accounts has been a point of contestation between several camps. While adherents to the notion of the social construction of reality have infused scholarly discourse with far-reaching doubts about journalists' ability to report facts, emphasizing the arbitrariness of their practices, pragmatic theorists of knowledge and realists, a minority among journal…
Determinants of Journalists' Professional Autonomy: Individual and National Level Factors Matter More Than Organizational Ones
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…
Islands of Divergence in a Stream of Convergence: Comparing the news practices of male and female journalists in Israel
This study focuses on the performance of female and male reporters in various news processes for which little systematic research has been accomplished. It is based primarily on a series of reconstruction interviews with 60 Israeli reporters in parallel beats and on the ways in which they obtained material for a sample of their recently published items (N=494). Findings challenge the accepted theoretical wisdom which suggests that male and female…
The fickle forerunner: The rise of bylines and authorship in the French press
Credit attribution for journalists represents a crucial development in journalism, with numerous organizational, legal, political and literary implications. This article explores the rise of bylines and authorship in the French press during the last 250 years, as an alternative to the Anglo-American model, on which studies have focused. Findings show that bylines not only emerged much earlier in France but also represent different driving forces,…
Stubbornly unchanged: A longitudinal study of news practices in the Israeli press
The article summarizes three consecutive studies (2001, 2006, 2011) in which national Israeli press reporters detailed how they obtained random samples of their recently published items ( N = 1003): first, in order to explore the public interest in whether the standards of news production are deteriorating, improving or staying put; second, to indicate whether journalists adjust to the transforming news ecosystem; and third, to resolve the theore…
Textual DNA: The hindered authorship of photojournalists in the Western press
For the first time, this paper studies the evolution of photojournalists' bylines compared to reporters' bylines, which proved a sensitive barometer of longitudinal changes in reporters' status, professionalism, creativity and authorship. Based on a sample of 8800 photographs and news items published across the twentieth century in five quality national dailies: New York Times, The Times of London, Le Figaro, Irish Times and Ha'aretz, this paper …
Out of the frame: A longitudinal perspective on digitization and professional photojournalism
Contrary to the scholarly literature frequently associating digitization with external threats to professional photojournalists, this study focuses on internal factors: the new routines and practices of digital photojournalism, embedding them in the broader context of growing threats to cultural industries and labor markets. Using a longitudinal perspective, and based on in-depth interviews with 15 Israeli photojournalists with experience of both…
A Time of Uncertainty: The effects of reporters' time schedule on their work
The present study is the first systematic attempt to examine the role of time constraints in journalists' daily routines and practices, at the level of individual news items. Long-standing concerns about journalism's “stopwatch culture” and the negative impact of time pressures on newswork have been exacerbated in the digital age by growing demands for multi-platform technological proficiency, resulting in “hamsterization” of journalistic work. T…
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