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Codes of ethics are important instruments in journalism, as they promote transparency and self-regulation of media, in addition to monitoring the quality of information. The purpose of this paper is to analyse the perceptions that Spanish journalists have of the effectiveness of codes of ethics and to evaluate the different personal and professional variables which condition this vision.

The methodology used in the present study is based on quantitative content analysis using the survey technique. This technique makes it possible to obtain empirical data on various key aspects of the profession that are determining factors in ascertaining Spanish journalists’ views of one of the instruments of accountability that is external to the media: general ethical codes.

The results show that Spanish journalists are largely confident in the effectiveness of ethical codes in their profession. Likewise, it was seen that variables such as age, professional experience or the media with which they work influence the perceptions that professionals have of such instruments.

If understanding journalism as a profession whose mission is to guarantee the citizens their right to information, then it is essential to be familiar with the tools provided by the profession itself to be accountable to the public regarding this professional mission. Hence the importance of instruments of accountability and the perceptions of the professionals themselves regarding their effectiveness.

Crisis in journalism is a widely discussed and controversial topic in Greece since 2009 when economic recession afflicted the Greek society. However, the last decade of financial hardships and ownership changes in the Greek media sector (2009–2019) gave rise to a widening of perception on the part of journalists of what really crisis stands for when it comes to their profession. Based on 25 in-depth interviews with Greek leading news media professionals from all types of media outlets (press, television, radio and news websites), the present research describes how journalists perceive, assess and manage the crisis of their profession in today's networked media landscape, characterised by unprecedented phenomena such as the rise of churnalism, post truth journalism and fake news in the context of new trends with regard to how the Greek audience is seeking information and consuming news. While existing research on journalism profession has tended to emphasise the conversion of journalist into a multitasked employee towards audience members who treat journalism with suspicion, this chapter focusses on to what extent journalists by themselves are critical of their profession's vulnerabilities such as the lack of genuine investigative journalism, alienation from the actual reporting based on primary material and manipulation of media professionals within an unstable market. The research gives insights into journalists' opinions and attitudes with regard to the symptoms indicating that journalism in Greece is suffering from chronic and acute crises related to the extraction and dissemination of news, the relationship of journalists with media owners as well as the operation of the media market.

This chapter examines the professional identities of Brazilian journalists. It does so through an analysis of the growing professional autonomy of journalism from 1950 to 1990 through the life stories of 10 intellectual-journalists, individuals whose journalistic activities have crossed over into other intellectual fields.

This study applies a symbolic interactionist framework to understand how these actors managed their reputations and careers within the intellectual world. The narratives were taken from qualitative semi-structured interviews, and supported by additional research such as interviews, biographies, and articles which have been published about their lives.

The life stories were compared to the extensive structural changes affecting the world of journalism and the world of intellectuals in Brazil. This comparison revealed gaps between these two spheres of practice, within which the ambivalent form of journalists’ identities have been constructed.

This chapter offers two contributions to the study of Brazilian journalists. From a theoretical and methodological viewpoint, it advances beyond other studies that focus more on the prevailing representations of journalists’ professional identities and their role in society. From an empirical standpoint, it describes the complex negotiations between the worlds of journalism, culture and politics. This chapter also reexamines the current dominant explanation for the changes in Brazilian journalism. It shows that building careers and new levels of interpersonal cooperation for intellectuals and journalists has been a slow process. Ultimately, this development has left some behind, especially those actors stretched between multiple professional identities such as those who self-identify as intellectual-journalists.

Professional journalism has recently been studied through the lens of audience participation in the production of news online. While initial enthusiasm for democratisation and community reinforcement was significant, empirical evidence points towards unwillingness for fundamental reconstruction of journalistic practices. This chapter aims to map participatory journalism in Greece through the synthesis of accumulated research on the adoption of participatory features and practices in online news media and on audience perspectives of engaging in new roles during news process. Professionals seem hesitant to support a different but the traditional relationship with the users, while even users themselves get involved in activities that require little time and effort, not challenging journalistic norms via creative content production. However, both journalists and audience are positive towards a new collaborative way of managing and exploiting user-generated content, which can support participatory environments that reshape the incorporation of users' contributions in the daily workflows.

For many decades, foreign correspondents have been regarded as a highly prestigious press corps with the core proposition of bearing witness to events in remote places. However, the advent of the Internet and the new technologies has challenged this position. Citizens living where the events occur can make use of a wide range of digital technologies and inform the rest of the world, without the need for the journalist intermediaries who were essential in the past. In addition, the new economic pressures brought to legacy media by the digital technology have paved the way for the rise of a new type of foreign correspondent, the multiskilled staffer, who has to be technologically literate in order to fulfil his daily task. This study based on 51 interviews with foreign correspondents aims at investigating how the foreign correspondents perceive these trends in their daily working routines and if the digital technology has caused a deprofessionalization of the foreign correspondence or we are witnessing the emergence of a new professional discourse which embraces a new core of professional traits.

The purpose of this paper is to explore whether journalism education techniques can be adapted for use in the information literacy classroom as a means of teaching the ethical use of information.

The author uses personal experience as a journalist and graduate of journalism education programs to examine the similarities between journalism pedagogy and information literacy and whether any aspect of journalism pedagogy is transferrable to the information literacy classroom.

Journalism educators deliver a potent anti-plagiarism message using case studies and “war stories” from the newsroom delivered through the pervasive instruction method or stand-alone ethics class. Using case studies from a variety of different disciplines in information literacy classes could help students make a stronger connection between honest writing in all subjects. However, until information literacy is taught more widely in libraries as semester-long classes, it would be difficult to use journalism’s pervasive method of instruction. The same holds true with the stand-alone class, which does not appear to be used as a part of information literacy education.

Given the many commonalities between journalism pedagogy and information literacy, there have been very few attempts to see whether it would be efficacious to adapt journalism education’s methodology to the information literacy classroom.

This study examines three significant collaborative journalism projects in the Americas: The Panama Papers, from the United States-based International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ); “América Latina, Región de Carteles,” by Colombian-based Connectas; and the first phase of the Brazilian-based project, Comprova, supported by Brazilian Association of Investigative Journalists (Abraji) and First Draft. The work investigates what encompasses collaborative journalism; and explores whether it is a recent phenomenon of the news ecosystem, a consequence of the institutional crisis of journalism, and if it is influenced by a network-based and platformed society. A mixed-method approach is applied in a three-stage analysis: (1) desk research; (2) quantitative content analysis; and (3) qualitative semi-structured in-depth interviews. To gain a broader picture of the organizations and their respective projects, documental and bibliographical research was carried out with a focus on data from press releases, corporate reports, and articles published on the websites of the organizations coordinating the projects. Furthermore, a quantitative content analysis of 10 news articles published by each of these collaboration partnerships was completed. Finally, qualitative semi-structured in-depth interviews were conducted with the directors, managers, and professional journalists’ part of the organizations and project. This study emphasizes the importance of collaborative practices, demonstrates how collaborative practices contribute to a new modus operandi of the news ecosystem; and considers why journalists and media organizations have turned to collaborative journalism as a model of production, circulation, and distribution of journalistic investigations.

The purpose of this paper is to consider the implications of the shift from citizen journalist to social media user by examining how ethics are addressed on social media sites compared to citizen journalism sites.

This paper applies the framework of a 2012 study of ethics on citizen journalism sites to social media sites’ guiding documents to compare how they discuss ethics and what they ask of the users, offering suggestions for how social media sites might imbue users with a sense of their responsibilities and obligations.

The analysis finds that ethics are largely ignored on social media sites, written in legalistic language and framed in negative terms, rather than in terms of responsibilities or obligations.

When citizen journalism was subsumed by social media, much of the language – lacking as it may have been – around users’ responsibilities to each other was lost. This paper suggests social media sites should seek to raise rather than lower the barriers to entry, and imbue users with a sense of the responsibility they accept when sharing information online.

This chapter theorises the Internet in Greece by placing it at the centre of Greek media offering a political economy which recasts it in a culturalist fashion. To achieve this, it critically addresses the country's alleged lag in cyberspace and asks why the Internet's hegemonic role in the advance of neoliberal policies and technoliberalism worldwide was never performed in Greece. It places the countrywide disdain for the technoliberal subject at the core of understanding of why the web mediations where so neatly denied over three decades across industry, policy and research. It centres around Internet remediations to argue that the Internet in Greece has been conceptualised as a nonmedia through the idea of lagging behind, essentially a construct veiling neoliberalism at work. It situates the advent of the web in Greece's media boom to argue that media power, as articulated in Greece, necessarily excluded the web, fetishising terrestrial broadcasting on the way to the neoliberal dismantling of culture, the media and everyday life, way before the Troika.

Purpose – This study looks at the explanations given in Finnish media for the two school shootings that took place in the country in 2007 and 2008. It also investigates how Finnish journalists reflected on the explanations and the problems they posed to journalists’ professional values.

Design/methodology/approach – The study gives an overview of the most common explanations for the two incidents in the media through a textual analysis. A qualitative reading of interviews with journalists after the two school shootings sheds more light on journalists’ reflections on the explanations given. The findings are considered against the concept of professional values of journalism in Finland.

Findings – The media coverage of explanations varied markedly between the two school shootings. After the first rampage, explanations centered on the shooter and portrayed the incident as an “isolated case,” whereas after the second rampage journalists focused on societal problems and authorities’ wrongdoings in their explanations. The change can be attributed to the different nature of the two incidents, plus journalists’ increased need to pay attention to audience feedback in the rapidly changing media landscape. The altered ways of reporting also indicated a partial rethink of the professional values among journalists. With the school shootings, Finnish journalists’ traditionally strong support for deontological ethics as the cornerstone of disaster reporting declined slightly, with teleological ethics gaining prominence.

Originality – The study provides new insights into recent changes and developments of disaster reporting and journalists’ professional values in Finland.