Does Journalism Still Matter? The Role of Journalistic and non-Journalistic Sources in Young Peoples’ News Related Practices

In today's hybrid media environment new content creators challenge the status of professionally produced journalism and blur the lines between professional and non-professional content. Growing up in this information landscape, younger generations have developed news-related practices and attitudes that lie in stark contrast to those of previous generations. In addition, discrepancies exist between news definitions and the use practices of young people. We conducted focus groups with German adolescents (15–17 years), young adults (18–24 years) and adults (40–53 years) in August 2020 to uncover young peoples’ orientation toward news and journalism. Our study indicates that the boundaries of what journalism is and what it is not are becoming increasingly indistinct. However, distinctions do emerge between the journalistic and non-journalistic sources that adolescents and young adults use and the functions they associate with them according to their information needs. Differences between the age groups become apparent in their motivations to stay informed which highlights the important role non-journalistic sources play in information behaviour and opinion formation. For teenage participants especially, Social Media Influencers (SMIs) are relevant within these processes, which are linked to a perceived social duty-to-keep-informed. Moreover, findings from the focus groups highlight cohort-specific differences regarding the understanding of journalism and, consequently, differences in the assessment of trust and reliability as well as the verification strategies that are applied. In sum, for young participants journalism is a reliable source of information, especially in the case of current events and for crosschecking online information, while non-journalistic sources fulfil social needs.

Democratic Situations

Democratic Situations places the making and doing of democratic politics at the centre of relational research. The book turns the well-known sites of contemporary Euro-American democracy – elections, bureaucracies, public debates and citizen participation – into fluctuating democratic situations where supposedly untouchable democratic ideals are contested and warped in practice. The empirical cases demonstrate that democracy cannot be reduced to theoretical schemes of conflict, institutions or deliberation. Instead, they offer an urgently needed renewal of our understanding of democratic politics at a time when conventional ideas increasingly fail to capture current events such as Brexit, Trump and Covid19.

Mapping the Knowledge

In this chapter, the author examines the possibility of applying the servant leadership concept's critical components in the innovation management process. The author, based on his own experience as a top manager of a prominent Russian public company, reveals the importance of a proactive approach to managing innovative projects. The chapter's objective is to develop the rules for the proactive management of innovative project portfolios and, based upon these rules, to lead the team of key personnel. The author concludes that while following the five rules of proactive management of innovative projects, the manager becomes a team's servant-leader. The manager is not suppressing the team's initiative, not depriving them of the right to independently understand current events, and arming them with self-immersion tools in the project's details. The author is confident that the presented approach may be of interest to other practicing innovative managers.

Cities and News

This Element examines urban imaginaries during the expansion of international news between the late nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries, when everyday information about faraway places found its way into newspapers all over the world. Building on the premise that news carried an unprecedented power to shape representations of the world, it follows this development as it made its way to regular readers beyond the dominant information poles, in the great port-cities of the South American Atlantic. Based on five case studies of typical turn-of-the-century foreign news, Lila Caimari shows how current events opened windows onto distant cities, feeding a new world horizon that was at once wider and eminently urban.

A Brief History of Central America

The history of Central America directly impacts current events, and exploring the social, political, and economic reasons why Guatemalans and other Central Americans emigrate to the United States deepens our connections to family stories and legacies. This chapter offers a brief overview of the region....

Culturally Responsive and Sustaining Pedagogies

Part 3: Beyond the Songs contains three chapters. “Culturally Responsive and Sustaining Pedagogies” presents summaries of these teaching approaches alongside strategies to responsibly integrate the repertoire into school curriculums. “Music in Central America” is a brief overview of the diverse and rich music genres of the region and how historic events introduced, shaped, and eradicated music traditions. Genres described include music in the classic Mayan period, folkloric dance, Spanish music, the marimba, Nueva Canción, Garifuna music, Miskitu music, and current traditions. “A Brief History of Central America” provides a historical context for the song collection. Beginning with the first civilizations and ending with current events, this chapter chronicles the political history of the region, including the involvement of the U.S. government in business affairs and civil wars. This overview allows the reader to develop an awareness of the effects of colonization, continued foreign involvement, current political situations, and a basic understanding of human migration patterns from Central America to North America.

Data-driven news work culture: Reconciling tensions in epistemic values and practices of news journalism

This study investigates the epistemological implications of the appropriation of audience analytics in a data-driven news culture. Focussing on two central aspects of epistemology, epistemic value and epistemic practices, we ask two overall questions (1) How are audience metrics balanced and reconciled in relation to other standards in the justification of news as valuable knowledge? How are different practices of research and presentation, truth-seeking and truth-telling, prioritized in a news organization marked as a data-driven news work culture? The study presents a case study of a Scandinavian legacy news publisher that has pursued the embracing of a data-driven news work culture. It is based on a qualitative multi-method approach. The findings show how metrics are used as a superior standard in deciding on the epistemic value of news. This is expressed in strategies, guidelines and discussions in the newsroom, and put into practice in coaching, evaluations and rewarding of the performance of individual journalists. In the everyday news production, metrics are reconciled in relation to independent standards in journalism, related to the claims of news journalism to provide relevant and verified public knowledge about current events. Moreover, the study shows how the embracement of metrics radicalizes the focus on presentation, packaging and timing in the optimization of news material and in the valuing of professional practices. Efforts in research and truth seeking are more seldom explicitly valued. The work of fulfilling reasonable truth claims is mainly taken for granted.