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The purpose of this paper is to bridge a gap in knowledge on the professional information practices of a group of people whose daily work of managing user-generated content online exposes them to users whom they perceive as acting aggressively or otherwise offensively online.

Journalists’ narratives of practices for managing and responding to user comments perceived as offensive are analysed qualitatively. For this purpose, ten interviews with journalists from nine different news organisations in Sweden, Denmark, Germany and Canada were conducted.

The study finds that the environment in which the journalists work plays a vital role in the evolution of the practices. Practices, indissolubly tied to the contexts or sites in which people’s activities take place, are conditioned by moral values, traditions and collective experiences which journalists enact through the practice they engage in when they are dealing with user posts online. The site, conceived as an information landscape, is that of the newsroom. Practices for managing users online evolve through actors participating in a process of learning and their ability to adopt the cultural norms and values of their environment.

This study sheds light on the mechanisms behind the evolution of practices for handling user-generated content online and it reports on the importance of properties such as norms, values and emotions for how things are done in the information landscape of news journalism.

This article aims to study digital competence (DC) in media work.

The authors utilize frame analysis to investigate how DC is framed in media work using 30 semi-structured interviews as data with journalists in Finland.

The authors identify three main frames of DC in the context of media work. The individual attitude frame emphasizes employees' attitudes toward DC, the team-level support frame underlines the need for support in the work community and the organizational-level practice frame highlights enablers of and organizations' requirements for digital competence.

First, media workers' DC is necessary to enhance work efficiency and accomplish tasks and may be supported with supportive management practices. Second, the findings suggest that DC should be understood and analyzed as a multi-level issue. Third, the findings suggest that appropriate continuing education and study opportunities were needed. Besides formal arrangements for learning, informal contexts of learning are important.

The article contributes to media studies and studies on the digitalization of work by taking account of the organizational, team and individual levels in discussing digital competence in the news media sector.

The aim of this paper is to understand how, in tough economic times, British‐owned, English language newspapers such as The Pioneer received and filtered news, especially gender‐related and nationalist‐related events and thinking.

Using qualitative and quantitative methods to assess communications by and about pro‐nationalist women, coverage of female activities was categorised into two groups: first, educational, social and peaceful campaigns and second, direct action such as strikes, burning of British cloth and business/land rent boycotts.

Direct action provided “bad news” coverage, but it simultaneously gave a small window for publicity. Less threatening peaceful campaigns provided a bigger window – enhanced by the novelty value of female activism.

Historians need to look specifically at Indian newspapers during the struggle for independence for a counter‐hegemonic discourse that reached a wide public. When evidence of women's activism is paired with financial news, it becomes clear that women had a negative impact on British business. Furthermore, The Pioneer's own business dilemmas made the paper part of the economic and ideological maelstrom that it reported on.

This is the first time that the colonial press in India itself has been scrutinised in detail on the subject of the rising nationalist movement and women. Findings underline female influence on both economics and ideology – a neglected aspect of Indian gender scholarship and economic history.

News algorithms not only help the authors to efficiently navigate the sea of available information, but also frame information in ways that influence public discourse and citizenship. Indeed, the likelihood that readers will be exposed to and read given news articles is structured into news algorithms. Thus, ensuring that news algorithms uphold journalistic values is crucial. In this regard, the purpose of this paper is to quantify journalistic values to make them readable by algorithms through taking an exploratory approach to a question that has not been previously investigated.

The author matched the textual indices (extracted from natural language processing/automated content analysis) with human conceptions of journalistic values (derived from survey analysis) by implementing partial least squares path modeling.

The results suggest that the numbers of words or quotes news articles contain have a strong association with the survey respondent assessments of their balance, diversity, importance and factuality. Linguistic polarization was an inverse indicator of respondents’ perception of balance, diversity and importance. While linguistic intensity was useful for gauging respondents’ perception of sensationalism, it was an ineffective indicator of importance and factuality. The numbers of adverbs and adjectives were useful for estimating respondents’ perceptions of factuality and sensationalism. In addition, the greater numbers of quotes, pair quotes and exclamation/question marks in news headlines were associated with respondents’ perception of lower journalistic values. The author also found that the assessment of journalistic values influences the perception of news credibility.

This study has implications for computational journalism, credibility research and news algorithm development.

It represents the first attempt to quantify human conceptions of journalistic values with textual indices.

This paper analyzes the beginning of the journalistic career of the youngest members of Página/12 and Tiempo Argentino newspapers from Buenos Aires, Argentina. The ethnographic research took place in the newsrooms between 2011 and 2015 to study the socialization process of young reporters and interns in media press. With this goal in mind, it explores how they learn the values and practical rules of the journalistic world, starting with the interactions they engage on with other members of that environment, such as their colleagues and editors, as well as how they deal with the sources. The research was structured in five dimensions of analysis that contributed to explain the socialization process: (1) The channels and strategies to enter the journalistic field, (2) the newcomers' rites de passage, (3) the forms of socialization within the newsrooms, (4) the identification processes, and (5) the strategies that these young people implement in the medium term to stay in the journalistic world.

Journalists moving into corporate communication have for many years been regarded as a move to the “dark side”. This paper turns the lens to explore how trained journalists working as internal communication practitioners due to their journalistic self-concept and skills can contribute to internal communication.

An interview study was conducted with twelve trained journalists working with internal communication in different types of organizations. Three indicators of professionalism, namely autonomy, altruism and expert knowledge, were used as categories to structure the interviews and analysis.

The respondents perceived that their journalistic self-concept and skills helped them identify the employee perspective, write relevant stories and deliver them quickly. Furthermore, their courage and lack of fear of authorities enabled them to challenge decisions made by their senior managers, especially regarding how, what and when to communicate.

The three indicators of the journalist profession, – autonomy, altruism and journalistic knowledge and skills – may help establish internal communication that is relevant, transparent and trustworthy.

Organizations may benefit from building their internal communication around the three indicators of the journalist profession. They could, for example, host independent internal media that present the employees’ perspective and maintain a critical attitude to the organization in a relevant and compelling manner.

Few studies have explored the role of journalists working as internal communication practitioners and their contributions to internal communication.

The idea that user comments on journalistic articles would help to increase the quality of the media has long been greeted with enthusiasm. By now, however, these high hopes have mostly evaporated. Practical experience has shown that user participation does not automatically lead to better journalism but may also result in hate speech and systematic trolling – thus having a dysfunctional impact on journalistic actors. Although empirical journalism research has made it possible to describe various kinds of disruptive follow-up communication on journalistic platforms, it has not yet succeeded in explaining what exactly drives certain users to indulge in flaming and trolling. This paper intends to fill this gap.

It does so on the basis of problem-centered interviews with media users who regularly publish negative comments on news websites.

The evaluation allows for a nuanced view on current phenomena of dysfunctional follow-up communication on journalistic news sites. It shows that the typical “troll” does not exist. Instead, it seems to be more appropriate to differentiate disruptive commenters according to their varying backgrounds and motives. Quite often, the interviewed users display a distinct political (or other) devotion to a certain cause that rather makes them appear as “warriors of faith.” However, they are united in their dissatisfaction with the quality of the (mass) media, which they attack critically and often with a harsh tone.

The study reflects these differences by developing a typology of dysfunctional online commenters. By helping to understand their aims and intentions, it contributes to the development of sustainable strategies for stimulating constructive user participation in a post-truth age.

This article seeks to analyse the skills and knowledge that have a positive impact on the reproduction of the core frames of social actors in the mass media.

The theoretical discussion is accompanied by a cross‐cultural case study of the debate surrounding the leaked e‐mail correspondence between climate researchers at the University of East Anglia (UEA) in 2009. First, the authors analysed the framing work of the three main actors with their respective views, namely UEA and the blogs “Real climate”, “Climate audit” and “The air vent”. Second, they conducted an analysis of the media coverage of the issue in the UK, the USA, Germany and Norway, focusing on the importance of cultural factors, psychological biases and conformity to journalistic needs.

The literature review came to the conclusion that public relations practitioners stand good chances to succeed with their framing when they are able to conceive a message in a way that: is resonant with the underlying culture; appeals to psychological biases; and conforms to journalistic needs. The authors use “framing expertise” as an umbrella term for the knowledge and the skills related to these aspects when designing and promoting frames. In the case study, these theoretical assumptions were tested. While three different frames dominated the discourse, no clear winner of the framing contest was observed. Though qualitative differences in their framing expertise were noted, the frames of all of the strategic actors were accepted in the media, perhaps due to the norms of journalistic balance.

As this study is based on a single case, more research is needed to back up the findings and elaborate on the knowledge and skills needed when framing an issue.

The article pulls together, discusses and elaborates on a body of literature that thus far has been scattered, and makes contributions towards a better understanding of what it is that public relations practitioners actually do.

The purpose of this paper is to develop a conceptual framework for assessing what are the possibilities and pitfalls of using algorithmic systems of news personalization – i.e. the tailoring of individualized news feeds based on users’ information preferences – for constructive conflict coverage in the context of peace journalism, a journalistic paradigm calling for more diversified and creative war reporting.

The paper provides a critical review of existing research on peace journalism and algorithmic news personalization, and analyzes the intersections between the two concepts. Specifically, it identifies recurring pitfalls of peace journalism based on empirical research on constructive conflict coverage and then introduces a conceptual framework for analyzing to what degree these pitfalls can be mediated – or worsened – through algorithmic system design.

The findings suggest that AI-driven distribution technologies can facilitate constructive war reporting, in particular by countering the effects of journalists’ self-censorship and by diversifying conflict coverage. The implementation of these goals, however, depends on multiple system design solutions, thus resonating with current calls for more responsible and value-sensitive algorithmic design in the domain of news media. Additionally, our observations emphasize the importance of developing new algorithmic literacies among journalists both to realize the positive potential of AI for promoting peace and to increase the awareness of possible negative impacts of new systems of content distribution.

The article particle is the first to provide a comprehensive conceptualization of the impact of new content distribution techniques on constructive conflict coverage in the context of peace journalism. It also offers a novel conceptual framing for assessing the impact of algorithmic news personalization on reporting traumatic and polarizing events, such as wars and violence.