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Constructive journalism as a (news) philosophy and practice is gaining ground around the globe as both new journalistic ventures and legacy news media variously experiment with so-called ‘constructive’ approaches, and specialized (nonprofit) organizations and training programs have been established. While scholarly interest in the subject has steadily grown accordingly, constructive journalism as a research field in its own right is arguably still in need of further development. Therefore, we set out to explore, advance, and shape a research agenda, and to build a theoretical and empirical foundation for constructive journalism, providing a 360° view by bringing together an international body of scholarship approaching the topic and the issues raised through different disciplinary, conceptual, and methodological lenses. As such, we aim, first, to contribute to the conceptual development of constructive journalism by refining its roots in positive psychology and carefully delineating its position along related and divergent types of journalism, identifying its core values and principles, the lineages and digressions. Second, we seek to advance theory building in this nascent research domain based on empirical data and insights variously derived from quantitative and qualitative methodological approaches exploring, describing, and testing through large-scale or in-depth analyses, how constructive journalism can be interpreted and put in practice, how it materializes and with what effect. In doing so, we adopt an overall stance of ‘critical appreciation’ toward the subject, engaging in foundational thinking while not shying away from an assessment of the potential and effective critique or controversy stirred by this proliferating ‘alternative’ branch of journalism.

This paper introduces the Special Issue’s central theme of ‘hybridity and the news’, defining the scope and setting the scene for the multiple issues and debates covered by the individual contributions in this collection. Opposing both relativist positions that discard hybridity as an analytically useless concept, and preconceived notions that construe hybridity as intrinsically negative or positive, it is argued to move beyond binary thinking and to approach hybridity as a particularly rich site for the analysis of forms and processes of experimentation, innovation, deviation and transition in contemporary journalism. In order to profoundly understand these developments, which come in many forms, manifest themselves on different levels, and serve multiple purposes, a comprehensive, multi- and interdisciplinary perspective is needed. The Special Issue aims to contribute to this research agenda by looking closely into blending categories and interaction patterns in journalistic forms, genres, and practices, encompassing theoretical frameworks and methodological approaches from various disciplinary backgrounds including political and communication sciences, sociology, linguistics, cultural studies, and history. While taking different angles on the subject and being variously located on the macro and micro levels of analysis, the articles assembled here all engage in a careful assessment of ‘hybridity and the news’ through profound conceptualizations and empirical analyses, connecting with and shedding new light on long-standing debates about the nature and meaning of journalism.

Text mining aims at constructing classification models and finding interesting patterns in large text collections. This paper investigates the utility of applying these techniques to media analysis, more specifically to support discourse analysis of news reports about the 2007 Kenyan elections and post-election crisis in local (Kenyan) and Western (British and US) newspapers. It illustrates how text mining methods can assist discourse analysis by finding contrast patterns which provide evidence for ideological differences between local and international press coverage. Our experiments indicate that most significant differences pertain to the interpretive frame of the news events: whereas the newspapers from the UK and the US focus on ethnicity in their coverage, the Kenyan press concentrates on sociopolitical aspects.

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