Overcoming methodological challenges in text production research: a holistic approach through data triangulation

2020

Journalism

Self Cite

Transparency is seen as a panacea for a major problem facing journalism and journalists today, that is, the loss of trust and credibility. However, the scholarly literature has focused primarily on normative considerations, without providing much empirical data that could confirm what are widely assumed to be the positive effects of transparency. In this paper, I argue, first, that editorial texts, in their various manifestations, are the most potent of the various established means of displaying transparency for opening up the production of news item. However, I then draw on my linguistic, process-focused research on quoting and highlight challenges this process creates for the use of editorial texts in the pursuit of transparency. It turns out that conveying the essentials of decision-making that occurs during newswriting requires profound understanding and awareness of the interplay between modalities, co-texts and contexts of language use. Finally, implementing the norm of transparency has allegedly led to the transformation of a well-intentioned goal into an institutional myth, leading journalists – constrained, for example, by the mechanism of impression management – to disclose only socially acceptable practices. Therefore, I conclude by arguing for transdisciplinary research in which scholars research ‘on, for and with’ (Perrin, 2018) other stakeholders in order to bring about a fundamental change in the culture of transparency in journalism.

Section: Quoting: a Seemingly Clear And Simple Phenomenonmentioning

confidence: 99%

Problematising the restoration of trust through transparency: Focusing on quoting

2020

Journalism

Self Cite

“…As my data I re-analysed two corpora that document the production processes of Finnish news items written for print and/or online media and of Swiss television news items. These corpora share a process-oriented approach to the study of newswriting and document both the material activities and the mental decision-making involved in newswriting (for a discussion, see Haapanen 2018). Besides the published media items, they also consist of recordings of journalistic interviews, editorial meetings, and workplace discussions, of semi-structured interviews, and of journalists' retrospective verbalisations of their writing processes.…”

Section: The Study: Modelling Quoting In Newswritingmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Capturing writing processes has long been methodologically challenging (Haapanen 2018). Grésillon and Perrin (2014) have explained this problem by using a double black box metaphor.…”

Section: Next Step: Operationalising the Modelmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In addition, the corpus includes tabulated summaries of the structure of the content (see Tables 2 and 3), as these tables are useful in supporting the course of retrospective verbalisation sessions. The procedure outlined above has some obvious advantages over the sometimes simplistic interview methods (often lumped together under the term semi-structured interviews) that dominate in the social sciences (Haapanen 2018). The immediacy of the verbalisation helps informant-journalists to recall the process accurately and in detail.…”

Section: Next Step: Operationalising the Modelmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Secondly, this paper contributes to the methodology of (news)writing research. For a long time, writing research has neglected procedural insights and writers' emic perspectives, a shortcoming that stems mainly from the challenges in data collection (Grésillon and Perrin 2014;Haapanen 2018). By operationalising the model into a method for data collection, I introduce a method that is especially suitable for documenting relatively long newswriting processes in detail, and from both etic and emic perspectives.…”

Section: Introduction: the Process Of Newswritingmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 2 more Smart Citations

Modelling Quoting in Newswriting: A Framework for Studies on the Production of News

2019

Journalism Practice

Self Cite

A framework for studies on the production of newsThe Mediated Social Communication (MSC) approach considers mass media a venue for opposing and complementary societal groups to publicly negotiate socially relevant topics. This negotiation is conducted through representatives of these groups and mediated by journalists. Inspired by the MSC approach, this paper presents an empirically grounded model that structures the mediating process through the process of quoting. By identifying the key phases of newswriting as sub-processes of quoting, the paper argues that journalists (1) decide on a topical issue to be addressed (topicalisation), ( 2) identify groups of people who are linked to this issue (societal localisation), (3) pick some people as representatives of these societal groups (personalisation), and ( 4) verbalise these people's points of view, often by means of quoting, inter alia (verbalisation). The four-phase model is then operationalised into a data collection method that facilitates access to and fosters new insights into the subtle dynamics of newswriting. Hitherto, these dynamics have often remained obscure, because the craft ethos is adopted as tacit knowledge through implicit socialisation and is therefore difficult for journalists to verbalise. The paper concludes by calling for reconsideration of journalists' role as gatekeepers who decide which issues and voices are heard in public discourse.

Etic and emic data production methods in the study of journalistic work practices: A systematic literature review

Manninen

2021

Journalism

Self Cite

This methodological paper discusses the application of etic and emic perspectives in producing data sets for the study of journalistic praxis. The concepts refer to the researcher-analyst’s and the practitioner-informant’s viewpoints, respectively, and that being the case, they have inherent weaknesses if used independently. We argue that these shortcomings can be mitigated through an integrated application of the concepts and by seeing the two perspectives as complementary to each other. Combining etic and emic perspectives will allow for a more comprehensive understanding of complex yet routinized real-life behaviour such as journalistic work. Following the appraisal of the etic-emic combination methodology, we present the results of a systematic literature review. We explore the application of this methodology in the study of journalistic work, as recounted in international journal articles published between 2000 and 2017. After keyword searches into several databases and a manual review of 3018 items, a corpus of 228 relevant articles was analysed. Our results demonstrate the studies’ disproportionate emphasis on the earliest phases of the journalistic process, that is, topic discovery, topic selection, point of view selection and sourcing, and the relative scarcity of studies applying a fully integrated etic-emic-combination methodology. We also report on, for example, the types of research material used and the media studied. We conclude with recommendations for expanding and diversifying the use of etic-emic-combination methodology in journalism studies to give us a more balanced understanding of the field.