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 ethical principles are also valued worldwide, though their perceived importance varies across countries. Various aspects of interventionism, objectivism and the importance of separating facts from opinion, on the other hand, seem to play out differently around the globe. Western journalists are generally less supportive of any active promotion of particular values, ideas and social change, and they adhere more to universal principles in their ethical decisions. Journalists from non-western contexts, on the other hand, tend to be more interventionist in their role perceptions and more flexible in their ethical views.

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 limits to journalists' work than political and economic influences.

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The arrival of new actors in the journalistic field increasingly necessitates new conceptual approaches to better understand journalistic work in the digital age. Social network sites have played an important role in these processes, with the rapid emergence of non-traditional actors engaging in activities that may be classified as journalism. Yet, while scholarship on Twitter and Facebook has continually expanded, the visual platform Instagram has received comparatively little attention, despite being an important venue for new forms, particularly in lifestyle journalism. Through an examination of professional lifestyle Instagrammers’ discursive constructions of journalistic boundaries and their role perceptions, this article suggests that in their key values and functional understanding their approach resembles traditional journalistic occupational ideologies, and their role perceptions are very similar to those of lifestyle journalists. The findings contribute to our understanding of transformative processes in journalism more broadly, and their implications for journalistic values, ideals, and practices.

Despite having experienced rapid popularity over the past two decades, lifestyle journalism is still somewhat neglected by academic researchers. So far mostly explored as either part of wider lifestyle programming, particularly on television, or in terms of individual sub-fields, such as travel, fashion or food journalism, lifestyle journalism is in need of scholarly analysis particularly in the area of production, based on the increasing importance which the field has in influencing audiences' ways of life. This study explores the professional views of 89 Australian and German lifestyle journalists through indepth interviews in order to explore the ways in which they engage in processes of influencing audiences' self-expression, identities and consumption behaviors. The article argues that through its work, lifestyle journalism is a significant shaper of identities in today's consumer societies.