Internationally, the issue of irregular immigration is highly contested and actors promote different frames in the news. In this article, we analyze the strategizing that goes on behind the scenes among nongovernmental organizations and public immigration authorities. Many studies have documented how strategic actors take advantage of mainstream news media conventions, but there is a dearth of research on how these frame sponsors critically reflect on their strategies. Based on ethnographic fieldwork and qualitative interviews, we analyze the dilemmas and challenges the actors face in adapting their communication strategies to the news media. The immigration authorities are systematic and professional in their media work, with easy access to leading media. Faced with the news media's emphasis on dramatic individual stories, however, they struggle to find a media strategy that balances efficient communication with bureaucratic regulations and values. The NGOs, on the other hand, have the opportunity to exploit media conventions and pitch emotional, individual stories to journalists. Still, for both type of actors, the challenge is to expand the media interest beyond such stories to foster a systemic debate on immigration policy.

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In recent years, violent extremism has been high on the global public agenda, invoking normative questions about the limits of free speech and how liberal democracies should deal with actors who promote views deemed anti-democratic and violent. Based on in-depth interviews with Norwegian newsroom professionals and content analysis of news from major Norwegian news outlets (n = 1819), this article explores how newsrooms deal with an important dilemma in reporting extremism: how to fulfill their democratic roles of informing the public of forces deemed anti-democratic and violent, while refraining from legitimizing and advancing extremist ideas and aims. The analysis shows that newsroom staff perceive these dilemmas as inherently challenging, with few clear-cut solutions as to how to strike a balance between inclusion and exclusion, ‘neutrality’ and condemnation, and these assessments are further complicated in the digital media environment, raising new dilemmas and questions concerning journalistic roles and responsibilities. In practice, editorial dilemmas are dealt with by making a distinction between newsworthy actors and legitimate voices. Reporters foregrounded several reasons why voices deemed extremist should be included in the news. Yet, analysis of news content showed that these voices tended to be included in short and de-contextualized bits that served to fulfill some stated journalistic aims, such as warning national audiences, while largely neglecting others, such as providing understanding of the motives and ideas of actors deemed extremist, with important implications for news construction of extremism. Theoretically, the article contributes to the literature on news access, limits of mediated debate, and construction of deviance in the news.

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Social media (SoMe) platforms provide potentially important information for news journalists during everyday work and in crisis-related contexts. The aims of this study were (a) to map central journalistic challenges and emerging practices related to using SoMe for collecting and validating newsworthy content; and (b) to investigate how practices may contribute to a user-friendly design of a web-based SoMe content validation toolset. Interviews were carried out with 22 journalists from three European countries. Information about journalistic work tasks was also collected during a crisis training scenario (<em>N </em>= 5). Results showed that participants experienced challenges with filtering and estimating trustworthiness of SoMe content. These challenges were especially due to the vast overall amount of information, and the need to monitor several platforms simultaneously. To support improved situational awareness in journalistic work during crises, a user-friendly tool should provide content search results representing several media formats and gathered from a diversity of platforms, presented in easy-to-approach visualizations. The final decision-making about content and source trustworthiness should, however, remain as a manual journalistic task, as the sample would not trust an automated estimation based on tool algorithms.